I didn’t sneak. I live here, too. I was not sneaking, nor being a sneak. I walked. I walked right up to the stand. I reached out a hand. I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t. I just wanted to—
Wait.
Okay, I’m back. I had to take a second and go throw up. Which is what I did those few months ago when I grasped the cover to flip the book open. I didn’t even get a good look at the title page, never mind the table of contents, before I started vomiting blood.
As a doctor, I found this to be a somewhat alarming symptom, especially since I had felt perfectly fine ten seconds earlier. I made it to the nearest bathroom—thank goodness the mansion’s got about thirty of them!—and, between bouts, called my friend Marty (part-time EMT, full-time guy who could keep his mouth shut) for a ride to the hospital.
By the time he got me there, I was fine again. His backseat was a mess, though. It cost me six hundred bucks to get it clean again.
Sorry, dude, that was a major digression, not a minor one. So that’s enough about the vampire bible, which I now prudently stay the holy hell away from; let’s get back to Laura.
It’s hard to believe that a gorgeous sweet Norwegian is the Antichrist. And even harder to imagine her destroying a cactus plant, much less the entire world. When she’s blond, anyway.
When Betsy and Laura first hooked up, we had no idea she even had a dark side (which was silly . . . don’t we all?). Then she killed a serial killer. And then she beat a vampire almost to death. More worrisome was the fact that she could have done much, much worse. Because Laura’s weapons pop out of nowhere when she’s mad, and they show up express delivery from hell.
And lately she’s been skipping church. She’d already been over here twice, and Betsy hasn’t been out of the state even twenty-four hours. I think she’s lonesome. Scratch that—I was familiar with all the symptoms. I knew Laura was lonesome.
I also knew she was extremely dangerous. But I know better than to try to open a dialogue with her about the subject. Laura hated her birthright, her heritage, her mother. Hated knowing someone had predicted she’d destroy the world almost a thousand years before she was born. I was pretty sure she hated the fact that we all knew about it, too.
So. Tonight we’re going out for drinks, and I’ll tease her and we’ll gossip about Betsy and Co. at the nearest smoothie bar and then Laura will be herself again.
For a while.
Chapter 13
The last thing we did before going to bed was set up Sinclair’s laptop—
Right, Sinclair, I forgot to explain that. I hardly ever call him Eric. He’s always been Sinclair to me (or Sink Lair, when he’s really pissing me off), just as I have always been Elizabeth (yech!) to him. I still can’t believe my mother stuck me with a first name like Elizabeth when my last name was Taylor. What, did she lose a bet?
Anyway, I was Betsy to everyone except the man I loved.
And speaking of the man I loved, he was rapidly typing something, probably an update e-mail to Tina. Then he showed me one of Marc’s typically annoying e-mails, which went like this:
Hey, girrrrl! miss you guys already, i mean WTF? Hope the furry friends haven’t eaten any of you yet, LOL! love, marc
Oh, boy. Don’t even get me started.
Too late, I’m starting. What the hell was it about e-mail that made everybody forget the stuff they learned in second grade, like capitalizing I and proper names, and using periods? Hello? We all learned how to do this less than five years out of diapers!
And what was with all the increasingly stupid acronyms? Nobody with any sense would dare send out a snail-mail letter written in that odd, juvenile style. No one would send a business letter written like that. But I’ve seen executive VPs send out e-mails riddled with spelling and punctuation errors and LOLs.
Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, somehow because it’s electronic mail, none of the basic grammar rules applied.
Barf.
Sinclair obligingly vacated the desk chair for me. I plopped into it and kicked off my pumps. However the werewolves might feel about us, they were pretty good hosts so far. This was the most beautiful bedroom I’d ever seen. No, not bedroom . . . suite. A sitting room. An office. A teeny kitchen. Two bathrooms. A living room with a piano in the corner. A freaking piano, who lives like this? And a bed so gigantic I felt as small as a saltine cracker when I lay on it.
