Undead and Unforgiven

  He laughed again, sounding much less tense. “Perhaps we will. But if all is well on your end—”

  “We’ve got it under control.” Translation: I don’t meddle in your business, how about you keep out of mine? “But if you change your mind, come on out.”

  “I will. Thanks very much for your time; I imagine you’re pretty busy.”

  “Well, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.” By now Sinclair had come from his office and was standing next to me after giving Marc a gentle push away to prevent the man’s blatant eavesdropping. A pouting Marc was not a pretty sight. “Say hi to Jeannie and the kids for me.”

  “I will. Pass my regards to Sinclair and the others.”

  “I will. ’Bye.”

  Click. Well, not really, not with these modern phones. I missed the satisfaction of hanging up. Pressing the end call button wasn’t nearly as satisfying.

  “He’s coming.”

  “Oh yeah.” I nodded. “Definitely.”

  “What?” Marc came out of his pout long enough to add, “From what I could tell, you set his mind at ease and he’s not coming.”

  “A visit’s pretty inevitable. It’s just, now he won’t leave today. They’ll watch from Massachusetts and show up, what? Within the next week or two?”

  Sinclair nodded.

  “Right. So that’s our deadline. That’s how long we’ve got to get this shit under control.”

  “Piece of cake, right?” Marc looked from Sinclair to me and back to Sinclair. “Right? You guys are making a plan?”

  Not really. But there was nothing sadder than a depressed zombie. So we lied.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Later, Marc shooed the reporters away again. It took a few minutes because one lingered and they chatted on the lawn for a bit—what was that about?—until the sun was down far enough that it was too dark and too cold to comfortably continue.

  Marc had been worried about going outside to deal with reporters, but after giving it some thought he changed his mind. As he put it, “No one outside the six of us knew I died, so there wasn’t a death certificate or a funeral. And it’s winter—lots of people feel chilly, not just mobile dead guys. And maybe they should see a friendly face—sort of, ‘Look, it’s not my call, but c’mon, how about you get out of our yard, sorry to be a hard-ass, my boss is a real meanie’ . . . like that.”

  “I object to ‘real meanie,’” I objected.

  “It’s like good cop/bad cop, when everyone else in the house is the bad cop. So, like, there’s a platoon of bad cops behind me, but I’m friendly and helpful.”

  “You sure seemed friendly and helpful out on the lawn. And why are you limping?”

  “I’m getting to it, just give me a—”

  “What were you talking to that guy about? Besides the fact that you definitely live with vampires?”

  “John Cusack.”

  ?????????

  “Betsy? Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you. It just took me a couple of seconds.”

  “His name’s Will Mason and he runs the G-Spot.”

  “So much more than I needed to know.”

  “Grow up. It’s the name of his website. He started out as a ghost chaser but now he covers all kinds of paranormal weirdness in the Twin Cities.”

  “That should keep him busy.” People didn’t normally associate Minneapolis–St. Paul with lots o’ paranormal weirdness. But even if you didn’t know vamps and weres were a thing, there were lots of people who claimed they’d seen ghosts. When I was alive I blew it off; after death, I rearranged my perceptions. A famous local French restaurant, Forepaugh’s, was known as much for its killer desserts (deconstructed banana cream pie, drooool) as for the ghost who haunted it: the spirit of a maid who’d fallen for the boss, slept with him, discovered she was pregnant, and jumped out the third-story window after he broke off the affair. Management was weirdly proud that that poor sad ghost hung around the place drooping in despair, but again: deconstructed banana cream pie.

  Heck, a house on this very street, Summit Avenue, was famous for being haunted: the Griggs Mansion boasted the ghosts of a maid, a gardener, a Civil War general, and a random teenager, among others (weird how a place always seems to be mostly haunted by the servants, never the rich people). The maid, like the poor girl from Forepaugh’s, threw herself out a fourth-story window after a bad breakup. Warning: if you’re a servant prior to 1950 and you throw yourself out the boss’s window, you’re apparently doomed to live in that house forevermore.

