chance that if I worked on Christian, he’d let Mattias and Kristjana go?”
“Well . . .” She slid me an odd look. “Christian is the head of the Moravian Council. That position has a lot of responsibility with it.”
She waited a moment, obviously expecting me to understand something that wasn’t at all clear.
“I’m afraid that I don’t see what one has to do with the other,” I admitted.
She sighed and thought for a moment. “He doesn’t break rules. He can’t, not in his position. And what you’re asking for would mean he’d have to do just that. So no, I don’t think there’s anything you can do that will get him to release Kristjana and Mattias.”
There was an odd emphasis on the word “release” that I didn’t quite understand. My brain chased around a hundred different thoughts, all of them ending with the same sad conclusion: If Christian wouldn’t let them go, I was going to be damned to Zoryahood for the rest of my life.
“I think you and Kristoff will be comfy here,” Allie said, looking around the room. “I’m sure you’ll have him up to speed in no time. He was already looking a hundred times better after dining at Casa Pia.”
I frowned at the thought of Kristoff being held prisoner, starved so callously. “He does look better, but I doubt if he’s back to full strength.”
“Probably not.” Allie paused a moment. “Despite what you may think, he wasn’t mistreated any more than the two reapers were. Kristoff was offered blood-he just refused to take it. We didn’t try to starve him, Pia. You have to understand that for a Dark One to be separated from his Beloved for a short while is bearable. It’s not comfortable in the least, not for either person, but it’s bearable. But to go two months . . .” She shook her head. “I can only imagine the pain Kristoff must have suffered, being deprived of you. And I’m sure you didn’t have a grand old time.”
I looked down at myself and immediately sat up straighter to lessen the resemblance between me and a Buddha statue. “Unfortunately, I’ve managed to eat just fine during our separation.”
“That’s not quite what I meant,” she answered. “When Christian is gone for more than a couple of days, I start getting headaches. Nothing truly horrible, but a low-grade headache that persists no matter what I take.”
I thought of the headaches I’d been prone to during the last few months. They were so constant, I’d gone to both my optometrist and a doctor to see if I was starting to have migraines. “I’ve had headaches a lot lately,” I admitted.
“But worse than that is a sense of . . .” She hesitated, her hands making a vague gesture. “Oh, I don’t know quite how to describe it. It’s a sense of being . . . incomplete. As if some part of me were missing. Things just don’t seem right, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” I said slowly, noticing for the first time that the vaguely empty feeling inside me seemed to be gone. “It’s as if you were hollow inside.”
“Hollow, that’s it exactly. And if you’re concerned about your other husband’s well-being, you’re welcome to talk to him. He’s confined to a room on the second floor. We don’t let him leave unattended-there are wards on the door-but we do take him out for little jaunts about the garden to get a bit of fresh air. He’s not mistreated in any way, and I’m sure that goes for the other reaper, as well.”
“A ward?” I asked. “What exactly is that?”
“It’s basically a magical symbol that’s drawn in the air or on an item. We find it works better than mundane things like locks. The ward allows people to pass through the door to enter the room, but not leave by it.” She got to her feet, opening the door to the closet. “Come out, Van Helsing. There’s a vampire downstairs who needs seeing to.”
“Vampiwe!” Josef emerged from the closet with an old-fashioned wooden shoe form. He held it by the long metal skewer that poked into the wooden foot, waving it about as if it were a crossbow. “Shoot the vampiwe!”
“That’s right, snuggles. Go shoot Daddy.”
The boy ran out of the room, yelling about vampires. Allie followed more slowly, pausing at the door. “If you need anything, just give me a holler.”
“I will,” I said, still distracted by the idea that I could be so affected by the loss of Kristoff. Just in time I remembered the question I had wanted to ask. “Oh, can I do the keeper thing with any spirit?”
“So long as they’re not bound to someone else, you should be able to. Although your ghosts sound like the grounded kind. The kind I summon are unbound.”
“Unbound? I’m not sure I understand.”
“Well, yours can make themselves seen and heard, and can interact with our reality. There are other spirits out there who have to be Summoned to that state. Those are the ones I deal with.”
“How do they get that way?” I asked, thinking of the ghosts who’d been waiting for me in Iceland.
She shrugged. “All we know is that there are several types of spirits. Some bound, some unbound, some present who refuse to be Summoned. Still others, like Esme, refuse to be Released.”
“Sent on, you mean?”
“Yep.”
“I know one of those,” I said, thinking fondly of Ulfur and his ghostly horse. “He would have gone on to Ostri, but he stayed to help me.”
“Bind him to a keeper and take him places with you,” she said with a little shrug. “Assuming he wants to go, that is. Keepers are a great way to let them travel and keep them safe. Not to mention out of your hair for those times when you want a little privacy.”
I smiled in response to her sudden grin, and was about to thank her when Christian appeared in the doorway. He held his son on one hip, the small metal skewer that I recognized coming from the antique shoe form sprouting out of his stomach. The glare he gave his wife would have scared me to death if it had been directed at me. “Allegra, would it be asking too much for you to not encourage my son to stake me at every available opportunity?”
“He was being Van Helsing. That’s what Van Helsing does. And I didn’t tell him to go for your heart,” she answered, patting her boy on the head. “Besides, I thought he was going to shoot you with his pretend crossbow. What a clever little boy you are to make a stake out of the shoe form.”
Christian’s expression turned into one of sheer martyrdom as he plucked the metal skewer out of his belly. “That’s it. I am destroying your Buffy DVDs. Kristoff, if you ever have children, I would advise you to ban any and all DVDs from your home. Come, Beloved. There are a few things I have to say to Josef, and I believe they will benefit you, as well.”
Kristoff, who had been standing behind him, watched with a horrified expression as Christian tossed the stake onto a hall table before taking his wife’s hand. Allie winked at me as she left with him, leaving Kristoff and me alone.
“Pia, are you back?” The door opposite me opened. Magda appeared, rosy and smelling of perfumed bath salts. “That was you I heard. I see you found Kristoff. Hello again. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Pia’s friend Madga.”
“Magda and her boyfriend, Raymond, kindly offered to come with me to Vienna,” I explained.
Kristoff made her a little bow, but said nothing.
“Well . . .” Magda examined Kristoff for a moment, then indulged in a little eyebrow semaphore with me. “Ray’s having a quick shower, but he wanted to go out and see the sights. I assume you two prefer to take a rain check on doing the tourist thing?”
I glanced at Kristoff. He didn’t look even remotely as horrible as when I first saw him, but his face was still much too gaunt, and more important, I sensed a gnawing hunger in him that had yet to be fully appeased. “I think a rain check will be best.”
“Gotcha. How did the meeting with the fanged ones go?”
I dredged up a somewhat weak smile. “It was . . . interesting. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, OK?”
“All right, but I’m going to hold you to that. Nice to see you again, Kristoff.”
Magda withdrew into her room with a pointed look at me that warned she would, indeed, expect full disclosure.
I looked at Kristoff. Kristoff looked at me.
“Awkward?” he asked.
“Well . . . yes. Kind of.”
