Undead and Unwary (26 page)

They were both smiling again. They had terrific smiles, I figured because of terrific orthodontists. “That’s fine. We’re okay to do that. In our house,” she explained, nodding at the mansion looming behind us, “weird
is
wonderful. It’s a synonym.”

“Is that, like, a metaphor? I’ve been working on metaphors this week.”

“Keep working. And don’t worry, Mom and Dad will get it.”

“They will?” I didn’t want to worry the kids, so I managed to keep most of the doubt out of my tone. “Okay. They will. Right? Right.”

“What choice?” the boy asked, looking, for a few seconds, older than his years. “That’s how it is here.”

“Point,” I said. “Then let’s get it done. We have to go around the side, I’m afraid.”

“Nix.” Jessica’s son reached into his back pocket and then jingled something in front of my face. “They’re called house keys and, nobody knows why, but you never have yours with you.”

I resisted the urge to snatch them away. “Off my case, brat.”

“Ease, willya? She’s got stuff. It’s not easy running Hell,” his sister said, sliding a protective arm around my waist.

“I loved when you came to career day.” He sighed. “Next time, bring more demons.”

“I might love you two,” I decided, “more than sandals in summer.”

“We grew on you. Like lichen!”

Her brother snorted, then shook his keys at me again and started trotting up the sidewalk toward the door. “Move-move, ladies! Let’s go have the Talk with the ’rents. Again. And then take a Cinnabon break.”

“I should be more terrified,” I confessed, following them.

“Plenty of time for that,” Jessica’s daughter replied with such a droll smirk, I couldn’t help laughing again.

 CHAPTER  

TWENTY-SIX

Here’s the thing about vampire hearing. We can hear a pin drop, but that’s boring. (Who lurks in doorways listening for pins to drop, anyway? Creeps. That’s who.) We can hear whispered conversations a floor away, sometimes a block away if the wind is right. We can hear a car pull in from the attic, or pull out from the basement. We can hear when Marc is experimenting and when he’s just pacing, desperately wanting something to keep his dead brain busy. We can hear the babies snuffling in their sleep, we can hear them wake up, and we can hear Jess and DadDick stumbling through the house to warm bottles and go to them. Sometimes we can hear heartbeats.

But a lot of the time we don’t want to. Speaking for myself, if I’m concentrating on hate-watching old eps of
Helix
(they’ve got to stop giving the Syfy channel money to make movies), I don’t want to be distracted by Tina muttering under her breath two floors away as she struggles to reconcile one of SinCorp’s many P&Ls.

So you learn to tune it out. Or try to. I could never get the hang of it until Tina took me aside and said, “Airport,” like that was an answer.

It was! But it took me a while to get it. She pointed out that when you’re in an airport, you’re walking to your gate while lugging an overnight bag or a laptop, counting gates and glancing from café to bar to Starbucks to figure out what you want to drink before the flight boards. And there are hundreds of people around you, milling and chatting and running and walking and it’s busy all around, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not upsetting or overwhelming or even interesting. It’s just how airports are. And you don’t care, so you don’t hear them. You can just tune out all those conversations that have nothing to do with you and focus on getting to your gate with your Green Tea Frappuccino intact. And once I grasped what Tina was trying to explain to me, it became easy. I didn’t have to hear the babies’ heartbeats, or Marc’s pacing, unless I wanted to.

All that to say that I did
not
need vampire hearing to hear Jessica’s shriek when we walked in the front door, courtesy of her kid’s keys: “Someone better find my babies
right goddamned
now
or I’m going to get my husband’s guns; call my lawyer; and take one of Sinclair’s shiny, sexy cars—and everyone in the city of St. Paul will have a very bad day!”

The twins exchanged a look and started to sprint and I had great respect for their reckless bravery. I, meanwhile, had to actively resist the urge to scuttle back outside to the driveway, or at least cower in the hall, and followed.

“Jessica, be reasonable,” my husband was pleading. “Leave the automobile out of it.”

“Stupid, we’re so
stupid.
” I could hear every bitter word, and if the twins weren’t in front of me, I would have crossed the length of the mansion in a heartbeat. It broke my heart to hear the savage self-hate in my friend’s voice. “We knew it had happened before and we just—we just sat around until it happened
again
. And I know you texted Betsy, but what do you think she can do, exactly? We’ve figured we can’t call the cops, but nobody’s dropped off a ransom note, nobody’s made a demand, our babies are just—just
gone
. Again! And even if we get them back, how long until they go missing again?” Her voice caught on sobs. “I c-can’t live like this. W-won’t live like this. It’s too m-much—who the hell are you?”

