A word about vampire superpowers: mostly I don't notice them. (This actually explains many things in my life. I'm too busy livin', baby! Who has time to contemplate every damn thing? Life is for living! And gobs of sex.) That probably sounds strange, because I haven't been undead very long. But it's true. After a while you realize you were bitching about somebody snoring . . . and they were doing it seventeen rooms and three floors away. Or you'll whine about food going bad . . . and the garbage was already triple bagged and taken out into a sealed-off garage.
It's scary how fast you get used to it. These days I took it for granted almost all the time. Like lumpless gravy. (It's surprisingly easy.) But tonight I was listening hard, so even though we were all still in the kitchen, I heard Laura's little sewing machine engine-powered Kia pull in.
"She's here," Sinclair and I said in unison. Tina, who must have known, hadn't taken her gaze off the Marc Thing. If that bothered him, he didn't let on. It probably took a lot more than an eyeballing from Tina to scare someone who used to have a Caesar haircut and was tortured for decades.
Jessica and Marc both jumped. "That's creepy," Jessica said. "And it always, always will be."
"Yeah, knock it off," Marc added.
"Children, children," the Marc Thing said, still staring out the window.
"Tell me she's not still driving that Kia," N/Dick begged.
"Who cares?" I asked. "You've got something against good gas mileage?"
"It's the Soul," he explained. "Kia's new miniwagon is called the Soul."
"Oh, lame!" This time I had spoken in unison with the Marc Thing, which was beyond blech. "Get your own lines," I hissed to him. To the others: "That's just bad. Lame, and bad. And lame! The Soul. Please. We don't have enough problems? The Soul."
"We've had this conversation before," D/Nick reminded me.
"Well, I don't remember it, so back off." As if I didn't have waaaay more important things to remember than keeping track of Laura's vehicles. Well, I did, dammit. In my old timeline, Laura's dad had saved for over a year to get her that Kia, which she loved almost as much as I loved new Manolos. Her adopted dad, is what I meant; her real dad, also my dad, was dead.
Wait, was he? Maybe in this timeline, he and (barf) my stepmonster, Antonia, were alive! And yes! I know how silly it is to have two people in the same house with the same weird name! So shut up!
How could I find out? Sure, everyone in the room knew what a moron I was, but that didn't mean I, you know, was in a big hurry to reinforce and advertise it. Was there a way to just casually ask, "So, is my dad alive?"
The kitchen door swung open, and in came the Antichrist. "Goodwill used to be more grateful," she said by greeting. "Now they're more interested in paperwork over polite conversation."
"Thanks for coming so-"
"Twice! I've worn those jeans twice! Not a speck of paint, which is no mean feat when you paint in them. I thought it'd be nice to give away clothing that was only 'gently used' as opposed to falling off me in shreds. Any gratitude, though? Hmm? Not a thanks, not even a smile."
"Here's the thing," I tried again.
Laura was shaking her perfectly coiffed hair out of her gorgeous eyes. "Just 'do you want a slip for your taxes?' No I do not, but how about some eye contact?" Laura was a luscious blonde . . . close to my height, give or take an inch, with beautiful blue eyes, a perfect pink-hued complexion, and a gorgeous fall of corn-silk blond hair. Just . . . sickening.
"I'm here," she said unnecessarily. "What's-oh, God!" She was pointing at The Thing That Was Jessica's Gut, and I couldn't blame her. "What-are you-what is that?"
"You haven't noticed any subtle and not so subtle weirdnesses-"
"Is that even a word?"
"Shut up, Marc or Marc Thing." I hadn't been looking, I was embarrassed to say. That sly/sneaky tone could have come from either the live Marc or the dead one. Because I didn't. Have enough. Problems.
"How long were you home? How's your mom-not the devil, your other mom? Has she had a perm? Quit school? Or never went to college? Do you have another sibling? New pets? Are old dead pets alive again? Is your dad-your live one, not our dead one-still a minister? That"-I pointed, ignoring Jessica's glare-"is the least of the scary-ass goings-on around here. Here, Dick and Jess are practically married, and are practicing living happily ever after."
Laura rounded on me like a gunfighter, using shrill accusations as bullets. On the whole, I'd have preferred actual lead bullets. "It's because you didn't feed on Nick when we were in the past! You fed on me instead, you thoughtless starving wretch!"
"Ouch," I said mildly.
"I warned you! Didn't I warn you?"
"You were less shrill in the old timeline."
"That changed his future, and Jessica's!"
"You don't have to make it sound like a bad thing."
"Excuse me!" Jessica's Sperm Boy was waving his arms around. "First off, it's Dick. I hate Nick, I've hated it my entire life," Nick said. "Second, didn't feed on him? Could the studio audience hear the playback on that one, please?"
"No time. I'll get you the blog entry later. Laura, the reason we called you here-"
"I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies."
