“Yes, Majesty.”
“Really, you can? Because I figure it's gotta be something pretty fucking spectacular when a Vampire Queen lights up. I mean, just goes off the deep end. Lets the blood boil and the teeth fly. Have you ever acthually theen that happen?”
“I cannot say that I have, Your Majesty.”
My tongue played around the sharp edges of my teeth. Her scent was fascinating—she had turned when young, and even the passage of centuries of evil deeds could not cloud a certain divine innocence. “Would you like to? You and I can lock ourthelves in a thpare room, and I can focuth on your particular thituation and conthernth, and we can thee who leaves the room a few hourth later. Hmm?”
“I will go now. See? I am making no sudden moves.” She slowly turned and reached for the doorknob. She was far more facile with the nineteenth-century technology than Delk had been; she was immediately back in the safety of open air. “Good… evening… Majesty…”
The door clicked closed.
“I think,” Sinclair's smooth voice came from behind me, “you are finally getting the hang of this, my love.”
As my fangs slowly receded, I didn't know whether to thank him or throw the baby-bomb at him.
Chapter 23
“Laura, I'm so sorry to do this to you again.”
“Betsy, it's fine. I'm delighted to help out.” She nuzzled the baby. “And delighted ooo see ooo again! Is ooo my best wittle boy? Is ooo?”
“Really, really sorry. But I had plans for tonight and frankly, if I don't do this now, I'll never psych myself up to do it again.”
She had all the baby crap, was hauling it (and BabyJon) easily into the front hall. “Betsy, will you stop? It's my pleasure to help out. You'll let his mom know?”
“Yeah, well, she's not gonna be happy when she finds out I shirked BabyJon on you. Just remind her not to shoot the messenger.”
Laura laughed, shaking her blond hair away from her face. “Goodness! I'm sure she'll be fine. You know, Betsy, Mrs. Taylor isn't nearly as bad as you—”
Okay, if I had to get the “give your stepmother a chance” lecture from someone who hadn't grown up with her, I was going to pop a blood vessel. “Yeah, well, thanks, I owe you, bye!” I gave her a helpful shove.
I closed the big front door and leaned on it. Right. BabyJon given the bootie: check. Sinclair off with Tina somewhere: check. No pop-ins that I knew of: check. Marc at work: check. Toni and Garrett prowling around outside, him to eat and her for kicks: check (I made a mental note to make sure those two were only fucking with bad guys). Cathie-the-ghost nowhere in evidence: check.
Jessica knitting in her room: check.
She had a largish room on the second floor, the one with the blue and gold wallpaper and all the trim and old furniture in blond wood, as if the Scandinavian carpenters who built this mansion so long ago were thinking of their wives' hair when they designed and built it.
I rapped on the half-closed door and went in at her, “C'mon in.”
Crocheting in bed was a new thing. Usually she brought her yarn bag into the kitchen with us, or went into the basement with Garrett, or took it to a craft class. But Marc had explained that she got tired earlier, and took longer to get going when she got up.
“Got a minute?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“I can't tell where the one on the bed is, and the one you're working on starts,” I joked. It was true, though: she was lying on a navy crocheted coverlet, and crocheting another one, this one red.
“Yeah, well, you're an idiot.” She grinned.
“Uh-huh.” I barely heard the insult. I started to sit on the bed, then got up and sort of prowled around the foot of it for a moment. “Listen, Jess, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I mean, alot .”
“Do you need some Advil?”
“This is serious!” I almost shouted at her. “Listen—I can't believe I'm even talking to you about this—”
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“No. You can't bite me. You can't turn me into a vampire. I won't allow it.”
My oft-rehearsed speech disappeared in a whirl of relief and indignation. “What? How did you know? Oh, those big-mouthed idiots!”
“Yes, that's how I'd describe Tina and Sinclair. Come on, Betsy. Nobody had to tell me. It was so obvious—not only are you having private conversations with experienced vampires, but frankly, every time you look at me it's like a dog looking at a raw steak.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, I'm sorry about the looks, but I've done some research, and the risks—”
“Are a lot higher if you bite me, than if I treat my cancer.”
