Undead and Unwary (16 page)

I groaned. “It’s like that exercise where they tell you not to think about a white bear and
all
you can think about is white bears. Your brain starts crawling with white bears.”

“Yeah. Ironic process theory and the Game.” At my expression of surprise she added, “What? I was studying for my psychology degree when I got gakked.”

“The Game?”

“Yeah, it’s basically the white bear exercise, except it’s a game.”

“Helpfully called the Game?”

She grinned. “Yeah, I know. Anyway, the Game is the white bear exercise except instead of trying not to think about white bears you’re trying not to think about the Game even as you’re playing the Game.”

“Oh, cripes.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Please stop.”

“And the presumption is that everyone in the world is playing the Game all the time.”

“What?”

“Yeah, and you’ll love this—it’s impossible to not play, and consent isn’t necessary at all.” Cathie sounded positively gleeful. “And of course everyone loses. The best you can do with the Game is be the last one to lose it. There’s no winning it.”

“Pure and utter hell,” I said, appalled.

“Yep.” Cathie glanced around. “Seems fitting, right? But never mind the Game—which we’ve both just lost, by the way—let’s get back to you summoning me without the vaguest clue how you did it or even if you could do it.”

“Hey! I’m doing the best I can.”

“No. You aren’t.”

Well. That shut me up, but only because she was right. I settled for prepouting, in which I was preparing to pout but would hold off to see if a full-blown Defcon 3 pout would be required.

Cathie sighed and shoved her hands even deeper into her pockets, which I hadn’t thought was possible. If those things were cut any deeper she’d be grabbing her kneecaps. “So, let’s see. Once again, you had no idea what you were doing, and while blundering around in your fog of ignorance—”

“Oh, come on!”

“—you did something inexplicably supernatural by accident, and then were shocked and amazed at what you hath wrought.” At my puzzled blinking, she elaborated: “Major in psych, minor in English lit.”

“I thought you were a horse trainer.”

“Part-time. Try to stay focused, you adorable moron.”

Adorable? I’ll take it. Too bad the word following it wasn’t quite as flattering. I looked down and scuffed a toe through the nothing. My kingdom for some dirt to kick. Wait, no!
No dirt. Don’t think about the white bear and don’t think about dirt. Maybe I can’t summon dirt. Maybe I can only summon people, which is fine because I don’t want dirt. Hell will be dirt free, I think.

“Oh, Betsy,
jeez
.” Her tone was annoyed, but thank goodness her expression was fond, something along the lines of
I can’t believe I like you, as you’re a significant dumbass who will only bring me trouble.
“You’ve had the vampire gig how long now?”

“Not long,” I said defensively. “In vamp years I’m a preemie, dammit.”

She ignored my whiny argument. “Still with this? No clue about what you can do and what you should do? You’re doing what you did when we first met, stumbling around and eventually succeeding in spite of yourself.”

“I think ‘succeeding’ is the key word in that sentence.”

“No, ‘stumbling’ is. Come on, what have you been
doing
for the last couple of years? Besides accidentally—you’ll never convince me it was on purpose—ending up helping your whacko sis run Hell?”

“Plenty!” the Antichrist snapped back, rushing to my side and leaving the Ant standing with her mouth hanging open in mid-bitch. “You don’t know what we’ve been going through. It’s inappropriate for you to take her to task. And I am not a whacko!”

“Oh, goody, you’re here, too.” Cathie eyed the Antichrist, unimpressed, and I had to swallow a giggle when I recalled how Laura kept insisting Cathie stop haunting me and go to her King (it never occurred to her it wasn’t cool to push Jesus on the horse-training atheist daughter of Jews). “And I meant whacko in a nice way. You
did
kill my killer. I’m not ungrateful. It’s just—”

“What?” Laura snapped.

“I think there’s something wrong with you,” Cathie said bluntly. “Something really, really wrong. And before you jump to conclusions, it’s not an across-the-board phobia of all things supernatural. I like your sister the vampire, and I liked the werewolves—” She cut herself off and turned to me. “How are they, by the way?”

“Gone,” I replied, “but in a good way.”

Boy, that was for sure. In the old timeline, Antonia-the-werewolf died taking a bullet for me. Werewolves were tough, better believe it, but the movies lied—if you blitz through their brain with a nonsilver hollow-point, they can’t heal from that. Antonia had been a colossal pain in my ass, but I never wanted to see her brains spray across the wallpaper. I wouldn’t have wished that on the Ant, never mind someone named Antonia who
didn’t
have it coming.

