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MaryJanice Davidson

 

 

Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements


Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61

Titles by MaryJanice Davidson
UNDEAD AND UNWED
UNDEAD AND UNEMPLOYED
UNDEAD AND UNAPPRECIATED
UNDEAD AND UNRETURNABLE
UNDEAD AND UNPOPULAR
UNDEAD AND UNEASY
UNDEAD AND UNWORTHY
UNDEAD AND UNWELCOME
DERIK’S BANE
 
SLEEPING WITH THE FISHES
SWIMMING WITHOUT A NET
FISH OUT OF WATER
 
 
Anthologies
 
CRAVINGS
(with Laurell K. Hamilton, Rebecca York, Eileen Wilks)
BITE
(with Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Angela Knight,
Vickie Taylor)
KICK ASS
(with Maggie Shayne, Angela Knight, Jacey Ford)
MEN AT WORK
(with Janelle Denison, Nina Bangs)
 
DEAD AND LOVING IT
SURF’S UP
(with Janelle Denison, Nina Bangs)
 
MYSTERIA
(with P. C. Cast, Gena Showalter, Susan Grant)
 
OVER THE MOON
(with Angela Knight, Virginia Kantra, Sunny)
 
DEMON’S DELIGHT
(with Emma Holly, Vickie Taylor, Catherine Spangler)
 
DEAD OVER HEELS
MYSTERIA LANE
(with P. C. Cast, Gena Showalter, Susan Grant)
 
 
* * *
 
Titles by MaryJanice Davidson and Anthony Alongi
 
JENNIFER SCALES AND THE ANCIENT FURNACE
JENNIFER SCALES AND THE MESSENGER OF LIGHT
THE SILVER MOON ELM: A JENNIFER SCALES NOVEL
SERAPH OF SORROW: A JENNIFER SCALES NOVEL

001

Acknowledgments
For my mother-in-law, Elinor Alongi, who will slow down on her own terms, thank you. And, as for the rest of you idiots, after you’ve squeezed out four babies and raised them practically on your own and then buried your husband, if you want to pick the Thanksgiving menu, then by God, you’re gonna pick it!
And for my sister-in-law, Julie Kathryn Gottlieb, who will run her house as she pleases, who struggled mightily to bring her dear son, Sam, into this world, who works for a multinational corporation while shopping, cooking, cleaning, and worrying about her widowed mother, and who, if she wants to change the Thanksgiving menu at the last minute, then by God, she’s gonna change it!
I try to imagine my life with dull in-laws and I just—I just . . . I lock up. Tilt. Overload. Can’t be done. Boring in-laws? What do they do? Just get along and be nice all the time? And never funny? N-never? Never funny? They just . . . I dunno . . . treat each other with a certain kind dignity and respect? Respect? Yeesh, I actually threw up in my mouth a little bit at the thought.
Boring relatives. Seems like a curse, don’t it?
I am not cursed.
 
Two thousand eight was a mondo-busy year. And a difficult year in many ways—deaths in the family were the worst of it, and only the beginning. But the show must go on, and with the help of many people, the show did.
Given that I have the long-term memory of a salamander, I’m not going to try to name them all. There are too many, and I’ve mentioned many of them before and embarrassed the majority. To them, and everyone else, thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.
You’ve all helped me turn daydreams into fictional characters, helped me create whole worlds. These characters, to my surprise, have helped my readers get through difficult times. Which is something I never imagined my scribbling could ever do. But readers have brought Betsy books to their chemo treatments. To counseling sessions. And, most horrifying of all, to family reunions.
That would be fine on its own, but they’ve also helped me use my work to help people who end up in jams . . . something that’s happened to all of us at least once.
The bottom line? I’ve done nothing for you. Any of you. I write books because I get off on it; other people enjoying the work never entered my teeny, tiny mind. But you’ve sure helped me.
And that, I won’t forget.
—MaryJanice Davidson
December 2008

Author’s Note
I have never once spotted a werewolf on Cape Cod. But there are a lot of Wyndhams on Cape Cod. Draw your own conclusions.
Also, young werewolves really aren’t at all like pre-adolescent humans. Don’t let the cherubic faces fool you. It’s a mistake you likely won’t get to make twice.
Finally, Zyr vodka does exist, but not in the flavors Marc notes in his freezer. And thank goodness.

The Story So Far
Betsy (“Please don’t call me Elizabeth”) Taylor was run over by a Pontiac Aztec almost three years ago. She woke up as the Queen of the Vampires and in dazzling succession (in no particular order), she bit her friend Nick Berry; moved from a suburb to a mansion in St. Paul; solved various murders; lost her father and stepmother; became her half brother’s guardian; continued to avoid the room housing the Book of the Dead; cured her best friend’s cancer; visited her alcoholic grandfather (twice); solved a number of kidnappings; realized her husband, King Eric Sinclair, could read her thoughts (she could always read his); found out the Fiends had been up to no good (Fiend: [noun] a vampire given only [dead] animal blood; a vampire who quickly goes feral).
Also, Antonia, a werewolf from Cape Cod, took a bullet in the brain for Betsy, saving her life. The stories about bullets not hurting vampires are not true; plug enough lead into brain matter and that particular denizen of the undead will never get up again. Finally, Garrett, Antonia’s lover, killed himself the instant he realized she was dead.
It’s been a tough couple of years.

“Unwelcome: ill-favored, inadmissible, objectionable, unacceptable, unwanted.”
—ROGETS II: THE NEW THESAURUS,
THIRD EDITION, 1995
 
“Someone who is persona non grata is a foreigner officially unwelcome in another country. We use both terms in extended senses, mainly about people unwelcome or welcome in any figurative sense.”
—THE COLUMBIA GUIDE TO
STANDARD AMERICAN ENGLISH

Preview
He stared through the lens so hard he nearly gave himself a migraine. He looked away, then back, then away again.
The star remained. Hanging like a diamond against black velvet, it glowed and beckoned.
After some minutes of this, maybe an hour, he finally lunged for his cell phone and stabbed in a phone number he had memorized over fifteen years ago.
It rang three times before a groggy voice answered, “Do you know what time it is?”
“I know exactly what time it is.” He took a deep breath and pressed a hand against his chest. If he wasn’t careful, he’d overexcite himself right into a coronary. “It’s the time we’ve been praying for.”
A short silence, followed by, “I’m getting up. I’ll call the others.”
“You do that.” He hung up and went back to staring at the star. He couldn’t look away. It called him.
Soon it would call them all.

Chapter 1
So, if I’m reading this correctly, you’re a vampire now. Not a secretary.”
“Not an administrative assistant,” I corrected automatically. I mean, jeez! I knew Cooper was old and creaky, but what century did he think we were living in? (Or in my case, dying in and then reliving?)
“The important bit,” Cooper went on, “is about the vampire.”
“Well, yeah.”
“And how you’re the queen of them.”
I sighed and flopped into an airplane seat. I examined the toes of my navy blue Cole Haan Penny Air Loafers . . . not a scratch so far. “I guess some people would consider that an important point. The queen thing.”
“It’s bulleted and boldfaced. Also, the date of your death is in italics, along with how you don’t have to urinate anymore.”
“My pee or the lack thereof is nobody’s business!” I gnashed my teeth and added, “Give me that.”
I snatched the memo away from Cooper so quickly, he didn’t see my hand move until his wrinkly fingers were clutching air. This startled him into a gasp, which we then both pretended I hadn’t heard. That, I was learning, was vampire etiquette. Or, that is, vampire etiquette when dealing with humans. I’d finally figured it out after three years of being undead.
There should be a class, you know. Vampire Etiquette When Dealing with Humans 101. In another fifty years, I could teach the stupid thing.
I scanned the memo, my eyes bulging so much they felt like they were trying to leap from my skull. Cooper hadn’t been kidding. Jessica had sent him a memo detailing my bodily functions. Two pages!
 
 
To: Samuel Cooper.
From: The Boss.
Re: Betsy, Vampirism, and Cargo.
 
 
Cargo? My gut churned.
And the part about me being the vampire queen was bulleted.
“I can’t believe she sent you a memo.”
“She always does. And I send ’em to her. Increasing fuel costs, licensing issues, route changes. You know how expensive fuel’s getting now that China’s buying all the oil? The E.M. ain’t cheap, you know.” The E.M.: Jessica’s private joke. It stood for Emancipated Minor.
“And she sends her memos to me to keep me in the loop, don’t you know. Seems this one’s a little late, though,” he muttered.
“ ‘Creepy speed and unnaturally grotesque super-strength’?” Aghast, I kept reading as other blechy phrases leaped out at me. “ ‘Still obsessed with shoes but married rich and can now actually afford the stupid things’? That scrawny traitor, I’m going to—agh! ‘Immortality hasn’t given her any interest in any topic she cannot refer to in the first person.’ Why, that—okay, I can’t really argue with that last one, but she didn’t have to highlight it. Look! It’s highlighted. ”
“So is ‘extreme narcissistic tendencies.’ In any case, I’m to fly you to Cape Cod, so you can meet with the King of the Werewolves and make sure he doesn’t sic his pack on you.”
“I think it’s pronounced Pack.”
Cooper heard the capital P and nodded. “Right. This Pack, they’re pretty ticked? Because of that little gal Antonia?”
I nibbled on the inside of my lip, distressed, as always, by any mention of Antonia. It had only been a week. It didn’t still sting, as much as feel like a lateral slice through the liver.
See, poor Antonia was making the trip with us—in the cargo hold, as all corpses flew. In a plain wooden coffin, the lethal bullet holes all over her skull still not filled in by an undertaker. My husband, Sinclair, and I had no idea what werewolf funeral customs entailed, so we’d given orders that her body simply be placed in a coffin and loaded onto Jessica’s private plane.
We didn’t even wash her beautiful, dear face.
But that was nothing compared to what we did with Garrett’s body.
“Look, Cooper, the important thing is now you know what you’re getting into. So if you can’t fly us out there, or if you think you—”
“Bite your tongue, miss. Or missus, I suppose. I’ve been flying for Jessica Wilson since she was seven years old, don’t you know, and we’ve had hairy days and we’ve had hairy days.”
“Cooper, I never, ever want to hear about your hair.”
He ignored me. It was just as well. “I’ve seen and heard things—never mind, that’s private family busi ness.”
“Oh, come on, we’re best friends. I mean, Jessica and me.” I didn’t know if Cooper had any friends. “There’s no way you know stuff that I don’t—”
Cooper ruthlessly interrupted my shameless scrounging for gossip. “This doesn’t scare me.” He nodded at the memo, inadvertently crumpled in my fist. “But I surely wish Miss Jessica had told me earlier.”
He meant, of course, “Like, how about before I flew you and the vampire king to New York City for your honeymoon, dumbass?” But Cooper neither a) freaked out, nor b) quit. And thank God, because finding another private pilot at this hour would have been a bitch.
“You got a problem with the boss?” I asked. “Take it up with the boss. What I want to know is, are we still leaving at eight o’clock?” Because if we weren’t, I (and probably my husband) was going to be in big trouble with seventy-five thousand werewolves. I held my breath, remembered for the thousandth time I didn’t have to breathe anyway, and waited for his answer.

Chapter 2
Memos don’t slow down my flight check,” Cooper semi-scolded in his luscious Irish accent. I managed not to swoon with relief. Also, oooh, European accents, I could listen to them all day. Americans sounded like illiterate bumpkins by comparison. “Gunshots don’t slow down my flight check.”
“Don’t worry. Nobody’s packing.” On this flight.
“I could tell you stories about the carnage and body counts . . .” Cooper’s pale blue eyes went misty with nostalgia while I watched him nervously, then he seemed to shake himself. “But the government made me promise.”
“Well, hoo-ray for the government.”
Cooper had first worked for Jessica’s dad and, when her folks died (an ugly yet fitting death and a story for another time) and their assets transferred to her, he kept right on flying for her.
And as he’d said, Cooper heard things. Chances were he’d already known I was walking around dead. He was just miffed that Jessica hadn’t told him three years ago.
And you know, he wasn’t revolting looking. Tall—my height—with eyes the color of new denim and a shock of pure white hair that he wore over his shoulders, he was like an ancient hippy, albeit one who had never touched drugs nor alcohol.
He was wearing what Jessica teasingly called his uniform: khaki shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that read, JESUS SAVES. HE PASSES TO NOAH. NOAH SCORES! He had tons of weird Jesus shirts. People picked fights if he wore the wrong T-shirt to the wrong place. Fights Cooper always won, despite his age. It was unreal, yet cool . . . sort of like Cooper himself. Jessica had fired him dozens of times for his own safety, but he always showed up the next day.
“Okay, then.” I stood, forgetting I had been sitting under a bulkhead, and banged my head. “Ow!”
“Luckily being dead hasn’t dulled your natural grace.”
“Shut up, Cooper.”
He smirked and tipped two fingers in a mock salute.
“All right, so I’ll see you in another hour or so. They’re, um, they’re done loading Antonia and my husband’s pulling together some paperwork . . .”
For what, I had no idea—Sinclair had his fingers in a lot of pies, and I wasn’t interested enough to ask. He might answer, and then I’d have to listen. Or look like I was listening, which was harder than it sounded.
“Anyway,” I finished, having almost lost my train of thought (again), “we’ll be back a little later.”
“I’ll be ready, mum.”
Oh, it was mum now? What was I, the queen of—never mind. “And for the zillionth time: Betsy. It’s Betsy.”
“Whatever you say, mum.”
Polite as always, he didn’t turn his back on me while I scuttled out of the plane and down the stairs. My car was parked on the west end of the tarmac of the Minneapolis International Airport; I had no idea what strings Sinclair had pulled so that I could park there. I didn’t want to know, frankly.
Okay, “my car” was a bit of an exaggeration . . . I’d driven one of Sinclair’s to the airport for my little hey-guess-what-I’m-dead meeting. It was a Lexus hybrid, the only SUV I could drive without feeling like another planet-polluting asshole. Also, it had seat-warmers.
There! One unpleasant chore out of the way—Cooper knew the scoop and, even better, hadn’t tried to jam a cross down my throat. He’d agreed to fly us to the Cape, and best of all, hadn’t tried to offer me a washcloth soaked in holy water. Another sneezing fit I so did not need.
Have I mentioned there are some actual perks to being the long-prophesied vampire queen? I’m so used to bitching about my unwanted crown I tend to overlook the positives.
Holy water, crosses, and stakes can’t hurt me. Nor garlic. Antonia, my dear dead friend, had no idea if bullets would kill me, and refused to risk my life to find out. Which is why she was riding in the cargo hold instead of the plush seats of a private plane.
I shoved Antonia out of my head; it still hurt too much to think about her sacrifice.
And speaking of sacrifices, there was Garrett, Antonia’s late lover, to think about. Once he’d realized that Antonia was dead—in part due to his own cowardice—he’d killed himself right in front of us. Messily.
I didn’t quite dare broach the subject with Sinclair; he felt unrivaled contempt for a lover who would jam someone up and then not face the consequences.
Me, I wasn’t so sure it was that black and white. Garrett was never strong. He was never even brave. But he had loved Antonia and couldn’t live without her. Literally.
Tina and Sinclair had taken care of his body, dragging it off the broken staircase (poor Garrett looked like he’d been caught in a giant set of teeth), cutting off the head, and burying it at Nostro’s old farm (where the Fiends . . . the ones still alive . . . lived).
But that was enough of that for now—Garrett was dead, and I couldn’t change that. But I was going to have a word with my alleged best friend about her irritating, insulting, and idiotic memorandum (memoranda?).
I mean, jeez. Narcissistic? Didn’t she stop to think how I would feel if Cooper read that about me? Not to mention, I wasn’t even cc’d on the thing.
I swear, I didn’t know what had gotten into that girl since I’d cured her cancer and she had to dump her boyfriend because he hated my guts. Frankly, I’ve been having a terrible time this week.
And now rogue memos! It was too much for anyone to expect me to handle, which I would be pointing out to her the minute I saw her.
Self-centered? Me? Sometimes that girl doesn’t know me at all.

