Romancing The Dead (19 page)

Coyote? With a capital C? No way, Micah was a real person, flesh and blood, not some Trickster God straight out of myth. Like Lilith.

Oh.

How stupid did I feel? I’d been tricked by the Trickster.

7.

Jupiter

KEYWORDS:
Luck, Hunting, and Philosophic Reasoning

Micah was Coyote.

Well, that certainly would explain the intense brightness of his aura and, strangely enough, his perverse sense of humor. Wile E. Coyote T-shirt. Oh yeah, I got it now. Very funny. Ha-ha.

Still, I wasn’t used to capital-letter Gods that walked around corporally—not full time, anyway. I’d thought that to come to this earthly plane, Gods and Goddesses needed human vessels. That was the role that the High Priest and Priestess played during most rituals—they opened themselves to the presence of a God or Goddess. It was a meditative channeling and part of how I’d called Lilith into me. Lilith didn’t exist on the physical plane, except within me, which is always why I assumed She stayed. For her own reasons, she liked having a body and being part of this place.

Maybe Coyote had commandeered Micah full time, like Lilith occasionally tried to do with me. If that were true, I had to find him. Because if he released Lilith, where was she now? Was she riding inside Micah now too? Holding on to that much deity for that long would burn him up, exhaust his human body.

Mátyás tapped the table with his finger. “Excuse me,” he said to my stunned, open mouth as I tried to process the concept that the man I’d ridden home with from the mall might be a Native God, and not just in the damn -you’rehot-small-“g” kind of way. “But can we talk about
me
for a minute? I did just drive through a tornado to tell you why I think my father is in mortal danger.”

“Uh,” I said, trying to remind myself that really, what was a God, when I dated a vampire and had dealt with zombies and ghouls?

“Yeah, sure.”

Mátyás took a sip of his tea and I noticed his hands trembled a little as he set the cup back down. “Thing is, I don’t . . . that is, I’ve never spoken of this with anyone outside of my family.”

I momentarily forgot about Gods that walked around in blue jeans and muscle shirts that showed off tattoos. “Spoken of what?”

He pursed his lips, and his eyes slid away from mine and back to the rain. “I walk into other people’s dreams.”

He’d said it as though he just told me had some kind of dread disease, so I waited for more. It sounded like clairvoyance to me, and having “real” or prophetic dreams was pretty common among Witches, so I thought maybe for Mátyás it was the kind of thing he got only if he drank goat’s blood or made some kind of virgin sacrifice under a dark moon. When the moments stretched and he didn’t offer anything, I prompted, “And?”

“And it’s my curse, you wouldn’t understand.”

Clearly, I didn’t. I took a sip of my tea while Mátyás brooded at my windowpane. “Well, so?” I asked. “Did you talk to Sebastian? What did you see?”

Mátyás snapped his attention back to me and blinked, like I’d given him angst whiplash. I guess he’d expected me to join his pity party and hardly knew what to do when I didn’t. “Uh,” he said. “Well, I saw Saint Sebastian with the arrows piercing him, except it was my father, of course. He was bleeding, but he didn ’t seem to know it. When I called to him, he didn ’t answer, which is unusual. Honestly, that’s why I came to you at the store the other day. I wasn’t as sure before, but I think he’s under some kind of spell.”

Mátyás’s eyes watched mine to see if I’d understood him. He seemed to be implying that he and Sebastian spoke to each other in dreams sometimes. Again, it seemed like pretty standard Witchy stuff to me. Honestly, I was more surprised to hear that Sebastian tolerated even that much communication from his son. “Do you talk to him a lot?”

The table became suddenly very interesting. “No. Perhaps you’ve noticed we’re a bit dysfunctional? But . . .” His gaze met mine.

“He’s always noted my . . . intrusion into his dreams, and we often exchange a glance if nothing else. This time, it was as if I wasn’t there.” He shrugged. “He totally blanked me.”

“Wait a minute, are you saying the dream of the saint is Sebastian’s dream?”

Mátyás nodded. “And that’s the thing, it’s the dream he has when he’s in the long sleep or, more rarely, in physical pain.”

“You see
other
people’s dreams?”

Mátyás squared his shoulders. His jaw flexed as though preparing for a blow. “Ah, so
now
you get it. With my mother’s people, I’m called
budjo shon
—literally ‘moon swindler,’ dream thief.”

