Meanwhile, Dad had gotten ready with his nasty retort when the engine caught (Nnnn-mmmm—mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!) and the blade started making horrible scraping sounds and bits of leather and fabric starting flying everywhere. I was amazed and made a note never to buy any other kind of lawn mower because, damn, that was good design!
“I cannot bring myself to look away, though I devoutly wish I could,” Sinclair said, appalled. “That poor automobile.”
“And you know what? It sounds exactly like you’d expect a lawn mower chewing up a Mustang to sound.”
“I have always been fond of the lady,” Tina announced, “and am now making a mental note never to enrage her. Should I do so, however inadvertently, I will refuse to engage for my own safety.”
As far as advice went, you couldn’t beat it. I’d made the same mental note fifteen years before and it had stood me well.
Jess hopped down from the hood and made no move to stop my dad as he pushed past her. She even stepped back with a courteous smile as the mower started to belch smoke and the engine began to hitch (nnn-ggkk!). Dad stretched up to grab for the starter switch (tough to hit a moving target) while flinching all over the place as he was showered with bits of Mustang. The mower chose that second to give up on trimming the car and died with a final choked screech. After the unholy racket, the sudden silence was startling.
Jessica blinked when she noticed us for the first time, raised one shoulder in a “sorry, but you know what I’m like” shrug, and turned back to Dad, who looked close to bursting into tears. “All right, fun’s over.”
“Fun? I don’t—”
“I meant my fun, shithead. Get off our property.”
Dad had been reduced to waving his arms like an impaired traffic cop. “I can’t, I have to—”
“Send a tow truck for it. Or don’t; I’d love to find other tools to use on it. I think an electric drill could be fun. Either way, leave.”
“But thanks to your childish tantrum I don’t have a way to—”
“Bus stop is two blocks east.”
“Bus stop?” he replied. From his aghast tone, you’d think Jessica had suggested he gouge out his own eyes. “I can’t do that!”
She gave him a long look, then turned and started for the toolshed. I managed to restrain myself from clapping my hands and jumping up and down. What next? The aforementioned drill? A weed whacker? Oh, please, please let it be the weed whacker.
My father did something smart at last: practically sprinted down the driveway and onto the sidewalk. He didn’t slow and after a few seconds I couldn’t see him anymore.
Jess turned back toward the house, then nearly fell over Dick, who had raced to back her up after my dad pushed past her. Now he was on his knees and staring up at her like a supplicant while grabbing the bottom of her shirt and tugging to keep her attention.
“Jesus, you scared me!”
“Oh, please, please,” he implored, gazing up at her with an adoration most people showered on chocolate croissants, “you’ve got to marry me.”
Jess smiled but then glanced away. “Not this again.”
Ooh, this again! It wasn’t the first time he’d proposed but after what had just happened, I knew it would be the last.
“How can I ever—? With anyone else, ever? You’re so—and this was so—” He gestured blindly at the car vs. mower showdown. Even though he wasn’t speaking in complete sentences, I knew what he was trying to convey. We all could. “Please, you have to. Please, there couldn’t ever be anyone else for me; say it’s true for you, too, and tell me yes.”
“I suppose.” She sighed. Then, because her fear of marriage demanded at least one snarky remark: “Like I could find another guy to put up with . . .” She made the same vague gesture he had, which encompassed Mowerzilla, the mansion, the rest of us. “Yes. I will. Of course I will. I’m sorry you had to ask more than once.” She bent to him, looped her arms around his neck, and kissed him softly on the mouth. “Thank you for asking more than once.”
I had to glance away. It was so much wonderful, it was too much wonderful after all the terrible. I didn’t just feel like bursting into happy tears, I felt like blowing up into tears, detonating into tears. Marc, too, was blinking fast and Tina had pressed a small fist to her mouth to contain her happy whimpers. I turned to Sinclair, who was doubtless shaking his head in bemusement at our emotional antics, and saw his lips tremble just a bit before his mouth tightened. In a week of weird, that was maybe the strangest, and best.
“Holy shit!” It was happening right in front of me and I still couldn’t believe it. “Sinclair, are you crying?”
