“Everything you’ve said is true. Which brings me to the question, should I be mad or scared? Or just overwhelmed?”
“Figure it out later. So yeah, Sinclair’s got Other You, but who’s to say that’s what he wanted? He’s been stuck with Other You when she was you you. Now, young, vital, non-CEO you, I bet Sinclair hasn’t seen that in a while.” She paused. “Did that make sense? I’m not sure that made sense.”
“It was genius,” I assured her. “Come on. Let’s get a tour and find my husband.”
Call me weird, or perversely curious, but I couldn’t wait to see ancient Sinclair.
“So if I’ve got this right, I’m about to help my husband cheat on me again, with me. Again.”
Laura shrugged. “I don’t make the rules.”
Chapter 67
Other Me and ancient Sinclair must have a bedroom around here somewhere. Probably a whole suite. A chilly, freezing underground suite where they poke skinny computers and can’t remember who makes their bed. Not that Sinclair was ever known for lurking in bedrooms during business hours. Other Me is working in her office . . . he must have one, too.”
“Think Jon will take us there?”
“Sure, why wouldn’t he? He’s sooo sweet. And oh my God, it pains me to say anything nice about the Ant, but did she and my dad make a gorgeous kid or what? Also! He’s nice because I raised him! Truly I astonish myself with my awesomeness. Once in a while, I mean.”
“You’re right about all of that, but remember: he does whatever Other You tells him. If she doesn’t want you to see Sinclair . . .”
“Hmmm. She knows how I think. And she probably remembers how you think. You know what? I just realized ... there must be an ancient you around here, too.”
“I know,” Laura said, looking grim. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
I didn’t blame her. If I’d gotten frigid and boring in a thousand years, what had happened to Laura? My mind shied away from even trying to picture it, and I let it. “So you keep Jon busy. I’ll try to dig up my husband. Get it? Dig up?”
“Ugh.”
“But first we’ll—”
“Oh my goodness, the rumors were true!”
I knew that voice, and sheer force of habit had me turning with a big smile. A smile that fell off my face like an anvil off a cliff.
Marc.
Marc was a vampire.
He rushed up to us with near-blinding speed, and Laura flinched back, hard. He gave me a spine-crushing squeeze and a cold kiss on both cheeks. I had to clench my fists to keep from rubbing his mark off my face. Both his marks.
“And you don’t look a day older than thirty. No matter what century it is!”
He sounded all right. He even looked all right. But he felt all wrong. He felt bad. A stupid and simple word, but one that fit. I knew, just by looking at him, that he was bad. Maybe it was a queen thing.
No. It wasn’t. Laura looked as horrified as I felt.
He grinned, showing fangs. Which I happened to know he didn’t need to do. They only came out when we smelled blood or were feeding. He was doing it to creep us out.
“What the hell happened to you?” I snapped, in no mood to feign happiness to see him. Laura went, if possible, even whiter. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t care that this thing was my friend a thousand years ago. I didn’t even care that I’d saved him from a high dive off a roof a thousand years ago. Whatever he was now, he wasn’t my friend. If he fucked with me or Laura in any way, I’d play Hacky Sack with his balls.
“Don’t you mean who happened to me, honey?” His grin widened, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Nothing reached his eyes. I glanced into them, then away.
Nobody home.
“So, what are you saying, Marky Mark and the Psycho Bunch? Are you saying I did that to you? Or Tina or Sinclair? Don’t be coy, shit stain. Cough up.”
“Tina or Sinclair! That’s awesome!” The Marc-Thing threw back his head (he’d died with a buzz cut, and it was so annoying that he was still terrific looking) and laughed, as my dead grandmother would have said, “fit to split.” “Tina or Sinclair, that is the question, isn’t it? In fact, that’s my favorite question. Because—”
“Marc.”
The Marc-Thing choked off his laugh as though somebody’d slammed an axe through his teeth. Which, believe me, was tempting.
