He was laughing. The kind of laughter that you can’t hold back; it just explodes out of you. I could tell he was trying to stop and couldn’t.
“As a rebuttal,” I said when he’d calmed down, “that sucked.”
“My apologies. And I agree, most definitely. You and my lord should absolutely hold an election. Walk right to the front of the room wearing a cross and holding a Bible. Then take them on a tour of Hell. Then challenge anyone to do the same.”
I got it. “Landslide.”
“Oh yes.” He grinned at me and I saw the predator for the first time.
“That’s pretty good. I’ll have to— Nuts.” My phone was buzzing. I pulled it out and saw I had a text from Sinclair.
Young master Mason has burst in upon us insisting he speak to you immediately. He is most distressed. Perhaps you would consider cutting your visit short?
“Yep, you bet.” And not just because I was done with Lawrence. Well, mostly because I was done with Lawrence. I looked up. “To be continued.”
A half bow. “I am always at your service.”
“Good to know.”
“If I may ask a question?”
“Hit me.”
“Never in life or death. How is it your cell phone works in Hell?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s nothing I’m doing. For whatever reason, AT&T works in Hell. I can’t think about it very long or I’ll get really, really scared of AT&T.” By now our walk had brought us past one of the food courts, which was usually where Marc could be—yep. “Marc! Your sweetie’s freaking out back home.”
“Will? Why?” Marc instantly lost interest in whomever he was talking to and whatever they’d been talking about. He actually hopped over a couple of tables to get to me quicker. Zombies: spryer than you’d think! “Is he hurt? What happened? Oh my God, did a vampire get him? Or—oh shit—a member of the press?”
“Let’s find out. Oh, and also, I think you’re in lurrrrrrvvv.”
“Shut up,” he snapped back. “Get me back there now.”
“Shut up, please. Get me back there, please.” That’s right, Lawrence, soak up how a real leader operates. You didn’t have to be an unrelenting douche canoe to command respect.
“I know the combination to your safe and I know exactly how flammable your shoe closet is.”
“Right, well, not a moment to waste.” Marc was probably kidding, but I was taking no chances.
Some things you just don’t joke about.
CHAPTER
NINE
To my joy, Jessica, her weird babies, my mom, and BabyJon were all at the mansion when I popped in. I hugged Jess so hard her feet left the ground, which I’ve been doing since we were in junior high and which she’s pretended to hate almost as long. “Yay! Hi!”
“Ooof, jeez, take it easy on my bones.” She shook loose—she was like a bundle of sticks, all pointy edges and gorgeous sharp elbows and bony knees—and thrust a baby at me. “Here. Make yourself useful.”
“No way, I’ve been useful enough for one day.” But I took it, cradling the baby like it was a soft little football that smelled like milk. Her twins were still too little for me to tell them apart, though they were fraternal, not identical. This one—I had it narrowed down—was either Elizabeth or Eric. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, honey.” My mother was holding my brother/son (bron? srother?) comfortably, his diapered bottom snuggled against her arm. She was the way she’d always been; my first memory was of being held the exact same way, snuggling into her shoulder and twining my teeny fingers into her white curls. (I’d found out later she’d brought me, age three at the time, to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. She was a Custer fangirl.)
Mom had gone prematurely white-haired in high school and had had a head of natural white curls as long as I’d known her. She was the type of woman I’d like to be when I got older, the kind who are told “you look good” as opposed to “you look good for your age.” She was a little plump, but only enough to make her huggable—she still traveled the country visiting Civil War sites and climbing all over everything. Her picture (“Do not admit!”) was up at Fort Sumter and Shiloh.
She was in her usual gear—dark slacks, tennis shoes (oh the years I wasted trying to teach the woman about quality footwear), a red turtleneck, a cardigan. The clothing of a woman of a certain age, you might call it, except she’s wearing the same thing in all her class photos. The woman was a nut about comfortable shoes and cardigans even as a teenager.
