Chapter 49

Where the hell do you think you're going?"

Tina looked more than startled-she looked borderline horrified.

"Well? Don't just stand there staring at my awesome-yet smudged shirt and filthy leggings! Go turn Sinclair into a vampire!"

"I can think of at least five other ways we could have done that more efficiently. And quietly."

"Shut up, you. Tina, come on." I stepped forward, seized her arm just above the elbow, and tugged her toward Sinclair. "Bite already. Gnaw away. Chomp like you've never chomped before."

"Who are you?"

I opened my mouth ... and stopped. What, exactly, should I tell her? That I was the long-prophesied vampire queen she hadn't ever heard of? That I was the wife of the teenager currently stumbling his way out of the cemetery? That I knew the killer of her friends was a vampire, and oh, by the way, I knew she was, too, so go ahead and bite that old family friend and also, don't kill me?

I really couldn't think of anything to tell her that wouldn't earn me a shot in the mouth. Or a broken neck.

"You have to help him." Hey, that sounded pretty reasonable. Which is probably why Laura thought of saying it. "He needs you."

"I failed him," Tina said, visibly upset, practically crying-not with tears, vampires don't have excess moisture just lying around for them to excrete, but you get the jist. "I failed them all. How can I ever face him?"

"How can you abandon him?"

Ohhh, good one, Laura! Thank God I'd brought her along on these dumb time-traveling trips.

"It's monstrous. I could never."

"You're just going to abandon him, then? Leave him with his grief?" I nagged. "You've seen him. He'll stick a gun in his mouth by the end of the week."

Tina flinched. Unlike Laura and me, she was appropriately dressed for the time. The big fat dresses from Salem were gone, and thank goodness. Instead, Tina was wearing an ankle-length skirt, which was pencil straight, pinching her knees together so that it was almost hobbling her. The top, a long tunic, completed the pencil look (I assume she was going for a pencil look); she looked skinny as a (pencil!) stick, but the deep cherry red of the tunic and the cherries-on-white print of the skirt made her look more substantial than she was. A big blonde hulk like me? If I'd worn a print like that, I would have been mistaken for the cherry tree. Petite women had all the luck.

Her hair was worn up, the big blonde waves carefully pinned up and away from her face. Her dark eyes were wary and full of pain. Which was sad and all, but her shoes! She had the most adorable red flapper-style shoes! Thick, chunky heels and delicate ankle straps completed the outfit, and Tina was a pretty, stylish picture indeed.

The shoes weren't much help ... she wasn't dressed flapper-style, but was wearing those kinds of shoes. So it'd be easy to assume, okay, probably 1920s. Except this was Hastings, Minnesota. Not exactly the center for all things fashion. So it could have been as early as 1910, or as late as 1935. No way to tell.

"-have to bite him! Tell her, Betsy."

"Eh? Oh, yep. You sure do have to bite him. Bite him and bite him and then bite him some more. He's gonna want to catch the killer."

"I will catch the killer," Tina said, and for a second she didn't look cute and beautiful and sweet; for a second, I felt a very real chill, and not because I was dressed in a bathing suit (sort of). Looks were deceiving, and who'd know better than a former Miss Congeniality? Tina was a predator, a beautiful woman used to getting her shit done while surrounded by men who assumed she was stupid, incompetent, or both. Her camouflage was excellent.

That was something I should probably keep in mind at all times.

"Listen, you have to chew on him, then, when he rises, you'll become his loyal sidekick, his Gal Friday, like a super-secretary except cool, and then you'll be perfectly positioned to ... to ... what, Laura?"

"Will you stop babbling things you have no way of knowing?"

"How else am I gonna bend her to my will?"

"Wait one moment," Tina interrupted. "When he rises, since it appears clear you two understand about vampires, he'll be a mindless beast for years, driven only by hunger and need. Why would I ever become the assistant of such a beast?"

"Because hemmmpph!" I snapped at Laura's fingers like a pissed-off bulldog. "Don't grab me, and don't stick your fingers in my mouth. Listen, Tina, the thing is, I know this stuff because you already did it. I know-I know you-" Would I create a paradox? I was pretty sure the answer was no, but ... it wasn't just my future I was screwing with. It was Sinclair's, too. "I definitely know ..."

"Your full name!" Laura prompted. "You've never seen us before, right? So how does the mysterious weirdo know your whole name?"

"Oh ho?" Tina looked at me.

I turned on Laura, so pissed I could only see her through a sort of red mist. "Have you ever met me?" I hissed. "Of course I don't know her full name! I'm lucky I remember it's Tina!"

"Well," Tina replied, unimpressed.

"Try," Laura encouraged. "Think. Exercise that teeny brain."

"When this is over, I'm going to beat you to death. Let's see. We were in the pit-"

"The what?"

"Yeah, I know. The vampires threw me in a pit. Then Tina jumped down into it."

"That does not sound one bit like me."

"Look, I didn't question your motives at the time, so don't be questioning mine. And ... she said-you said-it was the least she could do. And since I'd been having kind of a shitty day, I figured she was right. And ... uh ..."

"I suspect you might be mentally ill."

"You wouldn't talk to me like that if the Antichrist would let me tell you who I was," I whined. "You just-I do know a name!"

Tina had folded her arms across her chest and raised a polite eyebrow.

"And here I thought you might only make things worse," Laura observed, "and yet, how wrong I was."

"Nostro! How's that for a name?"

My half-assed plan worked; Tina looked shocked and her eyes opened wide, like I'd slapped her.

