“I also need some clothes,” I continued, sitting up and crossing my legs, and using my other arm to shield my tits. Which was stupid; he’d already seen me naked. In fact, I’d been nakedly exposed since he unzipped the body bag, then unceremoniously dumped me onto this big shiny table.
No
sheets! They just flop the naked corpses onto the tables where they can ogle our dead nudity, the pervs.
Law and Order
lied to me!
Oh, and the toe tag? Hurt like a
bitch
! (Who’d have thought? It hurts when someone ties a wire around your big toe and then cinches it tight. Savages.)
The poor doc dropped the big shiny saw-thingy, and I caught it before it could break half the bones of his foot. Far from being reassured by my swift, toe-saving action, he went whiter (if possible; could paper get paler? Could marshmallow fluff? Mmm, marshmallow fluff . . .) and backed away.
“Sorry to scare you.”
Nothing.
“Uh, I don’t suppose you know how I got here?”
Still nothing, this time accompanied by so much head shaking, at first I thought he was having a seizure.
I thought:
Better not get off the table and follow him across the room just yet. This was no time for the one who wasn’t a corpse to get hysterical.
I tried again. “Do you maybe know where I am? Come on, you must know where I am. Think hard. Hey, I’ll even give you a hint: it’s where
you
are. Anything? Bueller? Bueller? Also, stop staring at my tits.”
“Dead,” he told me.
“Betsy Taylor.” I stuck out my hand. “I’ll be the corpse you’re not cutting up today. Maybe you should sit down.” Worried, I hopped off the table and steadied him. “Listen, I’m not dangerous or anything.” This was a gigantic lie, but one told in a good cause. The poor guy really did look like he was going to plant a header right in the middle of my freezing steel table.
“You didn’t wake up,” he explained, “you couldn’t because you’re
dead
.” The doc was slender and short, with wispy blond hair and bulging blue eyes. His voice was a surprising baritone . . . I would have expected him to sound more reedy in his terror. “You didn’t wake up. You couldn’t wake up. Because you’re dead.”
“No, I didn’t. And yep, I am. But while I was waiting for you to get down to it, I had a better idea then letting you chop up my brain, so I sprang into action, all heroic and determined to right wrongs and stuff. Wasn’t it cool?”
I set down the saw. Ohhhh, boy. I was sooo thirsty. Poor guy. Feeding right now radically increased my chances of getting the hell out of here and back to the mansion. Thus, I would feed right now.
Poor guy.
“Listen, can I have some scrubs? Or my clothes? And maybe your car keys? And can I borrow your cell phone? Oh, hell, just give me everything you can get your hands on.” I briskly clapped my hands in front of his face. “Dude!
Ándele
. That’s Spanish for get your ass in gear, scrubs.”
CHAPTER ONE
SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER . . .
“Okay. I have to bring you up to speed. Okay? Sinclair?”
The king of the vampires was lying facedown on our bare mattress. Bare because in our doin’-it-like-monkeys frenzy, the sheets had been yanked and tattered, the pillows were in the bathtub, and at least two of the west windows were broken. The window guys downtown absolutely loved us. They’ve started giving us discounts.
“Hey! Are you listening?”
“Gummff ummf uhnn gunh.” My husband was as loose and relaxed as I’ve ever seen him; I had marital-relationed him to death. (Almost.) He turned his head. “Allow me to enjoy the last of my postcoital coma, please.”
“No time!”
“Why?” he mewled.
Note the date and time, please, and not because of all the time traveling. I didn’t think Sinclair
could
mewl. Kittens did that. Whiny ex-wives. (Or whiny current wives.) Kids not getting their own way did that, grown women did that, and ouch, when they made that shrill extended meeeeeewwwllll, it felt like that icky earworm from
Wrath of Khan
drillin’ in there.
