Undead and Unstable (6 page)

(I wasn’t quite sure about my sister Laura, the Antichrist.)

The coolest thing was how Jessica didn’t blink, or pause. Just took a step back while holding the kitchen door and yelled, “Milk shakes, idiots!”

I had to take a few seconds and pretend to be busy dumping scoops of ice cream into the blender, so she couldn’t see my face. I didn’t leak tears anymore, but any girlfriend can tell at a glance when you’re upset or touched or pissed.

After a few seconds I was able to turn my back when I went to the fridge, and no longer had to pretend. Because now I had a whole new problem: where were my candy bars? My precious delectable Hershey bars, always kept in the fridge (room temp chocolate = yuck) so I could chop them and dump them into a blender with the Precious and a generous splash of whole milk, were not in their appointed spot!

“This is not the right time for me to deal with this,” I growled, pawing past gallons of milk, some sticks of butter, Jessica’s vile ginger ale (with actual lumps of ginger in it, which did not belong in ginger ale!), a few boxes of leftover Chinese takeout (who was eating
that
, I had no idea), a bottle of blueberry vodka (what, the freezer wasn’t enough, fer Chrissake?), a box of Godiva cookies (pretty decent chocolate, but useless for my needs), and a couple of tins of Giselle’s cat food. Ouch. Another of my many character flaws: I was a little slow to do my share of the upkeep around here.

“All right, first off, remind me to clean out the fridge,” I said into the fridge, still hunting. “This is just sad, and also gross. And second, if one of you amoral thieving shitheads filched my Hershey’s, there will be
blood
on the
streets
, I swear it,
blood
on the
st
—oh, there they are.” Why they were in the door slot for eggs I did not know and did not give one shit.

I heard the
fwoomp
of the kitchen door swinging open, and looked up in time to see Antonia and Garrett walk in. Sinclair and Jessica were right behind them, and Nick/Dick was behind
them.

“Oh, good,” I said, grateful. Sometimes it could take over half an hour just to round everybody up.

“Uh-oh,” Nick said, eyeing the Precious and grinning. It was weird that he didn’t hate me in this timeline. The way I remembered it, he had made Jessica pick between him and me … and she picked me! (I couldn’t believe it, either.) But that had never happened now. So … had it never happened? Even though I could remember? Because it was so awkward and awful? Ow, I’m hurting my brain. “Bringing out the big guns, vampire queen.”

And that! What was that? He said it, but not in a mean way. In a happy way. Like me being a vampire was a good thing. Like it hadn’t ruined his life.

I don’t like being confused and angry!

“You keep shooting me these incredulous glances,” he continued (happily!). “I take it in the old timeline we weren’t close?”

“Uh, she wasn’t pregnant, and you weren’t living here.” To put it mildly. Also, I accidentally tortured you and then my husband did, too. Oops! “But we’ve got weirder problems.”

“Yeah. Like how she’s not dead anymore.” He pointed at Antonia, who’d gone to the booze freezer for a drink, and was now knocking back espresso vodka in a milk glass.

“Weirder than that, even.”

Antonia chortled in mid-gulp. Her black rat’s-nest hair was its usual unkempt mess … on a good day, Antonia looked like a witch having a bad day. Not that she wasn’t gorgeous—she was. Sickeningly so, what with the black masses of tumbled and tousled hair and the pale skin and the burning werewolf-y eyes. But she was weird. All werewolves were.

“Not weirder than that,” Jessica mock-gasped. “Nothing could be weirder than that.”

“What’s weird about it? I left. Now I’m back. Don’t throw me a party.”

“Don’t worry.”

Antonia glanced around. “Where’s Tina?”

See, see? Nothing about Marc being dead. Nothing about hell. Just “time for booze and then I think I’ll bang my man for a while, don’t wait up and ha ha, I scored more free vodka off Tina, and oh by the way, where is she?”

“Everything’s better now,” Garrett said with a sweet smile. But I expected his reaction, too. Garrett was a little … off. He’d been a Fiend (a vampire deliberately starved until it went feral and bitchy) for decades, and had been dead going on a hundred years. That had shattered any vibrancy of personality he’d ever had in life. He’d been a shell of a vamp until Antonia swooped into his pants. I mean, his life.

