Honeymoon of the Dead Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1. - The Lovers

  Chapter 2. - The Chariot

  Chapter 3. - Strength

  Chapter 4. - The Hermit

  Chapter 5. - The Devil

  Chapter 6. - Justice

  Chapter 7. - Death

  Chapter 8. - The Moon

  Chapter 9. - The Star

  Praise for the novels of Tate Hallaway

  Dead If I Do

  “Abounds with magic, zombies, vampires, and ghosts so there is no shortage of fantasy action in the story to go along with the romance . . . A satisfying read and even though it is set in the dead of a Wisconsin winter (brrrr) it still ticks all the boxes for a fun summer read.”

  —LoveVampires

  “Bright, funny . . . Delivers all bridezilla’s worst night-mares.”

  —Monsters and Critics

  “Quirky, different, and amusing . . . Dead If I Do is an interesting read full of twists, turns, and ‘OMG what is going to happen to this poor couple next’ anticipation. . . .You’ll love it.”

  —Fang-tastic Books

  “The story line is fast paced from the moment Teréza curses the happy couple. Filled with angst yet amusing, Dead If I Do is a terrific bewitching tale.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “This paranormal romance overflows with danger, excitement, and mayhem; however, whenever things become too stressful a healthy dose of irony or comedy shows up to ease the way. Tate Hallaway has an amazing talent for storytelling.”

  —Huntress Book Reviews

  “This chapter in the first-person series is packed with humor, wackiness, and a touch of pathos. It’s a genuinely heart-warming treat for fans!”

  —Romantic Times

  Romancing the Dead

  “A fun book with a nice whodunit, great characters, and the kind of detail that really brings a setting alive . . . a wonderfully fun read.”

  —Errant Dreams Reviews

  “Ms. Hallaway provides another exciting adventure in her unique series.”

  —Darque Reviews

  “This superb tale affirms the theory that ‘life’s a witch’ worth reading about.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “Lots of danger and comedy set within an extremely well-written plot.”

  —Huntress Book Reviews

  “Fans of the Garnet Lacey series will certainly not be disappointed, and those new to this piece of paranormal escapism I’m sure will soon be fans as well.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “One of the real pleasures of this series has been watching this spunky heroine come into her own . . . This is a genuinely funny, adventurous, and delightful read.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Has lots of excitement and mystery to keep you guessing throughout. It’s a fun reading treat.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A truly enjoyable read if you like a jaunt into the paranormal . . . and enjoy humor as well as the more serious side of life!”

  —WritersAreReaders.com

  Dead Sexy

  “Another wild adventure . . . Check out the highly entertaining Dead Sexy for a walk on the wild side.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “The second Garnet gem is a delightful whodunit fantasy [with an] offbeat chick-lit style. Tate Hallaway combines romance, paranormal, and mystery into a fun read.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  Tall, Dark & Dead

  “What’s not to adore . . . Tate Hallaway has a wonderful gift, Garnet is a gem of a heroine, and Tall, Dark & Dead is enthralling from the first page.”

  —MaryJanice Davidson, New York Times bestselling author of Undead and Unwelcome

  “Tate Hallaway kept me on the edge of my seat . . . A thoroughly enjoyable read!”

  —Julie Kenner, USA Today bestselling author of Demon Ex Machina

  “Curl up on the couch and settle in—Tall, Dark & Dead is a great way to pass an evening.”

  —Lynsay Sands, New York Times bestselling author of The Renegade Hunter

  “Will appeal to readers of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stack-house series.”

  —Booklist

  “Unique, intriguing, and a sexy read . . . lively and fresh . . . and the ending will leave you clamoring for more.”

  —Midwest Muse

  “Funny and captivating . . . in the style of the Sookie Stack-house series [with] an intrepid and expressive heroine . . . Look out, fans of the paranormal, there’s a new supernatural heroine in town . . . Tate Hallaway is an author to watch!”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “I love how Garnet handled everything that came her way with grit, humor, and attitude as she kicked some serious butt! . . . Hallaway keeps you glued to the pages.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “[Hallaway’s] concise writing style, vivid descriptions, and innovative plot all blend together to provide the reader with a great new look into the love life of witches, vampires, and the undead.”

  —Armchair Interviews

  Titles by Tate Hallaway

  HONEYMOON OF THE DEAD

  DEAD IF I DO

  ROMANCING THE DEAD

  DEAD SEXY

  TALL, DARK & DEAD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2010 by Lyda Morehouse.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / May 2010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hallaway, Tate.

