Summoning Sebastian (15 page)

As a result, I couldn't quite follow everything Mom was telling me about the statues and shops as we bounced from one side of the street to the other. The street itself reminded me a bit of the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, but wider and older and with a slightly different brand of hipster. Everything had a wide, open feel to it—a city a-sprawl.

At some point, I must have started to act like I was cold. I
was
cold. I was also tired and starting to think it would have been a better idea to stay home with Colin even though he was dead to the world and not very warm. Cuddling with a chilly dead guy seemed better than wandering the streets of Chelyabinsk, barely able to stay awake and trying to remember if the statue Mom had dragged me past was Lenin or Pushkin. Sacrilegious, probably, but hell, I couldn't tell the difference.

“Time for shopping,” Mom announced, pointing toward the other side of the street. I wasn't sure which shop she was pointing at, but I knew wherever we went, she'd end up in the right place.

Mom knew the local shopping scene pretty well, as it turned out. This shouldn't have been a surprise—they'd been living here for a while, after all. But somehow it seemed strange to me to see Mom comporting herself competently in a foreign country, spitting out Russian sentences that went far over my head in spite of my nearly thirty hours of study. It also seemed weird to be out and about without Colin. That disturbed me a little. I should be more self-sufficient than that.

But almost since I'd met Sebastian, Colin had been a source of protection. He'd kept me safe from things I'd never even known existed. And strolling around a strange city in a strange country without his bigness at my back left me feeling more vulnerable than I would have liked.

I'd left Sebastian's bottle at the house, inside my carry-on, wrapped in bubble wrap and hidden behind a chair in the guest bedroom. He was safe—I couldn't imagine how he wouldn't be—but not having the bottle with me only seemed to ratchet up my anxiety that much more. When I'd checked it just before we left, the bottle was warm and not really vibrating, but I could sense movement inside. It was more a subtle shift in temperature than anything else.

“You need a good hat,” Mom said, dragging my attention back to the here and now. “Some boots wouldn't hurt either. And a coat.”

“I brought all my winter stuff.” I knew she was right, but I still felt the need to argue. She was my mom, after all. “It's not like I live in Florida or something.”

“I know, but you're heading off to Siberia. You need to be warm.”

I blinked at her as she waved me toward a shop, whose sign, in Cyrillic letters, declared it to be something I couldn't read because I hadn't run across those words yet in my thirty hours of study.

“Mom,” I said. “We're in Siberia now.”

She waved it off with a pssht-ing sound. “Please. This is barely Siberia. It's Siberia-light.”

“Just because you're used to it.”

She shrugged, her head tipping in that way that meant I'd made a fair point. “Well, where you're going is much less civilized.”

I'd gotten that impression, so I opted not to argue. I followed her into the store, where she made a beeline to a rack of heavy, fur-lined coats. I brushed a fuzzy collar. Real fur. PETA didn't have much influence in Russia, I presumed.

I set about trying on coats, hats, gloves and boots, trying to find that perfect balance between comfort, warmth and style. After a while I decided to give up on style, or at least my personal sense of it. Comfort and warmth were going to be far more important. Plus nothing in this store actually fit my personal sense of style. The new focus was perking me up, though. I almost felt awake again just from shoving my arms into coats repeatedly.

I was on the fifth or sixth ensemble when I started feeling an itch on the back of my neck, like someone was watching me. My brain twitched with flashback—the stores at home, when I was certain I'd been watched. I turned toward the sensation, pretending to be concerned about the back of the coat. Mom, of course, didn't know I was pretending and gave me a serious perusal while I checked out the other customers, trying to figure out who might have been taking a little too much interest in my ass.

No one looked suspicious, really. There weren't that many people in the store to begin with. I turned back, not wanting to stare too long and draw attention. If somebody
was
keeping an eye on me, I wanted to know who it was so I could tell Colin.

