SEVEN

"I wasn't going to hurt him."

"No, of course not."

"They're acting like I was going to hurt him. You are, too."

"No," my husband disagreed.

"Sinclair, you've got your arm around my elbow and you're propelling me out of the kitchen."

"No."

"You absolutely are, Sinclair."

"No."

"And Tina's right behind you!" Backing him up, like she always did. Or she was backing me up. Or she was helping him back me up. So that'd be ... backing him up to back me up?

Anyway: they were hustling me up the stairs so fast, I was getting vertigo.

"We're not ... I'm just, ah, pleased to see you, my queen."

"Spare me the crapola, Tina."

Tina was our assistant/subject/friend. She was Sinclair's majordomo-I've recently learned that's one word! (Oh, the things I've picked up in death ... I could write a book. A funny, shallow book, which would be, incomprehensibly, a bestseller.)

Tina was my husband's superassistant, a secretary with power who occasionally carried a pistol. (So: best secretary ever! And since I used to be a bad one, I'd know.) Majordomo or, as she once teased last month (I think she was teasing), Major of the Mansion. Yeah, I know: I was scared to call her that if she was teasing, or if she was serious. Could I tease if she was serious about M of the M? What if I took it seriously when she was teasing? You see the sort of problems I have to deal with on a daily, nightmare-y basis.

So she was an assistant, but much, much more. Except I never knew just how much. Friends didn't call you "Your Majesty," and she'd saved my ass about nine times in the last couple of years. But she discouraged closeness. Chilly, and also insanely hot: Tina'd been killed in her teens during the Civil War, and dressed like an escapee from a Catholic school run by a really dirty old man. So chilly but hot. Distant but caring. Professional but familiar.

"We were having a family meeting," I explained, all the time being rushed to my room like a bad girl ("Bad vampire queen!"), "and things got a teensy bit heated, and then Sinclair freaked out, and that's when you came in. Cribbing lines from Practical Magic, I might add." It was Tina's favorite book, but not her favorite movie. Weirdo. Bullock and Kidman rocked that flick.

"It did seem a little tense in there."

"Tense? Try insane. They don't think I should save Marc."

"Can you save Marc?"

"You missed the 'duh, queen of the vampires, duh!' part of the meeting, because I established I was pretty sure I c-yeow!" A final shove up the stairs, a slam of the door, and now the three of us were in my bedroom.

I took a breath and tried to chill. "Seriously: why did you put me on the train to heck straight to my room?" (Having actually been to hell, I hardly ever used hell these days unless I was referring to hell.)

"You cannot, my own."

Tina nodded so hard she almost lost a hair ribbon. (See, see? A hair ribbon? She looked like a slutty hot extra from Little House on the Prairie.) "The king is right, Majesty, you cannot."

"Don't you two start." I scowled and flopped on the bed, leaned back on my elbows, and scowled more. "It's my fault Marc decided he had to give himself a dirt nap. I'm getting him out of said dirt nap, and I don't wanna hear from you two about it."

"Yes."

"Precisely," Sinclair said in almost the same breath.

"Uh ... what?" I was usually braced for opposition, so when I didn't get it, it sometimes threw me off guard. "Sorry?"

"But you cannot."

"I'm confused," I admitted. Maybe less scowling, more paying attention? I guess it could work ... couldn't hurt to try, right? "And too hungry to concentrate on your riddles. Dude, we haven't snacked on each other for two days. And my rapist-trolling was a bust last night. Stupid St. Paul low crime rate..." Rapists and cops: they were never around when you needed to complain about a parking ticket or lure a sexual offender into a dark alley to drink their blood and explain the concept of irony. Typical. I bounded off the bed and spotted the small bowl of cherries on the mantel-Jessica had been snacking and chatting in our room earlier, and must have forgotten the bowl.

I grabbed one, popped it into my mouth, and then gently bit down and sucked on the juice. It wasn't as good as I remembered eating them to be, and not nearly as thrilling as blood, but it was also better than nothing. I could think if I had something in my mouth. Uh. Maybe I should rephrase...

"We have to come up with a plan."

"Agreed."

"Oh. We are on the same page ... that's always nice." I shifted the cherry to my other cheek. Chomp, suck. Admonish self to ignore urge to swallow, so as not to then be victim to the urge to vomit.

Sinclair smiled broadly. "It is, my own."

"And as their (ugh) king and queen, we gotta set a good example. Well, Garrett's king and queen. But the example-setting, that's gotta be the first thing." The enormous bedroom, bigger than the living room and master bedroom in my old house, suddenly felt too small-that was a first!-and I started to pace. "Then we gotta convince them that we actually know what we're doing. So we can do the second thing. The leading. If they know we've got the Marc Thing under control-whatever the Marc Thing's gonna be-they probably won't freak, right?"

Sinclair started to laugh. And Tina was looking at the ceiling, the mantel, the headboard ... anywhere but at me.

"I know, it sounds kind of impossible, but Marc's counting on us to pull it off. At least I think he is. Wherever he is."

He was still laughing. And she still wouldn't look at me.

"What's the matter with you? I'm the one doing all the thinking, and your big contribution is to chortle like a hyena. Handle your shit, Sink Lair."

"The stem," he managed, holding his stomach, "has been sticking out of your mouth during your entire discourse."

"Well, who gives a ripe shit?" I spit the pit, stem, and masticated cherry remains into my palm. "Focus, you two." Ewww. An average observer would think I was hanging on to a blood clot. "There's a garbage can around here somewhere." I spied it, and tossed the clot. The cherry, I meant. "And I guess we'd better figure out what we're gonna tell the others."

