"Wait, wait, wait. Wait." Everyone waited. Unfortunately, that was all I had. But wait! I had more. "So this Marc Thing, the dead guy in our kitchen right now, he's not in his past. He's in our past." I turned to him. "Is that right? You don't remember any of this?"

"I remember it," he said. "Just not this way."

I scowled. Maybe he could be less helpful. "So, no, then."

"What difference does it make?" Laura asked. "He's evil and he's gotta go."

"You are correct, but we need to talk about this for a bit," Sinclair said. "Murder is an irreversible action. I try to avoid irreversible actions when at all possible."

"Does this mean we can't fix the past? His past?" I asked, pointing to the trussed vamp. "We're on . . . what? A parallel route now? Separate events and they can't ever touch in the way that parallel things can't ever touch, which I learned in sixth grade and never thought I'd have a use for?"

"Fifth grade!" Jessica called from the ralph room.

"The past already happened," the Marc Thing volunteered. "You can't un-happen something. Hrrmm. That came out more ignorant than I intended. And duller! What I meant was-"

"Wait!" I leaped to my feet . . . then remembered I'd already been standing and almost pitched into a wall. I was too excited to sit still. "I mean, wait again. We don't have to sit around and blah-blah this one to death."

"But I wanted to," Still Human Marc whined. "If I'm not in here, I've gotta go to work. I've mentioned it's a full moon, right? There'll be things to remove from rectums and lacerations to be stitched."

"No, this is a good thing! Don't you get it? I'll check the Book of the Dead! That's the whole reason I went to hell in the first place and let Laura beat me up for three centuries."

"You let Laura beat you up for three-"

"No time, Jess. Anyway, that's why I went through all that. So I could read the thing without going crazy. Finally, the stupid thing will actually come in handy instead of being awful and scary." I whirled and practically ran out of the kitchen.

"Wait," Laura began.

"What good is having an all-seeing creepy dead book of skin that's always right if I can't ever take advantage of it? Huh?" The hallway was narrow, so they were all stampeding behind me. Onward! I would lead my faithful minions to the path of the righteous, and also the library. "Right? Right? So I'll read it and it'll tell us what to do. Or at least what happened. Then we can make a plan. Then we can make another supper. Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm wicked thirsty."

"Betsy," Laura called again, but I was one heedless queen of the undead. It was so rare for me to get a really good idea, I couldn't wait to implement this one. I practically skidded to a halt in the library, which was harder than you'd think, what with the 1970s apricot shag. "Now we-shit."

"What?"

I pointed; the unholy book stand upon which the unholy and smelly Book of the Dead evilly perched was empty.

The book was gone. And thank goodness. Wow, was I glad the thing had gone missing. Now I didn't to worry about it, right? Because up until that point I had nooooo problems, right? And everything was working according to my plan, right?

Right. Gah.