Chapter 5

Disgusting, horrible, wretched, tremendously evil, evil, yuck-o, poop-ridden crap!"

"I could hear your dulcet tones at the front door," my husband, Sinclair, commented as he came into our bedroom smelling like secrets and blood. "However, you seem more, ah, agitated than usual."

"Agitated is putting it mildly."

"Yes, my love, but furiously foaming is not romantic in the slightest. Was that Laura just now leaving?"

"Huh? Yeah."

"She did not seem inclined to chat"

"She's having mom issues."

Sinclair grimaced, his emotional equivalent of screaming hysterically and yanking out his hair by double handfuls. A taciturn man, the love of my life. "Laura's mother issues? A sobering thought." He shrugged out of his navy suit coat, stepped to our walk-in closet, and fussily hung it on a wooden hanger. "I missed you tonight, my own."

"Oh, yeah?" I was unmoved. Big, big perk of being the vampire queen: I didn't have to feed every day. So when I could, I drowned my thirst with gallons of iced tea and blenders-full of smoothies. It didn't help. Not really. But it made me feel better. Less freaklike. Not quite so movie-monster-ish. "I didn't miss you, not even one little teensy-yeek!" I collapsed on our bed, giggling, as the king of the vampires zapped me with his evilly wriggling fingers of death-by-rib-tickling.

"My understanding is that admitting to being ticklish is admitting you have no willpower of any kind."

"Oh, you I'm-not-ticklish thugs always fall back on that one. Like being some sort of weird genetic freak is, I dunno, proof of willpower or something."

"It is," he said with an absolutely wicked smile, and then his fingers were skating over my ribs again. I thrashed and kicked and yowled. Do other queens have to put up with this shit? Did Victoria? Did Anne Boleyn? Elizabeth II? It seemed unlikely. Not that I envied Anne Boleyn. But I'm pretty sure that, although Henry I'm-never-satisfied Tudor planned her legal murder, he never tickled her until she felt ready to pee her pants.

"No, quit, I've got a-stop that!" I wriggled and shoved and managed to extricate myself from his rubber-cement-esque grip.

Okay. Lie. He let me up. I'm strong for a dead girl, but Eric Sinclair was one in a million. Literally.

"I've got this humongous problem."

"Oh, so?" He, too, rose from the bed and kept methodically undressing and hanging everything up. I didn't blame him-I saw his AmEx statement once and nearly went into shock on the spot. I'd hang up everything, too, if I spent over a hundred bucks on a single necktie.

We were plenty rich-he was, I mean, and Jessica-my best friend-was, sure.

The most I ever earned was forty thousand dollars a year, and that was as an executive assistant with seven years of experience the year I got run over by a Pontiac Aztek. But we lived in a mansion on the supertony Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Our mansion, in fact, looked right at home on the street with all the other mansions. Our mansion could give some of the other mansions a run for their money. Our mansion could freely taunt the other mansions. (Our mansion wasn't very mature, though; it was built in 1860, I think.)

See, the way things happened was-you know what? I actually don't have time for the whole story. I'll sum up: woke up dead, kicked ass, became queen of the vampires, hooked up with Eric Sinclair and made him king of the vampires (I still get mad when I think about how his having sex with me was the beginning, middle, and end of his coronation ... what kind of a sad-ass society planned for stuff like that?), moved into Vampire Central a couple years ago when my old house was teeming with termites, and have, at any given time, about half a dozen (uninvited) roommates, living, dead, and in-between.

See? If I'd coughed up the whole thing, we'd be here all month. The awfulest month. November.

(It was 3:18 a.m., November 1. The beginning of Hell-month. The awfulest month. November.)

"Does this have something to do with your unreasonable hatred of the Thanksgiving holiday?" Sinclair the Uncaring asked, carefully removing cufflinks (gold beans by Elsa Peretti, and yeah, you read that right, the man wears gold beans at his wrist and then mocks me for indulging in jewelry by Target) and placing them in his cufflink drawer.

Yeah. That was the sort of man I was condemned to live with for five thousand years.

"Dude! Unreasonable? Anything but, you ruthless putz. My Thanksgiving hatred is extremely reasonable."

"How is it I have known you for-"

"An eternity."

"-no, it only feels like that, dearest. I have known you going on three years-"

"Absolutely, completely an eternity."

"-yet I never cease to be surprised by your absurd prejudices, in particular your dislike of a basically inoffensive holiday."

"Inoffensive? Spoken like an old rich white dude." Annoyed, I swung my toe toward one of the bed legs and nearly fractured the thing for my trouble. Undead strength and speed did not mean invulnerable toes.

"I do not understand."

"Of course you don't understand; you're a guy. A rich white one, if you didn't catch that. All you've ever had to do for Thanksgiving is commit mass genocide, watch football, and wear turkey pants."

