Undead and Unwary (29 page)

“She did? Well, if you’re looking for ideas about how to torture the denizens of your second home—”

I shuddered. “Please,
please
don’t call it that. Most people, their second home is a cabin somewhere. Mine’s Hell. I can’t. No.”

“You could make them play kill-bang-marry.”

“Nobody plays kill-bang-marry anymore.”

“How are they supposed to know that if you don’t tell them? If the person in charge of Hell says playing kill-bang-marry is still a thing, then it’s still a thing.”

“Uh-huh, and every time we play, someone ends up crying.” Meaning:
I
end up crying. It does my ego zero good to find out how many of my friends would rather kill me than marry or bang me. Tina and Marc want to marry each other (“A sexless marriage is the best marriage.”), Sinclair wants to do all three to me in no special order, and
everybody
wants to marry Jess, because she’s rich and low maintenance. A lot of my friends secretly want to be kept men. Or women. Plus, I didn’t want to cry in Hell. Not in front of the damned—they’d never let it go. “No, it’s too awful, even for people there to be tortured for eternity. I’ve gotta put my foot down somewhere, Marc.”

“Okay, how about what’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever had in your—”

“No.”

“I was going to say mouth!”

“Not much better, pal. A thousand times: no.”

“Aw, come on, I’ll bet someone who’s been in Hell for a thousand years could come up with crazy stuff nobody’s ever heard of.”

“No. I wouldn’t let you play that game with vampires and a zombie and a new mom; why would you think I’d okay it in Hell? Like I said, even that’s too awful for Hell.”

He shrugged but didn’t seem put out. Usually he’d be in partial-pout mode if I shot down two ideas in a row. Odd, even for him.

“What’s going on? Did you seriously come up here to give me terrible ideas you must have known I’d nix?”

“Only partly,” he replied, leaning against the doorway to get comfy, his eyes crinkling as he smiled. “Mostly I’m supposed to keep you here so you don’t run off. Teleport off. Whatever.”

I froze in midlabel, then forced myself to relax. I had thought it was dumb delightful luck that Sinclair didn’t start with the nagging the minute the newborns were newborns again. Not only did he not bug me, he’d left. I had assumed he was checking over his gigantic electric shaver of a car, but he hadn’t come back yet. And that didn’t bode well. And I wasn’t thinking about the second part of his text. Nope.

“Ah, you’re still here.” Tina had appeared in the doorway beside Marc, who stepped aside to let her into the room. “The babies are asleep. All the babies.” Ah. She meant Fur, Burr, Thing One, Thing Two, and my brother/son. At least that was what I hoped she meant. She was old enough to consider the rest of us as babies. Hell, she’d been Auntie Tina to Sinclair the first dozen years of his life.

The age issue aside, I felt a stab of guilt since I hadn’t been able to play with BabyJon for days. I hadn’t laid eyes on him in at least two. Maybe I’d been kidding myself and the reason he turned out so great in the future was because I didn’t have time for him when he was little. An awful thought; I had to swallow the lump it brought to my throat. I was missing my brother’s childhood and had no one to blame but myself. Other working moms made it work, ones with much less time, money, resources, supernatural abilities, and jobs from Hell where they couldn’t set their own hours. I wouldn’t consider “bring your brother/son to Hell” day, but there were other things I could do. Things I’d better do, or I’d wake up one night and BabyJon would be enjoying his prom. And probably resenting the nickname BabyJon.

Tina read my mind, because she was terrifying. “He adores you. And when he is older, he will honor your work.”

That probably wasn’t true at all, but she was a sweetie for saying so.

“Besides, my queen, you should—ah, perhaps turn off the television?”

Eh? Oh. That could only mean one thing. Tina wasn’t a fan of the Food Network. She considered it torture porn (“I cannot enjoy any of those dishes unless I dilute and puree them. Why would I put myself through such an ordeal?”). However, she would occasionally keep Marc company in the wee hours and watch it with him. Which was how she learned of his deep abiding hatred of Giada De Laurentiis, a perfectly lovely woman Marc wanted off the air forevermore.

“It’s ‘spuh-GET-ee.’” Uh-oh. He had forgotten about everyone else in the room and regressed to yelling at the TV. “It’s ‘ri-ZOT-o.’”

We were too late.
You arrogant ass, you’ve killed us all!
Trapped, trapped like rats, unless . . . knocking Tina off her feet so I could be the first to escape wasn’t very queenlike. Right? Dammit.

