Undead and Unwary Page 23

  “It’s ‘spuh-GET-ee.’” Uh-oh. He had forgotten about everyone else in the room and regressed to yelling at the TV. “It’s ‘ri-ZOT-o.’”

  We were too late. You arrogant ass, you’ve killed us all! Trapped, trapped like rats, unless . . . knocking Tina off her feet so I could be the first to escape wasn’t very queenlike. Right? Dammit.

  “Shut up, you many-toothed bitch, stop pronouncing stuff like that—‘spah-GAY-tee,’ ‘moots-ah-RAY-la,’ ‘pan-CHAY-tuh’ . . . you’re from California, for God’s sake!”

  “It’s quite legitimate,” Tina corrected him mildly from her safe spot beside the door, ideal for a quick getaway. This. This was why Tina was still alive after well over a century: she always mapped escape routes, even in her own home. “Ms. De Laurentiis was born in Italy.” Why do you know that? I mouthed, but only got a shrug in response. A respectful shrug, but still.

  “Yeah, born there; it proves nothing, nothing!” Marc had progressed past yelling at the TV and was in full-on violent gesture mode. “Because right after that, the family picked up and moved to the States when she was . . . what? Eight days old?”

  “Twelve years.”

  Seriously: why does she know that? Marc was the Food Network freak in our house. She was putting up with a lot of vampire torture porn to keep Marc company. They’d become besties right under my nose.

  “Regardless. She’s from California; the big move was decades ago; every other word she pronounces with an American accent. I don’t even think she speaks Italian.”

  “Of course she speaks Italian,” Tina replied, exasperated. At least their squabbling got the attention off me so I could work on the project some more.

  “Nuh-uh, she speaks Italian food. Everything else: American accent. Because, again: California, lived there for decades. Giada should stop talking about ‘spah-GAY-tee’; it’s so pretentious.” Marc turned a haunted gaze on me. “No one from California should ever be pretentious. And don’t get me started on her disproportionately sized head.”

  “Easy there,” I said warily. Marc was as a rule so easygoing he should have kept a surfboard in his room, but when his zombie dander was up, he was no one to fool with. Death, it seemed, left him a wee bit judgmental. And, as I’d already pointed out, it had been a nutty week, even for us. “She pronounces food that way probably out of respect for her mom, right? She’s maybe from Italy?”

  “My dad was from Germany and you’ll never catch me singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland.’”

  “Right. Okay. Marc, I think it’s time you went to your happy place.” Mine was the Manolo Blahnik brick-and-mortar store on Fifty-fourth Street in New York, which I modified only slightly in my head by putting a smoothie bar in the basement. “Which is good advice for all of us.”

  Before I could elaborate, I realized Sinclair was in the doorway with his mouth already open, clearly geared to lecture mode, when he stopped and looked, and then looked some more. “Hmm.” While he hmm’d, Marc and Tina vamoosed without him saying a word. Jess, natch, was still snoring. I had to actively fight the temptation to label her.

  “Here you are. I have need of you.” That could mean a whole host of things, many of them delicious and filthy; others, smoothie related. Hell, it could even be vampire monarch business. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything like that.

  “Busy.” I finished with the chest of drawers, then crawled to the bed and fished around beneath it, found Jessica’s terrible filing system, and pulled it out.

  “So I see, but there is something that requires your urgent attention.” He was still holding his keys. Hadn’t stopped in the kitchen to hang them up, then. He’d just disappeared on an abrupt errand, returned quickly, then come straight up to get me. Not good. “At once, if you please.”

  “What doesn’t require my urgent attention these days? Besides, I’m not done atoning.” I gestured at the room, and the bed, where I may or may not have succumbed to the urge to label Jessica.

  His lips twitched but he swallowed his laugh, and most of the smile. “And I loathe taking you away from it because in this, as in most things, you are a delight.”

