In the Company of Vampires (3 page)

The warehouse was mostly empty, a huge old building filled with a whole lot of black, and a few faint rustling noises that I took to be rodents. I wasn’t particularly afraid of rats and mice, finding the two-legged variety much more worrisome. But the relative quiet of the warehouse worried me. Was I too late? Had the men taken Geoff off in another car?

The faintest murmur of male voices had me stiffening as I turned to the right, where the vaguely black shape of a staircase loomed. I gripped my piece of pipe and started up the stairs, blindly feeling my way up each step, moving slowly and carefully so as not to alert anyone to my presence.

By the time I neared the top of the stairs, the sounds of voices were much clearer. I flattened myself against the steps and eased up my head to see how many of them there were. In a small oval pool of bluish white light, three men stood around another person, who had been tied to a chair.

Three against one. Not very good odds. But I wasn’t about to let Loki take my roomie. With another deep breath, I lifted my pipe and flung myself up the last couple of stairs, yelling a one-word spell of protection that my mother had insisted I learn.
“Salvatio!”

The first man dropped before I even realized that I had swung my pipe at his head.

“Oh my god!” Geoff screamed as I stood stunned for a second, staring down at the man lying at my feet. “That was awesome!”

The two other men clearly couldn’t believe it, either, because they stared at their fallen buddy for a couple of seconds before turning identical expressions of surprise on me.

That didn’t last long. The one who had shoved me out of the van yelled something in a Nordic language and ran for me.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I told him as I swung my pipe and sidestepped him, the pipe connecting with the back of his head with a metallic clang that made my stomach turn over. “I’m not at all a brave person. I don’t beat people up. Ever. Well, okay, maybe a demon or two, but they aren’t real people.”

“The master will have your life for this,” the third guy said as he slammed me up against a wall.

“Get him! Smash him! Beat his brains in!” Geoff chanted from her chair, the scrape of wood against the floor audible as she chair-hopped over to us.

“Eep,” I managed to squeak out, trying to crack the man on the head with my pipe, but he had wised up after watching his two buddies drop and held my arm straight out at my side. His fingers started to tighten around my neck, causing black splotches to dance in front of my face. “Tell your master that he can’t have Geoff. If he wants to get tough, he’ll have to face me, and the last time he did that, it didn’t end well for him.”

The man stopped strangling me for a second, a look of confusion filling his eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.

The chair screeched against the floor.

I twisted my body, bringing my knee up to nail the guy in the noogies, biting his arm at the same time. He cursed profanely, dropping to his knees as I raised my pipe high over my head. “My name is Francesca Ghetti, the keeper of the Vikingahärta, and Loki’s worst nightmare!”

“You go, Fran!” Geoff cheered as I stood over the kidnapper.

Her words brought some sanity back to me. I was panting, the blood rushing in my ears, my heart beating wildly. I looked down on the man for a second, toying with the thought of braining him, too, but instead I just stomped on his foot hard enough to make him yelp, and jumped over his halfhearted attempt to grab me.

“There’s an X-Acto knife over there,” Geoff said, nodding toward a rickety table half hidden by shadows. “I’ve been watching it for the last ten minutes, trying to figure out how I could get to it. Oh no, you don’t, Buster Brown.”

As I snatched up the knife, Geoff kicked at the kidnapper, who was just getting to his feet. He howled as she hit him dead center in his groin.

“Oh, that has to hurt,” I murmured as I bent over her, cutting through the nylon cord that bound her to the chair. “Poor guy isn’t going to have kids after this.”

“Poor guy? Are you insane? He’s a kidnapper! You sure you don’t want to smash his brains in?” Geoff asked when her bonds fell to the ground. She rubbed her wrists, glaring down at the writhing man. One of the others started to moan and move his arms and legs.

“I’m sure. Let’s get out of here before the other two wake up.”

“Okay, but you know, no one would blame you for roughing them up a little. . . .”

We made it outside before the groin man started down the stairs (hunched over quite a bit). I didn’t stop to explain to Geoff, just grabbed her arm and hauled her after me to where the cabby was just getting back in her car. “Take us to 1021 Woodline Avenue,” I told the cabby, shoving Geoff in the car. I glanced back at the warehouse, adding, “And hurry, please.”

The door to the warehouse was flung open, and two men staggered out. I was relieved to see that I hadn’t done any permanent damage to them, and hoped the third wasn’t seriously hurt. The cabby eyed them for a moment, then met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “You in some sort of trouble?”

“No. Someone else is going to be, though,” I said grimly.

“Gotcha.” She gunned the engine and pulled a very illegal U-turn, the shouts of the guys faintly following us as we zipped down the road.

I leaned back against the seat, letting go of my breath.

“You want to tell me what all that was about?” Geoff asked, examining her wrists.

“Er . . . not really.”

“They thought I was you, you know,” she said, eyeing me carefully.

“They what?”

She nodded. “They called me Francesca. I guess it’s because I copied your haircut before you cut yours. They said the master wanted to see you, and they were going to take me to him. What the hell is going on, Fran? Who were those goons? And why would they want to kidnap you to take you to some bondage dude? Or wait—
was
it a kidnapping?”

“Bondage dude?” I asked, confused how she leaped from Loki to that.

“Master, remember? What else is that if not bondage?” She eyed me again. “You know, I had no idea you were into that sort of thing. I’m not, myself, but I have friends who run a little club in town—”

I held up my hand to stop her. “I’m not into bondage. The master in this instance isn’t into bondage, either. At least I don’t think he is. He’s an old man. A really old man.” Like a couple of thousand years, at least. “He’s . . . uh . . .”

