“We were having a family meeting,” I explained, all the time being rushed to my room like a bad girl (“Bad vampire queen!”), “and things got a teensy bit heated, and then Sinclair freaked out, and that’s when you came in. Cribbing lines from Practical Magic, I might add.” It was Tina’s favorite book, but not her favorite movie. Weirdo. Bullock and Kidman rocked that flick.
“It did seem a little tense in there.”
“Tense? Try insane. They don’t think I should save Marc.”
“Can you save Marc?”
“You missed the ‘duh, queen of the vampires, duh!’ part of the meeting, because I established I was pretty sure I c—yeow!” A final shove up the stairs, a slam of the door, and now the three of us were in my bedroom.
I took a breath and tried to chill. “Seriously: why did you put me on the train to heck straight to my room?” (Having actually been to hell, I hardly ever used hell these days unless I was referring to hell.)
“You cannot, my own.”
Tina nodded so hard she almost lost a hair ribbon. (See, see? A hair ribbon? She looked like a slutty hot extra from Little House on the Prairie.) “The king is right, Majesty, you cannot.”
“Don’t you two start.” I scowled and flopped on the bed, leaned back on my elbows, and scowled more. “It’s my fault Marc decided he had to give himself a dirt nap. I’m getting him out of said dirt nap, and I don’t wanna hear from you two about it.”
“Yes.”
“Precisely,” Sinclair said in almost the same breath.
“Uh … what?” I was usually braced for opposition, so when I didn’t get it, it sometimes threw me off guard. “Sorry?”
“But you cannot.”
“I’m confused,” I admitted. Maybe less scowling, more paying attention? I guess it could work … couldn’t hurt to try, right? “And too hungry to concentrate on your riddles. Dude, we haven’t snacked on each other for two days. And my rapist-trolling was a bust last night. Stupid St. Paul low crime rate…” Rapists and cops: they were never around when you needed to complain about a parking ticket or lure a sexual offender into a dark alley to drink their blood and explain the concept of irony. Typical. I bounded off the bed and spotted the small bowl of cherries on the mantel—Jessica had been snacking and chatting in our room earlier, and must have forgotten the bowl.
I grabbed one, popped it into my mouth, and then gently bit down and sucked on the juice. It wasn’t as good as I remembered eating them to be, and not nearly as thrilling as blood, but it was also better than nothing. I could think if I had something in my mouth. Uh. Maybe I should rephrase…
“We have to come up with a plan.”
“Agreed.”
“Oh. We are on the same page … that’s always nice.” I shifted the cherry to my other cheek. Chomp, suck. Admonish self to ignore urge to swallow, so as not to then be victim to the urge to vomit.
Sinclair smiled broadly. “It is, my own.”
“And as their (ugh) king and queen, we gotta set a good example. Well, Garrett’s king and queen. But the example-setting, that’s gotta be the first thing.” The enormous bedroom, bigger than the living room and master bedroom in my old house, suddenly felt too small—that was a first!—and I started to pace. “Then we gotta convince them that we actually know what we’re doing. So we can do the second thing. The leading. If they know we’ve got the Marc Thing under control—whatever the Marc Thing’s gonna be—they probably won’t freak, right?”
Sinclair started to laugh. And Tina was looking at the ceiling, the mantel, the headboard … anywhere but at me.
“I know, it sounds kind of impossible, but Marc’s counting on us to pull it off. At least I think he is. Wherever he is.”
He was still laughing. And she still wouldn’t look at me.
“What’s the matter with you? I’m the one doing all the thinking, and your big contribution is to chortle like a hyena. Handle your shit, Sink Lair.”
“The stem,” he managed, holding his stomach, “has been sticking out of your mouth during your entire discourse.”
“Well, who gives a ripe shit?” I spit the pit, stem, and masticated cherry remains into my palm. “Focus, you two.” Ewww. An average observer would think I was hanging on to a blood clot. “There’s a garbage can around here somewhere.” I spied it, and tossed the clot. The cherry, I meant. “And I guess we’d better figure out what we’re gonna tell the others.”
