Undead and Unstable (14 page)

TWENTY-ONE

“So it’s true.” The devil, who looked like Lena Olin—she had
the cougar thing
down
—looked irked. “You’re supposed to be somewhere else, boy,” she told Marc. “You are
not
supposed to be here, in the state you are in, right now. It’s all wrong.” She shook her head. “I might have known you’d screw it up.”

“Ha ha, Lena Olin, shows what you know. I didn’t have anything to do with
that
.” I pointed triumphantly at Marc.

“You did, actually.” She crossed her legs and admired the toes of her beautiful shoes. Then she looked at Marc. “What do you have to say for yourself, boy?”

“That I really want someone to kill me right now, and if you’ve got a minute…”

“I can’t touch you, and you damned well know it,” Satan snapped. “You’re hers now, and I can’t—wait. Ahhh … you don’t know that yet. None of you nitwits know that yet.” She sighed, aggrieved. “Ask me how much I loathe time travel.”

“Is that why you popped in from hell? To bitch?”

“No, mostly to see for myself. Unfortunately, the rumors were true.”

“What rumors?”

“Mother!” Laura had rushed back to the parlor, Sinclair right behind her, so quickly I barely had time to realize they were back in the room before my sister was screeching at her mother. “Get out of here! This has nothing to do with you!”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong.” She eyed Laura’s old sweatshirt and muddy shoes. “You’re looking … ah … frumpy.”

“Go
away
, Mother.”

“But I have to be here when she finds out. Well, perhaps I don’t have to,” the devil admitted, “but I must insist on watching the whole sordid scene.” Then she tittered.
Tittered.

Sinclair was stepping in front of me, which sometimes made me feel cherished, and other times—like now—made me feel like he was crowding me into a corner. I put a hand on his shoulder and shoved him aside. “It’s fine, Sinclair, we’re all fine, and Satan here was just hopping back on her broomstick to go back to hell or Newark or wherever.”

“A New Jersey joke?” Satan rolled her eyes. “At least no one has ever tried
that
before.”

“Doesn’t my nasty stepmother have something else on your schedule for today?” Antonia Taylor—the Ant—was Laura’s biological mother and my stepmother, or had been in life. In death she was Satan’s assistant, or whatever the hell she does down there in hell. Which made my brain hurt. First, what were the odds that I’d have two Antonias in my life? Second, what were the odds that if I called one of them Antonia-from-hell,
it wasn’t specific enough
? “Anything else?”

“Sadly, no.” The devil looked right at Laura. “Are you going to tell her, or shall I?”

“Mother,
don’t
. I told you I’d handle it.”

“Well, thus far, you haven’t.”

“It’s been less than a week!” she howled.

“Time isn’t always on your side, Laura, even if you’re a time traveler.”

“Okay, at least that wasn’t cryptic and weird. Get thee behind us, Satan. We’ve got stuff to take care of, and your name was nowhere on the guest list for my Thanksgiving party.”

Satan wrinkled her adorable nose. “But you loathe Thanksgiving.”

“Never mind! Get the heck out of my house!”

“Indeed,” Sinclair said, trying once again to shove me behind him.

“Oh, but this concerns you, too, Eric. You most of all, I think.”

“Mother. Don’t do it.”

Satan’s demeanor lost all playfulness; now she was giving off all the warmth of an ice sculpture. “Then you’d best get to it, daughter.”

There was a long silence while mother and daughter locked gazes, broken by Marc’s puzzled, “What’s she talking about? What’s wrong? Uh, besides all the obvious stuff…”

Laura dropped her gaze and slowly turned so she was facing the three of us. “I didn’t want to meet at the farm—”

“Puppy farm,” I interrupted, still annoyed at the puppy hair that was now everywhere.

“Just to talk about Jon Delk. I also wanted to come back here with you to talk about this.” She ducked out of the parlor, and I could hear her rummaging around in one of the coat closets in the huge entryway, and then she came back carrying—ugh—the Book of the Dead. “We’ve got to talk about this.”

“Gross! Why? Jeez, Laura—sorry, Sinclair—jeepers, Laura, you and I bounced all over time, and in and out of hell, so I could learn to read the stupid thing without going batshit nutballs, then you
steal
it and refuse to give it back. Except now, less than a week later, you
did
bring it back. After stashing it in a coat closet?”

“Thank you so much for the recap, Vampire Queen.”

“Pipe down, Lena Olin. So why, Laura? Just what is it about this nasty thing that’s got you so freaked out?”

“Besides the obvious,” Marc added.

Even now, feeling our impatience, feeling the devil’s ire, Laura couldn’t seem to spit it out. We watched her struggle with the words, and when they finally came, it’s like they were wrenched out of her. Torn from her.

“Betsy, in the future,
you
write the Book of the Dead.”

I laughed.

“No, really. Then you ask the devil to put it back in time, so the first vampires find it and keep passing it down through the ages. It’s not a book that tells your future … it’s a book that lists your past, because you wrote it in the future, when you already knew everything.”

I laughed harder. Oh, this was rich! I couldn’t even write a grocery list, never mind
that
nasty thing.

