Undead and Unwary

  “This is not about soothing your insecurity!”

  Aw, come on, not even a little? She could soothe me if she really tried. “Don’t you remember me telling you how horrible the future was?”

  “Vividly,” she muttered, trying—and failing—to run a hand through her hair. She had it pulled back, and slicked back, so it wasn’t budging for a while. When the screaming started, we all assumed the positions: Sinclair and Tina off to one side, watching with polite dispassion; Marc pulling back so DadDick could step up (for a hug; he knew better than to try to run soothing fingers through her hair); and me cowering by the sink. “The whole thing is still very, very vivid. Mostly because you wouldn’t shut up about it.”

  “It was awful but fascinating. It’s hard to picture me not being with Jessica like you said in the old timeline.” DadDick gave his wife a squeeze. “I’m sorry there’s no more Christian Louboutin to make your favorite shoes, but at least there’s us and the babies.”

  I bit my lip so as not to let out something less than charitable (“You could have a thousand weird babies and none of them would replace Louboutin’s genius, flatfoot!”) and tried to stay on point. “Yeah, like I was saying, the future sucked hard and long—”

  Jess slammed her hands over the girl’s ears. “Not in front of the babies!”

  “Ow, my tympanic membranes!” The riled teen shook her off. “Mama!”

  “She’s in all the advanced classes,” her brother confided. “It’s fine, Mom. We’ve heard this story a hundred times: You Almost Never Existed except for Onniebetty’s Blundering. And she’s said way worse than ‘sucking hard’ and—”

  “Enough,” Jess warned, and her son closed his mouth: zip!

  How? How is this my life?

  “I was tyrannical and gross and Sinclair was mysteriously absent and you were, too, and there were zombies, icky, drippy, rotting zombies, but remember how wonderful BabyJon was? Oooh, and handsome? Not that good looks measure goodness or anything but it’s still worth noting. He was gorgeous. Because of me! Okay, because of the Ant and my dad, genetically speaking, but he was confident and strong and sweet because I raised him to be like that! So how come I can’t be their godmother? If the spawn of the Ant can turn out terrific, your li’l sprogs can, too.” Also, what exactly were the responsibilities that came with godmotherhood? I should probably get a detailed job description before I got further invested in being hurt that I wasn’t being offered the job. The girl seemed savvy about footgear, so clearly my work with her had borne fruit, but the boy was a trickier read, though his fondness for Cinnabon and Orange Julius was a huge point in his favor. They were fearless and funny, which was even better. And maybe I was supposed to, I dunno, guide them spiritually? Or whatever? “Give me one good reason why it wouldn’t work.”

  “I’ll give you six. Vampires. Zombie—no offense.”

  Marc let loose with his “none taken” sigh. I admired how he didn’t point out that the house zombie had safely delivered her weird babies.

  “Ghosts. Dads who aren’t dead. Dads who are dead. And—how many?”

  Her twins each held up one hand, fingers splayed wide.

  “We can help you out with that list if you like, Mama. Number six—”

  “Traitors!” I clutched my chest. “Argh, your betrayal burns. Why? Why would you turn on your Onniebetty?”

  “Because you ratted me out two years ago when I spent the night at—never mind.”

  “Look. Betsy.” I could see Jessica visibly trying to calm herself. “I love you. There’s not much I wouldn’t do for you, but you’ve got to admit. You—and by extension we—live a dangerous life. Someone outside that, someone who knows about the craziness of our lives but who isn’t necessarily exposed to it all the time, that’s who we need to look after the babies in case the worst happens. If something happens to us”—gesturing to DadDick—“the last thing we should do, no matter how much we love the people involved, the last thing we should do is plunge our children further into the supernatural cesspool that is your life.”

  “‘Cesspool’ is a little harsh,” I mumbled, wanting to keep being offended but aware that she had a damned good point. Dammit.

  DadDick stepped forward and took my shoulders in his giant cop hands. Here comes a “stop it, you’re hysterical!” slap. He doesn’t even care that I’m not hysterical. He just wants to get to the slap. Police brutality in my own kitchen!

