Garrett, a slim, tall blond with hair almost as long as Marc's, was sitting low in the bow, staring at his hands.
“Garrett? Helloooo? Time, if you didn't notice by the whole Fiends breaking down the door and the tunnel escape, is not on our side.”
“I am shamed,” he said at last, still staring at his hands. “I feel ashamed.”
“Well,” Marc said reasonably, swiveling around in one of the captain's chairs, “what'd you do?”
He looked up at me, the moonlight bouncing off his face and making his eyes seem to gleam. “You should kill me, dread queen. Right now.”
“Blech! I mean, uh, no way, Garrett, you're one of the family.” The giant extended family I neither wanted nor asked for. To think, three years ago I was living in a two-bedroom in Apple Valley, bitching because I hadn't had a date in over a month. My biggest problem had been fixing the copy machine at my day job – management would try to fuck with the machines, and often there was no hope afterward. “Besides, if I didn't kill you when you were a Fiend, I'm sure not going to now and risk your girlfriend's wrath.” Antonia-the-werewolf was a high octane bitch when she was in a good mood. I never, never wanted to see her when she was really mad.
“Antonia,” Garrett said, almost sighed. “As you know, my mate has to leave me. Often, she leaves. More so, now that you changed her.”
We nodded, like we'd been cued. We did know this. Antonia had to pop over to Cape Cod now and again – the seat of werewolf power, pardon me while I snigger – and tend to pack business. We assumed she didn't take Garrett, because traveling with a vampire could get tricky.
Also, up until two months ago, she was a werewolf who had never changed during the full moon. I had done something to her, something we all still didn't like to talk about, and now she did change. The meetings on Cape Cod had increased as a result, but those of us in the manse weren't talking about it.
“I stay,” he continued, “because I'm afraid.”
“Of what?” Jessica asked.
“The world,” he replied simply. “The last time I went out in the world, I was captured and bound like a slave.”
Thank you, Marjorie, you kidnapping fuck, may you roast in Hell for a zillion billion years.
“The time before that, I was killed. The monster got me. I don't go out in the world anymore.”
It occurred to me (it was going to be a night of discovering things that had been under my nose) that except for going after Antonia last summer (and getting captured, as he put it, and bound like a slave), I couldn't remember the last time he had left the mansion.
I imagined he fed on Antonia, but such things were none of my business, so I didn't ask. As long as he wasn't hurting innocent people, I had no interest in where he was getting his liquid diet.
“An agoraphobic vampire?” Marc asked, and I could tell he was trying very, very hard not to laugh.
“It's more common than you might think,” Tina said, pacing the small deck. She was so light on her feet, the boat didn't even rock. “Particularly when the vampire in question had a bad death.”
“Uh, excuse me, but don't you guys have to kill somebody for them to come back? Aren't all vampires, by definition, murder victims? They all sound like bad deaths to me.”
“Point,” Jessica said, actually sticking her left index finger in the air to mark the point.
“So, didn't you guys all have bad deaths? Except for Betsy?”
“Call me the day after you get run over by an Aztec, and then we'll talk,” I grumbled.
“We are not here to discuss such things with – with guests,” Sinclair said, correcting himself so smoothly Tina and I were probably the only ones who knew he'd been about to say “outsiders” or “humans.” “And you were telling us about Antonia.”
“Other than my mate, I have no peers. All of you, even the humans, are smarter than I.”
“What 'even'?” Marc said. “I'm a doctor.”
Jessica put a soothing hand on Marc's arm. “Garrett, don't be so hard on yourself. You've been out of it for, what? Sixty, seventy years? Crack a few modern history books, you'll be up to speed in no time.”
Garrett waited patiently until Jessica was finished. “It is not my place to befriend a queen, or a king. So when Antonia leaves me, I am lonely.”
I was beginning to see where this was going. Oh, it'd be a lovely children's book: Garrett the Fiend Finds Friends!
“And it seemed to me that I was – that I was the way I am now – because the good queen and the devil's daughter allowed me to feed off them. I thought perhaps if I gave my old comrades my blood...”
Okay. This is a little embarrassing to explain, so I'm just gonna plunge in and get it over with. See, I had let Garrett feed from me, ages ago. And as a sort of punishment, I'd ordered the devil's daughter to do the same thing.
The devil's daughter being my half sister, Laura.
(I know. Bear with me.)
See, the Ant was possessed by the devil years back, only she was so fucking nasty nobody noticed. And the devil didn't care for child rearing, so she dumped Laura and took off back to Hell. Laura was adopted by (seriously, don't laugh) a minister and his wife.
How do you rebel against the evilest nastiest yuckiest entity in the universe (who looks like Lena Olin and has an amazing shoe collection)?
You go to church. You teach Sunday school. You don't touch a drop of booze until your twenty-first birthday.
And you conceal a hateful, murderous temper. Laura was going to blow one of these days, but I just didn't have time to worry about it right now. Among other things, I had slavering Fiends on my tail and thank-you cards to finish.
“So I began to visit them and let them feed off me.”
“Eh?”
“Pay attention, Elizabeth.”
“They didn't try to puree you or anything?” Marc asked.
Garrett shook his head. “Even though I had... changed, they still knew me as one of them. They would never have hurt me. Or so I thought, until tonight. And I felt... bad. To see them. I had everything, and they were drinking buckets of cow blood.”
I was suddenly interested in studying my feet. I wouldn't have credited Garrett with a guilty conscience. But then, I scarcely thought about him at all.
“I was not sure what would happen, but I kept trying. I had found so much happiness in – ”
“Your agoraphobia,” Marc prompted.
“ – in my new life, I felt it cost me nothing but blood to try to help my old friends. And Antonia is generous with her blood. She regenerates quickly, as is part of her superior genetic heritage.”
“Superior genetic – ” Tina began, equal parts outraged and interested (until a very short time ago, neither she nor Sinclair believed in werewolves), but Sinclair shook his head, and she shut up without another word. God, I'd love to learn that trick. I'd only use it for fighting evil, though.
“It worked. My friends were helped by my blood. The effect wasn't all at once. It took many visits. It was – was – ”
“Accumulative?” Jessica and Marc asked in unison.
Garrett nodded.
“But they weren't really friends, right?” I asked anxiously. “You guys didn't even know each other in life, right? Once in a while, ole Nostril would take it in his teeny brain and toss another one of you into the snake pit and that was about it. Right?”
“We were prisoners together,” Garrett said quietly, “for decades.”
“Right, right, got that, sorry.” I was so embarrassed I couldn't look at him. So I went back to studying my toes. “So, you had good intentions, right?”
“Exactly so, my queen,” he said eagerly. “I only wished – ”
“And in your loneliness and self-exile, you put the queen's life in danger,” Sinclair said coldly. “You put her friends in danger, and my friend.” I noticed he didn't include himself in the pack. “I should have ignored Elizabeth's soft heart and staked you myself.”