“Shut up, you many-toothed bitch, stop pronouncing stuff like that—‘spah-GAY-tee,’ ‘moots-ah-RAY-la,’ ‘pan-CHAY-tuh’ . . . you’re from California, for God’s sake!”

“It’s quite legitimate,” Tina corrected him mildly from her safe spot beside the door, ideal for a quick getaway. This. This was why Tina was still alive after well over a century: she always mapped escape routes, even in her own home. “Ms. De Laurentiis was born in Italy.”
Why do you know that?
I mouthed, but only got a shrug in response. A respectful shrug, but still.

“Yeah,
born
there; it proves nothing,
nothing
!” Marc had progressed past yelling at the TV and was in full-on violent gesture mode. “Because right after that, the family picked up and moved to the States when she was . . . what? Eight days old?”

“Twelve years.”

Seriously: why does she know that? Marc was the Food Network freak in our house. She was putting up with a lot of vampire torture porn to keep Marc company. They’d become besties right under my nose.

“Regardless.
She’s from California
; the big move was decades ago; every other word she pronounces with an American accent. I don’t even think she speaks Italian.”

“Of course she speaks Italian,” Tina replied, exasperated. At least their squabbling got the attention off me so I could work on the project some more.

“Nuh-uh, she speaks Italian
food.
Everything else: American accent. Because, again: California, lived there for decades. Giada should stop talking about ‘spah-GAY-tee’; it’s so pretentious.” Marc turned a haunted gaze on me. “No one from California should ever be pretentious. And don’t get me started on her disproportionately sized head.”

“Easy there,” I said warily. Marc was as a rule so easygoing he should have kept a surfboard in his room, but when his zombie dander was up, he was no one to fool with. Death, it seemed, left him a wee bit judgmental. And, as I’d already pointed out, it had been a nutty week, even for us. “She pronounces food that way probably out of respect for her mom, right? She’s maybe from Italy?”

“My dad was from Germany and you’ll never catch me singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland.’”

“Right. Okay. Marc, I think it’s time you went to your happy place.” Mine was the Manolo Blahnik brick-and-mortar store on Fifty-fourth Street in New York, which I modified only slightly in my head by putting a smoothie bar in the basement. “Which is good advice for all of us.”

Before I could elaborate, I realized Sinclair was in the doorway with his mouth already open, clearly geared to lecture mode, when he stopped and looked, and then looked some more. “Hmm.” While he hmm’d, Marc and Tina vamoosed without him saying a word. Jess, natch, was still snoring. I had to actively fight the temptation to label her.

“Here you are. I have need of you.” That could mean a whole host of things, many of them delicious and filthy; others, smoothie related. Hell, it could even be vampire monarch business. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything like that.

“Busy.” I finished with the chest of drawers, then crawled to the bed and fished around beneath it, found Jessica’s terrible filing system, and pulled it out.

“So I see, but there is something that requires your urgent attention.” He was still holding his keys. Hadn’t stopped in the kitchen to hang them up, then. He’d just disappeared on an abrupt errand, returned quickly, then come straight up to get me. Not good. “At once, if you please.”

“What doesn’t require my urgent attention these days? Besides, I’m not done atoning.” I gestured at the room, and the bed, where I may or may not have succumbed to the urge to label Jessica.

His lips twitched but he swallowed his laugh, and most of the smile. “And I loathe taking you away from it because in this, as in most things, you are a delight.”

“Most, huh?” I sat back on my heels and brushed my bangs out of my eyes, accidentally labeling myself in the process. Nope. Would not do for Dick to get the wrong idea. I unlabeled myself. “Listen, we can talk about the twins, whom I’m now calling I Don’t Know His Name and I Don’t Know Hers Either. And we can talk about how much you want to take over Hell for me and Jessica’s refusal to name us godparents and anything else in a little bit.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Hell’s doing great, by the way. As great as Hell can be, I mean. Not that you asked or anything.”

Elizabeth.

Yeah, being scary and firm in my head wasn’t any more effective, buddy, but points for effort. “I don’t know how I did it, but things happened. I’ll go back in a bit and more things will happen. I’m almost sure of it.”

He had crossed the room, knelt, grasped my wrists, and lifted me to my feet. “Your father is downstairs.”

“No. He isn’t.”

“He is, my love.”

“Impossible.”