BabyJon was resting his head on her shoulder, either ready for a nap or just getting up from one; he blinked those big beautiful blue eyes at me and smiled. I leaned in to nuzzle his teeny nose and got a sleepy giggle for it.
Mom patted him and turned so she was looking at me. “You’re really getting the hang of popping back and forth, aren’t you? It wasn’t so long ago that you couldn’t do it without Laura.”
“Stop! She’s dead to me, Mom. Never say her name; it’s the verbal equivalent of a hate crime.”
“And after you kicked Laura out of Hell,” my cruel, cruel mother went on with relentless cheer, “you needed those shoes to figure out how to teleport back and forth.”
“Yes, you had to click your heels together.” From Jessica, who was also cruel. Because this was the life I had chosen: free of yes-men. “There’s no place like Macy’s; there’s no place like Macy’s—”
“I hate you both,” I announced. “So much.” Why were these terrible women entrusted with infants? Was this why society was screwed?
“But now you don’t even need the shoes.”
No, I didn’t need the shoes anymore. But for the longest time, no matter how often I practiced, I’d go from Hell and end up in the garden shed. Every damned time. Took weeks of practice just to ’port into the house. These days, my control was better, but I don’t think it was because I was improving. I think I just worried less, because we had bigger problems. And when I worried less, things just fell into place.
“No, I don’t need the shoes anymore.”
“So you just . . . what?”
“I focus. I concentrate.” I waited for the scorn and guffaws. “And then I’m there.”
“I’m not sure what’s stranger . . . how you’re changing or how quickly we’re getting used to the changes.”
I shrugged as she popped BabyJon into the portable crib she’d set up in the corner. She had a point—five years ago, I was still alive; I had a day job; I was dateless and not a little aimless. My biggest worries were avoiding the Ant and not strangling the executives I worked with, the ones who thought dumping a box of paper clips into a copy machine meant the copies would come out clipped.* If this was a TV show, the “previously on the Betsy show” part would take hours.
“How come you’re here? Not that I mind, but I thought we agreed the babies were safer elsewhere until the ruckus died down.”
“They are,” Mom agreed, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t visit.”
“Actually, I thought that was exactly what it—”
“Dick had to quit the Cop Shop,” Jessica said abruptly, putting a twin down beside BabyJon. Port-a-cribs, I was coming to learn, were one of the greatest inventions ever to spring from the mind of (wo)man. They were right up there with the telephone in terms of convenience. Thirty seconds to set up! Ten to take down! Goddamned miraculous is what it was, and oh hell, that was bad.
“Well, shit,” I said, dismayed. Detective Richard Berry, also known as Jessica’s boyfriend and sire of weird babies, had been in our lives before I’d died (the first time). I’d been attacked outside Khan’s Mongolian BBQ by a pack of feral, yowling, howling vampires, fended them off with well-placed kicks from the toes of my pointy shoes (thank goodness I’d avoided round-toed shoes that day) and my purse, like it was 1955 instead of the twenty-first century. I didn’t know it then,
but that had been step one of my evolution from out-of-work administrative assistant to reigning queen of vampires/Hell.*
Anyway, Detective Dick had been the cop assigned to my case. We’d flirted with the idea of flirting, but to be frank, wealthy blonds with swimmers’ builds didn’t do it for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I liked them tall, dark, and vampiric. (And also wealthy. But in fairness to moi, I had no idea Eric Sinclair was rich when we met. Mostly I was focused on how much I loathed the very sight of him. We did not meet cute.)
“But Richard loves being a cop,” my mother said. She’d gone right over to Jess and patted her, and Jessica sort of leaned—casually, like she wasn’t consciously doing it—until she was basically slumped onto my mom like a gorgeous gangly leech. “He never needed that job.”
Truth. Richard Berry was rich, rich, rich. Almost as rich as Jessica, who was probably the wealthiest person in the state. Wealthiest live person, anyway. Not sure how I started out as a middle-class suburban kid and ended up surrounded by millionaires, but it happened. I am the poor white trash of our set. (Note to self: stop bragging about being the poorest, dumbest person in the room.)