And her lover, Garrett, did not handle grief well: he killed himself about a minute later. That was the shit cherry on the poop sundae that was my month.

Cue a clueless vampire queen tripping through the centuries in both directions and I returned to a timeline where Antonia was dead, and in Hell, but rescue-able. (Yeah. That’s a thing now: people can be snatched out of Hell. I . . . don’t understand.) And a very much alive Garrett determined to ride me (so to speak) until she was back with him.
⁷

I settled for the Wiki version: “They wanted to see a bit of the world, get away from the nuttiness. Garrett’s old-fashioned, so they send postcards.” It had been so long since I’d gotten a handwritten communiqué on paper, at first I thought they had been kidnapped and I was reading a ransom note.

Cathie laughed. “Yeah, can’t blame them for that one. It’s concentrated nuttiness in your mansion, that’s for sure. Can’t tell if you’re the source or you just exacerbate everything.”

“Excuse me,” Laura interrupted, so much ice in her tone I wanted to dump it in a glass of Coke and fix myself a refreshing beverage, “but you were telling us there’s something wrong with me.”

“No,” she replied shortly. “I said
I think
there’s something really,
really
wrong with you.”

“But why?”

Cathie stared. “Seriously? You’ve got no idea why I might be a little edgy around you? None at all? You’re drawing a great big blank?” She glanced at me. “Huh. You guys look a bit alike—same coloring—but you’ve got more in common than I thought.”

“Yeah! Shows what you—wait.”

Before I could work out the insult tucked into the compliment, Laura was on top of it. She managed a self-deprecating shrug and a smile ninety-five percent of the planet would find irresistible. “It’s the Antichrist thing, isn’t it?”

“No,” Cathie snapped. “It’s the murderous temper coupled with magic and no-actual-checks-on-power thing. Or do you not remember why the Driveway Killer is in Hell, where he spends eternity being choked out with belts when he’s not balancing Louis XIV’s books?” She sighed and anticipated the inevitable blank looks. “One of the most expensive and corrupt courts in the history of human events. Half the expenditures weren’t even written down, much less tracked, so Pryce can never get the books right. He’s a murdering accountant being tortured by women who look like his victims while knowing he can never balance the books he’s charged with.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not . . .” Laura shrugged again. “Who?”

“Yeah. That? That’s why I think there’s something really, really wrong with you.”

 CHAPTER 

FIFTEEN

BACK IN THE DAY, KINDA . . .

“Down here!” Cathie called, and darted into a closed wooden door.

I was starting to get used to the smell of the refinery—we’d been driving around the neighborhood a good twenty minutes, after all. But Cathie was right, it blotted out everything else. If he was killing women in his basement, I couldn’t smell it from the kitchen. I couldn’t even smell the kitchen from the kitchen.

Laura and I hurried down the stairs, which were predictably dark and spooky until Laura found the light switch. Banks of fluorescents winked on, and in the far corner we could see a woman with messy, short blond hair, tied up and gagged with electrician’s tape. Her outfit was, needless to say, a mess.

“Ha!” Cathie screeched, phasing through the wood-burning furnace and zooming around in a tight circle like Casper on Mountain Dew. “Told you, told you!”

“It’s all right,” Laura said, going to the terrified victim. “You’re safe now. Er, this might sting a bit.” And she ripped the tape off the woman’s mouth. “It’s like a Band-Aid,” she told her apologetically. “You can’t do it little by little.”

“He’s coming back—to kill me—” Mrs. Scoman (I assumed it was Mrs. Scoman, the lady gone missing from her driveway three days before) gasped. “He said he—was going to use his special friend—and kill me—” Then she leaned over and barfed all over Laura’s shoes.

“That’s all right,” Laura said, rubbing the terrified woman’s back. “You’ve had a hard night.”

“If those were my shoes,” I muttered to Cathie, “I wouldn’t be able to be so nice about it. Thank God she wasn’t wearing flip-flops.”

“Oh, your sister’s a freak,” Cathie said, dismissing the horror of Shoegate with a wave of her hand. “I’ve only known her a couple of days, and I figured that one out.”

“She’s different and nice,” I said defensively, “but that doesn’t make her a freak.”

