THIRTY
Label maker in hand, I was deep into my project when Marc walked in on me. I held a finger to my lips and he shrugged; he knew how it was with her. We’d need to be quiet, but not silent. Jess was a heavy sleeper even when she got a solid eight hours per. She was sprawled facedown on her bed right now, her exhausted snores muffled by her pillow. The Food Network was blatting away on the television near the wall across from her bed. Jess wasn’t a foodie or close to one, but she liked the background noise of people chatting and cooking. Her mom had been far too refined to slime her manicured paws cooking for “loved ones” (the quotes were ironic), so the Watson kitchen had been the opposite of a warm, friendly room the whole family liked to congregate in. It was more like a lab that had been shut down for lack of funding.
“Huh,” Marc said from the doorway as he glanced around the room. “This is new.”
“Yeah, Dick and I had a thing.”
“The name thing.”
“Yep.” God, had I really been that obviously offensive, or had Dick confided in Marc? Dumb question, even for me; it was both. Who hadn’t confided in Marc at one point or another? Dead men tell no et cetera. “It’s been a strange week for all of us. Whatever problem you’re bringing to me, maybe it could wait?” Which was shitty, because I never hesitated to burden him with my silly bullshit.
Okay, new plan. After I made things right with Just Plain Dick, I’d offer Marc a friendly and attentive ear. Maybe both ears. This, of course, assuming I managed not to offend any other loved ones before the weekend. I’d better update my schedule.
“No problem. And I’m not bringing a problem, I just wanted to check on you. Because you’re right, and even though I hate to feed your immense starving ego, your week has probably been the strangest.”
I grinned. “Probably?” Then, “Aw, come on. Starving?”
“Like I said, hate to spoon-feed that insatiable ego you’ve got lurking in you. How’s Hell?”
“You won’t even believe it. It’s actually starting to come together.” What was that strange tone in my voice? It seemed familiar. I almost had it. What was the opposite of shame? Got it: pride. “Laura’s gonna be psyched when she sees I finally made progress.”
“Mm-mm. Once she got you down there she pulled a Houdini?”
“Well, yeah, but she’s got stuff besides Hell to deal with. Her charity work alone eats something like fifty hours a week. She went down there—dammit, now I’m doing it again, Hell isn’t down anywhere! But like I said, she went down there plenty of times without me.”
“She did? Well, if you’re looking for ideas about how to torture the denizens of your second home—”
I shuddered. “Please, please don’t call it that. Most people, their second home is a cabin somewhere. Mine’s Hell. I can’t. No.”
“You could make them play kill-bang-marry.”
“Nobody plays kill-bang-marry anymore.”
“How are they supposed to know that if you don’t tell them? If the person in charge of Hell says playing kill-bang-marry is still a thing, then it’s still a thing.”
“Uh-huh, and every time we play, someone ends up crying.” Meaning: I end up crying. It does my ego zero good to find out how many of my friends would rather kill me than marry or bang me. Tina and Marc want to marry each other (“A sexless marriage is the best marriage.”), Sinclair wants to do all three to me in no special order, and everybody wants to marry Jess, because she’s rich and low maintenance. A lot of my friends secretly want to be kept men. Or women. Plus, I didn’t want to cry in Hell. Not in front of the damned—they’d never let it go. “No, it’s too awful, even for people there to be tortured for eternity. I’ve gotta put my foot down somewhere, Marc.”
“Okay, how about what’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever had in your—”
“No.”
“I was going to say mouth!”
“Not much better, pal. A thousand times: no.”
“Aw, come on, I’ll bet someone who’s been in Hell for a thousand years could come up with crazy stuff nobody’s ever heard of.”
“No. I wouldn’t let you play that game with vampires and a zombie and a new mom; why would you think I’d okay it in Hell? Like I said, even that’s too awful for Hell.”
He shrugged but didn’t seem put out. Usually he’d be in partial-pout mode if I shot down two ideas in a row. Odd, even for him.
“What’s going on? Did you seriously come up here to give me terrible ideas you must have known I’d nix?”
“Only partly,” he replied, leaning against the doorway to get comfy, his eyes crinkling as he smiled. “Mostly I’m supposed to keep you here so you don’t run off. Teleport off. Whatever.”
