Undead and Unwary

  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?”

  They were both smiling again. They had terrific smiles, I figured because of terrific orthodontists. “That’s fine. We’re okay to do that. In our house,” she explained, nodding at the mansion looming behind us, “weird is wonderful. It’s a synonym.”

  “Is that, like, a metaphor? I’ve been working on metaphors this week.”

  “Keep working. And don’t worry, Mom and Dad will get it.”

  “They will?” I didn’t want to worry the kids, so I managed to keep most of the doubt out of my tone. “Okay. They will. Right? Right.”

  “What choice?” the boy asked, looking, for a few seconds, older than his years. “That’s how it is here.”

  “Point,” I said. “Then let’s get it done. We have to go around the side, I’m afraid.”

  “Nix.” Jessica’s son reached into his back pocket and then jingled something in front of my face. “They’re called house keys and, nobody knows why, but you never have yours with you.”

  I resisted the urge to snatch them away. “Off my case, brat.”

  “Ease, willya? She’s got stuff. It’s not easy running Hell,” his sister said, sliding a protective arm around my waist.

  “I loved when you came to career day.” He sighed. “Next time, bring more demons.”

  “I might love you two,” I decided, “more than sandals in summer.”

  “We grew on you. Like lichen!”

  Her brother snorted, then shook his keys at me again and started trotting up the sidewalk toward the door. “Move-move, ladies! Let’s go have the Talk with the ’rents. Again. And then take a Cinnabon break.”

  “I should be more terrified,” I confessed, following them.

  “Plenty of time for that,” Jessica’s daughter replied with such a droll smirk, I couldn’t help laughing again.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Here’s the thing about vampire hearing. We can hear a pin drop, but that’s boring. (Who lurks in doorways listening for pins to drop, anyway? Creeps. That’s who.) We can hear whispered conversations a floor away, sometimes a block away if the wind is right. We can hear a car pull in from the attic, or pull out from the base
ment. We can hear when Marc is experimenting and when he’s just pacing, desperately wanting something to keep his dead brain busy. We can hear the babies snuffling in their sleep, we can hear them wake up, and we can hear Jess and DadDick stumbling through the house to warm bottles and go to them. Sometimes we can hear heartbeats.

  But a lot of the time we don’t want to. Speaking for myself, if I’m concentrating on hate-watching old eps of Helix (they’ve got to stop giving the Syfy channel money to make movies), I don’t want to be distracted by Tina muttering under her breath two floors away as she struggles to reconcile one of SinCorp’s many P&Ls.

  So you learn to tune it out. Or try to. I could never get the hang of it until Tina took me aside and said, “Airport,” like that was an answer.

  It was! But it took me a while to get it. She pointed out that when you’re in an airport, you’re walking to your gate while lugging an overnight bag or a laptop, counting gates and glancing from café to bar to Starbucks to figure out what you want to drink before the flight boards. And there are hundreds of people around you, milling and chatting and running and walking and it’s busy all around, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not upsetting or overwhelming or even interesting. It’s just how airports are. And you don’t care, so you don’t hear them. You can just tune out all those conversations that have nothing to do with you and focus on getting to your gate with your Green Tea Frappuccino intact. And once I grasped what Tina was trying to explain to me, it became easy. I didn’t have to hear the babies’ heartbeats, or Marc’s pacing, unless I wanted to.

  All that to say that I did not need vampire hearing to hear Jessica’s shriek when we walked in the front door, courtesy of her kid’s keys: “Someone better find my babies right goddamned now or I’m going to get my husband’s guns; call my lawyer; and take one of Sinclair’s shiny, sexy cars—and everyone in the city of St. Paul will have a very bad day!”

  The twins exchanged a look and started to sprint and I had great respect for their reckless bravery. I, meanwhile, had to actively resist the urge to scuttle back outside to the driveway, or at least cower in the hall, and followed.

  “Jessica, be reasonable,” my husband was pleading. “Leave the automobile out of it.”

  “Stupid, we’re so stupid.” I could hear every bitter word, and if the twins weren’t in front of me, I would have crossed the length of the mansion in a heartbeat. It broke my heart to hear the savage self-hate in my friend’s voice. “We knew it had happened before and we just—we just sat around until it happened again. And I know you texted Betsy, but what do you think she can do, exactly? We’ve figured we can’t call the cops, but nobody’s dropped off a ransom note, nobody’s made a demand, our babies are just—just gone. Again! And even if we get them back, how long until they go missing again?” Her voice caught on sobs. “I c-can’t live like this. W-won’t live like this. It’s too m-much—who the hell are you?”

  This because the girl had gotten to the swinging kitchen door first, darted through, and threw herself into her mother’s arms. I heard Jessica grunt and stagger back—the twins had their father’s long legs—and got to the kitchen in time to see her arms automatically go around the intruder/daughter.

  “It’s okay, Mama.” Jessica’s daughter squeezed her in a fierce hug, eliciting a pained squeak, then pulled back and held Jess at arm’s length. “We’re right here. We’re not missing. We’re here. It’s—nnnfff.”

  Her brother, right on her heels, and that was twice in five seconds Jessica nearly went sprawling courtesy of her exuberant offspring. DadDick was on his feet and moving to pull them apart. “Hey! Get off her, both of you. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  “We didn’t use my house keys,” I replied, “I can tell you that.”

