Dead If I Do (12 page)

He looked a little embarrassed. “Why?”

“I remember that girl you dated. She was an amazing seamstress, and she made that one awesome dress with all the beadwork in, like, two weeks.”

“Lady Candice, yeah,” he said with a fond smile.

“Are you on speaking terms?”

“Again with the ‘why’?” he asked.

“The dresses for the bridesmaids,” I said. “The order is all screwed up, remember? I’ve got the right dresses on back order, but, well, the way things are going, I’d like to have a backup plan.”

“I think she’s expensive when she does work for non-SCA people, but I’ll give you her number.”

“That’s great, William. Thanks,” I said, and then I set out on the Internet to find a possible pattern for the lady to use. I hummed while I surfed. I felt, briefly, like things might be back on track again. It was dark by the time we closed up the shop. Since William was coming to the bridal shower/coven meeting, he offered me a ride home.

I was turning the key in the shop’s lock when a figure stepped out of the shadows. I almost did my ninja -Lilith thing again before I recognized Parrish. I showed him my keys in my fist, “You’re going to have to stop doing that. I’m going to end up killing you.”

He smiled devilishly. “Sorry, it’s in my nature, dear Garnet. Hello, William,” he said in a rather predatory tone. William scratched his neck nervously, and said, “Uh, hi,” huskily.

I stared at the two of them. It was clear there was history between them I didn’t know. William watched the neon marquee light flicker on the snowdrifts without meeting Parrish’s eyes; all the while Parrish stared hungrily at him.

“Uh, anyway, I’m glad you’re skulking about,” I said to Parrish. “I wanted to have a word with you.”

“Oh?” Parrish glanced away from William long enough to give me a raised eyebrow. “What about?”

“Teréza. You did a great act the other night, pretending you didn’t know her or what she was. I think you turned her.”

“Why would I do that? She belongs to Sebastian, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, exactly.” That was precisely the sort of thing that would motivate Parrish beyond hard, cold cash: getting one up on Sebastian.

“Uh, we’re going to be late,” William said quietly.

“Did Mátyás pay you to vamp her?”

Parrish tried to look offended. “You think I’d sell the Dark Gift?”

“Yes,” I said with a smile. “You’d sell your own grandmother if the price was right.”

Parrish laughed. “You know me well, indeed.”

William tugged my sleeve. I nodded that I knew we needed to be going, but I just wanted a few more seconds with Parrish.

“Did you? Did you turn Teréza?”

Parrish shook his head. “You’ll have to look for another scapegoat. If I had, do you think I would have let the vambie do this?”

He held up his injured hand. It looked better, though still a bit puffy. He ’d removed the bandage, and the swelling was down. I thought the color looked better, but it was hard to really tell much in the harsh electric light.

“Vambie?” William asked.

“Vampire zombie,” Parrish supplied. “I rather like the term. Likewise, zompire.”

“I don’t know,” said William. “Vambie sounds like something starring Jane Fonda, you know?”

“Like
Barbarella
?” Parrish laughed. For a second, the boys seemed to bond, but then William got all scared-like and stepped back.

“We’re late,” he reminded me.

“We’ll talk later,” I said to Parrish, and I let William drag me off to his parked car.

William’s car didn’t start right away. The below-zero
temperature made the battery sluggish. It took three tries, but the engine finally caught.

“So . . . ?” I asked after William stopped complaining about Wisconsin winters.

“So what?”

“What’s with the tension between you and Parrish?”

“Nothing,” he said too quickly.

This was the moment where I had to decide if I really wanted to know the details or if finding out would push this conversation into that gray area of “too much information.”

I was pretty sure I understood what transpired, anyway. After discovering that vampires were real, William had gone through a Goth phase of his own, complete with lots of black clothes and eyeliner and fingernail polish. At that time Parrish had been hanging around the university crowd, doing a little blood fetish work for hire. It wasn ’t impossible to imagine the two of them hooking up.

Uh, except for the actual imagining part . . . William and Parrish naked together? My brain hurt.

“Did Sebastian tell you what the coven is planning on doing tonight when he called you? ” I asked, allowing the subject to change.

“Not really. It was a short conversation. He said something about a hex-breaking spell, though. Is that against Teréza? Are you still convinced she’s cursed you?”