I opened my mouth.
“Because pretty it up how you want, you're still killing me, right?”
I closed my mouth and she went on, in a nice but totally firm way. “Even if I come back after. And if Ido come back after, there's no guarantee I'll be me, right? In fact, it sounds like for at least the first few years, I'll be a mindless blood-sucking automaton. No thank you.”
“Anything sounds bad when you put 'mindless' and 'sucking' in front of it.” I flopped down on the end of her bed. “Jeez, days I've been working up to this, grilling everybody, screwing up the courage to talk to you about it, and you're all, 'yeah, I knew what you were going to say, and by the way, no.' ”
“It's not my fault it's pathetically easy to read your minuscule mind.”
I gave her a look. “I guess this is the part where I'm all 'youwill be mine, O yes' and you're all 'eeeek, unhand me, I'd rather die than join in your unholy crusade.'”
“No, that was last winter when you wanted me to go Christmas shopping in early October.”
“Christmas shopping in October is just efficient.”
“Trust you”—she sneered—“to getgrotesque andefficient mixed up.”
“Why do I want to save you and keep you around for eternity again?”
She shrugged. “Beats me.”
I looked at the ceiling, because I didn't want to look at her. I didn't want to try to figure out if her color was off, if she'd lost weight. “Jessica, this thing might kill you.”
“So your response is… to kill me?”
“It's a chance for some kind of life. A life where your best friend is the queen. That's got to be worth something.”
She nudged my shoulder with a toe. “You're glossing over all the things that could go wrong.”
“Well, so are you!”
“There's time. Time to fight this. I'm sorry—I can see it's been a little on the agonizing side for you. But typical Betsy—you assumed this was somethingyou had to decide. It's my life, and my death, and I'm choosing to stand and fight.” She smiled. “Besides, if you turn me into a vampire, I don't think we can hide that from Nick. And then he'll know for sure!”
“The least of my problems,” I said glumly. Then I said, “You haven't told him yet?”
“I'm saving it,” she said, suddenly glum, too, “for our two-month-aversary.”
What a phenomenally bad idea. Also, none of my business. “If that's how you feel…”
“That's entirely, exactly how I feel. So no sneaking around and leaping out at me from the shadows to try and turn me, okay?” She picked up her afghan, and got back to work.
Good example for all of us.
“Okay,” I said, getting up and walking toward the door, “but if you change your mind and decide you want to be foully murdered—”
“I'll run up to your room first thing,” she promised.
Mollified, I left.
Chapter 24
I didn't get far.
“Hey,” Cathie said, walking through the wall at the top of the stairs.
“Hey.”
“I wasn't eavesdropping,” she began defensively.
I groaned.
“Well, I wasn't. I was coming to get you.”
“Why?
”
She shrugged. “No ghosts around to talk to right now. Which leaves you. Hey, I'm not happy about it, either.”
“So when you weren't eavesdropping, what didn't you overhear?”
“That you aren't going to turn Jessica in to a vampire. Good call, by the way. Which reminds me, are you ever going to do anything about the zombie in the attic?”
“Are you ever going to drop the joke? I mean, I know you guys all know I'm scared of zombies, but this is just—”
“Betsy, I'm serious. There's a zombie in the attic.”
I swallowed my irritation. Cathie had had a hard life. Or death, rather. She was lonely. She was bitchy. I was the only person she could bug. Talk to, rather.
“It's not funny anymore,” I said, as nicely as I could. “And it never really was. So can you please drop it now?”
“Come up to the attic and see.”
Aha! The surprise party. It was on me at last, like a starving wolf in the moonlight. Fine, I'd play along.
“Okayyyyy, I'll just pop up into the attic to check on the zombie.” I looked around. We were at the top of the stairs; there were closed doors on both sides of the hall. “Uh, whereis the attic?”
“Come on.” She floated off.