I froze in midlabel, then forced myself to relax. I had thought it was dumb delightful luck that Sinclair didn’t start with the nagging the minute the newborns were newborns again. Not only did he not bug me, he’d left. I had assumed he was checking over his gigantic electric shaver of a car, but he hadn’t come back yet. And that didn’t bode well. And I wasn’t thinking about the second part of his text. Nope.
“Ah, you’re still here.” Tina had appeared in the doorway beside Marc, who stepped aside to let her into the room. “The babies are asleep. All the babies.” Ah. She meant Fur, Burr, Thing One, Thing Two, and my brother/son. At least that was what I hoped she meant. She was old enough to consider the rest of us as babies. Hell, she’d been Auntie Tina to Sinclair the first dozen years of his life.
The age issue aside, I felt a stab of guilt since I hadn’t been able to play with BabyJon for days. I hadn’t laid eyes on him in at least two. Maybe I’d been kidding myself and the reason he turned out so great in the future was because I didn’t have time for him when he was little. An awful thought; I had to swallow the lump it brought to my throat. I was missing my brother’s childhood and had no one to blame but myself. Other working moms made it work, ones with much less time, money, resources, supernatural abilities, and jobs from Hell where they couldn’t set their own hours. I wouldn’t consider “bring your brother/son to Hell” day, but there were other things I could do. Things I’d better do, or I’d wake up one night and BabyJon would be enjoying his prom. And probably resenting the nickname BabyJon.
Tina read my mind, because she was terrifying. “He adores you. And when he is older, he will honor your work.”
That probably wasn’t true at all, but she was a sweetie for saying so.
“Besides, my queen, you should—ah, perhaps turn off the television?”
Eh? Oh. That could only mean one thing. Tina wasn’t a fan of the Food Network. She considered it torture porn (“I cannot enjoy any of those dishes unless I dilute and puree them. Why would I put myself through such an ordeal?”). However, she would occasionally keep Marc company in the wee hours and watch it with him. Which was how she learned of his deep abiding hatred of Giada De Laurentiis, a perfectly lovely woman Marc wanted off the air forevermore.
“It’s ‘spuh-GET-ee.’” Uh-oh. He had forgotten about everyone else in the room and regressed to yelling at the TV. “It’s ‘ri-ZOT-o.’”
We were too late. You arrogant ass, you’ve killed us all! Trapped, trapped like rats, unless . . . knocking Tina off her feet so I could be the first to escape wasn’t very queenlike. Right? Dammit.
“Shut up, you many-toothed bitch, stop pronouncing stuff like that—‘spah-GAY-tee,’ ‘moots-ah-RAY-la,’ ‘pan-CHAY-tuh’ . . . you’re from California, for God’s sake!”
“It’s quite legitimate,” Tina corrected him mildly from her safe spot beside the door, ideal for a quick getaway. This. This was why Tina was still alive after well over a century: she always mapped escape routes, even in her own home. “Ms. De Laurentiis was born in Italy.” Why do you know that? I mouthed, but only got a shrug in response. A respectful shrug, but still.
“Yeah, born there; it proves nothing, nothing!” Marc had progressed past yelling at the TV and was in full-on violent gesture mode. “Because right after that, the family picked up and moved to the States when she was . . . what? Eight days old?”
“Twelve years.”
Seriously: why does she know that? Marc was the Food Network freak in our house. She was putting up with a lot of vampire torture porn to keep Marc company. They’d become besties right under my nose.
“Regardless. She’s from California; the big move was decades ago; every other word she pronounces with an American accent. I don’t even think she speaks Italian.”
“Of course she speaks Italian,” Tina replied, exasperated. At least their squabbling got the attention off me so I could work on the project some more.
“Nuh-uh, she speaks Italian food. Everything else: American accent. Because, again: California, lived there for decades. Giada should stop talking about ‘spah-GAY-tee’; it’s so pretentious.” Marc turned a haunted gaze on me. “No one from California should ever be pretentious. And don’t get me started on her disproportionately sized head.”
