“No!” he wailed, warding it off with an elbow. Serving food in Hell had given Jennifer quick reflexes, though, and though she had to juggle the tray for a second, everything righted. “No,” he said again, and ran away from her. He found a seat as far away from the food as he could and sat and tried to be still and tried to quiet his brain and definitely didn’t think about anything that had happened in the last hour.
It took him a half hour to stop shaking.
’NOTHER PROLOGUE
(MY BOOK, MY RULES)
You know the cliché about your life flashing before your eyes just before you die? It’s true, and it’s terrible. In those moments before death, you don’t see loved ones or birthday parties or graduation or falling in love or your wedding day or your best vacation or anything, anything good.
No, you see your mistakes. All of them. Every missed chance, every bungled opportunity, every wrong choice, every consequence, every error in judgment, every left when you should have taken a right. In an endless parade, right before your eyes, right at the end, and it should take years, but it doesn’t; it takes only a few seconds. And it pretty much guarantees that when you die, you’ll go out regretful and deeply depressed.
That’s what happened to me, anyway: my well-deserved, miserable death.
CHAPTER
ONE
I hung up on the bitchy mermaid and waited for the gate to slide back. That was new. The reporters huddled on the sidewalk, though? They’d been there for three weeks. Long enough for me to remember their names, if I were the type to remember names. There was Needs Highlights, and Enough with the Aftershave, and This Isn’t My Real Job, and It’s Not Like I Stepped on You on Purpose, and Seriously with That Hair? Oh, and my personal favorite: Those Shoes Aren’t Terrible. I referred to all the camera personnel by the same name: Get That Thing Out of My Face.*
I parked in the garage, which was also new. Before the deluge
(“Onslaught,” my assistant/friend/devoted vodka guzzler, Tina, corrected. “Deluge means flood.”
“Have you been out there? I’m sticking with deluge.”)
we’d had an outside, unconnected garage that was really long and weirdly deep (it used to be a stable that held the carriages and the horses). It was too vulnerable to Enough with the Aftershave and his ilk, though, so Tina had pulled a zillion strings and gotten a modern, safe, connected, impenetrable garage put up in less than a week. Luckily, the mansion sat on a corner lot and almost took up the block by itself; our yard was still big enough for Fur and Burr and smoothie picnics. Ah, the carefree days of smoothie picnics, before vampires went viral.
I made my way into the mansion, waking up Fur and Burr when I passed through the mudroom. I had to amuse them for only a minute; given the yawns and round bellies and bad breath, they’d just eaten, and I’d interrupted nap time. (Fur and Burr were not reporters. They were black Lab puppies.)
What was waiting for me inside the mansion was almost as scary as what was lurking on the sidewalk, though: a jittery zombie, a pissed-off Southern belle, the guy who saw dead guys (Bill? Sam? Something short, anyway), and a vampire king, all under siege.
I’d gotten no farther than a single step into the kitchen when I was seized, backed into a wall, and kissed so hard my feet left the tile. I wiggled my toes so my left shoe didn’t fall off and clop to the floor. That sound was so distracting. “Finally,” Sinclair murmured against my lips. “I loathe your interminable shopping trips.”
“I filled up the tank and got ice, jackass; I was gone maybe twenty minutes mmmpphhh.”
Should have said a vampire queen under siege.
I managed to fight off my husband (not without regret, but time and place, man, time and place) and put away the ice. This took, subjectively speaking, about five years, since the freezer was crammed with flavored vodkas
(Sriracha-flavored vodka, Tina? PB&J vodka? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?)*
and dead mice stuffed into neatly labeled Ziplocs. Only in this place would the mouse population go down after the cat died.
“Yes, but I missed you this morning as well. I dislike rising alone.” Don’t worry—the king of the vampires definitely wasn’t pouting. I’m not pouting, he’d correct while I tried not to giggle at his protruding lower lip. I’m concentrating. Not even a little tiny bit. Borderline pout at most.
