Derik looked at me and I liked him a little more just then, because I could relate to the look of complete bewilderment on his face. “What just happened?”
“Same old, same old. Which I think is nice.” I shook the almost empty blender at him. “Smoothie?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Lars had grown fat.
Jennifer realized her first thought on seeing her high school crush was as accurate as it was unkind. Did you expect him to go into stasis for thirty-one years? Not everyone was lucky enough to be damned, then return to the real world still looking like a teenager.
Did I just classify my situation as “lucky enough”?
Finding the house had been easy. She’d known Burnsville well before she’d killed herself. (She never referred to her situation as “died.” She always said exactly what happened: “killed myself.”) Before the Mall of America, there was the Burnsville Mall. She and Tammy went every weekend they could, and when they couldn’t shop for clothes, they hit Baskin-Robbins. Tammy always had some kind of chocolate; Jennifer stuck with daiquiri ice. It was pale blue, a cloud on a cone, and deliciously tart and cool. It even tasted pale blue.
Lars lived in a three-garage house on Nicollet Avenue South, and other than the paint jobs and the cars, it all looked as it had the last time she’d been in the small city. Jennifer piloted the Ford space shuttle right up the small hill into the driveway—3923 was prominently displayed on the front porch as well as the mailbox. Hooray, they still had mail! Jennifer decided to find joy in the small things. Especially since she might be back in Hell by the end of the night.
She hopped out of the space shuttle and rushed up the sidewalk, but she wasn’t eager. All her life and death, she had rushed through things she couldn’t bear, so she wouldn’t chicken out. If she took the coward’s way out today, if she chickened out about not chickening out, the pain wouldn’t just be hers. Her mother would pay the price, too. She’d spend the rest of her life in the house on Mill Street, listening for Jennifer’s footsteps.
No.
She knocked on the door and heard a faint, “Yeah, c’mon in, Pete!”
She opened the screen door, then the front door, and walked in. Lars—like her mother, he sounded essentially the same, just a bit rougher—kept yelling from the back of the house. “Hey, you’re early, buddy! Be right out!”
Okay. Lars didn’t sound mad, or sad. Whoever Pete was, he was a welcome guest. Or at least not overtly unwelcome. His parole officer, maybe? Lars had been set free early; would he still be on parole?
His house looked nice—nicer than her mother’s, in fact. Two stories, three-car garage, sunken living room. A little cluttered inside, and the blankets on the couch were rumpled, but there weren’t any dirty dishes in the living room, the bookshelves had been dusted, the newspapers were neatly folded and had been carefully placed back on the coffee table. There were vacuum tracks on the tan wall-to-wall carpet.
Lars had made a life for himself from the ashes of Tammy’s demise.
She cleared her throat, sounding, to her ears, like a dying goose. “It’s—it’s not Pete,” she called.
“Eh? Oh hell, Renee, is that you? Did I forget to leave your check yesterday?”
Check. Vacuum tracks. Cluttered but clean: cleaning lady.
“It’s not Renee, either.”
“Um . . . Tara?”
Are we going to go through every woman he knows? The thought was hysterical, but not in a good way. It’s not Tara or Jane or Susie or Carol or Mindy or Barbara or Debbie or Fiona or Lisa or Kelly or Penelope or Roberta or Anna. It’s no one living.
She heard heavy footsteps approach; it appeared the kitchen connected to the dining room, which connected to the living room. She could hear him but not see him until he turned the corner and—
Saw her.
Lars had gotten fat. The blond teenager she’d crushed on the moment she saw him was buried, swallowed in the older man before her. His complexion was florid, dark pink and getting darker as he looked at her. His hair was brutally short, a buzz cut that made him look like a retired soldier. His blue eyes were small, like raisins pressed into dough. He was wearing olive green work pants and a green-and-white plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Athletic socks, no shoes. He was holding work boots in one hand, unlaced and ready to be pulled on.
Fishing opener, maybe, she thought. What’s the date? Whatever he and Pete were going to do, it was probably outside. Hope he doesn’t have to climb a lot of hills.
Why was she so obsessed over his weight gain? She couldn’t believe that’s what she was focused on, kept going back to again and again. Then she figured out the problem.
This is what it’s like to go to your thirtieth high school reunion, she thought. You don’t recognize anyone because you haven’t seen them since they were teens. And in your head, and theirs, you’re still teens.
Except in her case, she really hadn’t changed a bit.
“Lars, it’s—it’s me. I’m back.”
He just looked at her.
Okay. That was okay. It had been decades. She shouldn’t expect him to remember her; she’d had the crush, not him. He’d barely known her before the fire. She would have to explain who she was and hope he didn’t think it was some cruel prank, that someone hadn’t figured out why he’d gone to prison and cooked this up solely to mess with an old fat man living by himself in Burnsville, with a friend named Pete and a housekeeper he occasionally forgot to pay.
“Jennifer Palmer back from the dead, oh Jesus-please-us,” he breathed, and then fell down, and she realized he knew exactly who she was, and had the moment he’d lumbered into his living room.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
The cherry on my nightmare sundae: we were all screaming at each other. In. The. Basement.