Chapter 3
Dear Myself Dude,
I can’t remember the last time I tried to write in a diary. This one will go the way the others went, I think. I’ll write like gangbusters for a week or two, then lose all interest in writing about my life and get back to living my life. But here I am again, starting a diary for the first time in over twenty years.
That’s a lie, of course. One of my psych profs told me in college that we lie best when we lie to ourselves.
The man knew his shit. I know exactly when I quit writing in diaries: it was right around the time I realized I had zero interest in girls, but plenty of interest in boys. I was fourteen, and kept waiting to grow out of it. Kept wondering what was wrong with me. Hoped it was just a phase. Prayed my father wouldn’t find out. Prayed no one in high school would find out.
The trouble with being a closeted homosexual is exactly this: you live with the agonizing fear you will be found out.
I hid until I was old enough to drink.
When I was sixteen, I tore up my last diary for the simplest and most cowardly of reasons: I didn’t want my dad to find it. Colonel Phillip P. Spangler’s only son a bum puncher? A faggot? A crank gobbler? He would have killed me, or I would have killed me, so best to stop writing things like “I wish Steve Dillon would dump that idiot cheerleader and blow me for an hour or two.”
So. Diaries. Specifically, new diaries. No chance the colonel will find this one; he’s in hospice, crankily dying of lung cancer.
It’s pretty rotten that I wasn’t sad when I heard. It’s worse that I reran his labs myself to confirm it. I was relieved. Poor excuse for a man’s only son.
My name is Marc Spangler. I’m a doctor, an ER resident at one of the busier Minneapolis hospitals, and I live in a mansion. No, I am not rich. Not yet . . . and probably not ever unless I specialize in cardiology, oncology, or face-lifts. Fortunately, this is not the sort of job you go into in order to make money. Which is a good thing, because I found out (quite by accident) that when you break down my shifts into hourly rates, every receptionist in the building makes more money than I do.
But back to the mansion. My best friends are a vampire and the richest woman in the state of Minnesota (and, as Jessica herself would point out, not the richest black woman . . . the richest woman). In fact, they are my only friends. Once I left the shithole I grew up in, I never went back. And I never will.
I haven’t gotten laid in a while, but on the upside, I lead the most interesting life of anyone I know . . . except maybe for Betsy and Sinclair, the King and Queen of the Vampires.
Ooooh, Sinclair. Don’t get me started. Tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair, dark eyes, long fingers, and when he and Betsy go at it, the entire mansion shakes. Those are usually the nights I go out and get drunk.
Mostly because I’ve always been wildly attracted to him, and partly because Betsy has unconsciously worked her charm on me . . . she’s about the only woman I’ve ever seriously considered sleeping with. And—don’t get me wrong, dude, because I love her to death—it’s just as well we didn’t hook up. What with the shoe shopping and the bitching about being stuck in a job she didn’t ask for and didn’t want, and the way she manages (quite unconsciously, I’m sure) to make everything about her . . . nope, nope, nope. If she was my girlfriend, I probably would have jammed a needle full of potassium into my heart before the end of the first week.
She has twenty-eight pairs of black pumps. Twenty-eight! I counted them myself. Then I counted again to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, and got twenty-nine. Those twenty-eight or -nine pairs were maybe a third of her collection. Her love for fine footgear . . . it’s almost pathological.
Thing is, while I was debating trying sex from the other side of the fence, Betsy didn’t even know she was doing it. Getting into my head, inspiring me to wear a bit more aftershave than I usually do, making me want her . . . she did it completely unknowingly and by accident. My inner scientist wished I could have known her in life, so I could compare her premortem charisma with her “vampire mojo,” as she called it.
And why am I going on and on about Betsy’s unholy sex appeal? That’s not what I wanted to say at all.
Basically, I guess I’ve started another diary because things aren’t all happy-happy-yay-yay, the-good-guys-win anymore. I thought I’d learned that by the time I was in my fourth year of medical school, but I didn’t know shit about death back then.
I know a lot more, now.
People are dying. Good guys are dying. Friends are dying. And I just figure someone ought to be writing it all down.
Because one of these days, I’m worried they’ll be flying me in a private plane and I won’t be riding in first class, if you know what I mean.
The colonel might care. Might. I won’t be around to see it, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

Chapter 4
My husband grimaced as I plopped down next to him with BabyJon in my arms. Not particularly keen on fatherhood in the first place, Eric had found it an annoying shock that his wife was the legal guardian of her infant half brother.
He was, like any man, jealous of anything that took his wife’s attention away from him (which was part cute and part irritating).
Also, it was my fault my father and stepmother were dead (long story short: cursed engagement ring, grants wishes, and the cost is always high). And when I used the ring, my father was killed. As well as my stepmother.
I had wished for a baby of my own and, like that story “The Monkey’s Paw,” my wish was granted in a rather grisly way: With BabyJon’s parents dead, guess who got custody? Bingo. Leaving me with an instant baby, zero stretch marks, and a ton of buried guilt.
Since I had inadvertently made BabyJon an orphan, I figured the least I could do was raise him. He was my only shot at motherhood; obviously, dead people don’t breed.
He squirmed in my arms. I smiled at him. Jet-black hair and crystal blue eyes, plump where babies are supposed to be plump. (Enjoy society’s acceptance of your body fat while it lasts, baby brother.) He had four teeth so far, and his lower lip was a waterfall of drool.
“Why not put him in his seat?” my husband asked, shaking out the Wall Street Journal like it was a beach blanket.
“Because we’re not going anywhere right this second.”
“Not yet!” Jessica called from the cockpit. She took off her headphones—she thought they made her look cool, when I knew she was listening to the latest Shakira album—and headed toward us.
She plopped into the seat behind us and curled up like a cat. She was so small, she actually pulled it off.
“So we’re really doing this thing?”
Sinclair looked around as if verifying the cockpit, the pilot, his papers, my magazines. “It appears so.”
“Because, for the record? I think it’s nuts. What happened to that poor girl wasn’t your fault.”
“Sure,” I said, shocked at how bitter I sounded. It felt like I was sucking on a psychic lemon. “I’ll blame the next-door neighbor’s dog.”
“Not Muggles?” Jessica gasped, which made me snicker in spite of myself. She could always do that. I was awfully glad she hadn’t died.
“Even if Elizabeth felt no sense of responsibility, bringing the body back is respectful.”
And it lets you get a good look at the maybe-bad guys, doesn’t it, hot stuff? But I kept that stuff to myself; it was pillow talk, and none of Jessica’s business.
She probably knew, though. Sinclair would no more let an advantage like that slip (meeting a powerful force in neutral territory) than he would go outside without pants.
“But I would like to add once again—”
“Oh, here we go.”
“I don’t think you should accompany us, Jessica. It’s likely to be dangerous.”
Jessica waved her sticklike arms around. She could put an eye out with one of those things. “Since Betsy came back from the dead, what isn’t? Shit. I can’t even go to the Mall of America without running into a sniper team.”
“You exaggerate.”
“Yes, but not by much.”
Sinclair shrugged. “As you like.” He knew, as we all did, that it was Jessica’s plane. And that she’d insist on coming even if it was his plane.
In some ways, and I know this sounds terrible, but in some ways it was almost bad that I’d cured her cancer. Now she was in the middle of this whole “lust for life” thing and was being more of a tagalong than usual.
I’d cured her by accident, which was terrific. But I’d also made her fearless by accident, which wasn’t. There’d come a day—the law of averages demanded it—when I wouldn’t be around to save her teeny butt.
“You know, Sinclair’s got a point,” I began, knowing I was wasting my time (I had no actual breath to waste). “Who knows what the reception’s going to be like? There’s still time to get off this crazy train and—”
“Taking off right about now, ma’am,” Cooper called.
“You did that on purpose,” I muttered.
Up front, Cooper was doing his flight check while Jessica climbed out of her seat, walked to the front (the fore? The cabin? I was many things, but a pilot wasn’t one of them), and took her seat next to Cooper.
She couldn’t fly and only had a passing knowledge of the instruments Cooper used, but it was her plane. I figured someday she would summon the nerve to ask him to teach her.
Jessica’s presence was less problematic for Cooper than for me, which is a horrible thing to say about a best friend. As I said, I’d cured her of a lethal blood disease, totally by accident.
But while the vampire in me had once cured her cancer, it had also attacked her. It had also ripped her boyfriend from her and leeched off her generous spirit.
Every time I looked at her I worried, and resolved to deserve her, and then worried again.
To distract myself I stood up, popped BabyJon into his car seat, made sure it was secured to the airplane seat, and then sat back down to buckle my own seat belt. Little brother stared out the window without making so much as a peep.
Wait. Buckle my seat belt? Should I bother? Could a plane crash even hurt me? I looked down at Eric’s waistline and saw that he hadn’t bothered.
Huh. Well. Old habits, you know?
“Aren’t you nervous?” I asked.
“Extremely.”
“I’m being serious.”
“Oh.” The newspaper slowly came down. “My pardon, dear one. Nervous about what? Facing down an unknown number of opponents as strong and fast as we are? Or surviving a plane flown by an Irish-man?”
“Nasty! What’d the Irish ever do to you?”
“Never mind,” he muttered darkly. “It was a long time ago.”
“Just focus on not dying, and we’ll be fine.”
He smiled and cupped my chin in his hand. In a second, our faces were only inches apart. “I shall promise not to die, but only if you do so as well.”
“Deal,” I murmured, having no idea what I was agreeing to. Being this close to Sinclair often had this effect on me.
“Taking off now, ladies and gents,” Cooper said, the party pooper.
Sinclair took his hand away and picked up the paper; I just stared at the ceiling. That was how we began the long taxi toward a place I had never been and didn’t particularly want to go.
With a corpse somewhere under my feet. Mustn’t forget that.

Chapter 5
A few hours later, we were descending the stairs (except for Cooper, who stayed behind to do whatever it is pilots do after passengers exit) to the Logan Airport tarmac.
I winced when I saw Antonia’s coffin brought out and carefully laid down.
For such a huge airport, I was surprised at how quiet Logan was . . . it seemed almost deserted. I figured that was because we were at the part where they parked the private planes.
Three people were waiting for us on the tarmac, clustered around a vehicle that was a cross between a limo and a hearse.
I recognized them right away. Michael Wyndham, Pack leader (and, though this wasn’t the time or place, so so cute, with golden brown hair and calm yellow eyes). His wife, Jeannie, a blonde with a head full of fluffy curls (must be hell in the humidity). And Derik, one of Michael’s werewolves, also yummilicious with short-cropped yellow blond hair and green eyes. Was being gorgeous written into the werewolf genetic code?
Well, wait. Jeannie was human, though the others weren’t. We’d met the week I got married (long, long story) and I’d gotten a bit of her history then. I guess, for Michael and Jeannie, it had been love at first sight.
As opposed to the loathe on first sight it had been for Sinclair and me. Ah, memories.
If nothing else, I hoped that my prior meeting with Jeannie might help smooth things over. The woman had helped me pick out my wedding gown, for heaven’s sake. There was a bond there, dammit.
I’d met Derik and Michael that same week, and though Michael gave off “cool leader” vibes, Derik was a ball of good-humored energy.
Usually.
We faced each other through a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, I cleared my throat to say something when Derik walked over to the coffin and started to—
Oh, man. He wasn’t. He wasn’t. He . . . was. He was lifting the lid off.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” my husband said quietly, and I seized his hand and squeezed, which would have pulverized the bones in an ordinary human’s hand, but would have as much effect on Sinclair as a mosquito bite.
He squeezed back, which hurt.
“Derik, Eric’s right,” Michael warned. Under the fluorescent lights, he was as pale as milk. They all were, actually. Poor, poor guys. I wasn’t sure who I pitied more: the dead Antonia or the living Pack members.
“I need to be sure,” Derik insisted, and I winced again. The poor guy had pinned all his hopes on the chance that we’d gotten another werewolf mixed up with Antonia, which was so dumb I wanted to cry.
The lid was all the way up. Derik stared inside for a long moment and then, with infinite care, slowly lowered the lid.
Then he started to howl.

Chapter 6
We were all shocked, even his friends were shocked. Derik, normally a man of sunny temperament (at least from what I’d seen a few months back), was roaring like a rabid bear. Then he raised his fists over his head and brought them crashing down on the coffin lid, which instantly gave way.
Suddenly it was hard for me to swallow. Suddenly I wanted a drink in the worst way. Any drink. A smoothie, a frozen mudslide, blood, gasoline, Clorox, whatever.
Derik was glaring at me with eyes that were hard to look away from. “You might have washed her face, at least.”
This was my evening for wincing, except this time it was almost a flinch. Because Derik was right . . . but then, was I wrong in trying to show respect for whatever rituals they had?
Jessica coughed and spoke up, attempting to save my ass. “We, um, didn’t want to offend you guys.”
“Offend?” Derik spat. And in a flash, I remembered Antonia once telling me that her only real friend in the Pack was Derik. “Offend?”
Crash! More fist-sized holes in the lid, which he seemed determined to convert into thousands of velvet-tipped toothpicks. I took a step forward . . . only to feel Sinclair’s hand close around my bicep and gently pull me back.
He was right, of course. This wasn’t about me, and stomping into the middle of it would have been grossly inappropriate. And yet. And still. I couldn’t stand seeing anyone—even a bare acquaintance—in so much pain.
My feet seemed determined to disobey my brain, because they took another slow step . . . and Sinclair tugged me back, not so gently this time.
“You never should have gone!” Derik was yelling into the coffin. “You stupid bitch! You left your Pack!”
Nobody said anything to that, big surprise. Because, again, it was the truth.
“All right, that’s enough,” Michael said calmly. His copper-colored eyes looked almost orange in the fluorescents. “Let’s take her home, Derik.”
So into the back Antonia went, the way back where there were no seat belts, because none were needed.
Jeannie drove; Michael sat beside her in the front. Derik sat across from us in the back. Looking through us, not at us.
No one said a word during the entire ninety-minute drive to Cape Cod.