“Yeah, well, I haven’t seen Jess and her weird babies in over a week. Unacceptable! I’m still getting used to not living with her.” And it sucked. It sucked rocks. It sucked like Trump’s hair.*
Jessica had been my best friend since our training-bra days. We’d lived together since college. But since I’d accidentally changed the timeline, she was stuck with blessed with a boyfriend and baby twins.* It was a measure of her loyalty that she was willing to put up with her friend rising as a vampire queen and eventually taking over Hell, willing to put up with vampire roommates and werewolves who loved the pop-in, willing to put up with a zombie doctor and a perpetual shortage of ice . . . it was all fine, until the Antichrist outed vampires.
No one—least of all me—knew what would happen now. There was constant news coverage. The block was infested with reporters and had been for weeks. We were also hearing from a lot of vampires who were super pissed to rise one night and discover that, while they were sleeping, their queen had confirmed to the world that they exist.
So: exit Jessica, Dick, and their twins, Elizabeth and Eric. Also, I totally didn’t cry like a wimp when I realized she’d named her babies after my husband and me.
It was for their own good. That’s what I kept telling myself. When I weakened and started to call to beg her to move back in, Sinclair and Tina reminded me.
(“Darling, must I confiscate your phone?”
“Try it. You ever gotten a fang in the testicle?”)
Laura Goodman, the Antichrist—dumbest name for the Omen ever, by the way—motivated by a combo of spite and bitchiness, had used YouTube and social media and her legions of pathetic devil worshippers to expose vampires. And the vampires, under my direction, hadn’t denied it. In fact, we’d done the opposite of denying it. Specifically, I had gone on live television and admitted that, yep, vampires were a thing and, yep, we weren’t going anywhere.
Cue the deluge. Or the onslaught, if you like that word better. The interview went viral. Everything vampire-ish went viral. We were the goddamned swine flu of the Internet. That was a virus, right? Anyway, people were pretty evenly divided between two schools of thought: “That bimbo is lying!” and “That bimbo is a vampire!” The worst part? Nobody called the Antichrist a bimbo. Must have been the angel pin she wore on the lapel of the hideous blazer (corduroy!) she liked to wear on air.
“Stop that.” Eric Sinclair, king of the pouters vampires, was once again trying to corner me for some more five-star smoochin’. “I can hear all your exposition.”
“I can’t help it,” I protested. “Also, Fred called again.”
“As I told you she would.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re freakin’ Nostradamus. Is it any wonder I can’t help thinking about all this junk? It’s what’s on my mind.”
“Easily fixed.” Eric Sinclair’s smile, slow and dark like a stream of chocolate ganache, lit me from the inside out. Better than sunshine, even. And that was saying something. He made a grab for me and I let him, and he pulled me straight to him, up against his broad chest, and oh my God the shoulders on the man! He’d been a farmer’s son in life, a hard worker who had loved his family. His family was long dead, and so was the farm boy he’d once been. Only the muscular frame and the keen, deadly mind remained. I sometimes wondered how much more terrifying a vampire Sinclair would have been if he hadn’t been raised by loving parents.
“Darling, I meant it—stop narrating.”
“You stop narrating,” I retorted, because he was now pressing soft kisses to the slope of my throat and
it was really, really hard to think. “I’m doing just flehhh burble menh mmmm.” The man’s mouth was the textbook definition of sinful, and the sexy baritone was the cherry on the oofta sundae. (Hmm. Maybe he was right; maybe there was such a thing as too much exposition.)
But never mind! It was time—past time—to slip upstairs and try to break our fourth bed in two years. The Slumberland rep loved our asses.
Sinclair was now nibbling—very, very gently—on my lower lip, and I lightly bit him back and mumbled hopefully, “Upstairs?”
Oh yes! The upside to a telepathic link with your husband: you couldn’t fake anything in or out of bed. The downside: you couldn’t fake anything in or out of bed. But this time it was all good.
