Chapter 43
Okay,” I managed after what felt like ninety minutes.
”Okay. That’s ... okay?”
“We’re on your
husband’s farm!” Laura had grabbed my arm, and her sensibly short
nails were doing a dandy job of sinking into my tender vampire
skin. “Your husband’s family’s farm!”
“Not for long. Argh,
quit it!” I removed her claws from my flesh. “They’re moving,
remember?”
“So Sinclair’s
parents were farmers?” Laura goggled at me. “Farmers? I thought he was—I don’t know—a
trust-fund baby. Or something.”
“Yeah. It seemed
weird to me, too. When we met, I mean.” I shook my head. Fucking
time travel; it made polite conversation impossible. “In the
future, I mean. It was weird. Here’s this big rich classy scary
vampire guy, and he got his start farming. I always thought that
was kind of funny. I mean, I’m not wrong—Sinclair dresses like a
city boy.”
Laura nodded. “He
sure does. And didn’t you tell me his whole family ...
?”
“Yeah. Died. In fact,
Tina found him in the cemetery the day of his parents’ funeral. I
think—”
Shit. What did Tina
tell me that night? It had been a couple of years, and I’d barely
paid attention at the time. In my defense, I’d been thrown into a
pit and was a little more worried about getting out than listening
to the babbling of my new friend.
“Okay. She told me
she turned him that night. I remember being surprised, because the
Sinclair I knew wasn’t a guy who inspired sympathy, you
know?
“And ... I always
thought that’s how they met, that Tina met him the night she gave
him the old one-two chomp. But the kids—the little twins—were
talking about Aunt Tina.” We looked at
each other. “She knew them before. She was a friend of the family.
Before.”
Laura had paled, from
fright or stress or both. “Then what happened?”
“Then ... nothing. I
mean, that’s all the story I got. She saw him, she turned him,
they’ve been friends ever since.”
A small lie. In fact,
that was all the story I ever bothered with. I lost all interest in
The History of Eric Sinclair once I found out I was supposed to
spend five thousand years ruling vampires with him. Soooo not on
the career aptitude test I took when I was a senior at Burnsville
High School.
In my defense, the
Sinclair I met had been conniving, sneaky, sexy, slick,
underhanded, horny, sexy, scheming, sexy, and duplicitous. He’d
tricked me! I’d had sex with him under false pretenses. And all
those orgasms were under false pretenses, too!
“Let’s get the hell
out of here,” I said, but Laura was way ahead of me. Her sword was
already out, was already cutting a circle through the dusty barn
air.
Just like last time,
getting back to the waiting room was the easy part: we clasped
hands and took a big step together, and the barn and the twins and
the dust fell away from us. Cake.
“Thank goodness,” I
said, “we’re back in hell.”
Not a sentence I
thought I’d ever say.