We looked. Other Me was standing at the other end of the hallway, temporarily free of her office. I noticed she had matching steel gray stockings and sensible black flats. I was too far away to see the designer. Since it was all winter all the time, I supposed I should have been grateful the future me didn’t clomp around in mukluks.
Were there any designers in the world anymore? I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in a world if there weren’t. Eternal winter I could have tolerated, especially if my family was with me, but . . . no designers? That was too much to ask of anyone.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be, Marc?” Ancient Me asked.
“Not really,” he admitted, but he turned and walked rapidly away before Ancient Me could say anything else.
“Good dog,” I called. “Woof, woof.”
His shoulders stiffened. But he didn’t slow or look back.
Chapter 68
l watched Infantile Me but, as I had expected and planned for, Infantile Me was so overwhelmed by all she had seen, she was reacting, not thinking.
Excellent.
Young Laura, now, she was thinking. She had a look on her face I knew well. Again, nothing I had not expected. Nothing I had not planned for.
Marc, though. He’d gotten so unstable over the centuries he was an utter wild card. For the thousandth time, I told myself to kill him.
I still had some residual humanity. Residual weakness. That weakness was the only reason Marc still walked and talked. I knew I should tend to that unpleasant business and be done with it, as I knew to do so would be to pound the final nail in my coffin.
Sinclair would never——
I put the thought away. Locked it away in the corner of my brain where I hid all remaining weakness.
I won’t deny being intrigued at seeing my younger self, and Laura’s younger self. But seeing the fool I had been was daunting. And depressing. I had been waiting for the idiot me for long years, and now that she was here, stumbling around like a puppy, I only wished for her to be gone.
I could never have made her understand anyway. She would have to become me to understand.
She needed to see what awaited her. She needed to go back determined to change her future.
She needed to fail, and become me.
She needed to learn to be ruthless for the greater good. And she needed to learn that she had only herself to rely on in the beginning. And would have only herself at the end.
Meanwhile, I had a nation to run. Over half a million vampires were crawling like ants beneath North America and needed direction. At all times, they needed direction. The world, I had long discovered, would not run itself
“Carry on with your business, ladies,” I said, and went back to my office.
Chapter 69
Decrepit Me had vanished back into her wood-lined cage, and good riddance. Also, gray was too severe a color for our complexion.
Even better, the Marc Thing had scuttled off like a rat. Better riddance.
Wait. Better riddance? Great riddance? Awesome riddance?
“Damn,” Laura muttered, a rare swear. “Elderly You said jump, and he leaped, didn’t he?”
“Just tell me I wasn’t the one who did that to him.”
“What, you’d feel better if it had been Tina or Sinclair?”
“No, but I’d like to ask them anyway.”
Laura stopped walking again. What with all the stopping and starting and the mini-tour and the Marc-Thing, we’d only managed to get about eleven feet. Good thing we weren’t planning on taking over the place.
“There’s no point in looking for Sinclair,” Laura said, hands on her
hips.
“Okay, that’s weird, because about two hundred seconds ago, you came up with this really great plan, remember? You said—”
“Of course I remember, Betsy, it was three minutes ago.”
“Are you sure? Because it seems kind of like you don’t.”
“We won’t find Sinclair. He either isn’t here, or he won’t see you.”
“But—”
“She knows, Betsy! She knows what you’re thinking, and she knows what I said. And she’ll have planned for that. Remember: she knew we were coming. There are no surprises for Ancient You.”
“Maybe that’s her big problem,” I said. “I don’t deny she gives me the creeps, but I feel a little sorry for her.” A very little.
“I don’t,” Laura said bluntly. “She scares the hell out of me. All your powers as queen in you is bad enough. All your power in her . . . guided by intellect. By the logic of an accountant! It’s wrong, Betsy, and it’s frightening.”
“Well, calm down, I don’t plan on turning into her in the next half hour. Let’s use this chance! We’ll find out what we can, and then we’ll be able to—
Laura was already shaking her head. “The sooner we get out of here, the better. That’s why we don’t stay here long. We realize that. And we leave.”