  My own. As ever, you arrive in the nick of time. My husband’s deep relief came through like a baseball bat through fog.

  Dude, you are not even going to believe the story behind these two.

  Doubtless. Stop calling me dude.

  “We’re not missing.” Jessica’s daughter was patting her cheeks, the way little kids do when they’re reaching out for someone they love, trying to get their attention. “We’re not stolen. We’re here, Mama, and it’s all fine.”

  “This’ll be tough to chew, Mom, but we’re yours. Remember your freak pregnancy? It resulted in freak kids.” The exuberant teen spread his arms wide. “Ta-da!”

  “But we’re your freak kids,” his sister said, snuggling into Jess for a hug, which my dazed friend automatically returned. “And there’s nothing to be scared of. We’re here even when we aren’t. It’s our nature.”

  On the one hand, I had to give them points for how quickly they were calming my pal. I hadn’t thought that was possible without heavy tranquilizers. On the other, the things they were telling her made no sense, so it shouldn’t have calmed Jess at all. But I didn’t interrupt or try to correct them. I was too busy trying to think up a nonalarming way to explain what was happening.

  “We can prove it.” They were now directing their comments to their father, who had stopped trying to separate them but looked like someone had punched him in the kidney and followed it up with a gut punch. “We know everything about you guys. You’ve told us so many boring stories of your childhood. Boring because of the repetition!” the boy hastily clarified. “Not boring because we don’t actually care how your childhoods were grueling and how good we have it and how when you were a little boy you had to sell tractors uphill in the snow while waiting for your trust fund to mature.”

  Jessica took in a deep breath, waited a couple of seconds, then let it out, along with, “I believe you.”

  “Oh, an example? Okay, when you and Dad were young and dumb—you believe us?”

  “You, um. You look like a picture of my grandma. You look exactly like her. This might sound hard to believe, but for a second I thought you were her, time traveling to the future for some strange supernatural-related reason.”

  “It sounds one hundred percent believable.”

  The boy slapped his forehead. “Grammy Midge! We should have thought of that straight off.” He turned to his father. “Elephant in the room? I look like her, too—it’s fine, it’s okay to say. Damn these delicate features! Why couldn’t I have inherited your swimmer’s shoulders, at least?”

  “It’s true. It’s really—you didn’t get taken. You didn’t. You’re okay. You’re—you’re nice, too.” Jessica burst into tears and elicited squawks as she squeezed the twins in a ferocious double hug. “And you’re not freaked out. You’re worried about your dad and me. You’re not surprised by . . .” She waved a hand at the kitchen, encompassing the zombie, the vampires, the king and queen of same, the evidence of an emergency smoothie session, the freezer practically bulging with bottles of strangely flavored vodka, the other freezer stuffed with dead mice. “By this. Any of it. You’re okay. You’re really okay.”

  “Thank God you’re finally here.”

  Finally? So I’d been gone longer than my time in Hell again. At least the others were taking it in stride, more because they were used to dealing with my incompetence than because they were resilient. Or numbed to the ongoing strangeness of their lives.

  “It was like a season two Game of Thrones flashback,” Marc whispered to me. “Y’know, when Dany finds out someone stole her babies? ‘Where are my dragons?!’ That whole season was just her yelling about her dragons.”

  “Time and place, Marc,” I replied, making shushing motions, but alas. Too late.

  “If you don’t stop with the GoT references, I will punch your face into the back of your skull,” Jess threatened in a way that seemed more than plausible. “There won’t be enough Advil in the world to fix the resulting headache.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The zombie gulped.

  “Stop scaring our zombie. And you two . . . how? How are you even here?” DadDick stil
l looked stunned.

  “Here it is, Big Papa, when a man and a woman love each other very much, sometimes they tell the vampires they live with to get gone for a while so they can practice private coitus—”

  I burst out laughing, a slave to the boy’s excellent smart-assery.

  “You can skip the technical details,” DadDick said, relaxing for the first time since we’d blitzed into the kitchen. I figured he, like me, had seen how like Jessica these two were, and it was almost better than a DNA test. “How are you doing this? Is it time travel? Oh. Huh.”

  “I know, right?” I asked. “You hear yourself say something that ridiculous and unreal, and you’re only surprised that you’re not surprised.”

  “Exactly.” He turned back to the teens. “Is someone doing it to you?”

  Vigorous nods. And the twins looked over at me.

  “Whoa.” I held up both hands like I was being arrested. Which would be the least of my problems right now. “Do not. Nope. You twerps aren’t pinning this on me.”

  “We wouldn’t, except for how it’s all your fault.”

  And like that, all the happiness was sucked out of the room.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “This!”

  “Ow,” I mumbled. Jess’s shriek was nearing supersonic.

  “This is why we wouldn’t ask you to be their godmother!”

  “I didn’t do anything! I am innocent and, also, I’m the one who found the little jerks. Twice!”

  “Little? We’re almost as tall as you are,” the girl snapped.

  I shrugged that off and turned back to Jess. “And what are you talking about, ‘wouldn’t ask’? You’re not going to ask? You’re not gonna name them and you’re not gonna assign godparents?” I couldn’t tell which one I found most appalling. Wait, I had it now. The one about me, definitely.