Dead If I Do by Tate Hallaway Read Free Book Online

skeletal, clawlike hand to ward us off. My stomach got all queasy again.
    Lilith perked up, as if she sensed trouble. I could feel her fire just under the surface, ready. Then my cell phone rang. The ring tone was Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca.”
    Everyone, even Teréza with her bugged-out eyes, stared at my coat pocket. The phone continued to ring. I reached for it automatically.
    “What?” Sebastian asked. “You’re going to answer it? Now?”
    Thing was, I’d set all the wedding related calls to that song. I’d been having such a hell of a time connecting with the band to discuss play lists and such, I didn’t want to miss it.
    Teréza moaned.
    I glanced at the screen. It was the band. “I’ve got to take this,” I told Sebastian. “It’s about the wedding.”
    “You’re fucking kidding me,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air.
    “Sorry.” I mouthed. I turned away slightly and connected. “Hello?”
    There was good news/bad news, the band’s manager explained. The good news was that the band got a record contract. The bad news was that the stress was breaking them up. The good news was they had a replacement lined up for me. The bad news was it was a polka band.
    “How is that good news exactly?” I shouted. My guest list was under the age of sixty, mostly, and I’d desperately wanted a band that could play our song. I doubted Rob Zombie’s “Dragula,” sounded the same on an accordion.
    “Hang up,” Sebastian demanded. “Hang up the damn phone.”
    Sebastian was right. I couldn’t cope with this right now, not standing ankle deep in snow in a graveyard. “I’ll have to call you back,” I told the manager. I hung up.
    “Sometimes I rue the day I gave you that blasted contraption,” Sebastian said.
    “I had to answer it. I’d been trying all week to get ahold of those people, and now they’ve canceled.” Turning around, I noticed Teréza was gone. “Wait, where’d she go?” I asked Sebastian, as I slipped the cell back into my pocket. Sebastian, who had been watching me with his mouth agape, turned to where Teréza had been standing. “Oh, great,” he said.
    “I can’t believe you answered the phone. Now she got away!”
    “And we have an oompah band!”
    He opened his mouth and then closed it a few times. Finally, he said, “What, like, polka music?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, this is a disaster,” Sebastian muttered, though I didn’t think he meant the band. Leaning his butt against one of the marble monuments, he crossed his arms and glanced over the cornfield, no doubt using his preternatural senses to check for signs of Teréza’s escape.
    I hugged myself as well. I was upset about Teréza, of course, but my mind kept returning to the music situation. The wedding was only two weeks away, and I’d already started having nightmares about it. My hands started shaking. For once in my life, I’d had every detail all planned out. In advance. Now everything was falling apart.
    “I just don’t see her,” he said.
    All I saw was dark and more dark and the impressive array of the Milky Way above, but I knew Sebastian could see miles in this light.
    “That’s strange,” I agreed. “She moved all creepy crawly at the restaurant. You wouldn’t think she could go far like that.”
    I closed my eyes for a second and reopened them in second sight. Before I bonded with Lilith, using my magical senses always took a few moments of prep and visualization. Now it came, quite literally, in the blink of an eye. I could see more too. For instance, though it was black on black, I noticed instantly the huge bend Teréza’s leaving had folded into the fiber of time and space. “She disappeared,” I said.
    “I know,” Sebastian muttered. “It’s weird.”
    “No, I mean she vanished. Teleported. Poofed!”
    “Oh,” Sebastian said in a tone that was both intrigued and spooked.

    Teleportation was a major skill for anyone corporeal; I have never heard of anyone who