"Cliche!" I said, clenching a fist in triumph. "That's been used to death in several sitcoms, including Night Court. Night Court, Laura. Be ashamed."
"Except I do," Laura said, calming down a little. "When our ministry spent a summer in Malawi, we assisted at dozens of births. There are at least three Lauras in Malawi, the moms were so nice and grateful."
"Getting gratitude is becoming a thing with you, but even so, you're the worst Antichrist ever," Jessica said. "Which is actually comforting. Stay close."
"It's not why you're here."
"Too bad." Laura sighed. "It would have been neat to deliver a baby. That tends to be the opposite of evil."
"Depends on the baby," Marc muttered.
"Cheer up-anything can happen in the next few weeks. Fairfield Hospital . . . the devil's daughter . . . if you don't have to deal with an HMO it's almost worth it . . ." Being dead was good for that if nothing else. Never again would I get a whopping bill because I'd dared use the gynecologist I was most comfortable with. "Sorry, you have to use our guy or we'll charge you a zillion bucks." Talk about soulless.
But! Enough musing about HMOs; I felt we were getting off track. This was nothing new, just alarming. Time was not on our side . . . even though I had a time-traveling sister.
"Laura, listen. You know all those cute stories about people moving and then their pets following them across the country to the new house? Or a kitten takes a liking to a family and follows them around until they give in and feed it before the ASPCA gets involved, and the new family ends up taking care of it so it doesn't go feral and kill everyone in the neighborhood?" I gestured to the trussed Marc Thing. "Guess what followed us back?"
"OhdearGod," Laura said, and missed when she reached out to grasp the back of a kitchen chair to steady herself. Her arms pinwheeled for a hilarious second until N/Dick reached out to steady her.
"Well put."
"How did I not notice he was sitting right there?"
"I was wondering that, too," Tina admitted.
"The gut," she replied absently. "I'm not used to Jessica weighing more than seventy-eight pounds. I couldn't help be mesmerized by it. I couldn't not look at it."
"No one can not look at it," I soothed, ignoring Jessica's glare.
"Oooh, yuck!"
"Disgusting," I agreed.
"I'm sitting"-the Marc Thing sighed-"right here."
"We actually weren't talking about-" I began, but fortunately wiser heads than mine (that would be every head in the room) were better able to stay on track.
"This isn't . . . our fault?" Laura looked horrified.
"Only in that I was able to follow you back to your loved ones because you burst onto my timeline with no right or invitation, after gaily running amok in my past and yours and instigating catastrophic change in the very fabric of the universe."
"Anything sounds bad when you put it like that," I snapped. Then, "Wait. How did you know we'd been in the past before falling into the future?"
"You told me," the Marc Thing replied.
I hate time travel.
"Why haven't we killed him yet?" N/Dick asked. As a cop, this wasn't an idle question. "He's already dead, so I can probably keep us out of trouble. And he's only here to fuck us or kill us."
"Or kill us and fuck us," Laura said. That was somewhat out of character, and from Sinclair's surprised glance, I wasn't the only one who thought so.
"I'm going to do a quick sweep around the house, make sure he didn't sprinkle any other surprises around before he let you grab him," Laura said, and darted off.
"Okay, that was . . . heroic, I think." Though what Laura would know about sneakiness that Sinclair and Tina wouldn't . . . oh, who cared? Back to business.
"Shall we kill him?" Tina was saying. "We could empty a clip into his head or put that shiny new axe to use-the one I ordered from Cabela's?-and chop him up into many, many pieces, or bleed him out and then set the corpse-"
"Uggghh," Jessica said, and rapidly waddled from the room, both hands crammed over her lips. Her eyes were practically bulging out of her head, and I knew exactly how she felt.
"-or burn him with acid or tie weights to all his pieces and drop him in lakes all over the world and be done with it."
"That sounds extreme," I said, and it was a sorry-ass day when I was the voice of reason. "It's not really our thing."
"But you know he isn't here to help us. Come on, really? He's come all this way to not hideously murder us in a number of gruesome ways?" Dee/Nick asked. "You've seen vengeance flicks, right?"
"Point," Tina admitted.
"I've gotta think about more than my safety, or yours," he continued as we all tried not to hear Jessica throwing up in the small bathroom down the hall. "I don't think it's a good idea to just stand around talking about this. We need to make a decision and then get it done."
Wow. I was still having trouble getting used to Nick/ Dick liking me again, never mind him using his awesome cop-powers to keep us safe, or out of trouble.
The Marc Thing seemed pretty cool about his impending dismemberment. "Don't you want to hear my unexpected-yet-vital information that will change the course of your lives?" it asked.
"No/Uh-uh/Not really," Tina, Dick, and I said at the same time.
And whoa! Dee-Nick and Tina had produced guns from nowhere. "How many bullets will it take?" Nee-Dick asked.
"Shall we find out?" Tina said.