Chapter 7
Jesus!” I gasped, staring out the window. Sinclair flinched, but I was used to his twitches. “This is where you live?” I asked, feeling like I had straw in my hair and cow shit on my heels. All I needed were a few “hyuk, hyuks!” to complete the picture. “You live here?”
“Yes,” Michael said shortly as he drove to the main entrance. I pressed my face up against the window so hard my nose squashed. Thanks to no longer being addicted to oxygen, I didn’t fog up the glass, at least.
It was a castle.
No, really. A castle. On Cape Cod! And I wasn’t the only impressed yokel: both Jessica (who’d napped all the way here, like BabyJon) and Sinclair (who’d grown up on a farm a zillion years ago) were staring out their windows, too.
Gravel crunched beneath the wheels as we neared the castle of red bricks and red stones with about a zillion windows, set square in the middle of a huge field of green, with the Atlantic Ocean right behind it and stretching all the way into a gray forever. If it looked this magical at night, how, oh how, would it look during the day?
I promised myself I would find out. If you’re going to get stuck with an eternal membership card of the undead, being the prophesied queen was the way to go. Not only did I wake up in the afternoon, instead of sunset, but I could go outside. I’d never burn up, not to mention worry about wrinkles and freckles. It was like getting your hand stamped at a club, only a zillion times cooler.
I realized I was still sitting in the car like a startled blond lump, and yanked on the door handle. I could hear the murmur of waves as I got out of the limo. Could smell the salt in the air, the sweetness of the grass field. Tilted my head back and looked at a sky of stars I had never seen before, dangling over the pure ocean.
I almost went into sensory overload, to be honest; it was a gorgeous night and, by God, it smelled gorgeous and I was absolutely loving my enhanced senses (which had not always been the case, believe me—don’t even get me started on Marc’s aftershave).
Until I got here, I hadn’t known that gorgeous could be a smell.
“It’s late,” Michael said curtly, striding up to the main doors with Jeannie almost in lockstep beside him. Sinclair was also abreast of them. (How did he do that, just fall into step right beside the biggest and strongest like he belonged there?)
So I tried to stop gaping and trotted after Jessica, who was trotting herself to keep up. I’d unhooked BabyJon’s car seat and carried it with us, though it suddenly felt like it was full of several gold bars as I hurried and sniffed and looked around and kept my grip hard enough so that the seat didn’t bang against my shins. Good Lord, I was really getting out of shape if a simple walk to a house . . . castle. . . . taxed my attention, not to mention my balance.
“And we have a lot to talk about.”
Eh? Oh, right. Michael was talking. I should absolutely be listening.
“Gee, ya think?” Jessica whispered to me. “And here I thought we were here for the lobster.”
I smothered a laugh, knowing that even if Antonia and Garrett weren’t dead this was no time to get the giggles. We had a pretty scary itinerary and never mind the seafood jokes (though I wondered if I could eat clam chowder). Maybe it seemed weird for a vampire to fret or be stressed—this vampire, at least—but despite how it always looks in books and movies, whole weeks—months—could pass by without any life-or-death bullshit.
Not last week, though. I thought the early part of the week had bitten the big one, what with the Fiends going all, you know, fiendish, solving the murders, avoiding my own murder (something I was starting to get good at just from sheer repetition, and wasn’t that the opposite of amusing), and being a helpless witness to a murder/suicide in my foyer. Okay, technically Jessica’s foyer.
So Antonia was dead, Garrett had killed himself, but the fun wasn’t over yet, which is why I was standing in front of the Atlantic Ocean instead of the Mississippi River.
Yeah, I figured we’d all earned about six years off—shoot, I was still a newlywed, I had a pile of thank-you notes yet to write—but the joke was on me, as it so often is, and all the tears and terror and bullets meant for me had only brought us to Wednesday. Now it was the weekend, and Sinclair and I had a fresh set of problems.
First and foremost, how big a mess was this? How much blame would fall on my friends and me, how much did we deserve . . . or need to dodge? Most important, what were the werewolves cloistered here going to do about it? About us? And how could I explain Antonia’s former-Fiend boyfriend to werewolves, without going too far and screwing over my own people?
Had Antonia ever even told her Pack she’d been sleeping with a vampire? I should have known the answer to that. But Antonia had always made it clear that her phone calls with Michael were Pack business, and we all tried to respect her privacy.
Only to the werewolves, it would probably look like negligence, or carelessness.
I had never wanted a drink so badly in my life.
We followed Michael up red brick stairs and into a vestibule the size of a ballroom. I stared . . .
Sure, why not? You’ve been gaping like a tourist instead of an invited head of state. Which is just fine, because you’ll never fool a real leader.
... while trying not to look like I was doing so. This place made our mansion on Summit Avenue—one of the prettiest, grandest, richest streets in the Midwest—look like a one-bedroom apartment in the warehouse district. Michael’s castle . . .
Yep, now there’s a real leader, so quit fakin’, bacon.
... was lit up in a blaze of lights (mostly from the overhead chandeliers) and what little furniture I could see was mahogany. The place smelled like old wood and cedar, floor wax and furniture. It was the most impressive dwelling I’d ever seen, and I’d only seen a tenth of a fraction of it.
We climbed a grandly sweeping flight of stairs (Marble floors! Marble floors! Werewolves must not ever slip, or maybe they just hated vacuuming.), followed the Wyndhams down a wide hallway carpeted in red (not the red you might think, an orangey red, a dark pink—no, this was red red, a deep, rich, true red), and were soon in a room twice as big as my kitchen that was clearly Michael’s office.
He probably filled out paperwork, or clipped coupons, or downloaded songs from iTunes when he wasn’t ruling the world from behind the ginormous desk almost directly across from us. And excuse me, had I described the grand piano-sized, reddish brown, beautifully appointed, gleaming chunk of wood as a desk?
More fool me. The President of the U.S. sat behind a desk. Elementary school teachers sat behind desks. Prison wardens. Librarians. DMV employees. Desk sergeants. (Thus the name!) Reporters. Loan officers.
Those were desks. This thing was a wooden monument to Michael’s status.
There were a few comfortable chairs scattered about, all dark wood with plush seats. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined two of the walls; the other walls had windows and pictures and such. One framed portrait caught my eye—obviously old, but the people were familiar to me somehow, which was impossible.
I stepped closer and stared harder. No, I didn’t know them. The man had lush dark hair and the woman had brown eyes—no, not brown, more golden than brown, more like—
More like Michael’s.
Of course! The mater and pater of the Pack. Damn. Bet they’d known some good stories.
(Can you hear them, Elizabeth?)
I stifled a yelp of surprise and darted a look in Sinclair’s direction. It was handy to be able to read your husband’s mind, but that didn’t mean I thought it was natural, normal, or not nerve-wracking. The fact that our telepathy tended to show only during extreme stress or excitement (making love, being murdered, trying to figure out if vampires have to pay property tax) told me something about Sinclair’s state of mind.
My tall dark darling might come across as calm and reasonable, even a little bored, and yet he was worried enough (about me? the whole group? both?) to pop his question right into my head, where I heard it as easily as if he was using a megaphone.
(Elizabeth. Can you hear them?)
Oh, right, you’re probably expecting an answer. I nodded. Sure I could. And I knew what Sinclair was getting at. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, and the castle seemed almost deserted, but it wasn’t. Not even close to deserted. We could hear them walking around and, even worse, standing still. I was—don’t ask me how—sure they were listening to us. Believe me, I know how it sounds: We could hear them listening to us? Give me a break.
Except we absolutely could. And that was the scariest thing of all, knowing the castle was full of monsters who really would eat you, just like an ogre in a fairy tale.
My, Grandma, what big ears you have.
My worry for Jessica increased by a factor of about eight hundred . . . she had nothing in the way of enhanced paranormal senses, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t picking up on the tension. Boy oh boy, I hoped we’d be able to make friends with the ogres. Which is a sentence I never thought I’d have to think, much less articulate.

Chapter 8
Drinks?” Jeannie asked, playing bartender. I was eyeing her hair with not a little admiration. Unlike mine, which at best could be coaxed to be wavy (I’d had a highlight touch-up and deep-conditioning treatment the week before I’d died; I might be a slavering ghoul of the undead, but I would never have graying split ends), hers was shoulder length, surfer blond, and curly . . . the kind that frizzed out in July, the kind that was a mass of soft spiral curls tonight. The rest of her was unexceptional.
Okay, that came out wrong . . . Jeannie Wyndham was a beautiful woman, admirably slim after two kids, casually dressed in jeans, loafers (Payless; ah, well, nobody’s perfect), a soft blue chambray shirt, and a tan wool blazer.
When I described her as unexceptional, I meant in comparison to my surroundings: Michael’s wife was the queen of everything I was staring at; it was all half hers. But you’d never know it to look at her; she had the brisk, understated demeanor of an experienced nurse.
Except for the eyes, of course; she had the flat and calculating gaze of a sniper. I wondered where her gun was. This was more than idle curiosity; the last time I’d seen her she’d shot me. Three times, in the chest.
But later she’d helped me pick out the greatest dress in the history of human garments, so I didn’t hold it against her anymore. Attempted murder is a fleeting moment, but the perfect wedding gown lasts forever.
“Betsy? Drink?”
Damn, I was really gonna have to pay better attention. I’d been so busy staring around the room and remembering point-blank chest wounds that I took the glass without looking and drained it.
And nearly barfed all over the beautiful Persian rug. I think it was Persian. It looked expensive and smelled old. Michael’s great-great-great-great-grand-parents had probably hauled it all the way to Plymouth from the Mayflower, centuries after their great-great-great-great-grandparents had hauled it from the palace of Cyrus.
How did I know Cyrus was one of the first rulers of the Persians, you ask? Hey. I don’t always ignore my husband when he’s prattling on about useless stuff.
“Wwwrrllgg!” I managed, wiping off what was dribbling down my disgusted chin. I forced what was left of the loathsome liquid down. “What the hell is this, kerosene?”
“We’re out of kerosene,” Derik said with no trace of a smile. This was far from the Derik I’d met before, who had been all smiles, charming and sexy and nice.
“I should have mentioned that my wife only likes drinks that come from a dirty blender,” Sinclair said. He was sitting across from Michael, who was behind his desk. I was sitting next to him; Jessica was on my right. Jeannie, done with handing out glasses of regurgitate, was pacing back and forth behind us. Like I wasn’t already nervous enough. “I take it you didn’t enjoy your first whiskey, dear one?”
Yeah, about as much as a tax audit, jerkhead. Guess I wasn’t as thirsty as I’d thought.
Sinclair nodded thoughtfully, his fist pressed under his nose to hide a smile. He hadn’t been reading my mind as long as I’d been able to read his (it’s a long story, and I come off kind of bad in it), so he was still in the wow-this-is-so-awesome stage, whereas I was at the fuck-you-I-have-no-privacy phase.
I fumbled frantically in my purse, found a tin of Altoids, and dumped half of them in my mouth. I crunched them up like they were Rice Krispies, relishing the way the mint overpowered the yuck-o booze. Zow! The potent little buggers were really clearing out my sinuses; my eyes were all but watering. Which would have been a good trick, since my eyes don’t water.
“Let me begin by saying we appreciate you bringing Antonia home to us.”
“Nnnn prbm,” I crunched, trying not to cough. Dammit! Probably shouldn’t have dumped such a big mouthful into my gaping piehole. Probably shouldn’t have done a lot of things this week.
“It was no trouble, and the least we could do,” Sinclair said, speaking as calmly and colorlessly as Michael while I crunched furiously. I wondered if that was the royal “we.” “It was an honor to escort her back home.”
“My understanding is that she was shot several times in the head, protecting you,” Michael said calmly. Calmly, but a muscle beside his eye twitched.
I tried not to stare, and failed. I gave serious thought to getting up and spitting my mashed Altoids into his spotless wastebasket, but just didn’t dare. It seemed . . . what was the word Eric would use? Undiplomatic.
With a mighty effort, I swallowed the minty lump down, gagged briefly, and sneezed. Beside me, I could sense Sinclair rolling his eyes and either trying not to smirk, or thinking up an excuse for me. I’d deal with him later.
“Yes, that’s right,” I replied with startlingly fresh breath. I managed to stifle the second sneeze. “She saved me.”
“Why?”
Huh. That didn’t seem very nice. My tongue ran away before I could stop it: “Because she lost a bet?”
There was a loud hissing sound, like everyone had gasped at the same time. I looked at my lap and muttered, “Sorry. Too soon?”
“What could bullets have done to a vampire?” Michael continued, unmoved by my terrific breath and sarcastic observations. And that was the $50,000 question. Because it was only recently that vampires realized werewolves existed, and vice versa. Michael probably assumed our vampirism was straight out of a bad horror movie. And who could blame him? I hadn’t thought lead bullets would hurt a werewolf.
“What would bullets in the brain do to anyone?” Sinclair replied quietly, totally screwing up my assumption. “There was no chance anyone could have regenerated.”
Michael had tipped back in his chair and was staring at the ceiling. “Mmmm.” Then he had all four legs of his chair on the floor and met all our gazes.
Well. Almost all. His gaze kept skittering over the sleeping BabyJon. He hadn’t asked one question about the baby, made one comment, not even a careless, “Cute kid.” And from what I’d heard, he was a devoted dad who loved ankle biters, nose miners, whatever.
But he wouldn’t look at BabyJon. And that was very strange. So strange it was starting to make me nervous.
“I hope the baby isn’t bothering you,” I said, to which Michael had no reply. Now he was locking gazes with Derik. It was like he hadn’t even heard me—which was bullshit, given what I knew about werewolf hearing.
Why ignore an infant? To what purpose? And why was it making me so nervous?
I was rocking BabyJon’s seat with my toe as he slept, trying to get a handle on my feelings. Hey, it wasn’t like I had to worry about bad breath at the moment. Quite the opposite, in fact. And sure, this was a stressful scene, but they had all seemed nice enough when I’d met them earlier.
After all, we could have gotten a much nastier reception. Much nastier. But nobody had so much as waved a crucifix in our direction. No one had attacked us yet, to be sure. So why was I practically shaking?
Sinclair was frowning at me picking up my nervousness, but not the cause. All I could do was lift my left shoulder in a tiny shrug, the international “tell you later” gesture.
Besides, I had other things to focus on. Derik, for instance. He’d been so different when he’d come to the mansion looking for Antonia a couple months back. Friendly and charming and funny and sooo cute . . . though I usually didn’t go for blonds.
In fact, the only time he’d gotten upset was when he followed me to BabyJon’s nursery and—and—
I could almost hear the click as the reason behind my sudden nervousness clunked home: Derik kept giving BabyJon a wide berth, and Michael didn’t even seem to see him. Which was impossible; you couldn’t hide a twenty-pound infant surrounded by a pastel car seat, not when it was right out on the floor and smelling like formula and stale powder.
Now that I thought about it, Jeannie was the only one who had acknowledged BabyJon; she had stroked his feathery black hair once we had him buckled in the limo, and complimented me on his good looks. I wasn’t sure if I could take the credit for those or not, so I’d just nodded.
But Derik . . . Derik had followed me to the nursery once, taken one look at the baby, and nearly broken his neck on the stairs while trying to achieve distance. There was so much other shit going on at the time, I’d completely forgotten about it until now.
I dared not forget again . . . something was wrong with this baby. Or with any werewolf who came in contact with him.
And I didn’t like that. At all.
Now Derik and Jeannie were pacing behind us, which was just as nerve-wracking as it sounds. But whenever Derik got near BabyJon, he would veer off. And Michael, as I said, couldn’t see him at all.
And they weren’t even aware of it. Derik could have been avoiding a mud puddle for all the emotion he showed, and Michael, who could and did hold everyone’s gaze in the way only an alpha Werewolf could, wasn’t looking at BabyJon.
All of a sudden, I had a brand-new problem dumped in my lap. Just what I needed. I’d have rather had a new pair of Prada pumps dumped on me.