“So are you, darling.”

“It’s a joke, right?” I could feel my lips twitching and realized I was trying to smile. “It’s an elaborate April Fool’s prank you’re all in on, which you did months ahead of schedule to throw me off.”

I would never.

I could feel myself starting to tremble and when Sinclair carefully pulled me into his arms I accidentally labeled myself again.

“How awful is it?” I asked his shoulder blade. I was hugging him back so hard I felt my fingers punch through the fabric of his shirt. Sinclair didn’t move away or make a single sound of protest, but I loosened my grip anyway. “On a scale of one to ten? One being ‘whoops, we were wrong, he
is
dead, we’ll get the corpse out of your house right away’ and ten being ‘kidnapped by sinister supernatural forces and tortured by same for years, which is your fault and you’ll be haunted by that for eternity.’”

“Come see for yourself.” I pressed my ear to his chest. I loved his voice almost anytime but the deep rumble was especially comforting now. “I will be with you, my own. As will we all. You are not alone.”

“Can’t you at least give me a hint?”

You must hear it from him.

“
He’s been kidnapped? He’s secretly a vampire? Satan found him and has been doing awful things to him because she didn’t like me? He’s dying and didn’t want to worry me by being alive? He testified against a murderer and had to go into Witness Protection? Audited? An STD he can’t seem to shake? What?”

He sighed and I clutched harder.

Oh, my love. It’s much worse than that.

 CHAPTER  

THIRTY-ONE

Sinclair was right. If anything, he undersold it.

“You’re alive because you’re alive? That’s it? That’s your explanation?”

My father had been over it twice and I still didn’t get it, making it worse than that appalling endless time he tried to teach me to change a tire. So much rage. And grease.

We were in the Peach Parlor and my father looked great. At first I thought he’d been tortured somewhere nice, like Little Cayman, explaining the tan. Or locked up somewhere without access to junk food, like a farmers’ market, explaining the fifteen-pound weight loss. Or held prisoner in the basement of a Neiman Marcus, explaining the smartly tailored dark brown pants, cream-colored dress shirt, silk tie with cream and gold accents, and Manolo Blahnik brown suede loafers. Argh,
Manolo Blahniks
on his treacherous feet! Why not just set my soul on fire and get it over with?

“Dad, what the hell?” I know. Lame. But it was the only thought to pop into my brain. At least it was a complete sentence.

He’d gotten to his feet when I trudged into the parlor, but sat back down the second I came to a stop in front of him. No tearful reunion father-daughter embrace, then. Not even a handshake, given how he was clasping his hands together.

Dick had been standing near him in a faded T-shirt and his rubber duckie pajama pants, like a menacing bodyguard who’d just gotten out of bed. Which, in a way, he was. Once I was in the room he relaxed and went to sit on the love seat with Marc. Tina and Sinclair remained standing. Their carefully neutral expressions were terrifying.

“Your, uh, friend has been guarding me. Right?” Dad tried a smile. It didn’t fit his mouth, and not just because he knew he was on the spot. He’d never had a roommate. He’d never seen the desire to live with people if you didn’t need them to do things for you. “Afraid I’ll run off?”

“Yes,” everyone but me said in unison.

He looked rattled, but I didn’t know if it was because of my friends’ retort or my lack thereof. “Er . . . why?”

“Because you’re a coward/chickenshit/dreadful man/runaway/scumbag,” everyone said in unison (though they all picked different descriptions).

In next to no time I went from puzzled that he was alive to worried about what he’d had to endure to shocked when I realized he hadn’t endured . . . well . . . anything.

“There’s no supernatural explanation? No dramatic terrible weirdness that snatched you out of my life?”

“Dramatic terrible weirdness is why I had to leave.”

“Had to leave?” I could only gape. Even I, occasional poster child for the self-involved, was staggered. “You didn’t appreciate the drama
you
had to endure?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’ve been in St. Paul this whole time?” That was the part my mind kept reeling back to. He’d faked his death and hid, except not. How had I never noticed we were living in the same city? Okay, St. Paul wasn’t exactly a small town, not with three hundred thousand live humans, nineteen vampires, an unknown number of ghosts, and one zombie (at last count, anyway), but still. In some respects, St. Paul
was
a small town in that many of us moved in the same little circles. (I was betting that was why he’d bumped into Jessica the other day.) It made me wonder if he’d wanted to get caught or if he was just lazy.