Undead and Unsure (18 page)

CHAPTER

THIRTY

My
shoes ex machina
dumped me on my front porch.

“Yes!” I was so pleased I hugged myself. But not for long! My poor husband and bereft friends, likely worried to death about me, would be hugging me soon enough. And soon after that, Sinclair would be hugging me naked while I hugged him back while we moved up and down a
lot
. Sex: hugs, only better.

I seized the doorknob, only to find it locked. Eh? Their cars were in the driveway. They hadn’t been here long, either; it was snowing lightly but their windshields were wet and snow free: they’d been driving with their wipers on until very recently. Alas, when Laura dumped me into the hellfog, I hadn’t grabbed my keys. And although I could eventually kick in our enormous ancient front door, I had no interest in spending the time or, ultimately, the money.

Side door? Sure! They were probably in the kitchen comforting themselves with sadness smoothies, so that door was probably unlocked, and if it wasn’t, they could take a break from their mourning long enough to let me in.

“Guys?” I trotted through the side yard and up the walk to the kitchen door. My silver shoes had surprisingly good traction. Also, now that I was out of the hellfog, how long would these shiny shoes stick around? Something perhaps to ask my wise husband. If I ever found the mournful s.o.b. “I’m back, so you can start with the rejoicing!” I couldn’t hear anything, but the door was unlocked. “Guys? Time to swap out the sadness smoothies for smoothies of triumph—guys?”

Nobody in the kitchen.

WTF?

Argh! Reason #26 I hated texting: texting invaded the language, infecting even those who did not text. Invading even my thoughts! What I meant was:
What the fuck?

Nobody in the kitchen. Recently driven cars in the driveway. Nobody was looking for me, nobody was listening for me. Tina and Sinclair should have both heard me by now. Ergo, they were in trouble or they weren’t here. The third option, that they were here but somehow their every thought
wasn’t
bent on finding me, didn’t bear considering.

Were they in trouble? Oh, jeez, while I was blundering through the hellfog restraining myself from strangling the Watsons with their own spinal cords, had my family been in trouble? Dying forever trouble?

Call for them or sneak around hoping to get the chance to brain any would-be bad guys? There were advantages to—

“Ow, Goddammit, ow!”

Jessica. And this probably wasn’t her standard bitching about taking a room on the third floor.

I ran at the stairs. Really ran, because there was something like forty stairs on two floors apiece but in next to no time I was ready to bash in her door (it was a day for me to be confronted with doors I couldn’t open, I s’pose) except her door was open.

Her door was open and she was on her bed and Marc and Not-Nick were also on her bed and at first I had the horrified impression it was some sickass “Dear Penthouse Forum” insanity, except—

“No, it’s okay, now you get to push! Go ahead and push!”

“
Get
to? What, like it’s a fucking prize I’ve won? I swear to God, Marc, I
swear
it, if you weren’t dead, I would fucking kill you.”

“Hey, guys.” I waved. Multiple heads—Jess’s, Not-Nick’s, Marc’s, Sinclair’s, and Tina’s—all swiveled toward me. “I’m back. I guess.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(That was Sinclair’s first thought. Which was touching and also weird.)

“My own, never has your face been more dear to meeeeee.” Sinclair was holding one of Jessica’s hands and apparently, the girl could squeeze.

“You okay?” Jess panted. I’d seen her more wild-eyed, but not when she was sober.

“Yep.”

“Any demons on your heels or some scary-ass vampire coup we’ve gotta worry about right this minute?”

“Nope.”

“Well,
good
!” Then somehow she scrunched her beautiful face into the approximate size of a golf ball. “Nnnnnnnn!”

“I told you, the dramatic yelling on TV actually just saps oxygen in real life. Put the noise into your pushing.”

“Uh . . .” I took a few tentative steps closer to Marc. “She’s letting you deliver the babies?”