"No, Majesty." Tina could finally look at me, which was a relief for both of us, I was sure.

"What?" "No" was not something I heard from her very often.

"No, you cannot talk to them about this." Sinclair and Tina were now nodding in unison. It was terrifying.

"Uh, what?"

"You cannot." He shrugged his broad shoulders, which looked especially yummy-Sinclair practically wore suits for robes, and had put on a nice dark one this evening. "They are good friends, and are loyal to us, but they are human. There are things they cannot understand. Not ever. You continually ask me why you must be the queen and I the king-we must for things like this."

"So ... you're saying..." Careful. It could be a trap! Though for what, I had no idea. "... that you support me in trying to bring Marc back to life, but that I shouldn't talk to Jess or Nick-"

"Dick, now that you've changed the timeline, Majesty."

"-never mind-or Antonia or Garrett, even though they're really weird?"

"Antonia isn't one of us." Ouch. Since Tina had been in a war to set people free, I was a little surprised at how quickly that came out of her mouth. "Garrett is, but he is also ... different." To put it mildly. Hmm, I'm gonna regress for a second and wonder if Tina might be just the person to do the spreadsheet. So I decided not to point out to her that up until a few months ago, she had been on my back to kill him. That was interesting, how quickly Tina could erase people from an equation.

I'd have to really, really try to remember that.

They were with me. But not with the others ... and so they strongly recommended I drop the Marc Thing for now. I could bring it back up soon enough when we had a plan or, even better, when we'd executed the plan I hadn't thought up yet, and could present Newly Alive Marc as a fait accompli.

I wasn't scared they were suggesting that course of action. I was scared because it sounded like a pretty good idea. So I dropped it.

For a while.

EIGHT

For the third time in an hour and a half, I tripped on something, and nearly pitched headfirst into the attic stairwell. Cursing, I caught myself on the railing and hauled myself upright, then looked to see what had nearly killed me. A stool! Who puts a stool on stairs? Who needs to use a stool on stairs?

Stupid Jessica and her stupid nesting instincts, that was who. Post-meeting, and post-meeting-meeting, Nick/Dick had explained the thing to me. Nesting was this weird hideous thing pregnant women did when they sensed their giant bellies were getting ready to expel the kid into the world. Depending on the woman (and the unholiness of the baby, I s'pose), that meant anything from reorganizing the spice rack to combing through every room of an ancient mansion and stacking stuff in hallways and stairwells to be hauled or stored or burned or blown up.

And I kept tripping on the damned things! It was no good having super vamp eyesight when I wasn't paying attention to my surroundings. Which I hardly ever was. I had stuff to think about. Mostly I had to think about the fact that Tina and Sinclair were all, "Yay, Team Betsy, rah-rah, bring Marc back!" while also being all, "And shhhh! Leave the humans and weirdos out of it, it's our vampire awesomeness societal secret." I had no idea how to feel about that, and just that part of it, the not knowing how to feel? Scariest thing to happen all week. And it had been a shit week.

But fuck it. If Jessica was waiting for the Stool Fairy to lug things into the attic, the Stool Fairy was here. No longer queen of the vampires, nay, now I be Ye Olde Stoole Faerie. Screw bringing back the dead (and the first geek to holler, "Bring outcher dead!" like a "hi, I never had sex in high school" Python-channeling idiot was gonna get smooshed); I'd bring back the footstools. I'd open my own U-Haul franchise. It wasn't like it could be more stressful than the queen gig, right?

So I picked up the little thing-about a foot high and wide, and so banged up there was no way to tell what kind of wood it was ... was rust a wood?-and stomped up the attic stairs. Time to use my stupid vampire strength for more than lugging six gallons of milk into the house at once. I'd haul all this icky crap into the attic. That ought to learn her ... and the unborn kid, too. Never soon enough for the kid to learn whose house this was. Whose house it was now, anyway.

(Yes. I'll come clean: the baby wasn't even here yet and I was jealous of it. I kind of liked being first in Jessica's life since her worthless asshat parents died their richly deserved deaths. In another time, she'd picked me. Maybe here, with a baby, maybe in the future I was determined to prevent ... she wouldn't.)

"Stupid babies," I muttered, plodding up the stairs, "ruining everything by being drooley and stupid. Except for BabyJon who is drooley, but not stupid. And how the heck am I gonna bring him back and also get through Thanksgiving? And my mom is dating! Ugh!" (I often bitched out loud to myself when no one I lived with wanted to hear it, which happened more often than you might think. No, really! And my baby bitching had nothing to do with how jealous I was that Jessica could make her body do something mine wouldn't ... couldn't, since I woke up dead. No, really!) "Stupid moms who date stupid guys whose names rhyme with 'beehive.' Stupid Clive Liveley, who looks like a giant baby and wants to make out with my mom! And stupid Giselle the cat, who started all this by willfully choosing to drop-"

I stopped bitching. Stopped walking. Also stopped breathing (which I probably hadn't been doing, anyway). My heart? Yep: stopped.

Because Giselle the cat was spread out on a clean towel on a carefully scrubbed section of the attic floor in all her dead-yet-pissed glory. And Marc, my dead friend, was busily dissecting her.

He looked up. His green eyes blinked slowly at me, like an owl. "Now, don't freak out," Marc said.

But I did, anyway.