Chapter 9
Why did I seize so quickly on the possibility that BabyJon was special? Well, consider our sister, Laura, who was still back in Minnesota but still very much in my thoughts as I whispered super-minty breath across the mahogany expanse that separated me from the alpha male of Antonia’s werewolf Pack.
Laura, an impossibly beautiful, naďve, and sweet blonde, was raised by a minister and his wife, which partially explained why she was currently a tireless worker for charities, as well as a cheerful and frequent Goodwill volunteer.
Laura worked in soup kitchens and went to church on Sundays. She stuck twenty-dollar bills into red Salvation Army buckets at Christmastime (and Laura was far from rich; her folks made less in one year than Sinclair made in a month). In February she had literally given the shirt (well, the coat) off her back to someone down on her luck.
Sickening? Okay. Yes. A little. But still, it all made perfect sense. How else could someone rebel against their parent? Laura fought back by being sweet and kind. Mostly sweet. Although she had a spectacular temper.
Also, her birth mother (not the minister’s wife) was the devil. Yes. The devil. As in Satan. As in Lucifer. As in a woman who looked weirdly like Lena Olin, except with better footgear. Either Satanic influence or Lena Olin’s terrific fashion sense had endowed Laura with supernatural abilities—of course! She was half angel, right? Lucifer’s lineage hadn’t changed when he/she was tossed out of heaven.
And I was beginning to suspect BabyJon had powers, too. Not that we could confirm this by asking Lena-Satan—after possessing the birth mother long enough to experience breast-feeding and stretch marks, she had fled for the easier comforts of hell. The minister and his wife who adopted Laura had been the best thing to happen to her, and kept her diabolic lineage in check.
So who will keep, I wondered, my half brother in check, if he inherits anything unusual? Me? It was the only thing that made sense in an increasingly complicated family history.
(I have a point. I promise.)
Okay, I can see how some of this—most of this—could be confusing. Shit, it’s my life and even I get mixed up sometimes. So. The Cliffs Notes version: the devil possessed my stepmother, the Ant, because she wanted to try the whole giving birth and raising a kid thing. My stepmother, the late Antonia Taylor (I know, I know . . . two Antonias? Both dead? What were the odds on something like that?) was so unrelievedly nasty, no one had any idea she was possessed.
Think about that for a minute. My stepmother was so horrible and nasty on a daily basis that no one noticed when she was possessed by the devil for almost a year.
I know! It boggles my mind, too.
Anyway, the devil had hated labor and delivery, not to mention breast-feeding and stretch marks, and fled my stepmother’s body to get the hell back to hell.
When my stepmother realized that someone else had been running her body for almost a year (remember: nobody even noticed!), she promptly gave the baby up for adoption.
And didn’t tell my father about it. Hey, the couple that lies together (no pun intended) stays together. Or however that saying went.
Only the Ant knew my dad had fathered Laura, which is why she and I didn’t meet until two decades later. My late father, who I’d always though of as a colorless coward, had fathered the Beloved of the Morningstar (in other words, the Antichrist) and a vampire queen.
God help us if it turned out I had another half brother lurking out in the world somewhere; maybe he was the reincarnation of Attila the Hun. Maybe I should have talked Dad into having some of his sperm frozen.
Yuck. Time to get off the subject of my father’s sperm.
Anyway, back to BabyJon. Now I was wondering—maybe it was silly . . . vampire queen or no, this stuff really wasn’t my field—maybe my stepmother’s body had retained some leftover magic from her days of possession. And maybe that had had a profound effect on her late-in-life baby.
Shoot, the poor kid had been conceived purely out of spite. The Ant had not liked it at all when her spoiled bimbo stepdaughter returned from the dead, and tried to pull her husband’s attention back to his second family with the age-old trick: she’d gotten pregnant to jazz up her marriage.
Michael was still talking. Jeannie and Derik were still pacing. Sinclair’s face was serene and composed, but he kept glancing at me and I knew he knew I wasn’t paying attention. Well, who could right now?
Besides, Sinclair would give me the scoop on anything I needed to know when we were alone. Meanwhile I, the Daphne of the Undead, had a mystery to solve.
I carefully nudged the car seat with the toe of my left shoe, forcing it farther away from the desk and toward the middle of the floor.
Again, Derik veered. He didn’t look down. He didn’t frown at the baby, or at me. He just kept giving the sleeping BabyJon a wide berth. And it looked like Jeannie hadn’t noticed the phenomenon, which didn’t surprise me. She’d just lost a family member; her mind was definitely on other things.
Hmmmm.
“—know when the service will be,” Michael was saying.
I was instantly diverted. Ah ha! Now we would find out the secret of werewolf funeral rituals. Did they burn the body on a pyre? Loft it into the ocean? Cremate it and scatter the ashes over sacred moss? Bury her while in wolf form with some yowling ritual under the yellow glow of a full moon? Preserve her in spice-soaked cocoon wrappings underground, like mummies?
Everyone was staring at me, and I would have died if I hadn’t already. I hate when I think I’m thinking something only to find out I’ve been saying it out loud.
“Pyres?” Michael asked. “Yowling ritual?”
“Oh, fuck me twice,” Derik said, throwing his hands in the air. “Did you really think we were going to bury Antonia in the woods like she was a dog treat?”
“Well, how’m I supposed to know what you’re going to do?” I snapped back as I leaned over and pulled BabyJon’s car seat closer. “That’s why we’re here. To do things your way. Ow!” Sinclair had kicked me none too gently in the ankle. I glared at him, then returned my attention to Derik. “Sorry. Muscle spasm.”
“Mummies,” Derik was muttering. “Funeral pyres. Burial at sea? Antonia was Presbyterian, mo rons.”
How anticlimactic.
“You may call me whatever you wish,” my husband was saying in a voice more smoke than sound. “But do not insult my wife and queen.”
“Well, which is it?” Jeannie asked. I heard the clinking rattle of more ice as she filled her glass with something. Her tone was okay; she didn’t sound mean or anything. Sort of half-teasing/half-curious. “Are you here wearing your wife hat or your queen hat?”
Huh. Hope they had a few hours to kill, because it was a long story.

Chapter 10
Dear Future-Self Dude,
Fifteen minutes ago I nearly experienced the heartbreak of fecal incontinence. I was in the kitchen, staring glumly at the near-bare refrigerator shelves and wondering if I had time to swing by Cub Foods before my shift started.
Living with vampires and the Antichrist isn’t the constant fun and games you must imagine. To begin, I don’t technically live with Laura; she’s a student at the U of M and has a place of her own in Dinkytown (That’s what we called the small batch of apartment buildings and restaurants near the U of M. After I gave this some thought, it made perfect sense that the Antichrist lived in Dinkytown. She was probably right down the block from a Cinnabon chain, too. As Jim Gaffigan said, “Tell me that place isn’t run by Satan.”).
Anyway, Laura has her own place and I imagine she eats most of her meals there. And since she’s alive, she buys food. Which she keeps in her fridge.
Our fridge, nearly big enough to use in a restaurant, is not so lucky. Today its contents revealed four bottles of Diet Peach Snapple (as a doctor, I never touched Diet anything . . . why not just drink gasoline and be done with it?), a carton of strawberries (which, as they were not in season, tasted like tiny, fuzzy raw potatoes), two pints of cream, half a box of Godiva truffles (I knew, without looking, that Betsy had already scored the raspberry ones, pureeing them with milk in one of the six blenders), an open box of baking soda that was not doing its job to defunk the fridge, fourteen bottles of water, a near-empty bottle of Thousand Island dressing, a cellophane-wrapped chunk of parmesan cheese so hard it could be used successfully as a blunt instrument, an unopened jar of lemon curd (whatever the hell that was), two cans of Diet Coke (Jessica was addicted to it; why is it that the chronically underweight were drawn to drink diet soda? And am I the only one to notice someone who drank seven cans a day ended up with cancer?), and something foul lurking beneath the tin foil on a paper plate . . . I just wasn’t up to exploring (I didn’t even know we had paper plates), so I let it be.
This is what comes of living with vampires and a woman who seemed to consume nothing but salads and Diet Coke. Unlike the community fridge, the freezer was full, but still weird. It fairly bulged with bottles of a vodka brand I’d never heard of—Zyr—in various flavors. The flavors were alphabetized. The bottles were perfectly lined up; they were like cloudy glass soldiers at attention.
As these were typical contents of the mansion’s kitchen freezer, I knew some of the flavors lurking in the back were lime, juniper, peppercorn, espresso, fennel, mint, garlic, cherry, sun-dried tomato, mustard seed, apple, and horseradish.
Dude, I am not making this up, or exaggerating for humorous effect. In a household of oddities and the undead, Tina was everywhere and nowhere. She excelled at going unnoticed and she could pull that off anywhere in the world . . . except our kitchen freezer. Vodka was her vice; the more obscure the flavor, the more she had to try it. She drank it neat, using a succession of antique shot glasses, which were always kept chilled.
Tina had offered to make me a drink once. I had accepted. Once.
I did not have time to swing by Cub on the way to work and would be too tired after my shift; time to order pizza again. Green Mill was practically on my speed dial.
Sighing, I swung the freezer shut and my senses, instantly overwhelmed by someone they hadn’t smelled, seen, or heard, but who was all of a sudden right there, went into overdrive. My adrenal gland dumped a gallon of F.O.F. into my system (what my interns called Fight or Flight juice) and for a long minute I thought my heart was going to just quit from the shock.
She greeted me with “I am out of cinnamon vodka,” then grabbed my shoulder and prevented me from braining myself on the metal handle as I flinched hard enough to be mistaken for an epileptic.
“Tina,” I groaned, yanking my hand out of her chilly grasp, “that’s the second time today. I’m putting a bell around your neck. Or sewing one into your scalp, I swear to—” No, don’t swear to God; just hearing the G word was like a whiplash to a vampire, the movies had gotten some things right. “I swear,” I finished.
Tina looked mildly distressed. Most of her expressions were mild versions of what humanity could come up with. What would put you or me in a killing rage would cause her to raise one eyebrow and frown. Frown sternly, but still.
The smooth efficiency and profound, almost unshakable calm were at odds with her appearance. Tina looked like an escapee from Delta Nu, the sorority Reese Witherspoon’s character made famous in Legally Blonde. (Great movie, dude. “All those opposed to chafing, please say aye.”)
Tina had long, honey blond hair—past her shoulders in rippling waves—and big, dark eyes, what Tina called pansy eyes. Not only did Tina look too young to vote, she would probably get carded if she tried to buy cigarettes. And she dressed to play up her appearance in a never-ending variety of kicky plaid skirts, white button-downs, anklets, everything but a backpack full of high school textbooks. She looked like a walking, talking felony. One far older and smarter than any would-be college boy who might try out a little date rape.
Also, she was about as noisy as an unplugged television. If you don’t believe that, dude, you couldn’t feel my heart just now.
“I apologize, Marc. I honestly don’t mean to frighten you.” This was true, and scary in its own way—I hated to think what she could do to my nervous system if she really put some thought into it. “We’re just two peas rattling around in a can ’round here, aren’t we?”
She laughed a little and I noticed she had slipped again. Most of the time, Tina had the smooth, accent-free tones of a weather reporter. But occasionally a Southern accent would creep in. I loved it when that happened because she seemed less a smooth-voiced butler and more like a walking, talking, feeling person.
Don’t misunderstand; I have no problem with the undead, although I was dying to learn all I could and trying to work up the nerve to ask Betsy if I could autopsy the next Big Bad she would inadvertently kill with a heretofore unknown superpower. Nope; no real problem with them, I just thought they should get back to their roots a bit more often.
Besides, Tina made me nervous.
And she knew she made me nervous. This was nothing I could discuss with Betsy, of course . . . my feelings were too vague and unformed and frankly, my best gal wasn’t what I would ever call a deep thinker. As Susan Sarandon said in the greatest movie in the history of cinema, Bull Durham, “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.” The world was made, in other words, for people like Betsy.
She had no time for “Hmm, Tina’s a quiet one, huh? Perhaps we should ponder what that signifies,” particularly during the fall when she had to update her collection of winter footgear. But it was there and I couldn’t deny it: Tina gave me the creeps.
I knew she had been born the year the Civil War had begun.
I knew she had been a vampire long before Sinclair.
I knew she had made Sinclair, had remained by his side all the years since then, and was his capable assistant.
And that was all I knew about her. And I only knew those things because Betsy had told me. In other words, that was all Betsy knew about her, too. And she was the queen, for the love of . . .
Dude, there are all sorts of etiquette rules for living with vampires. There had to be; there was etiquette for everything. But it was hard to come up with a tactful way to ask, “So, how’d you get murdered, anyway?” And that was only one of the things I would love to learn.
All this went through my head in about eleven seconds. Meanwhile, Tina was still lurking—well, standing—by the fridge.
“Will you have a drink with me?” She opened the freezer and reached for the first row of bottles. I saw she had extracted mustard seed-flavored vodka and, thanks to years of seeing man’s inhumanity to man via the emergency room, I manfully concealed my shudder.
“I have to get to work,” I said glumly.
Curious, I waited a beat, but Tina did exactly what I anticipated. “Oh, that’s too bad, Marc. A pity you won’t have time to shop first.”
Dude, if I had been Sinclair or Betsy, her answer would have been something like, “Oh most wondrous undead monarch, please give me, your humblest, lamest, most slovenly servant, your grocery list and I shall fill your fridge with any produce, meat by-products, Little Debbie snack cakes, and dairy products you desire and also pick up your dry cleaning on my way home, unless you would prefer I simply run out to KFC for some original recipe chicken.”
Alas, it was not to be: not only was I alive and well, I was neither the vampire queen nor the vampire king. Tina was their willing and untiring slave, not mine.
Still, we were roommates. You would think that would lead to some kind of bond. The Sacred Roommate Bond. Would it kill her to bring home a gallon of milk once in a while?

