“Excuse me, captain my captain,” Marc said, “but do you know how many horror movies start out like this?”
“We probably shouldn't split up,” Jessica agreed. “Besides, if you really thought the Fiends were still here, you'd never have let us come. You'd have clocked Betsy, too, if it had come to that.”
Sinclair muttered something that the chime of the “door open” light drowned out; sounded like “wretched woman.” We all solemnly clambered out with him, knowing that even if Marc and Jess had won a victory, it was nothing to celebrate.
Chapter 9
We were okay until we found Alice 's body. Sure, there had been an obvious fight, the fence had been torn open in several places, there were splashes of blood on the ground, but... really, I was okay until we found her head.
While Marc supported Jessica as she threw up in the chokecherry bushes (he was pale, but had seen so much death as a doctor, even this couldn't make him sick) and I swayed dizzily on my feet,
(don't faint don't faint don't faint QUEENS DON'T FAINT!)
Tina and Sinclair prowled the area like vampiric bloodhounds, finding arms, legs, both halves of a torso.
“This is maybe a dumb question,” Marc began, smoothing Jessica's tight black cap of curls and letting her lean on his shoulder.
(don't faint don't faint don't faint)
Tina shook her head. “There's no chance of regeneration. Absolutely none. Frankly, I'd be amazed if the queen could handle this kind of punishment. My queen?” Her voice sharpened. “Are you all right?”
“Of course she's all right,” Sinclair said, squatting to examine another body part. “Queens don't faint.”
“Damn right! Look, Alice is obviously dead. What are you poking around for?”
“Oh, this and that,” he said vaguely. “I'm a little puzzled by the condition of the corpse.”
“I was thinking that exact thing,” Tina added.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, but they were ignoring me and having their own conversation.
“Did you call – ”
“Already done, my king.”
“Excellent.”
“Ah, and a mysterious van of vampires will show up and dispose of all the evidence,” Jessica managed, wiping her mouth.
“More or less.”
“I think we should go back now, can we please go back home now?”
Sinclair looked at Garrett with obvious distaste. “What makes you think it's safe?”
“I-I don't think they'd stay. Not if they couldn't find... her.”
Okay, so Garrett wasn't exactly being the stand-up guy you read about in romance novels. But I felt sorry for him – it couldn't have been much fun getting the crap stomped out of him by half a dozen pissed off vampires, vampires he'd tried to help, and then come home to tell Sinclair what he'd done.
Sinclair didn't understand about fear, how it ate your guts, and how nobody came off like they did in the movies. He'd claimed, on occasion, to have feared for my safety, but frankly, I doubted it.
“Even if they are still there, it's our home, and a bunch of jerkoff vampires aren't keeping me out of it. I mean, you explained that to me once already, Sinclair. How we're not worthy of our crowns if our people can't find us.”
“Yay, Queen Betsy,” Jessica said.
“But they're sure as shit keeping you two out of it,” Marc teased.
“Boo, Queen Betsy.”
The argument raged all the way back home.
Chapter 10
Marc and Jessica's apparent casual attitude toward death was partly my fault. Make that totally. I'd saved their butts so many times (from suicide, murder, cancer) they just naturally felt impervious around me.
It didn't help that none of us were talking about it in any real detail. See, I'd always been different from other vampires. So different than even Tina (the oldest vampire I hadn't killed; she had made Sinclair way back when) didn't know much about me, or what I could do.
I had, completely by accident, cured Jessica's cancer and killed an eight-hundred-year-old vampire librarian. And I'd done it without laying a finger on the librarian. I just sort of – pulled her into me. What was left wouldn't have filled an urn.
That didn't bother Sinclair or Tina especially, since I'd saved Sinclair at the time. What did bother them was that I had no idea how I'd done it and had been unable to do so again. Not that I'd tried. God, no. I figured somebody would have to die for me to try out my nifty new power. Pass.
Sinclair had been spending some time in the library perusing the Book of the Dead. He thought I didn't know. But I understood his puzzlement, and I knew he was being careful.
Read that thing too long – written on human skin with blood by a centuries-dead insane vampire – and you went crazy. Upside was, it was always right. Downside, there was no index or table of contents. You just opened it and took your chances that you'd actually read something, y'know, useful.
Worst of all, it always came back to me. It had been set on fire and thrown into the Mississippi River (on two separate occasions!). It always showed up wherever I was. Fucking creepy thing that I didn't dare read and couldn't get rid of.
Or tell Sinclair I knew he was reading it. How could I bring that up without mentioning Jessica's cure, or what I did to Marjorie?
And don't even get me started on what I did to the Ant and my dad. I'd wished for a baby, and I got one – because they had been killed. It wasn't my fault, it was a Monkey's Paw situation. I'd been wearing a cursed engagement ring at the time. One gruesome car accident later, and I was the sole guardian of my half brother, BabyJon.
Thank God he'd been spending the weekend with the devil's daughter and didn't get ripped to pieces by the Fiends!
(I can't believe I just said that. This, this is what my life had become.)
What was worse, that my distant dad and bitchy stepmother were dead, or that I didn't feel too broken up about it? Let's face it, he'd never been there for me, and she was a stiff-haired nightmare.
Who, last I checked, had been haunting me. Maybe I'd get lucky – maybe instead of an actual ghost, that vision of her was just a hallucination, the onset of permanent brain damage.
I sighed as we pulled into the driveway. I should be so lucky, I told myself.
Chapter 11
“This is an inopportune time,” my husband pointed out as I knocked on the door at 1001 Tyler Street , a small, neatly kept gray and white house.
“No shit,” I muttered. The mansion had been trashed; it was the next evening, and Jessica had called in an army of fixer-uppers. Even now, after sunset, they were still working on the house. No sign of the Fiends, and Tina had promised to get Marc and Jess into the tunnel at the first sign of trouble. She even thoughtfully provided flashlights by the entrance to the mansion basement. Even better: Marc's ankle was much better. No break, thank God.
“Then why are we here?” Sinclair asked, looking around the tidy suburban neighborhood. Inver Grove Heights was famous for their tidy suburban neighborhoods.
“Because he's been incarcerated for months, and this is the first time I've seen him since I got married.”
“And... ?”
“I want my bigoted, angry, dying grandfather to meet my dead husband. Now slap on a smile and feel the family joy!”
Sinclair managed a friendly grimace, as the lady who ran the hospice ushered us in. It wasn't really a hospice; she was a registered nurse who owned the house, and she had three patients, including my grandpa. She could give meds and change dressings, and knew when to haul in an MD.