“Of course. And I’ll thank you to keep your mockery to yourself,” he replied with perfect dignity. Dignity ruined when he sniffled just a tiny bit. “Damn. I suspect I will be hearing about this for quite some time.”
I giggled and nodded.
“Yep.” From Marc.
“Your suspicions,” Tina said, “are accurate, as they often are.”
He shook his head, then put an arm around my waist and pulled me in for a kiss. “Your dad is a fool.” Another kiss. “And you are a wonder.”
“Better that than the other way around,” I replied and kissed him back.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
“You’re going back to Hell right this minute?”
“I’ve got one stop to make first.” I had no interest in getting into that with Marc. With anyone. I didn’t dare; if I talked about it before I did it, I’d talk myself right out of it. “After that, yeah. I’m going back. But only for an hour. Or three days. Haven’t got the time thing worked out yet.”
“Betsy, you’ve been through a lot in a super short time.” Marc sounded more distressed than he did after a Giada De Laurentiis marathon. “People will understand if you hang here for a bit.”
People. Oh, sure. And who were people? The ones stuck there? Laura? No and no. People was me. And, in fact, people would not understand if I didn’t take care of this nasty business as soon as I could.
But it wasn’t the time to explain that to Marc. It might not ever be the time.
“It’s actually a good time to go.” As he raised the eyebrows of skepticism, I backpedaled a bit. “Okay, ‘good’ might be an exaggeration. It’s a not-terrible time to go, how’s that? We’ve found out what’s up with the babies, Dad’s out of my life, and I actually made a little progress in Hell last time.”
“But there’s so much to ponder! There was a lot even before your dad stopped by under duress.”
“Duress, huh?” I couldn’t keep the smile off my face and turned to Sinclair. Jessica had spotted my father earlier in the week, but I knew Sinclair had done the rest: followed up, found Dad, tracked him. Figured out what he had done, cornered him like a rat. Produced him at the right time for me to confront him—when there was a house full of loved ones to lend emotional, physical, and mower-based support. “How’d you get him over here, anyway? I can’t imagine he wanted to come.”
“I appealed to his family responsibilities,” Sinclair replied.
“Uh-huh, what’d you really do?”
“I appealed to his love of keeping his legs unbroken and his testicles unsmashed.”
I nearly melted; so romantic!
“I just realized, your dad’s a widower now.”
I grimaced. “So?”
“He’s back on the marriage market. Maybe your mom and dad will get back together—it’s the dream of every child of divorce.”
“Please stop,” I groaned.
“And maybe you’ll get a new brother or sister, too!” Marc enthused, which made me want to punch him and punch him and punch him. Before I could get started, we were interrupted.
“What are you guys doing in our room? Nope, don’t care,” Dick added as Marc opened his mouth to explain. “Go away. Jess and I
need some alone time.”
Marc waved that away. “You’ve got all night to have ‘hooray, we’re engaged’ sex. You gotta check this out first.”
“Whatever it is,” Dick grumped, gently pushing past what he clearly considered to be an absurd number of people hanging out in his bedroom, “it can wait until—oh, cripes.”
Jessica, who’d followed right behind him, snorted and rested her forehead in the middle of his back. “Saw it when I woke up,” she managed, shoulders shaking. “Had to get moving after doing a quick check on the babies. Didn’t want Betsy’s dad getting away. But now I’ve got time to take it in.”
“We all do!” Marc added cheerfully.
After years of trying to encourage me to be more organized, my mother gave up in despair, but not before indulging in a handheld, battery-operated label maker. Marc found it in the attic and took to it like a long-lost best pal. He’d burned through two days labeling experiments, experimenting on labels, experimenting on labeled experiments . . . he’d had a blast. I knew where he kept the thing, and after apologizing to Dick I’d popped into the attic to grab it and got to work.
PROPERTY OF NICK BARRY was on everything in the room: the headboard, the pillows, the quilt. The tops of the dressers, each individual drawer. The framed photos on the walls. The end tables, and everything on the end tables (books, box of Kleenex, lamp, bottle of lotion, American Cop magazine). The walls, the carpet.
