Almost Final Curtain (25 page)

I pressed the button just as I got off the train. Shoving the phone into my pocket, I tried not to wonder how soon he’d reply.

 

 

On the bus, I wished I’d brought my iPod. I couldn’t believe I’d left home without it. So, of course, since it languished in my desk drawer, today was the day everybody seemed to be shouting into their cells or sassing one another with their outside voices, as Mom might say. What I wouldn’t give for a nice mellow tune from Coldplay or Snow Patrol to drown out all the noise.

I pulled out my phone and stared at the screen. I flipped it open and checked the bars. Despite everyone else on the phone, mine showed only three out of four. But that would be strong enough to get a text—

—if anyone bothered sending one, that was!

Maybe I really should give up on Nik once and for all. He wasn’t going to quit vampire hunting, apparently, and I couldn’t stop being half vampire if I tried. Maybe it wasn’t about Nikolai, anyway. I just missed having somebody to take me bowling or to the movies, and who would put up with
my
stupid stories and opinions.

Somebody who could do that on a Sunday afternoon.

Going dancing that night at Lilydale with Elias was incredible. Running sounded even more intense. But I couldn’t really go to the beach or ride the Ferris wheel at the state fair with a vampire who sizzled to ashes in the sun.

Nikolai didn’t reply the entire ride home. He hated me. Once home, I sank into my bed and buried my face in my pillow.

 

 

My phone woke me up, but it wasn’t Nik. Bea was at the front door. I dragged myself out of bed to let her in, wondering why Mom hadn’t done so. As I passed the living room, I noticed the grandfather clock read seven o’clock. I’d slept the entire day away. It was night.

Elias would be up soon.

“Where’s your mom?” Bea asked as I finally fumbled the locks open to let her in.

“She said something about a council meeting.” I shrugged. I was just as grateful; after all, this way Elias had a better chance of getting out of the house without her noticing. In fact, time was ticking. “We should get Elias and get out of here.”

“Yeah, where did you want to go?”

My stomach rumbled. “Let’s go out to dinner. I’m starving.”

“Does the vampire pay?”

“No, I will,” I said. “He doesn’t have a job.”

“Neither do you,” Bea pointed out.

Mom, however, always left me money in the cookie jar for those nights when she worked late. “I’m covered.”

“Well, let’s go somewhere decent, like Fasika this ti—” Bea stopped; she was staring in the direction of our basement door. The ancient hinges creaked ominously as the door slowly swung open. Elias emerged slowly into view. I tried to see him as Bea would, for the first time. But I saw only familiar smile lines on a friendly, if angular, face. His short dark hair was ruffled by sleep, and his clothes had taken on a decidedly slept-in look. The silk showed spots of cobwebs and smudges of dust. However, rest had returned the sparkle in his eye, and he no longer seemed quite so stooped by his injuries. I thought he looked terrific. Bea, meanwhile, seemed to find his appearance hilarious. She laughed wildly. “This ... You’re a vampire? He just looks like a guy! With that entrance I expected at least a long cloak and a ‘good evthing,’ ” she drawled in a passable if ridiculously thick accent.

“Good evening,” Elias obliged, with a slight tip of his head. To me, he asked, “Bea, I presume?”

I nodded, though I would have been just as happy to deny knowing her, the way she kept smirking at Elias. I kind of wished Elias would transform his eyes and drop his fangs just to show her what vampires could really look like. But it would be hard to get service at the restaurant like that and I was starving. “Can we go?”

Bea sniggered the whole way out to Elias’s car.

“You didn’t drive?” I asked her.

“No. Mom dropped me off.”

I took Elias’s elbow and pulled him close so I could speak softly in his ear. “I’ll catch you up on everything. Bea has some interesting theories about the talisman.”

“I look forward to it,” Elias said.

 

 

It was weird not having Elias in the driver’s seat, and even stranger to see him at a restaurant. Fasika was this hole-in-thewall on Snelling Avenue with cramped seating and sticky plastic tablecloths, but the scent of Ethiopian spices made my mouth water. Neon signs advertising Summit beer flashed in the window, above rows of dusty plastic potted plants. A college student with a goatee and round-rimmed Harry Potter glasses showed us to a table. “Hamline,” Bea guessed, spotting the tattoos on his forearms as he set out service and water glasses. We liked to play a game where we tried to guess which college waiters/waitresses went to, since there were so many in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

I shook my head. “No way. Macalester.” Macalester was a much hipper school, in my opinion.