“To be fair, we haven’t stayed in any time period long.”
“Right, but she’ll know we won’t need to stay. Remember: she’s already come to this dance. She knows all the steps.”
“And that’s how we’re gonna get her.” Get? Was I plotting my own downfall? I hated time travel! If nothing else, I never knew what tense to use. And why, exactly, was I trying to change things? Ancient Me was a chilly workaholic, but that didn’t make her evil beyond compare. Right? “Because Decrepit Me has forgotten what it’s like to just pull plans straight out of her butt without thinking.”
“That might work,” Laura admitted. “She’s used to plotting. And she’s had the advantage of knowing what would happen. Maybe instead of trying to stop whatever-it-was, she planned for it”
“So maybe we try to get info out of her so we don’t just lie back and let it happen. Maybe she figured whatever-it-was couldn’t be stopped. So she made sure the vampires would be taken care of. If it’s July now, think what it’s like here in the winter! Vampires can’t freeze to death, so who better to take over when global warming bitch-slapped the planet?”
“Makes sense. So what do we—”
I held up a hand. “Uh-uh. I can’t tell you. That way, in the future, you can’t tell shriveled, withered Other Me. Go try to—”
“Don’t you tell me.”
“Right. So after we don’t tell each other what we’ll do, we’ll meet—or not—sometime afterward. Probably.”
“Well, good luck, I think.”
“And to you, probably.”
We embraced, then dashed off in different directions.
Chapter 70
l looked up as Infantile Me booted her way through my mahogany doors. Mahogany! The idiot child had no comprehension what such things cost these days.
“Ah, yes, you’re off. No, I’m not going to tell you where Jessica and Tina are. And as I’m sure Marc told you, Sinclair isn’t available to you at this time.”
“Marc didn’t tell me shit. He was too busy channeling Ted Bundy, George W. Bush, and the guys from Queer Eye. He’s pretty stylin’ for a sociopath.”
Ah, that was unfortunate. Marc was a tool these days and nothing more. But the chisel can turn in the sculptor’s hand. He’d gone off the reservation, mentally, before he could impart the information I needed Juvenile Me to have.
“He’s having an off century,” I said, feigning disinterest. “Thank you for stopping in. So sorry you can’t stay, goodbye—grrkk!”
I’d said grrkk because Insane Me had darted across my carpet, lunged across my desk (my desk!), and hauled me to my feet by the throat. I didn’t mind that nearly as much as I worried for my boucle dress. Such things were difficult to come by these days, and it didn’t matter what year it was: once wool was stretched, it never went back. “Stop that!” I gurgled, kicking. I felt one of my flailing feet smash over a filing cabinet and reminded myself those files were more priceless than firewood.
“What did you do?” Toddler Me shouted. “Or what didn’t you do! Tell me!”
“This—is not—correct!” How could she be doing this? I didn’t remember doing this! “You’re not—sticking—to the script”
“Sucks to be you, then, I guess,” Preschool Me said with a noted lack of sympathy.
The most maddening thing? I didn’t dare fight back. I couldn’t risk causing a fatal injury. I had so much experience, centuries worth of knowledge, not to mention being the most powerful vampire in the history of the undead. It would be too easy to kill her. And as I had learned over the years, it was difficult to raise the undead.
Raising the dead.
Yes. I knew how to handle this. And it would give the stupid child something to ponder when she was back in the twenty-first century, struggling with a sudoku puzzle.
I took my hands from her wrists, wrenched us sideways, and managed to stab the button on the left side of my electronic blotter. The rear door to my office slid open, and as always, the zombie was preceded by her smell.
Betsy dropped me and backed off at once, as I’d anticipated. “Oh my God!” she shrieked, hands clapped over her mouth. “What the hell is that?”
“One of the shambling undead, naturally.” I straightened the neckline of my dress. “You’re fortunate you didn’t smudge me. And still, it hasn’t occurred to you to take a shower? Be shamed, slob.”
