CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

“They are here. They move among you. They hunt among you. All the old stories we were told as children to frighten us into behaving are true: there are monsters. They exist whether we behave or not. I should know: the queen of the vampires is my half sister, a blight on my life and a danger to all of you.”

“Notice she left out her own title,” Tina pointed out.

“And her own blight-eyness,” Jessica added.

Of course she did. The Antichrist is the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever known. Not that I could say any of that out loud. I was pretty much rendered speechless.

“This is everywhere?” Jessica asked with wide eyes. We had gathered in the kitchen and everyone was awake, and most of us were even alert. She had one of her as-yet-unnamed babies slung over one shoulder and was rubbing his/her back, while Dick was feeding his/her sibling, cradling her/him in his arms while he watched the level in the bottle go steadily down. A baby glutted on milk was hilariously cute.

“Yes, she’s made several YouTube presentations, started a Facebook page with over two hundred thousand Likes and rising, and #vampiresarereal is trending.”

At last I found my voice. “That alone is enough to make me throw up in my mouth a little.” I looked at Sinclair. “Thanks for texting me.”

“As my queen commands,” was the chilly response, and I managed not to roll my eyes (I was trying to cut back on that).

“People don’t actually believe this—this campaign to expose us,” Tina asked, looking like someone had nailed her with a punch between the eyes. “Do they? Surely not.”

“Never underestimate the stupidity of herd animals,” was my husband’s grim retort. “There have been times we were nearly exposed, and that was before the plague that is social media. The more man embraces science over spirit, the harder it is for us to hide.”

“Oh, come on. This is just the latest Internet thing, the supernatural version of ‘is this dress blue or gold,’ right? In a month no one will care. They’ll be on to, I dunno, reillegalizing marijuana or something.”

“Not so fast.” The kitchen door swung in and Marc entered, lugging an armful of junk. He put everything down on the counter, turned, and said, “Ah, excellent. You’re probably all wondering why I’ve called you here.”

“You didn’t call us here,” I replied, eyeing the poster boards and the tripod with more than a little trepidation. “We were just here. Where’d you disappear to?”

“We have a tripod?” Jessica asked.

“All right, this is your resident research geek speaking, so everyone put your petty woes—”

“Petty?” Sinclair asked, and I was not to be outdone: “Woes? Who says that?”

He ignored our interruptions, pulled an old wooden pointer from somewhere (the same place he got the tripod?), and thwacked the first poster.

“Reasons why the Antichrist’s YouTube crap will probably go viral if it hasn’t already,” he said, and damn if that wasn’t the title of the poster. He pulled the top page away, exposing the second. Another thwack!

“She’s hot.” Hot was right at the top of the page in big red letters and with, if I may say so, a ridiculous number of exclamation marks. “I know it’s dumb—”

“She’s not that hot,” I mumbled, probably fooling no one. That was normally Sinclair’s cue to say something reassuringly sexy, but . . . nope. Not today, it seemed.

“—but people want to believe beautiful people are telling the truth and are intrinsically good. It’s dumb, but hotties get the benefit of the doubt all the time.”

Thwack!

“Er . . . surely there is a quicker way to do this,” Sinclair began, but Marc was well into lecture mode.

Legions was next, this time in black, and with only two exclamation marks, thank goodness. “She’s got hordes of Satan worshippers who will do anything, literally anything, she asks.”

This was true, though I often forgot about it, because Laura found her followers extremely embarrassing, didn’t talk about them, and didn’t let them come around. Hard to pretend to have the moral high ground when people were constantly tracking her down (something to do with astrology and the Bible helping them find her, don’t ask me how it works) and pledging to do her evil will. Which in this case was . . .

“She wants to expose vampires and she’s got an army of asshats to help her.”

“This is the most organized I’ve ever seen you,” I commented. Hey, it kept him busy, it wasn’t gross, no dead animals were harmed and later stored in our freezer—I had no complaints. Well, I did, but not about Marc’s process.

“Yes, well, to continue: Her minions shouldn’t be discounted. They’re not just helping her with the YouTube stuff, they’re spreading this stuff all over social media. And plenty of them are coming across as credible, because she’s keeping mum about that whole Antichrist thing, and she’s not letting them sacrifice babies or otherwise be evil when the cameras are on. She’s got lawyers and cops and politicians on her side.”

“So do we,” Tina said.

“Dead lawyers,” he explained, “dead politicians. You can’t point to one of them and be all, ‘See? That thing about vampires being real is a hoax—just ask this vampire lawyer, who will sue you and suck your blood if you slander us.’”