“Gee, I hope nobody jumps out at me or anything. Certainly not with the new Prada strappy sandals in ice blue…”
Cathie shook her head. “Oh, honey. If I wasn't so bored I'd never do this to you. But I am. And so I am.”
She gestured to the door at the end of the south hall. I opened it and beheld a large, spiderwebby staircase. The stairs were painted white, and in serious need of a touch-up.
“Okayyyyy… I'm coming up the stairs… here I come… suspecting nothing…”
There were light switches at the top of the stairs, which was good, because even though I could see in the dark pretty well, the unrelieved gloom of the attic was a little unnerving. I couldn't even hear anybody breathing. Maybe they were all holding their breath. My live friends, that is.
Like any attic, it was filled with generations of accumulated crap. Dust covered everything: broken pictures, beat-up desks, sofas with the stuffing popping out of the cushions. It appeared to run the length of the house, which meant it was ginormous.
Out of force of habit, I put my hand up to my nose and mouth, then remembered I never sneezed—unless something threw holy water in my face, anyway.
I took a few steps forward and heard a scuttling from behind a scratched wardrobe missing a door. Ugh! Mice. Please not rats. Just little harmless field mice who had decided to stay in the mansion for the winter. I didn't mind mice at all, but rats…
And what was that other smell? A layer of rot above the dust. Had someone, ugh, left their lunch up here or something? Fine place for a turkey sandwich.
Cathie pointed. “He's right over there.”
“Oh he is, eh?” What a crummy place for a birthday party. But I had to admit, I would never have snooped up here for presents. “Well, he'd better watch out, because here I come.”
I marched a good fifteen feet and shoved the wardrobe—which was huge, much taller than I was—out of the way. “Surpri—what the… ?”
At first I was genuinely puzzled. It was like my brain couldn't process what it was seeing. I'd expected: banners, presents, a group of my friends and family huddled, ready to leap up and yell “Surprise.”
What I got: a hunched figure, wearing rotted clothes—everything was the color of mud. Slumped shoulders; hair the same color as the clothes. And thatsmell . God, how could the others stand it? Surely even the live people could smell it.
The figure pivoted slowly to face me. My hand was back up, but this time to prevent a gag instead of a sneeze.
I could see bone sticking out of the remnants of what might have once been a white dress-shirt sleeve. Bone? That wasn't bone. It was something else, something gray and weird. It was—
“Nice zombie costume,” I managed. Complete with authentic stink and rotted clothes and—this was a great touch—graveyard dirt in the wig.
“Betsy, that's what I've been trying to tell you. It's not a costume. It's a real live zombie.” Cathie was circling it admiringly. “The things you see when you're dead! I thought it was a movie thing.”
“Nuhhhhhhhh,” it said. It reached toward me. It had long fingernails, so long they started to curve under, like claws. There was dirt under every one.
I backed up a step. It compensated by taking a step closer. I couldn't bear to look in its face—and then I did. At first I thought he—he was wearing the decayed remains of a suit—was smiling. Then I realized one of his cheeks had rotted away and I could see his teeth through his face.
I had thought I was frozen with fear. No, that was too simple a word: terror. Absolute numbing terror. It was silly, but I had a lifelong terror of dead things. Especially zombies. The way they kept coming toward you
(the way this one was coming toward me now)
and the way they reeked of the grave
(the way this one did)
and the way they moaned and reached for you and nothing stopped them, no matter what you did, they came and came
(the way this one was coming)
and I thought I was frozen with fear, thought I could never move, but somehow I was backing up. Internally, yeah, I was frozen, I couldn't make myself speak, scream, figure out where the door was, reason, think. But my legs were moving just fine. And that was good. Because if that thing touched me, I would die. Die for real. Die forever.
It
(he?)
reached still, and I was backed up against one of the dusty couches, and its hand brushed my shoulder, and then my internal freeze vanished like an ice cube on a July sidewalk and I let loose with the loudest scream I'd ever heard anybody scream. I sounded like a fire alarm.
I fell back over the couch and hit the floor, raising a cloud of dust. I was trying to back up and stand up at the same time while the zombie calmly walked around the side of the couch and kept coming. As a result, I was leaving a Betsy-wide track through the dust on the floor as I shoved myself along the floorboards.
