He smiled. “And it’s also morally wrong.”
“Cheater! You picked that answer out of my brain.”
“Oh, I often do. As to your father, he’s hardly worth the effort of killing.”
I giggled, which was probably the wrong reaction, but fuck it. “That’s him in a nutshell.” But the laugh stuck in my throat. Sure, we were joking about killing him, but we were doing so because he was in the middle of betraying me, putting me and mine in the worst danger of our lives, and for what? Because he didn’t like how our last meeting went.
“Y’know, if he’d loved me a tenth as much as he loved himself, that would have been enough.” I could feel my mouth trying to tremble and pressed my lips together. “More than enough. More than he ever gave me in life and a shitload more than he’s given me in death. I don’t— Was it one particular thing I did, d’you think, that made him not like me?”
Elizabeth . . . He wasn’t speaking out loud, but I could feel the pain behind my name.
“Or was it just my basic personality? I’d blame it on being a vampire, but honestly, he was like this pretty much the whole time I was alive, too. Except this time . . .” I paused, then forced the rest of the words out. “This time he’s putting everyone I love in danger, too. For spite. You’re in the worst danger of your life because my dad never loved me.”
And that was it. I clapped both hands over my eyes in a gesture I knew was childish
(if I can’t see them they can’t see me)
but was too upset to care, and burst into tears. I hadn’t cried so hard since my dad faked his death to get away from me. There was probably a lesson there, but I couldn’t get to it. So I just wept and let Sinclair offer what comfort he could, and in a while I fell into an exhausted sleep.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Jessica’s twins, who were about a month old, were just getting home from kindergarten when I walked into the kitchen a few hours after my breakdown.
(This will take some explaining.)
Though life was currently stressful and shitty, I knew everyone was working on the problem. The reporters hadn’t come back, though we expected more press tomorrow . . . I’d given them a few sound bites while processing my sister’s betrayal. Don’t even get me started on the horror of Mr. Tinsman’s grief being a contributing factor to this . . . fucking . . . mess.
The one bright spot: I’d popped into Hell for an hour, almost sad I’d fixed the time problem (how great would it have been to come back a year later, when Sinclair and Tina had fixed everything?). To my surprised pleasure, things were running smoothly. Operation Hell Buddy was still going strong, and Cathie and the Ant had started reviewing cases/souls that were eligible for parole, as it were.
I was beginning to realize that running Hell was like the old saying about one person eating a bear by herself. It seemed impossible when you thought about the whole job, but the trick was to do it one bite at a time, however long it took.
Hell was my dead bear.
Meanwhile, there was this to deal with.
“H’lo, Onnie Bets.”
“Hi, kiddo. Sorry, plural.” Jessica’s twins—a boy and a girl who reminded me of Poe’s Raven (“Nameless here for evermore”) due to Jessica’s hatred of government paperwork—were seated on bar stools pulled up to the big butcher block that dominated the kitchen. They had identical expressions of “well, we’re politely waiting, how about you move your butt and get us a snack already?” on their teeny cute faces.
“Aw, c’mon.” I tried not to whine. “You guys will get me in trouble with your mom again. And she was super pissed at me just a few hours ago. I’m not stirring that pot again.”
“Nuh-uh! We won’t say anything.”
“You can stir, you can stir! And even if she knew—”
“Not from us!”
“She’d forgive you ’cuz you’re best friends.”
“That’s true,” I admitted, because Jessica had overlooked worse crimes (borrowing her eyeliner without asking, coming back from the dead, temporarily wondering if she was in cahoots with the Antichrist), “but there’ll be hours of shouting first.”
“And also, you have the most prettiest shoes in the world.”
“Well, one cookie won’t hurt.” I smiled at them. Dammit, they were adorable. “Besides, you should be rewarded for being so smart.”
In unison (which should have been creepy but was just cute): “We know!”
