We all shut up as we navigated another set of stairs... and then another. I'd been living here for months and months, and nobody had told me about the secret vampire escape tunnel.
I remembered that Sinclair had steered Jessica toward this house when we had to upgrade. Back in the days when I thought I hated him. And here I thought it had been because he was a history buff and liked old houses!
“I've never been bored, and scared, at the same time,” Marc commented.
“What do you want me to do with that information?” Tina asked.
“Just put us down,” he grumbled, and Tina did, hard enough to rattle my teeth. Marc and I groaned in unison.
Sinclair pressed another button, another wall raised, and I suddenly could hear flowing water. He walked out into what must have looked like pure darkness to the others, except I could hear his heels clanking on the boards of the dock. He sounded like a sheriff from the Old West.
“We walked all the way to the Mississippi?” Marc goggled.
“What 'we'?” Jessica asked. “And it was, what? Seven, eight whole blocks?”
We heard Sinclair start up the Evinrude, and as he hit the lights Jessica and Marc cheered.
“Get the rope, will you, darling?” he asked casually, as if he didn't look, at that moment, like the coolest guy in the universe.
The dock was a memory a few seconds later, and when Sinclair opened 'er up, I decided I wasn't mad anymore and allowed him to put his arm around me.
Chapter 7
“All right, Garrett,” my husband said about half an hour later. I had no idea where we were, but we were out of the Fiends' reach, at least for now. He'd powered down the motor, and we were floating between a couple of islands. City lights were visible, but far off. I'd always sucked at geography; the lights could have been St. Paul or Minneapolis for all I knew. “Suppose you tell us everything.”
I realized that during our tunnel getaway and subsequent penis discussion, Garrett hadn't said word one. And at some point, the Ant had disappeared. Thank goodness for small etcetera.
Garrett, a slim, tall blond with hair almost as long as Marc's, was sitting low in the bow, staring at his hands.
“Garrett? Helloooo? Time, if you didn't notice by the whole Fiends breaking down the door and the tunnel escape, is not on our side.”
“I am shamed,” he said at last, still staring at his hands. “I feel ashamed.”
“Well,” Marc said reasonably, swiveling around in one of the captain's chairs, “what'd you do?”
He looked up at me, the moonlight bouncing off his face and making his eyes seem to gleam. “You should kill me, dread queen. Right now.”
“Blech! I mean, uh, no way, Garrett, you're one of the family.” The giant extended family I neither wanted nor asked for. To think, three years ago I was living in a two-?bedroom in Apple Valley, bitching because I hadn't had a date in over a month. My biggest problem had been fixing the copy machine at my day job – management would try to fuck with the machines, and often there was no hope afterward. “Besides, if I didn't kill you when you were a Fiend, I'm sure not going to now and risk your girlfriend's wrath.” Antonia-?the-?werewolf was a high octane bitch when she was in a good mood. I never, never wanted to see her when she was really mad.
“Antonia,” Garrett said, almost sighed. “As you know, my mate has to leave me. Often, she leaves. More so, now that you changed her.”
We nodded, like we'd been cued. We did know this. Antonia had to pop over to Cape Cod now and again – the seat of werewolf power, pardon me while I snigger – and tend to pack business. We assumed she didn't take Garrett, because traveling with a vampire could get tricky.
Also, up until two months ago, she was a werewolf who had never changed during the full moon. I had done something to her, something we all still didn't like to talk about, and now she did change. The meetings on Cape Cod had increased as a result, but those of us in the manse weren't talking about it.
“I stay,” he continued, “because I'm afraid.”
“Of what?” Jessica asked.
“The world,” he replied simply. “The last time I went out in the world, I was captured and bound like a slave.”
Thank you, Marjorie, you kidnapping fuck, may you roast in Hell for a zillion billion years.
“The time before that, I was killed. The monster got me. I don't go out in the world anymore.”
It occurred to me (it was going to be a night of discovering things that had been under my nose) that except for going after Antonia last summer (and getting captured, as he put it, and bound like a slave), I couldn't remember the last time he had left the mansion.
I imagined he fed on Antonia, but such things were none of my business, so I didn't ask. As long as he wasn't hurting innocent people, I had no interest in where he was getting his liquid diet.
“An agoraphobic vampire?” Marc asked, and I could tell he was trying very, very hard not to laugh.
“It's more common than you might think,” Tina said, pacing the small deck. She was so light on her feet, the boat didn't even rock. “Particularly when the vampire in question had a bad death.”
“Uh, excuse me, but don't you guys have to kill somebody for them to come back? Aren't all vampires, by definition, murder victims? They all sound like bad deaths to me.”
“Point,” Jessica said, actually sticking her left index finger in the air to mark the point.
“So, didn't you guys all have bad deaths? Except for Betsy?”
“Call me the day after you get run over by an Aztec, and then we'll talk,” I grumbled.
“We are not here to discuss such things with – with guests,” Sinclair said, correcting himself so smoothly Tina and I were probably the only ones who knew he'd been about to say “outsiders” or “humans.” “And you were telling us about Antonia.”
“Other than my mate, I have no peers. All of you, even the humans, are smarter than I.”
“What 'even'?” Marc said. “I'm a doctor.”
Jessica put a soothing hand on Marc's arm. “Garrett, don't be so hard on yourself. You've been out of it for, what? Sixty, seventy years? Crack a few modern history books, you'll be up to speed in no time.”
Garrett waited patiently until Jessica was finished. “It is not my place to befriend a queen, or a king. So when Antonia leaves me, I am lonely.”
I was beginning to see where this was going. Oh, it'd be a lovely children's book: Garrett the Fiend Finds Friends!
“And it seemed to me that I was – that I was the way I am now – because the good queen and the devil's daughter allowed me to feed off them. I thought perhaps if I gave my old comrades my blood...”
Okay. This is a little embarrassing to explain, so I'm just gonna plunge in and get it over with. See, I had let Garrett feed from me, ages ago. And as a sort of punishment, I'd ordered the devil's daughter to do the same thing.
The devil's daughter being my half sister, Laura.
(I know. Bear with me.)
See, the Ant was possessed by the devil years back, only she was so fucking nasty nobody noticed. And the devil didn't care for child rearing, so she dumped Laura and took off back to Hell. Laura was adopted by (seriously, don't laugh) a minister and his wife.
How do you rebel against the evilest nastiest yuckiest entity in the universe (who looks like Lena Olin and has an amazing shoe collection)?
You go to church. You teach Sunday school. You don't touch a drop of booze until your twenty-?first birthday.
And you conceal a hateful, murderous temper. Laura was going to blow one of these days, but I just didn't have time to worry about it right now. Among other things, I had slavering Fiends on my tail and thank-?you cards to finish.