Chapter 11
The words wife or queen seemed almost to hang in the air over our heads. I had the sense that they weren’t asking these questions out of idle curiosity, or to be polite. No, no. Michael was a predator, of course, as Antonia had been, which meant he was constantly on the lookout for weakness. He couldn’t help it. Probably he didn’t even know he was doing it.
Wife or queen? A question I had asked myself on more than one occasion. Sinclair was bigger, stronger, faster. Older. Richer. Better educated. More even-tempered, more in control. Frankly, there were times—lots of times—when I wished I could just be the wife, and leave the whole vamp royalty thing to him.
But I could do things no other vampire on the planet could. Seemed dumb not to take advantage of that, or at least acknowledge it. So we existed in an interesting state of love and respect.
Well, occasional respect, when I wasn’t giving him a Wet Willy or poking him in his flat belly when we showered together—the man wasn’t ticklish! Talk about an unnatural creature.
He’d bowed to my authority on more than one occasion, too—usually just before I started hurling heavy objects at his head to emphasize whatever point I was making. You want to see something funny? Eric Sinclair, following one of my orders. Believe me, it didn’t happen all that often. Whenever it did, he always had an odd expression on his face: part admiration, part annoyance.
Now where the hell was I? Dammit! It was three A.M., I was tired out from being on edge all night, and was having more trouble than usual following the conversation, which had veered from funeral rights to religion to atheist vampires to my title.
“Funny thing for you to ask, Jeannie,” I finally said. I guess it wasn’t exactly unheard of for a werewolf to marry a—you know, a regular person. But it was rare enough so that the two of them caused a stir now and again—I’d gotten that much from Antonia, and that only after she’d been living with us for a while.
Get this: not only was it rare for werewolves to marry boring old humans, it was considered super-lucky for the Pack, and the offspring were usually exceptional Pack members. For example, Antonia—
But I wasn’t ready to go there again. Call me a chickenshit coward; that’s fine. I just couldn’t do it again right now.
“Mmm.” Jeannie grinned, but didn’t rise to the bait, just shrugged. “Good point.”
I cleared my throat, because I was having trouble swallowing the whole—the whole mundaneness of the thing. Mundaneness? Mundanity? “So there are Presbyterian werewolves, and Catholic ones, and Lutherans—”
“And Buddhists and atheists and Hindus,” Derik added.
“Will you please stop that pacing and sit the fuck down? Ow!” I yanked my poor sore ankle out of reach of Sinclair’s foot. “You look like a cheetah on crack.”
“Back off, blondie,” Derik snapped back and, if anything, sped up the pacing.
“I’m surprised you didn’t draw your own conclusion,” Michael said loudly, clearly trying to distract us. I think he was clearly trying. It was hard to know what the guy was up to. “Because clearly, all vampires are Christians.”
“No,” Sinclair said.
No? What, no? How did we get off the topic of werewolf retribution for Antonia and on to religion? I got enough of the “let’s all pray to Jesus meek and mild” stuff I needed from Laura.
“No?”
“No. We, too, have Muslims and Catholics and pagans. We, too, have—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jeannie interrupted. “That makes no sense at all.”
“We do not go about our lives with the objective of making sense to strangers,” my husband said with terrifying pleasantness.
“Fuck.” Derik, thank God, had grabbed a chair, dragged it over, turned it so it was facing backward, and sat. His blond hair fell into his eyes and he shook it out of his face with a quick, impatient movement. “Why would a cross work on an atheist vampire?”
Sinclair and I traded a glance. Jessica, I noticed, was all ears as well—she’d been so quiet I’d almost forgotten she was in the room.
“Or someone Jewish?” Derik continued.
Because vampirism was a virus. A virus that was very hard to catch, and even harder to pass on. This was Marc’s theory, backed up by Tina and Sinclair—again, not all of a sudden. After months and months and months. Tina and Sinclair couldn’t be much more tight-mouthed if someone sewed their lips shut with ultralite fishing line.
Vampirism, as a virus, slowed your metabolism waaaaay down, but didn’t stop it. Good points: you no longer sweated, or peed. Aging seemed to stop altogether. You were faster, stronger. Heightened senses. Blah-blah.
Bad points: vampires were highly susceptible to suggestion. (All of them—modest cough—except me.) Tina, my husband’s right-hand woman (she had been the one to turn him into a vampire in the early part of the twentieth century . . . yup, I was in love and regularly boinking a man old enough to be my grandfather), had eventually advanced this theory with Marc.
Marc went into MD mode and had tentatively concurred (on the grounds that he could change his mind if further proof emerged) that yes, it was a virus, and yes, a Jewish vampire would cringe away from a cross. Because we all know that’s what vampires do. They are vampires; ergo, crosses and holy water can hurt them.
I know, sounds stupid, right? Give it a minute. If you catch a disease that makes you highly suggestible, and you have the weight of a zillion horror movies telling you holy water burns . . . then holy water burns.
But we were getting off the point.
And it was driving me so nuts, I was practically biting the tip of my tongue off so I wouldn’t point out that Derik had made the same silly assumptions about vampires that we had about werewolves. After calling us morons.
“—explain what happened?”
Eh? Aw, shit. Michael was looking right at me. I jerked my foot away in time and Sinclair’s Kenneth Cole-shod shoe clunked into the back of Michael’s desk.
“Explain what happened?” I repeated with what I hoped was an intelligent question on my face.
“Yes, to the Council.”
Council? What council? That didn’t sound good at all. Nobody had said anything about a council—I think. Damn. I really should be paying attention to the goings-on in my life. “Can’t you tell them what happened? You’re the boss around here.”
“No.” Click. Closed. End of argument. I knew that tone—I’d heard it in my husband’s voice often enough—to know when it was no good to protest. “We’ll be meeting on the grounds just after sunset tomorrow. I’ll need all of your testimonies, so do not send one representative to speak for the group.
“Then what?” I asked nervously.
He just looked at me, almost like he was sorry for me.
Somehow, that was even worse than his cool fury.

Chapter 12
Dude,
Here I am again, shift over (and I managed to leave the hospital on time, a miracle of parting-the-Red-Sea proportion), writing the day after Betsy and the others flew away to Cape Cod to face whatever music there was to face. I’d asked to go and had been gently refused. Jessica got to go, but then, it was her airplane.
That left Tina—as I mentioned earlier, she was a sort of super-secretary to Sinclair—and Laura and me.
I didn’t have a chance to go into Laura much before I had to leave for work (and grocery shopping). Now I’ve got some time and, as it’s daytime, Tina won’t be lurking in a shadowy corner of the kitchen, waiting to startle me to death and then smoothly apologizing.
So. Laura. A word or two about her, yes, please. Very, very nice girl. Young . . . not even drinking age. She studied hard at the U of M and was a credit to her parents. Excellent health, and conventionally beautiful if you liked slender, fair-skinned blondes with terrific breasts, long legs, and big blue eyes.
She was also occasionally homicidal and cursed (or was it more of an inheritance?) with an unbelievably bad temper. When she’s upset about something, you can practically feel the air get heavier and warmer. One thing I hated to see was Laura’s hair shading from buttercup yellow to auburn, as it always did when she was infuriated.
According to the Book of the Dead, a sort of vampire bible, Laura is fated to destroy us all, something Betsy seems to keep overlooking or forgetting. Or forgetting on purpose (she’s not quite the ditz she’d like us to believe . . . at least I think she isn’t).
A digression for a minute: the Book of the Dead was kept in the mansion’s library, on its own stand. Betsy didn’t talk about it much, but she practically babbled about it nonstop compared to how much Tina and Sinclair discussed it. So you can imagine how frustrating it was to just get a minor detail or two about the vampire bible.
It was bound in human skin, and written in blood by a crazy vampire a thousand years ago. Everything in it (so far) came true. And (here comes the fun part!) anyone who read it too long went clinically insane. Scariest of all, Betsy had tried to destroy it—twice—and it always found its way back to her.
I wasn’t dumb enough to try to read it, but I did want a look at it. I waited for a night when I had the mansion to myself (Betsy and the others were off trying to catch a serial killer—or maybe it was the time that crooked cop set the Fiends free? Who could keep track of their nocturnal crime-fighting habits? Well, it doesn’t matter now.), then went into the library.
I didn’t sneak. I live here, too. I was not sneaking, nor being a sneak. I walked. I walked right up to the stand. I reached out a hand. I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t. I just wanted to—
Wait.
 
 
Okay, I’m back. I had to take a second and go throw up. Which is what I did those few months ago when I grasped the cover to flip the book open. I didn’t even get a good look at the title page, never mind the table of contents, before I started vomiting blood.
As a doctor, I found this to be a somewhat alarming symptom, especially since I had felt perfectly fine ten seconds earlier. I made it to the nearest bathroom—thank goodness the mansion’s got about thirty of them!—and, between bouts, called my friend Marty (part-time EMT, full-time guy who could keep his mouth shut) for a ride to the hospital.
By the time he got me there, I was fine again. His backseat was a mess, though. It cost me six hundred bucks to get it clean again.
Sorry, dude, that was a major digression, not a minor one. So that’s enough about the vampire bible, which I now prudently stay the holy hell away from; let’s get back to Laura.
It’s hard to believe that a gorgeous sweet Norwegian is the Antichrist. And even harder to imagine her destroying a cactus plant, much less the entire world. When she’s blond, anyway.
When Betsy and Laura first hooked up, we had no idea she even had a dark side (which was silly . . . don’t we all?). Then she killed a serial killer. And then she beat a vampire almost to death. More worrisome was the fact that she could have done much, much worse. Because Laura’s weapons pop out of nowhere when she’s mad, and they show up express delivery from hell.
And lately she’s been skipping church. She’d already been over here twice, and Betsy hasn’t been out of the state even twenty-four hours. I think she’s lonesome. Scratch that—I was familiar with all the symptoms. I knew Laura was lonesome.
I also knew she was extremely dangerous. But I know better than to try to open a dialogue with her about the subject. Laura hated her birthright, her heritage, her mother. Hated knowing someone had predicted she’d destroy the world almost a thousand years before she was born. I was pretty sure she hated the fact that we all knew about it, too.
So. Tonight we’re going out for drinks, and I’ll tease her and we’ll gossip about Betsy and Co. at the nearest smoothie bar and then Laura will be herself again.
For a while.

Chapter 13
The last thing we did before going to bed was set up Sinclair’s laptop—
Right, Sinclair, I forgot to explain that. I hardly ever call him Eric. He’s always been Sinclair to me (or Sink Lair, when he’s really pissing me off), just as I have always been Elizabeth (yech!) to him. I still can’t believe my mother stuck me with a first name like Elizabeth when my last name was Taylor. What, did she lose a bet?
Anyway, I was Betsy to everyone except the man I loved.
And speaking of the man I loved, he was rapidly typing something, probably an update e-mail to Tina. Then he showed me one of Marc’s typically annoying e-mails, which went like this:
Hey, girrrrl! miss you guys already, i mean WTF? Hope the furry friends haven’t eaten any of you yet, LOL! love, marc
Oh, boy. Don’t even get me started.
Too late, I’m starting. What the hell was it about e-mail that made everybody forget the stuff they learned in second grade, like capitalizing I and proper names, and using periods? Hello? We all learned how to do this less than five years out of diapers!
And what was with all the increasingly stupid acronyms? Nobody with any sense would dare send out a snail-mail letter written in that odd, juvenile style. No one would send a business letter written like that. But I’ve seen executive VPs send out e-mails riddled with spelling and punctuation errors and LOLs.
Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, somehow because it’s electronic mail, none of the basic grammar rules applied.
Barf.
Sinclair obligingly vacated the desk chair for me. I plopped into it and kicked off my pumps. However the werewolves might feel about us, they were pretty good hosts so far. This was the most beautiful bedroom I’d ever seen. No, not bedroom . . . suite. A sitting room. An office. A teeny kitchen. Two bathrooms. A living room with a piano in the corner. A freaking piano, who lives like this? And a bed so gigantic I felt as small as a saltine cracker when I lay on it.
I clicked on REPLY and rapidly typed.
Marc, you nitwit, how many times do I have to tell you, enough with the acronyms. I’m assuming since you made it through college and medical school that sometime before you left for college someone mentioned a cool new invention: punctuation. Try it sometime. You might like it.
Clicked on SEND. Stretched in the chair like a cat, then got up and ambled over to my husband, who held his arms out to me. He was smiling his sexy, somehow sweet smile and I could see the light glinting off his fangs, teeth so sharp they made a rattlesnake seem like it had a mouthful of rubber bands.
I grinned back, kicked out of my clothes, and pulled the sheet back. As my husband’s fangs sank into my neck and things began to go dark and sweet around the edges of my brain, I had a thought: What about werewolf hearing? Shit on that, how about their sense of smell, which was even better than a vampire’s? Even if they couldn’t hear us, they could sure tell what we were doing.
Then Eric’s fingers were gently parting my thighs and stroking me in that luscious, insistent way he knew I loved, and I forgot all about werewolf hearing. Hell, I’d be lucky if I didn’t forget my own name.

Chapter 14
Dude!
You will not believe this. I was there, and I almost don’t believe it. And there’s no way to pretty this up, so I’m just going to spell it straight out: a group of Satan worshippers found Laura.
Yes! And yes, I know how it sounds! But it’s all true; my God, I can hardly type I’m so excited/freaked out/ amazed.
Okay, so this is what happened. Laura called and asked if she could hang out at the mansion, and of course I said yes. It was daytime, so Tina was snoring away somewhere (not that she snored, or even breathed, but you know what I mean). So into the mansion I come, only to be greeted by a scene out of—of—shit, I have no frame of reference for this.
Real Satanists had apparently tracked Laura down via astrology (not my field, so much of the explanation I got later went right over my head). Apparently, just as there was a star of Bethlehem, there is also a Morningstar, which shows up just before the Antichrist comes into her maturity.
?????
Seriously, dude, I know how it sounds. A star? Laura’s own star, shining down on the planet like a treasure map leading Satanists to our door? (And why not her apartment? Why Betsy’s place?) A star that didn’t show until her maturity, what the hell did that mean? The star didn’t show itself until she had a driver’s license? A passport? Until she was legal drinking age? What?
Laura either didn’t know, or wasn’t saying, pardon me while I evince a complete lack of surprise. And I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is the star is here (I plan to dip into my savings first thing tomorrow and buy a decent telescope to set up in the yard . . . I simply have to see this puppy for myself) and people who have read the right books and worshipped the right demon and made the right sacrifices (I’m guessing on that last one, but the movies can’t be all wrong, right? Memo to me: Netflix Rosemary’s Baby.).
Anyway, the right people can now track Laura down pretty much at will.
Which is why, when I walked into the house after a milk run, I nearly tripped over the dozen people kneeling in front of Laura, who was blushing like a tomato. A demonic tomato. I was instantly alarmed; she was so fire-hydrant red, so incredibly flushed, I was afraid she was going to stroke out, and I almost dropped the milk.
They had (not on purpose, I’m sure of that) backed Laura into a corner of the kitchen and were moaning and praying.
Yeah. Praying. Praying to Laura.
I don’t know what I should do with this information, not to mention the stuff that happened afterward. Betsy has enough on her plate these days. And it wasn’t like Laura had killed anybody.
In fact, the way she handled it was nothing short of hilarious. She—
Wait. She’s calling me from the hallway. More later, dude.

