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.
