In the Company of Vampires

Chapter 2

“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.

“Is it so much to ask to want to have a say in my own life?” I asked sadly, wiping at a tear that had sneaked out of the corner of my eye.

“No. But sometimes life doesn’t work that way.” Geoff held out a mug to me. “Sometimes life is messy and confusing and makes you cry, and you have to work like hell to get things straightened out. You going to see your boyfriend?” I started to protest, but she continued. “Oh, I know, you claim he’s not your boyfriend, but you don’t keep a man’s picture in your undies if he doesn’t still mean something to you.”

“He’s . . . it’s . . . no. I made my decision. I’m sure he’s happier for it.”

“I sure hope so, because you’ve been miserable as hell.” She pulled open the top drawer and extracted Ben from my panties. “I gotta admit he’s yummy,” she said, eyeing the picture. “You said he’s even better in person?”

“Yes.” My gaze was drawn to the picture, even though I’d stared at it so often it was permanently etched into my memory. Ben’s face was half in shadow in the picture, a little smile curling those delectable lips that I remembered with much fondness, but even with his face partially in shadow, I could see the warmth in his gold and brown eyes, see the stubbornness in his jaw, see the black as sin hair that he pulled back into a ponytail. Just looking at him made my body tingle and my heart thump uncomfortably.

“I’m surprised you left him,” Geoff said softly, her gaze now on me.

I made an effort to pull my mind back from the deep well of pain that surged up whenever I thought of him. “I had to. He wanted a commitment that I wasn’t ready to make. And everyone wanted me to make it, too. Well, everyone but my mother, who told me I needed to get out of the relationship because it wasn’t healthy.”

Geoff rolled her eyes. “Heard that. Have the T-shirt. My last girlfriend, she makes Carmen look like Miss Free and Easy. I finally had to get a restraining order against her because she started stalking me. It was really creepy. I don’t blame you for leaving Brad when you did, because seventeen can be such a wacky time, but are you sure you don’t want to see him? I mean, you’re all grown up now. Maybe things will be different.”

“No. Nothing will be different.” I’d still be his Beloved. We’d still be bound together because of that odd quirk of fate, and not because we wanted to be together.

“Well, good luck to you. I’d be scared stiff to move in with my dad. He’s so rigid. He still thinks I’m twelve.”

I grimaced. “My father isn’t much different, but it’ll only be for a couple of weeks until I get a place of my own. My mother isn’t going to be happy, though. She thinks my dad is the devil incarnate, and she really can’t stand her replacement.”

“Yeah, my mother hates the current Mrs. Widden, too. I just wish Dad would get past his trophy wife stage and settle down to one.”

“Well, there’s nothing my mother can do to stop me. Except maybe a spell or two,” I added under my breath.

“Except what?”

“Nothing.” I scooted back on the bed, mentally counting down the days. Two weeks and I’d be done with the big Web site launch project that I’d been working on for the last three months, and I could leave Oregon and step into a new life.

Why did that thought seem so bleak?

“Doesn’t it just figure,” Geoff said with an exaggerated sigh, pulling out her phone when it indicated she had another message. “I finally find a normal roommate, and you’re dumping me.”

“I’m sorry about leaving you in the lurch.”

She waved away my apology, tucking the phone into her pocket. “It’s your life, and you have a right to live it the way you want. Damn, she’s having another hissy. So much for relaxing. I’d better go see what bee is up Queen Carmen’s butt this time. See ya.”

“Later,” I said, mentally rehearsing the conversation I was going to have with my mother. A sudden itchiness had me twitching slightly. Maybe I should tell her now, rather than wait until I was in California. “It’s not like it’s going to be one simple conversation,” I murmured as I put Ben’s picture back into the drawer. “I might as well start my martyrdom sooner than later.”

I reached for my cell phone, remembering after a few seconds that it was lost with the backpack. “Bullfrogs! I’ll just have to wait until Geoff gets back.”

I used the time to trot downstairs to check if my backpack had been turned in to the bookstore (it hadn’t), finally using their phone to call the police and report it stolen. I suffered through a lecture about leaving valuables out in the open, then headed back up the stairs to the apartment, wondering how my life had suddenly become so chaotic.

“Goddess!”

I stared openmouthed at the man who turned from the small ancient refrigerator that squatted next to the TV, a chicken drumstick in his hand. He was tall, had shoulder-length bleached blond hair, and blue eyes that had seen more history than I could possibly imagine. “Eirik? Eirik Redblood?”

“Goddess Fran! We are so happy to see you again! You have grown bigger!” A second man popped out of the tiny bathroom, wiping his hands on his linen tunic. He was bigger than the first, large and imposing, with a long brown beard that was split down the middle and braided.

“Isleif? What—?”

“She is pleased to see us,” a voice said behind me. I spun around and stared with continued stupor at the third man. He, too, was tall and muscular, but his hair was walnut, and he had a short goatee and mustache that gave him a roguish look. “Finnvid.”

