“Pretty soon?” she snarled. “That’s five years away, asshat.”
“No!” I was on my feet, too, and as I stepped forward Sinclair’s hand closed over my biceps and he gave a not-especially-gentle yank backward. “That is my word. You’re not allowed to use that word. Take it back!”
The State of Minnesota, it must be said, was disturbingly laid-back about naming babies. I guess they figured that the mom in question had just squeezed a human (in Jessica’s case, two of the li’l suckers) out of her body, so maybe cut her some slack on paperwork?
The babies had to be registered within five days, not necessarily named. And all the naming chaos aside, the question I couldn’t avoid: registered for what? Register is a noun and a verb: we sign guest registers, we register for wedding gifts and domain names, we register cars and boats, we register to vote and when we hit a mountain summit . . . and now we register babies, I guess? Good God, for what? What weird creepy thing did they need a statewide baby register for?
Anyway, if you register the babies but haven’t named them within those five days, Baby Girl Berry and Baby Boy Berry were the names that went on the dotted line. Jess and Nick then had forty-five days to change Baby Boy and Baby Girl to anything, for the love of God, just pick something! If they waited longer than forty-five days, they had to pay extra.
Needless to say, Jess and DadDick didn’t give a tin shit about what they had to pay. Also, when had I become surrounded almost entirely by millionaires? That was troubling, because it meant I was the white trash of the mansion. Hell, the neighborhood; this was Summit Avenue in St. Paul. The governor’s mansion was across the street! How had I let that happen?
Anyway, it had been weeks and the babies were still Frick and Frack. Or whatever we were calling them that day. Salt and Pepper hadn’t gone over well, probably because of the whole biracial thing. Sprite and 7-Up were greeted with derision bordering on rage. The reaction to Rocky and Bullwinkle will never be spoken of again, though DadDick did take me aside to quietly mention he thought Batman and Robin were the best so far. My faves: little Manolo and little Blahnik.
“Are we fighting about your hallucination, you bugging my mom for no reason, Sharpie ink, or how much you hate government paperwork?” I asked, trying and failing to wrest myself from Sinclair’s clawlike grip. The man hung on like a velociraptor. “Because with all the yelling I can’t deny I might have lost track! Which makes me even madder!”
“We’re talking about deflection as it relates to the modern vampire queen.” Marc, piping up helpfully, got a double glare from Jess and me.
“No, we’re talking about how Betsy puts the dumb in dumbass,” Jessica snapped.
“That doesn’t even make sense!” was my outraged rebuttal, followed with the ever-intellectual, “and you have barf in your eyebrows!”
“Oh.” DadDick, who’d been holding Jess back, peeked around her, let go with one hand, rubbed his thumb across her left eyebrow, then said, “It’s just a little spit-up.”
“Gross,” was my revolted comment. I know. I was being a megabitch. Realizing it didn’t make me want to behave, though; it just made me as mad at myself as I was at her.
“I just had two babies!”
“We know.” I threw my hands up in the air. “It’s all you talk about. And what, being a new mom means you don’t have five seconds to look in the mirror?”
“Yes,” she replied, relaxing in DadDick’s grip. “That’s exactly right. I don’t expect you to get it.”
I groaned. “Oh, please. Not this again. Come on. Come on. Please not with the ‘I as a parent now understand all the mysteries of the universe, which you, poor babyless imbecile, will never, ever be able to grasp with your babyless mind and which is why your poor babyless existence is forever doomed to be unfulfilling, you poor idiot.’”
“Well.” Jess coughed. “That’s pretty much it.”
I glared and was casting around for a rejoinder when I saw the corner of her mouth twitch. Then she did the awesome thing I could never resist. When Jessica was trying not to laugh, she sort of swallowed it. That’s the only way I can describe it: her mouth would twitch and she’d fight the smile, and while she fought the smile the giggle would start to rise along with (weird!) her left eyebrow, and pretty soon her face was wrinkled up like a baked apple and the giggle would escape anyway, and now I was giggling, too, which was a helluva lot better than screaming.
