Dead Over Heels (16 page)

“Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!”

Sinclair pulled out and started frantically feeling me. “Where are you hurt?”

“The Ant! The Ant!”

“You—what?”

Before I could elaborate (and where to begin?), I heard thundering footsteps and then Marc slammed into the closed office door. I heard him back off and grab for the doorknob, and then he was standing in the doorway. “Betsy, are you—oh my God!” He went red so fast I was afraid he was going to have a stroke. “I’m sorry, jeez, I thought that was a bad ‘aaaaahhhh,’ not a sex ‘aaaaahhh.’”

More footsteps, and then my best friend, Jessica, was saying, “What’s wrong? Is she okay?” She was so skinny and short, I couldn’t see her behind Marc.

“The Ant is here!” I yowled as Sinclair assembled the rags of his suit, picked me up off the desk, and shoved me behind him. I don’t know why he bothered; Marc was gay
and
a doctor, and so couldn’t care less if I was mostly naked. And Jessica had seen me naked about a million times. “Here, right now!”

“Your stepmother’s in this room?” I still couldn’t see her, but Jessica’s tone managed to convey the sheer horror I felt at the prospect of being haunted by the Ant.

“Where
else
would I be?” the Ant, the late Antonia Taylor, said reasonably. She was tapping her Paylessclad foot and nibbling her lower lip. “What I’d like to know is, where’s your father?”

“One problem at a time,” I begged.

A
fter Marc decided a Valium drip probably wouldn’t work on a vampire, he brought me a stiff drink instead. Which was sweet, but I was so rattled I drank it off in one gulp and it could have been paint thinner for all I knew.

“Is she still here?” he whispered.

“Of course I’m still here,” my dead stepmother snapped. “I told you, I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m the only one who can hear you,” I shrilled, “so just shut up!”

“Bring her another drink,” Sinclair muttered. We were still in his office, but Jessica had kindly brought robes to cover our shredded clothes. “Bring her three.”

“I don’t need booze, I need to get rid of you-know-what.”

“Very funny,” the Ant grumped.

She and my father had been killed in a gruesome, stupid car accident a couple of months ago. Where she had been since her death, and why she had shown up now, I didn’t know. And I didn’t
want
to know. But I was going to have to find out, because the ghosts never, ever went away until I solved their little problems for them.

And where
was
my dead dad, anyway? I sighed. Non-confrontational in life, as well as in death.

“What do you want?”

“I
told
you. To fix this.”

“Fix
what
?”

“
You
know.”

“This is so weird,” Marc murmured to Jessica, forgetting, as usual, about superior vamp hearing. “She’s having a conversation with the chair.”

“She is not, quiet so I can hear.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I really, really don’t. Please tell me.”

“Stop playing games.”

“I’m
not
!” I almost screamed. Then I felt Sinclair’s soothing hands on my shoulders and sagged into him. Like our honeymoon hadn’t been stressful enough, what with all the dead kids and Marc and Jessica crashing it and all. This was a hundred times worse.

“If you could just—” I began, when the office door crashed open, nearly smashing into Marc, who yelped and jumped aside.

Garrett, the Fiend formerly known as George, stood in the doorway, panting. Since he was seventy-some years old and didn’t need to breathe, I knew at once something was seriously fucked.

“They’re awake,” he gasped. “And they want to kill you.”

“Who?” Sinclair, Jessica, Marc, and I asked in unison.

“The other Fiends. I’ve been feeding them my blood and they’re pissed. They—they sort of ‘woke up’ and now they want to kill you.”

“It’s this lifestyle you lead,” the Ant said smugly. “These things are bound to happen.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up!” I barked. I actually had to clutch my head; which problem to tackle first?

“You’d better sit down and tell us everything,” Sinclair said, reminding me he was the vampire king. Bam. Decision made. We’d deal with what Garrett had done first.

So take that, dead stepmother.