“No.”
“No?” I looked at him in surprise.
“I only have one daughter, and she’s never been married, so no, I have not dowered my daughters.”
I smacked him on the arm. “You know what I meant, Mr. Literal.”
He examined Finnvid, who straightened up and clearly tried to look like suitable marriage material. “Two sons,” Nikola finally said.
Imogen sighed, and rose, moving over to a counter to plug in an electric teakettle.
“Two?” Finnvid asked.
“You will name one son after me, and one after my father. The naming of daughters I leave to Imogen, although it would please me to see one named after Io. With more consonants in the name, obviously.”
“You are beyond obnoxious,” I told Nikola, getting off his lap and going toward the back of the trailer. “Imogen, I take it you have a bathroom?”
“Yes, it’s just before the door to my bedroom.”
I tended a little business, and returned to find Imogen pouring out cups of tea for herself, Fran, and me. The gentlemen had disappeared.
Is everything all right? I asked Nikola, worried at his absence.
Yes. The ghosts insist we celebrate the betrothal of Imogen with ale, which Benedikt says can be found in something called a food truck. What is a food truck?
It’s a truck with food. I thought we were going to tackle the issue of your brother?
We will shortly, but first I must negotiate the terms of the marriage settlement with the Viking.
Are you really OK with the idea of having a ghost for a son-in-law? I mean, can they even have children?
I am promised two grandsons and as many granddaughters, so I assume the answer is yes.
“Congratulations,” I told Imogen, toasting her with my cup of tea. “I hope you both will be very happy. And…er…don’t pay any attention to that stuff about naming children after your dad or me. Although obviously, if you wanted to name a kid after your father, that’s fine. I didn’t know—well, it’s not like I even knew ghosts existed, let alone could be tangible and stuff like that—but I didn’t know that ghosts could have children.”
“It depends on the ghost, evidently,” Fran said, sipping her tea. “Mine were raised by means of the Vikingahärta, an amulet which belongs to Loki, a big pain-in-the-patootie Norse god, so those ghosts are more substantial than your run-of-the-mill spirits, or so I gather. They can stay corporeal indefinitely.”
I set down my cup. “I just don’t know that I’m going to get used to this sort of thing.”
“It’s OK. I know just how you feel,” Fran said, patting my hand. She still wore her gloves, I noticed. She saw me looking at them, and grimaced. “I’m a psychometrist. I feel emotions and things like that by touching objects.”
“Really? That’s kind of neat.”
“It is if you’re not the one who has to deal with it,” she said with another grimace. “It’s not nearly as handy as someone who can summon a time-traveling portal. You don’t happen to have a screwdriver, do you?”
“A screwdriver?” I shook my head.
“Yeah, you know, like the Doctor?” She laughed when I continued to stare at her. “Never mind, it was just a little joke. I’ve been watching too much of the BBC. Did you really freak out when you met Ben’s dad?”
I sighed heavily. “Mostly. And a lot of it was his fault. I thought I was going crazy because I could hear his thoughts.”
“I imagine that was quite unnerving if you didn’t realize you were being marked,” Imogen said. “How exactly did you meet Papa?”
I settled back and went over the last few days in more details than I had at Tallulah’s trailer, glossing over the parts where I couldn’t keep my hands off Nikola. By the time I’d gotten to the smutty FedEx woman, the men returned, looking extremely pleased with themselves. The Vikings smelled of ale and staggered in after Nikola and Ben, who just looked dark, dangerous, and oh-so-sexy. At least Nikola did.
“So what’s the game plan?” I asked when everyone was settled again. Nikola and I had possession of Imogen’s couch, which allowed me to surreptitiously press my leg against his in a way that made me very happy. Ben took up his spot on the chair, with Fran perched next to him. Imogen sat on a small ottoman next to Finnvid, and the other ghost, Eirik, murmured something about needing to stretch his back, so he lay down in the aisle and promptly fell asleep.
“As I see it, we have two problems,” Fran said, combing her fingers through Ben’s hair. “The first is the situation with David, but I don’t expect that to be solved immediately unless we get a whole lot luckier than we have been in the last three months. The second is to find Ben’s wicked uncle Rafe.”
“Ralph,” I said, frowning a little and wondering how we were going to find him.
