A Tale of Two Vampires

“Beyond what?” I couldn’t help but ask. Don’t you think I’m doing really well at not even blinking at the idea of people who have ghosts as boyfriends?

If I died, would you wish to continue a relationship with me? Nikola asked.

Beneath the cover of the table, I took his hand and squeezed it. Yes.

“The beyond is the name for that form of reality that lies between this and the next,” Tallulah answered, which didn’t really help me at all, but I decided that it probably wasn’t the best moment to make a fuss about just what exactly she meant.

Nikola, of course, pulled out his notebook and made a few notes.

Imogen made a sound that I could’ve sworn was a giggle, but when I glanced at her, her face was impassive.

“OK. So your ghost friend thinks there’s a mystery surrounding us? Does it have something to do with the swirly time-travel thing, or why Ben is being such a giant ball of snot to his father?”

“That is totally uncalled for,” Fran said loudly.

“Swirly time-travel thing?” Tallulah looked up from her bowl. “Do you mean a portal?”

“That’s what Nikola called it, but I just think of it as the swirly thing. It was almost gone by the time we came through it.”

Her eyes seemed to strip away all my layers of defense, and peer straight into my soul. “I believe before we go any further that we would all benefit from a recap of your experiences with the portal.”

“Sure, but don’t expect us to have many answers. It took me forever to figure out what exactly happened, although Nikola seemed to have coped better with the whole thing. Except the part where he was convinced I was a prostitute.”

“It was understandable given the situation,” he said mildly, squeezing my fingers where they rested on his thigh.

“Several days ago I came to visit the fair with my cousin Gretl.” I settled back and gave a succinct accounting of high points from the last few days, skipping over much of the craziness where I thought I was insane, and focusing on the nefarious plan by Nikola’s brothers to destroy him. When I finished with us arriving back in the present, there was a profound silence for a good minute.

“I don’t know what to think. I knew that my uncles had something to do with Papa severing ties with us, but to plan a scheme to physically harm him…it just seems so wrong.” Imogen finally broke the silence, her gaze moving from Nikola to Ben. “Are you sure about this, Io?”

“Absolutely. Just as I’m sure that in the present before I went through the swirly portal, you told me that your father was dead, and Ben told me he was in South America. It’s clear that although lizards didn’t take over the world because we altered the past, something did change, because you guys are so hostile and mean to Nikola.”

“No,” Imogen said, shaking her head briefly. “Your recollection of that day meshes with mine. Nothing has changed.”

“Then why did you tell Io that I was murdered?” Nikola asked her.

She pleated the material of her dress while she thought for a few seconds. “I—that night when you left the castle, something happened to you. But you weren’t killed. At least, your body wasn’t. But Rolf and Arnulf came to me the next day and said that you had ordered me from the house, and that I wasn’t to return. Ever.”

I looked at Nikola. I hate to keep repeating myself, but what the hell?

He shook his head. This does not make sense. “And you believed them?”

“Not at first. I tried for several days to see you, but you had locked yourself away in your study and refused to see me. At last you had to emerge from your study, and then…” She rubbed her arms. “Then it was like you had died inside. You were cold and cruel and said that Ben and I had betrayed you, and destroyed your heart, and that you would not tolerate vipers in your nest. You cast me out of the house, and cut off funds to Benedikt so that he had to leave university. In vain we protested that we had done nothing to betray you. You would not listen.”

Emotion was so thick in her voice it was impossible not to feel empathy. I turned to Nikola and smacked him on the arm. “What the hell was the matter with you? Your own kids!”

“That cannot be,” he said, frowning. “I would never spurn my children in such a manner.”

“Destroyed your heart,” I repeated, scooting a little closer to him. The pain he felt at Imogen’s words more than exceeded hers. “What does that mean?”

“Papa never said,” Imogen answered sadly. “He did not explain, nor did he answer my pleas to tell me what I had done to harm him.”

“Do you think it meant your late wife?” I asked Nikola. “But she was dead for seven years when we met, and—”

“When we met,” Nikola said slowly, looking at me with speculation. “Tell me, Imogen, in this past that you remember, was Io in it?”