  “Most, huh?” I sat back on my heels and brushed my bangs out of my eyes, accidentally labeling myself in the process. Nope. Would not do for Dick to get the wrong idea. I unlabeled myself. “Listen, we can talk about the twins, whom I’m now calling I Don’t Know His Name and I Don’t Know Hers Either. And we can talk about how much you want to take over Hell for me and Jessica’s refusal to name us godparents and anything else in a little bit.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Hell’s doing great, by the way. As great as Hell can be, I mean. Not that you asked or anything.”

  Elizabeth.

  Yeah, being scary and firm in my head wasn’t any more effective, buddy, but points for effort. “I don’t know how I did it, but things happened. I’ll go back in a bit and more things will happen. I’m almost sure of it.”

  He had crossed the room, knelt, grasped my wrists, and lifted me to my feet. “Your father is downstairs.”

  “No. He isn’t.”

  “He is, my love.”

  “Impossible.”

  “So are you, darling.”

  “It’s a joke, right?” I could feel my lips twitching and realized I was trying to smile. “It’s an elaborate April Fool’s prank you’re all in on, which you did months ahead of schedule to throw me off.”

  I would never.

  I could feel myself starting to tremble and when Sinclair carefully pulled me into his arms I accidentally labeled myself again.

  “How awful is it?” I asked his shoulder blade. I was hugging him back so hard I felt my fingers punch through the fabric of his shirt. Sinclair didn’t move away or make a single sound of protest, but I loosened my grip anyway. “On a scale of one to ten? One being ‘whoops, we were wrong, he is dead, we’ll get the corpse out of your house right away’ and ten being ‘kidnapped by sinister supernatural forces and tortured by same for years, which is your fault and you’ll be haunted by that for eternity.’”

  “Come see for yourself.” I pressed my ear to his chest. I loved his voice almost anytime but the deep rumble was especially comforting now. “I will be with you, my own. As will we all. You are not alone.”

  “Can’t you at least give me a hint?”

  You must hear it from him.

  “He’s been kidnapped? He’s secretly a vampire? Satan found him and has been doing awful things to him because she didn’t like me? He’s dying and didn’t want to worry me by being alive? He testified against a murderer and had to go into Witness Protection? Audited? An STD he can’t seem to shake? What?”

  He sighed and I clutched harder.

  Oh, my love. It’s much worse than that.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  Sinclair was right. If anything, he undersold it.

  “You’re alive because you’re alive? That’s it? That’s your explanation?”

  My father had been over it twice and I still didn’t get it, making it worse than that appalling endless time he tried to teach me to change a tire. So much rage. And grease.

  We were in the Peach Parlor and my father looked great. At first I thought he’d been tortured somewhere nice, like Little Cayman, explaining the tan. Or locked up somewhere without access to junk food, like a farmers’ market, explaining the fifteen-pound weight loss. Or held prisoner in the basement of a Neiman Marcus, explaining the smartly tailored dark brown pants, cream-colored dress shirt, silk tie with cream and gold accents, and Manolo Blahnik brown suede loafers. Argh, Manolo Blahniks on his treacherous feet! Why not just set my soul on fire and get it over with?

  “Dad, what the hell?” I know. Lame. But it was the only thought to pop into my brain. At least it was a complete sentence.

  He’d gotten to his feet when I trudged into th
e parlor, but sat back down the second I came to a stop in front of him. No tearful reunion father-daughter embrace, then. Not even a handshake, given how he was clasping his hands together.

  Dick had been standing near him in a faded T-shirt and his rubber duckie pajama pants, like a menacing bodyguard who’d just gotten out of bed. Which, in a way, he was. Once I was in the room he relaxed and went to sit on the love seat with Marc. Tina and Sinclair remained standing. Their carefully neutral expressions were terrifying.

  “Your, uh, friend has been guarding me. Right?” Dad tried a smile. It didn’t fit his mouth, and not just because he knew he was on the spot. He’d never had a roommate. He’d never seen the desire to live with people if you didn’t need them to do things for you. “Afraid I’ll run off?”

  “Yes,” everyone but me said in unison.

  He looked rattled, but I didn’t know if it was because of my friends’ retort or my lack thereof. “Er . . . why?”