  Honeymoon of the dead / Tate Hallaway.—Berkley trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 9781101431931

  1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Honeymoons—Fiction. 3. Minneapolis (Minn
.)—Fiction. 4. Occult fiction. 5. Chick lit. I. Title.

  PS3608.A54825H66 2010

  813’.6—dc22

  2010001851

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my beloveds: Shawn and Mason

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, I must take a bittersweet moment and say good-bye to all the characters found herein as this is the last of the Garnet Lacey series. “Gucci, Gucci, Garnet, you were a good series.”

  Despite that old adage about a writer’s life being a solitary one, I find I’ve always been helped along in the process by a number of indispensable people. First, as always, the lovely and talented Anne Sowards, my editor, and the wise and indefatigable Martha Millard, the best agent anyone could ask for (seriously!).

  Fellow writers who took the rough edges off this manuscript and smoothed them into the polished perfection you see before you now are Naomi Kritzer, who always sees the themes I intended and helps me exploit them, and Sean M. Murphy, who makes for an excellent plot monkey. The fine-grain sander on this work was brought to you by my incredibly supportive and infinitely patient partner, Shawn Rounds. Computer game breaks, silly fests, and very best parts of the story are thanks to my ever brilliant son, Mason.

  Also a last-minute rescue was performed by Patrick Wood, computer god extraordinaire. I couldn’t ask for better friends. Thank you. Your generosity astounds and touches me deeply.

  The Minneapolis/Saint Paul in this book mostly exists, though it reflects the Cities as I see them in my own head. And, though last time I checked, there are no trolls on the city buses, my friend Nick Dykstra drives one and he’s been a lot of things including an orc.

  Lastly, thanks to you, faithful reader. I hope that after an appropriate period of mourning, you will continue to follow the strange meanderings of my imagination wherever it goes next.

  Blessed be to you all and merry meet again.

  1.

  The Lovers

  ASTROLOGICAL CORRESPONDENCE:

  Gemini

  A honeymoon in Transylvania with her vampire husband. I ask you: What more could a witch ask for?

  Well, for starters: How about everything going smoothly for a change and this plane leaving the tarmac sometime this year?

  Minnesotans like to say “could be worse” or “can’t complain” at times like this, but I’ve been living in Madison, Wisconsin, for several years now, so forget that. Besides, my wedding was nearly a nonstarter, what with the ex-wife zombie and all, so was it too much to ask that my honeymoon be just a touch better?

  I could probably deal if the airline hadn’t screwed up so that Sebastian and I not only didn’t get first-class seats but also now sat two rows apart with me wedged between a sumo wrestler and a stringy-haired teen with his MP3 player so loud I could hear every word Slip Knot belted out.

  And then there was the dinner with my Minneapolis cousins who couldn’t make my wedding. My mother had insisted we see them before we left for our honeymoon, despite the fact that Sebastian and I had nothing in common with the ultraconservative, fundamentalist Christian, meat-loving side of my family. My stomach was still urpy after making polite attempts to ingest bacon-wrapped chicken drowned in beefy marinara sauce. I don’t think they had a vegetable in the entire house! And the wedding present! Who wants to lug a heavy, antique porcelain figurine of two cherubic angels all the way to Europe? We would have shipped it home, but there just wasn’t time, what with the storm and a plane to catch.

  I didn’t want that horrible thing in my possession at all. Sebastian privately joked about just leaving it on the side of the road, but it was Great-Aunt So-and-So’s, so now it was taking up valuable space in my luggage.

  My stomach roiled unhappily.

  The heavy metal bass line beat in time to the pounding of my head.

  Couldn’t we at least get off the ground?

  I adjusted my hips in the narrow seat and looked around the other passenger’s girth at the gleaming expanse of the jet’s wing through the window.

  Admittedly, Sebastian and I couldn’t have picked a nastier time of year to go on honeymoon. At least the flights were cheap thanks to the New Year’s holiday. Sleet rained from a dismally gray sky. It’d been an oppressive drive up from Madison to the Saint Paul/Minneapolis International Airport yesterday. If it wasn’t for the oh- you’ll-have-a-lovely-time-with-them-I-promise cousins, we’d have headed south to O’Hare and hopped a direct flight to Austria, but no . . . Instead, we braved ice slicks on the curvy stretches of Interstate 94 that had me holding on to the door handle with white knuckles. The snow really started hitting somewhere around Menomonee. The weather had only grown worse and worse the closer we got to the Cities. Honestly, I’d been surprised they’d let us board. I was sure the flight was going to be canceled.