I shrugged. “There are just too many things going wrong. I mean, I know every wedding has its disasters, but these just don ’t seem to stop.” I ticked off the list on my fingers. “The dresses, the band, the cake, my mother . . . okay, that last one was probably inevitable, but—oh! Where’s the application?”

I dug around frantically in the pockets of my coat.

William, who almost pathologically never took his eyes from the road, glanced nervously at me. “What did you lose?”

“The application for our marriage license, and I spent all afternoon going to get it too, ” I said, and despite myself, my voice caught a little. “Maybe I left it at work or at my parents’ hotel room.”

“Should I turn around?”

“No,” I said, although part of me wanted him to. “It’ll be okay.”

I just had to keep convincing myself of that. Besides, the sooner we got to the coven meeting, the sooner I could put an end to this damn curse. Or whatever it was.

There was a line of cars in the driveway when we pulled
up. I saw Griffin’s beat-up station wagon with guitar cases piled in the back and Xylia’s stylish yellow VW bug covered in leftist political bumper stickers. I recognized some of the others as well. When we stepped in, I smelled chili and cornbread. My mouth watered. People sat on the couches. Xylia came over from where she’d been perched by the staircase and gave me a hug. “Congratulations.”

“Really?” I was kind of surprised to hear her say that. She was totally the type to call traditional weddings “giving in to the patriarchy.” Xylia had a flattop and, despite the chill, she wore a muscle shirt that showed off fairly sculpted arms and a tattoo of a gecko.

“Yeah,” she said with a smile. “I’m looking forward to the wedding. I love weddings.”

“You do?”

“She’ll probably cry,” Griffin said, throwing an arm around Xylia’s narrow shoulders. Griffin had classic metalhead, Norse God looks. Long, slightly straggly blond hair framed a stubble-studded square jaw. He pretended to dab his eyes. “I’ll probably cry too.”

“You guys,” I said with a shake of my head.

They laughed. “I do like weddings, though,” Xylia said with a little shy smile that made her nose stud glitter. “There’s a little traditional in me, I guess.”

I nodded. I could understand. All the things I wanted when I was a dreamy tween became so important when I started planning the wedding.

“Not me,” Griffin said, letting his arm drop from Xylia. “It’s going to be a simple handfast in the woods for me.”

“If anyone will have you,” Xylia said with a poke.

“Ha. Hey, William,” Griffin said. “What about you? What’s your dream wedding?”

“I don’t know. Don’t I have to keep a girlfriend longer than six months first?”

Sebastian came out with a stack of bowls. He leaned in and said, “It’s a must.”

“Oh! Does that mean chili is ready?” Xylia asked, reaching for a bowl.

We all descended on the kitchen. Sebastian had whipped up both vegetarian and meat versions of his fantastic chili. There was also homemade cornbread. He’d set out all sorts of munchies as well: carrot slices, broccoli florets, sliced radishes. There were potato chips, popcorn, and pretzels in bowls all around the house. Enough food to feed an army, which was good, since I doubted there would be a crumb left after everyone was satisfied.

“So what’s the plan of action?” Blythe asked after we’d licked the last of the chili from our lips. Blythe was a leggy, model gorgeous comparative religions major at UW. She was a British national, and Sebastian found her cosmopolitan and charming. I spent a lot of time and energy trying not to hate her. After months of working with her in the coven, however, I had to grudgingly admit she made a good addition to the crew.

“I think I might have gotten cursed by Mátyás’s mother,” I said.

“She was dead, but she got better,” William muttered next to me. Our elbows touched, and I gave him a little heynow-none-ofthat nudge in the ribs.

“So you want to turn the hex?” Blythe asked.

I nodded. “Mostly, I just want to deflect the energy.”

“I don’t know,” William said. “I’ve been doing my reading, you know, and this seems like bad juju to me. ” William was voluntarily studying Wicca for a year and a day. He said he didn’t quite feel qualified to be in the coven and proclaimed himself a novice. “Every time you cast a spell against someone, you bind your energy to them.”

“But the woman has to protect herself,” Griffin said.

“Damn straight,” agreed Xylia.

“I’m not sure it’s precisely the same when used in defense,” Blythe said. “I mean, after all, the person who cursed Garnet already bound them together. Garnet is trying to break that bond and free herself.”