I screamed again. This time words. But more fire alarm than words, because Cathie said, “What?”
I chewed on the phrase, actually coughed it out of my mouth: “Go get Eric!”
She rushed toward me—it seemed to take her forever to cross the fifteen feet or so between us. “Betsy, I can't!”
“Then get Tina! Get Marc! Get the Ant! I don't give a shit!Help !”
Suddenly, her hands shot through the zombie's chest. It kept coming.
“I can't! Nobody can see me but you! What do you want me to do?”
I'd shoved myself into the far wall and clawed my way to my feet. God, the stink! I could handle almost anything else except for the stink, the godawful, rotting, disgusting, fuckingstink . “I don't know,” I said, and never had I been so angry about being so dumb.
“Well, kill it! In the movies, the good guys shoot them in the head.”
I didn't say anything, just knocked away its arm as it reached for me. Cathie finally remembered: “You don't have a gun. Okay, but you're not without skills. You're a vampire. Break his neck!”
But then I'd have to touch it. I couldn't bear to touch it. I'd go crazy if I had to touch it.
I grabbed its wrist and pushed. Hard. It went sprawling off into a broken coffee table, and smashed to the ground.
Okay, I'd touched it. And it hadn't been so bad. Okay, it had been crawly and awful—like touching a shirt full of squirming maggots—but there were worse things. Like—like—
I couldn't think of anything worse.
I looked at my hand and saw there was dirt and skin on the tips of my fingers. I started to cry and frantically wiped my hand on my jeans.
“Maybe it isn't trying to kill you,” Cathie said helpfully from right beside me. “Maybe it's trying to communicate. You know, like I was. Maybe it came here because you're the Queen a
nd you can help it. Please stop crying. Betsy, come on. It's not that bad. It's just a zombie. It can't even do anything to you.”
Couldn't do anything? It was hurting me just by existing. It was—my hysterical brain groped for the word and caught it. It was anabomination . It was wrong for this thing to be anywhere, never mind my attic. It went against everything right and good and sane and normal.
It was getting up. It was coming toward me again. It was saying “Nuhhhhhhhhh” again. It was trying to touch me again. I cried harder. It seemed that crying like a B-movie heroine (the ones who always got saved at the last minute, but who was going to save me?) was going to be the way I dealt with this. Well, that was all right. Crying didn't hurt anybody. Crying never—
“Betsy, will you for Christ's sake do something!”
Here it came again. Here it reached again. Here it was touching me. Here it was showing me its teeth. Here it was pulling on me. Here it was making an odd noise—ah. It was trying to smack its lips, but they had rotted away. Smacking its lips the way a hungry fella smacked his lips as he contemplated Thanksgiving dinner. Or a big steak. Or—
Me.
Its hands were on my shoulders. The stench rose, almost a living thing. I raised my own hands. It pulled me close. I put my hands on either side of its head. It slobbered without saliva. I twisted. But of course it didn't die, of course it leaned in like a grotesque parody of a vampire and bit me, chewed on me, ate me while I screamed and screamed, while Cathie darted around helplessly and watched me get eaten, while—
—it fell down, its head twisted around so that, if it were alive, it would have been looking down on its own butt.
“Now that's what I'm talking about,” Cathie said. “Whew! I thought you were really going to—Betsy?”
I had walked stiffly over to one of the couches. Sat down, almost impaling myself on a broken spring. Cried and cried and rubbed my hands on my jeans. They would never be clean. My fingers would always stink. They would always have dead meat and graveyard dirt on them. Always. Always.
Chapter 25
I sat on the couch and looked at the (dead) zombie. I never, ever wanted to get away from a place more than I wanted to get out of that attic, but I couldn't make myself get up and make the long walk to the door at the top of the stairs. The only thing I had the strength for was sitting on a filthy, broken couch that was so dusty I didn't know what color it was under all the dirt. That, and looking at the zombie I'd killed.
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