  In a way, I wished they would just call the whole thing off. At least then Sebastian and I could be laughing at our misfortune while snuggled under a scratchy blanket at a Days Inn.

  I wished we could even just sit together.

  I turned back to try to catch Sebastian’s eye when the teen accidentally elbowed my breast. My stomach lurched in a you’re-falling-catch-yourself sensation. I rubbed the injured part absently as I acknowledged the teen’s mumbled apology. Laying my head back on the hard cushion of the seat, I waited for the dizziness to pass.

  I’d been getting these strange touches of vertigo for a couple of weeks now.

  In fact, I got them nearly any time someone touched me. It was almost as if the nausea was some kind of magical feedback loop when my aura and someone else’s collided unexpectedly.

  Sometimes I experienced double vision too.

  I should’ve probably told my new husband about all this before we booked a flight to Vienna, but I didn’t want to worry him. Sebastian and I’d had a lot of adventures so far—crazy stuff involving zombies, shape-shifters, and ex-dead Gypsy ex-wives. And, you know, I just didn’t want to burden us with what could just be some version of witch-aura flu.

  Rubbing the space between my eyes, my frown deepened. In fact, because Sebastian and I had such a tendency toward trouble, before we left, I cast a just-let-it-all-be-normal spell. It wasn’t much. Just a candle and some hurried visualization before rushing out the door to head to Minneapolis. I sure hoped Mátyás remembered to blow out the candle like I asked.

  Mátyás was Sebastian’s half-vampire, immortal son, now my stepson. There was something that was going to take some getting used to. Mátyás and I didn’t always get along. Now we were family.

  Over the intercom, the captain apologized for the continued delay. I snorted in disgust.

  Had my “normal” spell even worked?

  Given all the problems we’d had on this trip so far, I’d doubt my abilities as a successful witch if it weren’t for the fact that where other people talked about being “goddesses,” I really was one. Okay, really, it was more like this: I had this full-time resident Goddess, Lilith, whom I accidentally permanently bonded to me when I needed help fighting off an American Indian Trickster God.

  The good news was that I could now call on Lilith when those zombies and whatnot attacked Sebastian and me, but the bad news was that She was the Queen of Hell and Mother of Demons.

  And, worse, the more time we stayed together, the more inseparable we became. Yeah, I was becoming the original bitch. Nice, huh? I felt it today for sure. Carefully, I shifted in my seat, impatient for some movement. The snow outside continued to fall.

  No offense to Sebastian, but I wished we were headed somewhere warmer—the Bahamas, Tahiti, or even Greece.

  That reminded me, I was actually carrying two Goddesses around. Because of Lilith’s darker side and tendency to destroy anything She touched, I called on another Goddess during the last big crisis that befell us—Athena. She could be hanging around because I kind of sort of promised to devote my life to Her worship in exchange for Her help.

  In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.

&nbs
p; I mean, I was beginning to think that maybe my body was overcrowded, and that was part of what was causing all these flashes of dizziness. Perhaps Lilith and the new Goddess in residence were duking it out for control over my spiritual real estate.

  The speaker crackled to life overhead and the captain’s voice informed us that we’d be taking off as soon as the deicer had a chance to work. Thank Goddess!—whichever one of my divine occupants answered my prayer!

  The sumo wrestler’s knee grazed mine and I felt that odd disorienting tingle, like the world just shifted under my feet. For a second, I thought maybe the plane was finally moving. I checked out the window. No such luck . . .

  And it looked like we wouldn’t be going anywhere for some time given that there was a Frost Giant on the wing.

  Wait, what?

  Doing a classic double take, I looked again. Yep, there she was crouching on the wing with a huge, black wolf-dog at her side. “Giant” might be a bit of a misnomer. She wasn’t precisely a ginormous woman, but she had the build of a linebacker and enough magical energy to make her “feel” big. She crouched on the wing, her Prince Valiant cap of white gold hair barely shifting even as her fur cloak flapped furiously in the howling wind. Ice blue eyes met mine and she smiled wickedly.

  Hey, this wasn’t just any Frost Giant—I knew her!

  It was Fonn, the ice-storm demon who tried to ruin Sebastian’s birthday last Christmas.