TWENTY-TWO
“When did it all go wrong for us, Sinclair?” I asked on my knees while scrubbing puppy pee out of the carpet.
“There’s no denying it has been a stressful month.”
“When I died? When I died again? When I didn’t set Laura’s hair on fire the day we met? If I can pinpoint the exact moment things went to shit, I can . . .”
“Yes?”
“Go back in time and make everything so much worse.” I sighed and wrung out the sponge over the bucket. If you had to sponge up pee, puppy pee wasn’t the worst. Their tiny bladders filled (and, alas, emptied) so quickly, their urine barely had any color or odor. “The good news is, Fur and Burr seem really healthy. And really hydrated. The bad news is, everything else. And why am I down here scrubbing while you watch?”
“You know why.”
It was true. But I was in a stubborn, pissy mood. “Enlighten me.”
“When you wish to punish yourself, you give away shoes to the disadvantaged or take on your least favorite household chores.”
That was also true.
“If I were to get down on the floor with you, it would accomplish nothing.”
“Except to get pee out of the carpet faster.”
“Yes, except for that.”
“Dick.” But there was no heat in it. He was right, the bum. I had earned this punishment by pee. The only thing for it was to scrub.
Technically I didn’t have to do a thing. We could hire a platoon of housekeepers; we could hire a dozen people whose only job was pee patrol. And now and again we did get a housekeeper in here, sometimes human, sometimes a random vampire. But we all liked our privacy, and with so many people living here, and most of us neat by nature (or at least not slobs by nature), the workload wasn’t out of hand. So we divvied up the chores based on individual specialty or preference.
Sinclair loved making homemade dog treats for the li’l monsters, so he was in charge of making sure they had sufficient food and water, kept their mudroom lair as clean as possible under the circumstances, walked them, and took them to the vet for checkups and shots. Oh man, the day the tech slipped with the needle
(“Sorry, I’m new at this.”)
and Burr let out a pained howl . . . let’s just say it was fortunate I’d happened to come along that time. I had to pry Sinclair’s fingers from around the guy’s neck, then use vamp mojo to make the terrified tech forget the whole thing. And that was after I tackled Sinclair to the ground.
Marc was in charge of fixing things: loose hinges, sticky drawers, the occasional boo-boo, maintaining the cars (“If I learn how to do oil changes, I can save us over a thousand—” “Don’t care.”). He needed to keep his zombie brain active or he’d start to deteriorate. As usual, the movies had the concept right (“Braaaaaains!”) but the details all wrong. Marc needed brains, all right: his own. He no longer had to sleep, so he had to fill that time with thinking and learning and doing. Recently he was a car guy. He’d mastered oil changes and was moving on to . . . I dunno, spark plugs or something.
Tina was in charge of— Actually, I had no idea. At all. I should probably spend a week just following her around: take your vampire queen to work day.
Me? I was in charge of ice and groceries, and the care and maintenance of my shoe collection, which, believe me, was close to being a full-time job.
Also, now and again I got the urge to organize and clean. (What? Just because I didn’t like cleaning didn’t mean I didn’t know how to do it.) Sometimes, and I don’t know why this is, sometimes manual labor just made me feel better.
Which is why I was on my knees on pee patrol.
“I hesitate to add to your burdens—”
“Oh God, what? What?”
“—but our out-of-town guest is nigh. She advises via a rather curt e-mail that she’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Of course she does.” Curt e-mail. Yep. Sounded about right.
“It will be interesting.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely the word. I wasn’t thinking of any other word but interesting.” I scrubbed harder, a beleaguered vampire Cinderella.
“And an assembly of vampires would like a formal meeting with us.”
“Assembly?” That sounded official.
“Yes, as you’ll recall”—I loved when he assumed I remem-bered stuff—“an assembly of vampires consists of several local citizens and out-of-state representatives, usually coming together to discuss matters of policy. Or policy changes.” Gosh, had there been some sort of policy change? About vampires? Jeepers, I had no idea. “There will be about twenty, and they’ll represent anywhere from two hundred to two thousand vampires.”
“So they’re like city councilmen.”
“If that enables you to grasp the concept. Yes.”
I wrinkled my nose at him. “Asshat. So what you’re saying is a whole bunch of pissed-off vampires want to come over and yell at us.”
“Yes.”
“And maybe have an election?”
“Likely not. I suspect that idea was quashed rather quickly.”
I had to laugh. “You sounded so smug when you said that. What, was Lawrence right? Nobody wanted to take me on? No one was up to putting on a cross and learning how to teleport to another dimension?”
“Precisely.”
“So smug.”
“I take pride in my wife and queen,” he replied with simple dignity, and for a second I thought of my parents’ ill-starred marriage. Had my dad ever taken pride in anything my mom did? If he had, I couldn’t remember. Sinclair and I were in love, yes. And in lust, oh, you bet! But we also respected the shit out of each other, and that was the part that took years.
“Goody.” I put my hands on the small of my back and stretched. Undead stamina was great, but scrubbing carpets was, apparently, a literal pain in the back whether you were alive or other. “Can’t wait. Bring it on. I’m sure nothing terrible will come of it.”
“Enough.” Sinclair had put his phone away, stepped behind me, and picked me up by the armpits. That shouldn’t have been sexy, but it was—everything he did seemed effortless and sexy. He took my sponge and my bucket. Still so sexy! “I will dispose of these. Shower?”
“Yeah.” And bed, pretty soon. The sun was coming.
“Start without me. We’ll finish together.”
See? Perfectly innocuous comment on mutual hygiene and I was still dizzy at the thought.
“Um. Okay.” Good Lord. We’d been together how long, and I still got tongue-tied. Oooh. Tongue. The things that man could—
“Are you all right, my own? You look somewhat . . . glazed.”
“Shut up, you know why I’m glazed.” I started past him toward our bedroom to strip, then turned. “I’ll tell you what, though—nobody’s having a weirder day than we are. No chance.”