A Tale of Two Vampires (23 page)

He tried to wave the shawl away, but after a few minutes of arguing, he gave in and let me drape it over his head.

We walked along in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds audible the sharp, high calls of birds, and the occasional low drone of noise that I had no problem picking out as belonging to a car.

“So, how old were you when you were vamped?”

Nikola glanced back at me, his pale blue eyes filled with curiosity. “I was seven and twenty. My mother died about a year later. She was taken by typhoid fever. My brothers had it, as well, but they survived.”

“I’m sorry. That must have been really hard on you. And you had no friendly neighborhood vamp to show you the ropes?”

“What rope?”

I waved it away. “It’s just an expression. What did your family think about what happened to you?”

Thor’s muffled hoofbeats filled in the silence for a minute. “My mother was dead, as was her second husband. My brothers were two and three years younger than me.”

He didn’t say anything more, but I sensed some strong emotion in him, an unhappy emotion, one that I wanted to explore, but with a mental oath at myself, I kept my lips (and mental microphone) quiet. Of course he felt a strong emotion; he was remembering how his world had changed at the hands of a demon lord. I wanted to ask who he believed had damned him in that way, but a swift glance at the rigid set of his shoulders and the tense line of his jaw told me my questions would not be welcome.

Instead, I spent the next forty minutes chatting about the town, and what differences he’d find once we reached there. I explained about cars, and cell phones, and airplanes, and was just broaching the subject of computers when we made the last turn of the twisty road that led into town. Below us, in the smooth pastureland that was the valley floor, the GothFaire still sat in its U shape of brightly colored tents, with equally colorful travel trailers arranged in a neat formation on the far side of the fairway.

“They’re still here?” I asked aloud, my eyes on a distant figure of a man as he wandered through the fair. “Well, that’s a stroke of luck. Look, Nikola, the fair is still here.”

He glanced over at it, his brows rising a little under the shadow cast by the shawl over his head. “Ah. Are there conjurers? I’ve always had an interest in conjurers. When I was very young, I wished to become one, but my mother said that no baron had ever been a conjurer, and she refused to get a tutor for me so that I might learn the art. I studied it on my own, naturally, but I believe that I would have been an excellent conjurer if only I had been apprenticed accordingly.”

“You are seriously the strangest man I’ve ever met,” I told him, sliding off Thor. “Fascinating, but strange.”

“You also find me arousing,” he said with a smug, very male expression on his handsome face. “Even now you wish to wrestle me to the verge, and ride my manly parts.”

“Look, it’s bad enough that you know I’m thinking these smutty things about you, but you don’t have to tell me that you know I’m thinking them!”

“Why?”

“Why? What do you mean, why? Isn’t it obvious?”

“If it was obvious, I wouldn’t have asked. I’m not the sort of man who talks just to hear himself speak. I do, however, have a curiosity about such things, which I believe I’ve mentioned in the past. So if I ask why, it is because I do not understand how acknowledging the fact that you spend an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the subject of riding me, not to mention reliving those moments earlier in the previous evening when you did, in fact, do just that, is repugnant to you. You wish to ride me, and I have no objection to such a desire, so we are of one mind regarding that subject. Why would you not wish to admit it?”

“For someone who doesn’t talk just to hear himself, you sure do go on and on,” I said somewhat tartly. The fact that he was absolutely right was neither here nor there, but I was determined to rise above such things and move on. “And as long as we’re being strictly factual, I may want to ride you like a ten-cent pony, but I don’t wish to do so on the side of the road. Come on, let’s get into town so all that riding can commence. Er…not in public, but in private. In my room. Assuming Gretl doesn’t have a hissy over you, which I don’t think she will, but you never know. GothFaire doesn’t open until nighttime, so we have plenty of time for all those things you are thinking about doing to me—oh yes, don’t look so innocent. I’m completely aware of your determination to try some kinky position you read about in a naughty French pamphlet you have hidden behind some boring books in your study—what was I saying? Oh, the GothFaire doesn’t open until later, so we can visit it then, and you can see Imogen and your son and his wife.”

He stopped and stared at me, his eyes wide beneath the folds of my shawl wrapped around his head. “Benedikt has married? He’s too young!”

“He’s over three hundred years,” I reminded him.

He grumbled at that, but allowed me to take the lead and hustle him toward town.

The Incredible Adventures of Iolanthe Tennyson

July 15, Part 2 (there’s a lot to write about)

I had to stop writing about the stuff that happened when we came back to the present day because all hell broke loose, but I don’t want to ruin anything by doing that foreshadowing crap, so I won’t say anything other than man alive! Just when you think everything is peachy keen.

Nikola coped with things much better than I expected, certainly much better than I had dealt with the eighteenth century. Mind you, he didn’t have to undergo the hell that was finding a camping toilet all done up to look spiffy and stuff inside a house (but let’s face facts—it was still a camping toilet).

When we walked into town, Nikola was all big eyes and curiosity about everything—cars and people and buildings—but he took it all in stride and simply made copious notes about what he wanted explained.

The people in town were equally cool about the fact that we led a horse into town, but given the pastureland around it, I gathered it wasn’t an unknown thing to see someone ride around the more urban areas. By the time I begged a woman who was outside gardening to use her phone, and called Gretl (and submitted to her screams of joy, and later a tirade about disappearing without a word to her), Nikola had removed the shawl I’d tossed over his head to protect his face from the sun, and begun to conduct what he thought of as a scientific examination of the people of the twenty-first century.