The waiter laughed, “Actually, Augsburg. I’ll be back in a minute to take your order.” He gave the bandage on my arm a quick nod. “Looks like you got a new tat, huh?”

“Oh.” My hand automatically reached to pull the sleeve down to hide it. Damn, my cuff must have come unbuttoned. “Um, something like that.”

As soon as the waiter walked away, I knew I’d have Bea to answer to. Sure enough, she was staring in horror at where my hand covered the bandage. It didn’t take long for her to put two and two together either. She gave Elias a nasty look.

“You ... ,” she snarled at Elias. She put her hand over her mouth and said to me, “You didn’t!”

All sorts of responses flitted through my head, but they all sounded like the kinds of excuses a battered wife might use.
It’s not a big deal. He didn’t mean to hurt me. I wanted him to. This was a special circumstance; it won’t happen again.
So I just shrugged.

“The lamb looks good,” Elias said drily.

Bea crossed her arms in front of her chest and frowned at him. “Don’t try to change the subject, leech,” she said.

“Really? Because that’d be cool with me,” I said. I really, really had to clamp down on my desire to explain the bite to Bea. It
had
been an emergency. I
wasn’t
planning to make it a habit. But it was also our business. And, more to the point, no matter how accurately and honestly we explained the circumstances, nothing would be good enough for Bea.

Elias’s lips pressed together. “Leech?”

“Could everyone just let this go?” I asked. Just once I’d like to get through a meal without feeling a keen desire to run away. “It’s hardly a news flash. Guess what, Bea? Vampires bite.”

My outburst shocked a laugh out of Bea. Even Elias smiled a bit from behind the menu.

“Okay, good. Now that that’s out of the way,” I said, taking charge, “we came here to talk about the talisman.”

Bea laid out everything she knew. I told Elias the details he might not have heard during last night’s break-in. Bea seemed to delight in the story and had me retell the part where I defiantly told Nik’s dad to replace the jar.

“Let me see if I understand correctly,” Elias said, as he tore off a piece of injera. “The hunter doesn’t have it or he wouldn’t be looking for it at your house. Your mother says she doesn’t have it, though she may just mean not with her.” Turning to Bea, he said, “Your father, an Elder, thinks a vampire is in possession and also sent you to try to find out who might have it. So, at the very least, he doesn’t know where it is, which may imply the rest of the Elders don’t either.”

Nods of agreement were shared all around.

“Vampires make good thieves,” Elias continued around a mouthful of lentils. It occurred to me that I’d never seen him eat before. He certainly did it with relish, savoring every bite. “We were often employed as such during the time of servitude.”

“What are you saying?” Bea asked. She sat back, her hands resting on her stomach, clearly stuffed.

I didn’t think I could eat another bite myself.

Elias, on the other hand, continued as if there was no limit to his appetite. “Unless your kind has perfected the spell of invisibility to electronic devices, then perhaps a servant
was
involved.”

Bea looked to me for a translation. “He means a vampire still loyal to the witches,” I supplied.

“There are witches who still keep vampires?” Bea sounded appropriately horrified. A least I thought she did, until she added, “Why doesn’t my family have one? How come we don’t rate?”

“Perhaps this tragedy will be rectified soon,” Elias said coolly.

“They could clean the house while we slept,” she leaned in to tell me excitedly. “Can you imagine? No more house chores!”

“Awesome,” I said, but she didn’t seem to notice my sarcasm.

“I suppose you’d still have to do the mowing and gardening,” Bea said, looking into her red plastic water glass and finding it empty. “Although there’s that guy in my neighborhood who always starts his engine up in the middle of the night—”

I couldn’t tell whether Bea was joking, so, ignoring her, I turned to Elias. “Mom doesn’t have any servants.”

“But she has command over others who do,” he reminded me.

“There can’t be that many of these servants, as you call them,” Bea said, abruptly joining our conversation. “
I
would have heard of it before now.”

