“No.”
“It’d be easy.”
Tread carefully, my own.
I ignored the voice in my head. A well-adjusted, confident, kinder woman might have had trouble shutting Sinclair out, but I had years of practice long before I formed a telepathic link with a vampire. “Wrong. Still no.”
She leaned in and reached for my hand but, as I was invested in being a grumpy bitch, I pulled it back before she could grab me with her long, bony, spidery fingers. She still needed a mani, but she had time to go bug my mom? “Betsy, I know it’s awful to contemplate, but don’t you want to know? For certain?”
“I do know. He’s dead. This isn’t a mystery, Nancy Drew.”
Elizabeth. Please. Consider your words.
No sale, big buy, and quit nagging in my head.
“You made a mistake, it’s understandable, you’re exhausted.” I decided to quit waiting for apologies. I could take the high road for once. I guess. Probably. “We’re just gonna pretend we never had this talk.”
“Are we going to pretend we never had smoothies, too?” Marc asked. “Because then we could just make more.”
Jess let loose with an annoyed snort. “Look, I get that your default is to turn a blind eye toward this stuff, just like Marc’s is to make jokes when he knows people are getting uncomfortable—”
“It’s true,” Marc said, nodding. “That’s what I do. It’s practically a compulsion.”
“In your case, it’s a defense mechanism you’d perfected by the time you were in high school—”
“Do not,” I warned, “try to psychoanalyze me. Not unless you want some right back.”
Elizabeth.
“You run away from everything. You’re still running. I don’t think you should, this time.”
“Not your call.” God, this was turning into a vampire-friendly After School Special. “Jess, you’re telling us you’ve been scurrying around behind my back with this crap for the last three days?”
“I wanted to help you,” she said in a low voice.
“Wrong. This is about you—how your life has changed and how it scares the shit out of you.”
Elizabeth.
No, I’m on to something here. Tina and I were just talking about how everyone’s life has changed in next to no time. This is part of it and proves she’s wrong and be quiet in my brain now!
“You have DadDick in this timeline, you’re a mom, for God’s sake, but part of you thinks it’s not going to last. Part of you almost wants to make sure it doesn’t last. You can’t focus on that, that’s the really scary stuff, which, for somebody who lives with a bunch of movie monsters, is actually pretty impressive. So you’re gonna focus on this to avoid facing your new responsibilities.”
ELIZABETH. The internal shout made me wince.
“I’m what?” The external shout also made me wince. I wasn’t alone this time, either; Jessica’s voice went so high all three of the vampires cringed. In the mudroom a few feet away, Fur and Burr woke and started yapping. Dogs all over the block were probably yapping. “What the fuck did you just say to me?” She’d leaped to her feet so quickly I barely registered the movement. I guess sleep deprivation sped up her reflexes. Or rage did. “You of all people? Accusing me of dodging responsibility, you silly bitch?”
“Proof!” I shouted, pointing a shaky finger at her. “Proof I’m right, you—you haven’t even named your spawn! Even after the . . . uh . . . the Incident.”
Oh God, the Incident. I couldn’t believe I’d brought it up. A measure of my desperation or evidence of suicidal ideation.
Look, bottom line, nobody got hurt. That’s what people keep overlooking.
CHAPTER
NINE
THE INCIDENT
I beat Jessica to the basement with minutes to spare, and thank goodness; I needed every second. I was in such a rush to get away from her avenging fingernails I nearly tripped on the step and flopped down the stairs. But our dank, dark basement, with the crumbling cement, stained floor, and cobwebs making it look like a scary movie set, was going to be my sweet haven. The gross, filthy place had multiple exits.
Oh, basement, I’ve been wrong about you all this time and will start making amends right now. Thank you for saving me! I promise to find a mop and wipe the floors. Or something. Nothing’s too good for you, basement, my dearest friend and finest ally.
“What’s going on up there?”
I screamed and nearly fell down the stairs for the second time. I’d been so terrified I hadn’t realized I wasn’t alone. Marc was blinking up at me, wearing smudged scrubs and snapping off rubber gloves.
