“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” my husband said quietly, and I seized his hand and squeezed, which would have pulverized the bones in an ordinary human’s hand, but would have as much effect on Sinclair as a mosquito bite.
He squeezed back, which hurt.
“Derik, Eric’s right,” Michael warned. Under the fluorescent lights, he was as pale as milk. They all were, actually. Poor, poor guys. I wasn’t sure who I pitied more: the dead Antonia or the living Pack members.
“I need to be sure,” Derik insisted, and I winced again. The poor guy had pinned all his hopes on the chance that we’d gotten another werewolf mixed up with Antonia, which was so dumb I wanted to cry.
The lid was all the way up. Derik stared inside for a long moment and then, with infinite care, slowly lowered the lid.
Then he started to howl.
Chapter 6
We were all shocked, even his friends were shocked. Derik, normally a man of sunny temperament (at least from what I’d seen a few months back), was roaring like a rabid bear. Then he raised his fists over his head and brought them crashing down on the coffin lid, which instantly gave way.
Suddenly it was hard for me to swallow. Suddenly I wanted a drink in the worst way. Any drink. A smoothie, a frozen mudslide, blood, gasoline, Clorox, whatever.
Derik was glaring at me with eyes that were hard to look away from. “You might have washed her face, at least.”
This was my evening for wincing, except this time it was almost a flinch. Because Derik was right . . . but then, was I wrong in trying to show respect for whatever rituals they had?
Jessica coughed and spoke up, attempting to save my ass. “We, um, didn’t want to offend you guys.”
“Offend?” Derik spat. And in a flash, I remembered Antonia once telling me that her only real friend in the Pack was Derik. “Offend?”
Crash! More fist-sized holes in the lid, which he seemed determined to convert into thousands of velvet-tipped toothpicks. I took a step forward . . . only to feel Sinclair’s hand close around my bicep and gently pull me back.
He was right, of course. This wasn’t about me, and stomping into the middle of it would have been grossly inappropriate. And yet. And still. I couldn’t stand seeing anyone—even a bare acquaintance—in so much pain.
My feet seemed determined to disobey my brain, because they took another slow step . . . and Sinclair tugged me back, not so gently this time.
“You never should have gone!” Derik was yelling into the coffin. “You stupid bitch! You left your Pack!”
Nobody said anything to that, big surprise. Because, again, it was the truth.
“All right, that’s enough,” Michael said calmly. His copper-colored eyes looked almost orange in the fluorescents. “Let’s take her home, Derik.”
So into the back Antonia went, the way back where there were no seat belts, because none were needed.
Jeannie drove; Michael sat beside her in the front. Derik sat across from us in the back. Looking through us, not at us.
No one said a word during the entire ninety-minute drive to Cape Cod.
Chapter 7
Jesus!” I gasped, staring out the window. Sinclair flinched, but I was used to his twitches. “This is where you live?” I asked, feeling like I had straw in my hair and cow shit on my heels. All I needed were a few “hyuk, hyuks!” to complete the picture. “You live here?”
“Yes,” Michael said shortly as he drove to the main entrance. I pressed my face up against the window so hard my nose squashed. Thanks to no longer being addicted to oxygen, I didn’t fog up the glass, at least.
It was a castle.
No, really. A castle. On Cape Cod! And I wasn’t the only impressed yokel: both Jessica (who’d napped all the way here, like BabyJon) and Sinclair (who’d grown up on a farm a zillion years ago) were staring out their windows, too.
Gravel crunched beneath the wheels as we neared the castle of red bricks and red stones with about a zillion windows, set square in the middle of a huge field of green, with the Atlantic Ocean right behind it and stretching all the way into a gray forever. If it looked this magical at night, how, oh how, would it look during the day?
I promised myself I would find out. If you’re going to get stuck with an eternal membership card of the undead, being the prophesied queen was the way to go. Not only did I wake up in the afternoon, instead of sunset, but I could go outside. I’d never burn up, not to mention worry about wrinkles and freckles. It was like getting your hand stamped at a club, only a zillion times cooler.
