Love Me Madly Read online

  “I…um…”

  Rosie put a tea kettle down. “I ask a lot of questions. Stop me if it’s too much.”

  “I grew up in a religious household too. Very strict. I don’t mind talking, but…I wasn’t raised to do it. We were so isolated there that apparently, I don’t know anything that other humans, or witches, know. I’m a witch but we weren’t taught very much magic at all.“

  “Your familiar didn’t teach you?”

  “Uh…I never had one.”

  “Never? That’s the coolest part of being a true witch.”

  I’d never thought about any of this before, since no one in the Order had a familiar, but Rayner had also mentioned it was strange that I didn’t have one. Did Father Joshua kill my familiar too?

  “So were you supposed to be some dude’s fourth wife or some culty thing?”

  “I thought I would be assigned a marriage with a nice boy and have babies, like my mom. Instead, our leader said I was to be his wife. Not…his fourth wife. Just his wife.”

  “Oh, honey.” Rosie shook her head.

  “And he did have other…girls. The priestesses. It was secret, though. I didn’t find out until the engagement. Everything about him was a lie. I know that now. He’s really a vampire named Johannes. But sometimes I still hear the rules of the village in my head. His sermons. I feel like I hardly know what’s right and wrong anymore.”

  “Rules? They’re simple. Be kind. Have fun. Do no harm to the world. Those are my rules. I guess you heard a lot of stuff about wicked women and modesty and stuff? I did.”

  “Yes.” I ended up telling her the whole story, in brief.

  “I’ll tell you right now, if you’re with vampires, you can definitely toss all that out the window.” She licked her lips. “A lot of those rules are there to control women so we don’t take over the world.”

  “The vampires are…very controlling, in their own way. And they also seem like they can be pretty violent. But at the same time, I feel so much better around them. I want to trust them, but I wonder if I’m wrong again. I had a family I thought I could trust already.”

  “It’s true,” Rosie said. “Vampires are uniquely wicked. I’ve been here for almost ten years and I’ve known a lot of vampires and they’re not like humans. They have this human mind inside of them but they feel everything deeply. Passion, hunger, rage. They want what they want, and they want it fiercely, and they have more power to get it than they did when they were alive. Some of them are very good at hiding their passion but I swear to you, it’s still burning in them. If they want you, they want you more than any normal man ever could. That’s a lot for one girl to handle. Four vampires.” She had this little gleam in her eye like she wouldn’t mind finding out if she could handle it herself.

  “What do I do?”

  “Do you want them back?”

  “I think so. I don’t know. I definitely feel something very strong for all of them but I’ve never been allowed to want anything! I feel like I hardly have a mind of my own sometimes!”

  Rosie poured me some chamomile blend tea in between finely chopping vegetables, browning and caramelizing ingredients as the kitchen filled with the smell of garlic and onion. “We should try past life regression and see if you can remember a time when you were more certain.”

  “Does that work?”

  “I’ve been working on stuff like that,” Rosie said. “Tapping into the subconscious. I’ve seen some of my own past lives.”

  “Really?” I wondered if she was serious. I got this feeling she might be the sort of person who exaggerates, but I also liked her.

  “Yes. I was this woman with a baby in a tribe somewhere. It was intense. And I’ve been able to do astral projection a few times. We should try it.”

  “I’d like to try.”

  “After you eat, we’ll do it.”

  “Right away?”

  “Sure! You’re not scared, are you? Don’t be!”

  When I finished the dinner, the vampires were still upstairs, talking loudly like the old friends I guess they were, and Rosie led me into an empty bedroom deep within the house.

  I don’t know why, but as Rosie lit a few candles and asked me to lay down on the bed, I was nervous, as if I was about to see something I wasn’t ready for. To become someone else.

  The smell of vanilla candles was gentle, and her voice was soothing as she began to lead me in a meditation. I felt as if I could go to sleep…

  Chapter Five

  Bertie

  “We’re almost there. Nothing like a fine day and a fine day’s work.” Hiram Macdonald opened his own lunch pail and admired the sight of the fields of baled hay.

  It was a cool day in early autumn, but I’d been working so hard since sunrise that sweat glued my shirt to my skin. A couple of the other boys had taken theirs off, their lean muscles tanned and sun spotted with sunburns past, suspenders hanging off their hips, their hats tilted to block the sun as we all wolfed down our lunches.

  I opened the photo case that never left my pocket to look at a photograph of Willa Mueller. She was my neighbor down on the corner and I’d known her all my life. She was very much in love with me and wrote me a letter every week. When I had enough money saved up to have a wife, I’d come back for her. That was our understanding and I couldn’t imagine breaking my word.

  “Bertie misses his girl,” Jack said, a little teasingly. “He needs a love song.”

  Hiram picked up his fiddle and started to play me Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair, the sweet notes singing out over the lonely fields. The horses tossed their tails in the wind, clouds rippling over the golden plain. I felt nostalgic, but I wasn’t sure what for.

  It wasn’t Willa, though. I knew that much, and every evening I collapsed into bed, bone tired from the work and the boarding house dinner sticking to my ribs, and tried to muster up any sort of enthusiasm to write her back. Her letters were bursting with love and talk of how much she wanted to see me and hold me and kiss my lips and how she couldn’t wait for our wedding day.

