SIXTEEN
ELIZABETH!
“What?”
“Stop doing exposition in your head,” Sinclair ordered out loud.
“I wasn’t!” When Marc snickered and Tina bit her lip so she wouldn’t laugh, I corrected myself. “Well, maybe a little. Mostly I was reminding myself why I hate our basement.”
“You hate our basement?” Marc asked, wide-eyed. “Really? Gosh, I had no idea. I don’t think you ever mentioned it.”
“Marc.”
“Not once.”
“Marc.”
“Not even one time.”
“Fine, I get it, I’ll try to bitch less about the basement, okay?” I snapped. “I can’t help hating it down here.”
“Given the many times it has saved our lives, that is idiotic,” my husband snapped back. Touch-y. I decided to let it go. Stressful week for everyone, and marriage to me isn’t all sunshine all the time. Marriage to me was, in fact, occasionally typhoonesque, with a side order of shrill. Besides, I’d much rather passively-aggressively punish him for the next several days. Those were the ways of my love.
“My king, I am sure the Wyndhams won’t—”
“Hush.”
Tina hushed. Marc gave her a ‘you gonna just let that one go?’ look and she shrugged. I, in a moment of rare wisdom (or laziness), decided to keep my mouth shut.
He had his head down and every line in his body was tense as he listened. “They’re coming,” he said quietly. “Four at l— No. Five. That’s . . . odd.”
“How’d they even know about this tunnel?” I whispered. Then, duh, it hit me. “Dumb question. Antonia the Werewolf would have told him.” She’d lived with us for a bit.* And I couldn’t even get mad at her for it. Her link to Michael was through blood and family; of course she would tell him everything. I was just her landlord for a few months. A landlord who didn’t charge rent. A landlord plagued with werewolf freeloaders. A landlord with the best shoe collection you’ve ever seen. “Though why they’d want to . . .” I stopped myself.
Duh, again. They didn’t want to. They didn’t want to drive through the media and knock on our front door in front of God and everybody. They wanted to come to us in a way where no one would see them. And maybe in a way they hoped we wouldn’t see them, because the sensors had gone up after Antonia had been killed. She couldn’t have told Michael about them, so maybe the werewolves didn’t know they’d activated them.
That didn’t bode well.
“At least they tripped ’em so we got a little warning,” Marc murmured.
“Well, that and the phone call.” It had been a weird call, though. Lara, of all people. I’m not one to tell people how to raise their werewolf cubs, but what’s a kid doing up at that hour? After a three-hour flight halfway across the country? Tsk, tsk. You’d never catch BabyJon running around in the dead of night calling vampires and sneaking into tunnels. He’d have to get a lot better at walking first. And maybe grow more teeth. And learn how to use a potty.
And of course we had sensors, and cameras, and bugs tripped by movement, and more cameras. The best money could buy, in fact, so sleek and high-tech I forgot about them most of the time, and you’d better believe they were tough to spot. They’d been in place before my sister blabbed about vampires but after we started putting our address in the vampire newsletter.
Sure, Sinclair and I had a basic “You got a beef? Come and tell us to our faces, jerkweeds” philosophy, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t take precautions. There were sensors all over, and one of the parlors had recently been converted to a security room; it was positively stuffed with monitors. Tina and Marc spent a weird amount of time in there. I suspected strong voyeuristic streaks in both of them, the pervs.
We could all hear the footsteps approaching—well, maybe not Marc. Zombies didn’t have enhanced senses. He was just really good at healing from horrific injuries now. He’d broken his leg hauling Will Mason’s narrow ass out of the path of a truck a few weeks ago, and he was fine by the weekend. It’s why Will had such a crush, I think. Marc was gorgeous and smart and funny and loyal and brave and he was now an unkillable paranormal doctor who hung out with vampires and werewolves and served on a committee in Hell. Who wouldn’t have a crush? Poor Will: he never had a chance. Put it this way: I saw someone getting hurt in all this, and it wasn’t Marc.
But Marc had tipped his head, listening, so we could all hear the steps now, and murmured voices, one high, two low. There was a click, and then the wall that looked like unmovable cement slid back. Not like the movies, either, all rumbly and slow. The cement wall that wasn’t slid back without a sound, in just a couple of seconds.
So what now? A pissed-off werewolf? A vampire who felt betrayed? Both? Ugh, I really didn’t want the werewolves teaming up with all the vampires who were super pissed at me right now. That could get messy. And inconvenient. And it would definitely cut into my Hell time. So, it wasn’t all bad.
Or worse: an enterprising reporter. Yeah, don’t worry, media, the paranormals lurking in the basement definitely aren’t up to anything sinister. Oh, this? This is our secret tunnel leading to the river, which we use in darkest night— What, you don’t have one?
Someone stumbled through the passage like they’d been given a shove from behind, and I caught the scent for the first time and nearly shrieked.
It wasn’t a werewolf out to get me because I sucked at PR. It wasn’t a vampire out to get me because he felt I’d exposed him to the world. It wasn’t the media.
It was so much worse.
“Dad?”