  “Betsy, I know this will be hard to hear.”

  “Because you’ll slap me so hard my ears’ll ring?”

  “What? No. This is hard to hear because . . . are you ready? This is not about you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Exactly.” He gave me a noisy smack on my forehead. Better than a slap, but also more confusing.

  “If, God forbid, something dreadful happens . . .”

  Both twins waved their hands. “We know, we know!”

  “Shush.” Jess spoke affectionately, if absently, and they obeyed. “Your mom’s on deck.”

  “Jeez.” I wasn’t happy about this at all, and still wasn’t sure where DadDick was going with the “it’s not about you” crazy talk, but this was their decision and I had to respect it. And she had a point. My mother would be a wonderful guardian, but she wasn’t far from retiring. If someone blew up the mansion one night in a blaze of bitchy retribution and the little ones somehow survived, Mom would be responsible for three babies at a time in her life when she would have been looking forward to grandchildren. She was always happy to baby-sit BabyJon, and she’d been over quite a bit to see the twins, but at the end of the day she knew the children weren’t her responsibility. Except someday they could be.

  Which, in an unsettling way, made Jessica’s point. An elderly, single college professor was their best option. That’s how nutty our lives were.

  “I’m going to sulk about this,” I warned, “for the rest of the week at least. And I’m going to do all sorts of passive-aggressive crap, like accidentally pouring all your nail polish down the kitchen sink and leaving you to deal with the mess. And the ensuing lack of polish.”

  “Agreed.”

  We glared at each other for a few seconds, then mutually looked away. A draw.

  Meanwhile, sensing the worst part of the crisis was over, the girl had taken notice of Marc, who’d been watching the events with interest and in uncharacteristic silence since Jessica had listed him as a reason why I wasn’t the twins’ godmother. She must have picked up on that (before I did, but that wasn’t such a trick) because she flopped down into the chair beside him with the air of someone supremely comfortable with her surroundings.

  Marc tried a tentative smile. “Hello.”

  “Good job delivering us when Mom couldn’t get to the hospital in time.” This with a sideways glance at her mother, who suddenly couldn’t return the gaze. Ha!

  “Thank you. But everyone helped; it wasn’t just me.”

  Well, phooey. Stupid Marc and his humane desire to play fair at all times.

  “Hiya, Unk.” The boy waved at him from across the kitchen, where he’d been chatting with Sinclair.

  “Hello. Glad you and your sister aren’t missing.”

  “That’s all boring now. We’ve solved it.”

  “We haven’t, actually, and you guys haven’t explained how—”

  “Yeah, yeah, how about this?” She leaned right into Marc’s personal bubble, cupped her hand around her mouth, and whispered in his ear. (Good trick, too; I couldn’t hear a thing despite eavesdropping.) His green eyes widened, then narrowed, and then he was on his feet and backing away. “No. No! Don’t. I don’t care. Don’t you dare. I can wait. Do not tell me how The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring end.”

  “But the dragons finally—”

  “No!” the zombie screamed and clapped his hands over his ears.

&
nbsp; “Too bad.” Jessica’s awesomely evil daughter sighed. “It’s pretty spectacular.” She caught her brother’s gaze and giggled, and then we were all laughing. It was the sharp-edged laughter that was this close to tipping over into hysterics (DadDick might yet get the chance to smack me), but we indulged anyway. It was impossible not to, and reason #742 why I loved where I lived and who I lived with.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “We call it shifting. Old stuff to all you guys by the time we started kindergarten. For us . . .” She looked at her brother and they both shrugged. “It’s how it is. How it’s always been. It’s our life.”

  “We were up to middle school before we tumbled that not everybody lived with vamps and zoms and weres.” Her brother chortled. “In fact, hardly anybody did. Made for some strange-o sleepovers.”

  I shuddered at the thought of keeping everyone’s nature hidden from various strange children all in some stage of sugar inebriation and, judging from the looks on Tina’s and Sinclair’s faces, they were having the same horrific vision.

