Chapter 49
Where the hell do you think you’re
going?”
Tina looked more than
startled—she looked borderline horrified.
“Well? Don’t just
stand there staring at my awesome-yet smudged shirt and filthy
leggings! Go turn Sinclair into a vampire!”
“I can think of at
least five other ways we could have done that more efficiently. And
quietly.”
“Shut up, you. Tina,
come on.” I stepped forward, seized her arm just above the elbow,
and tugged her toward Sinclair. “Bite already. Gnaw away. Chomp
like you’ve never chomped before.”
“Who are you?”
I opened my mouth ...
and stopped. What, exactly, should I tell her? That I was the
long-prophesied vampire queen she hadn’t ever heard of? That I was
the wife of the teenager currently stumbling his way out of the
cemetery? That I knew the killer of her friends was a vampire, and
oh, by the way, I knew she was, too, so go ahead and bite that old
family friend and also, don’t kill me?
I really couldn’t
think of anything to tell her that wouldn’t earn me a shot in the
mouth. Or a broken neck.
“You have to help
him.” Hey, that sounded pretty reasonable. Which is probably why
Laura thought of saying it. “He needs you.”
“I failed him,” Tina
said, visibly upset, practically crying—not with tears, vampires
don’t have excess moisture just lying around for them to excrete,
but you get the jist. “I failed them all. How can I ever face
him?”
“How can you abandon
him?”
Ohhh, good one, Laura! Thank God I’d brought her
along on these dumb time-traveling trips.
“It’s monstrous. I
could never.”
“You’re just going to
abandon him, then? Leave him with his grief?” I nagged. “You’ve
seen him. He’ll stick a gun in his mouth by the end of the
week.”
Tina flinched. Unlike
Laura and me, she was appropriately dressed for the time. The big
fat dresses from Salem were gone, and thank goodness. Instead, Tina
was wearing an ankle-length skirt, which was pencil straight,
pinching her knees together so that it was almost hobbling her. The
top, a long tunic, completed the pencil look (I assume she was
going for a pencil look); she looked skinny as a (pencil!) stick,
but the deep cherry red of the tunic and the cherries-on-white
print of the skirt made her look more substantial than she was. A
big blonde hulk like me? If I’d worn a print like that, I would
have been mistaken for the cherry tree. Petite women had all the
luck.
Her hair was worn up,
the big blonde waves carefully pinned up and away from her face.
Her dark eyes were wary and full of pain. Which was sad and all,
but her shoes! She had the most adorable red flapper-style shoes!
Thick, chunky heels and delicate ankle straps completed the outfit,
and Tina was a pretty, stylish picture indeed.
The shoes weren’t
much help ... she wasn’t dressed flapper-style, but was wearing
those kinds of shoes. So it’d be easy to assume, okay, probably
1920s. Except this was Hastings, Minnesota. Not exactly the center
for all things fashion. So it could have been as early as 1910, or
as late as 1935. No way to tell.
“—have to bite him!
Tell her, Betsy.”
“Eh? Oh, yep. You
sure do have to bite him. Bite him and bite him and then bite him
some more. He’s gonna want to catch the killer.”
“I will catch the
killer,” Tina said, and for a second she didn’t look cute and
beautiful and sweet; for a second, I felt a very real chill, and
not because I was dressed in a bathing suit (sort of). Looks were
deceiving, and who’d know better than a former Miss Congeniality?
Tina was a predator, a beautiful woman used to getting her shit
done while surrounded by men who assumed she was stupid,
incompetent, or both. Her camouflage was excellent.
That was something I
should probably keep in mind at all times.
“Listen, you have to
chew on him, then, when he rises, you’ll become his loyal sidekick,
his Gal Friday, like a super-secretary except cool, and then you’ll
be perfectly positioned to ... to ... what, Laura?”
“Will you stop
babbling things you have no way of
knowing?”
“How else am I gonna
bend her to my will?”
“Wait one moment,”
Tina interrupted. “When he rises, since it appears clear you two
understand about vampires, he’ll be a mindless beast for years,
driven only by hunger and need. Why would I ever become the
assistant of such a beast?”
“Because hemmmpph!” I
snapped at Laura’s fingers like a pissed-off bulldog. “Don’t grab
me, and don’t stick your fingers in my
mouth. Listen, Tina, the thing is, I know this stuff because you
already did it. I know—I know you—” Would I create a paradox? I was
pretty sure the answer was no, but ... it wasn’t just my future I
was screwing with. It was Sinclair’s, too. “I definitely know
...”
“Your full name!”
Laura prompted. “You’ve never seen us before, right? So how does
the mysterious weirdo know your whole name?”
“Oh ho?” Tina looked
at me.
I turned on Laura, so
pissed I could only see her through a sort of red mist. “Have you
ever met me?” I hissed. “Of course I don’t know her full name! I’m
lucky I remember it’s Tina!”
“Well,” Tina replied,
unimpressed.
“Try,” Laura
encouraged. “Think. Exercise that teeny brain.”
“When this is over,
I’m going to beat you to death. Let’s see. We were in the
pit—”
“The what?”
“Yeah, I know. The
vampires threw me in a pit. Then Tina jumped down into
it.”
“That does not sound
one bit like me.”
“Look, I didn’t
question your motives at the time, so don’t be questioning mine.
And ... she said—you said—it was the least she could do. And since
I’d been having kind of a shitty day, I figured she was right. And
... uh ...”
“I suspect you might
be mentally ill.”
“You wouldn’t talk to
me like that if the Antichrist would let me tell you who I was,” I
whined. “You just—I do know a name!”
Tina had folded her
arms across her chest and raised a polite eyebrow.
“And here I thought
you might only make things worse,” Laura observed, “and yet, how
wrong I was.”
“Nostro! How’s that
for a name?”
My half-assed plan
worked; Tina looked shocked and her eyes opened wide, like I’d
slapped her.
“That’s right!” I
crowed. “I made that idiot my bitch! The guy currently making your
life suck rocks; I owned his ass. And I
did it with your help.” I turned to my
sister. “There, see? She knows stuff, but not enough to destroy her
own future, probably.”
“You could only know
that name if you were in league with him, which,” she said, looking
me up and down with all the warmth of an overworked customs
inspector, “I don’t believe you are. Or if you were telling the
truth. So I suppose I must assume you mean what you
say.”
“That’s
right!”
“So the only living
child of my dear friends must be damned to a lifeless
existence.”
“Lifeless?” Clearly
she’d never had sex with undead Sinclair. Lifeless was so
not the word springing to mind. “You
don’t understand. This will change ...” I saw Laura shake her head.
“Tons,” I finished. “It’ll change tons. It’ll change
everything.”
And for the first
time, I owned the queen-of-the-undead thing. Because I had changed everything. Not alone, of course. With
the help of all the mobile people in this cemetery (not Michael, but I assumed he was back home by
now), I’d kicked out an asshat dictator, saved the Fiends, defeated
various forms of evil, while maintaining a residence where all were
(sort of) welcome, marrying the love of my life, becoming a mom
(sort of), forming an alliance with seventy-five thousand
werewolves ... what could I say? It had been a busy couple of
years.
“Great. So you’ll do
it? You’ll bite Sinclair?”
“Is there a reason
you never refer to him by his first name? Have you forgotten it as
you have forgotten mine?”
“We do not have time for your picky, irritating questions,
Tina. Now go chomp.”
“We have to find him
again first,” Laura observed. “Because while you were convincing
Tina you were an intimate friend who didn’t know her full name,
your boy took a walk.”
We looked. I cursed.
Laura was right: Sinclair had bailed.