I opened the snack cupboard and stretched to reach the Thin Mints, which Marc still obsessively bought and hoarded even though he didn’t eat anymore. The cookies-on-the-top-shelf ploy worked except when Jessica’s weird babies were in their late teens. Then it was like a pair of wolverines had been released into the cookie cupboard; the mess was right out of I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
“Here.” I gave them each two, then poured milk and watched carefully as they drank. In this universe, Jessica and Dick’s babies were still newborns; we had no sippie cups on hand, and so kept an eye on the kids as they drank. Two weeks ago one of them (I forget which) lost his or her grip and sloshed chocolate milk on my Nicholas Kirkwood prism ankle boots. They took turns comforting me as I collapsed in a heap on the floor and sobbed for five minutes (I’d have cried a lot longer if the boots hadn’t been black).
A sweet, high-voiced chorus of two: “Thank you!”
“Welcome. Now keep your lips zipped. If your mom kills me, I’ll kill you.”
A chime of giggles. “Nuh-uh! Not even if someone tried to make you.”
“Not even if we took your Blanks!”
I grinned; I couldn’t help it. “Blahniks. Manolo Blahniks, you little savages.”
They were dressed in what I liked to call future toddler fabric: shiny overalls, his green and hers blue. No idea what the material was, but nothing stuck to it. Nothing. Frankly, I could have used a few outfits made out of whatever it was. They had dark blue long-sleeved T-shirts beneath the overalls, and their sturdy little feet were clad in fuzzy red socks.
Jessica and Dick’s gorgeous biracial kids were Exhibit A for Proving Bigots Wrong: races should mix constantly because I’d never seen more gorgeous kids.
Their skin was pale with rosy gold undertones, and their hair was deep black and kinky. The girl wore hers pulled back into braids that reminded me of Jessica’s killer-tight ponytail; the boy’s was clipped short. Their enormous dark eyes were their mother’s, too. And they were precocious, and not just because they were continent newborns sitting up and feeding themselves and going to kindergarten. They were smart. Whip-smart. Marc was always fascinated when other iterations of the twins popped in, and he did IQ tests on them disguised as games. Which they immediately figured out and called him on. Which made him want to test them more. Which they tolerated, what with the blatant Rice Krispies bar bribery that always ensued.
Of course, not everybody was enchanted by their, um, special gifts. Parenting newborns was relentless and stressful enough (at least, judging from Dick’s and Jessica’s permanent state of exhausted confusion). Newborns who were sometimes a month old and sometimes in elementary school and sometimes old enough to drive . . . that was trickier. Jessica had explained it like so: “I don’t know the five-year-olds, so how can I love them? Understanding intellectually that those are my children years from now doesn’t help me feel it. I love the babies. I don’t know the others.”
I didn’t have a clue about parenting, not really, and made the rare decision to nod and keep my mouth shut. My half brother/son BabyJon spent more time with my mother than he did here. It was better that way. Safer.
And speaking of safety, how would the recent unpleasant developments affect Jessica’s family? Dick was beyond tolerant of our supernatural shenanigans, but if reporters were going to be poking around—or, worse, goth kids searching for real vampires—how were they going to
handle that?
“You’re our best most favorite aunt,” the girl told me approvingly, draining her milk and handing me the cup like I was a goddamned waitress. (What the hell. I took the cup and rinsed it. She got me off an unpleasant train of thought, after all.)
“Your only aunt,” I reminded them.
“Nuh-uh! There’s Tina and Grandma Taylor.”
“Grandma Taylor is Grandma Taylor, not aunt,” the boy corrected. (Argh, when was Jessica going to name these things? We all agreed asking the twins would be cheating, and the kids never addressed each other by name, preferring “No, you shut up!”) “And Tina’s a friend in the family. Right, Onnie Betsy? Friend in the family?”
“Of the family,” I corrected, taking his empty cup. I could see him making a mental note so he’d use the phrase correctly next time. He would, too. These guys never forgot anything, except that they weren’t supposed to have too many cookies after school.