I clicked on REPLY and rapidly typed.
Marc, you nitwit, how many times do I have to tell you, enough with the acronyms. I’m assuming since you made it through college and medical school that sometime before you left for college someone mentioned a cool new invention: punctuation. Try it sometime. You might like it.
Clicked on SEND. Stretched in the chair like a cat, then got up and ambled over to my husband, who held his arms out to me. He was smiling his sexy, somehow sweet smile and I could see the light glinting off his fangs, teeth so sharp they made a rattlesnake seem like it had a mouthful of rubber bands.
I grinned back, kicked out of my clothes, and pulled the sheet back. As my husband’s fangs sank into my neck and things began to go dark and sweet around the edges of my brain, I had a thought: What about werewolf hearing? Shit on that, how about their sense of smell, which was even better than a vampire’s? Even if they couldn’t hear us, they could sure tell what we were doing.
Then Eric’s fingers were gently parting my thighs and stroking me in that luscious, insistent way he knew I loved, and I forgot all about werewolf hearing. Hell, I’d be lucky if I didn’t forget my own name.
Chapter 14
Dude!
You will not believe this. I was there, and I almost don’t believe it. And there’s no way to pretty this up, so I’m just going to spell it straight out: a group of Satan worshippers found Laura.
Yes! And yes, I know how it sounds! But it’s all true; my God, I can hardly type I’m so excited/freaked out/ amazed.
Okay, so this is what happened. Laura called and asked if she could hang out at the mansion, and of course I said yes. It was daytime, so Tina was snoring away somewhere (not that she snored, or even breathed, but you know what I mean). So into the mansion I come, only to be greeted by a scene out of—of—shit, I have no frame of reference for this.
Real Satanists had apparently tracked Laura down via astrology (not my field, so much of the explanation I got later went right over my head). Apparently, just as there was a star of Bethlehem, there is also a Morningstar, which shows up just before the Antichrist comes into her maturity.
?????
Seriously, dude, I know how it sounds. A star? Laura’s own star, shining down on the planet like a treasure map leading Satanists to our door? (And why not her apartment? Why Betsy’s place?) A star that didn’t show until her maturity, what the hell did that mean? The star didn’t show itself until she had a driver’s license? A passport? Until she was legal drinking age? What?
Laura either didn’t know, or wasn’t saying, pardon me while I evince a complete lack of surprise. And I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is the star is here (I plan to dip into my savings first thing tomorrow and buy a decent telescope to set up in the yard . . . I simply have to see this puppy for myself) and people who have read the right books and worshipped the right demon and made the right sacrifices (I’m guessing on that last one, but the movies can’t be all wrong, right? Memo to me: Netflix Rosemary’s Baby.).
Anyway, the right people can now track Laura down pretty much at will.
Which is why, when I walked into the house after a milk run, I nearly tripped over the dozen people kneeling in front of Laura, who was blushing like a tomato. A demonic tomato. I was instantly alarmed; she was so fire-hydrant red, so incredibly flushed, I was afraid she was going to stroke out, and I almost dropped the milk.
They had (not on purpose, I’m sure of that) backed Laura into a corner of the kitchen and were moaning and praying.
Yeah. Praying. Praying to Laura.
I don’t know what I should do with this information, not to mention the stuff that happened afterward. Betsy has enough on her plate these days. And it wasn’t like Laura had killed anybody.
In fact, the way she handled it was nothing short of hilarious. She—
Wait. She’s calling me from the hallway. More later, dude.
Chapter 15
When I next opened my eyes, it was, according to the grandfather clock bonging away at the other end of our suite, four o’clock. Our bedroom was utterly gloomy, thanks to all the heavy curtains, so I stretched and sat up, swung my legs over the bed, and thought about what to do.
Sinclair was still—ha, ha—dead to the world beside me. He was on his side, one arm flung out, palm up. His normally pin-neat hair was a ruffled dark mass; his lips were slightly parted.
