Undead and Unsure (4 page)

“Majesties.” She wasn’t panting, because she had no breath to be out of, but she’d wasted no time coming on the run. “How may I serve?”

Sinclair, meanwhile, had twisted the lid off the puppies’ canister o’ treats. “This is unacceptable.”

“My king?”

He held the canister upside down and shook it. “It is not to be borne!”

Tina blinked slowly, like an owl. She loved my husband; she had loved him for decades before I was born and I confidently expected her to love him for centuries more. But her love didn’t threaten mine. She had been a friend of the Sinclair clan for generations; she was the vampire who had turned my husband from a grieving brother and son to a coldly infuriated predator. She was devoted, had killed and (at least twice that I knew of) almost died for him, and her love for him was utterly maternal.

Which, given how she looked, was as hilarious as it was touching. Tina had been a prime hottie in her day and still was, in mine. Her dark blond hair was pulled back into a thick braid, which brought attention to her pale face, making her dark eyes and bristly lashes even more striking. Pansy eyes, my mom called them. She was regularly carded when she tried to a) drink and b) see an NC-17 movie. This was partly because she was a vampire and partly because she liked dressing the part of a lecherous senator’s fantasy: plaid skirts, usually in a green or red tartan; crisp white blouses; little to no jewelry; no makeup. In life, she must have driven the other Southern belles out of their teeny tiny minds, and trust me, their minds were having enough trouble grasping the fact that Daddy’s slaves had nutty ideas about how it sucked to be owned. (Yeah. She was
that
old. Her full name was Christina Caresse Chavelle. Ha!)

All this to say she was a creature of contradictions, just like my insane husband; and also like my insane husband, she loved and protected us. That didn’t mean we didn’t drive her bugshit sometimes. Like now, for instance. Sinclair was shaking an empty canister and I could tell she wanted to roll her eyes but wouldn’t indulge. Thus the slow blinking.

After a few seconds while Sinclair practically tapped his foot waiting for her answer, she said, “I must apologize, my king.”

“How could you let this happen?”

“I foolishly let the budget, the management of our offshore accounts, an audit on the nightclub the queen keeps forgetting she inherited, a conference call with Michael Wyndham and Dr. Bimm to lay groundwork for possible alliances, and the monthly newsletter take precedence.”

I wanted to sigh with admiration. Only Tina could have gotten away with it: a perfectly serious response, with terrific undertones of
Because it’s not my fucking job, nimrod, now how about you go play with your dogs and let me get back to the grown-up stuff?

“It’s nothing to freak out about. We’re not out.” I figured I’d toss Tina a save, not that she needed one. “There’s a whole pack of those Chew-eez puppy treats things in—”

“Store-bought?” the king of the vampires nearly shrieked. I had the feeling he would have said
“Abstinence?”
in the same horrified tone. “Factory-churned dreck with peanut shells and corncobs as filler? Never! Never while I live!”

“Technically you’re not ali—quit that.” Tired of waiting for her snack, Fur had abandoned her bowl and jumped up on my legs. She had sharp claws to go with her sharp baby teeth—those puppies had mouths full of sewing needles. “Stop it!”

“My darling, my own,” Sinclair crooned as he set the canister down and came to me. He put his lovely strong hands on my shoulders and pulled me in for what I hoped would be some heavy kitchen smoochin’. Maybe we’d shoo everyone out and nail each other on the butcher block. Hmm, no, we made our smoothies there; the others would throw a fit. The puppy counter?
I’d
throw a fit. It was no coincidence that the kitchen was one of the few rooms in this monstrosity we hadn’t christened by defilement. “I need you at my side.”

“Back atcha, big guy.”

“Let us bake love.”

“Oooh, I’ve been waiting all day for—what?”

“Bake love.” Was he . . . ? He was! Eric Sinclair was reaching past me and grabbing an apron, which he dropped over his head and then tied behind his back. “That is how you show love to your pets,” he went on as if this was a serious topic of conversation and not further evidence of clinical insanity. “You
bake
love. I shall begin with a batch of Apple Crunch Pupcakes.”

“Please lose the apron,” I begged while Tina sloooowly backed out of the room. “I can psychologically block most of this if you just lose the apron. I can blitz the whole day, just please lose the apron!” Oh God, God, why wouldn’t he lose the apron?

