Undead and Unwary (12 page)

Sinclair settled back into his seat as well. “Tina,” he said, and she turned her head at once. “You were saying . . .”

“Ah. Thank you, Majesty.” She turned to me. “I should like to explore the circumstances surrounding your father’s ‘death.’”

“Don’t use quotes,” I said irritably. “I can hear them, you know. It’s my dad’s death, not ‘death.’ Because he’s dead.”

“As you like, Dread Queen.” Her tone was respectful, polite, and very, very careful. “Please elaborate. There was a funeral, but no bodies. His car was involved, and his identification was found. The assumption by police and the coroner’s office was that he and his second wife were killed instantly. Your stepmother, Antonia,
was
killed. Yes?”

“Yeah.” As I’d already relived, I’d seen her ghost a few days later. I would not think about what that meant about my dad.

“What about the autopsy?”

I must have looked blanker than usual, because Marc helpfully piped up. “There may not have been one. The ME could have requested one—they have to if the cause of death is in question. Maybe nobody thought it was.”

“Mm-mm. Possible.”

“If there was one,” he added, “the State of Minnesota requires the Ramsey County ME to file the death certificate within five days of the death.”

I stiffened and the angel on my shoulder instantly started yammering.
Don’t do it. Don’t. You’re the better person and now’s your chance to prove it!

I’m not, actually.
“Good thing the coroner keeps up with
his
government paperwork,” I said snidely and ducked in time to avoid the glass Jessica hurled at my head. “Ha! Too slow.”

“Stop that!” Tina snapped, which was unheard-of. I decided that for yelling at the queen she would pay the ultimate price and started to sink into a massive sulk. “Was there an obituary?”

Distracted, I thought for a second even as Jess and Marc were shaking their heads. Then I remembered, and I knew why they’d been so quick to answer in the negative. Not only was there not an obit, there hadn’t been a word in the papers at the time. Which was how Marjorie, the eight-hundred-plus-year-old vampire who’d caused all my problems that week, tripped up. She told me she’d read a blurb in the paper about the crash, explaining her presence at the evening service and how she’d come to express condolences.

Which was a pretty mean trick because there had been nothing in the papers. Marjorie knew about the funeral because she’d kept tabs on us, was causing trouble everywhere she could, and had the suicidal gall to put her hands on Sinclair and lock him in a cross-covered coffin with no plans to come to her senses anytime soon. And she’d celebrated the insanity by showing up to my dad’s funeral to giggle inside while she consoled on the outside. Just remembering this crap was getting me pissed at her all over again.

This is a terrible thing to say about killing an old lady, a librarian no less, but that was one I enjoyed. She’d thrived for almost a thousand years, but fucking with my man ended her wrinkled ass. It was like she hadn’t even cared that she was ruining my wedding! No way could I tolerate that level of sociopathy in someone who wasn’t a roommate. Didn’t she know it was
my
day? Night? Whatever?

“Nothing in the papers, no obit,” I agreed.

Tina had her phone out to take notes. Marc called her iPhone ‘the Precious,’ although he confided to me that she loved her phone far more than Gollum obsessed over jewelry. I found that equal parts terrifying and hilarious.

“I know your father earned an above-average income in his lifetime,” Tina said, “based on things you have mentioned over the years.”

“Yeah, he had his own consulting company.” Consultant. Was there a vaguer job description? It suited my dad perfectly.

“Yes, and did you inherit?”

“. . . No.” At the polite silence, I jumped back in with, “That doesn’t prove anything, because I didn’t expect to.”

“Dick,” Jessica muttered to the table. Entirely against my will I warmed to her a bit. She’d been outraged at the time, even more so when she realized I wasn’t in the least surprised he’d left me in death what he’d given me in life: nothing.

“He left it all to his son?” Christina Caresse Chavelle asked, because you could take the Southern belle out of the nineteenth century but you couldn’t take the nineteenth century out of Tina. I love how she didn’t even sound surprised, like disinheriting females was a standard thing.

