Undead and Unwary (25 page)

Babies gone again. Your father is alive.

“Oh, fucking
fuck
,” I nearly shrieked and then nearly died of mortification. “I’m so sorry,” I added at once.

“I’ve heard those words once or twice,” Father Markus said, eyes going teeny as he grinned. “Even before I got sent to Hell.”

“Trouble at home again.” I noticed the Ant hadn’t phrased it as a question.

“Yeah. My friend’s weird babies keep disappearing except not really. But I think I know what to tell her. At least, in a way that won’t result in her permanent nervous breakdown. Or my decapitation.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t.”

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t.”

I stood, ready to empty my tray, when I realized all the garbage cans were full because of course they were. I set the tray back down. “I have to go . . . do you have to go find your Hell? Is one of these stores for you?”

The Ant immediately started flipping through pages on her (magic, right?) clipboard. “I can answer that for you. I’ve got it here somewhere . . .”

“I can, too,” he said politely then turned back to me. “No, I don’t have to participate. My penance is to forever offer counsel and be rebuffed nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand.”

Sounded grueling. But knowing Father Markus, reaching that one soul kept him going. I admired his dogged compassion, even if I couldn’t match it.

“I just don’t want you to get flogged or burned or whatever you don’t want to have happen to you.”

“Not all penance is of the body. I prefer a flogging to despair,” he admitted. “I prefer it to nothing, to be honest.”

“Come on, how bad can nothing be? Getting lashed has to be way worse.”

“Even if I just wandered around the food court and no one ever laid a hand on me, it’s eternity, Betsy. You don’t have to be burned or flogged forever to realize it’s punishment.”

“Oh.” Wow. Hadn’t thought of it like that. What a depressing thought. “Good. I think.” I clipped my phone back to my hip. “I’ll be back when I can.”

“Oh, we’ll be here,” the Ant said with annoying cheer.

“Again with the threats,” I said, and I vanished with the smug thought that, in Hell, getting the last word felt soooo good.

 CHAPTER  

TWENTY-FIVE

“All right, everybody calm down, let’s just keep it together and I don’t understand why I keep ending up in the damn toolshed!” Beyond ridiculous. I ruled over the vampire nation, traveled through time, and Hell was starting to bend to my will, but I couldn’t seem to avoid toolsheds as I traveled through space and time? Why does every cool thing in my life have to be tempered with something ridiculous?

At least I knew the routine by now as I trudged through the snow to the side door, helpfully (hopefully?) unlocked as it was last time. Then I’d hose Jess down with sedatives until she was calm enough to hear my theory about how the babies weren’t actually gone. They were just gone. Not
gone
gone, just gone. Nothing to worry about! Probably!

Better work on my soothing explanation. But before I could begin, I heard a car slow and pull into our driveway. I prayed it wasn’t someone from outside our inner circle of strange—let it be Mom, let it be any one of my roommates, let it be a former Bloat Wonderer, anything but a stranger because I could not handle being fake-polite to an underage cookie salesman.

Wish granted. It wasn’t a stranger. It was
two
strangers. Two teenage strangers and what the hell was this now?

I watched them climb out of Sinclair’s concrete gray (“For the final time, it is silver, Elizabeth!”) Lamborghini, also known as Elizabeth, I Love You but If You So Much As Scratch This Car I Will Not Touch You for a Month. I don’t have the strength to go into how ridiculous boys are about their toys, except to say that my husband didn’t appreciate how I shrieked, “You’re driving a gigantic electric shaver!” and then laughed so hard I fell down.

Still, despite my chortling contempt of Sink Lair’s toy, the fact remained that a couple of strangers had been dumb enough to a) steal Eric Sinclair’s concrete-colored midlife crisis (I figured he was on his third crisis by now) and then b) were insane enough to return to the scene of the crime.

They chattered at each other as they started for the front steps with the affectionate familiarity of family or close friends and as I approached I could see how closely they resembled each other. They were about the same height, tall, lanky, all lean limbs and casual grace. They were both in jeans, the girl in dark green and the boy in jeans-colored jeans. She was wearing a beige silk T-shirt, with the short sleeves neatly rolled up about an inch, and a simple gold chain around her neck. No makeup except for frost-colored lipstick, which, incredibly, she made work. If I so much as tried a sample of that at Sephora, I’d look like I was succumbing to hypothermia. This would easily be enough to hate her on sight, but she threw me such a brilliant, beaming smile my pissyness couldn’t get a firm hold.

