Undead and Undermined

Chapter FORTY-FOUR



Half an hour later, we were back in smoothie central. I was just getting to the (abbreviated) part where Satan asked me what she’d have to do to get me to leave hell (I’d been there, and I could still hardly believe it) when Garrett and Antonia walked in.

“I don’t even want to ask. Did you at least set our room on fire as you were leaving? Fire purifies everything,” I said as an aside to Sinclair, who was staring at Antonia. “I’m pretty sure.”

“My God!” Jessica said, pointing. Normally she tried not to bust the first commandment when friendly vampires were around, but I think in this case, her shock was justified.

“My God!” Antonia said, pointing at Jessica’s belly.

“I know,” I said, nodding. “Shocking and disgusting, isn’t it?”

“You’re just so gigantic.” Antonia seemed hypnotized. I knew exactly how she felt. “How . . . how do you even move? What are you eating? Who are you eating?”

“Great to have you back,” Jessica said dryly. “The place just wasn’t the same without you. You can take that any way you want.”

Tina had crossed the room and, to my surprise, gave Antonia a spontaneous hug. It’s not that they were enemies in the old days, it was just that spontaneous affectionate gestures from the coolly controlled Tina were unusual. “I’m looking right at you and I can’t believe my eyes.” She looked at me and I was a little uncomfortable at the unmistakable admiration in her face. “And you did this? This is amazing. I am . . . amazed.” She shook her head. “Just . . . it’s just very, very amazing.”

“Hey, a deal’s a deal.” Vain jerk that I was, even I could get a bit uncomfortable with what looked like borderline hero-worship. Maybe not even borderline. “I promised Garrett I’d try to get Antonia back, and here she is.”

“No,” Garrett said. They had both gotten dressed—and in their own clothes. That was interesting. That meant Garrett had never packed any of Antonia’s things away.

“Hey, don’t underestimate yourself. Antonia, he was right there with Laura and me the whole time. Wasn’t he, Laura? You know the saying ‘I’d follow you to hell and back’? Garrett really did!” Have I mentioned I loved this timeline’s Garrett? Quiet, but cool under pressure, and utterly reliable.

Laura had been quietly sipping her smoothie and not contributing much to the conversation. This was cool by me, since I was definitely the hero of this story and was happy to explain that to anyone who wanted to listen. It had been a long few days. I didn’t blame her for being drained, poor kid.

“No,” Garrett said again. He’d brought his knitting bag into the kitchen and was having Antonia help him roll yarn. Which I never understood at all. The yarn comes in a nice wrapped-up little package . . . which the knitter then unwraps. Then rewraps into a ball. Dumb. I could feel myself slipping into a boredom-induced coma just thinking about it. “You didn’t promise.”

“Uh-huh, sure, anyway, then the devil was all ‘hey, bitch, you can’t do that to me in my own waiting room’ and I was all ‘so call a cop, jerk’ and—wait. What?”

“You didn’t.”

Now we were all looking at him in surprise, even Antonia.

“It’s not what you did, it’s what I did,” Garrett said, idly rolling eggplant purple yarn into an eggplant purple ball. “When Betsy came back—when she didn’t remember Jessica being pregnant and didn’t remember I was alive, I lied. She doesn’t want to think she’s a bad person, so she helped. But she didn’t.” He looked at me for a half second, a casual glance before pausing to root around in his knitting bag. “She didn’t promise.”

If he’d blown up, we couldn’t have been more shocked. Garrett saying more than a sentence or two at a time was hard to wrap our minds around. To think that quickly . . . come up with a plan . . . execute the plan . . . and lie? It was almost unthinkable.

“I . . . I . . . I . . .” I hate the new Garrett! I sat there staring like a goldfish. “I have no idea how to react to this.”

(Privately. React privately. You and I will discuss this later, my own. At length.) Sinclair’s voice in my head was grim and cool, but he kept a pleasant expression on his face as he watched Garrett. Sometimes I loved this telepathy stuff.

(I don’t know what . . . you know what? I don’t even know what to think about this, never mind what to do.)

(Privately. At length.)

I casually picked up my smoothie and nodded. Damn right, privately at length. I didn’t mind being tricked . . . okay, that wasn’t true, I did mind. I mind that Garrett could lie, and do it so well no one questioned his word.

“Hey, Marc hasn’t come back down yet. You know he’s gonna make me play back all the gossip for him if he misses it.”

“I think he’s trying to grab some shut-eye . . . he volunteered to pull a double tonight.”

“You want to—” I got up and grabbed an empty glass from the dish strainer, held it out to Jessica, and she carefully filled it with our new flavor experiment, blueberry-banana-and-more-blueberries. Sinclair was such a freak for strawberries, we were glad to have some variety. “I’ll run this up to him. If he’s snoozing, I can just throw it back in the freezer.”

“Tell him he can have the Mystery Machine for the weekend. He met somebody,” she said to the group. “He wants to head up to Superior for a couple of days.”

“Good for him,” I said, pleased. Marc’s social life usually sucked rocks. I was glad he’d put himself out there again. Let me say for the zillionth time: how had he not found some great guy and settled down with a white picket fence to raise beagle puppies and pick fights with Superior Court rulings on gay marriage? That sounded like a pretty great happily-ever-after to me.

And Marc deserved it more than most. I always understood why he’d become a doctor . . . it was hard to imagine him doing anything else. Or being anything else. It was a cliché, but he was a giver. He was never happier than when a situation was improved (hysterical roommates with boy trouble, hysterical fourth grader with a scalp laceration, hysterical vampire queen in a Louboutin-less timeline) by his presence.

It didn’t take long to get to his room—he was a floor above Sinclair and me, in a little-used section of the mansion. He had taken the smallest bedroom for himself, not for the size, but the view . . . when the leaves were gone, you could see the Mississippi from his window.

I rapped on his closed door. He wasn’t blasting the Eurythmics, so he was probably awake. He said nothing soothed him to sleep faster than Annie Lennox’s throaty, raspy, penetrating voice. It takes all kinds of people to make a world, or so my mother says.

“Marc?” I rapped harder. “I come bearing smoothies and gossip.”

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

And I started to get a bad feeling. It wasn’t any one thing, it was all of them. Marc, spending who-knew-how-long with the Marc Thing. Not coming to the kitchen, but going up into his room, alone. No music blasting . . . but no one answering when he knocked. Any one of these things would be slightly odd. Add them together and . . . there it was! My bad feeling.

I tried the knob, already knowing it would be locked. And it was, of course. I’d seen this movie, too. And it was no problem for me; I raised my foot and slammed my heel into the wood just below the lock. The old, thin door didn’t have a chance. It didn’t have a chance because who worried about locked bedroom doors? Not us! That was who! No, we just worried about big, heavy, securely bolted doors in the basement, doors behind which we thought Marc was interrogating the Marc Thing. Doors behind which we thought the Marc Thing would tell us important things to fear in the future.

I was betting that was exactly what he had done.

I shoved the rest of the door open with a twist of my hip as I shot inside. The room was small, like I mentioned, and I immediately saw what he had done.

I saw what he had snuck off to do when no one would come looking for him, when no one would notice he was missing, when no one would stop telling stories about how great she was, when no one would call 911, when no one would stop him from killing himself, when no one would drown out the Marc Thing’s voice urging, commanding, informing, ordering.

No one. Not even me? How about, especially not me.