Undead and Unwary

  “It was an accident,” I bragged. Wait, why was I proud of that?

  “Yes, I assumed. You’re off to a good start.”

  Why, why was her praise cheering me up? God, this place was so insidious, making me feel things I had never felt and never wanted to felt. I mean feel.

  “It still smacks of being way too simple. The fact that this is how it really works. It’s almost anticlimactic.”

  “I’ll never understand why people think anticlimactic is bad,” said the damned priest who used to help orphans kill vampires.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you don’t, Father. But this place . . . you believe you’re supposed to be here, so here you are. Same with my Ant—”

  “Your aunt?”

  Over the Ant’s annoyed huff, I replied, “Long story, no time. Same with her, same with Henry Tudor, same with the guy over there allergic to ketchup who’s only allowed to eat ketchup . . .” We all shuddered at the far-off retching noises the poor bastard was making. “If we’re here because we want to be, can we leave? I mean, I know I can, but could you?” To my stepmother: “Could you?”

  “Yes. I think,” he added. The Ant said nothing, just stood there with her dorky clipboard and shifted her weight from one foot to another. “There are souls I’ve spoken to here that I no longer see.”

  “Yeah, but billions. Billions of souls, right? Of course you couldn’t be expected to remember ’em all.”

  “Correct. But it’s not difficult to track down someone here. It’s not a planet with a defined area like Earth, it’s a different dimension with different rules, as you’re busy discovering. I do think people are leaving.”

  I nodded, remembering Laura’s warning. But I need you. They’re leaving! “Yeah, that’s part of the reason I’m here.”

  Puzzled, Father Markus tilted his head. His small dark eyes were bright like a sparrow’s. “I don’t understand. Some souls are leaving when they’re ready to move on. When they’ve learned. Or been forgiven. Or forgave themselves. Or repented. They’re—”

  “There’s a lot to take in,” the Ant cut in, almost like she didn’t want the priest to keep clarifying for me. Which was nuts; she wanted me up to speed ASAP to ease some of the burden from poor precious Laura’s delicate creamy shoulders. “I think you’ve done very well in a short time.” That explained the praise, too. Should have known it wasn’t entirely sincere. “Once you actually showed up,” she added in a mutter, because she was, after all, still the Ant, no matter how pleasant and helpful she was being. Or pretending to be. It was almost a relief to hear the knee-jerk insult.

  “All I can tell you, Betsy, is what I learned myself not long after I arrived here.” Father Markus kept forgetting his drink was nasty, because he again picked it up and again put it down without sipping. Torture! Oooh, I was a genius. “It has been the joy and sorrow of my afterlife to find that there are more questions than answers. The only thing I have learned is that I have much to learn.”

  “Yeah, I learned that, too. Way before I died, even.”

  “There are Muslims here, and Jews. I’ve debated theology with Sikhs and Baha’is and I’ve heard confession from atheists and Taoists and Lutherans.”

  “Bet the atheists are pissed to be here.”

  “You’d be surprised. Some of them were relieved. Not to be in Hell, but that people they’d known who’d judged them for their beliefs were also in Hell.”

  Heh. “Okay, that’s funny.” What? It was.

  “This is not a dimension set aside solely for Catholics who believe in a concrete Heaven and a concrete Hell and an Almighty Father and a Devil and punishment and redemption. It’s for everyone and I don’t know why. I may never know why. And there are children, too.”

  I was so startled I sucked in a breath. “Kids? Aw, no. Don’t tell me that.”

  “Not being tortured, not damned,” he reassured me. Tried to, I mean, jeez. I wasn’t sure I could be reassured, though he’d get points for trying. The whole idea—toddlers in a food court that wasn’t childproofed!—was horrifying. “They didn’t sin, how could they, the precious ones? But here they are. What does that mean? And there are people who absolutely deserve to be punished for quite some time, if not forever, who aren’t here.”

  “Like my dad!” Wait. Did I say that out loud?

  “It’s puzzling.” I was relieved he’d let the dad comment pass. “Like Jewish vampires being burned by crosses. One of the Blade Warriors’ victims. It shook me and I could never get it right in my mind. I’d hoped to find the answer to that here, as well, but so far I haven’t.”

  I remembered, vaguely. They’d told me about it before they disbanded. They’d tracked and killed an old-school vampire, one who had a taste for rabbinical seminary students, men as well as women. He’d been old enough, and experienced enough, to give them enough trouble that one of the Blind Worriers ended up in a wheelchair. They got him down, finally, and killed him. The cross worked great, and they’d brought buckets of holy water, which was even better.