“It’s the only part of the house that can hold everyone,” Tina had explained, because the Peach Parlor was sadly insufficient. Even our huge kitchen—back in the day the kitchen had pumped out meals that fed twenty or thirty people a day, every day, multiple times a day—was too small for all the “visitors” (as polite a term as I could manage).
Worse? Worse than being here? It had been cleaned! The basement ran the width of the mansion, which meant it was as long as hell and almost as wide, with lots of rooms off the main area. It was basically a dark, underground mansion with a tunnel leading to the river. Someone had been down here dusting and scrubbing and mopping, and brought lots of big tables and all kinds of chairs, from folding (“Poker, anyone?”) to overstuffed easy chairs (“Football game, anyone?”). Here I assumed we were just between housekeepers, cleaning up puppy pee without complaint, when Tina had hired an army of them and they’d spent the week making the basement slightly less revolting.
I felt tricked.
“It’s not about tricking you,” Marc soothed while I’d stomped down the stairs. “It’s about not wanting to hear all the whining for a week beforehand. Now we just have to hear the whining now.”
“Not better,” I growled.
“Depends on where you’re standing.”
So we had vampires interrupting each other in their rush to complain about Laura exposing them, and Sinclair just letting them vent, and now tromp-tromp-tromp down the stairs, here came Derik and Michael and Lara and Jeannie, and I knew damned well at least three of them didn’t have to make a sound when they moved; they just wanted to be noisy. Hey-ho, the werewolves are here, sorry we’re late, U mad, bro?
“Oh, check this,” I muttered. “Something jerk-ass this way comes.”
Marc, who’d been leaning against the wall watching with an avid gaze, pretended to stagger. “Whoa. I—whoa! Was that a literary reference?”
“Shut up,” I snapped. “I read.” It was true! Though I’d never read that book. I just really loved the title. C’mon, how bada
ss is a title that basically tells you bad shit is en route? Hey,” I said a little louder as the Wyndhams approached. “Grab a seat and get ready to bitch.” I remembered the world’s most terrifying middle schooler was there and added, “Sorry about the language.”
“’Sfine,” Lara said with a giggle.
Normally I’d say something dumb and tiresome like “are you sure this meeting in a spooky basement packed with pissy vampires is an appropriate hangout for your child?” except, again: Lara Wyndham. She’d probably handle it better than I did. She was handling it better than I was; she at least had a smile on her face and seemed genuinely interested in the goings-on.
“This is amazing,” Marc murmured. “I can’t believe Sinclair isn’t just telling them all to shut up and fall in line.”
“That’s the plan. Y’know, eventually. But I asked him to let them have their say first. What, bored already? Play with your phone.”
“Definitely not bored. And I forgot it upstairs.”
“Yeah, me, too.” It was in my bedroom. Tina and Sinclair probably had theirs; they were famous for taking their screens to bed long before taking screens to bed was considered acceptable twenty-first-century behavior. In fact I almost never had my phone on me because whoever I was with nearly always had theirs. “No big.”
At least people were only yelling. No one was punching. Or biting. Nothing was on fire. It might not end horribly for all involved.
Ha.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
Laura was back at the mansion, the place she hated to be but couldn’t stay away from. She was getting a little worried about Ronald Tinsman. Not much, just a bit. And not because she was starting to wonder if Betsy had been right. Betsy wasn’t right. It was statistically impossible.
Laura was back and the mansion was looming in front of her like the Bates Motel and she was just . . . concerned. As a friend. A friend Ronald had known less than a year and never socialized with either before or after his daughter’s murder. A friend who had told him she was the Antichrist and he hadn’t blinked. Because he was open-minded, not because he was numb, Betsy, thank you very much.
The irony, given their mission to expose vampires, was that these days Ronald was the walking dead. But despite his deep personal grief, he’d been integral to the plan, had helped her expose vampires, would help her keep manipulating the media until the world rose in righteous fury and destroyed every bloodsucker they could find.
None of this would be happening without Ronald. It was almost as though Cindy had been murdered for the greater good. Perhaps in time, he would come to see it that way. That her death was necessary. Perhaps even a blessing in disguise.
You think him being numb means he’s fine with that?
Even when Betsy wasn’t there, she was there. Sometimes her half sister babbled on and on and on in Laura’s mind until she thought her brain would burst.
He knows I’m a force for good, despite my birthright.
That was right. That was just right. Laura had been nervous about revealing her dark genetic legacy to Ronald, but he’d been fine with it. With her being the Antichrist. Totally fine with it. Not numb—accepting. Like a friend.
Besides, she wasn’t anymore. Betsy was the Antichrist. If not the daughter of the Morningstar, then her heir. And Laura was—was—
(trapped)
free.
Anyway, here she was, worried about Ronald, and Betsy was probably wrong about him
(wrong about everything)
because Ronald wasn’t numb to the world, he was mourning, there was a difference, and she didn’t expect Betsy Taylor of all people to see the nuances. To understand anything beyond her own nose.
But still: troubling behavior. Ronald almost never went home. He spent hours and hours on the sidewalk in front of the mansion. He was the first reporter there and the last to leave. Everyone knew his story, and after the first few days, the other journalists left him alone. He made them all uncomfortable—men and women whose job was showing people’s pain to the world were getting creeped out by Ronald Tinsman.