“Io?” She considered me with a slight pucker between her brows. “No, I don’t think so. It was a very long time ago, but I do not remember Io being the woman with whom you were smitten.”

“But there was one?” Nikola pounced on her words. “There was a woman present at the time?”

“I think so.” She turned to Ben. “You have a better memory than me—do you remember the woman who Papa kept before that horrible day?”

“No. I was away from home.” Ben looked thoughtful. “Although I do remember you writing to me and telling me that you were most pleased because he was interested in a woman again. I don’t remember her name, though.”

“It is possible that there are two planes of time,” Nikola said, sketching something in his notebook. “One is the past that Imogen and Benedikt remember, where I severed relations with them—something I find difficult to believe, but might be explained if for some reason I thought they had destroyed a woman I loved—and the second plane of time, which I remember, and which Io has participated in. It is not beyond reason that the two planes touch at several points, and it is at one of those points that we moved from one time to the other.”

“So you’re saying, what, that in Ben and Imogen’s past, your brothers killed me, or some other woman”—and buster, it had better not be another woman, because then I really will feel like a tramp—“and in the past we lived through, they tried to kill you, instead?”

“It is possible, given that my brothers had the desire and ability to kill anyone.” He tapped the end of the pencil against his chin, which just made me want to bite it. His chin, not the pencil.

Something struck me, other than the desire to molest Nikola. I turned to Imogen. “You told me that your uncles had killed your father. Why did you say that if, in your version of the past, Nikola severed ties with you himself?”

She exchanged a glance with Ben. “My uncles and Papa have never been very close. And yet, at the time of his…derangement…they were not only present, but in his confidence where I was not. That was most unusual, and Benedikt and I suspected later that they had done something to Papa, cast some spell upon him, or corrupted his love for us. We had no proof, but it could not be a coincidence that they were present to poison his mind.”

“I do not recall any such thing,” Nikola said, his gaze blind as he sorted through his memories. “They made me an unwelcome visit the day that Io insisted I accompany her through the portal, but we did not spend enough time together for either of them to have any effect on me.”

“That’s because I got you away from them so fast,” I said with a sense of pride that I felt was wholly warranted. “Why did they come to visit you in the first place?”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t make any sense of out either of them. Rolf babbled about how someone near me meant ill for me, and Arnulf simply groveled in his usual manner, and echoed Rolf.”

“Whatever it was, you can bet it was part of their plan to knock you off.”

“Possibly.” Nikola looked somewhat pensive. “From my experiences with them, however, I would find it difficult to believe that they had the drive to conduct such a heinous act.”

I let that supposition go, knowing Nikola well enough to understand that I wasn’t going to convince him of his brothers’ betrayal without solid proof. “OK, so it seems like it’s pretty clear that both pasts were real, but since you’re here now, that means your past is the right past, so the one where you were a jerk to your kids didn’t happen, and thus, they can stop being pissed at you and can be grateful you’re alive and well and here to be a daddy to them again.” I sniffled a little with happiness. “It’s like a deranged Hallmark movie. Oh my god, Nikola!”

“No, I am not a god, although if it pleases you to think so about me—”

“No, silly.” I whumped him on the arm. “What if there’s another you? The one that Ben and Imogen know? What if there’s a second you who is living in Brazil hitting on all the tanned, bikini-clad women?”

“That would be impossible,” he said, putting away his notebook.

“No, impossible is traveling back in time three centuries and falling for a vampire.”

“The Nikola who spurned his children did so at the loss of his heart. My heart is very much in place, as are you. Therefore, that is the past that is negated, and my past is, as you point out, the valid one.”

“But we don’t know for certain what else we might have affected,” I said.

“The only thing that changed concerned my existence, and if that was devoted solely to the pursuit of pleasure and nothing else, then it was trivial at best. I doubt if the shift of trivial to nonexistent—in that context, at least—would affect any great changes on the future.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I said slowly.

Imogen gave a stifled sort of sob, then flung herself on Nikola, murmuring, “Papa! Oh, Papa, how I’ve missed you.”