“It will not stand! We may have run out of homemade dog biscuits but my precious darlings will never be forced to choke down—”

“Forced? So you’ve never once noticed how they eat? Because they are not forced. Ever.”

“—repulsive store-brand dog treats loaded with by-product meal and chicken heads. Now where . . .” He stood still for a moment, thinking. “. . . where is my mixing bowl?”

I fled the horror.

CHAPTER

FIVE

I like living with a cop. They have the best stories, it’s really,
really
hard to knock them out of their equilibrium, they’re in and out at all hours, which makes them perfect roomies for the undead, and it’s nice hearing stories that don’t start with
I stirred from my corpse-nap ravenous for the taste of human blood, and also needed to do some Christmas shopping, so I went trolling for rapists in the Mall of America parking lots.
On the rare occasions I pull my head out of my ass and take a frank look at my living conditions, living with a cop never hits the disad side.

Police work is greedy, though; it’s always hungry. Some asshole is always making trouble somewhere and some cop(s) will get stuck trying to fix it, and whether they do or don’t, another asshole is always coming along. I was touched and horrified to realize that Nick/Dick saw life in our mansion o’ monsters as a respite, a place where he could relax and let his guard down. In a mansion full of the undead. This sort of thing relaxes him. Yeah, weird, right? Poor guy.

If I hadn’t known Dick/Nick didn’t need the job, I’d have felt a lot worse. But he didn’t, so I didn’t. Detective Berry was also a Deere, as in John Deere, as in seven-figure trust fund. That brought the number of millionaires in our household to five. (Tina
had
to be rich. She was too smart not to be, dressed far too well—those hand-tailored plaid skirts weren’t cheap—taught Sinclair everything
he
knew about finance, had her claws in too many undead pies and, my God, that’s such shitty imagery . . . claws and pies? What was I thinking?)

Minnesota was an equitable distribution state, so Sinclair being rich meant I was, too. (I learned more than I ever wanted about equitable distribution vs. community property when the Ant torpedoed my mother’s marriage.)

It bugged me sometimes; it was like living in a Richie Rich cartoon as written by Wile E. Coyote: hard to believe, often illogical, always mystifying. How many people were on intimate terms with millionaires? Hardly any, right? And there lies my
problema grande
: I was afraid of becoming the monster Ancient Me had been, and I knew the best way to avoid that hideous future was to stay grounded. Except I was a vampire. And a queen. And rich. And lived in a mansion. With millionaires. Grounded? Shit . . . not even when I was alive, sharing a duplex with Jessica and brown-bagging it so I could scoop up some Marc Jacobs Caprice sandals. I was always the ordinary one surrounded by interesting weirdos. It only got worse after I died. And despite their claims, I was
still
the ordinary one surrounded by interesting weirdos.

(Also, how sad is it that I could start talking about living with a cop and turn it around to not wanting to be evil? No matter what the topic—the economy,
30 Rock
’s final season, killing the devil, hiring minstrels—it always came back to me not wanting to grow up to be me.)

All that to say I liked living with the new and improved Nick/Dick Berry. He was something else I’d accidentally changed; he was my proof that I didn’t have to become the bad guy. Plus, the benefits for me were super cool. Along with not turning evil and not writing the Book of the Dead on Sinclair’s skin, Nick’s personality change, in my arrogant opinion, was in the win column.

The old Nick: not a Betsy fan. Well, he was in the way that deer hunters are deer fans. Nick-Not-Dick had pulled a gun on me more than once, and not in a sexy role-playing way, either. But that was fair, because Sinclair and I had forced ourselves into his mind without much thought to how he’d feel about it. He never got over it—why should he have? We’d violated him; that’s the whole thing right there, there’s no way to make it not awful: we raped his brain to save ourselves.

Ah! But in the new timeline we hadn’t done that. My blundering through the past led to me chomping on the Antichrist instead of him. And Laura was already fucked up (see above: Antichrist). So Dick-Not-Nick never had any vampire-related trauma to work through; he thought we were all swell. He liked living in Vamp Central. He loved that he was going to be a dad. He got off on life: he liked the controlled insanity of his day job and the uncontrolled insanity of life at the mansion.

Case in point: he’d just gotten home from being on shift, a day of seeing the worst people can do to each other, and instead of heading for the kitchen to sneak some of Tina’s vodka or for his room to go fetal for half an hour or to take a hot shower to scald away man’s ickiness to man, I could hear him bounding up the steps to the third floor, where I was once again trying to figure out which dreadful velvet clogs to donate and which to burn. And which to (ugh!) keep.