Once he’d gone thirty-seven hours without a trip home. Laura had intervened then, had asked a couple of her followers to make him go home, make him eat and rest, and they had; they were anxious to do anything she asked; they would have eaten him if she’d asked, but of course she never would; she was good, and she would make her followers be good, and anyone who couldn’t fall in line could leave, or die, or both.
Six hours later, he was back.
The meeting was tonight. Two dozen (maybe more!) vampires were in that house right now, and because they were animals there would be blood, and there were half a dozen reporters here and finally, finally the world would have to acknowledge Betsy Taylor was an animal who should be put down or at least run out of town, thrown out, not given a loving husband and buckets of money and a mansion and friends and her very own kingdom on earth and in Hell.
Finally.
“It’s almost over,” she whispered to Ronald. She thought about gently bullying him to go home and rest. But what she’d started with a few YouTube videos would be finished tonight. He would rest tomorrow. She would see to it. She’d show him that she was a friend, not someone who manipulated his grief and used it to her own end.
“You’ve got a lot to be proud of, Ronald. Cindy would be proud, too.” Probably. Hadn’t she been a cheerleader? Well, perhaps she would have shaken her pom-poms and cheered for her father if she could see him avenging her. Something like that. Sure.
“Yes,” he replied with all the animation of—it must be said—a corpse. When she’d met him at Fairview, her first thought had been, What a sad gray man. But sad wasn’t the word. Not even close.
“Is it true?”
Laura looked around at the unfamiliar low-pitched voice and felt her eyes narrow. She knew that man. An overgrown boy, really, the skinny guy in his midtwenties, the blogger who claimed to see ghosts. The one who looked at Marc Spangler like he could eat him alive, the one Marc Spangler was careful not to look back at. Too often, anyway.
Another person who, by rights, should be scared to death of Betsy and her ilk but was too dumb or infatuated to keep away from here. He’d met Betsy’s mother and her friends. He was a welcome visitor there. And Laura was out here on the sidewalk.
God, she hated the mansion.
Will something. Something to do with cooking, or kitchens. Will Pot? Jar? No. No, that wasn’t it.
Mason.
“Is what true?” she asked, not bothering to keep the irritation out of her tone. If she hadn’t been raised to be a good person, she’d tell him to get the hell away from her, couldn’t he see there was important work to be done?
He wasn’t speaking to her, she realized, irritated all over again. He was pestering poor gray Ronald. “My sources told me you lied to Laura about the bomb.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No. No. No. Will Mason, puny infatuated faggot, did not know about the incendiary device Ronald had built as an absolute, total last resort. As a tool there was a ninety-five percent chance they wouldn’t even use. It was . . . was . . .
Just in case.
Right. Insurance. People bought insurance knowing the chances were good that they’d never, ever need it. The bomb
(don’t call it that sounds scary it’s a device just a device like an alarm clock or a kitchen timer just a tool)
was like that. Hardly worth the trouble to assemble and plant, because they likely wouldn’t use it.
God, he was still talking. He’d sidled close to them and was almost whispering. He didn’t want the other reporters to hear him, which was a relief but also puzzling. Why was he confronting them? Had he told Betsy? Was this a trap?
Of course it’s not a trap. It was my idea to come here, like it’s always my idea to come because m
y darling sister can’t be bothered to invite me. I’m the one who set the trap. The trap I can spring whenever I want, but I won’t. Because I’m not like that. That’s something she would do.
“You told Laura you could trigger it remotely as a last resort. But that you probably wouldn’t have to.”
“Yes,” the gray man said.
“But my sources say that really, your bomb’s on a timer, and the clock’s been running for two days.” Pause. When neither of them said anything—Ronald too gray, Laura too horrified—Will asked, “Is that true?” And his voice. His tone. It’s not true, right? You didn’t really do that, right? My sources got it wrong. I’m almost sure. That’s why we’re out here having a quiet, civilized conversation. Because you wouldn’t have done that to your own sister. Even if you secretly hated her. Even if you’ve thought about killing her since the week you met.
Oh, it was awful. So thank God he had it wrong; his stupid little ghosts were lying to him and stirring up trouble because anyone not in Heaven or Hell was clearly up to no good, vampires and werewolves and now ghosts, treacherous, not to be trusted, they fell outside the natural order of things and ha! Your ghosts got it wrong, Will!
“No,” she said, triumph ringing through her voice; oh, wouldn’t he feel stupid. Betsy’s friends were as dim as she was and it was pretty funny when you thought about it. “No, of course not; I’d never—”
“Yes,” Ronald replied absently, almost indifferently. “The clock’s almost run down. Not long now.”
“Wh-what?”
To Laura: “Why do you look shocked? You know what they did to my girl. Did you think I’d be satisfied with a meeting? What do I care if they’ve come over to yell at the king and queen of the vampires? What do I care if they’re fighting? Or if they kill one or none or some or both? None of them can live. They have to burn, Laura. They have to and anyone who would help them. We all have to burn.”