Undead and Unsure (11 page)

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

“Well, last word, singular.” There was a long pause while
I observed Laura wasn’t a) leaving, b) shrieking at me to shut up already, or c) killing me. “‘Finally.’ That’s what she said when she knew her plan to make me have a plan was going to work.”

“You can’t tell me the Lord of Lies actually wanted—”

“I don’t
know
what she actually wanted. I barely know what I want half the time. I just know she wasn’t sorry to die. I think . . .” It took a couple of seconds before I could articulate what I knew was true. “I think she was very tired. And tired of being tired.” Awesome cover by Jane’s Addiction aside (
much
better than Jagger’s take), I really did have sympathy for the devil. Not a lot. But yeah, some. Even when I was afraid she was killing me, some. “I think she knew there wasn’t anything she hadn’t seen a million billion times. I think when life can’t offer up any surprises, ever again, what’s the point in staying around?”

“That doesn’t make anything right.”

“No.”

“Not any of it.” Laura had shoved her hands in her pockets and turned her back to me. “Not one thing.”

“I know.” I swallowed a smile at the Antichrist’s double take when she spun back around to face me. “No, really, I know. It was a crap thing to do to you. I knew you’d be the one stuck with the bag.” I shrugged. “I knew and I did it anyway. Plus, I half-assed it and it shouldn’t have worked at all. I’m the one who should be dead.”

Silence. Hey, she didn’t rush to agree! That was something. The balloon bouquets had definitely softened her up. Thanks again, 1-800-FLOWERS. Is there any squabble you can’t heal?

“And since I’m coughing up all kinds of details where I come off like a sock-clad sociopath, I’ll tell you I wasn’t smart enough to think of anything else. And she was tired. That’s why Satan is dead.” Oh, and because I had a choice: Laura’s future or Sinclair’s. And I chose Sinclair’s. But there was a limit to the amount of truth I thought she could handle.

No. That was a lie. There was a limit to the amount of truth I was willing to share with a volatile Antichrist with the powers of a god in Hell.

Laura sighed. “You can’t get out of this by playing the genius ditz card.”

Okay, time and place, time and place, but I couldn’t help being absurdly flattered. Genius ditz! That was me all over, except she was only half right.

“I’m not trying to get out of anything. I’m telling you straight out, it was a shitty thing to do.” I spread my hands. “I’m owning it, okay? I still suck at it, but I’m getting better. You should have seen me when I was twenty.”

Which I didn’t say lightly, because Laura
could
see me when I was twenty. Not only could she use Hell to travel through space, she could also travel through time. At first, she could only do that with “strong physical contact,” the devil’s euphemism for “smacking the shit out of the vampire queen.” But in almost no time, in a scary amount of no time, Laura had gone from zero knowledge and control to pretty decent knowledge and better control. In this case,
no time
meant less than a year. And she didn’t have to touch me to do it. I was starting to wonder if Satan had pulled that whole “contact with one of your blood” thing out of her ass.

“It’s nice you’re telling me this,” Laura was saying, so I pasted on my politely attentive expression. The eyebrows were crucial for that: raised
slightly.
Too far and you looked like a bad improv actor; too little and you looked like you didn’t give a tin shit. Like so many things in life, a fake “I’m listening” look was all about the middle ground. “But words don’t change anything. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t fix anything.”

“No,” I agreed, “but not saying it is kind of a douche-bag move.”

She almost smiled. “I’m still stuck with”—she gestured to the nothing again—“this. I still have no idea what to do and I’m
stuck
with it. How can I turn my back on this? But how can I take it on?”

“Sorry.” I hated to even think it, but the girl who’d informed me she was a grown-up was going round and round a
lot
with the “it’s not fair!” bleating. A) She was right, and b) it didn’t matter. Sure, it wasn’t fair and, sure, I’d wronged her. And anytime you drop by a playground, you’ll hear a lot of the “it’s not fair” battle cry, because things started being not fair pretty much the day you’re born. Kids had to cry about it; grown-ups had to deal.

It was probably too soon to point this out.

“Sorry,” I said again. “I don’t know how to fix this. And I’m pretty sure I’d be out of my league to even try.”

“Yeah,” Laura said sadly. “Me, too. So: see how it feels.”