“Aye, she is pleased,” Eirik the Viking ghost said, frowning as Finnvid captured my hand and pressed his all-too-real lips to my knuckles. “Do not slobber on the goddess, Finnvid. It is unseemly.”

“Sorry.” Finnvid’s brown eyes twinkled at me with an expression I remembered well.

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked, trying frantically to wrap my mind around the fact that three Viking ghosts—my three Viking ghosts—were standing here in my apartment. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Valhalla? Didn’t Gunn and her Valkyries take you there? I distinctly remember her taking you away.”

“We have returned,” Isleif said simply.

“Freya has sent us to you to beg your help,” Eirik said, waving the piece of chicken at me.

“Freya wants my help? The goddess Freya?” I asked, remembering a very pissed-off, very beautiful woman.

“Yes. Frigga—that’s Odin’s wife—she asked Freya to take care of Loki, and since he keeps trying to sell her to the dwarves, she finally had enough and sent us to help you banish him to the Akashic Plain.”

My mouth was hanging wide open in prime fly-catching position. I blinked at Eirik a couple of times, wondering if I’d suddenly gone insane. I reached out and touched his chest. He, like the other Vikings, wore a combination of fur, leather, and wool clothing. Each man had a sword strapped to his back, and a dagger and ax on his hips.

Eirik’s eyes lit with interest as my hand touched his chest. “You wish to rut at last, goddess?”

“No!” I snatched my hand back from him, remembering well his desire to do things that I had only ever considered doing with Ben. “No, I do not wish to . . . er . . . rut with you.”

“Ah, that would be because you rut with the Dark One. He is here?” The three men looked around.

“No, Ben’s in Europe.”

“Europe?” Isleif pursed his lips and lowered his large body gingerly onto Geoff’s overstuffed beanbag chair. “You have had a quarrel with your man? We will give you advice.”

“No, no, that’s not at all necessary,” I said quickly, all too familiar with their sort of relationship advice.

“Advice,” Finnvid agreed, nodding. He shoved Isleif upright when the latter tipped over backward, having evidently not realized there was no back to the beanbag chair. “We are excellent in advice. I, myself, have had five wives. Eirik has had two, and Isleif has been married to the same woman for over a thousand years.”

Isleif smiled smugly.

“We are experts on women,” Eirik said, taking my hand. “You will tell us about this quarrel, and we will tell you what you have done wrong.”

“Honestly, guys, it’s all good. Ben and I . . . er . . . we aren’t really a couple anymore. He stayed in Europe when I came home to go to college. Now I work for a Web development company.” I fought back a little bit of panic at the thought of the three Vikings, well-meaning as they were, giving me endless advice regarding Ben.

“You aren’t a couple of what?” Finnvid asked.

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Tell me about this thing with Freya. Why does she want Loki banned? And how on earth does she expect me to do anything about it?”

“You are the goddess Fran, bearer of the Vikingahärta,” Eirik said, releasing my hand when I tugged firmly. “Freya knows you have the power to defeat Loki, since you have done so in the past.”

“I didn’t defeat him, per se,” I said, mentally going over the events almost five years in the past. “We kind of hit a deadlock. And as for the Vikingahärta . . . I don’t have it.”

The three Vikings goggled at me. Eirik dropped his piece of chicken. “You don’t?” he asked, absently wiping his fingers on his wool tunic.

“No. It’s in Europe. I left it with Imogen.”

“Imogen,” Finnvid drawled, a wicked smile coming to his face. “How I have missed her.”

“Uh-huh.” I gave him a look that told him I wasn’t buying it. His smile grew broader. “She’s keeping it safe for me. I didn’t feel it was right to bring it with me when I went to college, and I haven’t seen Imogen since I left Europe.”

“Then you must retrieve it from her,” Eirik said, picking up the chicken and blowing on it. He must have seen my face because he added, “Five-second rule.”

I gawked at him. “You know about the five-second rule?”

He shrugged. “Odin has many televisions. Sometimes he lets us watch MythBusters. There was a show about the five-second rule.”

I held up my hands, having too many difficulties trying to picture a bunch of Viking ghosts sitting around watching TV. “Let’s get back to Loki, shall we? Freya sent you to me to help get rid of him?”

“Aye. She was impressed with how bravely we fought against him before,” Isleif said. He suddenly brightened as he turned to the other two men. “We can pillage a McDonald’s again!”

“McDonald’s!” Finnvid and Eirik exclaimed in unison, their faces filled with delight.

“Oh, for the love of the birds in the trees . . . you guys know the rules! No pillaging!”

Finnvid patted me on the shoulder. “You need not get yourself roused with anger, goddess Fran. Freya gave Eirik much gold to spend while we aid you.”

Eirik pulled out a credit card. “We have weasel gold.”

“That’s Visa Gold, not weasel . . . Oh, never mind. Just be sure you use that and don’t pillage anything.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know why Freya thinks I can banish Loki, and frankly, the aborted kidnapping of Geoff notwithstanding, I’d rather be left in peace.”

