Undead and Unforgiven(25)

Then I looked at my phone again, observed it was Sunday morning (the clanging church bells and gaggles of families dressed in their Sunday best should have tipped me off), and found her at First Presbyterian in Hastings.

I had thrown the incredibly heavy door open (it took some effort—argh, so windy!—even with vampire strength—how did the Sunday school kids manage?) and pointed my cup of hot chocolate at her, bellowing to the startled churchgoers that, aha, I thought I’d find her there, eventually.

“Betsy!” the Antichrist hissed, setting down a coffeepot. “This is fellowship!”

She made it sound like a place, rather than something they were doing. Unless fellowship meant “behold the ritual of the serving of the coffee and of the nondairy creamer, for yea, some churchgoers shalt be lactose intolerant.”

Maybe it was the name of the room. Church—the service—was clearly over; the place was packed but everyone was eating. And it was the food moms and dads and grandmas had brought to church: pans of brownies, plates of cookies, some blondies that didn’t get gobbled as quickly as the brownies (when will people just accept that blondies will never trump brownies? ooh, memo to me: people in Hell should get blondies when they order brownies), a pyramid of Rice Krispies bars, fruit plates, Kool-Aid for the kiddos, coffee for the adults, and bowls of peanuts for whomever. Somebody always brought peanuts; it was weird.

I’d been raised Presbyterian by a mother with agnostic leanings and a father who tried to spend every Sunday he could out of town “on business.” When my mother started getting suspicious, he converted to Judaism so he could ostensibly worship on Saturdays (often in hotel rooms).

But once Mom saw I had the basics down (“A talking snake tricked a rib lady into eating bad fruit and that’s why women need epidurals for labor and it’s also why the world is jam-packed with sinners, but the baby born of a virgin who later came back as the Holiest of Zombies fixed it so anyone, no matter how skanky, can get to Heaven if they know the secret passwords.”) we hardly went anymore. Ironically, I had prayed to God a lot more after my death than before. I wondered if that was true of everyone or just vampires. It was really something to consider when you thought about it, a complicated—

“Ow!”

“Come on.” My sister had bequeathed the Ritual of Coffee and Nondairy Creamer to a scowling old man who looked like Mr. Burns after he’d been embalmed, then she’d crossed the room and sunk her fingers into my arm like it was Play-Doh and her nails were nails. “We can talk upstairs.”

Upstairs was the nave, where the lectures/sermons were heard. It was gorgeous, as I found most churches to be (I had a thing for stained-glass windows; they really classed up a joint). The ceiling was quite high, at least two stories, so every footstep and whisper echoed, and the place smelled old and clean, like a library when someone had cleaned the shelves with Pine-Sol just a few hours earlier. The only person who hadn’t bolted for fellowship to nom-nom-nom some brownies was an elderly lady with stacks of programs, which she was sorting at a small table at the rear of the room. What was it with church programs and how there are always at least a hundred left? Gotta give the church props for optimism. She nodded at the Antichrist, who smiled back, then returned to her sorting.

We went to the front, just a few feet from the altar, and my butt had barely settled on the pew before she rounded on me.

“What do you think you’re doing, coming here of all places and at all times? This is very inappropriate!” This from the woman who had killed, and/or tried to kill, almost every vampire she’d ever met (including me), as well as the occasional serial killer.

“There are, what? At least five hundred churches in Minnesota?”

“Thousands,” was the dry response.

“So why does whatever it is you’re up to—”

“Repenting sin and asking for forgiveness?”

“And for brownies, yeah. So why do you have to do that here? Heck, Hastings has a dozen churches, but why this town and this church?”

“Because your husband contaminated this church with his filth.”

“Are you talking about his money, or did he whiz in the corner during prayer circle?”

“Don’t make fun.” Her mouth turned down and for a few seconds she looked like the sad kid picked last for kickball. Dammit! I didn’t have time to feel sorry for the Antichrist!

“Okay, okay. Just . . . help me understand your thought process. So because Sinclair—whom you’ve never liked, but that’s okay, he’s not on Team Antichrist, either—has started going to this church again, his dead family’s church, suddenly you need to be here, too?”