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m BabyJon’s legal guardian now and I’m sure I would have seen some kind of paperwork naming him as an inheritor.” Was that the word? Inheritor? Or maybe just
heir
? “Or, if there was, I would have ignored the paperwork, which Sinclair would have found while he was snooping—”

“Darling, helping you organize your finances is hardly—”

“Shut it, Snoopy McSpy, we both know you can’t help yourself.” One of those things that had aggravated the piss out of me a couple of years before but which I was slowly becoming resigned to. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t care anymore as that I didn’t mind. There’s a difference there. A teeny one, but still. “I’m right, aren’t I? No financial paperwork. Just the baby. I inherited my brother,” I finished glumly. I did not regret that. Not one goddamn bit; I loved BabyJon not least because he was my only chance at motherhood. But it sounded so bleak to hear it out loud. I’d wished for him, and it had killed my father. I wanted a baby of my own, and it had orphaned my brother.

I shook myself out of the sadness semicoma and continued. “Dad’s finances were always a snarl. He and my mom would fight about money when they weren’t fighting about him treating marriage vows like marriage suggestions. He had offshore stuff, I think, and lots of money tied up into various funds. We lived well, but he was always bitching about being pulled in too many directions. So . . .” I looked around the table of sympathetic faces. Nope. No sale. I didn’t want any fucking pity. And my father was dead. End of story. “So that doesn’t prove anything. That doesn’t mean he hid all his assets before ditching the Ant in death, only to pop up downtown a few years later and sprint away from Jessica.”

“Insurance?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know. At the time, I’d cared about two things: BabyJon, and that I didn’t feel worse our father was dead. If there had been some—and he must have had key man insurance at the least—it hadn’t trickled my way. It wouldn’t have gone to my mom, either. The Ant, then, and since she died with him . . . what? Where did unclaimed insurance money disappear to? The ether? The Internet?

“Well.” Tina set her phone on the table, folded her hands, and looked at me. “This is very curious.”

“It’s really not.”

“I can begin looking into this for you at once, but of course—”

“No.”

Elizabeth.

I turned to Sinclair. “I said no
.
” I looked around the table. “Not a single person in this room has time for this shit. Not one of us. And even if you did, it’s none of your business.”

“My own,” the king began gently, “will you not consider—”

“I—I forbid you from looking into it, Eric.” His eyebrows arched; I only called him Eric when I meant business. To Tina: “Both of you. I’m not allowing it. No.”

A heavy, stressful silence, broken when Tina bowed her head and murmured acquiescence. Sinclair took a few seconds longer, and things were mighty tense while he considered my order.

A lot of people didn’t get that I wasn’t the queen because I’d married the king. Sinclair was the king because he’d married me. I was foretold; how about that for a joke on the universe? Sinclair was incredible and wonderful and maddening and lovely and one of tens of thousands of vampires. He was a king because he married the queen, and there was only one queen: she be me. If we were insane enough to file taxes as vampires, my name would be in the Head of Household box.

After a decade or two, he inclined his head toward me. “Of course, my queen. It will be as you say. We are yours to command.”

I blew out the breath I’d taken and then forgotten about. I probably shouldn’t have seemed so obviously relieved, so “oh, thank God, what would I have done if he’d said no?” but I couldn’t help it. To his credit, he said nothing but the corner of his mouth twitched upward.

“All right,” I said. “Okay. We’re all on the same page, then.”

Marc shook his head and DadDick piped up with, “Not even close.”

Yeah, well, close enough, anyway. Crisis over.

“We’re not, though,” Jessica said quietly. “Yours to command, I mean.”

Crisis back on. “Don’t I know it,” I snapped. “If anything, it’s been the other way around ever since you kidnapped my plant in eighth grade Health.”

“You had no right to take that magazine hostage,” Jess retorted. “Something had to be done; you were going power mad.”

“Kidnapper!”

“Hoarder!”

That bitch! I got aggravated just remembering. Some schools made students pretend to mother or father an egg; ours used little rosemary sprigs in pots. I’d refused to lend Jessica
Seventeen
magazine’s prom issue and she had retaliated by kidnapping my plant, then sending me misspelled ransom notes with rosemary clippings (“Proof we have your sprig! Give up the magazine or your plant won’t live to garnish anything!”). I’d refused to negotiate with terrorists and took the D in Health, then wore my dishonor proudly, like last season’s Choos. To this day neither of us can stand the sight or smell of rosemary.