The boy glanced where she was looking and grinned at me, too. He was wearing a black T-shirt so faded it was closer to gray, which read, “Everything is easier said than done.” They were both in narrow black running shoes that didn’t have laces or Velcro or anything to keep them tight on their feet. I sidled closer to get a better look at their gear, which looked to me like a loafer and a sneaker had a baby.

Well. Time to aggressively get to the bottom of this. “Uh . . . hi?”

“Uh . . . hi back?” the girl replied.

“Hiya!” her brother added, flapping a wave in my general direction. “Managed to ’port into the shed again, huh?”

“Did not,” I said automatically, revising the rest of my opening statement, which was going to be, “You two dolts better get your ass out of my driveway before my husband eats you and, yeah, I mean that as a literal threat,” because
what the . . . ?
They knew about the teleporting? And my annoying inability to escape the gravitational pull of the shed? “Uh, what are you doing here?”

“We live here.”

“Nuh-uh!” Unless . . .

Babies gone again. Your father is alive.

Oh. Huh. Still, best to be sure. Probably not a good idea just to grab them and march them into the house and then call a smoothie seminar. Or, as was more likely, grab them and march them around the house, through the (unlocked?) side door, and into the kitchen after fighting our way past Fur and Burr. I wasn’t putting myself through all that unless I was
sure.
Although who the hell else could they be?

Just the fact that I was thinking,
These teenagers are obviously teenage iterations of Jessica’s newborn twins, duh,
was a testament to how much things had changed. It was getting to the point where if something incredibly strange and unexplainable
didn’t
happen, I felt itchy and out of sorts.

My long silence got the teens thinking, apparently, because the girl—she and her brother looked about sixteen—spoke up. “We might have to break out the hand puppets for this one.” But—and I’m not sure how she pulled this off—she said it in such a nice way that I wasn’t offended. Okay, not too offended.

And the other one said something in reply that I didn’t catch at all: “Onniebetty likes keeping it stripped to the bones.” And even though I had only the vaguest clue what any of this was, again, the delivery was so pleasant and kind my annoyance was having a hard time catching fire.

“Just give me a few seconds,” I snapped. “If you guys know me, you’ll know I’ll need—”

“Ten minutes?” the boy guessed.

“Half an hour,” the girl said with a nod. At my disgruntled expression they both grinned.

I knew this behavior. I had seen it before, many times. And, my suspicions aside, there was something about the two of them—

Of course! They looked like larger versions of the strange toddlers, only trapped within puberty this time around. They had the same pale skin with gold undertones, the same large brown eyes and foxlike faces (loved those pointed chins!). This time their hair was bristling into large proud Afros, which made their faces look smaller and foxier.

More telling, their mannerisms and tone were vintage Jess. I’d heard—and loved—that affectionate sarcasm for years. Hell, I’d been on the receiving end of it for almost two decades. I was a little embarrassed it had taken me this long to tumble to who they were. Then I gave myself a “give yourself a break, you’re trying to run Hell” pass.

Even though I knew who they were I still stared. Even though I was pretty sure I had figured out how they kept doing this I stared. I had to. It was just so . . . enormous. So huge. And they were so . . .

“Oh, but you’re so beautiful,” I managed, and it was tough work croaking around the lump that was suddenly making it hard to breathe and doing weird things to my eyes. “You’re so beautiful.”

Which was awful. Like it defined them and was more important than, say, their ethics or their brains. I deserved the twin eye rolls! But all I could think was that my best friend and her husband had created a miracle × 2, and no matter what happened to any of us down the line, some part of my mortal pals would live on.

And not just endure: it would live on in two gorgeous, clever children who were gonna grow up to be King Cool and Queen Awesome going by their clothing
alone.
I had no illusions about my “normal” friends outliving me. It was so dreadful to have to face, I usually didn’t.

Tina could do it; she could find the courage to make friends year after year only to lose them, always, year after year. Hell, she’d befriended the Sinclair family for generations. And despite that example, Sinclair couldn’t or wouldn’t do that, choosing to be alone until I’d stumbled (literally) into his afterlife.