Garrett looked at the world with envious simplicity: life without Antonia wasn’t worth living. Antonia was back. Knit one, purl two. All was well. Again: envious simplicity.

But I was starting to wonder. We sometimes wrote him off as a mindless savage who can cast on, knit, and then purl while blindfolded. But I tended to forget, even though he brings out my protective side, that Garrett wasn’t a kid, and hadn’t been one for close to a hundred years. And if I ever wanted to make my very own serial killer, putting someone through all that Garrett had endured was as close to a fool-proof recipe as I could get. I knew there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to protect Antonia. I also knew he was a liar and a coward.

I guess seeing the Marc Thing a few days ago was giving me some unwanted perspective on “it’s always the quiet ones.” And this is the part where, if this was a movie and I was a sensible (yet hot) heroine, I’d make a vow to “get to the bottom of this.” Then I’d haul out another chestnut by adding, “This isn’t over.” By which I’d really mean, it’s over. I mean, who has the energy?

Spreadsheets. That’s what we needed. Some kind of written record of all the weird stuff we should never lose track of no matter how busy or life-or-death things got. Then when things were settled (however briefly), I could look on my Spreadsheet O’Evil and Scary and say, “That’s right, I caught Garrett in some lies and he tricked me into going to hell and I also know he’s killed more people than Hot Pockets … maybe we should follow up and do a little investigation?”

It would be easy! Which was the flaw. Too easy, if anything, because such things tended to get shoved out of my brain when the Big Bad of the week reared its—

“—much of a problem, right?”

“Yeah, but with this particular problem,” I said, “it’s time to get moving. We can’t just lie around working on spreadsheets, people!”

“Uh, what?”

“Never mind. Here it is: I’ve been sitting around long enough.”

“Does this have anything to do with how much you hate Thanksgiving?” Nick/Dick asked.

“Don’t speak to me about That Holiday.”

“Does this mean you’re not going to make a cornucopia for the dining room?”

“I’d rather gargle gasoline and then light up a cigarette.”

Sinclair laughed. “What an … interesting mental image that makes.”

“And I’ll save plenty of gas for you, too,” I threatened. My parents had gotten divorced in November. Jessica’s parents were killed in November. The Ant was born in November! April was
not
the cruelest month. “So you’d better stay on your toes, pal.”

“This,” my husband commented, sounding not at all perturbed at the thought of being burned alive, “will be the third time this week I have fallen in love with the queen all over again.”

“And it’s only Saturday,” Jessica pointed out.

“Is it really?” I was amazed. It felt like eight years had gone by. Too much happening and not much time to soak it up. “Oh, crap. So Thanksgiving is next week already?” No wonder my teeth were on edge. “God, that sounds ominous. It’s a whole damn holiday lurking in next week’s calendar. Just waiting to pounce.”

“It’s turkey and football,” Nick/Dick said, exasperated.

“With a side helping of genocide,” Antonia snickered. She had by now drained her glass. “You think it’s bad here? Try New England this time of year. It’s all Thanksgiving and Pilgrims all the time out there.”

“Gross,” I said, appalled. Ye gods, I’d never thought of it, but she was right: Thanksgiving must be pure heck if you hated it and yet were surrounded by it. “Remind me to count my blessings.”

“Why?” She was rolling sky blue yarn so fast her fingers were a blur. “You never do, anyway.”

“Can we get back to the matter at hand if it’s not too much trouble? Like I said, weird stuff is going on, and it’s time to fix it. We’re gonna fix it so
hard…
”

“What are we fixing?” Garrett asked. For him, that was practically a speech. A Gettysburg Address, even.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you,” I warned, “but with Marc dead, I’ve gotta have my focus—”

“What
are
we fixing?” Nick/Dick interrupted. “Because this conversation is already making me nervous.”

