Sex and the Single Vampire

'No, no, this shade of eyeliner is all wrong for you. Well, it might be fine for the dark eye, but it's much too harsh for your white eye.'

'It's not white; it's silver. Or gray, if you prefer. The doctor said my left eye is actually just an extremely light version of gray, while the right is ordinary brown.'

Esme looked up from where she was poking through my cosmetics case. 'Allie, dear, your eyes are anything but ordinary.'

'Well, the left one is a bit spooky, but the right—'

'Has color variations that just aren't human.'

I dropped my chin into the water and made a face into the bubbles, where she couldn't see it. While I'd heard comments like that all my life, it didn't make them hurt any less.

'Oh, my, now I've hurt your feelings. That was unkind of me, Allie; please accept my apology.'

I lifted my chin so I could speak. 'Esme, you're standing in my legs. While I know you don't feel anything, you're making me lose all feeling in my toes.'

'I won't move until you tell me you forgive me for that unkind comment.'

'I forgive you. Believe me, I've heard worse.'

She stepped through the edge of the tub and patted my head, making my vision go squirrelly for a minute. 'Don't listen to anything unkind that people tell you. It just shows they're jealous. And ignorant. That's what caused me to say that cruel thing, I'm ashamed to say. Why don't you tell me about your eyes, and then I'll understand.'

I had to give her credit; she was truly sorry she'd said what she did. It was hard to stay hurt when she felt so bad about it. I explained about the heterochromia irides, and tried to leave it at that, but she prodded and pushed until I spilled how hard it was to grow up so obviously different from anyone else.

'But that just makes you unique, dear! You should celebrate your differences, not hide them!'

'Easy for you to say; it doesn't make people skittish when they see your eyes coming.'

She smiled and winked. 'Now that isn't in the least bit true.'

I laughed at her mischievous face and reached for the towel as I got out of the tub. 'Oh, trust me, I've heard tales about the ghost of room one-fourteen. I know you like to pop out at couples when they are arguing, and you have a tendency to rearrange towels.'

She made a little moue. 'Girls these days have no idea how to properly fold a towel.'

Eventually I managed to impress Esme with the fact that I needed to sleep, and she faded off into the nothingness that I gathered was a ghost's state of sleep. Before she dissolved away, I begged her to not bother the maid when she came in later to clean the room. She fussed about that for a bit, but in the end promised that she would make no untoward appearances.

Six hours later I was heading out the door to meet with the hermit. The SIP office had been reticent to give me her name and number (at least I knew it was a woman now), but promised to pass along my information. Ten minutes after I'd hung up, the hermit called and made an appointment to meet me at the British Library.

'I thought the whole purpose of a hermit was that they shut themselves away from everyone, not gallivanted around one of the most popular research libraries in the world,' I told the then-quiet room. It didn't answer back.

The British Library is now housed in a huge building at St. Pancras, more than fourteen floors of books, manuscripts, periodicals, and other literary items. I had arranged to meet the hermit in the John Ritblat Gallery (which contains, amongst other things, the Magna Carta), as I didn't have a reader's card and couldn't access the reading rooms.

I wandered through the gallery looking at the missals and Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, and was about to join a demonstration of what a scribe's workshop was like when a middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt and jacket approached me.

'Allegra Telford? I'm Phillippa. I spoke with you this morning.'

'Oh, hi. You must be the—' I stopped. I supposed it wasn't entirely appropriate to call a woman wearing a tweed suit and expensively coiffed blond hair a hermit.

'I'm a hermit, yes,' she nodded, then waved toward an exit. 'Why don't we go into the restaurant and have a cup of tea? We can talk about your problem there.'

I followed her through the piazza to a well-lit restaurant. We collected two little pots of tea, and seated ourselves in an out-of-the-way corner table.

'Phillippa, you'll have to forgive me, but I've never met an honest-to-God hermit before. What… uh… what exactly does a hermit do? If you're not comfortable being here, around so many people, I'd be happy to go somewhere a little quieter.'

She looked around the room. 'No, this is fine. I spend many hours at the library. Oh, I see what you want to know—why am I a hermit when I don't hide myself away in a dank cave?'

I nodded.

'In my case, the hermit status applies on a metaphysical level only. I spend most of my time mentally cloistered, doing research. I do sometimes take on apprentices, and even more rarely offer my services to penitents such as yourself who seek to gain greater knowledge.'

I gnawed on my lip a bit. 'I see. You're kind of a mental hermit?'

She grimaced and sipped at her tea. 'For lack of a better term, I will accept that. Now what is the problem you're having with Releasing spirits?'

I explained what had happened the day before with the cat.

'I tried every variation I could think of, but none of it worked. I thought perhaps there might be something different about English ghosts, and that's why I couldn't send the cat on.'

'Hmmm.' The hermit poured more tea into her cup. 'You warded yourself before you spoke the words of Release, yes?'

I nodded. 'Left hand, right eye.'

'Just so. And the ginseng? It was ground by a stone mortar and pestle? No metal touched it?'

'Ground it myself.'

'You haven't been raising demons lately, have you? I've found that even the weakest of demons can wreak havoc on ginseng.'

'I didn't know that, but no, I haven't raised any demons, ever. I'm really not interested in the dark arts, just the Summoning side of things.'

'Hmm. Very bizarre. Now, if it were a human spirit, I would say it had some unfinished business, but a cat… surely a cat cannot refuse to be Released. What do you know of the cat's owner, the one who died in the fire? Perhaps the cat is bound to her, and that is keeping it from transferring.'

'The ghost is a woman. She refuses to leave, too. She told me she's not leaving me until she sees me happy with a… well, with a certain man. It's not going to happen, so I have no idea how I'm going to convince her to move on.'

The hermit set her cup down carefully. 'You didn't tell me you'd Summoned a human spirit.'

'Oh. Sorry. I did, last night… er… early this morning.'

'And does the cat seem to be bound to her?'

I thought about Esme kissing that poor cat's head. 'Oh, definitely. She calls him her woogie Woogums. I think that just about says it all.'

'Indeed!' The hermit looked horrified. 'Well, then, that is your answer. The human spirit has bound the cat's spirit to hers. If she refuses to leave, the cat will not be able to be sent on.'

'But I tried to Release the cat before I Summoned the other ghost.'

She shrugged and adjusted the string of pearls she wore over a blush-pink blouse. 'It is still bound.'

I took notes on some suggestions she had that might help in future Releases, then looked up when she asked, 'Tell me about this spirit refusing to be Released.'

I sighed heavily. 'Oh, Esme. She's—Oh, my God! What are you doing here?'

I stared in horror at the translucent image of a woman in a ratty old bathrobe with fat gray curls, holding a three-legged cat. 'Good afternoon, Allie. You called?'

'Go away!' I hissed, waving my hands through her in an attempt to dissipate her ghostly form as I peered around us to see how many people were witnessing a completely unplanned spectral