“Easy there,” I said warily. Marc was as a rule so easygoing he should have kept a surfboard in his room, but when his zombie dander was up, he was no one to fool with. Death, it seemed, left him a wee bit judgmental. And, as I’d already pointed out, it had been a nutty week, even for us. “She pronounces food that way probably out of respect for her mom, right? She’s maybe from Italy?”
“My dad was from Germany and you’ll never catch me singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland.’”
“Right. Okay. Marc, I think it’s time you went to your happy place.” Mine was the Manolo Blahnik brick-and-mortar store on Fifty-fourth Street in New York, which I modified only slightly in my head by putting a smoothie bar in the basement. “Which is good advice for all of us.”
Before I could elaborate, I realized Sinclair was in the doorway with his mouth already open, clearly geared to lecture mode, when he stopped and looked, and then looked some more. “Hmm.” While he hmm’d, Marc and Tina vamoosed without him saying a word. Jess, natch, was still snoring. I had to actively fight the temptation to label her.
“Here you are. I have need of you.” That could mean a whole host of things, many of them delicious and filthy; others, smoothie related. Hell, it could even be vampire monarch business. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything like that.
“Busy.” I finished with the chest of drawers, then crawled to the bed and fished around beneath it, found Jessica’s terrible filing system, and pulled it out.
“So I see, but there is something that requires your urgent attention.” He was still holding his keys. Hadn’t stopped in the kitchen to hang them up, then. He’d just disappeared on an abrupt errand, returned quickly, then come straight up to get me. Not good. “At once, if you please.”
“What doesn’t require my urgent attention these days? Besides, I’m not done atoning.” I gestured at the room, and the bed, where I may or may not have succumbed to the urge to label Jessica.
His lips twitched but he swallowed his laugh, and most of the smile. “And I loathe taking you away from it because in this, as in most things, you are a delight.”
“Most, huh?” I sat back on my heels and brushed my bangs out of my eyes, accidentally labeling myself in the process. Nope. Would not do for Dick to get the wrong idea. I unlabeled myself. “Listen, we can talk about the twins, whom I’m now calling I Don’t Know His Name and I Don’t Know Hers Either. And we can talk about how much you want to take over Hell for me and Jessica’s refusal to name us godparents and anything else in a little bit.”
“Elizabeth.”
“Hell’s doing great, by the way. As great as Hell can be, I mean. Not that you asked or anything.”
Elizabeth.
Yeah, being scary and firm in my head wasn’t any more effective, buddy, but points for effort. “I don’t know how I did it, but things happened. I’ll go back in a bit and more things will happen. I’m almost sure of it.”
He had crossed the room, knelt, grasped my wrists, and lifted me to my feet. “Your father is downstairs.”
“No. He isn’t.”
“He is, my love.”
“Impossible.”
“So are you, darling.”
“It’s a joke, right?” I could feel my lips twitching and realized I was trying to smile. “It’s an elaborate April Fool’s prank you’re all in on, which you did months ahead of schedule to throw me off.”
I would never.
I could feel myself starting to tremble and when Sinclair carefully pulled me into his arms I accidentally labeled myself again.
“How awful is it?” I asked his shoulder blade. I was hugging him back so hard I felt my fingers punch through the fabric of his shirt. Sinclair didn’t move away or make a single sound of protest, but I loosened my grip anyway. “On a scale of one to ten? One being ‘whoops, we were wrong, he is dead, we’ll get the corpse out of your house right away’ and ten being ‘kidnapped by sinister supernatural forces and tortured by same for years, which is your fault and you’ll be haunted by that for eternity.’”
“Come see for yourself.” I pressed my ear to his chest. I loved his voice almost anytime but the deep rumble was especially comforting now. “I will be with you, my own. As will we all. You are not alone.”
“Can’t you at least give me a hint?”
You must hear it from him.
“He’s been kidnapped? He’s secretly a vampire? Satan found him and has been doing awful things to him because she didn’t like me? He’s dying and didn’t want to worry me by being alive? He testified against a murderer and had to go into Witness Protection? Audited? An STD he can’t seem to shake? What?”
He sighed and I clutched harder.
Oh, my love. It’s much worse than that.