“Do you like it?” I tried and failed to keep the anxiety out of my tone. “I meant what I said about not screwing up your name anymore. I wanted to show you, because sometimes I talk and never do.”
Dick’s mouth, property of Dick Barry along with the rest of his face, twitched at the corners and his eyes went very bright. “You did. It’s great. You didn’t have to go to this much trouble.”
I was touched at how he was so obviously overcome. “It wasn’t much trouble.” Not compared to some of the other things I’d had to do that week.
“Really, really great,” he squeaked. Squeaked? Wait, was he overcome with tears of gratitude or trying not to laugh? Because it seemed more like he was trying not to laugh.
“That reminds me. I don’t ever want to wake up and find PROPERTY OF NICK BARRY stuck on my shirt and in my hair.” Jessica’s hand went to her pocket and she extracted a small ball of crumpled-up labels. “What kind of savage are you when I can’t take a nap without being labeled?”
“The worst kind of savage,” I replied, brandishing the label gun at her. I’d left it on the dresser when Sinclair and I went downstairs to deal with Dad. It felt sooo good to have it back in my hand. Perhaps everything in the house needed to be labeled. “The kind with no remorse.”
“Majesties, I wanted to advise you about the—the—” Tina peeked in the doorway, then let out a stream of giggles that were like verbal champagne bubbles. “Oh. Oh!”
“I was just telling her,” Dick said, and why was there a warning in his voice? “I told her she didn’t have to go to so much trouble and I thanked her and that’s the end of it.”
“What? Did I miss something?” I took another look around the room again. I was sure I’d hit everything.
“She’s gonna find out,” Jessica admonished. “Might as well be up-front about it.”
“Find out what?” In my exasperation, I accidentally labeled myself again. “Dammit! Don’t get any ideas,” I warned, yanking it off. “My leggings aren’t property of Dick Barry.”
“Nor is what’s inside them,” Sinclair advised. He had the small, familiar smile on his face that I particularly loved, the “I can’t believe this is my life now and it’s so great” expression. “Nicholas’s last name is spelled B-e-r-r-y like strawberry, not B-a-r-r-y like Barry Manilow.”
I digested that for a second. Peered at the label gun, looked at alllll the misspelled labels. “I don’t know what’s more upsetting,” I announced at last. “That I fucked this up so completely or that you know who Barry Manilow is.”
“The latter,” Marc said with a vigorous nod. “No question.”
“You could have warned me,” I snapped, glaring at Marc and my husband. “You both watched me do it!”
“Yeah,” Marc agreed.
“We could have,” Sinclair added. “No question.”
“You both suck.” I turned back to Dick Berry-not-Barry. “I’m sorry. I’ll redo the whole thing.”
“Oh, please don’t,” Jess groaned from behind him. “You made your point. We get the remorse at play here.”
Dick hugged me so hard my feet left the floor for a second. “Yes, please don’t. And Marc’s right, Jess and I have the rest of the night. I want to check on the babies, anyway. Putting portable cribs in the kitchen was the most brilliant idea you ever had, Tina. C’mon, I’ll make strawberry-banana-chocolate-chip smoothies.”
“You keep wanting to add candy to our smoothies,” Marc complained as they started out of the room. “At some point you’ll have to admit that your healthy smoothie has become an unhealthy milk shake.”
“Never! C’mon, hon.”
“In a second,” I said, though he hadn’t been talking to me. I fired off a quick thought to Sinclair—I need a minute with Jess, be right down after—so he left, too, after pressing a kiss to my palm.
“Uh-oh,” Jess said when we were alone. “Is it lecture time? Confession time? Worse, are you going to get mushy on me?”