“D’you know where Mommy is?” The girl had glanced at the calendar on the wall and then outside, figured it was daylight and business hours, and assumed Dick was at work so no point in asking after him. All correct. Cripes, when I was five I sometimes forgot how to open the fridge.
(“No, honey, pull. Don’t push.”
“But I’m so hungry!”)
Dick hadn’t wanted to go back to work—well, he had, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it, and he’d both dreaded and anticipated getting the hell out of the house. Jessica had insisted, pointing out there were few things scarier than a man legally required to carry a gun who was overtired and shaking from too much caffeine. He was on a part-time schedule for now, trying to figure out his official cop stance on Operation Expose Vamps. He felt bad about hiding in the house during my inadvertent press conference that morning and was determined not to do so again. But how to explain to the brass? “Of course it’s not true. I’m definitely not exposing myself, my wife, and my helpless infants to vampires and a zombie. Well, time for my gun and me to patrol the streets—hope I don’t run into any reporters, ho-ho-ho!”
The good news was, he didn’t have to work at all—he had almost as much money as Jessica did—but he loved his job. We loved it, too. If not for his job, he and Jess never would have met.17 Sinclair had taken him aside and asked him not to make any permanent decisions for the next few days. He’d agreed.
All that to say he wasn’t home right now, which the twins figured out immediately.
“Onnie Betsy?”
“Sorry; thinking. Your mom’s coming now.” I started pulling smoothie ingredients from the fridge, because I knew my pal would need one. The kitchen door swung in and, as we both were prone to do, she was in midfret and didn’t bother with social niceties like “hello” or “get your big white butt off the counter—we eat there!”
“I can’t find the babies again, will you please help me l— Oh.” She saw her newborns, who were on either side of me and chewing like piranhas to get rid of the cookie evidence. “Oh.” She managed a smile and put the big Barnes and Noble bag she had with her on the counter. That was a little odd; I knew she hadn’t left the mansion all day. Probably full of clothes for Goodwill. Or even books. “There you are.”
I sympathized. Could not imagine what parenting these darling weirdos was like. Well, I could, because I saw a lot of it, but stressful didn’t begin to cover it.
Jessica and Dick were unique in our house: they were run-of-the-mill normals in a house of the undead. But somehow, when Jessica got pregnant, her proximity to me as I was learning how to navigate other dimensions (Hell) and time travel backward (Salem during the witch hunts, also known as Hell) and forward (Minnesota in the future was a winter wasteland, twenty feet of snow in July, also known as Hell) affected her unborn twins.
Jessica’s twins were drawn to this mansion, this timeline, and to me. Any of her twins. From any reality out there. In one universe, she’d had her babies a few years earlier, thus: the kindergarten newborns sucking down Thin Mints. In another, she and Dick had known each other in high school and she’d gotten pregnant on graduation night: the twins who had driver’s licenses.
We should have been tipped off during her pregnancy, except anyone in the house (where Jessica and I spent most of our time) either wouldn’t notice something was very, very odd, or we’d notice but didn’t find it alarming. My mother eventually figured it out, and that only because she didn’t live here. One day Jess wasn’t showing, the next she’d look eleven months pregnant, then later that week she’d barely be showing again. Jessica’s weird babies were weird even in the womb.18
Without exception, the twins always knew who we were and where they were. They were never alarmed to find themselves in an entirely different universe. And they would disappear as mysteriously as they’d arrived. It took some getting used to—we still weren’t, not really—but most of the time it was jarring but also kind of cool.
Most of the time.
“What’s this?” Jessica asked, bending down to peer at her daughter’s mouth. The girl gave an elaborate, overly innocent shrug. “Hon? What are you eating?”
A head shake. Big wide innocent eyes got bigger and wider and innocenter.
“Answer me, please.”
“She has linjinitis,” the boy suggested, lightly spraying his mother with Thin Mint crumbs.
I snickered. “Laryngitis.” Everybody was always correcting me. It was nice being the one to do the correcting. I figured I should enjoy the twins until they were smarter than me in another four, maybe five years. “When you can’t talk? That’s what she’s got.”