Bea took pride in the fact that she’d been invited to all the prominent-witch households. Her father’s position as an Elder meant that they had a very active social life, and at an early age, Bea had decided to collect them all, like some sort of game. She kept note of every family she met in a diary—actually,
diaries
at this point.

Elias nodded. “If we knew how many, it would narrow down our search.”

“Our?” Bea snapped. “Don’t consider me part of your little scheme, witch biter.”

Witch biter? That had to be the lamest insult yet. “You want me to be a slave?” I asked her. Bea wasn’t in my honors class, but I was pretty sure the horrors of slavery were covered in most standard American history textbooks. “Really? You’re okay with that?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “This situation is totally different. Vampires aren’t human.”

Of course, that was the moment the waiter came with the check. We all looked at him nervously, but he gave a knowing smile. “Neither are zombies, I hear,” he said.

The three of us found that enormously funny. Perhaps even a bit too funny, given the look the waiter gave us as he retreated, having deposited the check in front of Elias.

“I guess they don’t teach feminism at Augsburg,” Bea said, taking the brown plastic tray and looking over the bill.

“Mom isn’t an adjunct there,” I said seriously. “So probably not.”

Bea scrutinized the bill for a long time, looking vaguely dissatisfied. I was about to ask her if they’d overcharged us for something, when she put the tray down with a determined slap. “You pay for this,” she said to me, “and I’ll give you my best guesses as to who has vampire help around the house, as it were.”

“Deal,” I said without hesitation. I’d taken more than forty dollars from the cookie jar, so I was confident I could cover the total.

“All right,” she said, never looking at Elias. She counted off on her fingers, “Franklin, Stewart, Nelson, Keillor, Ramsey, and Jones for sure. They’re all traditionalists in the worst way. Oh, and the Hills, of course.”

My eyebrows rose. Most normal people didn’t know it, but the old money of Minneapolis and St. Paul were all True Witch families. In one way, they wouldn’t be hard to find. Most of them owned palatial residences in my neighborhood or in nearby Cathedral Hill. The problem would be getting in unnoticed. “They’re going to have wicked wards,” I told Elias. “With vampire backup.”

“We are in your debt.” Elias bowed slightly to Bea, who still refused to look at him.

“I’m doing this for you,” Bea said, jabbing a finger at me.

“Nobody else.”

“Thanks,” I told her.

“You’d make a crappy slave anyway, Ana.” She gave me a crooked smile.

 

 

Before we parted ways, Bea grabbed my elbow and pulled me aside. I’d sat in the front seat this time. We’d stopped for a quick scouting expedition before taking Bea home. Elias was already in the trees, surveying the security system surrounding the Summit Avenue house of a very famous radio-show host.

“Do you remember the Initiation?” she asked me in a hushed tone.

“Of course,” I said. My Initiation Fail. The worst night of my life—it was hard to forget.

“Remember my gift?”

Bea’s aunt Diane, who had been acting high priestess that night, had proclaimed each initiate’s special area of witchcraft at the end of the ceremony. I remembered jealously that a friend of ours, Shannon, had gotten to be a bard, a talent I’d been secretly hoping for. But what had Bea gotten?

“Prophecy,” she supplied when I hesitated too long. “I’ve got a bad feeling in my gut. It’s early stages, but—well, be careful.”

That was her prophecy? Bad stuff could happen? “You should get a refund,” I joked. “Your superpower sucks.”

“I’m serious,” she insisted, but then let my arm go. “You’re right. My gift totally blows. It’s taken forever for me to understand how to read these strange sensations I get. But I’ll go home and do a spread. That will tell me more.”

Yeah, like tarot cards were never vague. But I appreciated the sentiment. “Thanks, Bea.”

Elias came back to the car, and we drove Bea home. We said our good-byes and he waited until she got inside the house before starting the engine.

It didn’t take very long to come to the conclusion that I wasn’t much help to Elias. If I were willing to go vamp, I could scale the brick walls or use superspeed to baffle motion detectors. The problem turned out to be more mental than physical. I couldn’t get over the idea of whose house we were about to illegally trespass into. “This isn’t right,” I whispered. “We’re going to get so busted. I mean, he must be one of the most famous Minnesotans ever.”