And like that, the gray fog swallowed her and I heard the muffled
pop
of air rushing into the space she and her boo-hoo ’tude had just occupied.

The Antichrist had dragged me to Hell, heard my apology, and then coldly left me there.

It was just me. Me and the fog and Tina’s fuzzy purple socks.

“Yeah?” I cried, shaking a fist at . . . uh, nothing. “Well, I take it all back, how about that? Your mom was horrible and I’m glad she’s in pieces, how about that? You can leave me here to rot and she’ll still be dead! How about that? And you sound like a fucking baby with all the ‘it’s not fair,’ how about
that
?”

Then I remembered the nature of the fog. That there were a billion souls out there somewhere, and any one of them could be hearing this.

I shut the hell up.

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

My wife and my sister-in-law fell off the world and I could
not stop them.

To my shame, I did not try. I stood like a weakling child and watched. And then I went away inside myself because, at my core, in my essential self, there was always the weakling child who could not prevent the deaths of those he loved, and who lacked the courage to follow them on their journey.

I spent decades not following them; I expected to spend centuries. And for the first time since I met my queen, I realized anew that immortality could be a curse to the cowardly.

“. . . my king? Sir? Sir?” A familiar voice, one I had loved long. “Eric?
Eric?
” Ah. This is where I am. This is what we are doing. Following her foray into familiarity, Christina Caresse Chavelle would now bite her lip and do something she hated. I was comforted by a routine that had begun when I was four and recovering from rubella. The uproar over the consequence

(ah . . . consequence . . . such a familiar word today . . . my queen would say it is the word of the week)

of my illness had hit my parents hard. I did not know it at the time, but the stress caused me to sleepwalk. If not for Tina’s timely slap, I should have blundered into one of the ponds and drowned. She woke me, she comforted me, and the next day she began teaching me to swim. It would not be the first time, or the last, I was saved by a quick-thinking woman who loved me.

Father, you thought my rubella-rendered sterility would put an end to the Sinclair name; you thought having no grandchildren by your son was the worst thing that could happen to our family. You made us believe it with you. Oh, my father, you were correct in many things; why not this one?

I caught Tina’s hand an inch from my face. “I am fine,” I said distinctly. “You may restrain yourself, however tempting your impulse.”

She gifted me with the ghost of a smile, gone so quickly it might never have been on her sweet face at all. Beyond hers was a ring of others, all wide-eyed and fretful.

I stood

(when did I lie down?)

and apologized. I noted the dining room table had been shoved across the room and there was a sizeable mess of broken plates and spilled drinks everywhere.

I apologized again.

“That’s okay,” Jessica said at once. From behind Detective Berry, I could not help but note. At some point in the last—I glanced at my watch—four minutes, he had seized her elbow and tugged her behind him. This was wise, if ultimately useless. “Listen, it’ll be okay. You know we’ll get her back.”

I did not.

“I think she’ll have to get herself back.” My mother-in-law reached for my hand. “But she can, I’m sure. And if not, you’ll think of something. Just—don’t worry. Okay? You’ll figure it out. Ah—we’ll all figure it out.” Her small warm hand squeezed mine even as her expression told me the former was truer than the latter.

I appreciated the sentiments, but had no time for them. “Words are wind,” as Mr. Martin had written many times. (I had read and reread the Song of Ice and Fire books because Elizabeth refused; they were delightful and astonishing. But I refused to watch the televised series, no offense meant to
Mssrs
. Bean and Dinklage.)

Words, in fact, were worthless; wind could at least be channeled for power. For I had no idea how Elizabeth would “get herself back.” Nor did I know how I could go to her. And that only if she—I gritted my teeth and forced the thought to its logical conclusion—only if my dear one was yet alive.

I could not feel her within me. Our fragile telepathic bond, so new, had quickly become invaluable, something we wondered how we had ever done without. As luscious in body and charming in mind as Elizabeth was, it was as humbling as it was arousing to show a woman the most dreadful places in your mind, and have her embrace when all others would shrink back. The loss of our priceless link was nothing less than devastating. Priceless as the dictionary defined it: “of inestimable worth.” There was nothing; probing for her spark was like feeling the bloody hole left behind when a tooth was yanked.

“We must go to Laura’s new home.”

Tina nodded, her furrowed brow smoothing.

