In the Company of Vampires

would not wish for you to consult one.”

“I consulted Absinthe,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but she is just an apprentice.”

“Still, I’m having a hard time seeing diviners as people to fear.”

He made a little half shrug. “Nonetheless, you should be wary. They demand too much in payment. There is another resource closer to you, however, and one that will think kindly about helping you.”

“Who’s that?”

“Tallulah. Or rather, her mate, Sir Edward.”

“Hmm.” I thought about that. Tallulah was a renowned medium, although mostly people consulted her in order to talk to their deceased relatives. Despite the constant, nagging worry that seemed to grow daily, I refused to consider the idea that my mother might be in that class. “My mother isn’t dead, though.”

Ben noted my stubbornly raised chin, but simply said, “Sir Edward’s abilities, and those of Tallulah, are not limited to conversation with the dead. We will consult them as soon as possible.”

“You go with the Dark One, goddess,” Eirik said, waving a hand containing the remote to my mother’s tiny portable TV. “We do not care for mediums.”

“You don’t? Why?”

“Archaeologists are always using them to contact us in Valhalla. They wish to know the location of our villages, and where we buried our dead. It is most annoying.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so after warning them to stay out of trouble, we went to see Tallulah and her ghostly boyfriend. She had only one person with her, so it only took ten minutes before we were shown into the small booth containing a table, her scrying bowl, a crystal ball, and three chairs.

“Fran!” She looked up in surprise as we took the chairs opposite hers. Ben placed some euros in the small stand to the side, where payment was made. “What are you doing here?”

“We wish to talk to you and Sir Edward.”

“You can do that any time,” she said, frowning toward the stand. “I do not require payment for that.”

“This is a professional consultation. We want you and Sir Edward to find my mom.”

Her eyebrows rose, her dark eyes speculative, first on me, then on Ben. “I am not a diviner. I do not have the power to locate your mother, Fran. If I had, I would have offered to do so when you told me she was missing.”

“Sir Edward—”

“He is limited in what he can see from the Akasha,” she said, shaking her head.

“But the two of you together . . .” Ben let the sentence trail off, his gaze just as speculative as hers had been. “You helped Fran once before, when her horse was stolen.”

“We did,” she admitted slowly, her gaze now on the table before her. Her fingers twitched as if she wished to touch the scrying bowl or the baseball-sized glass orb that sat in a mound of midnight blue velvet. “This is more difficult, however. Someone has gone to much trouble to hide Miranda’s whereabouts. If that person should discover that we sought to uncover his actions, it could be dangerous not just to me but to Sir Edward and Fran and you, as well. Are you willing to risk your Beloved’s safety for that?”

“Yes,” Ben said without hesitation, and I was comforted by the fact that despite his past differences with my mother, he would do everything possible to locate her. It didn’t escape me that he was also determined to move heaven and hell to keep me safe, but that was fine by me. I had the same plan with regards to his safety.

“Very well,” Tallulah said, rising from her chair. “Remain here. What you ask will take both Sir Edward and myself a little time to prepare.”

I didn’t have time to do more than envision three different types of grim deaths for Ben, my mother, and myself before she returned. I smiled my thanks when Tallulah returned, carrying, much to my surprise, Davide, my mother’s fat black-and-white cat. She plopped him in my lap before retaking her chair, hesitating between the glass ball and the scrying bowl, but eventually settling on the highly polished black metal bowl.

Davide looked at me with profound disdain.

“You smell like tuna fish, cat,” I told him. His whiskers twitched, and he dug his claws into my arm when I asked Tallulah, “Is he giving you trouble? If he is, I’ll put him in Mom’s trailer. Stop it, cat, or I’ll see to it you don’t have any claws.”

“I told you before that he is no trouble to me.”

“Er . . .” I looked back at the cat. He flattened his ears and hissed silently at me, but at least he stopped digging his claws into the flesh of my arm. “Then why did you bring him out here?”

She smoothed the cloth over the table and poured a little water into the scrying bowl. “He is your mother’s familiar. He will provide a bridge to her.”

“That’s just an old wives’ tale. Or more accurately, I guess, an old witches’ tale, because my mother never used a familiar, and if she did, she would have hardly chosen a fat, grumpy cat to be one.” Davide’s lips thinned, his whiskers held flush with his face, his eyes shooting lasers at me. Or they would have if he could have managed it.

“You are mistaken,” was all she said.

I looked back at Davide. He squinted back at me, and farted on my leg. “For the love of—”

“Silence.”

At Tallulah’s softly spoken command, I stopped glaring at Davide, shooting a quick glance at Ben out of the corner of my eye. He had adopted a mildly interested expression as Tallulah invoked a trance, but as I watched, one corner of his mouth tipped up.

You are entirely too sexy for your own good. How am I going to spend the rest of my life with you if all you have to do is quirk one side of your mouth to have me imagining the most lewd things?

You will enjoy yourself greatly, both in chastising me for my appearance, about which I can do little, and in being pleasured as only a Beloved can be pleasured. Yes, including more tongue swirls in that particular spot, although I object to you including in your fantasies that object, and I would like to know, since you’ve had no other men, how you learned about devices intended to prolong erections?

The Internet, baby, the Internet.

“Sir Edward is with us,” Tallulah said, interrupting my mental review of all the toys I thought might be fun to use on Ben. She sounded brisk and businesslike as usual, not at all adopting the dreamy tone my mother did whenever she communed with the goddess. “I have told him of your request, Fran, and he has agreed to help you, although he warns that he is limited in what he can see.”

I was expecting the session with Tallulah to take a long time, what with all the looking around Sir Edward had to do from the Akashic Plain, referred to by people in the Otherworld as Akasha, and by normal people as limbo. But to my surprise, it took Tallulah and Sir Edward only three minutes to tell us what we wanted to know.

“There is a man, swarthy and bull-chested,” Tallulah said, gazing intently into her scrying bowl. “I see him clearly. Sir Edward says he has much dark power, although he disguises it well. He was a servant, but has been freed. It is he who holds your mother, bound by love.”

“A swarthy man?” I glanced at Ben.

“De Marco,” he said.

“That’s what I was thinking. But why? Because he knew Mom in the past?”

“Perhaps the issues of their relationship were not resolved in the past.”

“Possibly. But that doesn’t sound like her.”

Ben admitted it didn’t.

“And is she really in love with de Marco, or did he magic her somehow?”

Ben asked Tallulah, “Is he nearby? Is Miranda with him?”

“Yes. And yes,” she said, her gaze still locked on the smooth surface of the water in the bowl. She was silent for a moment, then added, shaking her head, “He has too much power for Sir Edward to see more details. He says that this man is gathering forces to him, dark forces.”

The therions? His experiments, do you think?

It’s possible, but therions are not beings of dark power.

Tallulah suddenly took a big gasp of air, then sat back, her eyes once again on us. “That is all we could see. The man sensed Sir Edward’s interest, and would have attacked him had Sir Edward not retreated back to the Akasha.”