“Do that,” Jessica muttered, turning around like a soldier doing an about-face and marching out of the parlor. “I've got to call Nick.”
“Very, very mean,” I told my husband, as I followed him up the stairs. “Ratting Nick out like third graders squealing about who stole the chocolate milk. Nice!”
Sinclair shrugged again. I pulled our bedroom door shut and jumped on his back.
“Ah?” he managed, looking around for his suit hanger.
“I'm starving,” I purred into his left ear.
The hanger, which he had just picked up, went sailing over our right shoulders. Then he reached back, got my coat in a fist, and yanked me off of him, over him, and flopped me onto the bed.
“Then let's eat,” he said, and fell upon me like a scary fairy-tale monster, only a whole lot sexier and, let's face it, better dressed.
Chapter 25
The sun fell down the next night, but I'd been awake for about an hour by the time it was full dark. Still wasn't taking my increasing resilience to sunlight for granted, and still not trying to rub it in to Tina and Sinclair who were, after all, much older than I was.
I knew it was a real treat to be able to go for a walk outside in the late afternoon. I'd paid for it, though, thanks to the Faustian bargain that was the Book of the Dead. (Sinclair lost a bet once when he didn't think I knew what Faustian meant; but there's more than one way for a girl to Google a cat.)
I got dressed, then remembered what I'd forgotten last night. Amazing what good sex and half a pint of vampire king blood could do to jog your memory.
I flopped onto the bed, picked up the bedside phone, and dialed Nick.
“Homicide, Detective Berry.”
“This is the woman,” I purred in my throatiest voice, “who is going to make all of your dreams come true.”
“Aunt Marian?”
“Gross!” I nearly dropped the phone. “Nick, that's disgusting!”
“So is your sexy voice. You sound like Patrick Warburton with a head cold. What's on your microscopic mind?”
“I forgot to tell you something last night.”
“Of course you did. You're a dimwit.”
“It's something that will make you extremely happy,” I wheedled.
“You're moving, and you can't remember your forwarding address.”
“You wish.”
“The mailman left a hand grenade in your slot?”
“Do you want me to tell you, or do I have to listen to more dumb comments?”
“They are not dumb. So. What is it?”
“Nothing much. A cadre of old vampires is ticked at me, has already tried to kill me once, and won't stop until I'm dead or they are, and there's, like, twenty of them and only one of me. Also, we're out of milk.”
“Really?” Nick sounded like he'd won the lottery. “You wouldn't tease me, would you?”
“I swear on every one of Marc's stitches that it's true. Not a drop of milk in the whole house.”
“Marc's stitches – hmm. Interesting that Jessica hasn't mentioned any of this. You'd better tell me.”
So I gave him the whole story, thinking, You only think Jessica's in hot water, you poor bastard. She must not have reached him last night. He had no idea the storm was about to break over his head.
“Uh-huh.” I'd assume he was taking notes, only Nick never wrote anything down. Not like the cops on TV, that was for sure. “Uh-hmm. And you don't know where they are?”
“Not yet, but Sinclair and Tina are doing hours of drudgery research to figure that out.”
“And Marc's at the General?” he asked, using the slang we used for the local hospital.
“Yeah, but he'll get out today. They ended up keeping him for a couple of nights, but not because anything wrong popped up. I think it was probably because he's big-time popular on the staff. But we're moving him to The Grand Hotel tonight.”
“Where he'll stay indefinitely.”
“Yeah, and the thing is, Jessica won't go. I mean, flat-out refuses.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Sic her!”
“Doesn't she have, I don't know, a fucking Swiss chalet or something? Some other property besides the mansion where she can stay?”
“No, she doesn't care for Europe unless it's Tuscany, but surely you've got a chalet up your sleeve, John Deere Boy.”
“Well, she doesn't have to stay there,” he said grimly. “Not in Vampire Central.”