“He does love the job,” Jessica agreed, still slumping. “But the news about vampires and all the media attention—it put him in a tough spot. They even caught him on camera a couple of times, and you can bet his bosses had questions.”
“I’ll bet.” So, how long have you been living with vampires? Or crazy people who think they’re vampires? You understand if they faked their deaths, that’s against the law, right? Let’s talk. Ugh.
“So he resigned before they could suggest a permanent unpaid leave of absence.”
“I’m really sorry.” That was it. That was all I had.
Jessica shrugged, almost dislodging herself from Mom’s shoulder. “There are worse problems than having the means to be a stay-at-home dad with someone you love. He might go into private investigation in a while—we want to see how everything shakes out first.”
“Okay.” My brain was already churning. Maybe he could be a cop-to-vampire liaison? He had a unique perspective unmatched by that of any other cop anywhere. Which, it was now occurring to me, was probably why he felt he had to leave. But couldn’t it be turned into a positive? Knowing vampires shouldn’t be a liability.
And not going along with the Antichrist’s plan to force the world to convert to Christianity shouldn’t be causing all the trouble, but it was. Because as much as I liked to bitch about my father and my sister, I was also responsible for the mess we were in up to our necks.
CHAPTER
TEN
LAST MONTH, ON THE BETSY SHOW . . .
“I’ll definitively prove there is a God!”
“—pires to the— What?”
Laura nodded at me with a big smile that wasn’t scary at all. “I’m going to prove there’s a God. Prove it to the world.”
I just sat there and tried to let that seep into my brain. It was so far from what Sinclair and I assumed she was up to, but I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.
There she sat, my half sister, Laura Goodman (subtle, fates or God or whomever), dressed in her Sunday best (she had a horror of people who wore jeans to church): a high-necked pink blouse, a rose-colored knee-length skirt, cream-colored tights, chunky black loafers. Chunky loafers is what women wore in the winter when the weather wasn’t bad enough for boots or good enough for pumps. Laura’s were especially hideous, like lumps of tires fashioned into a vague shoe shape. We had a few things in common; our fashion sense wasn’t one of them.
Besides, she was so irritatingly, thoroughly gorgeous, she could have been wearing newspapers. Light blond hair halfway down her back, perfect fair complexion with a natural rosy blush, big blue eyes that went poison green when she was angry, or murderous, or murderously angry.
Nobody ever looked at Laura Goodman and thought, Spawn of Satan? Oh, sure. Knew it the minute I laid eyes on her.
I stopped pondering her annoying good looks and managed, “Could you say that again, please?”
“You cheated me of my birthright.”
“No, no, the other thing.” So not in the mood for the “Satan and I tricked you into running Hell but now I want to bitch about the consequences” chat. I’d warned her at the time that getting your own way was often as much a curse as it was a blessing. See: Sinclair’s life, death, and afterlife, also mine, the Ant finally landing my father, and anyone who voted for Hitler back in the day.
“This is the other thing,” she corrected. “You want the background, don’t you?”
Not really.
“I can’t do what I was born to do—”
“Be effortlessly gorgeous while sitting in judgment on pretty much everybody as you ignore your own sins?”
Her lips thinned but she continued. “But I can do this. I can bring faith to the world.”
“How?”
“Any way I can.” She leaned forward, warming to her subject. Leaning away from her would probably be interpreted as unfriendly. Maybe I could pretend I didn’t want to catch her cold? If she had one. And if I could still catch colds. “Lectures, videos, websites. I already started a few while I was waiting for you to get back.” Was there a tiny hint of reproach in her tone? No. I decided there wasn’t, because if there was, I’d have to slap the shit out of her with a hymnal. “So I’ve been preparing the ground, so to speak, talking about our adventures and Hell and such while waiting for you.”