“Look, if that’s supposed to mean you’re gonna waste your time on this frivolous crap, then that’s what you’ll do, because if you say you’ll do a thing, Jessica, then you’ll do it and it’s one of the things I usually love about you. But
they
”—jerking my thumb at the vampires—“can’t help you.”

“Yeah, I caught that when you pulled the queen card, not an overreaction at all. I don’t need their help, you megalomaniac,” she snapped back, “and if you’re going to be such an ungrateful, miserable twat—”

“I am not miserable!”

“—then fine. I’ll stay out of it.”

“Good!”

“Fine.”

“Okay.”

“Yes.”

Crisis averted again.

“But just because we’re not digging doesn’t mean you can hide behind denial, even if that’s your default.”

“Hide!” I gasped; that one genuinely hurt. Didn’t she understand I was basically forced to secrete myself from the Antichrist and, by association, Hell? That wasn’t hiding, except for how
secrete
was a synonym for
hide
. How did she not get that? “Oh, very nice! As if I’d—whoa.”

And just like that, the Antichrist was storming into our kitchen. We’d been so caught up in the argument, which felt like it had been raging for a year, no one realized she was there until she was
right there.
It was easy to surprise me, but seeing Tina
and
Sinclair looking like someone goosed them was startling.

I shouldn’t have been surprised; as a half angel (apparently Lucifer used to be a good guy), Laura had inherited the ability to teleport herself anywhere as long as she did it from Hell. And she’d learned pretty quickly how to pop into Hell. Reason #261 the devil sucked: “physical contact” with a “blood relative” facilitated the “magicks” (ugh, I hate when they misspelled it on purpose, you could actually hear the
k
) of interdimensional teleportation. In other words, the Antichrist had learned how to teleport by slapping the shit out of the vampire queen. Sometimes I feel like my entire life after death(s) is one long punch line.

“You.” Laura stopped dead and rapidly shook her head. There was a tiny pattering sound and white and yellow things in her hair. They were—were those eggshells? Yes. Yes, they were. She had eggshells in her hair and some of them were falling to the floor in her agitation. Someone had lost their damned mind and egged the Antichrist. “You!”

“Me?” I squeaked.

“I can’t. I can’t do it alone. I probably can’t even do it with you. They’re finding ways to get out of Hell and I can’t make them stop.”

New crisis avoided. Old crisis: back on.

 CHAPTER 

ELEVEN

“What happened?” I reached up to brush more eggshells from her hair.

“What does it look like?” she snapped, jerking away from me. Which, for Laura, was the equivalent of kicking me in the shin. If someone bumped into her,
she
apologized. I’d seen it. Hell, I’d bumped into her. (Once with my fist.)

It was so annoying. The Antichrist was just one big, constant, never-ending annoyance. I went through most of my life assuming I was an only child and, unlike other only children (Jessica, Marc, others I knew but didn’t live with), I never once wished for a sib. Laura had met my expectations and then some: younger sibs, I had quickly discovered, were a pain in the ass. (I won’t waste anyone’s time with Laura’s theories about recently discovered older sibs.)

“You were egged in Hell?” I guessed. It was impossible, but the only thing I could come up with based on the evidence. Just picturing it made me want to laugh and then vomit from terror. The dead had eggs?
Hell
had eggs? I—what? No. I can’t. No.

“Of course not,” she said impatiently, flicking her fingers through her hair. Anyone else covered in eggs would look like they’d refused to hand out candy on Halloween and had been punished accordingly. Laura, frazzled and out of temper as she was, looked like she was in the middle of an expensive beauty treatment. One that worked. “I forgot my eggs in the trunk.” At my blank expression she elaborated: “Eggs. In subzero temperatures.”

“So they got super cold?” I guessed. Unless she was the chicken who was supposed to sit on them, I had no idea why she’d care. Also I was positive the Antichrist had more important things to do than sitting on frozen eggs. I mean, she did charity work all the time but surely she didn’t have to stoop to stooping over eggs. This is why I distance myself from charity work. You figure you can get away with just writing a check, and then they show up with frozen eggs for you to sit on.