“Goddess Freya wishes you to banish Loki as soon as you can,” Isleif told me, struggling to get out of the beanbag chair. Eirik and Finnvid were rummaging around in the fridge, murmuring softly to themselves over my yogurts and Geoff’s leftover take-out chicken. I gave Isleif my hand, planted my feet firmly, and did my best not to topple over when he managed to get to his feet. “He is scaring away the dolphins.”

I was getting a little tired of all the goggling and gawking, but there was nothing else I could do at such a bizarre statement. “Huh?”

“He scares away the dolphins. Is that chicken I smell? Excellent. I am very hungry. I will eat a whole one myself.”

“What dolphins?” I asked, tugging on the sleeve of the linen shirt he wore beneath his wool tunic.

“The ones at Asgard.” He frowned as Finnvid handed him a lemon crème yogurt. “There is no more chicken?”

“Eirik is eating it.”

“The goddess will get us more,” Eirik answered around a mouthful of fried chicken breast, little crumbs flying from his mouth.

“The goddess will do no such thing. You boys can feed yourselves.”

“She is right. We have the weasel gold,” Finnvid said, sucking on a wing.

“Low-fat? I do not want low-fat,” Isleif declared, examining the yogurt. “I need fat to maintain my strength.”

“You have dolphins in Valhalla?” I asked Eirik.

“No. We have fighting and blood and ale wenches in Valhalla,” he corrected. “The dolphins are in Asgard.”

“But I thought—” I stopped, confused.

“Valhalla is part of Asgard. Some years ago, Odin moved it to the Bahamas because Frigga wished to swim with the dolphins.”

“Your Nordic heaven place is in the Bahamas?” I asked, incredulous.

“I just said so. Loki scares the dolphins away. Frigga is most angry with him, and tried to have him banished from Asgard, but Odin refused. He said that Loki lost much standing with the other members of the Aesir when you defeated him, and it would be cruel to take Asgard from him.”

“I didn’t defeat him. It was a deadlock.”

Eirik shrugged, cracking the chicken bones and sucking on the ends. “That is not what the gods think. Loki has been stomping around Asgard muttering about revenge for the last few years. Frigga demanded Freya’s help, and she turned to us, charging us with aiding you to do the job. That is why she gave us solid forms—to help you.”

I sank bonelessly onto my bed. Eirik sat next to me, still sucking on the chicken bone. “I wish I could help, but I don’t know what I can do. I don’t have the Vikingahärta, and even if I did, Loki probably wouldn’t let himself be banished with it.”

“We will come up with a plan,” Isleif said, frowning as Finnvid sucked down a container of yogurt in one slurp. “We will need equipment, however. The weasel gold will get us that.”

“I will need a laptop,” Finnvid said, wiping his mouth. “I left mine in Valhalla.”

“We will all need new spears and shields. And the goddess will need a ladies’ beheading ax, since she did not get one the last time we went shopping for her,” Eirik said, nodding toward me.

“Oh, no, not again,” I moaned, wanting to curl up into a little ball.

“I will need a new bow, since Birta, my wife, broke mine over my head when I tried to shoot her cats.”

I stared at him in abject horror.

“I thought they were sick and needed to be put out of their misery,” he said quickly, looking offended. “I was trying to help them, but Birta didn’t see it that way. And in the end, it turned out to be balls of hair that were distressing them.”

“I think I like your wife,” I said, giving him a long, hard look. “A lot.”

He grinned suddenly. “She would approve of you, too, goddess.”

“That’s nice, but in truth, neither here nor there.” I got off the bed and folded my hands as I faced the three Vikings. “There’s no way I’m going to get out of this, is there?”

“No,” Eirik said. “Why would you want to?”

I sighed. “Right. Since Loki brought this fight to me by nabbing Geoff, then I guess I don’t have any choice but to take care of him. I will do what I can to help you guys—or rather, let you help me—but I need a couple of weeks first to wrap up a big work project. Once that is done, then I can get the Vikingahärta from Imogen and we’ll go from there, okay? In the meantime, it was wonderful to see you again, and if you check back with me two weeks from now, I’ll be able to tell you when we leave.”

They looked confused. “Check back with you?” Finnvid asked.

“We must stay with you,” Eirik said, shaking his head. “We have given our oath to Freya to aid you.”

Panic hit me hard and hot. “You can’t stay with me! I only have this little apartment, and I share it with another woman! There’s no room for you here, not to mention the distraction you’d be!”

“We are not leaving you until we have banished Loki,” Eirik said with a firmness that made my stomach clench up. The other two Vikings nodded.

“But what am I going to tell Geoff—”

As if her name was an invocation, the door opened and Geoff walked in, freezing when she took in the sight of three large men in Viking wear. “Uh . . .”

“Oh, bullfrogs!” I swore, plopping down onto my bed as I dropped my head onto my hands.