I watched his chest for a long time . . . three minutes, almost. I think it rose once. But he felt like living flesh; he was warm (we’re speaking comparably, of course). He wasn’t a corpse, he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t alive, either.
Undead.
Stupid word, I’ve always hated that word.
This was the part of every day when I deeply pitied my husband, and I would never tell him. Sinclair needed me for several things—pity wasn’t one of them. He didn’t have to sleep all day, and he could stay awake when the sun came up (unlike yours truly, who would drop like a puppet with her strings cut as soon as it was dawn) but he could never, ever go out into the sun.
I, however, could.
So I got to my feet and checked on BabyJon, who we’d set up in the small sitting room. And by the way? The guy who invented the port-a-crib? A genius of Jonas Salk proportions.
Anyway, he was in his crib, flat on his back with his little arms in the “this is the police, put your hands up” position. If he grew up to be anything like the Ant, he couldn’t practice that position soon enough.
I couldn’t help but smile when I looked at him. Don’t get me wrong, it was unfortunate that my father and his wife died. But BabyJon was mine, now.
Forever.
Best of all, he was adjusting to the new sleeping schedule. After all, I can’t have a kid running around during the day when I sleep. No, BabyJon was officially on graveyard shift now, and for a long time to come.
I wondered what I would tell him when he was older. “Mom, why is there an unconscious man stuffed in the closet?”
“Nothing to worry about, dear, Mommy just wanted a snack.”
Hmm. Better rethink that one. Later. Besides, since he’d be growing up with us, he’d probably think it’s normal for parents to stay up all night and never eat solid food. Or age. Or poop.
A problem for another time, so I popped into the bathroom, which was more or less unnecessary, but old habits, right? Sometime during our late-night chat with the Wyndhams, a castle employee had unpacked our clothes and stocked the bathroom. Good stuff, too—Aveda products.
Feeling minty fresh, I left the bathroom, and pulled on brown velvet leggings and a long-sleeved blue flannel shirt. I was always cold, and had long since donated all my tank tops to Goodwill. I slipped into my Cole Haan Penny Air Loafers and was ready to face the day. What was left of it, anyway.
I had to walk through the rest of the suite, and after a second I realized that our suite was on the west side of the castle. Okay, mansion—really huge, amazing mansion. That looked, to my Midwestern eyes, awfully like a castle.
Someone was being pretty thoughtful. Never let it be said that werewolves weren’t polite hosts—I only had to look around our guest suite to see that. But I drew all the curtains anyway, just to be on the safe side. I didn’t want to take the smallest chance that Sinclair might get burned. The sun wouldn’t go down for another four hours or so.
I stepped out into the hallway, pulled the door closed, and nearly fell over Jessica, who was all but lurking in the doorway of the suite directly across from ours.
“You know, they did let you have that room,” I said. “In fact, I think they’re assuming you’ll use it, as opposed to lingering in strange hallways.”
She responded to me with, “Girl, I am bored outta my tits.”
“Can we have one cross-country quest without talking about your tits?”
Her pretty dark eyes went narrow and thoughtful, and she caressed her cheek with a long fingernail colored jack-o’-lantern orange. After a thoughtful pause, she shook her head. “I don’t see how.”
“I figured.” I scanned the hallway and listened hard: it was as empty as it looked. “Want to find the kitchen? Maybe whip up a—”
“If I have to look at another smoothie this month, I’m going to barf in one of your Beverly Feldmans.”
“And face a terrible, prolonged death.” We fell in step and, when we reached the main staircase, I pointed in the direction of the kitchen—or whatever room smelled like spices, meat, and fresh vegetables.
“How can you be bored in the middle of a Pack of werewolves?”
“Easy. They’re not talking to me. The ones I bump into are soooo polite—bathroom’s right there, the east wing’s over there, one of the indoor pools is through there, the weight room is over there—but I’m a cipher here.”
Jessica, well used to my blank expression, correctly interpreted it as “I am unfamiliar with that word; please explain” and added, “I’m a nobody. A nothing. A zero. This is about vampires and werewolves, which, thank God, I’m neither. No offense.”