“Hey! Is my favorite vampire queen in there?” A polite rap-rap at my bedroom door. “One preferably not having sex with my favorite vampire king? What am I saying; of course you’re not exercising your marital privileges all over each other. I can’t hear a bed breaking or a window shattering.”

I rolled my eyes. Break two beds in the same week and people make all sorts of assumptions about your bedroom antics. “Will you come in already?”

“Which brings me back to my first question,” he shouted cheerfully through the door. “Is there a vampire queen in there? I just need to talk to someone in charge. But I guess you’ll do. Ha!”

“Blow me,” I called back, which he knew was Betsy-ish for
Come right in, dear friend.
“And I’m getting more in charge every week. Probably.”

“And again I say ha.” He grinned at me from the doorway. He was wearing his usual off-to-fight-crime ensemble: tan dress shirt, dark gray slacks, matching jacket, and special-order cop shoes—they looked spiffy, but he could run in them. Except for the shoes it was all off-the-rack, but he was exactly my height (six feet even) and lanky like a swimmer, so he could wear just about anything and look good.

Dick-Not-Nick was not a label whore, but with those shoulders, he didn’t have to be. He could throw a gunnysack over his shoulders like a cape and I’d be all, hmm, that looks pretty good, maybe I’ll get a gunnysack for Sinclair.

“Ye gods, Betsy.” He looked around the room at the dozens of shoe boxes, the closet door yawning open and me sitting in the middle of the floor taking notes and pics with my camera, looking not unlike something my closet had spit up. “Are you still bemoaning the whole clog thing?”

“
Velvet
clogs.” I sulked. “And yes. Bemoaning? Really? That’s how you think people talk in real life?” But just seeing him was cheering me up. I’d changed the timeline so recently, it was still a huge lift to be in a room with my best friend’s lover and know he wasn’t terrified of me. I liked Dick-Not-Nick for himself but I wouldn’t lie. I also liked him for what he symbolized: I occasionally got it right, and not all accidents are bad.

Knowing the new Not-Nick liked me just fine would have been satisfying enough (I’m vain, but at least I own it). But he
loved
Jessica and he was excited about their baby. Sometimes too excited, because the baby was forcing their relationship to evolve; Not-Nick was feeling the pressure to change lives, and not just his own.

For the better, we all thought. Unfortunately, Jess disagreed. And that, I suspected, was why he’d really come to find me in my room at a time he knew Jess would probably be napping/digesting, Tina would be in her office crunching numbers or talking to a mermaid (yeah, mermaids—they existed, and who knew? I left all that to Tina, having enough vampires on my plate o’ drama without adding a side of mermaids), Marc would be engrossed in Web Sudoko, and Sinclair would be scampering about the countryside with Fur and Burr.

No-Longer-Nick was looking over the stacks of shoes I had all over the room. “How come you don’t do this stuff?” he asked, moving a few shoe boxes off my fainting couch and sitting down.

“Sorry, what? And be ready to move in an instant if I feel faint. You know that thing is supposed to be used mostly for fainting. I was gonna put up a sign, ‘For Emergency Swoons Only,’ but Sinclair wouldn’t let me, that tightass.” I’d had to buy the stupid Bordeaux couch because that was literally what it was: a fainting couch. Back in the day, it was something for the lady of the house to swoon onto, usually upholstered in dark velvet, with a raised back on one end, and the whole thing supported by gorgeous dark wood.

Not that I swooned, but I blacked out now and again, usually when I was about to get killed again, or just after I’d been killed again. And if I ever almost got killed in my bedroom again, I had a lavender couch to swoon onto. Progress, baby. The Boy Scouts had nothing on me, bless their little homophobic hearts. “Half an instant.”

“Yeah, sure. You love this stuff so much,” Nick-No-More said, gesturing to the many shoe boxes. “Which is strange to me and always has been. They’re shoes, for God’s sake. You stick ’em on your feet and out you go. You come back, you take them off, you’re done. That’s it. That’s all it is.”

I smiled at him. Not to go all “you’re just a guy you don’t get it” on the guy, but he was just a guy and he didn’t get it. “That’s not all it is. Not even close. As a species we’ve been stomping around in footgear for close to ten thousand years. We had to; the foot’s got more bones in it than any other body part. We had
to think up ways to protect all those teeny tiny bones, and if today shoes are more about status than need, back then it was one of the ways we tried not to get killed in our prime—so, when we were fourteen or fifteen. Man, it must have sucked to be considered elderly when you still had acne and had barely started to grow boobs.”