As if I really could. I looked over at Sebastian, who was silent through this entire discussion. He seemed lost in his own thoughts, studying the pattern of the Persian rug.

“What do you think, Sebastian?” I asked.

Barney wandered into the room. She made a beeline for the empty chili bowls on the table. Putting her front paws on the edge of the table, she put her nose into one of them. Sebastian edged her away with a gentle nudge from his toe.

“If Teréza hasn’t cursed you, then all this energy we’re raising tonight most certainly
will
bind you to her,” Sebastian said. I opened my mouth to protest, when he continued, “But it seems obvious she has. I’m not sure how much more can go wrong with our wedding plans.”

I made a mental note to tell Sebastian about my mother’s meltdown and the missing application later.

“You’ve convinced me. Let’s do this,” William said.

It was nearly midnight once we had everything planned
and ready. We’d brainstormed and consulted several of the spell books that Sebastian and I had in our library. Plus William used his BlackBerry to Google hex-breaking. Nearly every source we found agreed that curse-breaking spells needed to be performed at a crossroads. We all piled into Robert’s van in search of a suitable site.

Sebastian called shotgun, since he had a road atlas and a pen flashlight. William, Xylia, Blythe, and I piled into the next row. The others filled in behind us. Robert’s van rumbled to a start, and we all bounced down the county roads. In my bag I had four oversized black votive candles, a compass, several boxes of matches, a charcoal brick, a strip of paper, and a pen. I also had a plastic bag full of homemade incense that the coven had whipped up in the kitchen. It consisted of frankincense, myrrh, pine needles, and dragon’s blood.

Sebastian and Robert argued good-naturedly about the directions in the front. Meanwhile, William tried to convince Griffin that

“real men” used a mortar and pestle to grind their herbs, not a Cuisinart. Someone in the backseat hummed “O Tannenbaum.”

With everyone in full arctic gear, we were packed in tightly. My hips tended toward ample anyway, but add in a layer of cotton long underwear and a fluffy parka, and I felt like a stuffed hippo. It didn’t help that Blythe sat next to me in her fashionable kneehigh boots and slim tweed jacket. Her mittens, scarf, and hat all matched. The windows fogged up from the heat of all the bodies wedged together in the van, but through the haze I could see the twinkle of stars in an inky black sky. Snow-covered hills rolled past the window. The dark shapes of bare, twisted oak branches and bramble patches slashed the crystalline landscape. Highway lights lengthened shadows cast by fence posts and wire. Lilith stirred in my belly. I felt her tingle along my nerves.

“Deer!” someone in the back shouted, and Robert hit the brakes just in time. A buck sprang onto the road. The deer stopped in front of the van for a second and stared at us with big, glossy black eyes. His ears flicked, and he turned his head, as if sensing something in the wind. With a single bound he cleared the road and darted up over the hill. We all watched breathlessly as his retreating white tail reflected the light of the headlights.

No one said anything for a long moment.

“Wow,” William breathed.

“Better than wow,” Sebastian said. “We’re at a crossroads.”

We tumbled out of the van, our boots crunching the snow. The air was cold and crisp and clear. The hairs in my nose stuck together with my first breath. A crescent moon shone faintly over a line of pine trees on the eastbound side of the road. On the opposite side, I could see cattails dusted with snow bent low in a brown pool of frozen marsh water. A short distance up the road, a small, log cabin-style mom-and-pop bait shop was illuminated by a yard light. The plastic letters on the portable marquee spelled out, “Closed for the Season. See U in April.”

Given Lilith’s sudden presence earlier, I wasn’t at all surprised when the compass revealed that not only had we arrived at a crossroads but that it was perfectly aligned to the cardinal directions. Green street signs informed us that we were at the junction of County Highway L and road number 107.

Robert pulled the van into the parking lot of the bait shop next to a semi trailer that clearly hadn ’t moved in decades. We huddled around each other in a tight circle, working out the last bit of logistics. “We’re going to need a sentry,” I said, looking at everyone in turn. “Someone willing to skip out of the spell in order to alert us if someone’s coming.”

“I’ll do it,” Sebastian said.

I frowned. As a vampire made from magic, Sebastian was the second most powerful witch in the coven. I only trumped him because I harbored a Goddess.