Ech, I can hear Ricardo “Welcome to Fantasy Island” Montalban now from one of the least lame
Star Trek
movies: Their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex; this has the yucky effect of rendering the poor things big-time susceptible to yucky suggestion and as they grow, yuckier and yuckier, madness and death are waiting for them in all their yuckiness,
gross
.
Anyway. I hate that noise and didn’t think my husband could make it. But he could. The things I learn when I return from time travel and hell.
Huh. He was still talking.
“You are back, you are alive, you are beautiful and sated (at least I hope), you know all—”
“All? You think I know all? Clearly I came back in time and found the wrong Sink Lair. I’m trapped in a weird parallel universe where you still talk
all
the
time.
” Seemed like I spent half my afterlife waiting for him to take a breath so I could jump in. Also, vampires? Never need to take a breath. So you see what I’ve been dealing with.
“Phaugh, do not babble, due to your jaunts you know how we all came together in the recent past, because of the far past, and . . .” He trailed off. I waited. Knowing my husband, it’d be profound and life-changing. It’d help me see a disaster as a not-so-terrible disaster, probably. It’d convince me I wasn’t alone in a cruel world. It’d . . . “. . . Mmzzzzz.”
“Hey! Wake up!” I jabbed him in the bicep with my toe. Okay, I kicked him in the arm. He flopped bonelessly off the bed.
“I’ve missed your tender love play, Elizabeth,” he groaned from the (ripped) carpet.
“We got stuff to do!” I was looming over him without looking right at him, which is quite a trick. I didn’t want to gaze into those dark, dark eyes, or eyeball his “day-amn, that’s a nice ab-pack” or play follow-the-treasure-trail, or anything else that would lead to another forty-five minutes of bringing down the resale value of the entire wing.
“We’ve got things to explain!” I explained. Loudly. “So you need to focus. And also stop being naked. At least we don’t have to deal with gross earworms from space—”
He blinked up at me. “Ah . . . what?”
“—but we’ve got other crap to wade through. Jessica wasn’t pregnant when I left and I didn’t know what a horse trough smelled like in Massachusetts and Minnesota. Whole planets have evolved between my ears!”
“
What?
” He sat up stiffly, like Frankenstein’s monster, a big gorgeous well-hung Frankenstein with big black eyes that were wide with alarm.
“Exactly. Shit. To. Do. Are you on board now, Frank—uh, Sinclair? House meeting, stat! To the smoothie machine, Robin!” I darted off the bed, sheets trailing like a cape. I was Wonder Woman, I was Power Girl, I was—
Sinclairenstein reached out, flash-quick, and whipped the sheets away. It was like an evil, sexy magic trick. “Darling, is it your intention to show the household the color of your nipples? And that you have not one, but two dimples on your—”
“Shut up. I’ll get dressed. Never mind my dimples.”
“Oh, I never do,” he said, surging to his feet so quickly, if I’d blinked I’d have missed it. “I don’t mind this one—”
“Hey!”
“—or this one.”
“Yeeek!”
CHAPTER TWO
“You’re probably all wondering why I’ve called you here.” I
tried, and failed, not to stare at Jessica’s gigantic gut.
“Not really,” The Thing with the Gut replied. “You’re back from hell and chock-full of gossip.”
“Intel,” I grumbled. “Gossip is what old ladies do after church.”
“Gossip is what you do, every day. And given the way you can’t not stare at our kid,” Nick added, sitting beside my best friend with an arm slung casually across her shoulders, “I’m guessing we’re living in an altered time stream.”
I gaped. I couldn’t help it. Every word I had ever uttered since the age of twenty-nine months (shut up, I was a slow talker) ran right out of my brain. I was morbidly aware my mouth was hanging open, and prayed most of the bugs in the mansion were dead on one of a hundred windowsills and not flying around looking for something to fly into. “I, uh, well, that’s a real time-saver for me. I’ll come right out and admit it. I thought this would take longer to explain.”
Wordlessly, they jerked their thumbs at Sinclair. Seeing me stare and flop still more, Jessica added, “You want the CliffsNotes version?”
