FORTY-THREE
“One Betsy . . . to rule the world.”
“Will you knock it off?” I leaned over to cuff Marc on the back of the head, only to be body blocked by Will Mason, who was getting cockier every day he was a zombie. “The triad doesn’t need a motto, and if we did, it wouldn’t be that. Oof! Jeez, Will, you almost knocked me into a bush.”
“Don’t touch him,” Will mock scolded. “He’s miiiiine!”
“Yeah, all yours. Take him and go far, far away.” We’d piled out of various cars and were eyeing the ongoing construction at the mansion. The fire had been two weeks ago; we’d come to check on the progress. Since it was the middle of the afternoon, Tina had stayed behind. Fred, the Wyndhams, and the assembly o’ vamps were, of course, long gone.
“We’re staying put.” This from Marc, who had his arms twined around Will and was nuzzling the space behind his ear. Zombie PDA: exactly as weird as you’d expect.
“You couldn’t chase us away if you tried,” Will added, because he was saucy now. Note to self: don’t make any more zombies. At least he’d gotten around to thanking me. It had been sweet and a little embarrassing. Lots of “I’ll be forever in your debt!” and “You’ll never regret doing this for me!” And “I don’t know why you saved a nobody but I’ll spend the rest of my days paying you back!” and “I feel like giving you something—can I give you something?”
Marc had been way more sophisticated about it, snuggling up beside me on the couch while we watched Deadpool again, never saying a thing because he knew I knew what he was really doing. That sometimes there weren’t words when a friend stepped up.
“Nobody’s chasing any of us away. Nobody’s making us leave our home. Well, permanently, I mean. We’ve been temporarily relocated by choice. We’ll rebuild.” I gestured at the scaffolding, the workmen, the cheerful progress in the sunshine. “It’s what we’re supposed to do.”
I started to walk around to the side, Jessica beside me holding a baby carrier. She’d brought Elizabeth, solo. Dick was doing something baby related with Eric that I didn’t care about, and so didn’t listen when she explained. Thank God they don’t outnumber us, she’d confided at the end of her super-long baby story. We divvy them up and go about our day.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said. “How do you know? I mean—obviously that’s what we’re seeing, but you were saying that the night of the fire, when we didn’t know how extensive the damage was. You always made it clear that you’d be back. We’d all eventually be back. But you couldn’t have known that.”
“This will sound crazy, but—”
“My babies told you.”
“Or it’ll sound completely sane, but only if you’re us. And yeah, they did.” Just not in so many words. Their ease with the mansion made me realize anew that in every timeline, the twins grew up here. So, obvious choice: rebuild.
And like she’d been conjured from thought, the door to the mudroom opened and a tall, slender teenager was standing in the doorway, waving us over.
We all looked down. Jessica’s baby carrier was, of course, empty.
* * *
“So!” Elizabeth Berry said with a bright smile. “Your house is trashed, Onnie Betsy. And it’s not even homecoming season. Be desperately ashamed.”
“I will not,” I snapped back. “And it’s deeply, deeply unfair that you’re gorgeous and fresh faced and have a flawless complexion at oh-God-thirty in the morning.” It was true. Same foxy, pointed face as her brother, but with a feminine cast to her features. Her small rose gold earrings set off the gold undertones in her skin, and she was wearing stuff, I couldn’t say what. That’s how great she looked: her outfit was irrelevant. Which was a thought I had never entertained before. “You’re not even wearing makeup; what a show-off.”
“Oh-God-thirty? It’s past lunchtime.”
“Who cares?” But hanging on to my grumpy mood was tricky. The mansion was coming along nicely, though Elizabeth and I were standing on plastic in the kitchen, and the main fridge had been pulled like a tooth and toted away. Just as well Tina wasn’t able to visit the vodka crime scene.
Elizabeth hopped up on the one stretch of counter that wasn’t filthy or covered in plastic. “So any new plans to, oh, I don’t know, step up the security setup? Cameras and motion detectors and bug detectors, and everywhere for a change?”
“Ya think?” Just like that, my bad mood was back. Should have done it years ago. Like, the day we moved in. We’d been lucky something wretched hadn’t happened before now.
