Undead and Unwary (30 page)

Once his fake funeral was over, Dad had gone straight back to his routine: making money, chasing women far too young for him, living in St. Paul, and pretending he didn’t have a family. He’d moved his money around so he could still access it after a name change. He’d sold off some properties and bought new ones. He was unfettered in all the best ways.

If he ever got to Hell, the Ant would kill him.

“Let me see if I’m getting this.” I saw him shift on the couch but had no pity for his impatience with my inability to grasp hideous behavior from someone who was supposed to love me. “There are no killers to apprehend, nobody to track down to avenge you? You haven’t been kept prisoner in a farmers’ market or Little Cayman?”

He blinked. “No.”

“You just . . . took a time-out from your life? And mine? Wait.” It hit me and I was a fool not to realize sooner. “
Not
just my life. Your other daughter’s life. Your son’s life. Your wife’s. Your ex-wife’s.”

“The pressures on me”—he sighed—“were crushing.”

“The Ant died in the accident, you selfish shit!” Talk about
crushing.

“Language. And the accident wasn’t my fault,” Dad interjected. “I had the flu, remember?”

“No,” I said shortly. I’d seized a peach throw pillow from the couch and started plucking at the tassels. Soon I was walking back and forth in front of him, shedding peach fuzz everywhere, keeping my fingers busy so I couldn’t strangle him. I reminded myself this was no time for multitasking. “Of course I don’t remember. You didn’t talk to me much before you faked your death, either.”

He blew that off. “I couldn’t go, and you know Antonia.”

Better than you now, maybe.

“She brought her hairdresser to the ball.”

“Sergio or Esperanza?”

“The illegal who had sticky fingers.”

Sergio, then. “So he didn’t have his own ID but he nicked yours.”

“Wherever he took it, or whenever, he didn’t have time to pick through and take the stuff he wanted, so he grabbed the whole thing. Probably would have stripped the cash and cards and then tossed it. Hell, maybe your stepmother gave it to him to spite me for not going with her.” He smiled, like a kid who was trying to impress his parents with something they found horrifying. “The accident was unforeseen, and it wasn’t like correcting the coroner’s ID would have brought your stepmother back.”

“But . . . the dental records? You were both burned beyond—I mean, your wife and Sergio were burned beyond recognition. Would the ID have been enough? Wouldn’t they have pulled dental records?” I mean, there was a reason I’d never questioned the fact that my dad was dead. It had seemed pretty definitive at the time, which, given my and mine’s penchant for returning from the dead, was unforgivably naïve in retrospect.

He coughed into his fist, a dry bark. “I spread some money around. Not even that much, come to think of it. Nobody cared much.” He glanced up at me and looked away. “Like I said, none of that would have brought your stepmother back. All I did was take advantage of a fortunate coincidence.”

“Fortunate. Coincidence?” Was it possible I was talking too fast? Was that why he wasn’t getting it? “Your wife. Died.”

“Aren’t you listening? I didn’t plan the accident. She died, but it wasn’t anything
I
did.” Another quick interjection, like he knew what I would say and when I would say it. He’d rehearsed, then. I recognized the behavior as I’d seen it almost constantly since about the first grade. When Sinclair tracked him down and explained to his father-in-law that he
would
be visiting Vampire Central before skipping town, Dad had started marshaling his arguments. Anyone else would have been polishing their apology.

Okay, so it was clear (and awful) he didn’t care his wife died. R.I.P., the Ant, and wow did I not want to feel sorry for her, but I did. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to help me solve the mystery, doing everything short of jamming her fingers in her ears while chanting “nah-nah-nah, can’t heeeeear youuuu!” She would have realized that instead of being devastated by her death, or at least unpleasantly surprised, her husband had turned it into a ladder he could use to escape. Which was cold-blooded on a level I had only ever seen in vampires. The really old, mean ones.

Appealing to his status as a loving husband hadn’t worked; time to try something else. “Your son. Was orphaned.”

“But left in good hands.”

“
No
, Dad,
not
in good hands!” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d lost it so quickly or completely. “You left him in
my
hands—what the fuck were you thinking?”