“I just wish you could hear yourself sometimes,” I managed and got a hold over the giggles. I was glad something had ramped down the tension, but we still had crap to sift through.
“Betsy, I literally have a ten-dollar bill for every time I’ve wished the same of you.”
I waved that off. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Oh, here comes the ‘I’m fine, it’s everyone else who has to change’ attitude.”
“And here comes the willing victim! Poor Jessica, saddled with Betsy, which is just so stressful, it must be the hour of the martyr yet again—”
“Martyr?” she nearly shrieked. “If only I could, but you’ve been hogging the cross for years. Should we make a list of your ‘problems’? Let’s see, eternally young—”
“Thirty is not—”
“—eternally cute—”
“Again: thirty! Cute is not a word to describe a woman in her thirties. I’m not going through eternity with the ‘cute’ moniker.”
“—a house full of minions to carry out your every dumb command—”
“Minion,” Tina said. “Singular. And if I may shift the discussion—”
“—married to a bangin’ sexy vamp—”
“It’s true, Betsy,” Marc said, “you are.” To Sinclair: “You are!”
“You never have to worry about the bills—”
“Right back atcha, Jess.”
“—you’ve got superpowers—”
“Being able to walk outside at noon is not a superpower!”
“Enough of this. Now.”
Like that, the temp in the room dropped ten degrees. Sinclair hadn’t even raised his voice, but the whip-crack tone got everyone’s attention.
“Be seated and pretend to be a grown woman.”
I had no idea which of us he meant, but it didn’t matter. I sat so quickly I wasn’t actually aware of a conscious decision to sit. The only thing to make me feel better was seeing Jess had dropped, too.
Sinclair settled back into his seat as well. “Tina,” he said, and she turned her head at once. “You were saying . . .”
“Ah. Thank you, Majesty.” She turned to me. “I should like to explore the circumstances surrounding your father’s ‘death.’”
“Don’t use quotes,” I said irritably. “I can hear them, you know. It’s my dad’s death, not ‘death.’ Because he’s dead.”
“As you like, Dread Queen.” Her tone was respectful, polite, and very, very careful. “Please elaborate. There was a funeral, but no bodies. His car was involved, and his identification was found. The assumption by police and the coroner’s office was that he and his second wife were killed instantly. Your stepmother, Antonia, was killed. Yes?”
“Yeah.” As I’d already relived, I’d seen her ghost a few days later. I would not think about what that meant about my dad.
“What about the autopsy?”
I must have looked blanker than usual, because Marc helpfully piped up. “There may not have been one. The ME could have requested one—they have to if the cause of death is in question. Maybe nobody thought it was.”
“Mm-mm. Possible.”
“If there was one,” he added, “the State of Minnesota requires the Ramsey County ME to file the death certificate within five days of the death.”
I stiffened and the angel on my shoulder instantly started yammering. Don’t do it. Don’t. You’re the better person and now’s your chance to prove it
!
I’m not, actually. “Good thing the coroner keeps up with his government paperwork,” I said snidely and ducked in time to avoid the glass Jessica hurled at my head. “Ha! Too slow.”
“Stop that!” Tina snapped, which was unheard-of. I decided that for yelling at the queen she would pay the ultimate price and started to sink into a massive sulk. “Was there an obituary?”
Distracted, I thought for a second even as Jess and Marc were shaking their heads. Then I remembered, and I knew why they’d been so quick to answer in the negative. Not only was there not an obit, there hadn’t been a word in the papers at the time. Which was how Marjorie, the eight-hundred-plus-year-old vampire who’d caused all my problems that week, tripped up. She told me she’d read a blurb in the paper about the crash, explaining her presence at the evening service and how she’d come to express condolences.