  Afterward, they realized he was Jewish (I was a little surprised his victim predilection didn’t tip them off). Which raised all sorts of problematic questions. Why did the cross work? Why did any of it work?

  “Oh, not that suggestibility thing again.” I managed, barely, to keep from rolling my eyes. This had come up before, and I’d dismissed it before. It was either too dumb for me to understand, or too sophisticated.

  It goes like this: vampires couldn’t stand crosses or Bibles or what-have-you because in life, they had believed the books and comics and movies. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was inserted so far into popular culture that even people who didn’t read the book (or read Stoker’s Dracula or watched Buffy and Angel on TV or read the 30 Days of Night graphic novels or went to the movies to see Shadow of the Vampire or The Lost Boys and shut up, that was a great movie!) knew how to kill vampires. Ergo crosses hurt. So even if you were a Jew or an atheist in life, a cross would burn you once you turned into a vamp.

  Which, again, makes no sense. It was so dumb I spent a lot of time deliberately not thinking about it. Unfortunately (or maybe the opposite?) Father Markus had zero interest in marinating in ignorance.

  “I think there are many dimensions out there. I don’t think we’ll ever know how many or what it means or even how they came to be. Perhaps not even how we came to be. If we can come to grips with that, if we can accept the thought that after an eternity of trying we still won’t have all the answers, there’s hope.”

  Hmm. Interesting thought. And possibly depressing as shit; I’d have to think about it. Also, did “we” mean he and I? The Ant, he, and I? Just me? Just him? Him and the demon standing behind him? (Not that there was one.)

  “So . . .” Gah. I’d had about all the theological chitchat I could take for one day. Or one hour or one year or however long I’d been here this time. “To answer the question I asked ages ago, you don’t have to stay here, probably?”

  “But I will.” He touched his collar, as if reminding himself it was still there. “Can you think of a place more in need of a sympathetic ear? And we need to set up a rotation schedule for those keeping an eye on the children.”

  With a jolt, I realized the Mall of America—my model for Hell Mall—had a day-care center. And again: children? I didn’t care that they weren’t being tortured, I had to look into that. If BabyJon—ohgodpleaseno—died, would he come here? Who would look after him and play with him and sneak him maple sugar candy?

  I shook the horrifying thought off with a determined effort. “I appreciate that, Father. But stay or go, I can put in a good word for you with . . .” Whom, exactly? The devil was dead by my hand. (My hand, my other hand, my feet, my teeth—toward the end I was lashing out with everything I had and I’m still kind of astonished I pulled it off.) I couldn’t imagine the Antichrist would care about a sinful priest—one willing to help us,
no less! or help me, anyway, which was almost as good—and if she did, what could she do? Send him away? Where? Back to “the real world”? The Heaven dimension? Could she banish a sinner to Heaven? Could we call God on the phone (cue Joan Osborne and her intensely annoying song “One of Us” and, no, Joan, God wouldn’t be a stranger on the bus, and He wouldn’t be anything like a holy rolling stone, either; God, I hate that song) to ask for leniency? And how would that phone call go? Hey, God, how’s it going? Can you believe so-and-so won the Super Bowl? Anyway, we’ve got a defrocked priest down here, he’s a pretty good guy, really, and maybe you could let him trade up?

  “Maybe you don’t have to spend an eternity here,” was all I could come up with.

  My stepmother let out another trademark inelegant snort. “I’m sure Father Markus is touched by your vague offer to help in some undefined way.”

  I scowled. “Careful, or I’ll put you on amusement park barf detail.” The shudder I received was more than satisfying. And speaking of being satisfied . . .

  “I’ve gotta tell you guys, this is pretty nifty. I’ve gotten a lot done.” They opened their mouths and I went on anyway. “Yeah, yeah, by accident, but who cares? The point is, a lot got done.” At her eye roll I revised. “Some stuff got done.” Another eye roll—her optic nerves were gonna go into spasm if she kept that up. “All right! A tiny amount of stuff kind of got done and there’s ever so much more to do, yes, fine, I get it. But cut me some slack. I (eventually) stepped up and (finally) took action and frankly, I think I deserve a smoothie break!” My hip buzzed and I reached for my phone. Perfect timing. I wondered how long I’ll have been gone from the mansion this time.

  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.