“Are you two done? Sounds like you’re done. Thank God you’re done.” Another roommate, Dr. Marc Spangler, shoved the swinging kitchen door open and marched straight to the blender, which was oozing with strawberry-banana smoothies. It was a lava flow of delicious strawberry-icy goodness!
He poured himself a generous cup, stared at the fridge where Tina kept her vodka, debated leaping off the wagon, decided to cling to said wagon for another hour, turned away from the fridge, and plopped onto one of the kitchen chairs around our big, wide wooden table. You could slaughter and dress a moose on the thing. We mostly just drank smoothies there, though.
A quick word about Tina’s vodka collection. Like all vampires, she was constantly thirsty. Unlike many (
many
being my code for
less than a dozen
) she tried to keep it at bay with frozen drinks made from potatoes. She also adored variety. Not that you could tell from her schoolgirl-bait wardrobe. Wait. Did schoolgirl-bait mean she was dressing to bait schoolgirls or was bait to people who liked—argh, focus!
Anyway, in our freezer lurked cinnamon-flavored vodka and bacon-flavored vodka. Ditto chili pepper and bison grass and bubble gum. Go ahead and barf . . . I nearly did.
“Now that you two’ve finished your unholy banging,” Marc began, taking a monster slurp, “tell me all about the past. Is it smelly? Is the food great? Do they really say ‘prithee’? And how come Laura’s not here?”
“Laura didn’t come back with me.” Even as I said it I realized it was weird. “I mean, she made a doorway to here for me, but she stayed in hell. Or made herself a doorway and went to her apartment from hell. Or both. Or neither.”
“Ah, beloved, one of the things I most cherish about you is your attention to detail.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll cherish you for shutting up now. I’m not my sister’s keeper.” Though if anyone needed one, the Antichrist qualified.
Marc was gulping his smoothie, and Jessica and Nick were watching him with some fascination. He had told me once that he’d gotten in the habit of bolting liquid meals when he was an intern. He could gulp down the equivalent of two pints of strawberries in three monster swallows. When he was off the wagon, he drank
all
his meals.
It was an indicator of how little I wanted to talk about the future and the past by how interested I was letting myself get in something I was normally leery about discussing. “Uh, so, how are the AA meetings going?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Don’t take my inventory, Betsy.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted over Nick’s snort.
“It means addicts in recovery know what they’re supposed to do to stay clean and whether or not they’re doing it. They dislike being reminded of it.”
“Is that what you are?” Sinclair asked with interest. “In recovery?”
“Nah.” Slurp. “People in recovery go to meetings. I’m a drunk.”
I clapped a hand over my mouth, but not in time. Marc grinned at my insensitive titter.
I’d never understand why he couldn’t find someone and settle down. He was smart, he was gorgeous, he had true green eyes (d’you know how rare that is? True green, not hazel?). He had black hair, currently cut brutally short into, I’m sorry to report, the Woody Harrelson. He was in his usual outfit of scrubs and his iPod. He was famous at the hospital for listening to heartbeats with one ear and They Might Be Giants in the other.
I know. They Might Be Giants? More like they might be one-hit wonders.
“But you know the old saying,” Marc was saying, “tomorrow being another day and such. And I can’t take credit for that . . . I think Stephen King said it first.”
“Margaret Mitchell did.”
“Not the another-day line. The addicts-go-to-AA line.”
“Like you even read
Gone With the Wind
,” I said. I mentioned how delighted I was in talking about stupid crap instead of the future, right? “Ha!”
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think there was much funny about addiction, outside of Sandra Bullock in
28 Days
. And I won’t deny being mystified by
28 Days Later
. . . she was nowhere to be found in that one.
But Marc, so open about his sexuality, job, and love life, was weirdly closed about his drinking. There were times when he went to an AA meeting every day. And times when he didn’t go for months. He’d made it clear (“Fuck off and die, again.”) he appreciated zero interference, advice, or tough love.