“Um . . . I think you’re getting off course.”

“Shows what you know. Listen: the hunters with foot coverings could hunt longer and better, so those families ate better so they lived to make babies and the babies were better fed because they had good hunters, right? The circle of life, blah-blah, but what it means is that shoes are about us evolving through design,
not
heredity. Isn’t that fascinating?”

“Um . . .” His eyes tipped up; I figured he was trying to think of a nice way to answer before giving it up: “Nope.”

“You’re just—”

“—a guy and I don’t get it, but what about the guys who design the shoes?”

“I didn’t say
all
guys don’t get it. Just
a
guy. My friend’s guy.” I smiled to ease the sting. I didn’t care for being marginalized, even by friends; I should try harder not to do unto others what pissed me off when it was done unto me.

“Okay, that’s—” He shook his head as if trying to clear a mosquito whining in his ear. I often had that effect on people, and it was wrong that I took pride in that. “Never mind. And when I said the guys who design them, I mean, why can’t you?”

Why did the me from the other timeline ever think I needed four pairs of purple velvet clogs?
“Why can’t I what?”
Velvet’s flammable, right?
“Besides make sense of this madness.”

“No. Design them yourself.”

I stared at him.

“Right?”

I stared more.

“Are you okay?” He leaned toward me and waved a hand in front of my face. “Are you in there still? Helloooo?”

I waved his hand away. “Quit. And I’m not like them. I’m not an artistic genius whose creative outlet would vastly benefit all mankind.”

“Okay, um, first I think you’ve maybe got shoe designers up on a pedestal.”

“Do not. They
are
artists, some of the finest in the history of human events.”

“My point. And second, why not give it a try? I don’t know anyone who knows more about this stuff than you do. Shit, you reeled off the bio of that guy you accidentally made not exist, that Chris what’s-his-name.”

“Christian Louboutin.” I could barely force my facial muscles, lips, and tongue to form the magic syllables. Gone, all gone, all his glorious works gone and worse than gone: never existed. Never will exist. Because of stupid, stupid me.

“Right, that guy. Have you considered trying to fill his shoes? So to speak?”

“Never,” I replied, shocked. “Not once. I couldn’t ever do it and it’d be awful to try. It’d be lying, I think, to try.”

“Or a tribute to his work! Like cover bands who play Nirvana.”

I shook my head again. “No.” On several levels. Nirvana, ugh. “My role, it’s totally different. I buy them and wear them. I don’t make them. Or help them get made. That’s not for someone like me, oh
hell
no. I can’t.”

“Okay, maybe.” He seemed taken aback at my vehemence. I told myself to dial it down. Hmm,
oh
hell
no . . . dial it down
 . . . next I’d be saying things were “off the chain,” because, surprise! We were back in 2010. “But you’ve never even tried, right?”

I just looked at him. Of course I’d never tried. Penguins don’t try to do physics, marmosets don’t try to tap-dance, and I don’t try to design shoes. The world was enough of a madhouse.

“So maybe you should! Try, I mean.” He sat back, his blue eyes almost twinkling with confidence. In himself as a persuader or in me as a designer, I didn’t know. His dimples—did Other Nick even
have
dimples?—appeared; he was nearly shaking with “you can do it”
vibes. “Look, just think about it, okay? I bet you could do it. If nothing else you know exactly what you like and exactly what you hate. You know the styles you like and the colors and the materials.”

“I know what kinds of cars I like, too, but I’ve got no plans to swing by Ford and drop off my résumé.”

“Still.” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”

“Nuts.” I went back to sorting. “What’s up, No-Longer-Nick?”

He groaned. “Come
on
. Stop it. Dick, okay, just Dick. I’m just Dick. When you see me, just remind yourself it’s all about Dick.
No
.” He jabbed a finger in my direction before I could get a snicker going. “Bad vampire queen! Keep your eensy brain out of the gutter.”

I won’t deny it: I did have an eensy brain, and I got off on messing with I’m-Not-Nick on the subject of his new-except-not-really name. Partly because I’m an immature asshat, but also I think I was testing him a little. Because nothing says friendship like immature mind games.