  “It’s like your pregnancy, Mama.”

  “I don’t really . . .” Jess shot a look at me and I gave her my “what?” shrug. “I don’t remember much of it. Just that everything worked out. Mostly I felt like whatever was going on in—”

  “Your uterus of the damned,” Marc supplied helpfully.

  “That everything would be fine,” she finished after shooting him a glare that practically smoked. “Other people worried—Betsy’s mom worried and then Betsy did, too, for a bit—but we . . .” She looked at DadDick.

  His reply was slow and careful, as though he was considering every word before speaking. “It all turned out. And it was like any other pregnancy—back me up on this, Jess—in that mostly we wanted healthy babies. And like I said, it all turned out.”

  Sure, it did. But it was all the way around the world from “any other pregnancy.” The way the Ant laid it out,12 I didn’t just accidentally change the timeline on my trip to the gross past (no air-conditioning) and horrific future (too many zombies). Moving myself from various dimensions of existence left me changed, and it wasn’t just the vampire thing. I couldn’t zap myself to and from Hell the first time I woke up dead; I couldn’t do it a year after I woke up dead. I couldn’t do it at all until a few months ago and the speed with which I started to get a handle on it was a little

  (terrifying)

  disconcerting.

  So take my undead shenanigans + the Antichrist being a blood relative × Satan always ready to stir up trouble ÷ time travel = I am subtly changed, and by subtly, I mean incredibly. One of those things where if any one of those factors had dropped, we wouldn’t all be in the kitchen talking to Jessica’s newborns who could legally drive.

  Long story short (ever notice how when people say that, it almost always indicates “this is gonna be a long story no matter how I tell it, so get comfy”?), even though Jessica was a regular person (comparably speaking), my physical proximity sort of rubbed off on people I spent the most time with. Marc wasn’t rotting because I was around. And Jessica’s pregnancy, which only existed after I changed the timeline, was supernatural . . . or so scientific we lacked the understanding to get it.

  A lot to take in, even for us. Having the twins explain their maybe-mystical, maybe-science-we-don’t-understand natures to their parents was the best way to keep them calm and help them accept the chaos they had to know was coming.

  Coming, hell. The chaos was here, and the chaos loved Orange Juliuses. The chaos was pretty damned adorable.

  “Sometimes you were three months along”—she was prompting her mother—“and then the next day you’d be six months along. And a week later you’d hardly be showing and a week after that you’d look ready to—”

  Her son mimed an explosion, complete with waving hands and those phlegmy blowing-up sounds boys can do almost from birth.

  “Nobody who lived here noticed, because you’re all under Onniebetty’s spell, for lack of a word that actually makes sense. Grammy Taylor noticed, but only because she didn’t live here.”

  Grammy Taylor . . . awwww! Good to know my mom’s still around in fifteen years. Except . . . um . . . wait, the twins aren’t time traveling, they’re twins from a different universe, so my mom might not be . . . damn, I’m getting a headache . . .

  “We’re the same. You see? Your pregnancy was kinda the harbinger to our natures.” They stopped talking and making explosion noises and looked expectant, as if that was all they had to say and we were about to assure them that, yep, we got it now, thanks for stopping by.

  Tina cleared her throat. “Young lady, if you please, speaking only for myself—”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You’re not alone in not getting this,” Marc added. “I thought a medical/scientific background would help me. I was wrong.”

  “—could you elaborate?”

  “Sure, Teeney Tina. Mama and Dad are norms,” the girl said. “The only ones in this circus of a home. Everyone else—including us—is mystical or supernatural in nature. Mom was pregnant after Onniebetty—”

  Marc snickered and I took the high road of maturity and only kicked him a little. “Nnnnf!”

  “Serves you right,” I muttered under my breath.