  For reasons I couldn’t figure, I was starting to dread that wedding day. I never wanted to go back to Cincinnati. I wanted to stay out here on the plains forever. Maybe I don’t want a family, I thought. What man doesn’t want a family? My mother sent letters too, missing me and informing me that my grandfather had already built a crib.

  “Can I have a look?” Hank wanted to see the picture. I handed it over. “She’s a beauty. When do you get to see her again, Bert?”

  “It probably will be another year,” I said.

  “Another year? What are you waiting for?”

  “Well, I don’t want her to worry about anything. My mother really had to stretch the groceries and I don’t want Willa to—“

  Hank cut me off with a loud scoff. “Are you waiting to find out you’re a long lost Vanderbilt? You ain’t never gonna be rich. Why aren’t you working in the city? Didn’t you say your father has a shop?”

  “Not a successful one,” I said. “Anyway, I like it out here.”

  “Bring her out west,” Jack said. “She might not like it at first, but having land of your own, can’t beat that.”

  “Maybe that’s the trouble,” I said. “Maybe I’m just not meant for the city.”

  It had crossed my mind plenty of times, of course. Getting land in the Dakotas, building a little house, just the two of us out under the sky. Willa would definitely struggle. She was close to her sisters and mother, and right now she was working as a maid for a wealthy family who let her read books out of their own library. When she had days off she loved to see plays in German, but if we lived out west I thought we had better just raise the children speaking English so they would fit in at their school.

  Well, the whole thing made me feel a little sick, to be honest.

  That night I knew I ought to write her a letter because her last letter was mostly just asking me why I hadn’t written.

  I never should have agreed to marry her.


  What’s wrong with me?

  She grew up into a beautiful girl. She’s cultured with all that reading. She sings as beautifully as a songbird. And I know her so well. I’m not going to be unpleasantly surprised by anything like I might be if I married some girl I met on an impulse out here.

  Not that I met a lot of girls here anyway. Hiram had a sixteen year old daughter but she was sickly. He was hoping to send her back east to live with his cousin in Arkansas.

  The next day was Sunday, and we got all the hay in, so everyone went to church, but I barely heard a word of the service because I was feeling too troubled over what to do. This work was over so I’d need to find something else, and Hiram said he might be able to get me a job working for the Katy Railroad. It was true that I wasn’t so much saving money to get married as I was just running away from home, getting carried farther and farther away, and it was no wonder Willa’s letters were getting frantic. What kind of a man was I turning out to be?

  After church I saddled my horse and went riding, thinking maybe I’d ride into town and board there for a night so I could ask about the railroad job first thing in the morning, but really I just wanted to talk some sense into myself.

  Just go home. Hank is right. You belong back there.

  But then, this is America where any man can own a piece, and you ought to just go home and tell Willa that you’re going to settle in the Dakotas and if she doesn’t like it, she’ll have to end it herself.

  I was no closer to a decision when I heard three horses in the distance. They seemed to be increasing in speed as they got closer to me, kicking up dust in the road. I saw four men, travel worn but three of them were dressed more like city folk, and I suddenly knew that I was about to be robbed. I hadn’t heard about any trouble on this road, but nothing else made sense. They were looking right at me. I had my pay from Hiram on me, and my horse, and I was going to lose them both.

  As they got close, the dark-haired man in front pulled back and let the fair-haired man go ahead. One of the men wasn’t white and at first I assumed he was a native but he didn’t look quite like any native I’d ever met, and he was dressed like an American just as finely as the rest. Now I was even more confused.

  The fair-haired man was looking at me with what I could only describe as shock. The dark-haired man drew up right beside him and said to him in a low voice and a crisp British accent, “There will be no easy way to say this, so you might as well not even waste time trying to find one. Do you want me to tell him?”

  The fair-haired man didn’t take his eyes off of me. No one had ever looked at me like that. I froze like an animal hiding from a hunter in the brush. I wondered if he meant to kill me. I tried to think what I’d done to get on the bad side of a stranger and his posse.

  “Lord, do you plan to let the sun go down?” said the one scruffy man hanging in the back. He was the only one dressed like he was a working man from around here, in a battered hat, a red flannel shirt, suspenders and sturdy boots. He had a pistol at his waist and a rope. “You’re Bertie, ain’tcha?”

  “Yes.”

  The dark-haired man was watching him carefully.

  “We’ve been looking for you. You belong to us.” He gave me this baffling grin, crossing his arms. At least it didn’t seem like he intended to draw that pistol. “Now, why the long faces? He’s about the prettiest boy I’ve ever seen so I’d say this could be a lot worse.”

  Were they going to sell me into some sort of indentured servitude? A band of mercenaries? But this sounded…much more ominous. Were they working with the foreigner for some truly nefarious purpose? I couldn’t think what this meant. I drew my own gun. “I don’t want any trouble. I’m just a poor working man going to town.”

  “Be quiet, Thom,” the blonde man said to the scruffy man. “Bertie,” he said. “Have you heard of reincarnation?”