  “Because you’re a coward/chickenshit/dreadful man/runaway/scumbag,” everyone said in unison (though they all picked different descriptions).

  In next to no time I went from puzzled that he was alive to worried about what he’d had to endure to shocked when I realized he hadn’t endured . . . well . . . anything.

  “There’s no supernatural explanation? No dramatic terrible weirdness that snatched you out of my life?”

  “Dramatic terrible weirdness is why I had to leave.”

  “Had to leave?” I could only gape. Even I, occasional poster child for the self-involved, was staggered. “You didn’t appreciate the drama you had to endure?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’ve been in St. Paul this whole time?” That was the part my mind kept reeling back to. He’d faked his death and hid, except not. How had I never noticed we were living in the same city? Okay, St. Paul wasn’t exactly a small town, not with three hundred thousand live humans, nineteen vampires, an unknown number of ghosts, and one zombie (at last count, anyway), but still. In some respects, St. Paul was a small town in that many of us moved in the same little circles. (I was betting that was why he’d bumped into Jessica the other day.) It made me wonder if he’d wanted to get caught or if he was just lazy.

  Once his fake funeral was over, Dad had gone straight back to his routine: making money, chasing women far too young for him, living in St. Paul, and pretending he didn’t have a family. He’d moved his money around so he could still access it after a name change. He’d sold off some properties and bought new ones. He was unfettered in all the best ways.

  If he ever got to Hell, the Ant would kill him.

  “Let me see if I’m getting this.” I saw him shift on the couch but had no pity for his impatience with my inability to grasp hideous behavior from someone who was supposed to love me. “There are no killers to apprehend, nobody to track down to avenge you? You haven’t been kept prisoner in a farmers’ market or Little Cayman?”

  He blinked. “No.”

  “You just . . . took a time-out from your life? And mine? Wait.” It hit me and I was a fool not to realize sooner. “Not just my life. Your other daughter’s life. Your son’s life. Your wife’s. Your ex-wife’s.”

  “The pressures on me”—he sighed—“were crushing.”

  “The Ant died in the accident, you selfish shit!” Talk about crushing.

  “Language. And the accident wasn’t my fault,” Dad interjected. “I had the flu, remember?”

  “No,” I said shortly. I’d seized a peach throw pillow from the couch and started plucking at the tassels. Soon I was walking back and forth in front of him, shedding peach fuzz everywhere, keeping my fingers busy so I couldn’t strangle him. I reminded myself this was no time for multitasking. “Of course I don’t remember. You didn’t talk to me much before you faked your death, either.”

  He blew that off. “I couldn’t go, and you know Antonia.”

  Better than you now, maybe.

  “She brought her hairdresser to the ball.”

  “Sergio or Esperanza?”

  “The illegal who had sticky fingers.”

  Sergio, then. “So he didn’t have his own ID but he nicked yours.”

  “Wherever he took it, or whenever, he didn’t have time to pick through and take the stuff he wanted, so he grabbed the whole thing. Probably would have stripped the cash and cards and then tossed it. Hell, maybe your stepmother gave it to him to spite me for not going with her.” He smiled, like a kid who was trying to impress his parents with something they found horrifying. “The accident was unforeseen, and it wasn’t like correcting the coroner’s ID would have brought your stepmother back.”

  “But . . . the dental records? You were both burned beyond—I mean, your wife and Sergio were burned beyond recognition. Would the ID have been enough? Wouldn’t they have pulled dental records?” I mean, there was a reason I’d never questioned the fact that my dad was dead. It had seemed pretty definitive at the time, which, given my and mine’s penchant for returning from the dead, was unforgivably naïve in retrospect.

  He coughed into his fist, a dry bark. “I spread some money around. Not even that much, come to think of it. Nobody cared much.” He glanced up at me and looked away. “Like I said, none of that would have brought your stepmother back. All I did was take advantage of a fortunate coincidence.”

  “Fortunate. Coincidence?” Was it possible I was talking too fast? Was that why he wasn’t getting it? “Your wife. Died.”