“And the reason you did that—do that—is because the Book is Sinclair.”

“Like … about Sinclair?” Marc asked.

“No. It
is
Sinclair. It’s his skin the Book is written on.”

I stopped laughing.

TWENTY-TWO

Okay. Okay. Okay. It’ll be okay. Just … stay calm. It’ll be
okay. It’s okay. Okay. It’s fine. It’s okay. She’s wrong, is all, or lying. She’s not just a liar, she’s the daughter of the lord of them. She’s got bad intel, is all. I don’t kill Sinclair and skin him and turn him into the Book of the Dead. I don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t.

Nope. Shake it somewhere else, Satan, ’cuz this vampire queen isn’t buying.

Okay. Okay! It felt good to have that settled.

I ran from the room and lunged for the closet. I could feel someone come in and stand behind me, but I had more pressing matters to deal with. I yanked open the closet door, groped for the nearest receptacle (sadly, it was a Beverly Feldman shoe box I’d stashed right after UPS dropped it off), tore the lid off, and threw up all over a lovely pair of pewter-colored gladiator sandals.

TWENTY-THREE

I’d run out and barfed and run back in so quickly, they were
all standing right where I’d left them.

It wasn’t true.

It
wasn’t
.

“You can talk until you drop dead,” I told the devil, furtively wiping my mouth—probably time to lay off the banana chocolate smoothies for a while—“and it won’t change a thing. You’ll never make me believe it. Hear me? Never. Shit, Satan, I wouldn’t believe you if you told me the ground gets wet when it rains.”

“Then believe me,” someone said.

We looked.

Ancient Me was standing in the doorway. “I did it. You will do it.”

I did the only sensible thing. I ran out and threw up again.

TWENTY-FOUR

I staggered back into the parlor, weaving like a coked-up
runway model. “This is the worst dream I’ve ever had.”

“You think you know fear?” Ancient Me asked. “I’m going through all this a second time. As if the first wasn’t horrific enough.” She glared at Satan. “I’m beginning to wish I’d never asked you for that favor.”

“That would be two of us, Betsy.”

“Don’t call me that, it’s infantile, you know I loathe it,” Ancient Betsy shot back.

“I do know you loathe it,” Satan agreed cheerfully. “Yes.”

“And that right there is the source of your problems,” Laura pointed out.

Meanwhile, Marc and Sinclair were looking from me to Ancient Me and then back to me again. “Okay,” Marc finally said, “don’t kill me yet, because this just got really interesting. So we’ll put my murder on the back burner for now. And no wonder the Book of the Dead follows you everywhere! It’s
Sinclair
!”

“It’s
not
Sinclair!”

“It absolutely is Sinclair,” Ancient Me confirmed.

“Why are you here?” I cried. “Don’t you have a future wasteland to lord over?”

Ancient Betsy, wearing yet another awful gray sweater dress with pilled elbows and a ragged hem that dropped a few inches past her knees, looked more ticked than ever. “Because of you, numbskull. You’ll have to fix this. I can’t, more’s the pity.”

“How am I supposed to—”

“I. Don’t. Know!” Ancient Me snapped. “But you had better figure out a way.
You’re
the one screwing up the timeline. My memories haven’t been reliable since you two showed up in my present.” She jabbed a bony, unpolished finger in my general direction. “Your future.”

“Okay, first? Buff the nails, Decrepit Me.”

“I’m not decrepit; we look exactly alike.”

“Except for your eyes,” Sinclair said quietly. “Your eyes are not at all the same.”

“
You
shut up.” Now that bony finger was pointing at my beloved husband. “Quite a lot of this is your fault.”

“Oh, sure, blame the victim! Buff, okay? It’s not hard, and you’ll feel better about yourself. You don’t even have to do polish, just a top coat.”

“My world is a nightmare of post-apocalyptic forever-storm.”

“And who’s fault is
that
?”

“So fix it!”
Ancient Me screamed. It was so loud and piercing, I nearly heard glass cracking. No, wait … that was probably just my eardrum blowing up. “Do you hear, you stupid mewling foolish idiotic girl? Fix it! Save him! Save
us
!”

She seemed almost appalled she’d had a screaming tantrum, because she visibly calmed herself—a good trick, one I might have to learn, or would learn—and then looked around the room at all of us and said, “You’re a stupid, stupid girl. But you might pull it off. And Marc.” She nodded at him and he nodded back, looking wary.

“Uh … yeah, um, Queen Elizabeth?”

“That’s a good look for you. It suits you. And you’re welcome.” Then she looked at the devil, who was wearing the expression of someone who thought something was gonna be a big joke … only to find the joke was on her. It was an expression I hoped to see on Satan’s face a few more times. The devil looking discomfited was hilarious. “Get me out of here. Right now.”

Satan shrugged, and they both disappeared.

“Ancient Betsy must have brought me back!” Marc cried when the stench of brimstone faded. Okay, there hadn’t been any brimstone, but the two of them disappeared in an appropriately sinister way. “She must have gotten the devil to bring her here, find my body, and resurrect me.”