“Rolf,” Nikola corrected.“And stop him from meeting with your lichmaster, and thus destroying every vampire he can find in a three-hundred-year span,” I said.
“What?” Fran shrieked, making Ben jerk away and give her a pained look. “Sorry, Ben, didn’t mean to shout in your ear. What did you mean destroy every vampire in three hundred years? How can Ben’s uncle do that?”
“If he could use the portal to zip around time and capture vampires, he could do an unimaginable amount of damage,” I explained.
“Sweet mother of reason,” Fran said, looking horrified. “Is that what you were about to mention earlier? I can’t believe—it couldn’t be possible—no, surely Rolf wouldn’t go in for wholesale genocide. Would he?”
She asked the question of Nikola, but it was Ben who answered. “He might well do exactly that.” His gaze turned to his father. “I’ve always wanted to ask you this, but given the circumstances…well, that’s all changed now. Who do you think engaged the demon lord who turned you?”
Nikola was silent for a moment or two, his mind whirring with speculation about the question. “I’ve never known for certain,” he said slowly. “I’ve had a suspicion, but the demon lord refused to tell me, and I was in no fit state to challenge him on the question. You appear to be implying that my brothers had something to do with it. Do you have any proof?”
“No,” Ben admitted. “But it seems to me that they are the ones who stood to benefit.”
“From Nikola being made a Dark One?” I patted Nikola’s leg. “Why? It just makes him immortal. If they wanted his position or inheritance, then they wouldn’t have wanted him living forever.”
“We have long tried to understand our uncles’ reasoning, but we can’t. It just doesn’t make any sense,” Imogen said. “Ben says it is because we don’t know all the truth of what happened at that time, that there were unseen forces at work, but he has always been a little prone to conspiracy theories.”
“I have not!” Ben snorted, outraged.
Imogen smiled a tolerant smile.
“It doesn’t make sense at all. My brothers couldn’t inherit Andras Castle,” Nikola said thoughtfully. “They were not sons of my father, and thus they had no claim on the castle. That will pass to Benedikt when I die.”
“They can’t? Well, crap.” I kicked my toe at nothing. “There goes my brilliant explanation.”
“But Imogen and I weren’t born when you were changed into a Dark One. Perhaps they thought they could take control of the castle and your fortune if you were dead?”
“Not the castle,” Nikola repeated, his mind still going over all the possibilities. “But my fortune…yes, that I could see them gaining if I had no descendants. It is, however, merely speculation.”
“I suppose we can’t damn them based on just the fact that it makes perfect sense.” I sighed sadly. “Oh well. Maybe we can beat the truth out of them once we catch them.”
Nikola looked at me as if he’d never seen me. “Beat it out of them? You expect me to beat my own brothers?”
“Well, not torture them, obviously, but surely a little arm-twisting to admit the truth wouldn’t be out of the question. Or wait, can you just, you know, do a mind thing on them to make them admit the truth?”
“Mind thing?”
I giggled at the expression on Nikola’s face.
“Unfortunately, Io, they can’t do that,” Fran said. “I should know, I’ve asked Ben to do it often enough, but he insists they can’t.”
“No, we can’t,” Ben said firmly, giving her a stern look that just made her kiss his forehead.
You really seem to have gotten cheated. You can’t turn into a bat or a wolf, you can’t do the brain thing on people and make them your unwilling slaves, and you can’t seduce women with your eyes.
Who said I can’t?
He gave me a come-hither look that just about had me pouncing on him. All right, I take it back, you can seduce with your eyes. But you’d better not be trying that on anyone else, or you’ll find yourself with one pissed-off almost-Beloved on your hands.
You are a very violent woman. I didn’t not realize this at first.
I am not! I’m a pacifist! I don’t believe in guns, or the death penalty, or wars, or stuff like that.
You are many things, sweetling, but you are not a pacifist.
“The question is,” Imogen said, leaning against her ghost while I glared at her father. “How are we to find Uncle Rolf?”
“As to that, I believe I have an idea,” Nikola said, pulling out his notebook.
Approximately an hour and a half later, I emerged from a small shop, a triumphant—if somewhat dazed—smile on my face.
“Did he buy the coins?” Nikola asked as I got into the small minivan that we’d rented a short while before. “Was your passport enough documentation?”
“Did he mention Uncle Rolf?” Imogen asked.