This because the girl had gotten to the swinging kitchen door first, darted through, and threw herself into her mother’s arms. I heard Jessica grunt and stagger back—the twins had their father’s long legs—and got to the kitchen in time to see her arms automatically go around the intruder/daughter.

“It’s okay, Mama.” Jessica’s daughter squeezed her in a fierce hug, eliciting a pained squeak, then pulled back and held Jess at arm’s length. “We’re right here. We’re not missing. We’re here. It’s—nnnfff.”

Her brother, right on her heels, and that was twice in five seconds Jessica nearly went sprawling courtesy of her exuberant offspring. DadDick was on his feet and moving to pull them apart. “Hey! Get off her, both of you. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“We didn’t use my house keys,” I replied, “I can tell you that.”

My own. As ever, you arrive in the nick of time.
My husband’s deep relief came through like a baseball bat through fog.

Dude, you are not even going to believe the story behind these two.

Doubtless. Stop calling me
dude
.

“We’re not missing.” Jessica’s daughter was patting her cheeks, the way little kids do when they’re reaching out for someone they love, trying to get their attention. “We’re not stolen. We’re here, Mama, and it’s all fine.”

“This’ll be tough to chew, Mom, but we’re yours. Remember your freak pregnancy? It resulted in freak kids.” The exuberant teen spread his arms wide. “Ta-da!”

“But we’re
your
freak kids,” his sister said, snuggling into Jess for a hug, which my dazed friend automatically returned. “And there’s nothing to be scared of. We’re here even when we aren’t. It’s our nature.”

On the one hand, I had to give them points for how quickly they were calming my pal. I hadn’t thought that was possible without heavy tranquilizers. On the other, the things they were telling her made no sense, so it shouldn’t have calmed Jess at all. But I didn’t interrupt or try to correct them. I was too busy trying to think up a nonalarming way to explain what was happening.

“We can prove it.” They were now directing their comments to their father, who had stopped trying to separate them but looked like someone had punched him in the kidney and followed it up with a gut punch. “We know everything about you guys. You’ve told us so many boring stories of your childhood. Boring because of the repetition!” the boy hastily clarified. “Not boring because we don’t actually care how your childhoods were grueling and how good we have it and how when you were a little boy you had to sell tractors uphill in the snow while waiting for your trust fund to mature.”

Jessica took in a deep breath, waited a couple of seconds, then let it out, along with, “I believe you.”

“Oh, an example? Okay, when you and Dad were young and dumb—you believe us?”

“You, um. You look like a picture of my grandma. You look exactly like her. This might sound hard to believe, but for a second I thought you were her, time traveling to the future for some strange supernatural-related reason.”

“It sounds one hundred percent believable.”

The boy slapped his forehead. “Grammy Midge! We should have thought of that straight off.” He turned to his father. “Elephant in the room? I look like her, too—it’s fine, it’s okay to say. Damn these delicate features! Why couldn’t I have inherited your swimmer’s shoulders, at least?”

“It’s true. It’s really—you didn’t get taken. You didn’t. You’re okay. You’re—you’re nice, too.” Jessica burst into tears and elicited squawks as she squeezed the twins in a ferocious double hug. “And you’re not freaked out. You’re worried about your dad and me. You’re not surprised by . . .” She waved a hand at the kitchen, encompassing the zombie, the vampires, the king and queen of same, the evidence of an emergency smoothie session, the freezer practically bulging with bottles of strangely flavored vodka, the other freezer stuffed with dead mice. “By this. Any of it. You’re okay. You’re really okay.”

“Thank God you’re finally here.”

Finally? So I’d been gone longer than my time in Hell again. At least the others were taking it in stride, more because they were used to dealing with my incompetence than because they were resilient. Or numbed to the ongoing strangeness of their lives.

“It was like a season two
Game of Thrones
flashback,” Marc whispered to me. “Y’know, when Dany finds out someone stole her babies? ‘Where are my dragons?!’ That whole season was just her yelling about her dragons.”

“Time and place, Marc,” I replied, making shushing motions, but alas. Too late.