“Can you see anyone’s dreams?” I asked suddenly wondering what Mátyás would think of that one where I’m in a hotel that’s really my old high school and I’m late for a test or a job interview, only I can’t find the room because all the stairs are Escher-esque and backward.

Mátyás sighed, setting his cup down gingerly in the only spot on the table not covered in paper or books. “I don’t know. I can’t really control it.”

“How do you know the dreams aren’t yours? I mean, how did you figure out you weren’t just dreaming your own dreams with other people in them?”

He studied his hands. “I’m always the stranger. The dreamers are always aware that I’m not supposed to be there.”

“Holy crap, Mátyás, you’re the boogeyman,” I said. “You’re the monster that I can’t run away from. That guy whose always trying to break into my apartment.”

“In the flesh,” he said with a grim smile and a salute of his cup.

“Does it happen every night?”

“Nearly.”

I tried to imagine what it must be like to never have a dream all your own and instead restlessly wander through other people ’s unconsciousnesses. It would be disconcerting, at best, I’d think, never understanding the symbolism, always wondering what was up with the old lady in the corner or whatever. How would you get any real rest? Especially if your presence changed the dream into a nightmare. “Wow,” I said. “That totally sucks.”

He laughed. “Yeah. It does.”

I drank my tea down to the honeyed sediment. Barney strolled in past us on her way to the adjacent tower room. She hopped up onto the window ledge and jammed herself into the narrow open crack. Her flabby fur hung over the edge of the sill, but somehow she clung there. The rain had mostly quit, leaving behind the fresh smell of ozone.

“Did Sebastian’s dream give you any clue as to where he was or who might have captured him?”

Mátyás started, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. “What makes you think that he’s being held?”

“You said you figured he was under a spell. We both had visions of him stuck to a tree. What do
you
think that means?”

The overhead light in the kitchen bathed the room in an artificial yellow. Mátyás’s finger traced the edges of the papers piled on the table. His eyes don’t meet mine.

“Pretty strong magic to hold a vampire.”

He sounded scared, but it was clear he was trying not to. I didn’t have a good answer, though he looked up at me, wanting one. I shrugged. “I don’t know. Your buddies in Rome figured out how to pin him against the wall.”

Mátyás’s gaze dropped.

“You told them,” I surmised. “They had no clue how to deal with a real vampire until you told them.”

Glancing at the darkened windows, Mátyás’s jaw muscles worked. “At the time I wanted him dead.” He laughed a little at his choice of words, then added, “I mean, all the way.”

“And now?”

Gold-brown eyes finally connected to mine again. “He’s my
father
.” I thought for a moment that was all he was going to say on the subject, but then he let out a breath and said, “Blood is blood, isn’t it?”

I nodded, staring into the bottom of my mug at the dregs.

Apparently gathering his thoughts, Mátyás watched the rain. With his shoulders slumped and hair falling into his eyes, he looked lanky and young sitting at my kitchen table. He wore a silvery -gray silk shirt that clung loosely to his narrow shoulders. Black tapered pants led in a straight line to polished, Italian leather shoes that marked him as a foreigner —no bright white, American brand-name tennis shoes for Mátyás.

At this moment, he looked surprisingly like Sebastian. Sebastian was more solid and much less pretentiously Eurotrash, but there was something of him in Mátyás’s expression, his carriage and mannerisms. They were clearly related. I thought about my own mother and father. I hadn’t called them yet to tell them the big news. They didn’t even really know about Sebastian, even though we’d been dating for more than a year now. My folks and I were benignly estranged, but that was no excuse. Sebastian and Mátyás actively hated each other and Sebastian had made the call. I sucked. “It is,” I said, resolving to call them first thing in the morning.

I must have telegraphed what I was thinking because Mátyás squinted at me like he suspected I’d dropped the ball. “What does your family think of you marrying a vampire?”

“They don’t know,” I admitted, since trying to deny it would only get Mátyás curious. He was anyway. “Don’t know? As in they don’t know your lover is a bloodsucker or they don’t know about Sebastian, period?”

I waved my hand embarrassingly indicating the latter. “That last one.”

Mátyás laughed, and I felt stupid.