"That's right!" I crowed. "I made that idiot my bitch! The guy currently making your life suck rocks; I owned his ass. And I did it with your help." I turned to my sister. "There, see? She knows stuff, but not enough to destroy her own future, probably."

"You could only know that name if you were in league with him, which," she said, looking me up and down with all the warmth of an overworked customs inspector, "I don't believe you are. Or if you were telling the truth. So I suppose I must assume you mean what you say."

"That's right!"

"So the only living child of my dear friends must be damned to a lifeless existence."

"Lifeless?" Clearly she'd never had sex with undead Sinclair. Lifeless was so not the word springing to mind. "You don't understand. This will change ..." I saw Laura shake her head. "Tons," I finished. "It'll change tons. It'll change everything."

And for the first time, I owned the queen-of-the-undead thing. Because I had changed everything. Not alone, of course. With the help of all the mobile people in this cemetery (not Michael, but I assumed he was back home by now), I'd kicked out an asshat dictator, saved the Fiends, defeated various forms of evil, while maintaining a residence where all were (sort of) welcome, marrying the love of my life, becoming a mom (sort of), forming an alliance with seventy-five thousand werewolves ... what could I say? It had been a busy couple of years.

"Great. So you'll do it? You'll bite Sinclair?"

"Is there a reason you never refer to him by his first name? Have you forgotten it as you have forgotten mine?"

"We do not have time for your picky, irritating questions, Tina. Now go chomp."

"We have to find him again first," Laura observed. "Because while you were convincing Tina you were an intimate friend who didn't know her full name, your boy took a walk."

We looked. I cursed. Laura was right: Sinclair had bailed.

Chapter 50

He can't be that hard to hunt down," I opined. "How many nineteen-year-old studs in the depths of grief are wandering around 1920s Hastings, Minnesota, right this minute?"

"Too right. So you think it's 1920s Hastings, do you?"

"Don't answer that," Laura said quickly.

"Duh, Laura. Hey, look, is that Satan over there? What year is it, exactly?" I whispered to Tina when Laura actually-get this!-fell for that. Putz.

"You are an odd one," Tina observed, falling into step with us as we left the cemetery. "You and your sister."

"How did you know we were sisters?"

"The family resemblance is remarkable."

"Really?" This was thrilling as nothing had been on this wacky time-traveling misadventure. Laura was hot! It would be awesome to also be hot. To have people look at her and then look at me and be all "sure, I can see the hotness running in their family." It made having the devil for a stepmother almost not sucky. "So, Sinclair went thataway."

"I know. His scent is distinctive. I have known it for-for some time."

"I heard-I mean, I know the kids thought of you as Aunt Tina." Not the time to mention that, a few hours ago (at least in my head), we'd seen l'il Sinclair and l'il Erin, and the only thing they had on their minds was how grumpy their mom was because it was Moving Week. "You must be a close family friend."

"I knew their mother." Long pause. "And their grandmother."

"Yeah, I bet you were best friends with those guys. Those ladies," I amended. "So did they not ever notice you weren't aging, or did they pretend to believe you were your own daughter and granddaughter?"

"My friends ... my friends didn't care. When my grandmother moved to Minnesota, Eric's great-grandmother was her best friend. It seems the Sinclairs have always welcomed me; it seems I have always been in their lives." There was a long silence as the three of us walked together. Then: "They knew I was, ah, different. We never spoke of it. And they-they paid me the honor of guardianship of their children."

"So you're Sinclair's legal guardian now? No. Wait. He's an adult ... barely."

"He is the-he is the closest thing I shall ever have to a grandchild of my own."

I could practically hear the click as long-unasked questions were answered: why had Tina stayed by his side so loyally all those years? Why had they never hooked up? They had way more in common than Sinclair and I did, and nobody knew that better than me. (Frankly, I'd always found Sinclair's interest in me a complete mystery.) And why did she regulate herself to the periphery of the power? Why did she never make a move for the crown herself?

Not that the crown, so to speak (there actually wasn't one, how was that for false advertising?), was so great. But a lot of people seemed to think it was.

"You must be so angry about what happened to your friends and Erin," Laura said.

"Angry. Yes. I am angry." She said this with all the heat of I am wearing yellow. "And he will pay and pay."

"From what we heard, it sounds like a vampire?"

"Yes. That's what it sounds like. But he didn't act alone. And Erin Sinclair was only a means to an end."

Hmm. Sinister, creepy Tina was something new. Of course, she and Sinclair had lots in common: both of them lost practically their whole family in a matter of hours.

"You think maybe they were after you?"

"I have had dealings with those men before," she replied evenly.

"Okay. So, turn Sinclair and he can help you. It can be all vengeance, all the time. It can be Die Hard: The Early Years."

Laura snorted while Tina said, "I don't understand you. And that is the second time you've made reference to Eric being able to help me. But I think there is something you don't understand about vampires."

"Only one thing?" the Antichrist sneered. I gave her the finger when Tina wasn't looking.

"Eric will be useless to everyone, including himself, for at least five years after rising. The new undead, they are savage. They think only of the thirst. It takes years to deal with such things. And such knowledge is hard won."

"You're wrong." Because this, I did remember. I remember being in that nasty pit and hearing Tina explain that some vampires wake up strong. That it was very rare, but occasionally, a vampire would rise strong.

In fact, there were only two vampires I ever heard of who came back to life strong.

My husband, Eric Sinclair.

And me.