“Yeah, so sock it to her.” I didn't mention that Jessica wasn't staying at the mansion because she had nowhere else to go. He knew why she was staying, too, but didn't want to admit it, at least out loud. “Go tell her who's boss, by God.”
“Oh, shut up,” he said, and clicked off his phone.
Chapter 26
My semi-good deed done for the day, I rolled over, thumbed off my phone, dropped it on the bedside table (Sinclair was already bitching about the marks my phone and keys were leaving on various antiques around the house), and examined my feet.
There were advantages to being a vampire. I had refused to admit that for a long time and, even now, wasn't very happy when forced to make such an admission. The strength thing, and the speed. The hearing, of course.
More than once I'd been grateful for all three, usually while some psycho was trying to kill me. (Although if I hadn't been undead in the first place, said psycho would not have been trying to kill me, but screw it.)
And, although there were far more drawbacks than advantages to being queen, that had its high points, too.
But there were plenty of disads to being dead. One of the many was, you couldn't change your looks. I mean, you could, but whatever you did – paint your fingernails, cut your hair, curl your eyelashes – was undone when you rose the next night. I had no idea why, just like I didn't know how we could walk around with a heart rate of seven, or how we didn't need to breathe more than a couple of times an hour.
Thus, I always – always – needed a pedicure. (Thank God I had died only a few days after a cut and highlights!) It was depressing and a fact of life (or death, if you will), but there it was.
No time to mope. (Well. There was always time to mope. But I wasn't in the mood tonight.) I decided to do a quick one, myself, and twenty minutes later I was admiring my pink, newly smooth feet, and the wiggling toes with their coat of “Bitterness,” which was actually a lovely soft gray.
Energized with the gorgeousness of my feet, I darted into the bathroom, rummaged around in the counter under the sink, and extracted a box of Crimson Tide, a wash-in/wash-out hair color. Stayed in for up to twelve shampoos. If you were alive, anyway.
When I got out of the shower, I couldn't help grinning at myself in the mirror. My hair was a dark, unnatural red; the shade made my skin paler than usual and my eyes seem green (they tended to fluctuate between blue and green, depending on what I was wearing and the quality of the light). And the box only cost twelve bucks. Since I'd be blond again tomorrow night, it wasn't worth going to the salon and dropping a hundred bucks for a custom dye job.
I dried off and got dressed, then opened my bedroom door, briefly wondered where my husband was (Sinclair only had to rest on occasion and, likely after sex, had waited until I conked out and then gone to the library or the fax machine or the local Kinko's to make color copies of something – wait, he had Tina to do that), furtively checked for unwanted ghosts, then bounded down the steps.
I could hear the fight long before I got to the kitchen door.
Chapter 27
“I can't believe you're staying! You know, and you're fucking staying!”
“Well, what about you, white boy?” Hmm. Jessica must be mega-pissed... “white boy” and “white girl” tended to come out only when she was furious, or scared. “You somehow forgot to mention that you're using my best friend to help you look good for the chief.”
Wait. What?
“Not to mention, you expect her to take bullets for you if thing
s get nasty. Slip your mind?”
“I'm not taking bullets for anyone,” I announced, pushing open the door, “unless it's Beverly Feldman.”
“Stay out of this, Betsy.”
“Yeah, fuck off, blondie.”
Sinclair's head came up with a jerk (he'd been seated at the counter, pretending to read the Journal), and he opened his mouth to hiss or roar something, but I overrode him with a breezy, “And a verrrrrry pleasant good evening to all of you, too.”
The pleasantness of my greeting appeared to take the wind out of everyone's sails, not just his. I poured myself half the pitcher of orange juice and sat my ass down just like I belonged there.
It could be tricky, busting in on a fight. There was the “oh my God, I'm so sorry you didn't see me, I'll just scuttle back out the way I came” method, always popular with roommates of the female persuasion.
And there was my “hey, you're doing this in a public place – sort of, our kitchen – and you're fighting about me, so guess what? I'm staying” method, which I normally didn't have the nerve to try.