Face it? That
at best
my dearest friends would get old and sicken and die? I couldn’t even bear to
think
it; Jessica had made her wishes perfectly clear when she’d had cancer a while back, to wit:
If you turn me into a goddamned bloodsucker who has to serve you into eternity while never again seeing the sun and outliving children and grandchildren and so on, the first thing I will do is bite you in the face. Then I’ll start with your shoe collection.

Except now it was a teeny bit less dreadful. Now I could see her children and, through them, my friends. For a few seconds I had a glimpse of what the centuries yawning ahead would bring me and, for a few seconds, it wasn’t terrifying.

“Maybe you should sit down,” the girl said, moving to my side and holding out her drink. “Here, sip.”

An Orange Julius!
How had I not noticed what they were drinking?
I actually swayed on my feet. “You stole Sinclair’s car—”

“Hey!” the boy yelped. “Uncle Sink gave standing perm to snatch any of his cars.”

The slang and abbreviations were annoying, but easy to follow, so I could keep thinking out loud. “—to make an Orange Julius run—”

“Mine’s strawberry.”

“—to the Mall of America?”

“’Course,” she replied. “What else on a Friday afternoon? Oh, and Macy’s, you know. The spring shoe sale. Too many boots, don’t bother.”

“And Cinnabon,” her brother added. “I won’t face the weekend without at least two dozen Cinnabons, Onniebetty. Not with the Net flickering in and out like that.
Won’t
.”

“My babies!” I cried and clutched them to me in a hug that left them both gasping and wriggling for their freedom. “Jess and DadDick will be so happy!”

“Oh.” They pulled back and looked at each other, then at me. It was equal parts uncomfortable and exciting to be the subject of such focused twin regard.

“Oh,” his sister added. “Um. You haven’t had the misnomer chat with Dad yet. He doesn’t like that, you know.”

Her brother whacked her on the elbow and glared when she yelped. “That hasn’t happened yet! They have to kill the prob themselves.” He turned to me. “Never mind. And about Uncle Sink’s car . . .”

I snickered. Couldn’t help it. Uncle Sink, heh. Oh, all the ways I was going to casually work
that
tidbit into conversation. How many times could I moan it during sex before he pulled out the spider gag?

The girl arched eyebrows at me and looked exactly like Jess had at that age, so yikes. “What are you chuckling at,
Onniebetty
?”

“Ugh, that’s my name?”

“It’s the closest we could get to saying ‘Auntie Betsy’ when we were babies. You don’t even want to know what we call Big Bro—ow!” She glared, rubbed her elbow, and added in a mutter, “Never mind. Hasn’t happened yet.”

Big Bro? Could they mean BabyJon? God, was it true? Were we one big happy family eventually? Or at least in the parallel universe these twin teens came from? That, too, was exciting and frightening. But a good frightening, if there was such a thing. The fear of knowing great things are coming, but not knowing exactly what, or exactly when, or how it will change your life.

“Uncle Sink lets us snag his cars, but maybe not tell Mom? That’s the rule.”

“There are sooo many things I shouldn’t tell your mother,” I agreed.

“Yeah, we actually have a list. Don’t worry, it’s a hidden list. We’ve also got stuff not to tell Dad. Much shorter list.”

“He’s fuzzy and it ruins alllll the fun,” the boy agreed. “For our sixteenth he showed us all these icko classic movies.
Wheels of Tragedy
;
Mechanized Death
;
Highway, Bloody Highway.
” He let loose with an exaggerated shiver. “Brought us to the morgue, even! Like we hadn’t been there a dozen times helping you with . . .” His mouth snapped shut. “Nope.”

“It’s like he doesn’t remember that it’s the twenty-first century and the GPS/Net heads off just about any accident. Nobody even gets e-tickets anymore. The Net makes your car slow down if you get a case of the stupids.”

“That’s amazing!” I gasped, then shook myself. This was no time to get distracted. More distracted. It definitely wasn’t time to beg them to tell me what was trending in boots. “Never mind. Listen. We have to go into the house right now because everyone thinks you’ve been kidnapped or are possibly on some kind of infant walkabout. We have to explain to your folks just how weird and wonderful you are . . . what?”