“You wish.”
“The mailman left a hand grenade in your slot?”
“Do you want me to tell you, or do I have to listen to more dumb comments?”
“They are not dumb. So. What is it?”
“Nothing much. A cadre of old vampires is ticked at me, has already tried to kill me once, and won't stop until I'm dead or they are, and there's, like, twenty of them and only one of me. Also, we're out of milk.”
“Really?” Nick sounded like he'd won the lottery. “You wouldn't tease me, would you?”
“I swear on every one of Marc's stitches that it's true. Not a drop of milk in the whole house.”
“Marc's stitches – hmm. Interesting that Jessica hasn't mentioned any of this. You'd better tell me.”
So I gave him the whole story, thinking, You only think Jessica's in hot water, you poor bastard. She must not have reached him last night. He had no idea the storm was about to break over his head.
“Uh-?huh.” I'd assume he was taking notes, only Nick never wrote anything down. Not like the cops on TV, that was for sure. “Uh-?hmm. And you don't know where they are?”
“Not yet, but Sinclair and Tina are doing hours of drudgery research to figure that out.”
“And Marc's at the General?” he asked, using the slang we used for the local hospital.
“Yeah, but he'll get out today. They ended up keeping him for a couple of nights, but not because anything wrong popped up. I think it was probably because he's big-?time popular on the staff. But we're moving him to The Grand Hotel tonight.”
“Where he'll stay indefinitely.”
“Yeah, and the thing is, Jessica won't go. I mean, flat-?out refuses.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Sic her!”
“Doesn't she have, I don't know, a fucking Swiss chalet or something? Some other property besides the mansion where she can stay?”
“No, she doesn't care for Europe unless it's Tuscany, but surely you've got a chalet up your sleeve, John Deere Boy.”
“Well, she doesn't have to stay there,” he said grimly. “Not in Vampire Central.”
“Yeah, so sock it to her.” I didn't mention that Jessica wasn't staying at the mansion because she had nowhere else to go. He knew why she was staying, too, but didn't want to admit it, at least out loud. “Go tell her who's boss, by God.”
“Oh, shut up,” he said, and clicked off his phone.
Chapter 26
My semi-?good deed done for the day, I rolled over, thumbed off my phone, dropped it on the bedside table (Sinclair was already bitching about the marks my phone and keys were leaving on various antiques around the house), and examined my feet.
There were advantages to being a vampire. I had refused to admit that for a long time and, even now, wasn't very happy when forced to make such an admission. The strength thing, and the speed. The hearing, of course.
More than once I'd been grateful for all three, usually while some psycho was trying to kill me. (Although if I hadn't been undead in the first place, said psycho would not have been trying to kill me, but screw it.)
And, although there were far more drawbacks than advantages to being queen, that had its high points, too.
But there were plenty of disads to being dead. One of the many was, you couldn't change your looks. I mean, you could, but whatever you did – paint your fingernails, cut your hair, curl your eyelashes – was undone when you rose the next night. I had no idea why, just like I didn't know how we could walk around with a heart rate of seven, or how we didn't need to breathe more than a couple of times an hour.
Thus, I always – always – needed a pedicure. (Thank God I had died only a few days after a cut and highlights!) It was depressing and a fact of life (or death, if you will), but there it was.
No time to mope. (Well. There was always time to mope. But I wasn't in the mood tonight.) I decided to do a quick one, myself, and twenty minutes later I was admiring my pink, newly smooth feet, and the wiggling toes with their coat of “Bitterness,” which was actually a lovely soft gray.
Energized with the gorgeousness of my feet, I darted into the bathroom, rummaged around in the counter under the sink, and extracted a box of Crimson Tide, a wash-?in/wash-?out hair color. Stayed in for up to twelve shampoos. If you were alive, anyway.
When I got out of the shower, I couldn't help grinning at myself in the mirror. My hair was a dark, unnatural red; the shade made my skin paler than usual and my eyes seem green (they tended to fluctuate between blue and green, depending on what I was wearing and the quality of the light). And the box only cost twelve bucks. Since I'd be blond again tomorrow night, it wasn't worth going to the salon and dropping a hundred bucks for a custom dye job.
I dried off and got dressed, then opened my bedroom door, briefly wondered where my husband was (Sinclair only had to rest on occasion and, likely after sex, had waited until I conked out and then gone to the library or the fax machine or the local Kinko's to make color copies of something – wait, he had Tina to do that), furtively checked for unwanted ghosts, then bounded down the steps.
I could hear the fight long before I got to the kitchen door.
Chapter 27
“I can't believe you're staying! You know, and you're fucking staying!”
“Well, what about you, white boy?” Hmm. Jessica must be mega-?pissed... “white boy” and “white girl” tended to come out only when she was furious, or scared. “You somehow forgot to mention that you're using my best friend to help you look good for the chief.”
Wait. What?
“Not to mention, you expect her to take bullets for you if things get nasty. Slip your mind?”
“I'm not taking bullets for anyone,” I announced, pushing open the door, “unless it's Beverly Feldman.”
“Stay out of this, Betsy.”
“Yeah, fuck off, blondie.”
Sinclair's head came up with a jerk (he'd been seated at the counter, pretending to read the Journal), and he opened his mouth to hiss or roar something, but I overrode him with a breezy, “And a verrrrrry pleasant good evening to all of you, too.”
The pleasantness of my greeting appeared to take the wind out of everyone's sails, not just his. I poured myself half the pitcher of orange juice and sat my ass down just like I belonged there.
It could be tricky, busting in on a fight. There was the “oh my God, I'm so sorry you didn't see me, I'll just scuttle back out the way I came” method, always popular with roommates of the female persuasion.
And there was my “hey, you're doing this in a public place – sort of, our kitchen – and you're fighting about me, so guess what? I'm staying” method, which I normally didn't have the nerve to try.
Jessica was eyeballing my head. “Nice hair.”
“Thanks.”
“It's very,” Sinclair said carefully, “bright.”
“Felt like a change.”
“Mmmm. Detective Berry,” Sinclair tried again, in a much calmer tone, but no less frightening, if you knew him, which we all did, “please do not speak to my wife that way in her own home.”
“It's my girlfriend's home,” Nick said, sounding sulky, but at least he was quieting down, too.
“Yes, so you delight in reminding me, and as I said earlier, I would be delighted to purchase the place from
