“What?”
He looked at me, and I swear there was more than a note of reproach in his tone as he added, “I didn’t call you back to me just to have sex, you know.”
Silly me.
CHAPTER
TEN
Marc and I crossed paths as we were both lunging for the keyboard in the kitchen. Tina had (stupidly) tried to implement hanging keys in order of status. Jessica and Dick (his name used to be Nick, but that’s a whole other thing5) abruptly lost their minds and threatened to threaten to sue (“I don’t actually want to sue, but I might promise to sue!”) over what they saw as discrimination against the living.
So then she suggested we hang keys in alphabetical order by owner. (“Boo! That means the cop goes first!” “What, it’s my fault my mother married a Berry?”)
So then she tried alphabetical by car, but since Sinclair had two Audis, a Bentley, and a Corvette, that was promptly shouted down as well.
And then Tina noticed that in the three days she’d spent trying to come up with a system that wouldn’t make us all want to kill each other, we were all just hanging our keys on whatever hooks were empty, and nobody had trouble finding theirs, even when in a rush. I mean, I lived with millionaires, but even they could drive only so many cars. The board had plenty of hooks.
So Marc and I were both scrambling for the keyboard. “My passive-aggressive sister is trying to out vampires to the world!”
“I missed two Game of Thrones and one It’s Always Sunny, and I’m two weeks behind on People, Entertainment Weekly, and Time!”
“And we were gone two weeks!”
“No one watered my cactus! Which is good, actually. Betsy. Seriously.” He blocked my retreat to the mudroom door. “You gotta get the time thing figured out.”
“No shit!” I realized I was clutching my keys in a white-knuckled fist and eased up. Those electronic keys were insanely easy to crack. “I’m open to suggestions.”
“You need a row of clocks, like they have in car rental places or brokerage firms. They all tell the time for a different city.”
“When were you in a brokerage—”
“I watched The Wolf of Wall Street. You know what I’m talking about—they’ll have a clock up for Tokyo time and one for New York time and one for, I dunno, L.A. and one for Hong Kong and one for Ann Arbor and one for Houston and one for Bismarck.”
“Bismarck? Really?”
“You need one that will always tell you what time it is at the mansion.”
Well. That was actually a pretty good idea, assuming my powers in Hell would work like that. Whenever I wanted to know something, my magical clipboard usually obliged. Maybe I could put a magical clock in, too. It was no surprise that there were no clocks in Hell; time meant different things to the souls there, and a fixed clock always set to, I dunno, central standard time wouldn’t be much help. Maybe not a row of clocks, but maybe a wristwatch that always told me what I needed to know? “Okay, that’s not bad,” I admitted. “Remind me next time we’re there.”
He nodded and scooted aside so I could pass. “Gotta go.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“Sinclair didn’t tell you until after the sex, did he?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Hey, the guy went two weeks without nooky. I’m surprised he remembered his own name, all that backup.”
“Vampires don’t get— Oh my God, I’m not discussing this with you.”
“You kind of are,” he said with a grin that was half apologetic, half wiseass. No, wait. All wiseass.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Have pity on the man!” my least favorite zombie hollered after me as I hurried through the mudroom. “Take pity on his penis!” Because the neighbors don’t have enough to gossip about.
In my rush to get gone, I nearly fell over something and knew without looking what it was. I seized the pitchfork, yanked the door to the side yard open, ignored the puppies’ yelps of welcome, and tossed it into the garden with the others.
“Stop giving me these things!” I shrieked back at the house in general. Prank-hungry bastards. Twice in a month, really? Bad enough they were defacing name tags and planting them on me, but to leave pitchforks lying around? Where does someone even buy a pitchfork? “Really? Don’t you have anything better to do?”
From all parts of the house, simultaneous replies came back: “No!”
Well, that was just a lie.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
I had the Antichrist cornered like the sun-kissed rat she was. “Aha! I thought I’d find you here!”
Eventually. First I’d tried her apartment in Burnsville, then Fairview Ridges where she volunteered, and then Hastings Family Service where she also volunteered. Then I stopped at Caribou for a large hot chocolate (I was back in the real world now, and so was my unholy vampire thirst of the damned . . . what little I’d taken from Sinclair wouldn’t hold me for long), then the United Way.