Page 24 of Desperately Seeking Vampire
“Gurg!” came an answering statement from inside the van. “Hurt. Ow.”
“Get on in front of me,” Ivo told Minerva, and after she said something extremely profane to the driver who kept honking at them, she did so.
The motorcycle roared to life, drowning out the cries of the strongman who was trying to get to the road.
“I swear, though, that if you kill me on this damned bike, I will haunt you to the end of your days, making sure that each and every one of them is the pinnacle of abject misery,” Minerva promised. “Just you remember that, Ivo. Abject misery to the end of time!”
He couldn’t be more in love.
SIX
Ivo’s buddy Finch emerged from the castle just as we pulled up at an adjacent outbuilding.
He did a double take, stared for a few seconds, then approached us carefully as Ivo turned off the motorcycle. “What ... erm ... what happened to you?”
“This man,” I said, aware that my voice was emerging in a near snarl, but unable to keep it from being such, “this man is not allowed to use a motorcycle again. Do you understand? He is a danger to not only himself, but others, as well.”
“Ignore my Beloved,” Ivo said, attempting to help me off the saddle of the bike. I thought about kicking him, but decided that was conduct unbecoming in a cartomancer. “She is a bit distraught.”
“A bit distraught?” I damned my cartomancer reputation and swung my leg over the handlebars, kicking at him. Damn his nimble hide, he managed to step out of the way before my foot connected with his kneecap. “A bit distraught? Is that what you call almost being killed multiple times during a four-mile drive? A bit distraught, Ivo?”
Finch’s gaze moved from me to Ivo and back again. “There was trouble?”
I took a deep, deep breath. “You could call it that,” I said at the exact moment that Ivo answered, “None at all. Minerva is distressed because I was unable to remove the binding from her face without causing her pain, and also, her hands are bound with a material that I was unable to break without hurting her wrists.”
“Do you have a knife?” I asked Finch, shooting a potent glare at Ivo, which he blandly ignored.
“Yes.” He pulled out a small folding pocketknife, handing it to Ivo. “You’ll forgive me for asking, but why have you strapped Ivo’s shirt about your torso? Also, what happened to his trousers?”
“Both very good questions. I can answer them with one word: Ivo.”
“There was another slight contretemps with the machine,” Ivo explained, cutting the zip tie off my wrists. The only reason I didn’t punch him in the chest as he deserved was that he took my hands in his, and gently massaged the red marks where the ties had cut into my flesh. “I believe it was due to the fact that Minerva rode in front of me. It offset the motorcycle, causing it to fall repeatedly.”
I pointed at him. “The only reason that I am not at this moment divorcing you is the fact that each of the three times that you crashed us, you managed to twist yourself around me so that I wasn’t the one who hit the road, the grass verge, and that poor cow who was minding her own business in a pasture a good hundred feet off the road.”
Finch looked at Ivo with what I could only interpret as admiration. “You hit a cow in a field?”
“It was not as dire as Minerva makes it seem,” Ivo said, waving away the fact that he was nothing short of a maniac on a motorcycle. “She had shifted on the seat, and the motorcycle went off the road and into an open pasture. The cow was unharmed, once we got her back onto her feet. Unfortunately, she disliked the machine, and Minerva got tangled on her horns, tearing her shirt. Naturally, I had to give her mine.”
“And your trousers?” Finch asked. All three of us looked at Ivo’s legs. I was just thankful he was wearing underwear.
“That would be the pond outside of town,” he said, clearing his throat and looking into the distance, as if trying hard to pretend the conversation wasn’t happening.
“The motorcycle bucked him off into the pond,” I told Finch. “I managed to land on the grass, but Ivo rolled down into the water.”
“Pond?” Finch frowned. “I don’t think I know of a pond in town. There’s a cesspit that is in the process of being drained ... oh.”
“Yes. We noticed the smell, hence the removal of his jeans.” I looked at the man with whom, despite the sane part of my mind’s warnings, I was infatuated to the point that I knew it wouldn’t take much more for me to be fully and wholly in love. “I don’t suppose there are any spare women’s clothes in your uncle’s castle? I don’t have anything else to wear, and I really need to get back to the Faire.”
“I believe so. I will ask my uncle’s housekeeper, Eve,” Finch told me, and turned on his heel to reenter the house.
“Beloved!” Ivo said in that bossy tone he liked to take with me. It amused me to see how hard he tried to be firm and unyielding, and yet the instant that he thought I was unhappy, he was moving heaven and earth to please me. “I can’t allow that. The strongmen might return to capture you again.”
I slid a bit further toward love at the memory of how well he’d protected me each time he’d crashed. And then there was the heroic way he’d saved me from the kidnappers. ... I sighed to myself. Why was I even trying to make sense of it? I loved him despite his horrendous poetry, Victorian sensibilities, and dismal ability at riding a motorcycle.
“Actually, I kind of hope they try, although I don’t want them to succeed,” I told him, rubbing my wrists. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder why they kidnapped me?”
“Of course it occurred to me,” he said in a manner that indicated that it hadn’t, until that moment, done so. “Obviously it must be related to this spell that your employer has stolen.”