“Sure she does.” I got a Defcon 2–level glare and pretended not to be terrified. “Betsy, hand me those baby wipes.”
I obeyed at once.
“Aw, Mommy, those are for babies. We’re not babies because, look! We’re big kids. And mmpphh!”
“Don’t fight it,” I advised the boy.
“Shush.”
We all obeyed her. I watched my friend scrub away all traces of Thin Mint crime and wondered how long this iteration would hang out. It was never for very long—I think a half hour or so was the max—but again, this had only been going on for a few weeks. We’d never seen them leave. They just walked through a door—usually the mudroom—and vanished.
Once they didn’t know who Dick was. At all. They were in fourth grade, they were both wearing dresses for some reason, purple for him and orange for her (the future must have a more enlightened view of gender roles and clothing for same), they both thought I was the greatest thing since sling-backs, and they had no idea who their dad was. And not in a “Dad died last year, so sad” way. A “we never knew our dad, Mom never talks about him and we’ve given up asking” way.
Once only the boy came. Sinclair and I were getting cozy while slugging down the dregs of a fantastic banana strawberry smoothie and while Marc made shooing motions with his hands—“Jeez, you have a room for that shit, go away”—and we were starting to make out solely to piss him off, groaning into each other’s mouths and groping at each other with smoothie-sticky hands, we sensed something and turned.
Where no one had been sitting (Tina had mumbled something about tax season and abandoned her chair when the make-out session started), there was, suddenly, Jessica’s son, about age ten.
He said nothing. He didn’t even look at us. We kept asking where his sister was and he kept shaking his head while fat tears rolled down his cheeks. He didn’t want food. Didn’t want to talk. Ignored Marc’s gentle coaxing and my increasingly worried questions and Sinclair’s furrowed brow
(Perhaps it’s best not to push, my love.)
and we were following him into the mudroom when he disappeared. It had been a thirty-second encounter that rattled the shit out of us. Sinclair, who had lost a twin to an ugly death, said what we were thinking: “My suggestion is we not mention this particular iteration to Jessica or Dick.�
��
And we haven’t.
“Now what’s this?” Jessica said, gently turning her son’s arm to get a better look at a long scrape, a red line standing out against his golden skin. What is it about the undersides of kids’ chubby arms that makes you just want to devour them? “What happened, baby?”
“The cat we don’t have yet scratched me,” came the cheerful reply. “It was turr’ble.”
“He cried,” the girl added.
“I did not! But I need more cookies, Mommy; it makes me upset to talk about it.”
“Oh, nice try,” I said with pure admiration. “But you have no idea how heartless your mother—”
“One more, and that’s it,” Jessica warned.
“—can be in her ruthless determination to— What?”
A chorus of yays.
“Dammit, Jess, you’re poaching on my territory,” I argued. “I’m the fun aunt who hands out cookies and you’re the hard-ass mom who’s no fun at all but they’ll appreciate it when they get older while secretly loving me more!”
“Two cookies,” Jessica said with total bitchy malicious intent, and beamed at the stereo cheers. I was marshaling my arguments (“No, you shut up!”) when the twins slipped down from their stools and went into the mudroom to play with Fur and Burr. (That was another thing: they always knew who Fur and Burr were as well. A psycho-paranormal-ologist (if there was such a thing) would have a field day.
“And furthermore, as reigning Cool Aunt, it’s my God-given right to ignore your fascist toddler rules in order to—”
“Betsy.”
“Dammit!” They’d slipped away again, without us noticing again. Again! The only things in the mudroom were Fur and Burr, the washer and dryer, and two wrinkled newborns.
Until this started happening, the puppies had had the run of the mudroom, their own place to nap, play, and poop in the rare moments when there wasn’t someone around to spend time with them. After an eternity of bitching, Sinclair had blocked off a portion of it for the Amazing Disappearing Reappearing Babies. Sometimes when the babies reappeared, Fur’s and Burr’s shrill yaps would alert the household.
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