“Don’t be nervous! Okay, I’ve gotta—remind me to talk to you guys about a spreadsheet later, but for now, there’s nothing to be nervous about. ‘Betsy can fix it’ doesn’t necessarily always translate to ‘Betsy accidentally destroyed the relationship/mansion/Eastern Sea board/world.” A short silence followed. “What? It doesn’t. But I think I’ve got a good shot at fixing it.”

“Fixing what? A spreadsheet?”

“No. Fixing—”

“Not Marc being dead,” Jessica said, an expression of reproach on her face. “You’re
not
talking about that.”

“Oh yes I am.” I must have been wearing one of those incredulous expressions Nick talked about. “What else do you think would be on my mind? The new Manolos? The fact that, incomprehensibly, Christian Louboutin doesn’t exist in this timeline?”

“Well…”

Nick wasn’t looking at me. Neither was Sinclair. Antonia tossed the now-round ball of yarn into Garrett’s bag and began rolling a new ball of yarn. Garrett was carefully crocheting … uh … something red and blue and big (too big to be a potholder, too small to be a blanket … maybe a grill cover?). His lap was full of yarn; his entire attention appeared to be on the whatever-it-was he was making.

Only Jessica, who’d put up with my bushwah for almost two decades, had the courage to look me in the face and say, “Yeah, kinda. Why wouldn’t you be worrying about shoes and their designers?”

“Well, you’re totally wrong because … okay, that’s a good point about Christian, but I can’t fix that.” Probably I couldn’t fix it. I’d look into it, sure, but one nightmare at a time. “Marc, now, Marc maybe I can fix. I’m gonna try, at least.”

“Why?”

“Hello! Queen of the vampires? Power over all the dead, or however the saying goes? Ring-a-ding-dinging a bell?”

“Not ‘why,’ why
you
? ‘Why,’ why would you
do
that?”

“Why wouldn’t I do that?” Was Jessica’s unborn baby eating her brain? She was normally quicker on the uptake. Was it just me, or were we all talking in riddles?

“Have you thought you might respect his choice?” Nick asked quietly.

“A braver man than I,” Sinclair said, rolling his big dark eyes heavenward.

“Ah, shaddup already from you. Listen, Nick—”

“Dick.”

“Stop it. Detective Berry, Marc killed himself because he was scared, I get that.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t talk…” I paused as Jessica judiciously hit the blender, which hummed and brayed and whirred for a good thirty seconds, an endless time in which my friends and I glared at each other. This hadn’t taken long to get nasty. For me to turn it nasty, I guess it’d be fair to say. I continued as she poured milk shakes, as everyone took hasty slurps. “… like I’m stupid.”

“No, we wouldn’t want to do that.” Like that! See? There was the Nick/Dick I knew, not the Mr. Happy Cop I’d been dealing with.

“Sure he was scared. He was scared of being the Marc Thing,” I said, assuming the baby had also been dining on Nick’s teeny brain cells as well. “Not scared to keep living. He loved it here.”

“Betsy, you met him when he was about to jump off a building!”

“Well, yeah.” Anything sounded bad when you said it like that. “But then he was better.”

“Oh, so you cured his chronic depression? Is that one of your superpowers now?”

Hmm, no. But wouldn’t it be cool? “Anything sounds bad when you say it—”

“He was a borderline alcoholic who couldn’t stay sober. He was a gay man who never dated, a man who had no relationship with his father, his only family.”

“We’re his family.”

He wasn’t listening. He was leaning so far forward his suit jacket was open and I could see the gun clipped to his belt. “This was an unhappy man. For God’s sake—sorry, Sinclair—I mean, for crying out loud, just let him rest in peace.”

“Stop talking about him in the past tense!”
Somehow I was on my feet and Nick/Dick was on his, and had backed up. Sinclair had moved across the table and was standing at my side, almost ready to block me. Like I was going to hurt Dickie/Nickie. And Antonia was now standing in front of me, like Dickie/Nickie was going to hurt
me
. I think it’d be safe to say we were all temporarily freaked.

“It seems I have not arrived in the nick of time,” Tina said, standing in the kitchen doorway, holding it open with tented fingers and totally stealing that line from
Practical Magic.