Which was a pretty mean trick because there had been nothing in the papers. Marjorie knew about the funeral because she’d kept tabs on us, was causing trouble everywhere she could, and had the suicidal gall to put her hands on Sinclair and lock him in a cross-covered coffin with no plans to come to her senses anytime soon. And she’d celebrated the insanity by showing up to my dad’s funeral to giggle inside while she consoled on the outside. Just remembering this crap was getting me pissed at her all over again.
This is a terrible thing to say about killing an old lady, a librarian no less, but that was one I enjoyed. She’d thrived for almost a thousand years, but fucking with my man ended her wrinkled ass. It was like she hadn’t even cared that she was ruining my wedding! No way could I tolerate that level of sociopathy in someone who wasn’t a roommate. Didn’t she know it was my day? Night? Whatever?
“Nothing in the papers, no obit,” I agreed.
Tina had her phone out to take notes. Marc called her iPhone ‘the Precious,’ although he confided to me that she loved her phone far more than Gollum obsessed over jewelry. I found that equal parts terrifying and hilarious.
“I know your father earned an above-average income in his lifetime,” Tina said, “based on things you have mentioned over the years.”
“Yeah, he had his own consulting company.” Consultant. Was there a vaguer job description? It suited my dad perfectly.
“Yes, and did you inherit?”
“. . . No.” At the polite silence, I jumped back in with, “That doesn’t prove anything, because I didn’t expect to.”
“Dick,” Jessica muttered to the table. Entirely against my will I warmed to her a bit. She’d been outraged at the time, even more so when she realized I wasn’t in the least surprised he’d left me in death what he’d given me in life: nothing.
“He left it all to his son?” Christina Caresse Chavelle asked, because you could take the Southern belle out of the nineteenth century but you couldn’t take the nineteenth century out of Tina. I love how she didn’t even sound surprised, like disinheriting females was a standard thing.
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m BabyJon’s legal guardian now and I’m sure I would have seen some kind of paperwork naming him as an inheritor.” Was that the word? Inheritor? Or maybe just heir? “Or, if there was, I would have ignored the paperwork, which Sinclair would have found while he was snooping—”
“Darling, helping you organize your finances is hardly—”
“Shut it, Snoopy McSpy, we both know you can’t help yourself.” One of those things that had aggravated the piss out of me a couple of years before but which I was slowly becoming resigned to. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t care anymore as that I didn’t mind. There’s a difference there. A teeny one, but still. “I’m right, aren’t I? No financial paperwork. Just the baby. I inherited my brother,” I finished glumly. I did not regret that. Not one goddamn bit; I loved BabyJon not least because he was my only chance at motherhood. But it sounded so bleak to hear it out loud. I’d wished for him, and it had killed my father. I wanted a baby of my own, and it had orphaned my brother.
I shook myself out of the sadness semicoma and continued. “Dad’s finances were always a snarl. He and my mom would fight about money when they weren’t fighting about him treating marriage vows like marriage suggestions. He had offshore stuff, I think, and lots of money tied up into various funds. We lived well, but he was always bitching about being pulled in too many directions. So . . .” I looked around the table of sympathetic faces. Nope. No sale. I didn’t want any fucking pity. And my father was dead. End of story. “So that doesn’t prove anything. That doesn’t mean he hid all his assets before ditching the Ant in death, only to pop up downtown a few years later and sprint away from Jessica.”
“Insurance?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know. At the time, I’d cared about two things: BabyJon, and that I didn’t feel worse our father was dead. If there had been some—and he must have had key man insurance at the least—it hadn’t trickled my way. It wouldn’t have gone to my mom, either. The Ant, then, and since she died with him . . . what? Where did unclaimed insurance money disappear to? The ether? The Internet?
“Well.” Tina set her phone on the table, folded her hands, and looked at me. “This is very curious.”
“It’s really not.”
“I can begin looking into this for you at once, but of course—”
“No.”
Elizabeth.
I turned to Sinclair. “I said no.” I looked around the table. “Not a single person in this room has time for this shit. Not one of us. And even if you did, it’s none of your business.”