“New home?” Dr. Spangler asked. He had kept back; he had not rushed to comfort me when I was back to myself. I would wager he’d endured my paroxysm by distancing himself until my foolish indulgence had burned itself out. A wise man in death as well as life. “She’s moved?”

“Yes, as she is now an
adult
.” I could not keep the scorn from my tone; I did not try. “A thwarted, angry child with delusions of maturity and the power of a god.” My fingers actually twitched, I wanted them around her neck so, so badly.
Ah, sweet sister-in-law, your mother’s well-deserved murder was not the worst thing that could happen to you; no, indeed. I will show you. I will.

If I could get my hands on her, that is.

“I don’t think she’ll stay in Hell for long,” Tina ventured.

“Nor do I, and so we must be ready.”

My oldest friend nodded once again. “We will be, my king.” She did not waste words on comfort or predictions she had no way of knowing would come to pass. She never had, and it would be a poor time to begin. Tina knew what the others did not: if the queen was dead, so was the Antichrist. If I had to burn every vampire on the planet to bring that about, I would. Including myself.

Tina knew that, too.

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

Stranded = bad. Hell = bad.
Stranded
in
Hell
= very terribly
awfully horribly dreadfully bad. Whew! That was a lot of adverbs. Wait . . . adjectives? Definitely should have paid more attention in Miss Wilson’s English class. At least I wasn’t trying to distract myself by pondering a past regret.

“Don’t panic,” I gasped aloud. Regardless of the damned who may or may not have been lurking just beyond the mist, I had to think out loud or go crazy. It wouldn’t take much for me to lose my shit. So I embraced the urge to yak-yak-yak. “It’s not as bad as it seems. It’s not! It’ll be fine. It will! You’re a badass shoe shopper with an utter lack of conscience at sample sales. And also, you’re a vampire. The queen of them, even. So take it easy. And you should probably stop talking out loud.”

Okay. Good pep talk, good advice. Or at least not terrible life-ending advice. So I was marooned in the hellfog for who knew how long. Stay put or walk?

I know all the survivor show guys (they’re always guys, for some reason) say if you’re lost you should stay put so the rescue team can find you. Except
I
was the rescue team. Laura was the only one who could go back and forth from hellfog to earth to hellfog; her mother could, too, but (whoops!) I’d killed her.

But if I had to just loiter in one spot until Laura (maybe) returned to (possibly) ’port me back, I’d (see above) lose my shit. So against everything Bear Grylls had tried to teach me (also, I’d rather succumb to dehydration before wrapping a urine-soaked shirt around my head), I started to walk.

And walk.

And walk.

This might not have been my best idea. I had the feeling I could walk for a long time and never find a Starbucks. Which would be, of course, the coffee shop . . .
from hellfog
!

I managed a giggle, which didn’t lighten my mood because it was swallowed by hellfog and just sounded sad. I could occasionally make out other shapes through the fog, but they never seemed to get closer and that was A-OK with
this
girl. In fact, after about half an hour I started to declench. I was still abandoned, still stuck, still wishing I hadn’t thought about Starbucks because I wanted a hot chocolate with a side of O negative in the worst way, but nobody seemed to be sneaking up on me or even approaching me. I’d think my rep was preceding me, but even my vanity wasn’t that all-encompassing. I figured the damned were as lost in the fog as I was; they were trying to keep their heads down until they could think of what to do next, as I was.

Heck, if I was one of them, I’d be fine with the “head down until further notice” plan. I’d definitely be doing my best to avoid notice, though it went against most of my instincts. Ha! That made me think of my late stepmother, the Ant, someone who’d be unable to keep her head down. Even when she tried for subtle and unassuming, she put off obvious and overdone. Every damn time. So I needed to get back to counting my blessings.

There were worse things, I reminded myself, than being abandoned on a strange spiritual plane with piles of bad guys (they had to be bad; they were in Hell, right?) who were damned.

“Oh, hell.”

I went cold(er). That voice. There
were
worse things and I had been stupid to forget it for even one-half of one second. My hackles were trying to rise so hard I was nearly on tiptoe. I knew that voice; oh, yeah. The voice of my shattered family, the voice I hated beyond all others, the voice that was my own personal Vietnam.

Think of the devil, and her
assistant
appears.

I whirled to confront the most fiendish denizen of Hell in the history of humanity: my stepmother.