  “—changed the timeline. Once Onniebetty was back, she was around for the whole thing. It changed us. In another timeline we don’t exist—Mama picked Betsy, not Dad.” Shooting her father an apologetic glance with Jessica’s lovely brown eyes, she continued. “After the change, though, Dad never gave Mama the ultimatum, so we’re here. But it’s us through all the iterations of the timelines. In some timelines Mama didn’t get pregnant for years. Or got pregnant much sooner. Any timeline where things didn’t go exactly the way they did in this one means we’re older or younger or not here yet. It’s . . . I know it’s a lot to . . .” She made a snatching motion with her hands. “It’s a lot for your brains to grab. I guess the best explanation is that your newborn twins have shifted into a timeline where you and Dad coupled up much earlier.”

  “But you wouldn’t be here? You wouldn’t be alive?” DadDick’s tone brought my attention back to him in a hurry. He talked like someone had a hold of his throat.

  I got it, as much as a nonparent could grasp such a thing. It was one thing for me to have the “hey, when I left, you were out of Jessica’s life forever, and now that I’m back you’re not only here but you’ve knocked her up, weird, huh?” conversation. It was another for him to love his life with Jessica and the twins and realize that if one little thing had been different, he’d be alone.

  Clearly his children were as alarmed by that tone of voice as I was, because in an instant they were up and at him with hugs and pats. It looked like he was trapped in a hurricane of gangly elbows and knees but it served its purpose: he calmed right down.

  “It seems peculiar and way too unsettling but I promise, I promise—”

  The boy took up where his sister left off. “—you get used to it, it’s no big by our fifth; you’re more disconcerted about Uncle Sink adopting four more Labs without telling you—never mind, I didn’t say that.”

  “Four?” Uncle Sink said, delighted. “What an outstanding idea, how clever your children are, Detective.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “We’re a little clever,” his son objected.

  “Not you, hon, of course not you, and, come on, Eric! We’ve already talked about how we can’t take on more—we’re getting off the subject.” He turned back to his teenagers. “Can you control it? Can you—what’d you call it—can you shift back to newborn? Or—God forbid, I don’t know if my heart could take it—ahead to your twenties? Or any time in between?”

  “Nawp.” He shook his head. “It just happens. In fact, I’m hugely surprised we’re still here. We’ll blip out pre
tty soon. That’s what you guys said it was like. We just blink out and there’s a ‘pop’ and—”

  “From the air rushing into the space we just occupied. Science, hooray!”

  “—and we’re back to the age you’d expect.”

  “I thank you for taking the time to explain,” Tina said with customary courtesy. “And none of this makes the slightest sense.”

  Welcome to my world, honey.

  “Next time, bring hand puppets,” Marc advised, which I should have found sarcastic but instead thought was a pretty great idea. Hand puppets would definitely help.

  “Maybe next time you see us like this you’ll be yawning from how everyday it is,” the boy said with a hopeful smile. His sister nodded so hard she had to steady herself against DadDick.

  I tried to think about how these two could be any awesomer and came up nada. Well, maybe if they’d come back from the mall with Orange Juliuses for everybody. When I thought about how jealous I’d been of them even before they’d been born—I had been dreading being usurped in Jessica’s life by incontinent, nonspeaking infants—it made me want to squirm.

  Speaking of the delectable orange drink of the gods, he’d left his drink unattended. Foolish boy! I sidled closer; all the stress and shouty emotions had left me parched. That Orange Julius was my due, he owed me the rest, or at least a sip, and nothing would stop me from—dammit.

  “I was just getting it for you,” I whined.

  “Nice try, vampire hag.” The brat helped himself to a noisy slurp. “Ahhhh! Never have I had a more refreshing beverage, all the sweeter because you were old and slow. Reminds me.” He tossed a silvery flash at Sinclair, who snatched it out of the air quicker than thought. “Thanks. Ace run, like always.”

  Sinclair clutched the car keys and we all heard the plastic crack. Not good; now he’d have to use the actual metal key to lock, unlock, and start it. “I demand the truth. You will be blunt, but no harm shall come to you.” Were his . . . yes. His lips were trembling as he prepared to face catastrophic news. “Is my automobile intact?”