“My own,” the king began gently, “will you not consider—”
“I—I forbid you from looking into it, Eric.” His eyebrows arched; I only called him Eric when I meant business. To Tina: “Both of you. I’m not allowing it. No.”
A heavy, stressful silence, broken when Tina bowed her head and murmured acquiescence. Sinclair took a few seconds longer, and things were mighty tense while he considered my order.
A lot of people didn’t get that I wasn’t the queen because I’d married the king. Sinclair was the king because he’d married me. I was foretold; how about that for a joke on the universe? Sinclair was incredible and wonderful and maddening and lovely and one of tens of thousands of vampires. He was a king because he married the queen, and there was only one queen: she be me. If we were insane enough to file taxes as vampires, my name would be in the Head of Household box.
After a decade or two, he inclined his head toward me. “Of course, my queen. It will be as you say. We are yours to command.”
I blew out the breath I’d taken and then forgotten about. I probably shouldn’t have seemed so obviously relieved, so “oh, thank God, what would I have done if he’d said no?” but I couldn’t help it. To his credit, he said nothing but the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
“All right,” I said. “Okay. We’re all on the same page, then.”
Marc shook his head and DadDick piped up with, “Not even close.”
Yeah, well, close enough, anyway. Crisis over.
“We’re not, though,” Jessica said quietly. “Yours to command, I mean.”
Crisis back on. “Don’t I know it,” I snapped. “If anything, it’s been the other way around ever since you kidnapped my plant in eighth grade Health.”
“You had no right to take that magazine hostage,” Jess retorted. “Something had to be done; you were going power mad.”
“Kidnapper!”
“Hoarder!”
That bitch! I got aggravated just remembering. Some schools made students pretend to mother or father an egg; ours used little rosemary sprigs in pots. I’d refused to lend Jessica Seventeen magazine’s prom issue and she had retaliated by kidnapping my plant, then sending me misspelled ransom notes with rosemary clippings (“Proof we have your sprig! Give up the magazine or your plant won’t live to garnish anything!”). I’d
refused to negotiate with terrorists and took the D in Health, then wore my dishonor proudly, like last season’s Choos. To this day neither of us can stand the sight or smell of rosemary.
“Look, if that’s supposed to mean you’re gonna waste your time on this frivolous crap, then that’s what you’ll do, because if you say you’ll do a thing, Jessica, then you’ll do it and it’s one of the things I usually love about you. But they”—jerking my thumb at the vampires—“can’t help you.”
“Yeah, I caught that when you pulled the queen card, not an overreaction at all. I don’t need their help, you megalomaniac,” she snapped back, “and if you’re going to be such an ungrateful, miserable twat—”
“I am not miserable!”
“—then fine. I’ll stay out of it.”
“Good!”
“Fine.”
“Okay.”
“Yes.”
Crisis averted again.
“But just because we’re not digging doesn’t mean you can hide behind denial, even if that’s your default.”
“Hide!” I gasped; that one genuinely hurt. Didn’t she understand I was basically forced to secrete myself from the Antichrist and, by association, Hell? That wasn’t hiding, except for how secrete was a synonym for hide. How did she not get that? “Oh, very nice! As if I’d—whoa.”
And just like that, the Antichrist was storming into our kitchen. We’d been so caught up in the argument, which felt like it had been raging for a year, no one realized she was there until she was right there. It was easy to surprise me, but seeing Tina and Sinclair looking like someone goosed them was startling.
I shouldn’t have been surprised; as a half angel (apparently Lucifer used to be a good guy), Laura had inherited the ability to teleport herself anywhere as long as she did it from Hell. And she’d learned pretty quickly how to pop into Hell. Reason #261 the devil sucked: “physical contact” with a “blood relative” facilitated the “magicks” (ugh, I hate when they misspelled it on purpose, you could actually hear the k) of interdimensional teleportation. In other words, the Antichrist had learned how to teleport by slapping the shit out of the vampire queen. Sometimes I feel like my entire life after death(s) is one long punch line.
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