“If you don’t stop with the
GoT
references, I will punch your face into the back of your skull,” Jess threatened in a way that seemed more than plausible. “There won’t be enough Advil in the world to fix the resulting headache.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The zombie gulped.

“Stop scaring our zombie. And you two . . . how? How are you even here?” DadDick still looked stunned.

“Here it is, Big Papa, when a man and a woman love each other very much, sometimes they tell the vampires they live with to get gone for a while so they can practice private coitus—”

I burst out laughing, a slave to the boy’s excellent smart-assery.

“You can skip the technical details,” DadDick said, relaxing for the first time since we’d blitzed into the kitchen. I figured he, like me, had seen how like Jessica these two were, and it was almost better than a DNA test. “How are you doing this? Is it time travel? Oh. Huh.”

“I know, right?” I asked. “You hear yourself say something that ridiculous and unreal, and you’re only surprised that you’re not surprised.”

“Exactly.” He turned back to the teens. “Is someone doing it to you?”

Vigorous nods. And the twins looked over at me.

“Whoa.” I held up both hands like I was being arrested. Which would be the least of my problems right now. “Do not. Nope. You twerps aren’t pinning this on me.”

“We wouldn’t, except for how it’s all your fault.”

And like that, all the happiness was sucked out of the room.

 CHAPTER  

TWENTY-SEVEN

“This!”

“Ow,” I mumbled. Jess’s shriek was nearing supersonic.

“This is why we wouldn’t ask you to be their godmother!”

“I didn’t do anything! I am innocent and, also, I’m the one who
found
the little jerks. Twice!”

“Little? We’re almost as tall as you are,” the girl snapped.

I shrugged that off and turned back to Jess. “And what are you talking about, ‘wouldn’t ask’? You’re not going to ask? You’re not gonna name them and you’re not gonna assign godparents?” I couldn’t tell which one I found most appalling. Wait, I had it now. The one about me, definitely.

“This is not about soothing your insecurity!”

Aw, come on, not even a little? She could soothe me if she really tried.
“Don’t you remember me telling you how horrible the future was?”

“Vividly,” she muttered, trying—and failing—to run a hand through her hair. She had it pulled back, and slicked back, so it wasn’t budging for a while. When the screaming started, we all assumed the positions: Sinclair and Tina off to one side, watching with polite dispassion; Marc pulling back so DadDick could step up (for a hug; he knew better than to try to run soothing fingers through her hair); and me cowering by the sink. “The whole thing is still very, very vivid. Mostly because you wouldn’t shut up about it.”

“It was awful but fascinating. It’s hard to picture me not being with Jessica like you said in the old timeline.” DadDick gave his wife a squeeze. “I’m sorry there’s no more Christian Louboutin to make your favorite shoes, but at least there’s us and the babies.”

I bit my lip so as not to let out something less than charitable (“You could have a thousand weird babies and none of them would replace Louboutin’s genius, flatfoot!”) and tried to stay on point. “Yeah, like I was saying, the future sucked hard and long—”

Jess slammed her hands over the girl’s ears. “Not in front of the babies!”

“Ow, my tympanic membranes!” The riled teen shook her off. “Mama!”

“She’s in all the advanced classes,” her brother confided. “It’s fine, Mom. We’ve heard this story a hundred times: You Almost Never Existed except for Onniebetty’s Blundering. And she’s said way worse than ‘sucking hard’ and—”

“Enough,” Jess warned, and her son closed his mouth: zip!

How? How is this my life?

“I was tyrannical and gross and Sinclair was mysteriously absent and you were, too, and there were zombies, icky, drippy, rotting zombies, but remember how wonderful BabyJon was? Oooh, and handsome? Not that good looks measure goodness or anything but it’s still worth noting. He was gorgeous. Because of me! Okay, because of the Ant and my dad, genetically speaking, but he was confident and strong and sweet because I raised him to be like that! So how come I can’t be their godmother? If the spawn of the Ant can turn out terrific, your li’l sprogs can, too.” Also, what exactly were the responsibilities that came with godmotherhood? I should probably get a detailed job description before I got further invested in being hurt that I wasn’t being offered the job. The girl seemed savvy about footgear, so clearly my work with her had borne fruit, but the boy was a trickier read, though his fondness for Cinnabon and Orange Julius was a huge point in his favor. They were fearless and funny, which was even better. And maybe I was supposed to, I dunno, guide them spiritually? Or whatever? “Give me one good reason why it wouldn’t work.”