SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER . . .

"Okay. I have to bring you up to speed. Okay? Sinclair?"

The king of the vampires was lying facedown on our bare mattress. Bare because in our doin'-it-like-monkeys frenzy, the sheets had been yanked and tattered, the pillows were in the bathtub, and at least two of the west windows were broken. The window guys downtown absolutely loved us. They've started giving us discounts.

"Hey! Are you listening?"

"Gummff ummf uhnn gunh." My husband was as loose and relaxed as I've ever seen him; I had marital-relationed him to death. (Almost.) He turned his head. "Allow me to enjoy the last of my postcoital coma, please."

"No time!"

"Why?" he mewled.

Note the date and time, please, and not because of all the time traveling. I didn't think Sinclair could mewl. Kittens did that. Whiny ex-wives. (Or whiny current wives.) Kids not getting their own way did that, grown women did that, and ouch, when they made that shrill extended meeeeeewwwllll, it felt like that icky earworm from Wrath of Khan drillin' in there.

Ech, I can hear Ricardo "Welcome to Fantasy Island" Montalban now from one of the least lame Star Trek movies: Their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex; this has the yucky effect of rendering the poor things big-time susceptible to yucky suggestion and as they grow, yuckier and yuckier, madness and death are waiting for them in all their yuckiness, gross.

Anyway. I hate that noise and didn't think my husband could make it. But he could. The things I learn when I return from time travel and hell.

Huh. He was still talking.

"You are back, you are alive, you are beautiful and sated (at least I hope), you know all-"

"All? You think I know all? Clearly I came back in time and found the wrong Sink Lair. I'm trapped in a weird parallel universe where you still talk all the time." Seemed like I spent half my afterlife waiting for him to take a breath so I could jump in. Also, vampires? Never need to take a breath. So you see what I've been dealing with.

"Phaugh, do not babble, due to your jaunts you know how we all came together in the recent past, because of the far past, and . . ." He trailed off. I waited. Knowing my husband, it'd be profound and life-changing. It'd help me see a disaster as a not-so-terrible disaster, probably. It'd convince me I wasn't alone in a cruel world. It'd . . . ". . . Mmzzzzz."

"Hey! Wake up!" I jabbed him in the bicep with my toe. Okay, I kicked him in the arm. He flopped bonelessly off the bed.

"I've missed your tender love play, Elizabeth," he groaned from the (ripped) carpet.

"We got stuff to do!" I was looming over him without looking right at him, which is quite a trick. I didn't want to gaze into those dark, dark eyes, or eyeball his "day-amn, that's a nice ab-pack" or play follow-the-treasure-trail, or anything else that would lead to another forty-five minutes of bringing down the resale value of the entire wing.

"We've got things to explain!" I explained. Loudly. "So you need to focus. And also stop being naked. At least we don't have to deal with gross earworms from space-"

He blinked up at me. "Ah . . . what?"

"-but we've got other crap to wade through. Jessica wasn't pregnant when I left and I didn't know what a horse trough smelled like in Massachusetts and Minnesota. Whole planets have evolved between my ears!"

"What?" He sat up stiffly, like Frankenstein's monster, a big gorgeous well-hung Frankenstein with big black eyes that were wide with alarm.

"Exactly. Shit. To. Do. Are you on board now, Frank-uh, Sinclair? House meeting, stat! To the smoothie machine, Robin!" I darted off the bed, sheets trailing like a cape. I was Wonder Woman, I was Power Girl, I was-

Sinclairenstein reached out, flash-quick, and whipped the sheets away. It was like an evil, sexy magic trick. "Darling, is it your intention to show the household the color of your nipples? And that you have not one, but two dimples on your-"

"Shut up. I'll get dressed. Never mind my dimples."

"Oh, I never do," he said, surging to his feet so quickly, if I'd blinked I'd have missed it. "I don't mind this one-"

"Hey!"

"-or this one."

"Yeeek!"