Undead and Unforgiven(53)

“All right, jeez, we’ll go into the kitchen, settle already, what, you smell peanut butter? Or Sinclair? Oh.” Marc was looking at us as Fur and Burr made a beeline for Sinclair’s knees. They were babies, but they knew what it meant when the apron, stainless steel bowls, and peanut butter came out.

“Complain as you will about how our marriage began—”

“Yeah, I was. Keep up.”

“—you did eventually come to embrace it, figuratively and literally, and must admit that all I did for you—”

“To me, Sinclair. To me.”

“—worked out for the best.”

“Oh, spoken like a true Martian!”

“I insist you stop reading that book.”14

“I don’t! Marc reads it to me and then explains the tricky parts!”

“Whoa.” Marc’s hands were up and he was edging toward the swinging kitchen door, keeping his distance. “Leave me out of it.”

“And that’s another thing, I didn’t embrace anything! I was tricked. Into all of it. You tricked me into being the vampire queen—”

“That’s not true!” Marc cried, stopping in midsidle. “You were always going to be queen; it was your destiny! Sinclair just tricked you into making him king.”

“Thank you,” Sinclair replied. Then, pinching the bridge of his nose: “Please run along and stop defending me, and do those things in no particular order.”

“Yes! Exactly!” I was so stuffed with triumph I was almost giddy. Marc had a great point! Which I had kind of forgotten! But now could hammer into the dirt! “And you’re all mystified: Jeepers, why doesn’t Betsy want me in Hell? What in our shared history would make her so wary? Why, it’s a puzzler! It’s not like I’ve slimed my way into every other aspect of her life with or without her consent.”

I heard myself. But it was too late. Never has a man in an apron looked so sexy or terrifying, I thought.

“Never has a woman been granted so much power for so little reason! Before we met, you stumbled your way through your tedious superficial life complaining about a series of first-world problems you were lucky to have. Then you died because you didn’t recall what any five-year-old is taught: to look both ways before crossing the street!”15

Marc gasped an oh-no-you-didn’t! gasp, which perfectly summed up my feelings.

“Then you stumbled through the city, maimed any number of the innocent and the guilty, and managed to whine your way into defeating one of the most powerful vampires ever to walk the earth! All the while complaining about your stepmother’s shoes and the job the mortician did on your makeup as opposed to concentrating on your new role. I had to force you to ‘step up,’ as you insist on recalling it, because you refused to ‘step up.’ You would have been beheaded years ago if not for me.”

“Oh, sure, tricking me was all about helping me and not at all about helping yourself to the throne! So to speak, because we don’t actually have thrones!”

“Ah yes, here comes the litany of how difficult your wonderful life is. You’re powerful, wealthy, loved, even worshipped by some. Legions of the undead bend to your will.”

“When they’re not trying to kill me! Besides, you’re forgetting— What the hell?”

There had been a low rumbling getting louder and louder in pitch, a sound I’d never heard before. It took me a moment to place the source: Fur and Burr.

The small bundles of black fluff were bristling so much that they looked like irked hedgehogs. Their tiny puppy milk teeth were all showing, and wrathful growling bubbled out of them like . . . like . . . I dunno . . . evil soda pop?

And they were growling at Sinclair.

Never had I seen my husband so astonished—and this was a man who’d seen me pull off all sorts of impossible weirdness. Burr and Fur looked ready to make the alpha male their bitch. He’d kill them, of course, but they’d still go for it. They wanted to go for it.

Sinclair took a tentative step closer to me and both puppies lunged exactly as far as his step had taken him, then stopped.

“No . . . bad dogs,” I said faintly, glad for once not to be in heels, because not falling down in surprise in socks was difficult enough. “Don’t. Don’t do that. You love him and he loves you. It’s not right that you’re on my side—I don’t even like you!” Well, I did. Just hadn’t realized how much until now. “You—stop it!”

They stopped growling and hurried to me, crouching miserably against my ankles and glaring at Sinclair.

My husband finally found his voice. “As you find my company so unendurable—all three of you—I shall retire.” He managed to pull that off with stiff dignity while untying his apron and hanging it next to his other two aprons.