Jessica was eyeballing my head. “Nice hair.”
“Thanks.”
“It's very,” Sinclair said carefully, “bright.”
“Felt like a change.”
“Mmmm. Detective Berry,” Sinclair tried again, in a much calmer tone, but no less frightening, if you knew him, which we all did, “please do not speak to my wife that way in her own home.”
“It's my girlfriend's home,” Nick said, sounding sulky, but at least he was quieting down, too.
“Yes, so you delight in reminding me, and as I said earlier, I would be delighted to purchase the place from her at a fair market price. She could then move in with you, or not, as she liked, and as you liked, and several of your so-called problems would be over.”
Nick had nothing to say to that, of course, and why would he? Sinclair was only telling the truth. In fact, I could see on Nick's face how very, very badly he wanted that option for Jessica.
Too bad he'd have about as much luck making her do anything she didn't want as I'd had in the past. Put it this way: I'd had more luck persuading the Ant not to wear so much polyester.
In fact, the only way he could maybe get her to leave would be if she moved –
Abruptly, Nick was on one knee. This startled Jessica, who kept her finger pointed at the space where his chest had been two seconds earlier. “I don't like you talking like – what the hell are you doing?”
He looked up at her soulfully, grabbed the hand that wasn't stabbing the air above him, and clutched it to his chest. “Jessica, will you marry me?”
“What?”
“Or at least move in with me? Right now?”
“Très romantic,” Sinclair muttered, and I winked at him. I noticed his green teacup was empty, rose, and poured him a fresh cup, ignoring his raised eyebrows. It was possible I had never done such a thing before. Damn, I was in a good mood tonight! It could only mean doom was on the way. Doom, or the Ant.
“How sweet of you to ask.” She yanked her hand out of Nick's no doubt sweaty grip. “And I'm only being half sarcastic when I say that, because you do think you're protecting me. But what a rotten way to begin living together or being engaged – so you can move me out of my best friend's house.”
“It's your house!”
“That's true,” I said, guzzling more juice. “It is.”
“And you,” he said, rounding on me. Definitely should have stayed out of this one. “Jessica's in mortal fucking danger – again! And this one is one hundred percent at your door, Oh Great Queen of the Suckheads! ”
“You quit it,” Jessica ordered, as the three of us pretended he wasn't one hundred percent right. “You were chortling over the possibility of the Fiends eating my friend – except if those things take out Sinclair and Betsy – ”
“Actually,” I said, “we prefer 'Betsy and Sinclair.' ”
“We certainly do not.”
“ – just what do you think they'll do to the rest of us?”
“Force us to buy time-shares in Cabo San Lucas,” Tina suggested in a low voice, passing the local newspapers to Sinclair. I stifled a snicker.
“If they take out Sinclair and Betsy, who's gonna be safe?” Jessica asked. “Don't you get it, white boy? Half the time, those two walking wood ticks are the only thing between us and the real monsters.”
“That was wonderful,” Tina said, scuttling in with her head down, as if Nick and Jess were throwing frying pans in addition to words, “except for walking wood ticks. Good morning, Majesties. Good morning, Detective. Jessica.”
They ignored her. Nick was still on his knees, but at least Jessica had stopped pointing at air. “Yeah, but you have to admit, most of the stuff they 'save' us from wouldn't be threatening us if not for them in the first place.”
Oooh, ouch, good one. I certainly had no come-back.
“Yeah, well, with rank comes responsibility. Or is it with great power comes – anyway, that's what happens when you decide to shack up with dead monarchs, or even just a friend, something I knew long before Betsy and I were shacking up here, my come-lately lover.” That was as close, normally, as Jess would come to “good point, you're right.” “I remind you that she's been on the scene a lot longer than you have.”
“You think I don't know that?”
“And that I wouldn't be on the scene if it hadn't been for her,” she continued quietly. “I'd be a month dead by now. But she saved my life. Better: my appendix grew back, and so did my tonsils, and I've never felt better.”