I realized I was still sitting in the car like a startled blond lump, and yanked on the door handle. I could hear the murmur of waves as I got out of the limo. Could smell the salt in the air, the sweetness of the grass field. Tilted my head back and looked at a sky of stars I had never seen before, dangling over the pure ocean.
I almost went into sensory overload, to be honest; it was a gorgeous night and, by God, it smelled gorgeous and I was absolutely loving my enhanced senses (which had not always been the case, believe me—don’t even get me started on Marc’s aftershave).
Until I got here, I hadn’t known that gorgeous could be a smell.
“It’s late,” Michael said curtly, striding up to the main doors with Jeannie almost in lockstep beside him. Sinclair was also abreast of them. (How did he do that, just fall into step right beside the biggest and strongest like he belonged there?)
So I tried to stop gaping and trotted after Jessica, who was trotting herself to keep up. I’d unhooked BabyJon’s car seat and carried it with us, though it suddenly felt like it was full of several gold bars as I hurried and sniffed and looked around and kept my grip hard enough so that the seat didn’t bang against my shins. Good Lord, I was really getting out of shape if a simple walk to a house . . . castle. . . . taxed my attention, not to mention my balance.
“And we have a lot to talk about.”
Eh? Oh, right. Michael was talking. I should absolutely be listening.
“Gee, ya think?” Jessica whispered to me. “And here I thought we were here for the lobster.”
I smothered a laugh, knowing that even if Antonia and Garrett weren’t dead this was no time to get the giggles. We had a pretty scary itinerary and never mind the seafood jokes (though I wondered if I could eat clam chowder). Maybe it seemed weird for a vampire to fret or be stressed—this vampire, at least—but despite how it always looks in books and movies, whole weeks—months—could pass by without any life-or-death bullshit.
Not last week, though. I thought the early part of the week had bitten the big one, what with the Fiends going all, you know, fiendish, solving the murders, avoiding my own murder (something I was starting to get good at just from sheer repetition, and wasn’t that the opposite of amusing), and being a helpless witness to a murder/suicide in my foyer. Okay, technically Jessica’s foyer.
So Antonia was dead, Garrett had killed himself, but the fun wasn’t over yet, which is why I was standing in front of the Atlantic Ocean instead of the Mississippi River.
Yeah, I figured we’d all earned about six years off—shoot, I was still a newlywed, I had a pile of thank-you notes yet to write—but the joke was on me, as it so often is, and all the tears and terror and bullets meant for me had only brought us to Wednesday. Now it was the weekend, and Sinclair and I had a fresh set of problems.
First and foremost, how big a mess was this? How much blame would fall on my friends and me, how much did we deserve . . . or need to dodge? Most important, what were the werewolves cloistered here going to do about it? About us? And how could I explain Antonia’s former-Fiend boyfriend to werewolves, without going too far and screwing over my own people?
Had Antonia ever even told her Pack she’d been sleeping with a vampire? I should have known the answer to that. But Antonia had always made it clear that her phone calls with Michael were Pack business, and we all tried to respect her privacy.
Only to the werewolves, it would probably look
like negligence, or carelessness.
I had never wanted a drink so badly in my life.
We followed Michael up red brick stairs and into a vestibule the size of a ballroom. I stared . . .
Sure, why not? You’ve been gaping like a tourist instead of an invited head of state. Which is just fine, because you’ll never fool a real leader.
... while trying not to look like I was doing so. This place made our mansion on Summit Avenue—one of the prettiest, grandest, richest streets in the Midwest—look like a one-bedroom apartment in the warehouse district. Michael’s castle . . .
Yep, now there’s a real leader, so quit fakin’, bacon.
... was lit up in a blaze of lights (mostly from the overhead chandeliers) and what little furniture I could see was mahogany. The place smelled like old wood and cedar, floor wax and furniture. It was the most impressive dwelling I’d ever seen, and I’d only seen a tenth of a fraction of it.
We climbed a grandly sweeping flight of stairs (Marble floors! Marble floors! Werewolves must not ever slip, or maybe they just hated vacuuming.), followed the Wyndhams down a wide hallway carpeted in red (not the red you might think, an orangey red, a dark pink—no, this was red red, a deep, rich, true red), and were soon in a room twice as big as my kitchen that was clearly Michael’s office.