  “Aren’t you listening? I didn’t plan the accident. She died, but it wasn’t anything I did.” Another quick interjection, like he knew what I would say and when I would say it. He’d rehearsed, then. I recognized the behavior as I’d seen it almost constantly since about the first grade. When Sinclair tracked him down and explained to his father-in-law that he would be visiting Vampire Central before skipping town, Dad had started marshaling his arguments. Anyone else would have been polishing their apology.

  Okay, so it was clear (and awful) he didn’t care his wife died. R.I.P., the Ant, and wow did I not want to feel sorry for her, but I did. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to help me solve the mystery, doing everything short of jamming her fingers in her ears while chanting “nah-nah-nah, can’t heeeeear youuuu!” She would have realized that instead of being devastated by her death, or at least unpleasantly surprised, her husband had turned it into a ladder he could use to escape. Which was cold-blooded on a level I had only ever seen in vampires. The really old, mean ones.

  Appealing to his status as a loving husband hadn’t worked; time to try something else. “Your son. Was orphaned.”

  “But left in good hands.”

  “No, Dad, not in good hands!” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d lost it so quickly or completely. “You left him in my hands—what the fuck were you thinking?”

  His shoulders had been going up in his trademark turtle-not-wanting-to-be-here pose, but that snapped him into sitting back upright. “Language.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! How’s that? Here’s more language: you are a craven shithead!”

  “Please stop indulging in hysterics,” he semi-begged. He didn’t dare get up and storm out of a room full of lethal people glaring at him, any one of whom would have been happy to turn his femurs into splinters, but neither was he happy about having to stay in the room with his overly dramatic daughter and her tiresome awkward hysterics. “No need to be childish.”

  Yep. My head was trying to blow itself up; I could almost feel the pressure building. Head, I sympathize, but you’re not going anywhere. “You haven’t seen anything yet. You’ve got a lot of nerve being alive, Dad,” I continued in a cold rage, “and also this is the last time I’m going to speak to you for a while so drop dead! Except don’t, because you suck at it! And—and I hate you, and your wife is more horrible in death than she ever was in life.” Lie. “And your h
air is stupid, everybody knows you’re going bald.” Truth. For a few seconds I wished we were having this chat over the phone so I’d only have to contend with his asshat voice and not his asshat voice and face. One of the old-fashioned phones, which granted the user the ability to slam the receiver down knowing you partially deafened the guy on the other end with the crash. The future sucks sometimes. No one in their right mind would slam an iPhone.

  He didn’t say anything, so I kept it up. “How could you do this to Laura? All she wanted from you was to get to know you a little. You had no history with her like you did with me, so you’d have a fresh start. You’d like her, the An—” I cut myself off. Reminding my dad that the daughter who wasn’t the vampire queen was the Antichrist might give him the mistaken idea that his shitty plan had been a good one. “She’s nice, a lot nicer than me. And what about BabyJon? He’s innocent.” The Ant was harder to argue. “Doing it to me I kind of get. I resented the shit out of you and the Ant and never stopped letting you know it. But with BabyJon you had a fresh start. Instead of a bitchy disrespectful teenager, you could start over with a wonderful baby. Indulge in the ‘this time I’ll do it right’ trope. Instead you bailed on everyone? Don’t you see how shitty and selfish that was?”

  “Stop acting like a child—”

  I wasn’t letting that go by twice. “Oh, and you’d know what that looked like how? You weren’t around for most of my childhood and you’re sure as shit not planning to be around for BabyJon’s. And pointing out your grotesque flaws isn’t acting like a child.”

  “—and look at it from my side.” Ha! He couldn’t think of an argument to what I just said, so instead he clung stubbornly to whatever asinine self-serving point he wanted to make. Oh, Christ, was there where I got it? Fuck and double fuck. “Trapped in a second marriage—”

  “Trapped?” That was it. My brain was definitely going to implode inside my skull. Marc had told me the brain didn’t have pain receptors, which was wonderful because I figured when it blew, it probably wouldn’t even hurt. Wait, did he mean all brains or just my brain?