“You know it’s twins?” Tina said, startled. I hadn’t quite figured out her function yet. Nick was standing at Jess’s right playing “you can do it, rah-rah, you’ve never been more beautiful and we both know I’m lying!” labor coach, Marc was kneeling at the foot of her emperor bed (wider and taller than a king bed; it was like going to sleep in a football field) either delivering the babies or on the hunt for newborn braaaains, Sinclair was letting Jessica pulp his knuckles into jelly, and Tina was playing stereotypical dad, wringing her hands and pacing and occasionally saying something sharp, but not to us. “I wasn’t talking to you!” she barked into the phone. “I called for an ambulance thirty-two minutes ago!”

I brightened. Not about the late ambulance, which I suspected was gonna be problematic for all sorts of reasons, but because I remembered a way I could be helpful. “Hey, Jess, don’t worry about the twins. You’re fine and they’re fine. The reason nobody’s been able to keep track of your pregnancy is—”

“Because the babies are shifting through parallel universes, yeah, yeah,” Marc said without looking at me.

“Laura told us all about it,” Not-Nick added.

“Oh.” The bitch bushwhacked me, then came calling to chitchat about Jessica’s pregnancy? And they hadn’t removed her head from her shoulders
why
? “Well, glad you’re in the loop.” I
guess.

“Nnnnnnnnnnnnnn!”

“Sorry, was that a no or a—”

“Okay, okay, good job, good job, last one, last one.”

“Did you say last one?” I’d sort of assumed she was in labor, not actually—

“Here we go here we go here we . . .
are
!” Marc held up a writhing octopus. No, it was a purple baby. A hideous writhing purple baby, but at least it was—

“Nnnnnaaaaahhh! Nnnnaaahhh! Nnnaaahhh!”

—
not
mute. Tell you something else: those sheets would never be the same.

“Okay, it’s a girl! Gorgeous, Jess, good job!”

Frankly, neither Jessica nor the purple thing was especially gorgeous. Maybe Marc’s zombie brain was getting his adjectives that start with
g
mixed up. Did he mean gruesome? Grotesque? I appreciated his tact. There was no tactful way to say, “Wow, you’ve just birthed the most hideous baby in the history of human events.”

Ah! One of Tina’s jobs was supplying clean towels for the purple thing. I noticed for the first time that on the bed with Jess, on the chair next to the bed, and piled beside Marc, there were several towels, dish towels, sheets, sponges (?), and two rolls of paper towels. All clean (thank goodness), but not for long, I bet.

Silence fell as everyone looked at the purple wriggling thing, and I decided to fill it. “So, I’m okay and all.”

“She
is
,” Tina cried, peeping at the baby while still clutching her phone. “She
is
beautiful!”

“This sucks,” Jessica gasped, up on her elbows, “but not as much as I thought it would, I gotta admit.”

“This is the easiest birth I’ve ever seen,” Marc told her. “Well, from my perspective.” He smiled when she managed a laugh. “You’re doing great. My mom was in labor with me for less than half an hour. Sometimes it’s like that. About one percent of labors, the mom thinks her contractions are just another backache, and the next thing she knows—whoops!”

“We’d barely got back from going to church with Laura when my water broke,” Jessica told me.

WTF? Was it possible they’d forgotten Laura had kidnapped me in front of their horrified gazes? Were they faking the horrified gazes because they were secretly glad to be rid of me for a couple of days? (How long had I been stumbling around in the hellfog, anyway?) Or did they figure the best way to bend the Antichrist to their will was to go to church with her?

Meanwhile Tina had engulfed the purple thing into one of the good emerald green bath sheets while pinning her phone to the side of her head with an upraised shoulder. “They’re fourteen minutes out because some idiot drove his semi into a ditch to avoid decimating a school bus,” she told the room at large. Feral killer vampires had been after her—I’d been there and seen them—and she hadn’t been this upset. “The kids are all safe, as is the truck driver, but traffic’s blocked. Yes! Yes, they are! All the children are alive and the ambulance is less than ten minutes away! Yes! Yesyesyes!” She nuzzled it and the purple thing subsided; probably it didn’t like being cold. I crept a little closer to it.

“Ask me how glad I am you’re here.”

“Thanks, Jess,” I said, touched. “I’m glad—”

“I was talking to Marc. Jeez, Bets! I know it’s all about you but right now? It’s all about—”

“You?” I guessed.