“That’s why Sinclair thinks the plan is to show the world vampires exist,” I said, thinking out loud.
She shrugged. “Yes, I imagine his undead spies keep him well informed.” When I raised my eyebrows she added, “Yes, he called me a couple of times, but I’m not obligated to explain myself to him.” Adding in a mutter, “I don’t know how he keeps getting my number . . .”
“So he was tipped off after he heard about the Betsy and Laura: Time-Travelin’ Cuties show.” God, Marc would have a field day with this . . .
“What, every other sinner can have a YouTube channel but I can’t?”
“Um . . .” Stay focused. I was already envisioning the conversation my husband and I would have: Good news! She’s not outing vamps. There’s a teeny bit of bad news, though. Why don’t you lie down while I tell you about her Great Idea . . .
Meanwhile she was obliviously babbling. “I’d be different from the regular preachers . . . They’re talking about faith, which is all well and good for someone who isn’t us. I can offer proof. Look what just you and I have seen in . . . what? Less than four years? I always believed in Him, and I think you did, too—your mother failed you in your teenage years but she did make sure you went to Sunday school long enough to—”
“Do not say one
(church you’re in church)
dang word against my mother.”
Laura cut herself off and even flushed a little. “You’re right. That was inappropriate. I like your mom.”
“I know you do.” I had to shake my head at my little sister’s many dichotomies. Skirts in church and brownies in the basement when not plotting to dump Hell on the vampire queen and murdering random serial killers. Genuinely fond of my mom—she called her Dr. Taylor and occasionally stopped in just to chat, or to play with our half brother, BabyJon—but wouldn’t shed a tear at my funeral. Blithely ready to shove God onto the world whether the world wants it or not, but gets embarrassed when called out for being rude.
“You were telling me,” I prompted without grimacing or clutching my temples, “about your Great Idea.” God, now I was using the caps. At least it wasn’t pronounced in all caps, like when fiftysomethings or thirteensomethings got on social media for the first time and felt every post had to be a scream.
“Okay, so you always believed in Him, but before your—uh—unfortunate death—it was strictly faith. And I had faith wi
thout proof until my thirteenth birthday, when Mother appeared and explained my destiny. Then I knew. And we can help everyone know. We’ve time traveled, we’ve seen Hell; my mother was the devil, you’re the new devil! We know the Bible’s right; we can tell people! We can save everybody!”
“Why . . . why would we do that?” Was she talking about us going on some sort of . . . of lecture circuit of the damned? Would we be copresenters, or would it be her show and I’d be trotted out like the miniature elephant in Jurassic Park: Look what we made! Give us money and we’ll make more! (The book, not the movie. I loved that stupid dwarf elephant. The scientists should have skipped the dinosaurs and just engineered a huge park of thousands of dwarf elephants. If they escaped, it’d be annoying but also adorable.) “Laura?”
“Why wouldn’t we do that?” she replied, puzzled. She was leaning toward me; our hands were almost touching; she was as friendly and excited as I’d seen her in weeks. Our last meeting hadn’t been so pleasant. Was she—was she trying to forge a new relationship with me? Was setting up the We Can Prove God Exists lecture series her way of reconciling herself to what she’d lost? Was she regretting her choices less than a month after she had made them, or was this the plan all along?
“I’ve barely started, and I wanted to tell you right away—”
Really?
“—but you’ve been gone.”
“Wow.”
“I know!”
“You actually managed to make me being in Hell, doing your job, sound like a character flaw, or like I was rude to keep your Great Idea waiting. I can’t even figure out the time thing between dimensions—”
“Conjure up a row of clocks, like in a brokerage firm.”
“—when I was—well, yes, that was Marc’s suggestion and it’ll probably work, but it’s not like I was off having fun!” Although listening to Dame Washington bitch about her kid had been pretty entertaining . . . and pissing off all the teens and twentysomethings with my No Tweets rule (and confusing everyone else over fifty: “What’s tweets?”) had also been fun . . .