Undead and Unforgiven (8 page)

CHAPTER

TEN

Marc and I crossed paths as we were both lunging for the keyboard in the kitchen. Tina had (stupidly) tried to implement hanging keys in order of status. Jessica and Dick (his name used to be Nick, but that's a whole other thing
5
) abruptly lost their minds and threatened to threaten to sue (“I don't actually want to sue, but I might promise to sue!”) over what they saw as discrimination against the living.

So then she suggested we hang keys in alphabetical order by owner. (“Boo! That means the cop goes first!” “What, it's my fault my mother married a Berry?”)

So then she tried alphabetical by car, but since Sinclair had two Audis, a Bentley, and a Corvette, that was promptly shouted down as well.

And then Tina noticed that in the three days she'd spent
trying to come up with a system that wouldn't make us all want to kill each other, we were all just hanging our keys on whatever hooks were empty, and nobody had trouble finding theirs, even when in a rush. I mean, I lived with millionaires, but even they could drive only so many cars. The board had plenty of hooks.

So Marc and I were both scrambling for the keyboard. “My passive-aggressive sister is trying to out vampires to the world!”

“I missed two
Game of Thrones
and one
It's Always Sunny
, and I'm two weeks behind on
People
,
Entertainment Weekly
, and
Time
!”

“And we were gone two weeks!”

“No one watered my cactus! Which is good, actually. Betsy. Seriously.” He blocked my retreat to the mudroom door. “You gotta get the time thing figured out.”

“No shit!” I realized I was clutching my keys in a white-knuckled fist and eased up. Those electronic keys were insanely easy to crack. “I'm open to suggestions.”

“You need a row of clocks, like they have in car rental places or brokerage firms. They all tell the time for a different city.”

“When were you in a brokerage—”

“I watched
The Wolf of Wall Street.
You know what I'm talking about—they'll have a clock up for Tokyo time and one for New York time and one for, I dunno, L.A. and one for Hong Kong and one for Ann Arbor and one for Houston and one for Bismarck.”

“Bismarck? Really?”

“You need one that will always tell you what time it is at the mansion.”

Well. That was actually a pretty good idea, assuming my powers in Hell would work like that. Whenever I wanted to know something, my magical clipboard usually obliged. Maybe I could put a magical clock in, too. It was
no surprise that there were no clocks in Hell; time meant different things to the souls there, and a fixed clock always set to, I dunno, central standard time wouldn't be much help. Maybe not a row of clocks, but maybe a wristwatch that always told me what I needed to know? “Okay, that's not bad,” I admitted. “Remind me next time we're there.”

He nodded and scooted aside so I could pass. “Gotta go.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“Sinclair didn't tell you until after the sex, did he?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Hey, the guy went two weeks without nooky. I'm surprised he remembered his own name, all that backup.”

“Vampires don't get— Oh my God, I'm not discussing this with you.”

“You kind of are,” he said with a grin that was half apologetic, half wiseass. No, wait. All wiseass.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Have pity on the man!” my least favorite zombie hollered after me as I hurried through the mudroom. “Take pity on his penis!” Because the neighbors don't have enough to gossip about.

In my rush to get gone, I nearly fell over something and knew without looking what it was. I seized the pitchfork, yanked the door to the side yard open, ignored the puppies' yelps of welcome, and tossed it into the garden with the others.

“Stop giving me these things!” I shrieked back at the house in general. Prank-hungry bastards. Twice in a month, really? Bad enough they were defacing name tags and planting them on me, but to leave pitchforks lying around? Where does someone even buy a pitchfork? “Really? Don't you have anything better to do?”

From all parts of the house, simultaneous replies came back: “No!”

Well, that was just a lie.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

I had the Antichrist cornered like the sun-kissed rat she was. “Aha! I thought I'd find you here!”

Eventually. First I'd tried her apartment in Burnsville, then Fairview Ridges where she volunteered, and then Hastings Family Service where she
also
volunteered. Then I stopped at Caribou for a large hot chocolate (I was back in the real world now, and so was my unholy vampire thirst of the damned . . . what little I'd taken from Sinclair wouldn't hold me for long), then the United Way.

Then I looked at my phone again, observed it was Sunday morning (the clanging church bells and gaggles of families dressed in their Sunday best should have tipped me off), and found her at First Presbyterian in Hastings.

I had thrown the incredibly heavy door open (it took some effort—argh, so windy!—even with vampire strength—how did the Sunday school kids manage?) and pointed my cup
of hot chocolate at her, bellowing to the startled churchgoers that, aha, I thought I'd find her there, eventually.

“Betsy!” the Antichrist hissed, setting down a coffeepot. “This is fellowship!”

She made it sound like a place, rather than something they were doing. Unless fellowship meant “behold the ritual of the serving of the coffee and of the nondairy creamer, for yea, some churchgoers shalt be lactose intolerant.”

Maybe it was the name of the room. Church—the service—was clearly over; the place was packed but everyone was eating. And it was the food moms and dads and grandmas had brought to church: pans of brownies, plates of cookies, some blondies that didn't get gobbled as quickly as the brownies (when will people just accept that blondies will never trump brownies? ooh, memo to me: people in Hell should get blondies when they order brownies), a pyramid of Rice Krispies bars, fruit plates, Kool-Aid for the kiddos, coffee for the adults, and bowls of peanuts for whomever. Somebody always brought peanuts; it was weird.