Oddly, I wasn't particularly afraid. Sure, I had concerns about vampires tracking us here, but it was daylight. Vampires would all be tucked away in bed. Of course humans could be dangerous too, but humans didn't faze me much. I'd faced down far too many immortal bloodsuckers with preternatural strength to get too excited about a normal dude or two. On the other hand, I still wasn't convinced the maybe-stalker from back home hadn't been a vampire. The thought made my neck prickle harder.

The odd feeling didn't go away. I tried on one final coat, just to be sure I knew which one I wanted, then sorted out a hat and gloves to go with it. As I moved through the store, the sensation seemed to come from different directions. Following me, yes, but not as fluidly as I might have expected. By the time I'd picked out a pair of fuzzy boots, it was starting to creep me out. And I still hadn't seen anyone who might be the source of the strangeness.

I debated bringing up the situation with Mom, but decided there was no point getting her upset. We were in a public place, so even if I had human vamp helpers trailing me, I was still relatively safe.

Mom tried to buy my stuff until I reminded her my boyfriend was loaded to his sharp pointy teeth. She looked like she was going to argue, then closed her mouth and smiled. I smiled back and slid Colin's credit card across to the cashier. I'd seen his credit limit. There were parts of the country where I could buy a house with that thing. Hell, there were places I could buy an entire country with it.

“Anyplace else you'd like to go?” Mom asked as we headed back to the sidewalk. It was starting to look glowery, and the sun was already dimming. Days were short up this way in the winter.

Before I could answer, she flipped up a hand. “Wait. I think I left my sunglasses on the counter. I'll be right back.”

I watched her depart, leaving me alone on the sidewalk. I moved to one side so I wasn't blocking the door and waited.

“
Gaspozha
?” The voice came basically out of nowhere; I jumped inside, my heart jolting, but managed to maintain an outward calm.

“
Ni govaroo pa Russki
,” I informed him as I turned to see who had addressed me. Then I saw him and froze.

It was the same man. The man who'd creeped me out in Colorado was now creeping me out in the middle of the street in front of a coat shop in Chelyabinsk.

Obviously, the guy got around.

“That's quite all right, Miss Taylor,” he said quietly.

I peered at him. My heart was thumping hard. My initial startlement had been replaced by a deeper sort of anxiety at the realization he knew my name.

“Who are you?” I demanded. This close, I was getting the same kind of vibe I'd gotten from him back home—that he was, quite possibly, a vampire. That there was absolutely no way he could be a vampire seemed irrelevant to the developing equation.

He just smiled, the expression about as smarmy as anything I'd ever seen. If he wasn't a vampire, he'd been hanging around with them way too much.

Of course he's not a vampire. He's out in broad daylight. Get ahold of yourself, Nim.
But that argument hadn't even convinced me back home.

I resisted the urge to glance back over my shoulder to see if Mom was on her way back yet. I actually hoped she wasn't. I didn't want her getting mixed up in this nonsense. It would be naive to think the local cadres didn't know who she was, but there was no sense making things too easy for them. Or in getting her too intimately mixed up in vampire bullshit. One of us in the family was more than enough.

“I asked who you are,” I repeated, crossing my arms over my chest. It was too bad I hadn't brought a hunting knife, or a bazooka. I didn't think launching a big furry coat at this guy's ass would make much of an impression. He looked a little more…together than he had when I'd seen him before. Like he'd bathed and combed his hair. He also seemed more sure of himself. That didn't make me happy.

“Just someone interested in what goes on in these parts.” He had a weird accent, like he'd been born in Russia but had swallowed a Georgia politician later in life. The Georgia in the US, not the Georgia next to Russia. Geography is confusing.

“You know my name—only fair you tell me yours.”

He made a vague head-tilt/half-shrug combo that conveyed it didn't matter that much, but he'd lower himself to answering my question. “Gregor,” he said. If he wasn't a vampire, he sure was acting like one, what with the cagey arrogance and basically comporting himself like an asshole. His gaze drifted down to rest between my collarbones, more or less. “What do you have there?”

I forced myself not to reach up and close my shirt collar. Instead I looked him right in the eye. “Boobs?” I offered. “I take it you've never seen any?”