“In my defense, he only proposed a few days ago. I haven’t really had time to call home.” And Sebastian knew he was going to ask me, so he contacted Mátyás and started dumping his ghouls . . .

Sebastian had been totally setting his affairs in order. Maybe there was a clue to his disappearance there. It was still possible one of his ghouls held him captive out of jealousy. I’d only met two and there were several more that seemed on the active list in his little black book. But if those options didn’t pan out, I had to start asking myself who else might be upset by my marriage to Sebastian. Looking at Mátyás, I could think of one.

“So what ever happened with Teréza, your mommy dearest?” I asked.

Mátyás, who had been smirking, faltered.

His jaw flexed. I’d clearly hit a nerve. Last I’d heard, Teréza was stuck in some kind of postdeath suspended animation. She’d been dying of consumption when Sebastian tried to save her by turning her into a vampire. Unfortunately, Sebastian discovered that, being made by science and magic, his blood didn’t work that way. He can’t make other vampires. But Teréza didn’t die all the way either. She was something in between—dead, not-dead. Sebastian and Mátyás fought about what should be done with her body. Sebastian wanted her buried somewhere peaceful; Mátyás kept unearthing her and searching for a “cure.” In fact, Mátyás had been willing to sell out his father to have the Catholic pope exorcise the “demon” blood from Teréza. If it had worked and she was up and wandering about, Teréza wouldn’t be too pleased about our upcoming marriage. She was Romany, a gypsy. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she might lure Sebastian away in order to keep him to herself.

“Yeah,” I said. “How’d that whole thing with the pope work out?”

Mátyás’s eyes narrowed and his lips flattened into a thin, menacing line. “Leave my
daia
out of this,” he said. This was twice tonight that I’d heard him say something in his native language.

“I just think it’s interesting that you showed up at the same time Sebastian disappeared. Did you bring Mummy with you?”

Mátyás stood up slowly with his hands at his sides, like we were facing off at the OK Corral. “I already told you why I came here. I came to talk him out of marrying you.”

“You didn’t answer the whole question. What about Teréza? Where is she?”

“Mother is . . . convalescing. Elsewhere.”

Well now, didn’t that sound just spooky? “Convalescing?”

“Yes.” He watched me from where he stood in front of the kitchen table. He continued to hold himself wary, as if ready to fight. I could tell he wasn’t going to give me any more details about Teréza. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anyway, as long as she wasn’t anywhere near Sebastian. “Just tell me she’s not in this country.”

“She’s in Italy.”

Though the sky was still dark outside the windows, it had lightened to a less threatening overcast. Rain pattered softly against the glass. Though it was possible that Teréza was in on Sebastian’s disappearance without Mátyás’s knowledge, I doubted it. Could she even be capable, having been not-dead/dead for so long? Even if she made some kind of recovery from that state, certainly Mátyás watched over her like a mother hen. It surprised me that he left her so far behind. “You left your mom in Italy?”

His jaw twitched again, and he sighed. “She’s with friends. People I trust.”

Mátyás had friends?

“Look,” he said. “I know what you’re getting at, but my mother simply isn’t capable right now. I don’t know if she ever will be. She spent a long time . . . in the darkness. She’s not well.”

Trapped between life and death for over a hundred years could easily make a person insane. “But she’s awake?”

His lips pressed even tighter. “Some days.”

Did that mean that sometimes she was alive and others she was dead again? Things sounded very complicated, to say the least. I began to understand why Mátyás didn’t want to talk about this.

I suddenly had a pang of sympathy for the guy. As if his life wasn ’t bizarre enough—he had a vampire for a father, whose blood had made him a perpetual teenager, cursed to wander through other people ’s dreams—now his dead mother was back from beyond, kind of.

I started to say something supportive when we heard the impact. All the lights went out with a pop. The house shook with noise. The door between the kitchen and the living room banged open, bringing with it a cloud of plaster dust and oak leaves.

“What was that?” Mátyás asked, pulling a keychain flashlight out of his pocket and shined it into my face. I blinked helplessly. It sounded like my living room had just exploded.

A gigantic tree killed my couch. Its massive trunk smooshed the frame into two separate halves, and stuffing erupted from the tears in yellow gobs. The tree’s branches also took out three windows, half of a 150-year-old lath-and-plaster wall, my end table, a lamp, and knocked over my bookcase.