“No, Majesty.” Tina could finally look at me, which was a relief for both of us, I was sure.
“What?” “No” was not something I heard from her very often.
“No, you cannot talk to them about this.” Sinclair and Tina were now nodding in unison. It was terrifying.
“Uh, what?”
“You cannot.” He shrugged his broad shoulders, which looked especially yummy—Sinclair practically wore suits for robes, and had put on a nice dark one this evening. “They are good friends, and are loyal to us, but they are human. There are things they cannot understand. Not ever. You continually ask me why you must be the queen and I the king—we must for things like this.”
“So … you’re saying…” Careful. It could be a trap! Though for what, I had no idea. “… that you support me in trying to bring Marc back to life, but that I shouldn’t talk to Jess or Nick—”
“Dick, now that you’ve changed the timeline, Majesty.”
“—never mind—or Antonia or Garrett, even though they’re really weird?”
“Antonia isn’t one of us.” Ouch. Since Tina had been in a war to set people free, I was a little surprised at how quickly that came out of her mouth. “Garrett is, but he is also … different.” To put it mildly. Hmm, I’m gonna regress for a second and wonder if Tina might be just the person to do the spreadsheet. So I decided not to point out to her that up until a few months ago, she had been on my back to kill him. That was interesting, how quickly Tina could erase people from an equation.
I’d have to really, really try to remember that.
They were with me. But not with the others … and so they strongly recommended I drop the Marc Thing for now. I could bring it back up soon enough when we had a plan or, even better, when we’d executed the plan I hadn’t thought up yet, and could present Newly Alive Marc as a fait accompli.
I wasn’t scared they were suggesting that course of action. I was scared because it sounded like a pretty good idea. So I dropped it.
For a while.
EIGHT
For the third time in an hour and a half, I tripped on something, and nearly pitched headfirst into the attic stairwell. Cursing, I caught myself on the railing and hauled myself upright, then looked to see what had nearly killed me. A stool! Who puts a stool on stairs? Who needs to use a stool on stairs?
Stupid Jessica and her stupid nesting instincts, that was who. Post-meeting, and post-meeting-meeting, Nick/Dick had explained the thing to me. Nesting was this weird hideous thing pregnant women did when they sensed their giant bellies were getting ready to expel the kid into the world. Depending on the woman (and the unholiness of the baby, I s’pose), that meant anything from reorganizing the spice rack to combing through every room of an ancient mansion and stacking stuff in hallways and stairwells to be hauled or stored or burned or blown up.
And I kept tripping on the damned things! It was no good having super vamp eyesight when I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings. Which I hardly ever was. I had stuff to think about. Mostly I had to think about the fact that Tina and Sinclair were all, “Yay, Team Betsy, rah-rah, bring Marc back!” while also being all, “And shhhh! Leave the humans and weirdos out of it, it’s our vampire awesomeness societal secret.” I had no idea how to feel about that, and just that part of it, the not knowing how to feel? Scariest thing to happen all week. And it had been a shit week.
But fuck it. If Jessica was waiting for the Stool Fairy to lug things into the attic, the Stool Fairy was here. No longer queen of the vampires, nay, now I be Ye Olde Stoole Fa
erie. Screw bringing back the dead (and the first geek to holler, “Bring outcher dead!” like a “hi, I never had sex in high school” Python-channeling idiot was gonna get smooshed); I’d bring back the footstools. I’d open my own U-Haul franchise. It wasn’t like it could be more stressful than the queen gig, right?
So I picked up the little thing—about a foot high and wide, and so banged up there was no way to tell what kind of wood it was … was rust a wood?—and stomped up the attic stairs. Time to use my stupid vampire strength for more than lugging six gallons of milk into the house at once. I’d haul all this icky crap into the attic. That ought to learn her … and the unborn kid, too. Never soon enough for the kid to learn whose house this was. Whose house it was now, anyway.
(Yes. I’ll come clean: the baby wasn’t even here yet and I was jealous of it. I kind of liked being first in Jessica’s life since her worthless asshat parents died their richly deserved deaths. In another time, she’d picked me. Maybe here, with a baby, maybe in the future I was determined to prevent … she wouldn’t.)
