Chapter 51
PSSt.”
“So how’d you become
a vam—”
“Pssst!”
I sighed. “Excuse me,
but my little sister can be very rude and selfish at times. She’s
the cross I must bear when I’m not time traveling all over and
saving the world. Worlds, maybe. Maybe I should get a plaque for
all this grueling world saving.”
“Pssst!”
“Two plaques. What?”
I fell back a couple of steps so Laura and I were walking abreast.
“What is it?”
“I think we should
go.”
“How come?” I was
genuinely surprised.
“You fixed it so Tina
will turn him. If there was a way to utterly destroy the future—our
present—you’ve made sure we’ll return to a smoking crater where
Grand Avenue used to be. It’s time to go.”
“But I need to make
sure he gets taken care of.”
“Why?”
“Why?” I gaped. Laura
wasn’t normally this dumb. “Because—because I have to! What are you
talking about, why?”
“You’re only saying
that because it’s him. Your love is
clouding your usually awful long view even more than
usual.”
“I can’t just gaily
hop back to hell without knowing he’s going to be ... uh ...”
Okay probably wasn’t the right word.
Set on his loveless track toward cold
vengeance, enduring decades of isolation and loneliness until I
pratfall into his life just sounded weird. “Look, I see your
point, but—”
“Shhhh!” Laura
hissed, grabbing my hand and yanking me off the dusty road. I knew
it, I knew it! I was inevitably headed
for a ditch tonight. “Look!”
We were cowering off
the gravel road, sort of hunched down in the shallow ditch, and I
could see Tina had caught up to Sinclair.
“What’s
she—?”
“Shhh! And duh,
clearly she’s talking to him.”
“... dreadfully
sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter
now,” Sinclair said, and I shivered. He sounded like a robot. An
incredibly depressed robot. “They’re gone. She’s
gone.”
“Eric, I promise you,
something will be done. These men won’t get away
with—”
Sinclair flinched.
“Men? I thought—I thought she’d been raped—and there was an
accident—?”
“There is—there are
more things at work here than you can know.”
“Explain them to
me.”
“Eric—”
“Right
now.”
I started to cheer
up. Now he was starting to sound like
the Sinclair I loved to loathe. Or loathed to love. He just needed
a mission. All those Death Wish movies
couldn’t be wrong.
“Eric, there’s no
time. I need to get on their trail tonight. I’m only here for the
funerals. But I couldn’t leave without saying
good-bye.”
“Was it another
vampire?”
Tina didn’t speak for
a moment, and Laura and I traded glances. I could tell she was
rattled that he’d just come out with it like that. Are you a vampire? Are the stories about monsters true?
What happened to you? And what happened to my
family?
And how much of it is my fault, for never questioning
anything?
“I—yes. How did you
know?”
Eric, embarked upon
his last night of life, started to laugh. I had never heard him
laugh like that and hoped never to hear it again.
“How did I know? How
did I know? My God, a better question
would be when did Erin and I not know? Our grandmother’s best
friend? Who was always beautiful and clever, who never lost her
wits or her looks?”
“Pretty big clue,” I
admitted, and Laura nodded.
“A friend who never
seemed to leave her teenage years, who always seemed to relate to
the elders far more easily than people her own age. People who
looked her own age,” he
qualified.
“You
never—”
“Our mother told us,
when we started asking questions. Before we were invested in the
Sinclair family secret. She said you were an angel. A dark angel,
sent to protect us and watch over us.” His hands flashed, and
suddenly he was gripping Tina’s shoulders and shouting into her
face, “An angel!”
“She lied, of
course,” Tina said calmly, as if she wasn’t being tossed around
like a cocktail shaker on a gravel road in a small town in the
middle of nowhere in 1920 (probably). “She lied because she
couldn’t reconcile the truth with her religious upbringing. She
couldn’t understand how a vampire could also be a friend of the
family. She couldn’t understand how a creature of darkness and
blood could enjoy the company of farmers, could babysit and take
vacations with you. Could love you.
“And rather than
question it, she created a convenient fairy tale, as her mother had
done for her, and her mother before her.”
“Then why couldn’t
you save them?” he cried, and his voice cracked like the adolescent
he still was. Though I was betting nineteen years old in the
(maybe) 1920s was the equivalent of thirty-five in the twenty-first
century.
“Because I’m a
vampire, not a goddess, and we’re not infallible. The reverse, if
anything. Our appetites often lead us to trouble. Even our
destruction. The only guarantee our state brings is freedom from
aging bodies, never-ending thirst, and great strength and speed.
Those are helpful much of the time. But they aren’t a promise. They
are no guarantee.”
“You’re off, then.
After the killers.”
“Yes.”
“Not by yourself. I
won’t leave ugly work like this to a woman.”
Ahhh, there was the
charming chauvinist I often fantasized about strangling. And not in
an auto-erotic way, either.
To her credit, Tina
didn’t go into gales of humiliating laughter. “I appreciate your
concern, my dear. But I have been involved in ugly work long,
long before you were
born.”
“Exactly. That’s why
you’re going to make me one of you.” Sinclair took a deep breath.
“And teach me. Everything. You’ll show me everything. And they’ll
pay. They will pay and pay, and when I’ve finished with them ... in
time ... there may be more to live for than vengeance and a living
death.”
Another short
silence, and I could have sworn Tina glanced at us pseudo-hiding in
the ditch. “Yes, that ... that seems to be the thing to do, doesn’t
it? Eric, you must understand—”
“Vengeance. I
understand vengeance. If I’m damned because of it, then so be
it.”
Again a glance in our
direction. “I’m not sure damned is ... exactly ... the appropriate
word.”
“We should go,” Laura
whispered. “There’s nothing else for us to screw up.”
“Not
yet.”
“Why?”
I didn’t know. I
couldn’t figure it out myself, much less explain to Laura. I
couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be a personal disaster to
leave just now. But I didn’t ... know ... why.
“Let me tell you what
it will be like.”
He made a curt
gesture. “Irrelevant. There’s nothing I wouldn’t endure for
vengeance. Losing my soul is the least of it.”
You won’t, though! I almost shouted. Soulless was
so not how I’d describe Sinclair. He came off as chilly and
indifferent, until you got his pants off. I mean, got to know
him.
“The ... act itself
isn’t unpleasant. You’ll get tired. You’ll sleep. And, as I plan to
steal your body, you needn’t worry about waking in a coffin six
feet in the earth. I cannot tell you how upsetting that is,” Tina
muttered.
Jeez. I could
imagine. I was learning more about Tina in one night than I had in
three years.
“But you’ll be ...
disoriented. You’ll—it might take a while to ... to learn ... how
to be strong ...”
I leaped to my feet.
Strong! That’s why we were still here!
I scrambled out of
the ditch. Laura lunged but, since I was in superspeedy-vamp mode,
missed by a mile (almost literally). I was moving so efficiently,
Sinclair was only now starting to turn toward the racket I was
making. And Tina, who could have
stopped me, seemed frozen in surprise, or maybe
disbelief.
Eric didn’t turn
quickly enough. I nailed him from behind, rode him all the way into
the gravel, and sank my canines into his neck.