"Wow!" Jessica said, shaking her head. "I heard it with my own ears, and I still don't believe she did it. Man, that's cold. Even for her."

"Most disagreeable," Sinclair agreed.

"Well..." Marc hesitated, then dunked his cookie into his tea until half of it dropped into the cup with a small plunk. Yech! I could never understand why he drank his cookies instead of eating them. "I'm not the biggest fan of Betsy's dad and stepmom, but if Antonia had a family history of that sort of thing-fugues or whatever-think how she must have felt. One minute she's pregnant, the next she's lost almost an entire year."

He shook his head. "She must have been scared shitless."

"Anybody would have been," I added, "but her especially because of her family history." I noticed everyone was staring at me. "What? I can put myself in her shoes. Her tacky, plastic shoes. I don't like her, and I definitely don't think she should have dumped my kid sister off in a hospital lobby, but I still feel kind of bad for her."

"Humph," Jessica said. She wasn't eating or drinking anything, just sitting at the table with the rest of us, her bony arms folded over her chest. "Listen, Tina, you were saying you thought you knew what happened the nine months the Ant was non compos mentis?"

Tina didn't say anything. After a moment, it got awkward.

"Uh, Tina? Hello?"

Sinclair sighed.

"Uh-oh," Marc said to his tea.

"Elizabeth," he began. "There is something I must tell you."

I carefully set down my cup. This never, ever boded well. It was never "I bought you six dozen flowers and forgot you don't like yellow.' It was always stuff like 'By the way, now you're the queen' or 'Hey, I'm moving in."

"Hit me," I said. I would have taken a deep breath to brace myself, but that would have just made me dizzy.

"This is... a private matter."

"Right," Marc said, standing and pulling Jessica out of her chair. "We'll just go."

"Right," Jessica said, catching on. "We'll, uh, be dusting something. In one of the rooms." They hurried out, and I heard her whisper, "She'll tell us later anyway."

"Possibly not," Tina said.

"I had an ulterior motive when we went to your step-mother's house."

"You did? You did? An ulterior motive? You? No way!"

"The Book of the Dead talks about your sibling."

"How do you know? I thought if you read that thing too long, you lost your mind."

"I have been reading bits and pieces of it over the last several decades."

I digested that one. "Okayyyyyy. So the Book knew I had a sister roaming around the wilds of wherever." Then it hit me, what he was saying. "You knew I had a sister."

"Yes."

"You knew I had a sister." I guess I felt like if I said it out loud enough, it would be less painful? "You knew I had a sister."

"Yes. Until today, I had thought the sibling in question was the baby your stepmother is carrying now." Then he added, totally calmly, "I was working my way up to telling you."

"Eric!" Jessica shouted from the hallway. "Work with me!" She raced in, Marc on her heels. "What is the matter with you? I fix it so you can move in, but this is the sort of thing that makes her nuts. Crazy, insane!"

"I think it's safe to say," I said through numb lips, "that I'm feeling a little insane right now."

"It's just that you had so many other things to worry about," Tina said quickly, trying to cover Sinclair's ass as usual. "Being sovereign and solving the murders from this summer and the-the house situation and the other vampires not respecting your position and all of that. That's why he had to go to Eur-never mind. He-we felt you had enough on your plate without worrying about your sister being the daughter of the devil and taking over the world."

I had been holding my teacup in both hands and accidentally squashed it like a bug. Jessica winced. Marc just stared at all of us. "What?"

Tina bit her lip. "Oh dear."

"Thank you for your assistance," Sinclair replied dryly.

Jessica dumped the cookies and crackers off the silver tray, walked around the table, and cracked Sinclair over the head with it. With a hollow bonnnng!, the silver dented. Sinclair didn't turn, just kept his steady, dark gaze on me.

"Lower," I said.

"You're so evicted," she told him.