“Me to know and you to find out. Why’d you do it?” I figured everyone else assumed her motive was petty vengeance on my behalf. But Jessica didn’t do petty anything.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t.” Her arm went around my waist and she rested her head on my shoulder. “I knew you wouldn’t kill him, and that’s fine. I knew you wouldn’t be able to make yourself hurt him, even, and that’s fine, too. Before he faked his death, you could hardly bring yourself to inconvenience him; you’d never be able to hurt him. You took crumbs too long, and told yourself it was a feast. That wasn’t fine, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. And I just . . .” She raised her head and looked at me, mouth set in a solemn line. “I wanted to see him suffer, even if just a little bit. I wanted there to be an instant consequence, not whatever might happen in a decade or two. He was too ignorant of what you are now to be properly terrified; that’ll come later, maybe. I didn’t want him to get to wait to be freaked. I guess you could put it down to my need for instant gratification.”
Yep. That was what I figured. I smiled at my oldest, dearest friend. “I love you.”
“Well, sure. I’m terrific.”
That one earned her a poke in the belly. She giggled, sounding not unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy, and then we were both laughing in a room riddled with misspelled labels.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
“I know you’re in there!” I lied to the intercom. “Might as well let me in. You’re lucky I didn’t just teleport right into your living room.” Ha! Unless Laura’s living room was in our toolshed, no chance. But I was counting on something besides Laura’s ignorance of how I sucked at teleporting. It was new to her, too, and we’d both been feeling our way along. Until Laura decided she’d felt long enough. “I’ll just hang around out here and give your neighbors polls. ‘Who did you vote for last election and what’s your policy on the undead and/or the damned?’ You think I can’t live my life from your lobby? I can make quite a comfortable life here, missy.” And if she wasn’t home, I would come back. And back and back.
This behavior was earning me a few odd looks from Laura’s neighbors as they came out the door headed to wherever her neighbors go, which was in line with my sinister plan. I was in the lobby of one of the multistoried buildings belonging to the Atrium Apartments in Burnsville, a yuppie-clogged Minneapolis suburb I once ruled as a former Miss Congeniality. I’d had to walk past the swimming pool and tennis courts to get to her building, which was ju
st annoying. I lived in a mansion and didn’t have a pool, I was pretty sure. There were entire rooms I hadn’t so much as peeked in. All right, I might have a pool. But Laura’s was out where people could find and enjoy it.
The Antichrist had moved from her comfortable, unique older apartment in Dinkytown (Minneapolis) to a bland yuppie hive, all part of her “now I’m, like, totally an adult so you have to treat me like one, like, okay?” move after I’d killed the devil. I should have realized then that the move was just step one in her plan. I should have realized all sorts of things. And maybe late really was better than never, but I didn’t think so this time. I think late was just late.
“Are you enjoying living down the hall from the Antichrist?” I asked a twenty-something woman clad in the official Minneapolis outfit for office workers: a neat, plain suit (usually in a neutral color, but occasionally an indulgence in navy blue or red was all right), nude pantyhose, and running shoes. If you missed a bus out here in midwinter, you could die. You needed to be able to sprint to save yourself. “Your new neighbor doesn’t throw loud parties, but she is the Son of Perdition. Daughter of Perdition, I guess. The Bible got that wrong, too.”
The poor thing, a redhead of medium height with pale pink lipstick, smeared eyeliner, and a strained expression, scurried past me, whipped out her keys, quickly got the door open, and darted through.
I pressed the intercom button for Laura’s apartment again. “Wow, your neighbor sure can move when she wants. It’s like she thought I was a vampire or something. Speaking of, I haven’t fed in days. D’you have any neighbors keeping you up late? Is the building manager a pain in your ass? Say the word and I’ll start to slurp.”
Bzzzzzzz!
I smirked and opened the door. Sure, I could have broken into the place, but I was trying to be subtle. Subtle without the hard b sound. And the crack about feeding got me thinking. I hadn’t fed in days, since I usually liked to snack with Sinclair (or on Sinclair). We tended to go trolling for rapists together as a way to keep our love alive. I was thirsty, I was almost always thirsty, but not (as Tina put it once, after which I begged her to find another way of putting it) gagging for it. (Why a Southern belle had picked up Brit slang I was determined never to discover.) Another queen perk: even newly risen, I hadn’t needed to feed every night like most vampires. Now I was down to once or twice a week and suspected that could go longer. My time in Hell seemed to be extending the time I could go between feedings. An hour there, three days here, it was screwing with my system, but in a good way.