Sinclair blinked at me slowly. Like an owl. A big, pale, gorgeous, muscle-y owl. "Turkey pants?"

I waved his question away. "You know. Like sweatpants. Pants with tons of elastic so you can eat turkey until you vomit"

"Thanksgiving was somewhat different in my home," he said, looking amazed.

"That's the big lie, dude."

"Also, I loathe it when you refer to me as dude."

"Dude, like I care! Listen: from the first Thanksgiving up until three weeks from now, all the Thanksgiving pressure is on women. Cook, clean, stuff, eat-barely; we're too busy jumping up and down with more gravy and cranberry sauce-clean, fall on face and pray for the strength to make it to Christmas, rinse, repeat. It's inhuman. As an inhuman, I should know. Also it's a conspiracy to keep us chained to our mops."

"Do we have a mop?"

"We must" The kitchen was as wide as a football field; the counters were always shiny clean, the floors always gleaming. The place smelled like lemons and old wood. We probably had a dozen mops. A battalion of mops. And a discreet, overpaid housekeeping staff.

"But, my own, you need do none of those things: cook, clean, stuff-you recall the litany, I pray. Frankly, I am certain you have never had to do those things."

"That's not the-listen, I'm trying to strike a blow for feminism here."

"Feminism?"

"Yes, you know, that pesky mind-set that assumes women are the equal to men. Don't say 'feminism?' like you've never heard the word, you repressing bastard."

My husband had an expression on his face I knew well: he was amused, and annoyed, and thus looked as though he were coming down with a three-day migraine. "But I have heard the word, my sweet, and-"

Too late! I was hip deep in lecture mode. "We feminists had to invent it to stop all the rampant repressin' and stuff going on.

"How are you repressed?"

I gaped. "How am I-do you not see my boobs, which perkily classify me as a member in good standing of the repressed people?"

"But you are not. You are wealthy-"

"It's your money." I paused. "And before you, it was Jessica's money."

"All right. You have access to money, shall we leave it at that? Your father made an excellent living, and you have always had access to funds. I have never seen you clean a window nor stuff a bird."

"Oh, so because Sinclair the Great didn't see it happen, it didn't happen?"

"My love, I shall swear obeisance to you and drop this entire line of discussion, provided-"

"Obeisance, awesome, I like the sound of that. I would like gobs of obeisance, but it's weird that you're giving up so early in the-"

"Provided you tell me where the mops are kept."

I stopped talking. I blinked. (Did I have to? I didn't pee, I no longer menstruated, I didn't sweat, and I didn't barf. Did I need to blink, or would my undead eyeball just naturally moisten itself, and why was I thinking about eyeball juice right now?)

"While I am grateful for the momentary silence, I will not deny that the thought of your rebuttal strikes terror in my breast"

"Dude, can we have one marital chitchat without talking about your boobs?"

"The mop, my own?" He adjusted the pleat on his Savile Row supersuit, then unbuckled his belt and, okay, major digression here, but I absolutely love the sound of Sinclair's belt unbuckling. It's sexy, yet practical. Yet clink-y!

Anyway, he was unbuckling his belt, clink-clank, pulling his zipper, and now he was sliding out of his pants and yakking the whole time: "Do you know where said mop resides? Do you know how many we have? Do you know"-he folded the pants onto one of his fancy wooden hangers; where a proud rain forest once stood, now there are holders for my husband's slacks-"where the Mop & Glo is kept?"

"You don't even know that," I guessed. It was a shot in the dark, but I was pretty confident.

"I will take that as a no."

"Okay, so I don't know exactly where the mops are. That doesn't mean I'm not repressed."

"In fact, it does, dearest."

"Because I-" Because I had a brain full of thoughts, and they all wanted out at once.

Okay. Let me think about this.

I never had to make a meal or a bed. I hadn't sewn on a button since seventh-grade Home Echh. I didn't pay any bills. I didn't even have to grocery shop, though I still did.

But Sinclair was white, and old-in his seventies. Or nineties. I could never remember and frankly, never tried too hard. If I thought about the fact that I was gaily and frequently fucking someone old enough to be my grandpa, he could unbuckle his belt until the end of time and it'd still squick me out.

But! He was old, he was white. Sure, he'd grown up on a farm, but he'd been pretty rich not long after he died. I think not long.

Hmm. This was a little embarrassing. How much did I know about the love of my life, come to think of it?

Chapter 6

Let's see. He was born and raised in the Midwest.

His parents were farmers.

He lost his folks and his little sister in some awful accident-I was pretty sure it was an accident-and he met Tina (more on her in a minute) the night of their funeral.

I knew he favored Kenneth Cole shoes, in black.

I knew he loved strawberries.

I knew he loved me.

I knew he loved power most of all.

And that was pretty much all I knew. If this was a book, and not my life, what I knew about my husband wouldn't even fill up one page. How's that for humbling?