“Stupid babies,” I muttered, plodding up the stairs, “ruining everything by being drooley and stupid. Except for BabyJon who is drooley, but not stupid. And how the heck am I gonna bring him back and also get through Thanksgiving? And my mom is dating! Ugh!” (I often bitched out loud to myself when no one I lived with wanted to hear it, which happened more often than you might think. No, really! And my baby bitching had nothing to do with how jealous I was that Jessica could make her body do something mine wouldn’t … couldn’t, since I woke up dead. No, really!) “Stupid moms who date stupid guys whose names rhyme with ‘beehive.’ Stupid Clive Liveley, who looks like a giant baby and wants to make out with my mom! And stupid Giselle the cat, who started all this by willfully choosing to drop—”
I stopped bitching. Stopped walking. Also stopped breathing (which I probably hadn’t been doing, anyway). My heart? Yep: stopped.
Because Giselle the cat was spread out on a clean towel on a carefully scrubbed section of the attic floor in all her dead-yet-pissed glory. And Marc, my dead friend, was busily dissecting her.
He looked up. His green eyes blinked slowly at me, like an owl. “Now, don’t freak out,” Marc said.
But I did, anyway.
NINE
“Who did it?” I screeched, pointing a shaking finger at him. A shaking finger with chipped Marshmallow fingernail polish (people have been dying, dammit, and Jess won’t go with me to the salon anymore; was it any wonder I needed a touch-up? Not for what the pedicurist actually did to my toes, but the pampering was essential to my mental well-being.). “Who did that to you? Did you figure out how to bring yourself back? If you did, you are so dead! You’re supposed to be dead until I’m damned good and ready to bring you back!”
Marc opened his mouth.
“Do you have any fucking idea how hard this has all been on me? Huh? I’m gonna guess no, dead guy! I’m gonna guess you don’t have the faintest clue!”
“Betsy—”
“I turn my back for five seconds and you kill yourself? That’s the thanks for being one of the coolest roommates in the history of human habitation, huh? No regard for how that’d make me feel, huh? Like I don’t have enough friends getting shot or ending up in hell or both? Huh? Oh, and that stupid nasty scary Marc Thing is dead, thanks to me, and you’re welcome!” Oh. Except the reason the Marc Thing existed at all was also because of me. Icky stoic cranky Future Me.
Irrelevant! Marc had a lot of nerve being alive, and I was going to explain just how much in loud and shrill detail.
“Betsy—” He sort of flowed to his feet … not fast, not like a vampire moved, but slow and not-quite-graceful. Like when you’ve given yourself a pedi and you sort of roll over and carefully climb to your feet so you don’t smear anything. You get there, the job gets done, but it’s not the most beautiful way to move. That was how Marc moved now.
My mind was ticking off possibilities even as I bitched and yowled at my inconveniently resurrected friend. Not a vampire. Not human—no way … he didn’t smell anything like his old cotton-and-blood-on-hospital-scrubs self. And you didn’t “catch” being a werewolf from a bite; I’d found out a couple of years ago that either you were born a werewolf, or you weren’t. Scratch lycanthropy. So that meant…
I brandished the stool at Marc like he was a zombie bull. “Back! Stay back! Do not lurch over here to try to eat my brains or I’ll bash yours right in. Why? Why am I even surprised to run into another zombie in this same attic? Again?”
“Betsy—”
“Don’t think,” I warned, taking a big step back. I hate hate hated zombies, and the only reason I wasn’t shitting myself in terror, other than the fact that I couldn’t, was because he wasn’t gross and goopy or trying to eat my brains. And because it was Marc. “Don’t think I won’t kill you again, buster. I’ll jam this stool up your ass so far you’ll barf splinters for a week! And then I’ll really make you sorry!”