Chapter 15
When I next opened my eyes, it was, according to the grandfather clock bonging away at the other end of our suite, four o’clock. Our bedroom was utterly gloomy, thanks to all the heavy curtains, so I stretched and sat up, swung my legs over the bed, and thought about what to do.
Sinclair was still—ha, ha—dead to the world beside me. He was on his side, one arm flung out, palm up. His normally pin-neat hair was a ruffled dark mass; his lips were slightly parted.
I watched his chest for a long time . . . three minutes, almost. I think it rose once. But he felt like living flesh; he was warm (we’re speaking comparably, of course). He wasn’t a corpse, he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t alive, either.
Undead.
Stupid word, I’ve always hated that word.
This was the part of every day when I deeply pitied my husband, and I would never tell him. Sinclair needed me for several things—pity wasn’t one of them. He didn’t have to sleep all day, and he could stay awake when the sun came up (unlike yours truly, who would drop like a puppet with her strings cut as soon as it was dawn) but he could never, ever go out into the sun.
I, however, could.
So I got to my feet and checked on BabyJon, who we’d set up in the small sitting room. And by the way? The guy who invented the port-a-crib? A genius of Jonas Salk proportions.
Anyway, he was in his crib, flat on his back with his little arms in the “this is the police, put your hands up” position. If he grew up to be anything like the Ant, he couldn’t practice that position soon enough.
I couldn’t help but smile when I looked at him. Don’t get me wrong, it was unfortunate that my father and his wife died. But BabyJon was mine, now.
Forever.
Best of all, he was adjusting to the new sleeping schedule. After all, I can’t have a kid running around during the day when I sleep. No, BabyJon was officially on graveyard shift now, and for a long time to come.
I wondered what I would tell him when he was older. “Mom, why is there an unconscious man stuffed in the closet?”
“Nothing to worry about, dear, Mommy just wanted a snack.”
Hmm. Better rethink that one. Later. Besides, since he’d be growing up with us, he’d probably think it’s normal for parents to stay up all night and never eat solid food. Or age. Or poop.
A problem for another time, so I popped into the bathroom, which was more or less unnecessary, but old habits, right? Sometime during our late-night chat with the Wyndhams, a castle employee had unpacked our clothes and stocked the bathroom. Good stuff, too—Aveda products.
Feeling minty fresh, I left the bathroom, and pulled on brown velvet leggings and a long-sleeved blue flannel shirt. I was always cold, and had long since donated all my tank tops to Goodwill. I slipped into my Cole Haan Penny Air Loafers and was ready to face the day. What was left of it, anyway.
I had to walk through the rest of the suite, and after a second I realized that our suite was on the west side of the castle. Okay, mansion—really huge, amazing mansion. That looked, to my Midwestern eyes, awfully like a castle.
Someone was being pretty thoughtful. Never let it be said that werewolves weren’t polite hosts—I only had to look around our guest suite to see that. But I drew all the curtains anyway, just to be on the safe side. I didn’t want to take the smallest chance that Sinclair might get burned. The sun wouldn’t go down for another four hours or so.
I stepped out into the hallway, pulled the door closed, and nearly fell over Jessica, who was all but lurking in the doorway of the suite directly across from ours.
“You know, they did let you have that room,” I said. “In fact, I think they’re assuming you’ll use it, as opposed to lingering in strange hallways.”
She responded to me with, “Girl, I am bored outta my tits.”
“Can we have one cross-country quest without talking about your tits?”
Her pretty dark eyes went narrow and thoughtful, and she caressed her cheek with a long fingernail colored jack-o’-lantern orange. After a thoughtful pause, she shook her head. “I don’t see how.”
“I figured.” I scanned the hallway and listened hard: it was as empty as it looked. “Want to find the kitchen? Maybe whip up a—”
“If I have to look at another smoothie this month, I’m going to barf in one of your Beverly Feldmans.”
“And face a terrible, prolonged death.” We fell in step and, when we reached the main staircase, I pointed in the direction of the kitchen—or whatever room smelled like spices, meat, and fresh vegetables.
“How can you be bored in the middle of a Pack of werewolves?”
“Easy. They’re not talking to me. The ones I bump into are soooo polite—bathroom’s right there, the east wing’s over there, one of the indoor pools is through there, the weight room is over there—but I’m a cipher here.”
Jessica, well used to my blank expression, correctly interpreted it as “I am unfamiliar with that word; please explain” and added, “I’m a nobody. A nothing. A zero. This is about vampires and werewolves, which, thank God, I’m neither. No offense.”
“Who could be offended by that?” I muttered, jumping down the last four steps. “That way. Then a right. So, they’ve been nice to you at least?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Listen, I think it’s really good that you’re here—”
“You’re the worst liar in the galaxy.”
“Shut up. Anyway, I sort of forced BabyJon on Sinclair—”
“This I already knew. The entire street knew,” she added thoughtfully.
“—because we’re his parents now and we have to learn how to be a family—”
“Uh-huh, yup. Getting to something I don’t know anytime soon?”
“—but I can’t watch him every minute I’m here.”
“I don’t mind watching him—much—but you know he’ll only be cute and cuddly with you. With me . . .” She sighed. “With everybody else, it’s colic city.”
“Sorry, Jess. I can’t help that. But I appreciate you watching out for him for me.”
She waved it away, and obediently turned left when I pointed. We were now in a slightly narrower hallway, on hardwood floors this time, no carpet. The smell of food was very strong.
“At least you got the boy trained. Sleeps half the day and half the night.”
“He’s really very sweet,” I whined.
Jessica snorted and straight-armed the swinging door into the kitchen.
Like everything, the Wyndham kitchen made mine look like a dining nook. At least four big tables—the kind you could chop anything on—with long legs. Another big table, marble-topped, probably for baking. Three fridges. Another door, which led to industrial-sized freezers. I could smell the Freon.
There were huge windows—one overlooking a kitchen garden—on every wall. The windows on the opposite wall overlooked the Atlantic.
“I could get used to this,” Jessica commented.
“So buy something just like it. You’ve probably got enough money in the sofa cushions for a down payment.”
Jessica shrugged and went to the nearest fridge while I slid onto a bar stool. “I like the place in St. Paul.”
I nodded. Shoot, before the mansion, she’d lived in an ordinary house in the suburbs. She had never lived rich, dressed rich, ate rich, or looked rich. It was one of her many charms.
“So you’re not, um, hungry, are you?” Jessica had extracted an apple and a Diet Coke. Wait’ll I ratted her out to Marc! He considered diet pop one step up from muriatic acid, whatever the hell that was.
“Naw. Sinclair and I snacked on each other for a while last night. I’m good for a few days.”
“Good to know. If you go nuts and accidentally chew on one of the locals—”
“Right, I get the picture, and duh, like I haven’t thought of that. How dumb do you think I am?”
Her answer was muffled in the loud crunch as she went to work on the apple . . . probably just as well.
“So, that Jeannie seems nice,” Jessica said, masticating slowly.
“Shhhh,” I said, putting a finger to my lips.
Jessica gnawed and crunched and all but growled at her McIntosh for a good minute, when the doors swung inward (werewolves must just know if someone’s on the other side; probably because they could smell them) and in walked Jeannie, carrying a toddler, and behind her, Lara.
“Hello,” Jeannie said. The toddler, a boy with his mother’s wild blond curls and blue eyes, waved a chubby hand in our general direction. “Sleep all right?”
“Like the dead,” I said cheerfully.
Jeannie rolled her eyes at me in a remarkable imitation of Jessica. She carefully set the toddler down in a high chair, strapped him in, then started rooting around for toddler food.
“Mmmmph gmmmph mmmm nughump mph,” Jessica commented, tiny pieces of apple flying like shrapnel.
“She didn’t know you had another kid.” Or forgot Jeannie had another kid . . . she’d been a little out of it when the Wyndhams visited us the last time. Chemo really plays havoc with your memory.
“This? This is Sean. And you remember Lara, Betsy.”
“Hullo,” the tiny werewolf said as she opened the fridge, pulling out a small Tupperware bowl. She popped the lid, and—
“Don’t you dare,” Jeannie said severely, pretending not to hear the delicate sound of Jessica’s gagging. “You have one of the chefs cook that hamburger, or ask me to.”
“But it tastes better when it’s raw,” Lara the Weird whined.
“You heard what I said.” Jeannie plunked a Lunchable in front of her son, who carefully began dismantling it and eating.
“But I want to eat a raw hamburger.”
Jessica raised her eyebrows at me while Lara placed her teeny hands on her teeny hips and glared up at her mother.
“Tough nuts,” Jeannie replied with admirable unconcern. “And that locked gaze might work with your father and the others, but it doesn’t do diddly to me. So: Cooked hamburger? Or no hamburger?”
“No hamburger.”
“Ah, starving yourself to spite the woman who gave you life.” Jeannie leaned against the counter and put a hand over her eyes. “Ah, ‘how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ ”
“Mommy Shakes,” Sean said, carefully picking up a pepperoni slice and popping it into his mouth.
“Yes, that’s right, Mommy likes to quote Shake-speare.”
Lara sighed. “Since I’m not going to eat my snack, can I go to the playground?”
“Lara, I’m sorry, but I can’t get away right now—your father and I have some stuff to talk about.” Her gaze slid to me, but I don’t think she was aware of it.
“I’ll take her,” I volunteered. “I’d like to get outside.”
“Oh. Well. That’s very nice, Betsy, but you’re not really used to werewolves, y’see, and—”
“Not used to—Hello? I lived with one of them?”
Jeannie gave me a long, speculative look, then beckoned with one finger. “Step over here with me for a moment. Would you?”
Jessica shot me her you’d-better-tell-me-everything-later expression and added, “I’ll keep an eye on your boy for you, Jeannie.”
“That’s great, Jessica. If he wants another Lunchable—”
“And he will,” Lara piped up.
“—they’re on the bottom shelf in the fridge to your right.
So saying, she spun on her heel and walked out through a different door, one I hadn’t even spotted until Jeannie moved toward it.
I guess I was going back down the rabbit hole. Me and Alice.

Chapter 16
I’ll trust you with my daughter,” Jeannie began the moment she’d started up four washing machines at once. The mysterious door had led to the mysterious Laundromat. The Wyndhams had their own Laundromat! Unreal.
Anyway, she got a bunch of the machines going and I was puzzling over that when I suddenly realized: she didn’t want Lara to overhear. Or anybody close by to overhear.
“I’m doing this,” she continued, “because I know you liked Antonia and wouldn’t have seen her dead. I’m also doing this because Lara can take care of herself. So if you turn evil and try to bite her or hurt her in any way, don’t be surprised if it’s your head bouncing across the playground.”
“That’s, um, sweet. You must be very proud.”
“But I need you to remember this: a werewolf cub is not a human child. They’re different.”
“Okay.”
“They’re faster. Stronger. Even crueler. She looks like a little girl to you, but you must never forget—she is her father’s daughter, the man who had to kill over twenty-five werewolves to take the Pack. Do you understand?”
I just stared at her while all around us washing machines went shhh-thump, shhh-thump, shhh-thmmp.
I’d expected the standard warning: if you bite my kid, I’ll hunt you down and shoot you dead.
But it wasn’t like that. Jeannie wasn’t scared for Lara.
She was scared for me.
“I told you something like this before, but you had a lot going on at the time. This time I’ve got your full attention. Right?”
“Right, absolutely, you bet.”
“As long as we understand each other.”
“Oh, we totally do,” I assured her.
“All right, then.”
“All right.”

Chapter 17
With her warning still ringing in my ears, we trooped back to the kitchen after Jeannie opened one of the dryers, groped around inside, then turned the dryer back on. “A quilt,” she explained, and I nodded just like this was an ordinary week, day, conversation, whatever.
We got back just in time to hear Lara laughing and Jessica’s “Ooof ! All right, all right, you crummy kid, you win the bet.”
Jessica, obviously the loser in a game of arm wrestling, looked relieved to see me as she rubbed her shoulder. “Ah, the Mysterioso Twins are back. What’s up?”
“Just giving her directions to the playground,” Jeannie calmly lied. “Lara, you can go, but you mind Betsy like it was me talking—you understand?”
“Yes, Mom.” Lara slid off the stool and faced me.
“Hi again,” the next Pack leader said.
“Nice pigtails,” I replied.

