Honeymoon of the Dead by Tate Hallaway Page A

the Phoenix someone had left at the table. It was a newspaper devoted to the substantial population in the Twin Cities of people recovering from drugs and alcohol or other addictions. As my eyes scanned articles about twelve-stepping, my mind wandered.
    Seward Cafe was one of the first places I’d been drawn to when I moved to Minneapolis from the small farming community of Finlayson, Minnesota, where I’d grown up. The people this restaurant attracted shared my values of recycling, renewable resources, and general respect for the earth. I’d mellowed in the intervening years and felt a bit conspicuous in my leather boots.
    The younger me would be horrified to know what I sometimes fed my cat, much less myself, some days. Of course, in those days I didn’t harbor a vengeance Goddess and wasn’t married to a vampire.
    My life certainly had taken quite a turn for the odd, hadn’t it?
    I looked over at a couple seated at a nearby table. She had a nose ring and multicolored hair, and he had dreads that roped nearly to the small of his back. They were laughing about something, and I found myself kind of jealous. Sure, they might be outside of the mainstream with their fashion and, most likely, their politics, but they were probably able to walk home without being accosted by Illuminati Watch thugs or werewolves.
    Even without the faerie queens and trolls, my life wasn’t very “average,” was it?
    Oh, nuts! That reminded me, I should find someplace to do the “normal” reversal spell.
    I had half hauled myself to my feet when I heard a voice call my name.
    “Garnet?”
    I looked up into a face straight from the past I’d been lamenting. “Larkin?”
    Oh, this was awkward. Larkin was the guy I’d had the scandalous fling with. Worse, I sort of forgot to dump him. Instead, I stopped answering his calls.
    I remembered Larkin as a sweet guy. In fact, I had a tendency to go for two types of men: alpha males and what used to be referred to somewhat derogatorily among my friends as SNAGs—sensitive New Age guys. Larkin was a SNAG.
    And was standing there wearing tie-dye no less.
    His short blond hair was stylishly unstyled, and he had a scruffy, oh-despite-myself-I-couldn’t-help-but-find-it-kind-of-cute goatee. It struck me how much he looked like William, my co-worker at Mercury Crossing. That thought made me blush. I had once told William I would have dated him in another life; apparently, I had.
    “Wow, you look different. I almost didn’t recognize you,” Larkin was saying. He shouldn’t have recognized me at all. When Lilith had entered me on that fateful night, my blue eyes turned purple. I used to have blond hair—I guess I still did; it was just hidden under black dye.
    But bits of the love spell lingered between us. I could feel it stirring my own heart.
    “I thought you were dead,” he said. Again, he was supposed to have. After the witch hunters killed my coven, they burned the covenstead to the ground. I let the authorities and everyone else presume I’d died alongside of them. It was part of my clever plan to keep the witch hunters off my scent, which would have worked much better in retrospect if I hadn’t continued to use my real name and Social Security number when I moved to Madison. Master criminal, I was not.
    “Yeah, I know,” I said apologetically. “Hey, how’ve you been?”
    “You mean after you disappeared on me?”
    “Uh,” I said, hiding my guilty face as I took a sip of my coffee. I cleared my throat. “Yeah.”
    “Liza and I got back together for a while, kind of for show and because everyone sort of expected us to. But we could never rekindle the flame. It didn’t last.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, because well, Liza had been a good friend and I totally messed up her life for this guy I thought I wanted so damn much. Turns out, I needed less talking and more alpha in bed. I snuck out on Larkin after only one night. I found it hard to look him in the eye now. The wood