He probably filled out paperwork, or clipped coupons, or downloaded songs from iTunes when he wasn’t ruling the world from behind the ginormous desk almost directly across from us. And excuse me, had I described the grand piano-sized, reddish brown, beautifully appointed, gleaming chunk of wood as a desk?
More fool me. The President of the U.S. sat behind a desk. Elementary school teachers sat behind desks. Prison wardens. Librarians. DMV employees. Desk sergeants. (Thus the name!) Reporters. Loan officers.
Those were desks. This thing was a wooden monument to Michael’s status.
There were a few comfortable chairs scattered about, all dark wood with plush seats. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined two of the walls; the other walls had windows and pictures and such. One framed portrait caught my eye—obviously old, but the people were familiar to me somehow, which was impossible.
I stepped closer and stared harder. No, I didn’t know them. The man had lush dark hair and the woman had brown eyes—no, not brown, more golden than brown, more like—
More like Michael’s.
Of course! The mater and pater of the Pack. Damn. Bet they’d known some good stories.
(Can you hear them, Elizabeth?)
I stifled a yelp of surprise and darted a look in Sinclair’s direction. It was handy to be able to read your husband’s mind, but that didn’t mean I thought it was natural, normal, or not nerve-wracking. The fact that our telepathy tended to show only during extreme stress or excitement (making love, being murdered, trying to figure out if vampires have to pay property tax) told me something about Sinclair’s state of mind.
My tall dark darling might come across as calm and reasonable, even a little bored, and yet he was worried enough (about me? the whole group? both?) to pop his question right into my head, where I heard it as easily as if he was using a megaphone.
(Elizabeth. Can you hear them?)
Oh, right, you’re probably expecting an answer. I nodded. Sure I could. And I knew what Sinclair was getting at. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, and the castle seemed almost deserted, but it wasn’t. Not even close to deserted. We could hear them walking around and, even worse, standing still. I was—don’t ask me how—sure they were listening to us. Believe me, I know how it sounds: We could hear them listening to us? Give me a break.
Except we absolutely could. And that was the scariest thing of all, knowing the castle was full of monsters who really would eat you, just like an ogre in a fairy tale.
My, Grandma, what big ears you have.
My worry for Jessica increased by a factor of about eight hundred . . . she had nothing in the way of enhanced paranormal senses, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t picking up on the tension. Boy oh boy, I hoped we’d be able to make friends with the ogres. Which is a sentence I never thought I’d have to think, much less articulate.
Chapter 8
Drinks?” Jeannie asked, playing bartender. I was eyeing her hair with not a little admiration. Unlike mine, which at best could be coaxed to be wavy (I’d had a highlight touch-up and deep-conditioning treatment the week before I’d died; I might be a slavering ghoul of the undead, but I would never have graying split ends), hers was shoulder length, surfer blond, and curly . . . the kind that frizzed out in July, the kind that was a mass of soft spiral curls tonight. The rest of her was unexceptional.
Okay, that came out wrong . . . Jeannie Wyndham was a beautiful woman, admirably slim after two kids, casually dressed in jeans, loafers (Payless; ah, well, nobody’s perfect), a soft blue chambray shirt, and a tan wool blazer.
When I described her as unexceptional, I meant in comparison to my surroundings: Michael’s wife was the queen of everything I was staring at; it was all half hers. But you’d never know it to look at her; she had the brisk, understated demeanor of an experienced nurse.
Except for the eyes, of course; she had the flat and calculating gaze of a sniper. I wondered where her gun was. This was more than idle curiosity; the last time I’d seen her she’d shot me. Three times, in the chest.
But later she’d helped me pick out the greatest dress in the history of human garments, so I didn’t hold it against her anymore. Attempted murder is a fleeting moment, but the perfect wedding gown lasts forever.
“Betsy? Drink?”
Damn, I was really gonna have to pay better attention. I’d been so busy staring around the room and remembering point-blank chest wounds that I took the glass without looking and drained it.