“I believe you,” he said dryly. He’d stopped coming for me, just stood there with his hands up in the universal please-don’t-shoot-me-in-the-face position. His hands were bloody—no. The surgical gloves on his hands were bloody. Because he’d been—he’d been—“Listen, Betsy, I—”
“Oh my God! What have you been doing up here?” My brain was still cycling through reasons, and not liking anything it was coming up with. I stared at the cat with fresh horror, then back at Marc, who was staring at the floor in … what? Shame? Hunger? Anger? “Why? Oh, Marc, what are you doing here, and why are you cutting up my dead cat? How could you do this to me?” I wailed, then flung myself facedown on the floorboards
(ow!)
and burst into tears.
TEN
It wasn’t entirely Sink Lair’s fault. But I didn’t figure that out ’til later. At the time, things were kind of an undead gross weird shocking scary mess. And they’d been bad enough before my husband literally burst in on the scene.
So anyway, Sinclair hurtled through the attic door and galloped up the stairs, and because he heard me screaming and yelling and crying, and because he knew it wasn’t at him, he took all seventeen of the stairs in about half a second.
Then he burst into the attic just in time to see a zombie with bloody hands looming over his wife. “Aw, c’mon, Betsy, don’t cry, I—glllkkkkk!”
“Never touch her,” he said in a tone that would seem friendly and conversational if you didn’t know him, and thus scared the shit out of at least two of us, “and explain yourself. Right now. Do not lie: I know you are not a new subject.”
Marc’s zombie feet kicked and swung about a foot in the air—Sinclair already had several inches on the poor guy, and had now hoisted him in the air in what looked like the beginning of Make Marc My Personal Piñata.
“Glllkkk!”
“Get your hands off him!” In a more mercurial than usual swing, I went from scared and pissed and crying to scared and pissed and protective. “He wasn’t doing anything except coming back from the dead without permission before I was ready and freaking me out by chopping up my dead cat after making me shake a stool in his direction to ward him off. Leggo!”
My shrill nagging had no effect. I jumped to my feet, silently groaning at the dust all over my wine-colored tights (the black mini was probably also a total loss), and tugged on Sinclair’s arm. It was like tugging on a redwood and expecting it to come to dinner with you. Just. Wouldn’t. Budge. Great: the one time I actually wanted vamp strength, I was tussling with a vamp stronger on his worst day than I was on my best.
“Let—ack—him—nng—go!” Ye gods, what did the man have in his pockets, gold bricks? “You better not … make … me … withhold … sex!” Please please don’t make me withhold sex … if there was a merciful God (and I was starting to seriously question the guy’s mercy), I wouldn’t have to withhold sex.
I nearly fell on my ass (again) when Sinclair obeyed (again). I’d ponder what that meant later; for now I
was just glad he’d put Marc down and I wasn’t clinging to the inside of his arm like a damn kinkajou.
“What is going on?” Sinclair asked. He bent, hauled me to my feet with as much trouble as he’d have picking up a box of paper clips, then thrust me behind him in one slick move. I could admire the guy’s sneaky deftness while being irritated that his Fred Flintstone side was showing. “Explain. Now.”
“What, like I know? I came up here, and there he was, all reanimated and back from the grave and everything.” I stood on tiptoe to peek at Marc over Sinclair’s shoulder. “You’re in a lot of trouble, pal!”
“Tell me,” Marc said dryly. He took the chance to strip off his surgical gloves and fire them, without looking, at a nearby wastebasket. That was such a Marc-ism, a trick I’d seen him do a few times before, that some of my fear and anger ebbed, and I felt the first beginning gladness that my friend was walking and talking and firing rubber gloves at things without missing. “You want the long version or the short version?”
“I want the version where you start by saying, ‘Then I stupidly OD’d in my bedroom so my roommate could find me and be totally traumatized’ and finish with ‘and then Sinclair shook me like a maraca.’”
He grinned, and it actually hurt my heart. If hearts could get cramps, mine did just then. I didn’t know how to feel, which made it cramp more. “I stupidly OD’d in my bedroom, and then all of a sudden I was back here. In the mansion.”
“You’re saying,” Sinclair began slowly, stepping to the side to block me when I tried to duck around him. “Ah … what are you saying?”
“I don’t know what happened. I’ve got no idea how I ended up here. I’m saying I was kind of hoping you guys would.”
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