“It’s colorful and bright. I like colorful.”
“It looks like a pair of scrubs,” I said.
“Mmmm,” he said. “It’s a color I can see, so I like it.”
“Oh,” I said. I paused to think this over. I thought of his Gumby-mobile outside. “Ohhhh.”
“I don’t think about it that often.”
“When you were turned, that didn’t… fix itself?”
“No,” he said. “It suits me fine. I can still smell and hear and feel things.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well.” I cleared my throat. Vic was staring at me with a sort of rapt fascination, and seeing him go from sharp, acidic asshole to terrified and color-blind was making my heart hurt.
“What do you think we should do first?” he asked. “You do know why Eddie asked me to come out, right?”
“Protection?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m a Necromancer.”
I paused to consider this.
“Explain.”
“I am a practitioner of the occult arts. One of my specialties is contacting the dead. It’s easier for most people when I say Necromancer, but that’s kind of a blustery, officious word, isn’t it?”
I had seen him cast something—he’d moved his hands, and a wall or a veil of some sort of energy had come up the night we first met.
“So, you think Eddie sent you—”
“Hoping if you didn’t find anything, we could summon something,” he said.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s. Well, I guess he made sure we were prepared.”
“He didn’t want you to miss out on this scoop.”
“Well, I definitely wasn’t intending on dabbling in the black arts this weekend, so. I think maybe it would be better if we just naturally happened to bump into a ghost or something.”
Vic nodded.
“Free-range, rather than caged,” he said. “I get it.”
“It would probably be good to look around—see where the guest rooms are, get the lay of the land. I have a few security cams in my bag. You think you could set one up on the stairwell?”
He hissed in through his teeth.
“I am not the person to talk to about technology,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Oh, boy. This is going to be a long night, I can already tell. Alright. Let’s just… scout the place out first. You take the second floor. I’ll take first floor. Meet back here in ten?”
Vic nodded.
Chapter 4
I was stuck in a (reputedly) haunted mansion with a jumpy, color-blind Necromancer of a vampire. Well. Not that he could do anything about being color-blind. At least it explained his car. This was far and away nowhere near what I expected for my supposed romantic getaway weekend.
“This is what you get when you date zombie-hunting vampires,” I said out loud. “You can’t have everything in a man.”