And nearly barfed all over the beautiful Persian rug. I think it was Persian. It looked expensive and smelled old. Michael’s great-great-great-great-grand-parents had probably hauled it all the way to Plymouth from the Mayflower, centuries after their great-great-great-great-grandparents had hauled it from the palace of Cyrus.
How did I know Cyrus was one of the first rulers of the Persians, you ask? Hey. I don’t always ignore my husband when he’s prattling on about useless stuff.
“Wwwrrllgg!” I managed, wiping off what was dribbling down my disgusted chin. I forced what was left of the loathsome liquid down. “What the hell is this, kerosene?”
“We’re out of kerosene,” Derik said with no trace of a smile. This was far from the Derik I’d met before, who had been all smiles, charming and sexy and nice.
“I should have mentioned that my wife only likes drinks that come from a dirty blender,” Sinclair said. He was sitting across from Michael, who was behind his desk. I was sitting next to him; Jessica was on my right. Jeannie, done with handing out glasses of regurgitate, was pacing back and forth behind us. Like I wasn’t already nervous enough. “I take it you didn’t enjoy your first whiskey, dear one?”
Yeah, about as much as a tax audit, jerkhead. Guess I wasn’t as thirsty as I’d thought.
Sinclair nodded thoughtfully, his fist pressed under his nose to hide a smile. He hadn’t been reading my mind as long as I’d been able to read his (it’s a long story, and I come off kind of bad in it), so he was still in the wow-this-is-so-awesome stage, whereas I was at the fuck-you-I-have-no-privacy phase.
I fumbled frantically in my purse, found a tin of Altoids, and dumped half of them in my mouth. I crunched them up like they were Rice Krispies, relishing the way the mint overpowered the yuck-o booze. Zow! The potent little buggers were really clearing out my sinuses; my eyes were all but watering. Which would have been a good trick, since my eyes don’t water.
“Let me begin by saying we appreciate you bringing Antonia home to us.”
“Nnnn prbm,” I crunched, trying not to cough. Dammit! Probably shouldn’t have dumped such a big mouthful into my gaping piehole. Probably shouldn’t have done a lot of things this week.
; “It was no trouble, and the least we could do,” Sinclair said, speaking as calmly and colorlessly as Michael while I crunched furiously. I wondered if that was the royal “we.” “It was an honor to escort her back home.”
“My understanding is that she was shot several times in the head, protecting you,” Michael said calmly. Calmly, but a muscle beside his eye twitched.
I tried not to stare, and failed. I gave serious thought to getting up and spitting my mashed Altoids into his spotless wastebasket, but just didn’t dare. It seemed . . . what was the word Eric would use? Undiplomatic.
With a mighty effort, I swallowed the minty lump down, gagged briefly, and sneezed. Beside me, I could sense Sinclair rolling his eyes and either trying not to smirk, or thinking up an excuse for me. I’d deal with him later.
“Yes, that’s right,” I replied with startlingly fresh breath. I managed to stifle the second sneeze. “She saved me.”
“Why?”
Huh. That didn’t seem very nice. My tongue ran away before I could stop it: “Because she lost a bet?”
There was a loud hissing sound, like everyone had gasped at the same time. I looked at my lap and muttered, “Sorry. Too soon?”
“What could bullets have done to a vampire?” Michael continued, unmoved by my terrific breath and sarcastic observations. And that was the $50,000 question. Because it was only recently that vampires realized werewolves existed, and vice versa. Michael probably assumed our vampirism was straight out of a bad horror movie. And who could blame him? I hadn’t thought lead bullets would hurt a werewolf.
“What would bullets in the brain do to anyone?” Sinclair replied quietly, totally screwing up my assumption. “There was no chance anyone could have regenerated.”
Michael had tipped back in his chair and was staring at the ceiling. “Mmmm.” Then he had all four legs of his chair on the floor and met all our gazes.
Well. Almost all. His gaze kept skittering over the sleeping BabyJon. He hadn’t asked one question about the baby, made one comment, not even a careless, “Cute kid.” And from what I’d heard, he was a devoted dad who loved ankle biters, nose miners, whatever.
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