Another poster. This one was a still shot of the “Leave Britney alone!” guy. Crazy hot was in green, sans exclamation points. “She’s just the right amount of crazy: she’s not a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath and she’s not boring, like someone with a phobia. So you’re scared of spiders or can’t handle small spaces, big deal. But Laura? She’s just crazy enough to be intriguing. And she’s got a fuckload of charisma to back it up. People want to hear what she’s got to say. And they keep coming back to hear what else she’s got to say. And then they tell their friends and forward links.”

“But . . . come on.” Jess looked around at all of us. “Vampires? Other than goths, who’d be willing to suspend their disbelief?”

“Plenty,” Marc replied grimly. “Take a stroll through a bookstore sometime. Don’t shout at me, I know you’re a new mom and I can’t possibly understand your exhaustion and how you barely have time to breathe, much less go book shopping, blah-blah—”

Jessica, who had in fact opened her mouth, had to grin.

“—but vampires are everywhere. And don’t forget about the Undersea Folk.”

“The what?” I asked blankly.

“Mermaids.”

“Oh, that whole thing.” Apparently mermaids were real. Or an offshoot of humanity mutated into people who looked like mermaids. Or it was a hoax. There were roughly a billion schools of thought on the subject and I had my own problems. Case in point!

Sinclair was frowning at me, big surprise. “You’ve met one,” he reminded me. “And not long ago, either. How can you not remember?”

Oh, now you want to talk? You couldn’t pass up a chance to needle me about forgetting something, could you?

He turned his head away and flicked his fingers in a “shoo, fly” gesture. Fine. As you will.

“Guys? Guys? GUYS! Really need you to pay attention. Look, whether you think the whole Undersea Folk thing is real or some YouTube stunt—”

“Real,” Tina said at once.

“Stunt,” Dick replied.

“—it still got plenty of attention and it’s only been, what? A year? Because plenty of people now believe in mermaids, they’ll be as likely to decide vampires are real, too.”

“Illogical,” Tina pointed out. “The existence of one doesn’t prove the existence of another. It’s like saying because there are zebras, there must be unicorns.”

“You’re looking for logic from the teeming masses?”

“Point,” she admitted.

“Look, even ten years ago Laura’s plan might not have worked, but these days everyone walks around with a camera on their phone. Social media reigns supreme and people want to believe this stuff. I think you’d be surprised how many people want to believe in vampires.”

“And kill them,” Tina pointed out. “Which is, of course, the real danger of exposure.”

“Yeah.” Marc paused and gave us an expectant look. When we just stared back, he said, “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”

“And if you had to sum up your presentation in one sentence?” Sinclair asked.

“We might be fucked.”

“Terrific,” I moaned. I was so upset, the thought of a smoothie was nauseating. Probably should stop drinking it, then; I set my glass down and buried my face in my hands. “I’m not sure how, but this is probably my fault.”

“Yes.”

I jerked my head up and glared at my undead skunk hubby. “What? Why? I mean, specifically?”

“You told her to do so at church. You practically dared her.”

“The hell I did! I’ve only talked to her once in the last three weeks and I did not dare her to expose us!”

(“They wouldn’t be so pleased to see him if they knew what he was!”

“Like I give a shit! Like he does! Tell anyone you want who he is, who any of us are, and enjoy the three-day psych hold that results.”)

“It wasn’t a dare, it was a stupid argument! I didn’t think she’d take me up on it. And I sure as shit didn’t think people would believe her.”

Dick’s daughter/son had pretty much passed out, drunk and lolling on milk, and he carefully lifted her/him to his shoulder and started to pat. “All this because you wouldn’t help her with Project Prove God’s Real?”

I rubbed my temples, ignoring the urge to bite something. In the face. Okay, someone. In the face. Her beautiful, lying, holier-than-thou face. “Apparently.”

“With respect, my king, I think you’re being a bit hard on Her Majesty.”

Yeah! I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out and gave Tina my full, hopeful attention.

“This might have been the original plan,” Tina continued. “She may have picked a fight—proposed a project you would have little to no interest in, at a time when she knew you were overwhelmed with your new duties—so she could then go about exposing you with a clear conscience.”

Made sense. The Antichrist was her mother’s daughter that way: she had no qualms about tricking people to make herself look better. Definitely an ends-justify-the-means mind-set.

“Well, Hell, I’d better call her. Or go see her. Right now.”

“No need.” Oooh, Sinclair was as cool as Fur and Burr sitting on ice cubes. “She’s currently holding a press conference in our front yard.”

Because of course she is.