“—my babies!”

Well, I’d had a 50/50 shot. Except it was twins, so it was a 33.3/33.3/33.3 shot. Wait. Was that right? Note to self: ask later.

“I’m lucky I don’t need a C-section, right?” she asked anxiously. She’d collapsed on her back, but now struggled back up on her elbows. “I don’t, right? For the other baby?”

“No, no. Actually, just over half of twins are born vaginally, so your odds were good anyway.”

“I don’t feel much right now,” she said anxiously. “Is the next one coming?”

“Actually, there’s an average of about seventeen minutes between twins,” Marc replied. “So you guys have time to get a Coke or something.”

I looked around the room. “Anyone want a Coke?”

Nobody did.

“You’re saying ‘actually’ a lot,” I told him.

“I’ve been doing lots of reading. Okay, I’m gonna check you again, this time to make sure the other baby’s in an okay position . . . sorry again . . .”

Jess winced while Marc did unspeakable things to her unspeakable. I was impressed it was only a wince and not a yowl of agony. “So you guys got back from church and all this started?”

“Yeah, and welcome home, by the—ow! Jeez, Marc, time to trim the nails!”

“Actually, they don’t grow anymore since I—never mind.”
Good call,
I mouthed at him. Women in labor don’t need to hear the fingernail pedigree of the zombie delivering their parallel-universe babies. “Okay, your other bag’s broken, so this one’s—”

“Nnnnnnnnn!”

“—yep, coming now.”

“Well, it had to come out eventually, right?” I had a ringside view, which I never wanted less. Not-Nick had the smart view: the top of her head. “So, uh, sooner rather than later is okay, right?” Never had I been more out of my depth. And I’m including the vampire queen thing in that.

“Jessica, your upper-body strength is impressive.” Sinclair had been so quiet on the other side of the giant bed, holding her hand, I’d almost forgotten he was there. “I have lost all feeling in three of my fingers.”

Good,
was my unworthy thought. (Unworthy = bitchy.)

“Okay, okay, looking good—this one’s in a rush to say hi to the world—it’s perfect, you’re perfect, keep it up, keep it up—here we go—Bets! Get your ass over here!”

Oh, now he remembers I’m here?
That was only in my head, though; Marc in doctor mode was no one to sass. By the time “ass” was out of his mouth I was beside him, taking the towel he’d grabbed with his spare hand and thrust at me.

“Twelve minutes out and
you are worthless
,” Tina said to the phone (I hope
it was the phone), then shrugged her shoulder so the thing she took to bed with her every night fell to the (carpetless) floor. She didn’t even look to see if it fell into pieces. Marc didn’t dare look at me and I didn’t dare look at him, but we were freaked. Gollum wasn’t as fond of his “precious” as she was of her iPhone. “Yes they are!” she cooed to the purple thing. “EMS is overrated yes they are!”

“Oh, come on, like we really want some poor EMTs in here with a zombie, three vampires, a—” Never mind. That was incredibly dumb. Of course we wanted EMTs, of course Jessica wanted EMTs. She wanted a labor and delivery suite at Fairview, too.

And was that so much to ask? She had to put up with vampire politics and fallout from same and werewolves dying and coming back from Hell and zombies and the Antichrist and Ancient Me and that was just the stuff off the top of my head. She
should
have a suite, and nurses who were nice because they were good nurses and doctors who were sucking up because their bosses knew she was worth billions, and a plasma screen in her delivery room so she could be skeeved out by
American Horror Story
between contractions. She should have the best hospital food available, which was still awful, and one of those warmer things full of blankets for her and the purple things when they came because one of them for sure didn’t like being cold, and a NICU ten steps away if something was wrong with one of the purple things.

And it sucked that she didn’t have any of that; it sucked that she had a drafty old mansion with a zombie delivering purple things, a Southern belle pissed at her phone and possibly the City of St. Paul, an off-duty homicide detective doing his best to pretend the zombie and the mansion and the lack of epidural were all part of a perfectly viable plan B, and a vampire queen thinking about herself instead of her friend and her friend’s purple things.

