Undead and Done (8 page)

NINE

To my joy, Jessica, her weird babies, my mom, and BabyJon
were all at the mansion when I popped in. I hugged Jess so hard her feet left the ground, which I've been doing since we were in junior high and which she's pretended to hate almost as long. “Yay! Hi!”

“Ooof, jeez, take it easy on my bones.” She shook loose—she was like a bundle of sticks, all pointy edges and gorgeous sharp elbows and bony knees—and thrust a baby at me. “Here. Make yourself useful.”

“No way, I've been useful enough for one day.” But I took it, cradling the baby like it was a soft little football that smelled like milk. Her twins were still too little for me to tell them apart, though they were fraternal, not identical. This one—I had it narrowed down—was either Elizabeth or Eric. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, honey.” My mother was holding my brother/son (bron? srother?) comfortably, his diapered bottom snuggled against her arm. She was the way she'd always been; my first
memory was of being held the exact same way, snuggling into her shoulder and twining my teeny fingers into her white curls. (I'd found out later she'd brought me, age three at the time, to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. She was a Custer fangirl.)

Mom had gone prematurely white-haired in high school and had had a head of natural white curls as long as I'd known her. She was the type of woman I'd like to be when I got older, the kind who are told “you look good” as opposed to “you look good for your age.” She was a little plump, but only enough to make her huggable—she still traveled the country visiting Civil War sites and climbing all over everything. Her picture (
“Do not admit!”)
was up at Fort Sumter
and
Shiloh.

She was in her usual gear—dark slacks, tennis shoes (oh the
years
I wasted trying to teach the woman about quality footwear), a red turtleneck, a cardigan. The clothing of a woman of a certain age, you might call it, except she's wearing the same thing in all her class photos. The woman was a nut about comfortable shoes and cardigans even as a teenager.

BabyJon was resting his head on her shoulder, either ready for a nap or just getting up from one; he blinked those big beautiful blue eyes at me and smiled. I leaned in to nuzzle his teeny nose and got a sleepy giggle for it.

Mom patted him and turned so she was looking at me. “You're really getting the hang of popping back and forth, aren't you? It wasn't so long ago that you couldn't do it without Laura.”

“Stop! She's dead to me, Mom. Never say her name; it's the verbal equivalent of a hate crime.”

“And after you kicked
Laura
out of Hell,” my cruel, cruel mother went on with relentless cheer, “you needed those shoes to figure out how to teleport back and forth.”

“Yes, you had to click your heels together.” From Jessica, who was also cruel. Because this was the life I had chosen: free of yes-men. “There's no place like Macy's; there's no place like Macy's—”

“I hate you both,” I announced. “So much.” Why were these terrible women entrusted with infants? Was this why society was screwed?

“But now you don't even need the shoes.”

No, I didn't need the shoes anymore. But for the longest time, no matter how often I practiced, I'd go from Hell and end up in the garden shed. Every damned time. Took weeks of practice just to 'port into the house. These days, my control was better, but I don't think it was because I was improving. I think I just worried less, because we had bigger problems. And when I worried less, things just fell into place.

“No, I don't need the shoes anymore.”

“So you just . . . what?”

“I focus. I concentrate.” I waited for the scorn and guffaws. “And then I'm there.”

“I'm not sure what's stranger . . . how you're changing or how quickly we're getting used to the changes.”

I shrugged as she popped BabyJon into the portable crib she'd set up in the corner. She had a point—five years ago, I was still alive; I had a day job; I was dateless and not a little aimless. My biggest worries were avoiding the Ant and not strangling the executives I worked with, the ones who thought dumping a box of paper clips into a copy machine meant the copies would come out clipped.
*
If this was a TV show, the “previously on the Betsy show” part would take hours.

“How come you're here? Not that I mind, but I thought we agreed the babies were safer elsewhere until the ruckus died down.”

“They are,” Mom agreed, “but that doesn't mean we can't visit.”

“Actually, I thought that was exactly what it—”

“Dick had to quit the Cop Shop,” Jessica said abruptly, putting a twin down beside BabyJon. Port-a-cribs, I was coming to learn, were one of the greatest inventions ever to spring from the mind of (wo)man. They were right up there with the telephone in terms of convenience. Thirty seconds to set up! Ten to take down! Goddamned miraculous is what it was, and oh hell, that was bad.