Laura had planted the bomb in the one room that wasn’t bristling with sensors and cameras: the monitor room. Because duh. We had no clue until the ceiling fell on us.
“No harm done.” And she wasn’t smiling anymore. And I jerked my head up, shocked, because she must know that Laura was dead; she seemed to know an awful lot, just like her brother. But she didn’t falter. “I’m sorry if that hurts you,” she continued gently, “but it’s the plain truth, Onnie. No. Harm. Done. What can be fixed will be fixed. And what’s gone should stay gone.”
“Maybe, but that’s not for you to say to me today. It’s still a little raw. Or, as we fuddy-duddies like to say, ‘too soon.’ Change of subject. Now.”
“Um . . . good job spinning it for the media?”
I was silent, because I wasn’t proud of that. We’d returned from Hell and vamp-mojo’d the firemen, police, ambulance attendants, media, and a few of our neighbors, just to be on the safe side. It was the first time I was glad there was an assembly of vampires to lend a hand.
We didn’t mess with them too much—we weren’t trying to trick people into thinking the fire didn’t happen. But the reporters reported that the fire was started quite accidentally by bad wiring. And the subsequent investigation
(“Your investigation will match those findings.”
“Yes, my investigation will match those findings.”)
matched those findings. And Will Mason—whoever that was—had never been shot. And he certainly hadn’t died. And the man who had tried to bring him back definitely wasn’t a zombie.
It didn’t hurt that the media broadcasted pictures of all of us being calm and cool and our neighbors helping and nobody eating anyone alive or drinking from jugulars. We’d just looked . . . normal. Which the world was fine with.
Besides, the fire had been two weeks ago. And everyone had learned vampires were real last month, and Undersea Folk were real last year. What’s new now?
“Look, kiddo, I’m an American, just like you.”
“Actually, I identify as an Earth-bound carbon-based life form. Brunette.”
“Adorable. As I was saying, the media’s not mine to manipulate and it would eventually backfire, anyway. One of the great things about our country, the media won’t put up with that kind of overt manipulation. It’s not like, I dunno, Communist Russia. Or China.”
“Uh-huh, and in response to your adorable ‘the American media isn’t easily manipulated’ nonsense, here is my rebuttal: Bwah-ha-ha!”
“I’ve also been thinking about recent events.”
Elizabeth stopped in mid-bwah. “Natch. It’d be odd-odd-odd if you weren’t.”
“My sister’s dead, and my dad’s a dead stick.” Gone, left town probably the day Lara Wyndham got her tiny deadly hands on him. No trace of him anywhere. Good. His money had bought Laura’s campaign to expose me and mine, and all that came with it. Which meant he’d bought the bomb, too. I was no longer ambivalent about how to handle our next meeting. It’d be our last. My mom hadn’t tried to talk me out of it like she had earlier this year. She either knew it’d be futile, or—after a look around the mansion the day after the fire—decided he deserved whatever I was going to do to him.
I kept going, because I wasn’t sure if she was inclined to be as helpful as her brother, but there was no harm in trying to find out. “The mermaids and the werewolves are going to band together and work with us, so it’s not just a few hundred thousand vampires exposed and vulnerable to anyone who wants to stake them; we’ll be a formidable nation with allies who are not to be fucked with.”
“All good, right, chieftess?”
“Extremely good. So in a way, this mansion, this life, will never be safer. It looks like—anything can happen, but it looks like Sinclair and I will be in charge and we’ll all be working together and running things for a long, long time.” Centuries. Maybe longer. Werewolves weren’t especially long-lived, but the next Pack leader thought my husband and I were peachy keen. The next Pack leader had risked her neck (and her beloved New England Aquarium shirt) to save my son. We were going to get along fine.
And mermaids were long-lived. I could expect to work with Fred for decades, barring something unforeseen, or me punching her so much when she pissed me off, which I foresaw could be frequently. I mean, yes, to give credit where credit was et cetera, she’d come up with the triad and we were going to play nicely with others, but . . . come on. She was still Fred Bimm.
“Yep-yep-yep,” Elizabeth said. “I can see that. Sure.”
She could. She was living it. We were from different timelines, but in hers, Laura died and things got better. And stayed that way.