  “Living more than one life?”

  “That’s right. You’ve lived four lives before this, and most of them have been with me. We first met in the seventeenth century. You were my wife. Three times, you have been my wife. I have traveled from London across this entire country looking for you.”

  Something very deep inside me stirred, looking at all of them and the strange expressions in their eyes. Well—not so much Thom. He had a very different air about him, like the very devil himself was here to tempt me.

  “They were hoping you’d be a girl,” he said, lifting his brows.

  He was insane.

  They all had to be insane.

  “I’m engaged to a girl back home and I’m—I’m going back to her. I’m sorry. You’re mistaken.” I spurred my horse on, my heart pounding even harder, hoping they would just let me go.

  But I knew they wouldn’t.

  As soon as I started to move, Thom whirled his own horse around and his rope was in his hand. The lasso dropped right over my head and tightened and a second later, Thom was beside me and he leapt from his own horse to mine. It all happened so fast that my extremely confused mind was starting to wonder if they were actually a circus act getting in some practice with a joke.

  Thom’s arm tightened around me. “Got you. You look scared, Bertie, but…you smell excited.”

  I was sure I no longer knew my own mind. Not at all. This was all as confusing as if green men had descended from the moon, but some part of me I tried desperately to bury also thought, This. This is why you don’t care for Willa. This explains everything.

  I was sweating now, trying to edge away from his touch, but there was nowhere to go.

  “I’m still not sure we should have let this wild man into the clan,” the dark-haired one muttered. “But we’re stuck with him now.”

  The road they brought me down was barely a road at all, just a sliver of a path that led off into scrubby trees to a shanty.

  “We don’t live here,” Rayner said, every word he spoke laced with the same tension I felt. “We have several well-appointed homes.”

  They had introduced themselves to me. They told me they were vampires, and then they explained what a vampire was. Jie was from China, although he barely even had an accent. Silvus was a warlock as well. Now I knew I was in the hands of some dark cult. Church that morning seemed a long time ago. Thom had not let me go the whole time and the longer his arm was tight around me, the more he seemed to stir some unholy thoughts inside me. I tried to suppress them.

  But it was also clear that Rayner, Silvus and Jie were not happy. They didn’t seem to know what to say or do. Rayner shoved open the door of the little house and they showed me in. It was sparse but very tidy. Silvus only had to wave a slender stick of wood at the fireplace and gentle flames rose from the kindling.

  “Magic,” I sputtered.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” Silvus said.

  “Are you making coffee?” Rayner asked him.

  Silvus nodded.

  “I’ll tend the horses,” Jie said, and it seemed like he wanted to leave.

  Rayner sat back in a rickety chair and looked at me in some despair. “You have always been my beloved wife,” he said. “Forgive me, I hardly know what to say now. I thought you would always be a woman. The smell of your blood is still sweet, but—I’m not…I’m not…” Words seemed to fail him.

  I had spent the entire ride here in complete terror, but now that I was in their lodgings, with all of them except Thom looking as if someone had died, I almost started laughing. “You kidnapped me. You kidnapped me! And now you are telling me you—you want to make me your wife? Except I’m a man, so you don’t want me after all? I’m not like that either. So it seems pretty simple to me. We don’t have any business with each other. I’m not ever going to be your wife. I’m going to marry a woman back home.”

  “Hmm,” Silvus said.

  “I can’t let you go,” Rayner said. “Silvus…could you?”

  “No,” Silvus said.

  “You’re bloodsucking demons and you’re fussing over something like this?” Thom said. “What the hel
l do you become a vampire for if you’re not willing to indulge in a bit of depravity?”

  “I am still a Christian,” Rayner said.

  Silvus poured him some coffee. “I think we are a bit past a strict adherence to Biblical principles.”

  “Do you like men, Thom?” Rayner said, a little confrontationally.

  “I’ll try anything once,” Thom said. “I have to admit that anything worth trying once usually turns out to be something I like. The thing is, I don’t have any history with you, pretty one.” He looked at me in a way that made me feel like a butterfly pinned down by a naturalist who had just found a jeweled wing deep within a forest. “Why don’t you let me show you a thing or two?”

  “No…” I barely got the word out, my throat strangled. “No, I’m not—interested.”

  “You’re not like any man I’ve ever met,” Thom said, walking a little closer to me. “You liked having my arms around you, didn’t you?” He put a hand to my chest and stroked his palm down my muscle. “You’re strong. Very strong. Definitely no pansy. But…there is something inside your eyes that makes me feel like I’m looking at a woman.”

  “Back off him,” Rayner said.

  “His heart is beating so fast…”

  “You usurp your place in this clan,” Rayner said. “I told you the rules before I turned you and I trust you’re a man of your word.”

  Thom lifted his hand off me and took a step back. “I am. But I’m not sure I can wait forever. Now that I see him, I’m not sure I can wait a damn week.”

  “You’re young,” Silvus said. “You must learn to wait. When you can’t bear it anymore, go hunting. But not for people,” he tacked on at the end.

  “I ain’t a murderer,” Thom said. He sat down, if restlessly. “You don’t have to tell me.”