“Well, shit,” I said, dismayed. Detective Richard Berry, also known as Jessica's boyfriend and sire of weird babies, had been in our lives before I'd died (the first time). I'd been attacked outside Khan's Mongolian BBQ by a pack of feral, yowling, howling vampires, fended them off with well-placed kicks from the toes of my pointy shoes (thank goodness I'd avoided round-toed shoes that day) and my purse, like it was 1955 instead of the twenty-first century. I didn't know it then, but that had been step one of my evolution from out-of-work administrative assistant to reigning queen of vampires/Hell.
*

Anyway, Detective Dick had been the cop assigned to my case. We'd flirted with the idea of flirting, but to be frank, wealthy blonds with swimmers' builds didn't do it for me. I didn't know it at the time, but I liked them tall, dark, and vampiric. (And also wealthy. But in fairness to
moi
, I had no idea Eric Sinclair was rich when we met. Mostly I was focused
on how much I loathed the very sight of him. We did not meet cute.)

“But Richard loves being a cop,” my mother said. She'd gone right over to Jess and patted her, and Jessica sort of leaned—casually, like she wasn't consciously doing it—until she was basically slumped onto my mom like a gorgeous gangly leech. “He never needed that job.”

Truth. Richard Berry was rich, rich, rich. Almost as rich as Jessica, who was probably the wealthiest person in the state. Wealthiest
live
person, anyway. Not sure how I started out as a middle-class suburban kid and ended up surrounded by millionaires, but it happened. I am the poor white trash of our set. (Note to self: stop bragging about being the poorest, dumbest person in the room.)

“He does love the job,” Jessica agreed, still slumping. “But the news about vampires and all the media attention—it put him in a tough spot. They even caught him on camera a couple of times, and you can bet his bosses had questions.”

“I'll bet.”
So, how long have you been living with vampires? Or crazy people who think they're vampires? You understand if they faked their deaths, that's against the law, right? Let's talk.
Ugh.

“So he resigned before they could suggest a permanent unpaid leave of absence.”

“I'm really sorry.” That was it. That was all I had.

Jessica shrugged, almost dislodging herself from Mom's shoulder. “There are worse problems than having the means to be a stay-at-home dad with someone you love. He might go into private investigation in a while—we want to see how everything shakes out first.”

“Okay.” My brain was already churning. Maybe he could be a cop-to-vampire liaison? He had a unique perspective unmatched by that of any other cop anywhere. Which, it was
now occurring to me, was probably why he felt he had to leave. But couldn't it be turned into a positive? Knowing vampires shouldn't be a liability.

And not going along with the Antichrist's plan to force the world to convert to Christianity shouldn't be causing all the trouble, but it was. Because as much as I liked to bitch about my father and my sister, I was also responsible for the mess we were in up to our necks.

TEN

LAST MONTH, ON THE BETSY SHOW . . .

“I'll definitively prove there
is
a God!”

“—pires to the— What?”

Laura nodded at me with a big smile that wasn't scary at all. “I'm going to prove there's a God. Prove it to the world.”

I just sat there and tried to let that seep into my brain. It was so far from what Sinclair and I assumed she was up to, but I couldn't tell if that was good or bad.

There she sat, my half sister, Laura Goodman (subtle, fates or God or whomever), dressed in her Sunday best (she had a horror of people who wore jeans to church): a high-necked pink blouse, a rose-colored knee-length skirt, cream-colored tights, chunky black loafers. Chunky loafers is what women wore in the winter when the weather wasn't bad enough for boots or good enough for pumps. Laura's were especially hideous, like lumps of tires fashioned into a vague shoe shape. We had a few things in common; our fashion sense wasn't one of them.

Besides, she was so irritatingly, thoroughly gorgeous, she
could have been wearing newspapers. Light blond hair halfway down her back, perfect fair complexion with a natural rosy blush, big blue eyes that went poison green when she was angry, or murderous, or murderously angry.

Nobody ever looked at Laura Goodman and thought,
Spawn of Satan? Oh, sure. Knew it the minute I laid eyes on her.

I stopped pondering her annoying good looks and managed, “Could you say that again, please?”

“You cheated me of my birthright.”

“No, no, the other thing.” So not in the mood for the “Satan and I tricked you into running Hell but now I want to bitch about the consequences” chat
.
I'd warned her at the time that getting your own way was often as much a curse as it was a blessing. See: Sinclair's life, death, and afterlife, also mine, the Ant finally landing my father, and anyone who voted for Hitler back in the day.

“This
is
the other thing,” she corrected. “You want the background, don't you?”

Not really.

“I can't do what I was born to do—”

“Be effortlessly gorgeous while sitting in judgment on pretty much everybody as you ignore your own sins?”

Her lips thinned but she continued. “But I can do this. I can bring faith to the world.”

“How?”

“Any way I can.” She leaned forward, warming to her subject. Leaning away from her would probably be interpreted as unfriendly. Maybe I could pretend I didn't want to catch her cold? If she had one. And if I could still catch colds. “Lectures, videos, websites. I already started a few while I was waiting for you to get back.” Was there a tiny hint of reproach in her tone? No. I decided there wasn't, because if there was, I'd have
to slap the shit out of her with a hymnal. “So I've been preparing the ground, so to speak, talking about our adventures and Hell and such while waiting for you.”