Then he did that corny thing I loved: bent and scooped me into his arms and literally swept me off my feet. He was an undead Rhett, and I was his bitchy Scarlett, with better shoes! Oh, it was glorious, and I—
“Hey!” A familiar skidding sound followed by a thud. When he had news, Marc liked to sprint for the kitchen, nearly always misjudged the distance, and bounced off the swinging kitchen door like a Super Ball. I’d blame this on his zombie-ness, but he’d been exactly like that in life.
Sinclair closed his eyes, likely mustering patience, or reminding himself that zombies taste terrible and thus must never be chowed upon. We could hear Marc righting himself before shoving the door open and darting into the kitchen. It was really, really hard not to snicker. “Betsy, it’s almost time for your— Again? God, you two are like rabbits.”
“We are not!” Rabbits did it at least a dozen times a week, right? Sinclair and I were both so busy that we’d only managed half of that, and it was Friday already.
“It’s odd that you frequently feel compelled to comment on our sex life,” Sinclair pointed out with admirable calm.
“Because it’s always in my face! Everyone’s faces! All the time!”
Er. Not really, I was pretty sure. I think this had more to do with Bill Lesser, or whatever the guy’s name was. When the “Vampires are, like, real! Whoa!” story broke, Marc ended up hanging out with one of the bloggers covering the story. Sparks flew, apparently? But Marc had this nutty idea that live people didn’t want to date zombies. His old-fashioned prejudices were so quaint.
“Now you’re just exaggerating and being shrill,” I said, keeping the reproach out of my tone. “Besides, I already told you guys about the stuff I said in the interview.”
“This isn’t a lame YouTube video like your useless sister came up with; it’s an actual interview on an actual news channel.”
“Aw. You’re so cute when you’re disparaging the Antichrist to stick up for me.”
“I’ve seen Hell and I’ve been audited. The Antichrist doesn’t scare me.”
Even Sinclair had to laugh at that.
“Though why you settled for Diana Pierce when you prob’ly could have gone on Larry King—”
“King creeps me out. It’d be like talking to a giant grumpy cigarette. Besides, I like Pierce.” She looked great, her hair was always nice, pleasant voice, and she didn’t make the sign of the cross at me when I came to the studio. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said of her sound guy.
“So let’s go watch it!”
“More exposition,” Sinclair muttered, and got an elbow to the ribs for his pains, which was tricky since he still hadn’t put me down.
Still, an excited zombie was hard to deny, and anything that got his mind off pining for the blogger was good. So Sinclair set me back on my feet and we followed Marc to the TV room, formerly one of the mansion’s many parlors. No one needed five parlors—honestly, no one needed one—so Marc had taken this one over and modernized it with a vengeance: wide-screen TV, stereo sound, a bar with a blender (the entire household was a bit smoothie obsessed), easy chairs, a sectional sofa that five of us could slump on at a time, new plush carpeting, soundproofing, et cetera.
(“It’s definitely not a man cave,” Marc had insisted as we stared at it a month ago, startled into silence, “so don’t ever call it that. God, I hate that word. Hate it.”)
Tina was already there, curled up at the end of the sectional, her short legs tucked beneath her, but she immediately unfolded and stood when she saw us. She’d known Sinclair all his long, long life—she’d been an honorary aunt to the entire Sinclair family for generations, had turned him at his request, then stuck by his side like a blond barnacle with exquisite manners.*
“Majesties.”
Years. Years of my life wasted, asking the woman to just call me Betsy already. “Seriously, Tina?”
She was too deep into her tablet to respond. “Ah, this is excellent; we’re all here . . . once we’re finished watching, I would like to discuss hiring a PR firm to handle more things like this.”
Yawn. Which wasn’t out loud, but apparently my poker face sucked, because she followed up with, “I know it sounds unnecessarily dull, Majesty, but the vampire nation has never needed public relations before. We were rather more invested in the reverse.”
“What, you think I’ll have to do more of those?” Well, going on TV wasn’t so bad. I’d gotten to debut my new navy pumps, at least.