His shoulders had been going up in his trademark turtle-not-wanting-to-be-here pose, but that snapped him into sitting back upright. “Language.”

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! How’s that? Here’s more language: you are a craven shithead!”

“Please stop indulging in hysterics,” he semi-begged. He didn’t dare get up and storm out of a room full of lethal people glaring at him, any one of whom would have been happy to turn his femurs into splinters, but neither was he happy about having to stay in the room with his overly dramatic daughter and her tiresome awkward hysterics. “No need to be childish.”

Yep. My head was trying to blow itself up; I could almost feel the pressure building.
Head, I sympathize, but you’re not going anywhere.
“You haven’t seen
anything
yet. You’ve got a lot of nerve being alive, Dad,” I continued in a cold rage, “and also this is the last time I’m going to speak to you for a while so drop dead! Except don’t, because you suck at it! And—and I hate you, and your wife is more horrible in death than she ever was in life.” Lie. “And your hair is stupid, everybody knows you’re going bald.” Truth. For a few seconds I wished we were having this chat over the phone so I’d only have to contend with his asshat voice and not his asshat voice and face. One of the old-fashioned phones, which granted the user the ability to slam the receiver down knowing you partially deafened the guy on the other end with the crash. The future sucks sometimes. No one in their right mind would slam an iPhone.

He didn’t say anything, so I kept it up. “How could you do this to Laura? All she wanted from you was to get to know you a little. You had no history with her like you did with me, so you’d have a fresh start. You’d like her, the An—” I cut myself off. Reminding my dad that the daughter who wasn’t the vampire queen was the Antichrist might give him the mistaken idea that his shitty plan had been a good one. “She’s nice, a lot nicer than me. And what about BabyJon? He’s innocent.” The Ant was harder to argue. “Doing it to me I kind of get. I resented the shit out of you and the Ant and never stopped letting you know it. But with BabyJon you had a fresh start. Instead of a bitchy disrespectful teenager, you could start over with a wonderful baby. Indulge in the ‘this time I’ll do it right’ trope. Instead you bailed on everyone? Don’t you see how shitty and selfish that was?”

“Stop acting like a child—”

I wasn’t letting that go by twice. “Oh, and you’d know what that looked like
how
? You weren’t around for most of my childhood and you’re sure as shit not planning to be around for BabyJon’s. And pointing out your grotesque flaws isn’t acting like a child.”

“—and look at it from my side.” Ha! He couldn’t think of an argument to what I just said, so instead he clung stubbornly to whatever asinine self-serving point he wanted to make.
Oh, Christ, was there where I got it?
Fuck and double fuck.
“Trapped in a second marriage—”

“Trapped?” That was it. My brain was definitely going to implode inside my skull. Marc had told me the brain didn’t have pain receptors, which was wonderful because I figured when it blew, it probably wouldn’t even hurt. Wait, did he mean all brains or just my brain?

Dad was still mumbling excuses. “You know she only had the baby to get me to marry her. And she had the other one to make sure I wouldn’t leave. For a while I thought it wasn’t even mine.”

“You—what? You—okay, first,
it
has a name. It’s . . .” Jon something. John something? I called him BabyJon but that probably wasn’t the name on his birth certificate. Shit! “And he’s more than the bait in a trap. Okay, Antonia shouldn’t have tricked you, but don’t blame your son for her choices, or yours. Nobody stuck a gun in your ear and forced you to marry her.”

“I’m too old to start over.”

“Do you hear yourse—?” I cut myself off. He didn’t, any more than I ever did. “You’re the one who chose to bang the Ant
sans
birth control.”

“She said she’d had a hysterectomy,” he whined.

“Dad, she still got her period! Or did you think the Tampax was for making Molotov cocktails?” I clutched at my hair and managed—just—not to rip out whole chunks and then start on my scalp. “This is not the time for a lecture on how much you don’t know about wives despite being married most of your adult life. You chose to marry her and to raise a kid together. What, you never planned on sticking around? Were you looking for an escape hatch before the ink dried on your marriage certificate?”

“No.”

Silence. A bubble was coming up from somewhere, one I didn’t want to surface. Because if he hadn’t planned to ditch the Ant, and later the son, because of
them
, that meant the straw shattering the camel’s back, the tipping point, was me.