“I banned you from the basement!”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Remember the Igor conversation?”
“Sure.” My zombie pal was supremely unconcerned. He nearly yawned. Once again, I had to think that the people I really wanted to intimidate with the vampire-queen thing never were.
“I’ll deal with your insubordination later.”
“Ooh, very Bond villain,” he said approvingly.
“You could at least pretend to be intimidated,” I muttered.
“I could,” he replied with a cheerful grin, “but I don’t think I could pull it off. Actually I’m glad to see you. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Later.” I hurried down and resisted the urge to tackle him out of my way. “Gotta go, please shove over. I mean it, Marc, move.”
He stepped back while shaking his head. “What? You didn’t burst in here to bust me for Igoring in the basement, so what the hell did you do now?”
“Oh, that’s nice! Blame the victim.”
“You are the polar opposite of a victim.”
“Thanks?” I have no idea how to take that.
“Betsy, what did you do?”
“Tried to help! That’s all I ever do, because I am a considerate roommate and hardly ever complain that Mustard and Ketchup have basically stolen my best friend.”
“You constantly complain about that. I think Mustard and Ketchup are your worst names so far. Just confess and maybe I’ll take it easy on you. I can’t promise anything about Jessica, though.”
“It wouldn’t have hurt them.” I sulked. Gawd, new mothers. So freaking paranoid. “It would have been a huge time saver. And it would have made my life easier, so I never did get what the problem was.”
“Wait.” Horrid suspicion was dawning on Marc’s face. “Is—no. It can’t—not even you would—is that why you were looking for a Sharpie a couple of hours ago?” Before I could answer he plunged ahead, mouth full of damnation to heap on my highlights. “You were gonna write ‘Ketchup’ and ‘Mustard’ on the babies’ foreheads with a Sharpie?”
“No, I was gonna write ‘Coke’ and ‘Pepsi’ on their foreheads with a Sharpie. A scented Sharpie,” I added, “for which, again, nobody bothered to thank me. Those two can get pretty ripe. Every little bit helps. Do they make deodorant for babies?”
“Deo—I—you—” He shook his head. “No, I can’t let myself get distracted by your dumb questions. I’ve got to stay focused. Let’s face it, just come out and admit it: you wanted to brand the babies.”
“Label the babies.” How could I be the only person on board with this terrific plan? “Don’t even pretend you can tell them apart. Jess and Dick say they can, but I’m pretty sure they’re just trying not to look dumb.”
“Yeah, because that’s their biggest problem right now. Not looking dumb. Not crazy vampire queens scribbling on their babies with scented markers.”
“Marker, singular.” And strawberry scented, which I didn’t add because nobody appreciated me.
“I should haul your dim ass up those stairs and hand you over, you twit!”
“Yet another betrayal,” I sniffed. We’d been hurrying through the basement while I figured which e
xit would keep me free of knife wounds the longest. “What a surprise. That’ll teach me to stick my neck out.”
“Stick it out much further, Jess will slash through it.”
“That’s the truth,” I muttered.
Believe it or not (and I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t seen it; the absurdity was immense), at the far end of the basement was a door, a door that led to a secret tunnel connecting our basement to the river. Sure, it was five below out and I had little interest in hanging riverside in subzero weather, but that would be a Caribbean vacation compared to what Jessica had in store for me.
“I’m gonna have to sleep out there, aren’t I?” I muttered aloud, asking but not really.
“Oh yeah,” my heartless zombie replied. “At least overnight. And it’s so stupid, Betsy. You’re so stupid.”
“I’m what?” Jesus! How many insults was I gonna have to take this week? “Marc! You know Sinclair made you promise to stop pointing out my intense dumbness.”
“Yeah, but when you use words like ‘dumbness’ and scurry around scribbling on babies, you make it impossible. And if you’d quit avoiding Laura, if you’d quit lurking in the mansion desperate for distractions to keep you out of Hell, the babies would be (relatively) safe and we could be in Hell right now, getting a tour or figuring out a new chamber of horrors or cornering Ferdinand and Isabella and asking them to defend the Spanish Inquisition.”
