“I think you and Kristoff will be comfy here,” Allie said, looking around the room. “I’m sure you’ll have him up to speed in no time. He was already looking a hundred times better after dining at Casa Pia.”
I frowned at the thought of Kristoff being held prisoner, starved so callously. “He does look better, but I doubt if he’s back to full strength.”
“Probably not.” Allie paused a moment. “Despite what you may think, he wasn’t mistreated any more than the two reapers were. Kristoff was offered blood-he just refused to take it. We didn’t try to starve him, Pia. You have to understand that for a Dark One to be separated from his Beloved for a short while is bearable. It’s not comfortable in the least, not for either person, but it’s bearable. But to go two months . . .” She shook her head. “I can only imagine the pain Kristoff must have suffered, being deprived of you. And I’m sure you didn’t have a grand old time.”
I looked down at myself and immediately sat up straighter to lessen the resemblance between me and a Buddha statue. “Unfortunately, I’ve managed to eat just fine during our separation.”
“That’s not quite what I meant,” she answered. “When Christian is gone for more than a couple of days, I start getting headaches. Nothing truly horrible, but a low-grade headache that persists no matter what I take.”
I thought of the headaches I’d been prone to during the last few months. They were so constant, I’d gone to both my optometrist and a doctor to see if I was starting to have migraines. “I’ve had headaches a lot lately,” I admitted.
“But worse than that is a sense of . . .” She hesitated, her hands making a vague gesture. “Oh, I don’t know quite how to describe it. It’s a sense of being . . . incomplete. As if some part of me were missing. Things just don’t seem right, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” I said slowly, noticing for the first time that the vaguely empty feeling inside me seemed to be gone. “It’s as if you were hollow inside.”
“Hollow, that’s it exactly. And if you’re concerned about your other husband’s well-being, you’re welcome to talk to him. He’s confined to a room on the second floor. We don’t let him leave unattended-there are wards on the door-but we do take him out for little jaunts about the garden to get a bit of fresh air. He’s not mistreated in any way, and I’m sure that goes for the other reaper, as well.”
“A ward?” I asked. “What exactly is that?”
“It’s basically a magical symbol that’s drawn in the air or on an item. We find it works better than mundane things like locks. The ward allows people to pass through the door to enter the room, but not leave by it.” She got to her feet, opening the door to the closet. “Come out, Van Helsing. There’s a vampire downstairs who needs seeing to.”
“Vampiwe!” Josef emerged from the closet with an old-fashioned wooden shoe form. He held it by the long metal skewer that poked into the wooden foot, waving it about as if it were a crossbow. “Shoot the vampiwe!”
“That’s right, snuggles. Go shoot Daddy.”
The boy ran out of the room, yelling about vampires. Allie followed more slowly, pausing at the door. “If you need anything, just give me a holler.”
“I will,” I said, still distracted by the idea that I could be so affected by the loss of Kristoff. Just in time I remembered the question I had wanted to ask. “Oh, can I do the keeper thing with any spirit?”
“So long as they’re not bound to someone else, you should be able to. Although your ghosts sound like the grounded kind. The kind I summon are unbound.”
“Unbound? I’m not sure I understand.”
“Well, yours can make themselves seen and heard, and can interact with our reality. There are other spirits out there who have to be Summoned to that state. Those are the ones I deal with.”
“How do they get that way?” I asked, thinking of the ghosts who’d been waiting for me in Iceland.
She shrugged. “All we know is that there are several types of spirits. Some bound, some unbound, some present who refuse to be Summoned. Still others, like Esme, refuse to be Released.”
“Sent on, you mean?”
“Yep.”
“I know one of those,” I said, thinking fondly of Ulfur and his ghostly horse. “He would have gone on to Ostri, but he stayed to help me.”