“So he was tipped off after he heard about the ‘Betsy and Laura: Time-Travelin’ Cuties’ show.” God, Marc would have a field day with this . . .
“What, every other sinner can have a YouTube channel but I can’t?”
“Um . . .” Stay focused. I was already envisioning the conversation my husband and I would have: Good news! She’s not outing vamps. There’s a teeny bit of bad news, though. Why don’t you lie down while I tell you about her Great Idea . . .
Meanwhile she was obliviously babbling. “I’d be different from the regular preachers . . . they’re talking about faith, which is all well and good for someone who isn’t us. I can offer proof. Look what just you and I have seen in . . . what? Less than four years? I always believed in Him, and I think you did, too—your mother failed you in your teenage years but she did make sure you went to Sunday school long enough to—”
“Do not say one
(church you’re in church)
dang word against my mother.”
Laura cut herself off and even flushed a little. “You’re right. That was inappropriate. I like your mom.”
“I know you do.” I had to shake my head at my little sister’s many dichotomies. Skirts in church and brownies in the basement when not plotting to dump Hell on the vampire queen and murdering random serial killers. Genuinely fond of my mom—she called her Dr. Taylor and occasionally stopped in just to chat or to play with our half brother, BabyJon—but wouldn’t shed a tear at my funeral. Blithely ready to shove God onto the world whether the world wants it or not, but gets embarrassed when called out for being rude.
“You were telling me,” I prompted without grimacing or clutching my temples, “about your Great Idea.” God, now I was using the caps. At least it wasn’t pronounced in all caps, like when fifty-somethings or thirteen-somethings got on social media for the first time and felt every post had to be a scream.
“Okay, so you always believed in Him, but before your—uh, unfortunate death—it was strictly faith. And I had faith without proof until my thirteenth birthday, when Mother appeared and explained my destiny. Then I knew. And we can help everyone know. We’ve time traveled; we’ve seen Hell; my mother was the devil; you’re the new devil! We know the Bible’s right, we can tell people! We can save everybody!”7
“Why . . . why would we do that?” Was she talking about us going on some sort of . . . lecture circuit of the damned? Would we be copresenters, or would it be her show and I’d be trotted out like the miniature elephant in Jurassic Park: Look what we made! Give us money and we’ll make more! (The book, not the movie. I loved that stupid dwarf elephant. The scientists should have skipped the dinosaurs and just engineered a huge park of thousands of dwarf elephants. If they escaped, it’d be annoying but also adorable.) “Laura?”
“Why wouldn’t we do that?” she replied, puzzled. She was leaning toward me, our hands were almost touching, she was as friendly and excited as I’d seen her in weeks. Our last meeting
(“I’ll take over your job, your destiny, the one you tricked me into and lied to get out of. But there are strings, Laura. You don’t get to dump this on me and walk away without major strings. I’m giving you the same deal I gave our dad: we’re family or we’re not. This isn’t something you can change your mind about later. And you can’t half-and-half it, either. No flitting down to Hell to check on me, or catch up on family gossip . . . If you’re giving up your birthright and dumping your responsibility on me, then do it, and do it all the way.
“You’re done, you’re out. Hell’s not your inheritance anymore, it’s not yours in any way anymore and that means everything that comes with it. You don’t get to jettison the responsibility but keep the perks . . . If I see you in Hell, I’m going to assume you’re dead.”)
hadn’t been so pleasant. Was she—was she trying to forge a new relationship with me? Was setting up the “We Can Prove God Exists” lecture series her way of reconciling herself to what she’d lost? Was she regretting her choices less than a month after she had made them, or was this the plan all along?
“I’ve barely started, and I wanted to tell you right away—”
Really?
“—but you’ve been gone.”
“Wow.”
“I know!”
“You actually managed to make me being in Hell, doing your job, sound like a character flaw, or like I was rude to keep your Great Idea waiting. I can’t even figure out the time thing between dimensions—”