Chapter 18
That was how I found myself taking Lara—Michael and Jeannie’s eldest—to the nearby playground for good, clean, wholesome werewolf fun.
She was a cutie, no question. She had her father’s eyes, that odd yellow-gold I’d seen on television nature shows—eyes the color of an owl’s, or a hawk’s. Slender and straight, with her curly dark hair pulled into pigtails. Jeans and a Hannah Montana T-shirt. Maybe . . . six?
“—then Daddy said you were going to bring Antonia back but now you have to talk to the Council and nobody knows what will happen after that but Derik’s really upset because he loves—loved—Antonia and—”
“Where the hell is the playground?” I muttered. Lara, as far as I could tell, hadn’t taken a breath in the last eight minutes. We’d taken a path that led off the grounds and onto a small, brick-lined sidewalk beside a bike trail. Lara had explained that it was “really close.” Sure it was.
“—had to go before the Council since Grandpa took over the Pack so nobody knows what’s going to—”
“There is no park,” I muttered. “That’s my theory. I’m trapped on a never-ending sidewalk beside a never-ending bike path.”
“—walk around outside?”
“What?”
“I said, how come you can come outside? It’s daytime.”
“I just can.”
“But how come?”
It sounded too dumb to say it out loud, but I did it anyway. “Because I’m the queen. Sunlight can’t hurt me. Only a knockoff shoe sale can hurt me.”
“Because I thought you’d have to sleep in a coffin but my friend said you guys have one of the guest suites and there’s no coffins in there and—”
I stopped. Lara halted beside me. We’d rounded a tree-lined corner and suddenly the park was spread out before us. There was a large sign at the entrance that read, MICHAEL WYNDHAM SR. MEMORIAL PARK.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess.”
“You don’t have to guess,” Lara said, giving me a look I knew well. It was the what-kind-of-moron-are-you look. “The sign’s right there.”
“So your dad made this?”
“No. Daddy’s the third.”
“He’s what?”
“Michael Wyndham the Third. My great-grandpa was—”
“You know what? I’ve kind of lost interest by now.” Legacies. I should have remembered where I was. This was New England, not Minnesota. “Run along.”
So she did, heading straight for the monkey bars. There weren’t many cars in the small parking lot to the left—maybe half a dozen—and about that many kids playing. A couple of moms were sitting on benches on the far side of the park, chatting and keeping half an eye on the children.
Which left me time to think about just what the hell we were in for. For example, just what the hell was the Council? Was it as bad as it sounded? Because it sounded a bit like a trial without a jury. Or a fair-minded judge. And what was I supposed to tell them? I hadn’t made Antonia take slugs for me, or even asked her. We walked in, the bad guy shot, and Antonia died. The end.
I prowled around the teeter-totters and tried to think of a plan. But I had no gift for strategy—I left that shit strictly to Sinclair and Tina—and felt more out of my depth than usual. What were we doing here, anyway?
Let’s say the Council decided the vampires had screwed up. What then? They couldn’t punish us. Could they? Would that mean we’d go to war? That could be a problem—not only did I not know how many vampires were walking around on the planet, I had no way to mobilize them. And I didn’t want to. I found it completely ridiculous that I had to police adults, most of whom were far, far older than I was. And as far as siccing them on werewolves, for crying out loud? Puh-leeze.
I kicked irritably at an errant tuft of grass, then looked up at the unmistakable sound of a child bursting into tears. A little girl—three? four?—was sprawled in the gravel, sobbing, and a bigger boy—nine, ten?—was standing over her.
“I said your turn was over,” the brat said, sounding remarkably unrepentant. I knew a few vampires like that.
The thing about being childless (as I still thought of myself, BabyJon being a relatively late arrival in my life) is you sort of freeze up when kids are acting badly. On the one hand, you know the kid’s in the wrong and you want to help. On the other hand, it’s not your kid, so perhaps it was none of your business.
The little girl was still crying. The bigger boy was now on her recently vacated swing.
I glanced over at the moms sitting on the bench and saw one stop in mid-gossip and say in that fake “I’m trying to sound stern but I’m really proud of my big boy!” tone that I absolutely hated, “Jaaaaason! You know you’re supposed to wait your turn, honey.”
“I’m telling!” the tiny girl in the gravel sobbed. “I’m telling! Mom! Mommy, Jason pushed me off the—”
“You be nice to your little sister, Jason Dunheim?” the mom asked. Asked. Not told. Oh, God save me from overindulgent nitwits who insist on procreating but not parenting. “Jason? Okay?”
Why is she asking? I hate when parents ask. What happens if the kid says no? Then what are you supposed to do? Slink away? Have a tantrum? What?
“Mommy!”
“Shut up, bawl baby.”
“Jason? You know we don’t use that phrase in our house, Jason? Honey?”
Sigh. Well, the little one didn’t appear to be hurt (I couldn’t smell any blood on her), and if I didn’t exactly approve of a mother who so clearly favored one child over the other, there wasn’t much I—
“Say you’re sorry.”
I turned my head so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash. Not only was Lara in it (groan), she was hoisting Jason by bunching his T-shirt in her fist.

Chapter 19
Lara lifted his big butt right off the swing, and was holding him a foot over her head with one arm. I’d never even heard her move, and the monkey bars were all the way across the playground from the swings.
“Let go of me!” Jason’s legs swung and kicked.
Lara gave him a brisk shake. It looked about as difficult for her as salting pasta would be for me. “Say you’re sorry.”
“Hey!” Miracle of miracles, The Thing That Spawned Jason was on her feet and running for the swings. “Leave my son alone! Put him down right now!”
I started to run, too. But my motives were in no way altruistic . . . I sure wasn’t at all interested in saving Jason’s spoiled little white-bread butt.
No, all I could think as I raced toward them was, First I get Antonia killed, and now I’m going to get Lara beat up . . . Oh, the werewolves are gonna throw us a party, they’ll be so pleased. Nice, Betsy. And it’s not even five o’clock.
I made myself slow down. A lot. Because about the only way this could get worse was if I outed myself as a vampire. Humans could not run at forty miles an hour. Slow down. A lot. Get Lara away from there before she—
“She’s littler than you.” Another shake. “And not as strong.” Another shake—sort of like when a terrier kills a rat.
Jason had both his hands locked around her wrist and, from his strained, reddening complexion, was trying as hard as he could to pry her hand off him. “You’re supposed to watch out for her,” Lara the Terrifying was saying. “She’s your ’sponsibility and you hurt her on purpose! You don’t ever do that!”
“Put me down!”
“ ’kay.” I didn’t even have time to groan and cover my eyes; Lara pulled Jason toward her, sidestepped, and threw him about six feet. He skidded nose-first into the gravel, sat up, and started howling. His nose was bleeding and the rich, heady scent went straight to my head.
Well, this was just swell. On top of everything else, I’d popped my fangs. Way to stay off the radar, Vampire Queen.
I reached Lara, veering around the mother who had instantly rushed to her son’s side when things stopped going his way.
“Argh, Lara, thith ith awful! Why’d you do that? You can’t be throwing bullieth around like that. Are you trying to get me eaten alive? Your father—”
Lara was ignoring me. I had, in fact, stopped existing for her at all. She had gone to the girl, helped her out of the dirt, and brushed her off. “Are you okay? We have Band-Aids at my house. Do you need one?”
“Nuh-uh.” The girl rubbed her cheeks with grubby fists, mixing dirt with tears. “How’d you do that? That was really cool. I want to do that. Can you throw him again?”
“I better not,” Lara muttered, giving me a wary look. Not like she was scared of me; more like she was calculating how much of a threat I was to her at that moment.
I had a flashback to what her mother—her human mother—had told me earlier.
A werewolf cub is not a human child. And what else had she said? She’d looked so strange when she said it. That look on her face—a mixture of pride and sorrow. It wasn’t an expression I’d ever seen before.
They’re faster. Stronger . . . crueler.
Jeannie had known her shit; Lara was no more human than I was. She hadn’t responded to Jason like a little girl who wanted to play on the monkey bars; she’d responded like an alpha who saw weakness and pain and instantly acted to put an end to it. She’d seen someone who needed protecting and she hadn’t hesitated—never mind the consequences to her, or me.
Which was a lot more than I had done.
Great. Shown up by someone who didn’t weigh more than a bag of dog chow. Who was already more of a leader than I could ever be.
“—because we could go up to my house and—”
“You!” Oh, terrific. The Thing That Birthed Bullies had marched over to us, dragging her bawling son behind her. “You think I didn’t see what you did? I saw what you did, and you’re going to—”
Okay, that was just about enough. I locked gazes with her and said, “Go thit down.”
The anger—all animation, in fact—left her face and she turned and walked like a robot over to the bench. Good old vampire mojo; there were times when I was more than pleased to use it.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” Lara asked.
“You jutht never mind my voith. Letth get out of here.”
“Hey, your teeth are all pointy! I don’t think you should bite him, though.” She looked at Jason, who was so bewildered by the events of the last twenty seconds he had stopped crying. Then she smiled at him, the flat, fake smile of a store mannequin. “He wouldn’t taste good at all.”
Jason was now backing away from her, wiping the blood from his nose with a swipe of his sleeve. I couldn’t say I blamed him. And the farther away he got, the less crazy the smell of his O-positive goodness made me.
“Your mom underplayed it, if anything,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Never mind. Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay. I’ve got what I wanted, anyway.”
We started heading out of the playground, back toward Lara’s house. “What, you wanted to throw a bully fifteen feet?”
“It wasn’t even close to fifteen feet. Boy, you really like to exaggerate, don’t you?”
“It’s one of my weaknesses,” I admitted.
“Besides, I just wanted to get another look at you.”
I stopped so suddenly she took a couple more steps before she realized she was walking alone. “You wanted to what?”
“To get another look at you. If you and my daddy become enemies, you’ll be my enemy. I might have to kill you someday, to protect the Pack. Why wouldn’t I come see you?”
“But you and I met already.”
“Yes,” Lara explained patiently, “but now you’re in my lands. I’m not in yours.”
I stared, struck speechless—which is not a normal thing for me, better believe it. “So, if I’ve got this right, you didn’t want me to take you to play. You wanted to—to—”
A werewolf cub is not a human child.
“—to size me up?”
“Uh-huh.” She brightened as the mansion came into sight. “D’you want some ice cream? I’d love a dish of chocolate.”
Okay. Now I was getting a genuine case of the creeps. Because I could see that, for her, the situation was over, done, resolved. She could move on to other things now, and would.
In other words, she was behaving exactly like she was taught and bred to behave: to worry only about the Now. Tomorrow was a thousand years away. Yesterday was even further away.
I sighed and surrendered. “Yeah. Let’s go get some ice cream.”
“Hey! You’re not talking funny anymore.”
“Let’s thank God for small favors, okay? Also, if you could not mention this little fracas to your folks, that would be peachy.”
Lara laughed. “You’re funny.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I followed her up the drive to the mansion. “I’m a barrel of freakin’ monkeys.”

Chapter 20
Dude,
Well, I definitely picked the right time to keep a journal. Because it has been an interesting couple of days. Who knows? I might actually keep writing the thing.
When Laura called me away during my last entry, I had followed her into the kitchen. But not as her friend . . . I was more than a little alarmed at the symptoms of intense stress she was exhibiting. Since unpleasant things had a way of happening when she was angry or frightened, I had a more than passing interest in her state of mind.
I was able to sit her down at the kitchen table and get her to drink a Snapple. The act of doing something nice and mundane seemed to calm her. That’s when I realized she was more humiliated than angry.
“Marc, I am so sorry you had to see that. I just don’t know what to say.”
“Laura, it’s not your fault. Hey,” I joked, “how do you think I’d feel if my old man showed up? You shouldn’t feel bad about something beyond your control.”
“Maybe it isn’t beyond my control.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. “It’s fine, Laura, I don’t mind. Satanists showing up in the foyer certainly add some spice to my day. Nobody likes the pop-in. And like I said, it’s not your fault.”
“No. It’s my mother’s.” That last was practically spit out. “I was going to ask you something and now I can’t, because of her.”
“Ask me what? Drink your tea. So. Ask.”
“Um.” Laura gazed into her bottle of Snapple, which I doubt held any answers. “It’s just, I told Betsy I’d look after you and Tina while she was gone. So instead of coming over when I can, I was hoping I could move in. Just for a little while,” she added, misreading my expression. “I won’t get in the way, I promise.”
“How could you get in the way? There are twenty bedrooms in this thing. But come on, Laura. Cut the bullshit.”
“I don’t—”
“Betsy asked you to look over Tina, too?”
“Well.” Laura looked down for a moment. “Mostly you, I guess. I think she felt bad about leaving you behind.”
I shrugged. “It’s moot. I didn’t have the vacation time, anyway. Tina had to stay, too—somebody’s got to stay in Vampire Central and handle any undead-related stuff that comes up while they’re gone. Which leaves thee and me. And of course you can move in. Heck, pick an entire wing to live in.”
“No, I can’t, now.” Her knuckles whitened on the bottle. “Not with these—these people tracking me down all the time and asking—”
“Wait. This has happened before?”
Laura didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The Snapple bottle shattered in her hand, spraying tea and glass all over the place.
“Oh my God! I’m sorry, Marc, I didn’t mean to be so clumsy, I’ll get a towel and—”
I was instantly on my feet, hauled her to hers, and hustled her over to the sink. “Laura, if you don’t mellow out, I’m going to slip some Valium into your next Frappuccino. Now hold still and let me look.”
I carefully examined her hand, rinsed it, and examined it again. She had a couple of minor cuts on the pads of her left ring and middle fingers, and that was all. Nothing arterial, no damage to the tendons that I could see.
“No more Snapple for you,” I said, handing her a dish towel and stepping around the broken glass. “From now on it’s strictly sippy cups.”
The only reason I was letting her clean up was because it was the only thing that would make her feel better. Laura was nice—a little too nice. She always made me wonder when she was going to blow. Looked like this might be the week.
“You said this has happened before?”
“Yes.” She wiped up glass and tea, being careful to get even the smallest pieces. “Those people. They always find me. Always.”
“So they show up at your apartment, too?”
“My apartment. My parents’ house.”
“I’ll bet the minister loved that,” I said dryly, earning a ghost of a smile. “What do they want with you?”
“To serve me,” she replied shortly, wringing the now-wet towel over the sink (after she’d shaken the glass into the garbage).
“Serve you, what? With toast?”
A real smile this time. “No, silly. To do my bidding.”
“So what have you done in the past?”
“I just tell them to go away.”
“No, no, no.”
Laura blinked. “No?”
“You’re going about it all wrong.”
“I am?”
“It’s going to happen anyway, right? Because of that star or whatever heralding you like—I dunno—like January heralds weight-loss resolutions.”
“Yes, I suppose.” Laura was looking increasingly mystified, which was a big improvement over mortified. “But what else could I do?”
“Lots of things.”
Then I told her. And got another smile, this one even better than the last one. This was a smile of absolute delight.

Chapter 21
I got back in time to change into a black suit, black panty hose, and Carolina Herrera black pumps. Sinclair was up and working at the desk in our suite; he was also dressed for the service.
Yes, indeed, my first werewolf funeral.
I watched my husband work for a minute until he felt my gaze and turned. “Something on your mind, dear one?”
“Several things,” I replied, thinking of Lara, future psycho werewolf leader. “Mostly about how awkward this is going to be. I mean, everyone there will know. They’ll know Antonia died saving me.”
“I imagine they will, yes.” He watched me with his dark eyes, an unreadable expression on his face.
“Like I don’t hate funerals enough.”
“Yes, of course,” he soothed. “Everyone should realize how difficult this will be for you.”
“Yeah, that’s—you jerk. I hate you.”
“No, you worship the hallowed ground I trod upon, which is what any good wife should—” He ducked, and my left shoe went flying over his head. Fortunately, it missed the window. I couldn’t stand the thought of my new pump being torn by flying glass. “My sweet, I was only seeking to give comfort in your time of—”
“Do you know how many pairs of shoes I packed?”
“Ah . . . no. Perhaps a change of subject would be prudent. Where is Jessica?”
“Watching BabyJon in her suite. You know, I didn’t want her to come, but now I’m awfully glad she did. I don’t trust the werewolves with him. There’s something weird going on there.”
“Mmmmm. What were you up to until the sun set?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
His eyes narrowed. “No one bothered you, did they?”
“It’s not like that, Sinclair.” I sighed and sat down across from him. “This is a weird place. I’m not sure I like it. And this whole Council thing is making me nervous. I miss our house. I miss Tina and Laura and Marc. I just want to go home.”
“At last,” he said, “we are of one mind. Perhaps it will help you to think of the funeral as part of the cost of returning to Minnesota.”
“Or perhaps I’ll think of it as the werewolf version of Tailhook.”
“Either way,” he said, glancing at his watch, “we had best get moving. Soonest done, soonest home.”
“Dammit. No time for a quickie?”
He smiled at me and shook his head, but I could tell he hated to do it.
“Not even a quickie quickie?”
“Stop that, vile temptress. Now let’s be off; people are waiting for us.”
Hmph. I’d always thought that whole “jump in and get it over with” thing wasn’t always the way to go.
But damned if I was going to cower in a room that wasn’t mine, in a house where nobody knew me and nobody cared to. No, I’d go to Antonia’s funeral and hold my head up, and if the fuzzy lollipop brigade didn’t like it, nuts to them.

