“No one forced him to become a vampire,” she snapped back. “Quite the opposite: he demanded Tina turn him.”
“Yeah, to avenge his dead family.”
She waved that away. Poof, buh-bye, Sinclair’s dead family, we’ve got more important things to obsess over. “The fact that you’ve found some undead loophole so he could return doesn’t mean he should be here.”
Well, that was fair. It was a loophole. Before I’d killed her, Satan had granted me a wish (that was when I started to suspect it wasn’t so much that I’d killed her as she’d let herself die). I’d been tempted to go with what’s the secret ingredient that makes Orange Juliuses so delish? but came to my senses and went with let Sinclair live in the light again.
But! “You’re wrong about the second one. He’s got every right to be here, more than any of us. His grandfather rebuilt this church way back when . . . when there was a fire? Or something? There’s probably Sinclair rules! from a hundred years ago scratched on a wall or under a pew around here.”
“Lord, I hope not,” she muttered. Couldn’t tell if she was blaspheming or actually praying. “This church is where your husband and I talked, and it’s where I got my Great Idea.” Great Idea. You could hear the caps.6
“Uh-huh.” I’d been here five minutes and still hadn’t gotten to the crux of it. I knew why. I didn’t really want to know what Laura Goodman was up to. At all. “So, speaking of great ideas that probably aren’t, what’s this about you trying to out vam—”
“I’ll definitively prove there is a God!”
“—pires to the— What?”
She nodded at me with a big smile that wasn’t scary at all. “I’m going to prove there’s a God. Prove it to the world.”
I just sat there and tried to let that seep into my brain. It was so far from what Sinclair and I had assumed she was up to, but I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.
There she sat, my half sister, Laura Goodman (subtle, fates or God or whoever), dressed in her Sunday best (she had a horror of people who wore jeans to church): a high-necked pink blouse, a rose-colored knee-length skirt, cream-colored tights, chunky black loafers. Chunky loafers were what women wore in the winter when the weather wasn’t bad enough for boots or good enough for pumps. Laura’s were especially hideous, like lumps of tires fashioned into a vague shoe shape. We had a few things in common; our fashion sense wasn’t one of them.
Besides, she was so irritatingly, thoroughly gorgeous, she could have been wearing newspapers. Light blond hair halfway down her back, perfect fair complexion with a natural rosy blush, big blue eyes that went poison green when she was angry, or murderous, or murderously angry.
Nobody ever looked at Laura Goodman and thought, Spawn of Satan? Oh, sure. Knew it the minute I laid eyes on her.
I stopped pondering her annoying good looks and managed, “Could you say that again, please?”
“You cheated me of my birthright.”
“No, no, the other thing.” So not in the mood for the “Satan and I tricked you into running Hell but now I want to bitch about the consequences” chat. I’d warned her at the time that getting your own way was often as much a curse as it was a blessing. See: Sinclair’s life, death, and afterlife; also mine, the Ant finally landing my father, and anyone who voted for Hitler back in the day.
“This is the other thing,” she corrected. “You want the background, don’t you?”
Not really.
“I can’t do what I was born to do—”
“Be effortlessly gorgeous while sitting in judgment on pretty much everybody as you ignore your own sins?”
Her lips thinned but she continued. “But I can do this. I can bring faith to the world.”
“How?”
“Any way I can.” She leaned forward, warming to her subject. Leaning away from her would probably be interpreted as unfriendly. Maybe I could pretend I didn’t want to catch her cold. If she had one. And if I could still catch colds. “Lectures, videos, websites. I already started a few while I was waiting for you to get back.” Was there a tiny hint of reproach in her tone? No. I decided there wasn’t, because if there was, I’d have to slap the shit out of her with a hymnal. “So I’ve been preparing the ground, so to speak, talking about our adventures and Hell and such while waiting for you.”
“That’s why Sinclair thinks the plan is to show the world vampires exist,” I said, thinking out loud.
She shrugged. “Yes, I imagine his undead spies keep him well-informed.” When I raised my eyebrows she added, “Yes, he called me a couple of times, but I’m not obligated to explain myself to him.” Adding in a mutter, “I don’t know how he keeps getting my number . . .”