  All that to say, the blogger in question—Will?—had plenty to keep him busy even if vampires weren’t real.

  “This led to John Cusack how?”

  “Well, we got to talking about the movie Better Off Dead, which as you’ll recall is the greatest movie of that decade, which got us talking about One Crazy Summer, which inevitably led to Say Anything, and then—”

  “Well, thanks for playing good cop.”

  “I did more than play. One of the news vans almost clipped him when they drove off, but I—”

  “Good, that’s great, thanks.” A window of opportunity! No reporters, Sinclair was probably ready for a break, it was relatively quiet around here for a change. I couldn’t let this chance go. I had an inkling of what to do about my Father Markus problem, but I needed more info first. “Sorry, Marc, I gotta do something. Tell me more about it when I get back.”

  “You realize whenever you say something like that, it ends up being really important la—”

  “Sinclair?” Want to take the puppies for a walk?

  Sinclair, who’d been holed up with Tina for the last hour, answered at once. Oh yes! You must wish to get out of here as much as I.

  Who knows when we’ll have another chance? Time to carpe the diem, pal.

  You know I go weak in the knees when you butcher Latin.

  Please. You go weak in the knees when I change my socks.

  In next to no time we were being led by the leashed furballs. It was unseasonably warm for late winter—thirties—and the full moon shone down on us so brightly we almost didn’t need streetlights. Well, with our vamp-o-vision we didn’t need streetlights, but you know what I mean.

  “So tell me about your friend Lawrence. We had that dumb fight before I got a chance to ask. How’d you two even meet?”

  Sinclair brightened and I felt his pleased surprise

  (????????)

  as he began to talk. I paid attention to what he said, and what he didn’t say. I was getting used to having an agenda below my agenda and was a little worried that it didn’t bother me the way it would have five years ago. Even two years ago.

  That didn’t stop me from pumping Sinclair for every scrap of info about his friend, though. The price of power, I guess. If things went the way I hoped, there could be a happy ending of sorts. If I was wrong, or my plan backfired, I likely wouldn’t be around to worry about the fallout.

  That shouldn’t have been a comforting thought.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  “There’s a mermaid on the phone for you.”

  “Oh, there is not,” I said, freshly irritated. I’d just about decided what steps to take to fix my Hell problem where both Father Markus and my husband were concerned, and I wasn’t keen to start. It was one of those things where you don’t want to be right and, if you are right, you don’t want to have to take the next step. I couldn’t tell if my reluctance to proceed was sensible caution or just another manifestation of my chronic procrastination. Worse, I’d have to move soon, especially before Tina and Sinclair put their awful plan into action. And that was a whole other thing: their awful plan.

  Marc was holding the phone out. I knew he wanted to distract me—Jessica, Dick, and the babies had moved out that morning. The fact that they had to drive their moving va
n past several reporters camped on our sidewalk just pissed me off all over again. And Marc’s new friend—Bill or Bob or whatever—the G-Spot guy, he was always the last to leave. I hoped it was for the reason I suspected, and not for the reason I feared.

  He added, like it would having meaning to me, “It’s a Dr. Bimm? From Boston?”

  “Nope. Take a message.”

  “Says she’s the queen of the mermaids? Or something—yes? Ow.” Marc jerked the phone away from his ear, but even without vampire hearing I could hear the tinny shouts. “You should definitely take this,” he added, holding the phone out to me as if offering a dead rattlesnake. “She may come up here just to kill me if you don’t.” More squeaking from the phone. Marc’s hand started to tremble. “Jesus. She’s seriously scary.”

  “You’re a terrible gate,” I told my terrible gate, snatching the phone. “Yeah? Hello?”

  “Hello again, Betsy.”

  “Hi. What’s up?”

  “You’re asking me? Apparently you’re being outed, if the YouTube stuff my intern made me watch is any indication.”

  “And you care because . . . ?”