“All of those things sound terrible. And what do you mean, ‘we’? Aw, no. Come on, Marc. Not you, too.” Why was everyone so fascinated with my new part-time job? Why did they think co-running Hell was something I should jump on right away and bring them along for the ride? Were they all crazy? It was Hell. What about any of it meant super cool road trip? “You can’t mean it.”
“I absolutely mean it, you dope!” he shouted, which I found startling. Not the dope thing; we both knew he was smarter than me. But Marc didn’t raise his voice often, so when he did, I paid attention. As much as I ever paid attention to anything. “Don’t pretend you don’t know why.”
“Marc: I absolutely do not know why. Where’s that secret lever? God, that’s not a sentence I thought I’d have to say twice in three years.”
“Betseeeeey,” the zombie lurking in the gloom with me whined, “boooored.”
“Shut up,” I snapped, drawing on my vast reserves of patience. Anyone overhearing this would assume we weren’t friends and possibly were plotting each other’s murder. “Or the next time you kill yourself to avoid turning into Future Psycho Asshat Marc, I won’t accidentally reanimate your corpse.”
“No, press lower.”
I jabbed irritably at the fourth brick down in the wall.
“Lower. It means the opposite of higher.”
“I am, it’s not—oh.” There was a distinct clack! and the super-duper secret hidden doorway swung back, revealing a tunnel filled with overhead lights automatically flicking on even as we stared. “Ta-da!”
“Yeah, you eventually followed directions, good work, Bets. But like I was saying. Bored. Bored, bored, bored. I’m ready to shoot a wall, here.”
“No more BBC Sherlock for you,” I warned, which was the biggest bluff since “no smoothies for me, I’m getting sick of them.” Marc and I were tremendous Cumberbimbos, long may Benedict Cumberbatch reign. The glorious velvet-voiced bastard had even gotten me hooked on Star Trek movies. Benedict, not Marc. Marc’s voice was perfectly nice but he was no CumberBetsy. And for a Star Trek reboot (I’m not a fan of the genre) it was pretty good. Way too much screen time for Spock and Kirk, but I was used to suffering for my crushes. I’m embarrassed to say how often I’ve contemplated biting my Cumbercookie. Turning him, even. Then he would be mine! Forever and ever, his velvety voice and long neck and long legs would be mine and we would rule the world!
Um, but those kinds of thoughts were not good, and Sinclair was likely to kick up a fuss, so thus far I had resisted the sweet, sweet lure of BenBatch’s sweet, sweet neck. His throat was a foot long, for God’s sake! The man was made to be chewed on!
“You know what happens when I’m bored,” Marc, the eternally nagging zombie, was saying as we gazed down the tunnel. It was chilly. It led to the frozen river. I had zero interest in venturing down there, but less in being stabbed.
And yeah. I did know. Marc had zero interest in eating brains, but his own brain needed constant stimulation or he’d be a walking corpse for real. Right now he looked fine—very fine; I’d always thought he was super cute—and as he had killed himself with an overdose, his body had no grotesque wounds. He had no real scent, either, whereas before he’d smelled like clean laundry, dried blood, hair product, and Mennen Speed Stick. As a zombie living in close proximity with the vampire who (kinda) raised him,2 he smelled like a piece of paper. Not offensive, but not especially memorable, either. As long as he hung out with me, he’d appear so recently dead—really recently, like, thirty seconds dead—as to seem alive.
That changed when he couldn’t keep his mind busy with puzzles, experiments, marathon TV sessions, smoothie sessions, animal autopsies, and puzzles. He once spent a week working a fifty-dollar jigsaw puzzle that was just a pile of Dalmatian puppies. Plus the thing had been cut from two sides, not just the top, making it really hard to figure which end was up. And it had the same picture of a zillion Dalmatians on the back, tilted ninety degrees. I took one look and fled. For days every time any of us closed our eyes all we could see were black-and-white puzzle pieces. The horror. The migraines. You can’t imagine.
