Cathie and Marc let out unanimous yelps of alarm, but even as they scrambled to take shelter beneath the Lego table, nothing happened.
“Oh, God, what does it rain in Hell?” Marc shrieked from the floor. “Acid? Blood? Clumps of pubic hair?”
“Right now it’s not raining anything, even though I ordered it to rain in here. My point! Why do some commands work and some don’t? Oh, come out from under there,” I added impatiently.
Only Father Markus had kept his shit together and remained seated. “Frustrating,” was his only comment, and was that a smile?
“Ya think? Quit grinning at me, you’re awful.” He shrugged it off, which was fine because I hadn’t meant it.
“Since it didn’t rain pubic hair,” Marc said, climbing out from under the table and collapsing back into his chair, “I think it’s as good a time to adjourn as any.”
Not much had been accomplished, but Father Markus seconded it almost before Marc had finished the sentence and, like that, I was paroled from another meeting. Yippee! I was like a kid let out of school! Except I was a kid (one of the youngest in the room, never mind the whole of Hell) let out of the bureaucracy of Hell, which was even better.
“Same time tomorrow?”
Oh, blech.
CHAPTER
SIX
“Excuse me, Mrs. Sinclair?”
Like an idiot I looked around for whomever she was talking to. Then I realized: “Oh. Me. It’s me? Yes.” Mrs. Sinclair. Mrs. Eric Sinclair. Mrs. Sink Lair. Mr. and Mrs. Sink Lair?
When I was little I was nervous about trying a kiwifruit. Fuzzy brown skin, green inside with icky-looking black seeds, it was some sort of fruit/Tribble hybrid and I had no interest in sticking it in my mouth. Nothing that looked that weird could be yummy.
But my mother hectored me until I bit into it. It was perfectly ripe, if not entirely sweet, with an odd texture that wasn’t unpleasant, just strange to me. It took me a few seconds to decide if it was vile or delicious; I eventually settled on delicious, but only when I was in the mood for one. That was how it felt now, hearing someone call me Mrs. Sinclair, which was my legal name even if I never, ever used it.
It was not that I didn’t love Eric Sinclair. It was beyond love; I’d die for him and kill for him (and had). But our relationship was at once like and unlike any union between lovers. We were in love, yes. But we had a business relationship, too; we were co-monarchs . . . except not really. As the foretold vampire queen, I outranked the king. Tina had explained it to me: Sinclair was a king consort, I was a queen regnant. I reigned in my own right; Sinclair, to be blunt, was just along for the ride.
Like most lovers (but not many business partners), I had no secrets from him, and he didn’t have very many from me (given his exquisite skills in the bedroom, there were some things I didn’t want to know . . . hearing your lover’s bang résumé wasn’t at all romantic). And though we’d touched and kissed and caressed every inch of each other, I almost always called him Sinclair, and he always called me Elizabeth. It sounded formal (in his case) and flippant (in mine) to everyone else; to us, it was like a stolen kiss.
We also shared everything . . . kind of. I let Sinclair handle the tedious side of monarching—the petitions, the management of our property, the newsletter (hey, we were a modern vampire monarchy), while I handled the fun stuff, and Hell.
I was very specific about Hell: it was mine. Yes, I formed a committee to help me, but at the end of the day (and the beginning, for that matter) I was in charge. I wasn’t a co-anything in Hell, and although that was the way I wanted it, I wasn’t entirely sure why.
Sinclair and I trusted each other—except he knew I was a procrastinating shoe lover with a horror of paperwork and any kind of bureaucracy, and would do my best to wiggle out of anything that hinted it might not be one hundred percent fun. And I knew he was loyal only to me . . . but always kept an eye on his own bottom line.
I had yet to let him have much to do with Hell. I’d brought him here once, but hadn’t done so again. Unlike the vampire monarchy, there wasn’t a foretold partner who would pop out of nowhere to help me. I had killed the devil and then taken the Antichrist’s birthright. If I couldn’t hold it on my own, I had no right to be here.
At least, I was pretty sure that was my reasoning. Bottom line, I was worried about giving him any real power. This was the man who had tricked me into making him king, after all. I loved him, but never forgot who he was.
All that to say I loved kiwis, sometimes, and my husband, all the time, but was wary of both.
“Mrs. Sinclair? Ma’am?”