“Who could be offended by that?” I muttered, jumping down the last four steps. “That way. Then a right. So, they’ve been nice to you at least?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Listen, I think it’s really good that you’re here—”
“You’re the worst liar in the galaxy.”
“Shut up. Anyway, I sort of forced BabyJon on Sinclair—”
“This I already knew. The entire street knew,” she added thoughtfully.
“—because we’re his parents now and we have to learn how to be a family—”
“Uh-huh, yup. Getting to something I don’t know anytime soon?”
“—but I can’t watch him every minute I’m here.”
“I don’t mind watching him—much—but you know he’ll only be cute and cuddly with you. With me . . .” She sighed. “With everybody else, it’s colic city.”
“Sorry, Jess. I can’t help that. But I appreciate you watching out for him for me.”
She waved it away, and obediently turned left when I pointed. We were now in a slightly narrower hallway, on hardwood floors this time, no carpet. The smell of food was very strong.
“At least you got the boy trained. Sleeps half the day and half the night.”
“He’s really very sweet,” I whined.
Jessica snorted and straight-armed the swinging door into the kitchen.
Like everything, the Wyndham kitchen made mine look like a dining nook. At least four big tables—the kind you could chop anything on—with long legs. Another big table, marble-topped, probably for baking. Three fridges. Another door, which led to industrial-sized freezers. I could smell the Freon.
There were huge windows—one overlooking a kitchen garden—on every wall. The windows on the opposite wall overlooked the Atlantic.
“I could get used to this,” Jessica commented.
“So buy something just like it. You’ve probably got enough money in the sofa cushions for a down payment.”
Jessica shrugged and went to the nearest fridge while I slid onto a bar stool. “I like the place in St. Paul.”
I nodded. Shoot, before the mansion, she’d lived in an ordinary house in the suburbs. She had never lived rich, dressed rich, ate rich, or looked rich. It was one of her many charms.
“So you’re not, um, hungry, are you?” Jessica had extracted an apple and a Diet Coke. Wait’ll I ratted her out to Marc! He considered diet pop one step up from muriatic acid, whatever the hell that was.
“Naw. Sinclair and I
snacked on each other for a while last night. I’m good for a few days.”
“Good to know. If you go nuts and accidentally chew on one of the locals—”
“Right, I get the picture, and duh, like I haven’t thought of that. How dumb do you think I am?”
Her answer was muffled in the loud crunch as she went to work on the apple . . . probably just as well.
“So, that Jeannie seems nice,” Jessica said, masticating slowly.
“Shhhh,” I said, putting a finger to my lips.
Jessica gnawed and crunched and all but growled at her McIntosh for a good minute, when the doors swung inward (werewolves must just know if someone’s on the other side; probably because they could smell them) and in walked Jeannie, carrying a toddler, and behind her, Lara.
“Hello,” Jeannie said. The toddler, a boy with his mother’s wild blond curls and blue eyes, waved a chubby hand in our general direction. “Sleep all right?”
“Like the dead,” I said cheerfully.
Jeannie rolled her eyes at me in a remarkable imitation of Jessica. She carefully set the toddler down in a high chair, strapped him in, then started rooting around for toddler food.
“Mmmmph gmmmph mmmm nughump mph,” Jessica commented, tiny pieces of apple flying like shrapnel.
“She didn’t know you had another kid.” Or forgot Jeannie had another kid . . . she’d been a little out of it when the Wyndhams visited us the last time. Chemo really plays havoc with your memory.
“This? This is Sean. And you remember Lara, Betsy.”
“Hullo,” the tiny werewolf said as she opened the fridge, pulling out a small Tupperware bowl. She popped the lid, and—
“Don’t you dare,” Jeannie said severely, pretending not to hear the delicate sound of Jessica’s gagging. “You have one of the chefs cook that hamburger, or ask me to.”
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