“Were you even a little glad I didn’t die for real?” The bubble had popped and it was as dreadful as I feared. And who was talking in such a small pitiful voice? Whoever they were, they should speak up; they sounded pathetic. “That even though I’d been run down like a skunk on a back road, I came back from that? I wasn’t hurt or—or anything. I was—”

“A monster.”

Hmm. Was he talking from a rapidly darkening tunnel? Or was the rage eclipsing everything but the need to pull his spine out through his ass and strangle him with it?

“It’s nothing personal,” he explained as I started to laugh. I think it was laughter. I was making weird noises, anyway. “I needed a fresh start. I deserved one, don’t you think?”

Bite him. Mojo him. Make him forget what he did, make him into the father BabyJon deserves. Or mojo him into taking a walk off the top of the IDS Tower.

“Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll give you what you deserve.”

Bite him. Turn him. He’ll be your slave forever, until you or someone else kills him; he’d never do it himself. Be his nightmare.

My family was so silent I’d almost forgotten they were there. But I could feel their shock and outrage, and Sinclair was carefully staying out of my brain. Probably didn’t want to shock me with what he was picturing doing to his father-in-law. Sweet, but unnecessary. There was no way whatever he was thinking was worse than what I was thinking.

“Y’know, I’m curious, Dad. What’s your plan for when you grow old? With one wife divorced and the other dead? No friends—not that you had many—because of the whole faked-death thing? You removed yourself from your children’s lives pretty thoroughly. It’ll just be you out there.”

A one-shoulder shrug. “I’ll hire people.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded; that was the response I expected. It would never occur to him to view a lack of friends and family as a crippling disadvantage.
Thank God, thank God in that one respect he and I are not alike.
“So you’ll never have an accident? Never endure some unseen calamity? You can foresee every single bad thing that could happen to you and meticulously plan for each and every one?”

“Well, I . . . um . . .”

“That’s what I thought. If you get clipped by a bus and pitched into a coma, anywhere in the world, the hospital will know exactly what to do, who to call? You won’t spend your golden years rotting away in a state-funded nursing home? What if you end up with a cancer diagnosis? You’ll foresee every single thing that could come of that and make all the provisions? Anything that might possibly go wrong in your life is one hundred percent foreseeable, if not preventable?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Nope. I’d put the brake on his brain.

I had him, and it should have been a triumph. “Because the thing about being a monster, Dad, is that I would outlive you by centuries, but would always have been in a position to keep you safe. I’m doomed—I mean destined—to be the top dog around here for quite a long time. If you lost all your money tomorrow, or ten years from now, I’d still be living with millionaires who would be able to handle any expense. Who would be happy to help you if only out of love for me.

“But that’s gone now. You wanted a fresh start? You wanted to put the new family behind you the way you put the old one behind you? Congrats. Wish granted.” I didn’t crowd him. Didn’t go near him. I would never touch him again. “Don’t come back here. Don’t reach out. Don’t call. Don’t write. If I see you again, or I find out BabyJon or Laura has seen you, I’ll see you dead at my feet. I won’t bother to do it myself, that’s how much of a nothing you’ll be to me. I’ll delegate your murder like it was sorting recyclables: something so boring I couldn’t be bothered to do it myself.”

Pale (even for him), Dad rose, straightened his crease, and crossed the parlor to leave. He didn’t speak to me. He didn’t look at me. That was fine.

“One more thing. I want you out of town within the week.”

He turned, eyes narrowed, a scornful smile riding his mouth. “What, you’re the landlord for the city of St. Paul?”

My hands had snapped into fists at some point. I had to make an effort to loosen them so I didn’t punch my nails through my palms the way they’d punctured Sinclair’s shirt. “As far as you’re concerned, yeah. You’ve got the whole rest of the planet to get old and die in. St. Paul is
mine
. Get the fuck out.”

He walked out of the parlor without another word. I listened to him cross the entryway, open the door, step outside. Then I used Tina’s trick. I pretended I was in the airport and he was a passenger who was a stranger to me, someone I didn’t have to listen to, someone whose proper place was background noise. And I let him fade.