“That's why Sinclair thinks the plan is to show the world vampires exist,” I said, thinking out loud.

She shrugged. “Yes, I imagine his undead spies keep him well informed.” When I raised my eyebrows she added, “Yes, he called me a couple of times, but I'm not obligated to explain myself to him.” Adding in a mutter, “I don't know how he keeps getting my number . . .”

“So he was tipped off after he heard about the
Betsy and Laura: Time-Travelin' Cuties
show.” God, Marc would have a field day with this . . .

“What, every other sinner can have a YouTube channel but I can't?”

“Um . . .”
Stay focused.
I was already envisioning the conversation my husband and I would have:
Good news! She's not outing vamps. There's a teeny bit of bad news, though. Why don't you lie down while I tell you about her Great Idea . . .

Meanwhile she was obliviously babbling. “I'd be different from the regular preachers . . . They're talking about faith, which is all well and good for someone who isn't
us
. I can offer proof. Look what just you and I have seen in . . . what? Less than four years? I always believed in Him, and I think you did, too—your mother failed you in your teenage years but she did make sure you went to Sunday school long enough to—”

“Do not say one

(church you're in church)

dang word against my mother.”

Laura cut herself off and even flushed a little. “You're right. That was inappropriate. I like your mom.”

“I know you do.” I had to shake my head at my little sister's many dichotomies. Skirts in church and brownies in the
basement when not plotting to dump Hell on the vampire queen and murdering random serial killers. Genuinely fond of my mom—she called her Dr. Taylor and occasionally stopped in just to chat, or to play with our half brother, BabyJon—but wouldn't shed a tear at my funeral. Blithely ready to shove God onto the world whether the world wants it or not, but gets embarrassed when called out for being rude.

“You were telling me,” I prompted without grimacing or clutching my temples, “about your Great Idea.” God, now
I
was using the caps. At least it wasn't pronounced in all caps, like when fiftysomethings or thirteensomethings got on social media for the first time and felt every post had to be a scream.

“Okay, so you always believed in Him, but before your—uh—unfortunate death—it was strictly faith. And I had faith without proof until my thirteenth birthday, when Mother appeared and explained my destiny. Then I knew. And we can help everyone know. We've time traveled, we've seen Hell; my mother was the devil, you're the
new
devil! We know the Bible's right; we can tell people! We can save everybody!”

“Why . . . why would we do that?” Was she talking about us going on some sort of . . . of lecture circuit of the damned? Would we be copresenters, or would it be her show and I'd be trotted out like the miniature elephant in
Jurassic Park
:
Look what we made! Give us money and we'll make more!
(The book, not the movie. I loved that stupid dwarf elephant. The scientists should have skipped the dinosaurs and just engineered a huge park of thousands of dwarf elephants. If they escaped, it'd be annoying but also adorable.) “Laura?”

“Why
wouldn't
we do that?” she replied, puzzled. She was leaning toward me; our hands were almost touching; she was as friendly and excited as I'd seen her in weeks. Our last meeting hadn't been so pleasant. Was she—was she trying to forge a new relationship with me? Was setting up the We Can Prove
God Exists lecture series her way of reconciling herself to what she'd lost? Was she regretting her choices less than a month after she had made them, or was this the plan all along?

“I've barely started, and I wanted to tell you right away—”

Really?

“—but you've been gone.”

“Wow.”

“I know!”

“You actually managed to make me being
in Hell
, doing
your job
, sound like a character flaw, or like I was rude to keep your Great Idea waiting. I can't even figure out the time thing between dimensions—”

“Conjure up a row of clocks, like in a brokerage firm.”

“—when I was—well, yes, that was Marc's suggestion and it'll probably work, but it's not like I was off having fun!” Although listening to Dame Washington bitch about her kid
had
been pretty entertaining . . . and pissing off all the teens and twentysomethings with my No Tweets rule (and confusing everyone else over fifty: “What's
tweets
?”) had also been fun . . .

I forced a calming breath (focus!), and decided to go with the least complicated objection first.

“Never mind where I was or for how long or why I had to be there in the first place; I'm here now, right? And the thing is, about your Great Idea, our word isn't proof.” I said it as nicely as I could, and not just because showing the world our trials and tribulations had zero appeal. In a future that will never come to pass, I ruled the world. And it was a huuuge downer. What little I'd seen of the other, ancient, grumpy, zombie-raising, Sinclair-killing me had been more than enough. I wouldn't revisit it. And since I could time travel from Hell, I meant that figuratively
and
literally. There was no way to prove the good (Heaven a real possibility!) without
dredging up the bad (vampires take over the world!). “People don't know who we are, and they shouldn't, Laura.”

She ignored this, so the bright-eyed enthusiasm continued unabated. “There are enough of us who know the truth; if we combine forces we can reach millions!”

