“Bed sport is good,” Eirik said complacently. “We enjoy it.”
“A lot,” Finnvid added.
“It is not quite as good as spending a day fighting outside of Valhalla, knowing there is endless ale waiting for us upon our return, but it is almost as good as that,” Isleif said.
“Aye, the fighting is best of all,” Eirik said, nodding. “Although I would put the bed sport before the ale. Ale is satisfying, but good bed sport is vital.”
“Bed sport with an ale wench is the best of all,” Finnvid said with a wolfish grin.
“Oh, aye, that’s so,” Eirik agreed.
“Can we please change the subject?” I begged. “Like to what I’m going to do with you all?”
“Assuming bed sport is out—” Eirik said.
The scowl I shot him should have turned him into Viking dust.
“—then we will escort you to the Vikingahärta, and make our plans for the capture and banishment of Loki.”
“No, see, that’s not going to work because I’m not going to be able to leave for two weeks.”
“Why not now?” Finnvid asked. “Freya will not be happy if you wait when you did not have to.”
“No,” I said firmly. If there was one thing I’d learned from my past experience with the Vikings, it’s that they’d run all over your good intentions if you let them. “I said I would try to help you, and I will, but on my terms. Loki’s goons know now that Geoff isn’t me, so I don’t have to worry that they’ll grab her again, so really, there’s no pressing reason why I should leave before my vet hospital Web site project is done. I wouldn’t feel at all right leaving it, even if Joann at work is aching to have me gone so she can take over the project and put all sorts of Flash elements into it. We’ll just have to find a place for you guys to stay until I’m ready to go.”
“That would leave us time for much bartering with the weasel gold,” Isleif told the others. “We could get new clothing. Freya said we must blend in with the mortals if we are to walk amongst them.”
“Shopping is an excellent idea,” I said, pulling out a phone book. “Let me just find you guys a hotel you can stay at, and then I’ll show you where the mall is, okay?”
It took the rest of the day, and the last of my patience, but at last I herded my small band of Vikings out to a hotel that was six blocks away. The receptionist didn’t look like she wanted to let them stay there, but when I told her in a whisper that they were rehearsing for a movie, she got all excited and gave them a suite. I prayed Freya’s credit card held up to that and the shopping spree the Vikings were about to embark on when I left them.
A feeling of unease grew in my belly until I returned back to my apartment. Geoff was chatting with her girlfriend, so I puttered around online, searching the apartment listings in the town in which my father lived, hoping something reasonably priced would magically open up. By the time Geoff was done talking, the worried feeling had grown to consume my thoughts.
“Geoff, I hate to ask you, but would you mind if I used your phone to call my mother? I’ll pay you for it since it’s an international call.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got free everything on my phone,” she said, tossing me her cell phone. “Dad gets it through his business.”
“That’s nice of him. I won’t let my mother go on and on, though. I’d hate to use up all your minutes. I just want to tell her I’ll be going to see her in a couple of weeks.” I wouldn’t say anything about the Vikings, though. Mom still had not-very-nice things to say about the last time I ran into them. I sat back on my now rumpled bed and punched in my mother’s phone number. “I just hope you don’t mind hearing my mom scream when she hears I am going to work for my father . . . Hi, Mom? Oh. It’s her voice mail.” I waited until her little speech was over and left a message telling her I’d call back later.
The next two days passed with relative normalcy. Eirik left a note on my door saying he had a cell phone, and that if I needed him, to call. He and the other Vikings had decided to take advantage of my stubbornness and had gone out to the coast to do whatever Vikings did in the ocean. Sailed around, probably. So long as they weren’t pillaging anything, I figured it couldn’t hurt.
But when I couldn’t reach my mother for a third day in a row, the worry that had continued to gnaw at my gut turned into a raging torrent of concern.
“I think something’s wrong,” I told my dad over the phone that night. “She’s never gone incommunicado like this. You’re sure she didn’t e-mail you?”
“I haven’t spoken to your mother in over a year, not since she sold her house and sent some old boxes of mementos to me,” he answered. “I think you’re worrying about nothing, Fran. Your mother is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. I speak from experience, if you recall.”
I smiled at the dry note in his voice. When my parents were in the act of splitting up, Mom had been very inventive in her spells. Most of it, he tolerated, like being forced to walk backward, an unnatural growth of hair out of his ears, and even the appearance of a black rain cloud that followed him for two entire weeks. But when she smote him with a spell that left him incapable of pronouncing the letter s, he moved out for good.
“I know, but this is different.”
“Why not call that friend of yours who’s with the Faire?” he asked, his voice distracted.
“Imogen? I think I’m going to have to. I hate to because . . . well, just because. But it’s call her or Peter, the head of the Faire, and I don’t have his number. If you hear from Mom, let me know, okay?”
“Will do. I’ll see you in a few weeks, yes?”
“Yes.” I grimaced into the phone and hung up. Taking a job at my father’s Internet-based company hadn’t been a priority for my life, but I desperately needed to do something to turn my life around. “That’s all well and fine, but where on earth is my mother?”
“Maybe she’s got a girlfriend, and went off for a wild weekend with her,” Geoff suggested, looking up from her book.
“Mom doesn’t swing that way.”
“That you know of. Maybe she does but she’s afraid to tell you, and that’s why she’s not answering her voice mail.”
I thought about that for a few minutes, finally shaking my head. “She’s pretty white bread, Geoff. She didn’t even like me dating a vam—” My lips closed around the word.
“A what?”
“Nothing. I guess there’s nothing for it but to try Imogen, if you’re sure you don’t mind me using your phone again.”
“Knock yourself out. I’ve got to write a letter to my nana. She doesn’t do e-mails, and her ninety-ninth birthday is next week.”
“Thanks.” I stared at her cell phone in my hand, my stomach tight with the thought of talking to Imogen.
“Something wrong?” Geoff asked.
I made a face. “Not really. It’s just that Imogen and I were really close friends. Ben is her brother, and when I decided to leave the Faire and go to college . . . Well, it was kind of ugly.”
“Ugly how?”
I was silent for a moment, the memories all but swamping me with grief.
“How can you be so selfish?” Imogen had asked me nearly five years before, tears trembling in her blue eyes, her face mirroring the pain I felt in my heart. “You know what you have to do. Stop fighting your destiny and just do it!”
“Is it so wrong to want some time to just be myself before I have to become an extension of Ben?” I stormed back at her.
“You should be happy to be his Beloved! How can you say you love him, and yet refuse to do what’s right?”
I had turned on my heel and walked out of her trailer at that. Three days later I left GothFaire and Europe.
The memory of that time was fresh even now. “Ugly in that Imogen felt I was betraying Ben by refusing to tie myself to him.”
“You were only seventeen, right?”
I nodded.
“Man. Talk about pressure,” Geoff said, her face filled with sympathy. “Just because you didn’t want to date her brother?”