All this because, as a zombie, my personal zombie (not a title I ever thought I’d assign anyone I knew, ever), Marc craved brains—his own. He needed to stay sharp. Boredom and ennui sped up the rot. He refused to be a doctor anymore, not trusting the occasional stiffening of his joints if he wasn’t getting enough stimulation, so he referred to himself as a kind of supermedic.
I had to admit, I had nothing but admiration for how he was dealing. I hadn’t done half so well. Sometimes I worried I still wasn’t.
“I don’t think taking you to Hell will help your zombieness,” I said, appalled. Truthfully I had no idea what Hell would do to him. And no interest in experimenting with him to find out. At all. No.
“Yeah, but it couldn’t hurt, and you kill a couple of birds with the same rock.”
“Marc, okay, first—gross. Second, I don’t even know how I would get you there. I just learned to get myself there—and back, but that was after wandering around the place for what felt like weeks. What if I can’t get you there? Worse, what if I can, but can’t get you back?”
“My risk,” he replied firmly.
“Too big of one,” I said, just as firm.
“I’ll sign a waiver.”
“I’m not giving you a waiver to sign, you zombified crazy person! We’re going to forget we had this conversation.”
“Mm-mm.” He was looking at me with his usual focus, as if I were a disease he’d just diagnosed. Which maybe wasn’t that far off—it was my fault he was a zombie, after all. Just like how in the old timeline, it had been my fault he had become the thing in everyone’s nightmares, the monster under all the beds. Just thinking of it made me want to vomit. “You say that a lot. And it never works.”
“Look, we need to talk about this later. I have to . . . oh.” I’d started to take a step down the hallway and froze. “Oh God.”
He cocked his head but couldn’t hear what I did, and even I had barely caught it. Footsteps racing up to the door I’d almost fallen through. Footsteps that abruptly stopped. “Fine! You stay down there!” The door shivered in its frame as Jessica unleashed a wood-splintering frenzy. “You stay down there until you die again! Idiot! Pull that Sharpie shit again and I will beat you until candy comes out!”
Lovely, just what I needed, a new title: Betsy Taylor, Undead Piñata. Much better than Betsy Taylor, Registered Republican. I sloooowly relax
ed as I heard the footsteps retreat, then turned back to Marc. “So. You want a field trip to Hell, huh?”
“In so many words, yup.”
“We never talk anymore.”
“We talk constantly.” He was grinning at me and easing the door to the tunnel closed. He knew I wasn’t river-bound, not anymore. He also knew I was trapped like a rat.
“Still. I’ve neglected you. Let’s catch up.”
“Because you know you’re stuck down here for hours.”
“‘Stuck,’ oh, Marc, that hurts!” I put every ounce of whiny hurt into my tone that I could. “Why would you want to hurt me?”
“So. Many. Reasons.”
“I’m thrilled to be in this cement-lined, dusty, spider-infested shithole with you.” I slung an arm across his shoulders, turned him around, and started walking him back to the other end. “So! How’s the dating going?”
“Fine until we get to the ‘I’m a Virgo,’ ‘Hey, neat, I’m a zombie’ part.”
“Superficial men.” I shook my head. “What’s the world coming to?”
He laughed at me, but that was fine. I had it coming.
CHAPTER
TEN
“Do you even know how many harmful chemicals lurk inside the average Sharpie?” Jess was raging, physically restrained by DadDick, who looked a) wide awake and b) like he wished he was anywhere else.
“Not the scented ones,” I whined. “Is it more than three? It’s probably more than three chemicals.”
“Oh good God.” Sinclair had his eyes closed as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Madness reigns.” Then, at Tina’s near-imperceptible flinch, he added in a mutter, “Apologies.” She shrugged and smiled; she loved—as he did—that these days he could break commandments with impunity and still be welcome at church. A lesson for all of us! Or something.
“And excuse me for wanting you to get on the stick and name your babies already. Pretty soon they’ll be in kindergarten and when the teacher asks their name they’ll be all ‘sorry, Mom hasn’t filled out that paperwork yet.’”