Sure, but so could Taylor Swift, and any Kardashian. In this day and age, reaching millions wasn't unheard-of . . . and oh boy, I hoped that wasn't her point. That if ordinary mortals

(sometimes I miss being an ordinary mortal)

could make their presence known with just a video or a silly trick on YouTube, if the “Leave Britney
Alone
!” guy and the ice bucket challenge could go global, the Antichrist and the queen of the vampires could, too. “Once we convince the rest of the world, things would change overnight! No more wars; no more murders.”

Oh boy. She was less than a decade younger than me and I felt every day of that decade now. “People not knowing if there's a God is not what causes murders and wars,” I said carefully, because she was glowing like a zealot turned light bulb. “At least, not all the time. Anymore. General dickishness causes wars. Money causes wars.” I had a flashback to one of my favorite lines from
Gone with the Wind
:
“All wars are in reality money squabbles.”
“I promise you, Laura. I promise. There will always be war and murder because there will always be assholes. They are not an endangered species. Even if every single person on the planet converted to Christianity, there'd still be crime.”

She waved away war and murder and crime with a small long-fingered hand. “We can quibble about the details later. Say you'll help me with this.”

“You mean in addition to being the queen of the vampires—”

“Sinclair is perfectly capable of overseeing the vampire nation.”

“—and running Hell—”

“You've made a committee, and even if you hadn't, Hell will run itself if you leave it alone.”

I— Wow. Okay. Wow.

“What's the pitch, exactly? Assuming you could prove God's existence? We somehow prove it and hey presto, everyone in the world becomes a Christian?”

“Sure.”

When I was little I'd wait for the bus with a bunch of neighborhood kids. And after the first big frost, we'd kill time by easing across puddles that looked frozen but weren't—or at least, not all the way through. We'd inch across, freezing and giggling at every
crack!
Best case, you made it across and the kids gave you props. Worst case, you broke the ice and soaked your shoes, which was unpleasant but not fatal.

Well, I felt like I was inching across a puddle that was bottomless. Like if I put a foot wrong I'd fall down so deep no one would ever find me. It
looked
safe enough . . . but probably wasn't . . . and if I put one foot wrong . . .

“Hell being a thing doesn't mean every other religion is wrong.”

Laura just looked at me.

I sighed. “I get it. You've decided Hell being a thing
does
mean every other religion is wrong.”

“We know the devil is real, ergo God is real, ergo Jesus is real.” At my expression, she plowed ahead with, “It's
not
arrogance. I'm not saying it's what I think. It's what we know.”

“But that doesn't mean other things
aren't
real. You're like someone who's red-green color-blind: just because you can't see them doesn't mean red and green don't exist.”

“Your analogies are starting to suck less,” she said grudgingly.

“Thank you!” Ugh, I was always so pleased when she
complimented me. It was the dark side of being Miss Congeniality, the thing they don't tell you at the pageant rehearsals. “Listen, Hell and the devil being real doesn't disprove Allah and Buddha and—uh—Mohammed and Zeus—and—” Why hadn't I taken a single religious studies course before I flunked out of the U of M?

She shrugged off Buddha and Mohammed and Zeus. “They can't prove
their
religious icons are real. That's the difference.”

“But what's the point of— Oh.” I saw it. Finally. “Aw, jeez. This is about you bringing gobs of unfaithful into the flock. So if you get to Heaven—”

“When.”

Oh Christ
. “Fine, when you get there, you can tell your pal Jesus that you heroically avoided running Hell—through lies and trickery, but who cares about the details, right?—and that you disapproved of your sinful vampire sister but managed to recruit her into helping you bring millions into the fold so where's your Christian gold star already?”

Her pretty mouth (how does she not have chapped lips in a Minnesota winter?) went thin. “It's a far better use of your time than lolling around your mansion slurping smoothies and accepting blood orange offerings.”

“First off, I don't loll.” I was pretty sure. That means lying around, right? Lolling around? I rubbed my temples.
Don't beat the Antichrist to death with a hymnal. That would be deeply uncool.
“Second, if vampires want to stop by and bring me fruit and promise not to be assholes, what's the problem? It's a lot more than the previous vampire monarch did. His big contribution was starving newborn vamps until they went insane and making older vamps do all his murder-ey dirty work.” Ugh, I hadn't thought of Nostril in years. Nobody talked about the undead-and-now-dead-forever wretch; he wasn't missed by anyone.
New as we were to the monarch thing, Sinclair and I were still loads better at it on our worst day than Nostril was on his best. Was it weird when vampires showed up at the mansion to hand me a bag of citrus and pledge eternal blood-sucking devotion and to seem relieved when all I made them do was promise to not be asshats? Yes. Was it a bad thing? Hell no! (Or just no.)