She raised an eyebrow as I thought frantically of what to tell her. Almost a year of living with her had made me very well aware that she freaked out at anything even remotely supernatural. There was no way she wouldn’t do the same if I told her the old Norse gods were alive and well and after revenge.

At least one of them was.

“He’s what?” she asked, prodding me.

“He’s . . .” My shoulders slumped. “He’s into bondage.”

“I knew it! I knew there was more to you than just a germ fetish! So this was what, a fantasy setup? Wow, that’s really wild. I’ll give you Mistress Dominica’s number later, if you like, although if you have your own connection, you probably won’t care too much. Are you a bottom or a top?”

I blinked at her. “Eh . . .”

“Bottom. I knew it. I’m a top, myself, but as I told you when I moved in, you don’t have to worry that I’m going to try to seduce you.” She smiled at the cabdriver’s startled glance in the mirror. “I have to give it to you guys—that was a hell of a kidnapping fantasy. I guess I won’t be siccing Daddy’s lawyers on the guys if they were your friends, although I have to say I thought they were a bit rough, especially when that one guy slammed you up against the wall. Unless, of course, you like that.” She gave me a considering look.

I smiled feebly, and spent the remainder of the ride wondering why the vengeful Norse god Loki would pick now to pop back up in my life.

“Any luck?”

“No. It’s gone. Everything but my wallet, which I took with me to pay the cab.” I slumped down on my bed and thought seriously about crying, except I wasn’t a crying sort of person. It just made me stuffy and hot. “My cell phone, my books, my keys, all gone. The worst part is, it’s my own fault—I should have taken the backpack with me, not left it lying next to the door. It all happened so quickly that I just grabbed my money and went after you.”

“Sorry that your fantasy went so bad, Fran,” Geoff said as she patted me on the shoulder. “I think you ought to tell your bondage dude to reimburse you for your stuff, though, since he botched the whole thing.”

I stifled a smile at the idea of demanding money from Loki. “Um . . . yeah.”

“Well, once you tell him that you cut and colored your hair, I’m sure it won’t happen again. And who knows? Maybe next year I’ll go back to being blond, although I have to say I like the ebony look. It’s so dramatic and Vampira and all.”

My gaze shot to her, but she was bustling around the tiny kitchen in the apartment we shared.

“About next year . . .” I bit my lip, watching as she plugged in an electric teakettle. “I know I said I’d be here at least a couple of years, but I’ve decided it’s time to move on. I accepted an IT job at my dad’s office. I’ll be starting there just as soon as I wrap up the Web site launch project for the vet hospital.”

“You’re moving?” Geoff looked surprised, but not in the least bit distressed, which relieved my mind considerably. I figured it wouldn’t be hard for her to find a roomie in a university town.

“To California, yes.” I rubbed my fingers over the material of my jeans, my hands a bit hot under the two layers of gloves. Ever since that last fight with Ben almost a year ago, I had been growing steadily more unhappy and restless. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I think change is what I need right now. A change in employment, a change of life, a change in . . .”

My gaze fell to the tiny chest of drawers that butted up against the foot of my bed. I knew well that Geoff had noticed when I removed the picture of Ben that used to sit on top of it. It resided hidden in my underwear drawer, the sight of it bringing me too much pain. It lashed me now as the memory of an angry voice echoed in my head.

“I don’t know what more you want from me, Fran! You asked for time apart, and I gave you time apart. You wanted to go to school, and I’ve followed every rule you set down, only seeing you once a year. Now you don’t even want that?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to see you,” I had tried to explain, but it had been difficult doing it over the phone. Part of me ached with the need to see him, but I knew I had to make a stand. I had to take back my own life. “I just want some time, Ben.”

“You’ve had time! It’s been four years since you left GothFaire. Fran, you’re my Beloved, the other half to my being. I need you. I can’t exist without you. You are the only one who can redeem me. Why can’t you understand that?”

And that was the point where I exploded on him. “I do understand it. I just reject the whole idea of Beloveds! I don’t want to be your soul mate because I have to, Ben! I don’t want to be bound to you just because of some quirk of fate. I want to make my own choices, make my own life, pick my own man! I want to know that the man I choose to spend my life with is right for me not because it was written into some grand plan, but because our hearts say we should be together. Is that so wrong?”

“How do you know that our hearts aren’t saying that?” he argued.

“Do you love me, Ben? Can you tell me, right here, right now, that you love me beyond all reason?”

“You are my Beloved,” he said in a low, angry voice. “I cannot help but honor and cherish you.”

His words pierced my heart like little shards of ice. “You
can’t help but cherish me
. That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Ben. Neither one of us had a choice in this relationship—you got stuck with me without any say in the matter, too. One minute we had two separate lives. The next we were tangled up together without either one of us wanting it. It just
was
. But that’s not good enough. Not any longer, it isn’t.”

Silence followed my tirade, a silence so filled with pain it almost made me relent. “You don’t want me.”

I took a deep, shaky breath. “I want to make my own choices. I don’t want to be handed a man and be told I have to bind my life to his simply because of a sympathetic link between us. I want to fall in love, not be told I must love. I want to make my own fate, not accept what life has dealt.”

Ben’s voice was flat and lifeless, as cold as the arctic wind. “It will be as you wish. Good-bye, Fran.”

I closed my eyes tight as I remembered the pain of hearing him speak those words, knowing they would be the last ones I’d hear from him. The year that had passed since that call had been filled with anguish over my decision. Had I been right to sever the relationship with Ben? Was he suffering because of it, or had he, too, been set free to make his own choices. At one time, when I was a naive sixteen, I had fancied myself in love with him. But even then I hadn’t wanted to be pushed into the irreversible commitment demanded as a Beloved without knowing my own mind first.