I'd been raised Presbyterian by a mother with agnostic leanings and a father who tried to spend every Sunday he could out of town “on business.” When my mother started getting suspicious, he converted to Judaism so he could ostensibly worship on Saturdays (often in hotel rooms).

But once Mom saw I had the basics down (“A talking snake tricked a rib lady into eating bad fruit and that's why women need epidurals for labor and it's also why the world is jam-packed with sinners, but the baby born of a virgin who later came back as the Holiest of Zombies fixed it so anyone, no matter how skanky, can get to Heaven if they know the secret passwords.”) we hardly went anymore. Ironically, I had prayed to God a lot more after my death than before. I wondered if that was true of everyone or just
vampires. It was really something to consider when you thought about it, a complicated—

“Ow!”

“Come on.” My sister had bequeathed the Ritual of Coffee and Nondairy Creamer to a scowling old man who looked like Mr. Burns after he'd been embalmed, then she'd crossed the room and sunk her fingers into my arm like it was Play-Doh and her nails were nails. “We can talk upstairs.”

Upstairs was the nave, where the lectures/sermons were heard. It was gorgeous, as I found most churches to be (I had a thing for stained-glass windows; they really classed up a joint). The ceiling was quite high, at least two stories, so every footstep and whisper echoed, and the place smelled old and clean, like a library when someone had cleaned the shelves with Pine-Sol just a few hours earlier. The only person who hadn't bolted for fellowship to nom-nom-nom some brownies was an elderly lady with stacks of programs, which she was sorting at a small table at the rear of the room. What was it with church programs and how there are always at least a hundred left? Gotta give the church props for optimism. She nodded at the Antichrist, who smiled back, then returned to her sorting.

We went to the front, just a few feet from the altar, and my butt had barely settled on the pew before she rounded on me.

“What do you think you're doing, coming here of all places and at all times? This is very inappropriate!” This from the woman who had killed, and/or tried to kill, almost every vampire she'd ever met (including me), as well as the occasional serial killer.

“There are, what? At least five hundred churches in Minnesota?”

“Thousands,” was the dry response.

“So why does whatever it is you're up to—”

“Repenting sin and asking for forgiveness?”

“And for brownies, yeah. So why do you have to do that here? Heck, Hastings has a dozen churches, but why this town and this church?”

“Because your husband contaminated this church with his filth.”

“Are you talking about his money, or did he whiz in the corner during prayer circle?”

“Don't make fun.” Her mouth turned down and for a few seconds she looked like the sad kid picked last for kickball. Dammit! I didn't have time to feel sorry for the Antichrist!

“Okay, okay. Just . . . help me understand your thought process. So because Sinclair—whom you've never liked, but that's okay, he's not on Team Antichrist, either—has started going to this church again, his
dead family's church
, suddenly you need to be here, too?”

“No one forced him to become a vampire,” she snapped back. “Quite the opposite: he demanded Tina turn him.”

“Yeah, to avenge his
dead family
.”

She waved that away. Poof, buh-bye, Sinclair's dead family, we've got more important things to obsess over. “The fact that you've found some undead loophole so he could return doesn't mean he should be here.”

Well, that was fair. It
was
a loophole. Before I'd killed her, Satan had granted me a wish (that was when I started to suspect it wasn't so much that I'd killed her as she'd let herself die). I'd been tempted to go with
what's the secret ingredient that makes Orange Juliuses so delish?
but came to my senses and went with
let Sinclair live in the light again.

But! “You're wrong about the second one. He's got every right to be here, more than any of us. His grandfather rebuilt this church way back when . . . when there was a fire? Or something? There's probably
Sinclair rules!
from a hundred years ago scratched on a wall or under a pew around here.”

“Lord, I hope not,” she muttered. Couldn't tell if she was blaspheming or actually praying. “This church is where your husband and I talked, and it's where I got my Great Idea.” Great Idea. You could hear the caps.
6

“Uh-huh.” I'd been here five minutes and still hadn't gotten to the crux of it. I knew why. I didn't really want to know what Laura Goodman was up to. At all. “So, speaking of great ideas that probably aren't, what's this about you trying to out vam—”

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

“—pires to the— What?”

She 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 had 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 whoever), 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 were 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 fifty-somethings or thirteen-somethings 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!”
7

“Why . . . why would we do that?” Was she talking about us going on some sort 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

(“I'll take over your job, your destiny, the one you tricked me into and lied to get out of. But there are strings, Laura. You don't get to dump this on me and walk away without
major strings. I'm giving you the same deal I gave our dad: we're family or we're not. This isn't something you can change your mind about later. And you can't half-and-half it, either. No flitting down to Hell to check on me, or catch up on family gossip . . . If you're giving up your birthright and dumping your responsibility on me, then do it, and do it all the way.

“You're done, you're out. Hell's not your inheritance anymore, it's not yours in any way anymore and that means everything that comes with it. You don't get to jettison the responsibility but keep the perks . . . If I see you in Hell, I'm going to assume you're dead.”)