“Nothing to sweat,” Marc assured me. “You said yourself you thought it went fine.”
“Oh, you bet. At first I was worried the Casadei sling-backs would be too much for daytime, but then I realized they were appropriate, but now it’s occurring to me that’s not what you meant.” I shrugged. “It was, what? Two days ago, maybe? It was fine.”
Sinclair sat on the far end of the sofa, pulling me into his lap as he got comfy. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t kick up a fuss like calling him Handsy McGrabass and maybe dumping ice down his back, because that was the last bit of fun we had for a long, long time.
CHAPTER
TWO
TWO DAYS AGO, MAYBE?
Green rooms aren’t really green, proving once again that much of life was a lie. But it was a decent enough room to cool your high heels in, with comfortable chairs, a sofa, a full-length mirror, a fridge full of snacks and pop,* and a TV.
So I sat there and guzzled my third Coke in five minutes and tried not to fidget and politely returned the stare of the cookbook author who had the segment before mine. She was a pretty, curvy woman who looked to be in her early forties, with short, fluffy brown hair, pale blue eyes, and big glasses with brown rims that made her look like a cute owl. She was clutching her book so hard her knuckles were white.
Someone (producer? guy who lost the coin toss?) opened the door, stuck his head in, saw we were both in the room, nodded approvingly, left. The woman’s gaze had shifted to him and she seemed a little devastated when he shut the door.
As for me, I was too antsy to play with my phone and, like an idiot, hadn’t brought anything to read. So, what the hell. “You’re thinking, if it’s true, I’m alone in a room with a vampire. And if it’s not true, I’m alone in a room with a crazy lady who thinks she’s a vampire.”
There was a reason I hid behind humor, and it wasn’t just because I was Minnesota Nice, which was code for passive-aggressive. It’s because humor worked. Sometimes.
“Well . . . yeah,” she admitted, and her mouth curved into a bashful smile. “That’s pretty much the whole thing right there.”
“Don’t worry. I only drink . . . Coke,” I said, because what’s more cheering than my terrible Bela Lugosi impression? I leaned forward—she was sitting opposite me—and held out my hand. “My name’s Betsy.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m Carol.” She moved the book to her other hand to shake mine and I let out a yelp of delight.
“Smoothie Nation,” I breathed, delighted by the title and content. “Oh my God, everyone in my family loves smoothies! We make them every single day! We have so many blenders!”
“Your family? You mean . . . other . . . um . . . vampires??
??
“Vampires, humans, maybe a zombie or two. The family I made.” As opposed to my blood relatives, who, with the exception of my mother, were all degrees of terrible. “We’re nuts about them. Are you going to make smoothies during your segment? Please, please tell me you’re making smoothies during your segment!”
“Well, yeah.” Another giggle. “Course I am. Look.” She opened the book to a glorious concoction: Strawberry Colada Smoothie. Ooh, and on the facing page: Cinnamon Roll Smoothie!
I started groping for my purse. Pen, pen, where was my pen? “May I please have your autograph? And where can I get your book? The gang will love your book. I have to get your book!”
She giggled, which was so charming. “Sure. Here, I’ve got an extra copy.” She picked up her tote bag, rooted around, produced another book and a pen. “It’s, uh, Betsy, right?”
“Yeah. You don’t have to say it. I’m well aware it’s an absurd name for a vampire queen.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, and started to write.
“Would you mind terribly making it out to my husband, too?” At her nod, I added, “It’s Sink Lair, two words, just like it sounds.” Heh.
“Oh, is he foreign?”
“No, but he was super insufferable when we met. I just like sticking it to him sometimes.” All times. But who was counting? “Thanks,” I added, smiling down at my new (free!) book. “I can’t wait to try these. I’m so lucky I ran into you.”
“Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. You don’t seem . . . um—” She cut herself off and the color rose in her face.
“Like a drooling psychotic with an unholy thirst for human blood?” An uneasy giggle was my answer. “Yeah, don’t believe everything you see on YouTube.”