“Say what?” I asked, choking on my juice. Tina had frozen in the act of handing several faxes to Sinclair. And he just looked at me with those dark, expressionless eyes and said nothing. “Stuff that got cut out of you grew back?”
“Of course I'm grateful to her, she's alive, isn't she?” he snapped. “She's walking around not arrested, right? I didn't mention her secret to any of the thirty-some Pioneer Press reporters I know. Did I?”
“Yikes. Thanks.” Reporters? Arrested? Man, I was getting an awful lot of new information to process at once. Time for more juice.
“You haven't done any of those things, because you don't want me to dump your sorry ass, not out of gratitude to Betsy.”
Oh, and the quarterback scores!
Nick slowly got up off the floor, brushed off his knees, and turned to me. “You know this is your fault.”
“I do know. I'm sorry, Nick. I tried to make her leave.”
“I can make her leave,” Sinclair said pleasantly, watching Nick.
“No, no,” I said, pouring the rest of the pitcher into my glass and draining it in three gulps. Other liquids didn't kill the thirst for blood – nothing but, well, blood could do that – but they helped a little. The household was used to watching me go through a gallon of juice at breakfast. Though breakfast tended to be at ten o'clock at night these days. “Nobody's gonna make Jessica do anything, I think we got that established in the seventh grade. And Nick's right. The Fiends thing – it's my fault. I just – I just sort of forgot about them for a while.”
“Typical,” Guess Who sneered.
I could feel my good mood draining away, sort of like the OJ out of the pitcher. Because I made this mess, I made it happen – or allowed, through inaction, it to happen. I felt shitty about it, but it was way beyond late for that. Feeling shitty wasn't going to solve the problem. Probably more people dying would, and I absolutely hated that.
The really awful thing was, the thought of the deaths to come didn't depress me so much as it made me tired.
Chapter 28
“Officer, I would like to report a crime. Several crimes.”
Ah, the perfect touch to destroy the last of my good mood. I sighed and rested my forehead on the counter. “He's a detective, you dimwit; note the plain clothes and the holster. And he can't hear you.”
“What?” Nick said.
“Never mind that,” the Ant snapped.
She was standing in the middle of the stove. That was surprising. Usually the ghosts behaved like they were still alive and tried not to walk through things unless they absolutely had to – say, through a door that was shut (because, natch, they couldn't grasp the knob). The center burners came up to the bottom button on her too-tight lime green blouse. It clashed awfully with her bright yellow hair and made her skin look positively greenish. “Tell him about how you're keeping me prisoner.”
My head snapped up so quickly I nearly overturned my chair. “I am not! You're here of your own free will, Antonia, and the sooner you figure that out the happier I'll be.”
“Make that all of us,” Jessica added. “Get lost, Mrs. Taylor.”
“You should tell the help not to speak to me,” she said triumphantly, thrilled that someone else was acknowledging her presence.
“You know damned well that's Jessica!”
“Is that bigoted bitch slamming me from beyond the grave? Where is she?”
“What difference does it make?” I sighed. “You can't touch her.”
“No, but I can throw things through her. Make me feel better, anyway.” She darted to one of the tables, snatched up a plate, and hurled it toward the fridge. Where it fluttered to the ground, since, to save on dish washing, we tended to use paper plates for breakfast.
“Stop that, and she's in the stove, okay? The stove!”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Betsy's dead stepmother is haunting her,” Jessica told him.
“Oh, that's – ” Nick threw his hands up in the air and walked around in a tight little circle.
“The last straw?” Sinclair suggested. “I quite agree. So snatch up your girlfriend and flee for your lives.”
“That's it,” Jessica said. “I just doubled your rent.”
“Everything in the whole world sucks.” I rested my chin in my hand and stared past Sinclair's shoulder at the window over the sink. “Every. Single. Thing.”
“A pity,” Sinclair replied. “And you were in such a charming mood, too. Although a little warning would be appreciated the next time you do something drastic to your hair.”
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