First Marc had thrust the towel at me; now here came another purple thing. Yuck-yuck-yuck! “Okay, okay, got him, got him,” Marc chanted. I obediently opened my arms and he dropped the thing into the towel. “Wait, wait—” Marc did something to its head, and then it made the same “Nnnnnaaaahhhh!” sound the other one did. Actually, it was sort of cute; it sounded like he was wailing “Naw! Naw!” over and over. Like he was saying no-no-no to the room and maybe the world.

Heh.

“Jeez, take a breath before you pass out,” I told him. “Your sister’s not being such a baby. Which is pretty good for a baby. Hey! Jess!” I bent over, rubbing Naw with the towel (which he didn’t like) to make him warmer (which he did), and looked at Other Naw in her towel in Tina’s arms. “They look like you!” And they did, little tiny pissed-off replicas of Jess. “But they’re really pale!” And they were. His sister’s yucky purple color was wearing off; must have been a newborn thing, I realized as they got warm and dry their color got lighter. Jess’s face; Not-Nick’s coloring. Depending on how it all shook out, the Naws would be gorgeous or hideous.

Not my problem. It was for Jess and Nick to worry about how ugly their freakish offspring might get. Me, I thought they’d turn out pretty cute. Now that they were warm, Naw and Other Naw had quit with the bleating and were yawning and going to sleep. Well, they’d had an exhausting twenty minutes. Babies: nature’s slack-asses.

“Hey.” I nudged Marc, who was up to his elbows in bits of Jessica. “Good job.”

“Oh,
man
, am I glad you’re back,” he muttered. “It’s been nonstop around here. Not that you being back will make it less nonstop.”

“Thanks. Do you need, uh, help?”
Please don’t say yes. There’s no one less qualified than me.

“No, I think it’s—Jess, you’ve got a little more pushing to do. I’m not sure how, but the placenta didn’t come between the babies, so you’ve gotta push it out now.”

“No! I’m on vacation as of the second the babies were out. The babies have vamoosed from me. See?” She pointed at the towels Tina and I were holding.

“It’s just a little push, nothing at all like earlier,” he coaxed.

“Nope. I’m closed.”

“Maybe when the paramedics come—” I began, as if I had the vaguest idea what I was talking about.

“She thinks me defeated so easily? Ha!” Marc shook a fist slick with baby goo. “She’ll come to regret that.”

“Are you all right?” Not-Nick asked with real concern. He had been stroking Jessica’s face while they murmured to each other, but now he looked up. “Because you sound like you’re channeling a Bond villain.”

“I don’t want you to pass your placenta. I want you to
die
.” He stared around the room. “Where’s a big fluffy evil white cat when you need one?”

“No cats!” I almost screamed. I still got the creeps when I remembered what he’d done to Giselle’s corpse. I knew why he’d done it, and under the circumstances it wasn’t wrong, but it was still yucky. As was this moment. I was in a world of yuck. “Do you want some Wet-Naps or something? I think all the towels are gross or holding babies or both.”

“No. Jess, will you please—”

I cocked my head, looked up, and caught Sinclair’s glance.

Finally.

“The ambulance is almost here,” I said, and Marc sagged with relief.

“Excellent.” His tone made me break Sinclair’s gaze and stare at him. He was scared. He was
really
scared, and he’d done a wonderful job hiding it. I felt such a rush of warmth for him I nearly staggered. I loved my zombie so much! (Argh. Marc. I loved Marc.) “In a couple of minutes, you’re officially their problem.”

“I know!” she agreed, happy. “I can’t wait. No offense to you.” She reached out and caught his mucky hand. “Couldn’t have done it without you.” She looked the worst I’d ever seen her look, with sweat-matted hair and her eyes almost bulging from deep sockets; she looked bad and she smelled worse. I don’t know how she managed it; I don’t know where that beautiful smile came from and how she could look so luminous. But she pulled it off. “How can I ever, ever thank you?”

“Same goes for me, buddy,” Not-Nick said hoarsely. “The next time you need a favor, you better come see me first.”