How grateful I am that you made me strong.
Elizabeth, your charm and your power come from the simple fact that you have no idea how powerful you have always been. This is the sort of thing that makes me love you while fighting the urge to strangle you.
He was right! I knew what that expression looked like. I’d seen it a zillion times in the last few years. Sort of like constipation paired with a sugar rush.
By now many of your questions about my past have likely been answered.
Yeah, you could say that.
But if any questions remain, I will answer them. If you require any information on any topic with which I am familiar, I shall provide you with all you need in the best way I can.
The time to keep secrets from you is over, Your footprints can be found throughout our lives; you have always been in our lives, and at last you can know it, to our gratitude and joy. Knowing this, we have counted the minutes until your return to your proper place in time.
Should this be at all unclear, I shall say it straight out: your place is at my side, and will always be, whether it is sixty years ago or five thousand years from now.
In this, as in all things, I am your devoted husband, servant, and monarch.
My own, how I miss you.
Sink Lair.
My hand spasmed and the note crumpled in my fist. I gasped and tried to smooth it out, which would have been tricky even if I hadn’t been crying. The nickname he hated! He’d signed it with the nickname he hated!
More: he let me go to hell, even though he knew I was going to be hip deep in all kinds of crap. For a macho control-freak, old-fashioned chauvinist like my husband, for him to stand back and let all that happen, let me face all sorts of danger and bad smells . . . well.
“Ah, I not only heard your dulcet voice but followed the smell of grime.” I looked up. Sinclair was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. “Your face is smudged, my own. And I must apologize for picking such an ugly, pointless argument to make you think—”
“Shut up!”
He blinked. “As you wish.”
“And fuck me!”
He blinked again. Had he developed a nervous twitch while I was gone? “As you wish.”
And just like that, I was in his arms. Just like that, we went staggering all over the parlor, kissing hungrily, biting, licking, yanking at our clothes, tripping over the end table (twice) and the couch (once), until we finally realized we should just stay on the floor.
My shredded leggings were more shredded, and Sinclair was trying to rip his tie off without strangling himself more than I accidentally had. I’m not sure why he was bothering, since his white dress shirt was in several pieces on the carpet . . . force of habit, maybe?
“My own, my dear, my Elizabeth, my Elizabeth, how I missed you.”
“Less talk,” I panted, levering my hips off the floor to meet his. “More dick.”
He laughed into my mouth. “As you—ah. That’s . . . really quite lovely.”
“Gawd, it sounds like a herd of pissed-off jaguars in here. What the—aw, dammit!”
Marc was in the doorway, arms akimbo. “Oh, come on! You know how long it’s been since I got laid? I’ve been lugging BabyJon to every Gymboree in town just to meet someone who’ll be my favorite bad choice!”
“Out!” Sinclair roared, not even looking.
“It’s not fair!” he whined, retreating with both hands over his eyes. “Bad enough you two are ridiculously hot so we all assume you’re having awesome monkey sex, but that’s why you have a bedroom! So the rest of us don’t have to walk in on scenes like this! Stop it, that table’s almost three hundred years old! Oh, now you’re just flaunting your vampire superpowers and sex life.” His voice was getting fainter. “The rest of us get to live here, you know. I mean have to. Have to live here. Aw, dammit . . .”
Epilogue
l had just finished checking on my new “ink” and deciding who would rest in peace, and who would be my new gopher, when a familiar doorway made of Hellfire began cutting its way into my office.
I leaned back, opened the top drawer, extracted the pen I’d had made just for this, then smiled as the devil dropped through the door in the ceiling onto my carpet.
“That’s dramatic,” I commented, “even for you.”
Laura Morningstar grinned. “What can I say, big sister? I’m in a flamboyant mood.”
“Another of your would-be heirs made it through adolescence?” I asked idly. “Or another dupe allowed himself to be seduced? Or did you think up something even more wonderfully awful to do to our father?”
“All three!” my sister answered, hugging herself with glee. She was, as I was, still a beautiful woman. In fact, at only a thousand-some years old, she was years away from her prime.
Which was fine with me. I didn’t need her in her prime, but she needed me in mine.
“I’m glad to see you,” I said, and it was nothing but the truth.
“I’m sure.” She plopped into the chair opposite my desk. “Relieved they’re gone?”
“There are no words,” I fervently replied. “What a distasteful business.”
“You just don’t like remembering how you used to be.”
Among other things, yes. But never mind, little sister. Never mind.
“And speaking of the bad old days, I’m finished with your husband.”
“Excellent. Because I’m ready to take him back.”
“Oooh, sounds kinky. Can I watch?”
“It doesn’t, and no, you cannot.”
Laura held out her hands. A small circle of Hellfire—even after all these centuries, I still couldn’t look at it directly—opened about two feet above her, and an enormous book landed in her hands with a distinctive whump!
“Behold, the king of the vampires,” Laura dropped the book on my desk. “It took longer than I anticipated to quiet him, skin him, and bind him, I won’t lie: I was impressed. He never made a sound. Not once in seventy-five years.”
I sighed . . . an unnecessary breath, but old habits were the hardest to break. Case in point: my husband.
I had disliked him at first. Then had become infatuated. Then devoted. And then disappointed. Finally: disenchanted.
He never would have helped me keep things the way they were, the way I knew, from my travels with the devil, they had to be.
Really, there was only one way he could help me now.
“It’ll take a while to get it all down exactly right. There’s quite a bit to remember.”
Laura yawned. She’d never been one for details.
“But once it’s finished, you’ll be able to bring it back? It’s a trip of more than a thousand years, you’ll recall.”
“If I recall, why d’you remind me? And a thousand years might as well be six months, after all this time. Or did you forget about practice making perfect?” She smiled. “I got my start schlepping you around Salem, remember?”
“Vividly.”
I picked up my pen, flipped open the cover of the blank book, dipped the tip of the pen in blood, and began to write on my husband.
Chapter one, page one.
The Book of the Dead.
Undead and Unfinished Page 22