He chuckled. I really didn't like this guy. Whatever Mom was doing, I hoped she kept doing it a little while longer. I didn't want her getting hurt.

“Oh, I've seen them before.” The way he said it made it sound like he'd seen my personal boobs before, and I didn't like that at all. Not that there was much to see, but they were mine, and he had no need to look at them. “I was more interested in the decorations.”

The decorations. I drew a blank at first, then remembered. The ink. Roland drawing on me in Sharpie. It should have washed or worn off by now, but it hadn't. Hazards of mixing weird vampire magic with permanent ink, I supposed.

“You got something against body art?” I started cataloging things I had on my person that I could use as weapons. I'd been on too many planes lately to be well armed. No pepper spray—I had a bottle of garlic-infused holy water, but that wasn't any good on humans. A really sharp ballpoint? Possibly useful. Pointy nail file? I wasn't even sure I was carrying one.

So what to do? I could maybe back up, back into the store, but that would involve manhandling my ginormous packages with me. Or leaving them on the street where somebody would undoubtedly take them. Then I'd have to buy more. I wasn't that worried about the money, but damn, I really didn't want to try on a bunch more shit. I could scream—that probably wouldn't do much good either.

It all became a moot point when he reached out suddenly, grabbing the placket of my shirt and jerking me to him. I felt a button give way inside his grip, either tearing loose or sliding through the buttonhole. He grabbed the back of my neck with his other hand, then pulled the collar of my shirt open, staring blatantly at the symbols inked on the upper swells of my breasts.

“I want to know what these are.” His breath wafted into my face, and the first thing I noticed about it was the smell. Rank, sweet, like decay. Offal, or just awful. I swallowed back a spasm at the back of my throat. “What are you using them for?”

The second thing I noticed was that the breath wasn't overly warm.

I had a hand in my coat pocket already, curled around a small spray bottle originally designed to hold throat spray. It didn't hold throat spray right now. It held less than three ounces so I could get it past the TSA, but that would be enough.

I didn't want to move too fast, though. This guy had a twitchiness about him I didn't like. Actually, there was a lot about him I didn't like. At the top of the list was the way he was holding my shirt open, exposing the ink on my chest and the dark material of my bra.

“It's just some shit a friend and I were dorking around with,” I said. “Making up art, fake letters, that kind of thing. It was fun. Kind of sexy.” Maybe not the best way to present it, given my position, but I was hoping the thought would distract him. I shrugged, easing a bit of my collar out of his hand. “Then the ink wouldn't wash off.”

Terrible story. I knew this. But it made him narrow his eyes, as if thinking over what to say next. Any distraction was a good distraction. I adjusted the little spray bottle in my hand, waiting for the right moment.

“These marks are from the Tablet of Trichore,” he said after a moment. I hadn't heard that before—hadn't heard any name assigned to the tablet that had taken over so much of my life over the last several months. “You have to know what they mean.”

“I have no idea. We found them on the Internet. It was just a goof. You know, like fucking around with a Ouija board.”

His hand tightened. “You're lying to me. I know who you are. These markings—they have to do with Sebastian, don't they? How did you bring him back?”

I swallowed. What the fuck was I supposed to tell him? He knew things nobody should know unless they'd been allied with Colin and me, or with Pieter. Under the circumstances, I was putting my money on this guy somehow being connected to Pieter. He knew a name for the tablet, or at least a tablet. Was there more than one tablet? But he didn't seem to know we'd recovered Sebastian. If he had no idea why I was marked up with symbols, then he probably didn't know I was carrying my boyfriend around in a blue bottle. Well, not at the moment—just in general.

What else did he know? And who the fuck was he? I was about to ask him a question, hoping to somehow pry more information out of him, when I heard the door to the shop open behind me.

“What the hell?” My mother, her voice high-pitched and nearly screeching. The man's attention wavered for just an instant.

It was enough.

I pulled out the spray bottle and pumped its contents right into his face.