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?”
“It goes a bit deeper than that,” I admitted. “There was . . . Ben and I had a . . . for lack of a better word, a sort of chemistry thing going on. Everyone said we were meant for each other, and I was expected to fall in with him whether or not I wanted to. Only my mother was on my side.” I choked to a stop.
“It was the right thing to do,” Geoff said softly.