  “Excellent question. Because I have firsthand knowledge of how intensely annoying you are.” Dr. Bimm’s tone was cool, with just the slightest trace of a Boston accent. She wasn’t quite dropping her r’s, but only just. “Nevertheless, this isn’t about you and me as individuals, it’s about my people and yours. Society’s already endured finding out about the Undersea Folk, and I thought you might want some advice on how to handle the sudden, unwelcome intrusion of fame.”

  “Who is this again?”

  “Fredrika Bimm. Formerly of the New England Aquarium, currently on the phone with an idiot. You came to Boston at my intern’s request, and we foiled a stereotypically evil supervillain’s plot to destroy every merperson on the planet. Then you insisted we go out for smoothies, which put the surreal cherry atop the surreal sundae that was that night.”

  “None of this sounds right.” Well, maybe that last part. The aquarium thing, though, that was ringing a faint bell. But for all I knew this was a reporter on a fishing expedition. Like those scammers who call and check your identity by making you tell them your account numbers and social security number. Like I’d fall for that again. “I think you’ve got the wrong gal.”

  I heard a faint creak and realized she was tightening her grip on her phone. “Are you serious?”

  “Look, lady, I don’t know who you are—”

  “I have told you three times!”

  “—but obviously you need a hobby if you’ve got nothing better to do than prank call and— Hey.” Sinclair, doubtless prodded by Marc, had come into the kitchen.

  “Hey, what?”

  “Not hey you, hey my husband.” I put my hand over the phone. “Someone named Ricky Binn says we helped her foil evil and then went out for smoothies.”

  Faintly, from the phone: “I cannot believe this shit!”

  Sinclair smirked. “Yes, darling, we did. Our august presence was requested by a young woman who was the adopted daughter of one of our subjects. We joined Dr. Bimm in Boston, where we discovered a diabolical plot to exterminate life in the sea, which we promptly foiled, then we celebrated with smoothies and later by making love in a suite at the Marriott Long Wharf.”19

  “Oh, the suite sex! Right.” Into the phone: “You should have just said ‘suite sex,’ I would have gotten it right away. So, Fred, nice to hear from you, kind of. What d’you want?”

  Nothing but a low grinding—were those her teeth? Then the disgruntled response: “Jesus Christ.”

  “Oh, come on. Just having a little fun. The yuk-yuks have been pretty thin this month.”

  “No doubt. Is it true? Is your sister trying to expose your people?”

  “Yes. It’s her childish way of expressing her displeasure with pretty much everything I’ve ever said and done. You know how it is with little sisters.”

  “Thankfully, no.” Her tone was getting less frosty, though it hadn’t quite crossed over into warm and friendly. “Would you like some help? Or advice?”

  “No to the former, yes to the latter.”

  “I’m impressed. I was sure you’d get those mixed up. Here’s my advice: no matter what you do or say, some people will always assume you’re lying and some will always assume you’re telling the complete unvarnished truth. The trick is getting the ones in the middle to come around to your way of thinking.”

  “Uh-huh. And how do I make that happen?”

  “Well, that depends,” the mermaid replied, “on what your way of thinking is going to be.”

  I thought about that while Sinclair was whispering and gesturing, giving Marc the CliffsNotes version of our adventures in Boston last fall.

  “Is this one of those things that seems like lame advice at the time, but later turns out to be perfect, dead-on advice?”

  “That’s up to you, too.”

  “Ugh. Got anything that isn’t a platitude?”

  “Yes: your shoes are ugly.”

  I gasped, horrified, then remembered. “Ha! Joke’s on you, Bimm, you can’t see me! I’m barefoot, so suck on that.”

  “God help every vampire everywhere,” was the rejoinder, and then the grouchiest mermaid in the history of mermaids hung up on me. Not a moment too soon, either, because Marc was all over me.

  “I can’t believe you met a goddamned mermaid and didn’t tell me!”

  “Hey, there was a lot going on that week. Most likely.”