“I’m shamed? I’m shamed? Why do you have a zombie lurking in a secret compartment behind your office that opens when you push a button on your big, ugly desk?”
I handed the zombie a subdrive (the size of a dime, the knowledge of worlds) and said, “Take this to Ops.”
One of her fingers fell off, and, when she clutched the subdrive, we could hear her remaining fingers squirting and squashing. I smiled to hear Betsy’s horrified groan. My zombie—the wife of one of our heating engineers, and how silly was it that in all this time, there was still no cure for cancer?—shuffled past Betsy and out the main double doors.
“What, I should just leave the dead in the ground? When they can’t freeze to death? When they take orders so beautifully, don’t feel pain, and don’t call in sick? You want me to waste a human on chores like this?”
“Waste a human? Do you hear yourse—wait. Where do they come from?”
“Sorry,” I said, which was a pure lie. “Privileges of rank. You’ll figure it out eventually. The Queene shall noe the dead, all the dead, and neither shall they hide from her nor keep secrets from her.”
The smile fell off my face when she snapped, “Yeah, and noe the dead and keep the dead. That’s how you interpreted that awful book? You figured out how to raise zombies? Stop me if you haven’t heard this in the last few hundred years, but what is wrong with you?”
“Run along,” I said coldly. “I could never make you understand.”
“Yeah? Well, I understand that I can kick the shit out of you pretty much at will, and you don’t dare hurt me back.”
“I will dare. Dare and more,” I muttered. “There are ways to keep you off me that won’t kill you.”
“Then bring it, cow.”
I tried to recall the last time someone had dared insult me to my face. Or even behind my back (among other functions, fresher zombies could repeat overheard conversations verbatim ... they were my all-seeing eyes, the rotten darlings).
To my annoyance, she had called my bluff. I sat behind my desk, my hand resting close to the zombie button. That, at least, wasn’t a bluff. I had raised another dozen or so only last week. They wouldn’t be too decayed to move for at least another three days.
“Run along, little girl.”
“What’d you do to my husband, you fucking sick zombie group
ie?”
“My husband’s whereabouts are none of your concern.” Had she really called me a groupie?
“Where are Tina and Jessica? And elderly Laura? And why are you letting Marc walk around like that? You might be dead inside, you might have crummy color-coordinating skills in your decrepit old age, but you have to see he’s dangerous, he’s unpredictable, and he’ll probably be the end of you.”
Good points, all. It was refreshing, seeing the occasional flash of logic Infantile Me was capable of. Certainly only a very old vampire would ever have any hope of killing me. Fortunately, Marc was too far gone to rally any troops. And one-on-one, as he had found out nine hundred years ago, he had no chance.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have kept him sealed in a coffin draped with rosaries for so long. I’d wanted him broken, but I hadn’t anticipated he would go insane. It had only been for fifty years, for God’s sake. I still remember the disappointment I felt when I realized I had overestimated his resolve, grit, and discipline. I’d expected more from a physician . . .
“What do you want, Betsy?”
“What do you think I want, you psycho shithead?” she cried. I didn’t like to admit it, but being insulted like this was almost refreshing. “I want you to not be a psycho shithead! I want you to go back in time and undo whatever the hell happened to Marc! He was your friend, you nasty cow! He was devoted to you!”
I stared at myself, my stupid, infantile, foolish self. I was red faced (a good trick for someone who’s blood moves sluggishly at best). I was out of control. If I’d been able to cry, I would have been bawling.
“I don’t know if you did it or Tina or Sinclair, but you should have saved him! And if you couldn’t, you should have taken the head of anyone who dared touch a friend of the vampire queen.”
“You have noticed Tina’s absence,” I said quietly, arranging the antique pens on my desk.
That shut her up. Alas, not for long. “I don’t believe you. Or maybe I do. I can’t do anything about it now. But you should be ashamed, not me. You let all this happen, and for what? So you could stay safe?”
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