Chapter 22
I knocked, then poked my head into Jessica’s room to see how BabyJon was doing. Jessica, resigned, was walking back and forth with him while he alternated crying with spitting up on her shoulder.
“And once again, I can’t thank you enough.”
“And once again, I need to buy a new shirt.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the baby. “Have fun at the funeral, anyway. Should be a piece of cake, right?”
“It’s a joke, that’s what it is.” I held out my arms and she gladly surrendered him to me. BabyJon hushed at once, except for the occasional hiccup.
“I wouldn’t say that around here if I were you,” she warned, scraping at the fusty left shoulder of her blouse.
“It’s the truth, though.”
“Come on, Bets. It’s hard for them. These guys—from what I’ve seen, they’re a tight bunch. It’s probably like losing a niece, or a sister, or—”
“Bullshit. The Pack didn’t like Antonia, remember? They were glad when she left.”
Jess snapped her fingers. “Jeez, you’re right! I’d forgotten all about that. It creeped them out that she couldn’t change, but could tell the future. They needed her, but they were all sorta scared of her, too.”
I nodded. Antonia had gotten abysmally drunk (do you have any idea how much booze a werewolf has to drink before feeling it?) one night a few months back. She’d told us the whole story.
How hardly any of them spoke to her.
How frightened they were of her: Would she withhold her predictions? If she saw something bad in a Pack member’s future, would she spill it? Or keep it to herself?
Worst of all, she’d told us how the Pack had been relieved when they’d found out she wasn’t coming back. They hadn’t missed her at all, or even worried about her.
No. They’d been relieved.
And now they expected me to face the music. The whole thing pissed me off.
Jessica was shaking her head. “Glad I’m not in your shoes, Bets. Although they are pretty nice,” she added, peeking at my pumps.
“They can do whatever they want with me,” I muttered. “But if they fuck with my shoes I’m going to kill them all in a variety of horrible ways.
“Gosh.” I kissed BabyJon on his sweet head. “I feel safer already.”

Chapter 23
Wyndham Manor, I had been told, was not only werewolf HQ and the seat of their power, it was also home to dozens of Pack members. And it had obviously been built to accommodate crowds, because the service was held in a room the size of a warehouse and nobody was crowded. I was guessing, when there wasn’t a coffin involved, it was a ballroom.
Michael had spoken briefly, and then a minister (a werewolf Presbyterian minister!) had spoken, and then people started filing past the coffin, no doubt paying their respects.
I had noticed right away that they’d switched Antonia to a much nicer coffin. It shone like polished jet and was just as black. An enormous spray of white calla lilies nearly covered the entire top. I wonder what they’d done with the old one—the one Derik had destroyed. Then I decided a) it was a morbid thought and b) none of my business.
At least Jessica was missing this. This was actually fine by me—if I knew where she was, I wouldn’t worry about her.
BabyJon was snuggled against my shoulder, thumb popped into his mouth, gazing around with bright-eyed interest. I tried to pretend he wasn’t drooling on the lapel of my Ann Taylor.
Weirdly, it had been Sinclair’s idea for me to bring him. It was the first time Sinclair had suggested we bring BabyJon anywhere, so on top of being sad for Antonia, and scared for us, I was suspicious of my husband’s motives.
I didn’t move when people started getting up. I had already paid my respects. I had wept over her, called her Pack, and told them the unthinkable, had flown her home. It was more than I’d done for my own father.
“Hello. It’s Betsy, right?”
I looked up and almost gasped. One of the most striking women I had ever seen in my life was standing in front of me, with a pregnant belly out to here.
“Uh, yeah.” I shifted BabyJon and held out a hand, which she shook briskly. “Betsy Taylor.”
“The infamous queen of the dead.” But her blue eyes were kind, and she was smiling. Her hair was a rich auburn cloud around her shoulders. “I’m Sara, Derik’s wife.”
“Undead,” I corrected, “and yeah, that’s me. Was Antonia a friend of yours? I s’pose she must have been; she and your husband were kind of tight, or so I heard. I’m very sorry about what happened to her.”
“Thank you.” Sara eased herself into the chair beside me and massaged the small of her back. “But she wasn’t my friend. I couldn’t stand spending time with her.”
I stared. And stared. And stared some more, feeling equal parts admiration and horror. Sara had a pair, that was for sure, to speak ill of the dead in this of all places. But she was telling the truth, which I admired tremendously.
“She was kind of a grump,” I admitted. “You’re, um, not a werewolf. Are you?”
“No, no.”
“So Jeannie’s not the only human who, ah, runs with the Pack?”
“No indeed. Although I’m not technically human,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I’m the reincarnation of the sorceress Morgan Le Fay.”
Oh. Great. A crazy woman—a crazy pregnant woman—was sitting less than two feet away. My, what an interesting week this was turning out to be!
Sara laughed, accurately reading my expression. “Never mind, you don’t have to believe it, just like I don’t have to convince you. Although I should warn you, if you try to hurt me, the chances are excellent that something awful will happen to you.”
“I just met you. Why would I want to hurt you?”
“Nobody knows. Just like no one can predict what you and your husband are up to at any given time. Are you going to finish that?”
I handed her my cherry Coke—yes, now that the actual service was over, they’d broken out the bar drinks. “Predict . . . what the hell are you talking about?”
Sara gestured to the room. I looked, but all I saw were hostile gazes pretty much everywhere I turned. “You’re just making them extremely nervous, that’s all.”
“What? Me? But that’s—”
“You don’t have a scent,” she interrupted gently. “So they can’t tell how you’re feeling at any given time. It makes them—all of them—extremely ner vous.”
Of course! I almost slapped my forehead. I had completely forgotten how much that had weirded Antonia out when she came to live with us. It took her weeks to get used to us for that exact reason.
“Then how come you’re on this side of the room, talking to me?”
Sara shrugged. “You don’t make me nervous. You’re still our guest, despite the circumstances. And you won’t be able to hurt me.”
Back to that again. “What, are you a superstar pregnant ninja warrior or something?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
Silence.
“Well? Jeez, you can’t make comments like that and then leave me hanging.”
“But you won’t believe me anyway, so why waste my breath?”
“Try me,” I retorted.
She shrugged. “I affect the laws of probability. If someone tries to shoot me, the gun will jam. Or a pinprick aneurysm he had all his life will pick that second to blow. Or he’ll miss me and the bullet will ricochet back into his brain.”
Sara sighed. “I knew you’d say that.”
“I didn’t have a chance to say anything, you—” Poor crazy person, I’d been about to say, which wasn’t nice, under the circumstances. “So in order for you to—to—uh—”
“Affect the laws of probability.”
“Don’t you have to do tons of math all the time?”
“Oh, no. My power’s completely unconscious. I have no control over it at all. After I won the lottery for the fourth time, I sort of hung it up.” She patted her belly. “Besides, there are more important things than buying lottery tickets.”
“Yeah, I s’pose.”
“And knowing I’ll win sort of takes the fun out of it.”
“Sure, I can see that.” Looney tunes.
“Is this your son?” Sara smiled and held her arms out. BabyJon smiled back and snuggled more firmly into my shoulder.
“It’s not you,” I hastily assured the crazy pregnant woman. “He pretty much only likes me. He’s not my son, though. He’s my half brother.”
“He’s charming,” Sara said admiringly. “What beautiful eyes!”
“Thanks.” I perked up a little. “He’s really a sweet baby. He almost never cries, and he sleeps all day—”
“I would imagine, with a vampire big sister.”
“Yeah, we had to do some juggling with everybody’s schedule,” I admitted.
“But weren’t you worried about bringing him here with—with everything that’s happened?”
“I haven’t been his guardian very long. My husband and I need to get in the habit of thinking like parents, not ravenous, slavering monarchs of the undead.”
Sara cracked up, holding her belly and clutching the table so she wouldn’t fall over. I perked up even more. At least someone at this funeral didn’t blame me for Antonia’s sacrifice. I could feel the disapproving stares, but Sara just laughed and laughed.
Finally, she settled down and wiped her watering eyes. “Hormones,” she explained. “Sorry.”
“Hey, I’m not offended. It’s kind of nice to see someone—” Lightening up, I’d been about to say, which would have been seriously uncool.
“So! I’ve never met a vampire before.”
“Well, I’ve never met a sorceress before.” I was trying to remember what I knew about Morgan Le Fay, but history was so not my strong point. I thought she’d been a witch during King Arthur’s time. She was one of the bad guys, I was pretty sure. Well, I could always ask Sinclair.
“We can’t say that any longer, can we?” Sara was asking.
“Not hardly.” I glanced over her shoulder and saw Derik stomping toward us, his normally smiling countenance twisted into a scowl. “Uh-oh. Pissed off hubby at six o’clock.”
Sara sighed. “It’s been awful for him; I’m sure you can relate. He doesn’t mean to act like you shoved Antonia into a hail of bullets. But it’s hard. You know?”
I did know. Derik was playing Pin the Blame on the Vampire as an alternative to facing up to the fact that the only reason Antonia left was because most of the Pack disliked her, or was scared of her. I understood, even though I didn’t like it one bit. Where was all this concern when she decided to leave town and never come back?
And here he was, looming over our table. “I’d like you to step away from my wife, please,” he managed through gritted teeth. “I don’t want—aaaggghhh!”
At first I thought he had slipped. Then I realized he’d seen BabyJon and jerked backward so hard, and so fast, that he lost his balance.
“That again! Get that baby away from my wife!”
You know those moments in parties where you have to talk loud to be heard, only you do it the one time everyone’s quiet? So they all hear exactly what you’re shouting?
Yeah. It was like that.

Chapter 24
Dude,
It wasn’t long before Laura had a chance to implement Operation Distract. Yes, another band of devil worshippers showed up. But this time she (we, actually) was ready for them.
“Oh most gracious and dread lady,” their leader was proclaiming, kneeling before her. His fellow lemmings followed suit, which meant there were sixteen religious extremists in one of our parlors. “We but live to serve you in any capacity you require. Only point us to your enemies and we shall wreak vengeance in your name. In your father’s name, Lucifer Morningstar.”
That was kind of interesting, because we knew Laura’s mother had been possessed by the devil. And the devil always appeared to Laura (you can imagine her mood after one of those fun-filled visits) as a woman.
I imagine the Prince/Princess of Lies can appear as anything he/she wants.
“We are yours to command!” he shouted at Laura’s feet, since they were all cowering before her on their knees. None of them could see the way she shook her head in disgust, rolling her eyes. “Oh most dread sovereign, your coming was foretold and it has come at last!”
“Yes, yes,” she replied impatiently. “That’s fine. Now. You. All of you.”
All the heads jerked up at once. It was like watching otters pop their heads out of the water at the zoo.
“I bid ye go forth. All of you find the soup kitchen on Lake and Fourth, in Minneapolis. Volunteer for at least fifty hours a week.”
The leader’s sad basset hound face seemed to sag even further. “But—but we wish to—”
“Are you questioning me?” Laura thundered in a pretty good imitation of an angry demigod wearing a pink sweater. “You dare question how I test your loyalty?”
Practically elbowing each other out of the way, they all denied questioning anything.
“So begone from here, and do my unholy bidding at Sister Sue’s Soup Kitchen. I will know when you are ready.”
They all galloped out, several of them getting wedged in the doorway in their eagerness to obey Laura’s completely unevil command.
They were no sooner out the front door than Laura threw herself into my arms hard enough to rock me back on my heels. “It worked! Oh, Marc, I can’t thank you enough, what a wonderful idea you had!”
“Fifty hours a week should keep them out of trouble,” I agreed, patting her back.
“Oh, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before!”
Well, honey, you pretty much tense up and close off whenever anything connecting you with your mother gets shoved in your face. When you’re that angry, or that upset, or that sad, it’s impossible to think logically.
(Dude, I prudently kept that to myself.)
“I don’t know how I kept a straight face,” Laura gasped. “I looked at you and I almost lost it right in front of that band of dimwitted sheep.”
In all modesty, I had to admit my idea stank with the reek of genius. Put them to work for you, I’d said. Make them volunteer at homeless shelters, at soup kitchens, at church fund-raisers. That way they’re happy—they think they’re being tested—and you’re happy because not only are they out of your hair, they’re spending virtually all their free time helping the greater good.
I’d saved the best for last: ordering devil worshippers to commit good deeds was a terrific way to defy her mother. If I had needed a deal closer, that was it.
“Marc, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, you have to come see me or call.”
“Are you kidding? You just gave me ten minutes of free entertainment. You’re square with the house, honey.”
Laura turned away for a moment, suddenly lost in thought. “Maybe I’ve been looking at this the wrong way. If they’ll do anything I say—if they’ll do things for me they would do for no one else—I wonder what else I can make them do?”
“Hey, one way to find out,” I said, having absolutely no idea that I was inadvertently, and with the best of intentions, driving Laura to a break with her conscience and her sanity.
I take full responsibility for the following events, which I will narrate as quickly and carefully as I can.

Chapter 25
Derik! Apologize this minute,” Sara practically hissed. “I know you’re upset, but this is ridiculous. He’s just a baby.”
“I don’t know what the hell that thing is,” Derik retorted, “but it’s not a baby.”
“You’re acting like you’ve seen a ghoul, or something,” Jeannie said.
“What baby?”
Jeannie turned to her husband. “What baby? The one she got off the plane with, what are you talking about, what baby?”
Oh, great, here were Michael and Jeannie Wyndham, with Sinclair hot on their heels.
“Everybody just calm down,” I began, but Derik drowned me out.
He pointed. “That baby.”
Michael frowned. “But you don’t have a baby.”
Jeannie stared. “What’s wrong with you?” She nodded toward Derik. “Him, I get. He’s just playing the blame game. But you—”
I was flabbergasted. I’d suspected last night he hadn’t noticed BabyJon, but not noticing or commenting was one thing. Michael didn’t appear to see my brother at all.
“Well, he’s not mine,” I said, trying to recover from my surprise. “I mean, he is now. He’s my brother.”
Michael was staring at BabyJon with his flat, yellow gaze. “Where did he come from?”
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