  Sinclair chuckled. “Oh, my own, tell him the real reason you’ve repressed conscious knowledge of Dr. Bimm and the ways of her people.”

  “No.” I pouted.

  “As you like.” My traitorous husband turned to Marc. “The good doctor is, ah, volatile. And my beloved is flippant and easily distracted. At times,” he added, like that made it better. “Dr. Bimm despaired of keeping her attention, so she seized an issue of Time and struck the queen.”

  Marc’s mouth popped open. “She hit you?”

  I nodded. “With a rolled-up magazine.” I could still feel the sting. “On my nose.”

  “Like a dog?” I couldn’t tell if he was thrilled or horrified.

  “Exactly like a dog,” I confirmed. “I was so flabbergasted I forgot to beat her to death.”

  “Dr. Bimm,” Sinclair said, already headed back to his office where Operation Terrible Plan was being ironed out, “does not suffer fools gladly.”

  “Got that right,” I muttered, and when Marc started laughing and didn’t stop, I grabbed a coupon insert and smacked him on the nose. He shrieked and hit me back, and I ended up chasing a zombie all over our mansion the day my best friend moved away to guarantee her family’s safety. So, a mixed day.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Dread queen, Tina and I have come up with a plan to stop the Antichrist, punish your father, and discredit the reporters covering this story. We’ll need to put it into practice at once. With a little luck—which you have always brought me—this entire episode will be a thing of the past a week from now.”

  It was later that same day, the end of a bad week and a stressful month. And it was finally time to get down to it. We were in Sinclair’s office, just down the hall from our bedroom. I’d been waiting for them forever, seemed like. There was only so much research I could lose myself in. And if my DVR got any more stuffed with shows I didn’t have time to watch, it’d explode all over the TV parlor.

  “Yeah, I know. Been waiting for you to bring it to me.”

  “Ah. Very good.” They were both in their casual Friday business suits: a deep rose for Tina, black for Sinclair. No shoes: Tina was wearing black stockings, and Sinclair had black dress socks. Me? Deep brown leggings, red hip-length sweater, slouchy red and white socks. Because I (a) knew how to dress for lounging
about the house, and (b) wasn’t stuck in the past. I loved Sinclair and Tina, but sometimes they acted every year of their great age. Case in point: their awful plan. “Shall we walk you through it?”

  “Nope. You’re going to tell vampires all over the city, state, and country to snatch the reporters covering this story, work vamp mojo on them, and get them to either retract everything or ‘discover’ the whole thing was a hoax. You’ll discredit Laura by revealing she’s the Antichrist, arrange for my dad to take a long swim in the Mississippi with lead Uggs, and then stomp every inquiry into all that you did, until people have forgotten or lost interest or are too scared to poke around anymore. And all for the greater good. Right?”

  They both gaped at me. Finally Sinclair cleared his throat. “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than—”

  “And we’re not doing it. Not any of it.”

  “Wait—you knew?” Tina asked me, surprised.

  “I guessed. C’mon, we’ve been hanging out for how long? I know how you both think. You’re traditionalists. You still send letters snail mail, for heaven’s sake. So you were going to come up with a traditional vampire solution to an old problem: Stomp the messengers. Kill the message. Sow enough fear and confusion to keep working under everyone’s sightline. Then wait for things to get back to normal. And why not? Time’s on our side.” I paused then added, very gently, “That won’t work this time. We’re not doing that this time.”

  Tina was shaking her head. “Majesty . . . forgive me . . . but then why wait for us to decide on a course of action?”

  “Because I was hoping you’d come up with something better,” I replied bluntly. “You’re both smarter than I am; it wasn’t an unreasonable thought. Maybe you’d have a plan B that wasn’t quite so Gestapo-esque that we could have gone with. But you don’t. Right?”

  A sharp inhale from Sinclair, which was a pretty good indication of his shock, since he didn’t have to breathe. He’d lost friends, good friends, in World War II. He had so much contempt for Hitler you’d think the guy was still around causing trouble. “Do not—”