“My half brother, Jon Taylor, can’t be harmed by anything paranormal,” I told someone who already knew. “And I can’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“Onnie Betsy, we all give you shit for being silly, but you’ve never been all-the-way stupid.”
“Thanks?”
Her gaze was kind but relentless. “You don’t think any of this is a coincidence.”
“No.” I drummed my fingers on the counter and watched my friend’s daughter, a confident young woman who, along with her brother, had seen things that would send most people sprinting to a shrink. “I can’t say I do. Not anymore.”
She stretched, long bony arms over her head, and yawned. “Sorry. College graduation coming up—last night was the party to celebrate the party we’ll throw on graduation day. I feel like I mainlined a liter of rum. And ate . . . cotton balls, it feels like?”
“Poor thing.” So, twenty-one. Drinking age. Unless she was a genius and had skipped some grades. Which was certainly possible. Also, I sucked at estimating ages. She could be seventeen or twenty-four (and either way, couldn’t legally rent a car, so I had her beat in one area at least).
“I need to rush. Mom’s still roaming the upstairs with the others, right? Won’t be a better time to slip away.” Oh, was that what they called their mysterious comings and goings? They were like beautiful biracial Batmans. Batmen? “I only came because—”
“You can tell if we need you,” I whispered, and I don’t know why. Maybe I wasn’t ready for anyone to hear the theory until I’d thought it over more. “That’s when you come. You do what you can and then you go back. Every time. Even when you’re tiny.”
She smiled and took my hand. “It’s not entirely altruistic, Elizabeth the One.” She laughed when I made a face. “We get a sizable emo-boost from the trips. It’s so severely wonderful to see you guys in your carefree days.”
I snorted. Carefree was never a word that leaped to mind when pondering our lives.
“But yep: I must motorvate. I was hoping to see BabyJon.”
“Sorry—my mom enrolled him in some kind of Lord of the Flies day care three mornings a week. Lots of emphasis on interacting with other toddlers. Apparently socializing is huge. But I dunno. Seems overrated.” I’d gone with them. Once. Soooo many sticky fingers, and they all wanted to touch me. I hadn’t salvaged six-eighths of my shoe collection only to be severely smudged.
“You should take my brother’s advice about the kiddo. Like he said, BabyJon’s the last one you need to worry about.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that.”
“This entire time?” she teased.
“Shut up, it’s my process.” I took a breath and said the thing that had occurred to me when Lara Wyndham saved my boy. “He’s my heir. Mine and Laura’s. She’s dead, so he’ll inherit her abilities. And since he’s a blood relative, like Laura and I were, I’ll be able to teach him how to go back and forth from Hell.”
She studied her (beautiful) nails and said nothing.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” I pressed on. “Sinclair and I will rule for a long time and when we’re done, and dead, Jon Taylor will be the new king.” Of vampires . . . and perhaps Hell, too. Who knew?
Elizabeth rose to her feet, put a hand over her breast, and sounded like the world’s biggest, dorkiest Girl Scout as she said with prim precision, “I can neither confirm nor deny that theory, Ms. The One, out of respect for the always fragile timeline, and also, I gotta pee and maybe get a sandwich, and I can’t do that here, so farewell, chieftess, time to arrivederci.” Only she pronounced it the way Brad Pitt did in Inglourious Basterds: uh-ree-vuh-DER-chee. Even I knew that was screwed up.
“Oh, go, then.” Should have known she wouldn’t confirm. Not that she had to. The smirk said it all, really.
She started to amble past me toward the mudroom door, then paused and rested a warm hand on my shoulder. “Gosh, if only BabyJon—he never ditches that nickname, by the way, poor bastard—if only he was raised by vampires and a zombie and was used to extreme weirdness and hung out with werewolves and mermaids and saw all kinds of amazing shit all the time. And if only that same guy had two best friends who could travel back and forth between parallel universes and figure out how to get him whatever he needed whenever he took on the bad guy du jour. Wouldn’t that be something?”
I stared at her. It was. It was all. It was literally all I could do. Because. I. Wow. Holy. Wow!
A giggle. “You should see your face!”
Then she left, the little jerk.