“I know, I know, I have tons of explaining to do, and I’ll gladly do it, but if you could bring me some clothes and my passport and the credit cards that’re tucked into my suitcase, and meet me in town at the hotel, I’ll tell you what happened. Although you probably should be braced for a really weird tale,” I told her after she had run out of steam. “I don’t suppose anyone found my purse and camera, did they?”

“Did you lose them?”

“They were…well…yeah, not sure. I assume they were stolen when I went through the…um…yeah. They were probably stolen. Never mind, I just wondered if anyone found them and brought them to the police or something.”

“Io, you aren’t making any sense at all. Why must I meet you at the hotel? Why will you not come home? And how were your things stolen?”

“I want you to come here because I’ve got a friend with me, and after some thought, I decided that it wasn’t fair to foist him on you, too. He’s a bit…uh…different. And I’ll explain how I lost my things later. Please grab some of my things and stuff them in the duffel bag for me, and I’ll see you in half an hour at the hotel, OK?”

“Io, what is going—”

“Gotta run. Nikola just found a FedEx woman, and I think he’s grilling her about the truck. See you in a little while!”

I hung up before she could continue, hurried past the gardening woman with scattered thanks, and grabbed Nikola’s arm just as the woman was about to urge him into her truck.

The hussy.

“There you are, munchkin,” I said loudly, baring my teeth at the skinny blond woman. She had her hand on Nikola’s arm, and was urging him to climb up into the truck in a syrupy voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I grabbed Thor’s reins from where they’d been looped around the mailbox, and hauled him over next to Nikola, covertly shoving the horse until he sidestepped toward the woman. “I told you I wouldn’t be long. No, Thor! Bad horsie! You shouldn’t step on people’s feet; they don’t like it.”

Nikola gave me a long look.

I smiled even broader at the woman as she swore in German, holding up one foot and hopping around in pain. “Sorry. You done here, Nikola? Excellent. Let’s go on up to the hotel and see if there’s somewhere we can park Thor.”

He frowned at me, then looked back at the truck. “This woman has offered to show me the inside of her carriage. It appears to be run on that engine you mentioned, and I wish to see it. If I am to explore your world, then I must understand how things function, and that includes how a—” He glanced at the side of the truck. “—how a FedEx works.”

“Oh, honey,” I said, taking him by the arm and gently pulling him away from the temptress. “She wants to show you much more than just how she delivers packages.”

Io, I wish to see inside this carriage.

I know you do, but honestly, that woman doesn’t give a hoot about you looking around at how the truck is built. She just wants to jump your bones.

He looked faintly puzzled.
Why would she want to kill me and assault my bones? I have done nothing to her.

Nikola, you’re what, sixty-some years old? Well, you don’t look more than thirty, an extremely handsome thirty, what with your gorgeous eyes, and that black hair, and of course your face, not to mention your chest and legs and naughty parts, and that woman—really, could she be any more blatant? I’m standing right here with my hand on you and she’s still yammering away in German. What’s she saying? I bet she’s whispering mechanical sweet nothings in your ear, isn’t she? Anyway, she just wants to do all those things to you that I want to do, and since I don’t share, she’s not going to have the chance to do them in the back of her smutmobile.

He gave me another long look as he pulled out his notebook.
I understand now. You are jealous.

So not true.

The woman tried to tug Nikola toward the truck.

I saw red. “Look, babe, you may do things differently here in Austria, and I’m all for being a good American abroad and stuff like that, but if you do that one more time, I’m going to deck you. He’s not up for grabs,
capisce
?”

The woman snarled something rude at me in German. Nikola laughed, and answered her in the same language before taking Thor’s reins, and slipping his other arm around me, urging me forward toward the center of town.

“All right, Mr. Urbane, what did she say that made you laugh? And what did you say back to her that made her look so shocked?”

“She asked if I could get rid of my mother so that she might answer all my questions about her carriage.”

I gasped. “Your
mother
! That bitch!”

He gave my waist a little squeeze. “I told her that you were my woman, and that although I appreciated the fact that she wanted to bone me, only you were allowed to do that.”

“Uh… Nikola, we’re going to have to have a chat about colloquialisms in the very near future,” I said, wondering how on earth I was going to explain to him the intricacies of modern slang. “But seriously, your mother? OK, I look older than you, but still. I only look a little older than you, just a smidgen older, but that’s because you look so frigging young.”

He shrugged. “If you like, I will change myself to appear older, although you do not look ancient, as you are thinking. You look…mature.”

I opened my eyes really wide and looked at him. “You do
not
tell a woman she looks mature. That’s tantamount to saying she’s an old hag.”

“Ah? How about ripe?”

I took a deep breath. “Look, I may not be as buffed and toned as Miss Austrian Hussypants back there, but I am
not
mature, and I am
not
ripe. I’m thirty-nine if you want to be absolutely specific, and my friends, my
friends
say that I look much younger. Much, much younger! OK, so forty is just two months away, but that doesn’t mean squat, because everyone knows that women just get better after thirty, whereas men have already peaked and are declining. So you can stuff that up your…hey. What do you mean you will change yourself to appear older?”

“If it bothers you that I appear to be younger, I will modify my appearance.”

I stared at him in amazement. “You mean dye your hair or something?”

“No. I did this for my wife, when she aged. She, too, disliked the fact that I looked much younger than her.” His brows pulled together a little. “I assume that is a trait particular to women, although Imogen does not yet display such leanings.”

“You mean you can actually change how you look?” I waved a hand around in a vague gesture. “Like, magically? Can you turn into a bat, too? Or a wolf?”