“Trust me. Having been killed by one, I recognize the breed.”

“You take that back! You can’t put someone like Laura in the same league as the Driveway Asshole.”

“Will you two stop it?” Laura hissed, struggling with the tape. “You’re scaring poor Mrs. Scoman! And I am not in the same league as the Driveway Asshole.”

“I just want to get out of here,” the bound woman groaned. “I want to get out of here so bad. Just my feet. I don’t care about my hands. I can run with my hands tied.”

Then I heard it. “Move,” I told Laura. “The—we have to go now.”

Cathie darted up through the ceiling and vanished, doubtless on top of the recon. Being murdered sucked, but the ghost gig had its compensations.

“What?” Laura asked.

I started to rip through the tape with a couple of tugs, tricky because I didn’t want to hurt Mrs. Scoman worse than she was. “The garage door just went up,” I said shortly.

Cathie swooped back into the basement. “He’s back! And, boy, he is freaked out. Keeps muttering about the damn foster kids, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“Hurry,” Mrs. Scoman whispered.

“Please don’t throw up on me. If I do it any faster or harder, I could break all the bones in your hands.”

“I don’t care! Do my feet! Break my feet! Cut them off if you have to, just get me out of here!”

“Carrie?” An appropriately creepy voice floated down the stairs. “Do you have friends downstairs, Carrie?”

“Oh, great,” I mumbled. “The killer has arrived.”

Cathie pointed at the man—I couldn’t see him because we were more under the stairs than beside them—walking down the stairs. “Time’s up, motherfucker,” was how she greeted him, and damn, I liked the woman’s style. What a pity he couldn’t hear or see her!

“Why did no one think to bring a knife?” Laura asked the air.

“Because we’re the hotshit vampire queen and devil’s daughter, and we don’t need knives. Unless, of course, the bad guy ties up his victims with tape. Then we’re screwed.” Ah! I finally got her feet free and went to work on her hands. Because she would have had to run past the killer to escape, I gently shoved her back down when she tried to scramble to her feet. “It’s okay,” I told her. “We’ve got it covered. We really are the hotshit—never mind. I’ll have this off in another minute.”

The killer turned and came into the basement. Saw us. (Well, most of us . . . not Cathie.) Looked startled, then quickly recovered. “Carrie, I told you no friends over on a school night.”

“My name isn’t Carrie,” Mrs. Scoman whispered. She wouldn’t look at him.

Cathie stepped into his chest and stood inside him. “Asshole. Jerkoff. Tyrant. Fuckwad,” she informed him from inside his own head. “Loser. Virgin. Dimwit. Asshat. God, what I wouldn’t give to be corporeal right now!”

“It’s overrated,” I mumbled.

“I can’t believe this loser’s face was the last thing I saw.”

And can I say how
weird
it was that she was talking from
inside
him? Blurgh. One of those laugh-so-you-don’t-cry moments.

“You aren’t the foster kids,” the psycho nutjob killer said, looking puzzled. “I thought the kids at the end of the block broke my window again.”

“Score,” I said under my breath, tugging away. I’d figured if the killer got home while we were still there, he’d see the window I’d broken (
so
satisfying to smash) and assume pesky kids, and wouldn’t immediately flee the state. And it wasn’t like he could sic the cops on us. “What did I say? Huh?”

“Yeah, you actually had a good idea,” Cathie snarked. “And we’re not calling the police right this second why again?”

“Why did you kill those women?” Laura asked, the way you’d ask someone why they picked a red car over a blue one. “Why did you steal Mrs. Scoman?”

“Because they’re mine,” he explained, the way you’d explain about owning a shirt. Everyone was being all calm and civilized, and it was freaking me the hell out. I could smell trouble. Not a huge talent, given the circumstances, but it was still making me twitchy as a cat in heat. “They’re all mine. Carrie forgot, so I have to keep reminding her.”

“Psycho!” I coughed into my fist.

“Did you really,” Laura began, and then had to try again, “did you really strangle them until they pooped, and then make fun of them after you stole their clothes?”

“Laura, he’s crazy. You’re not going to get a straight answer. Look at him!”

Unfortunately, looking at him didn’t help: he looked like a lawyer on casual Fridays. Nice, clean blue work shirt. Khakis. Penny loafers. Not at all like the slobbering nutjob he obviously was. “Look at him!” was not good advice.