Chapter 51

PSSt."

"So how'd you become a vam-"

"Pssst!"

I sighed. "Excuse me, but my little sister can be very rude and selfish at times. She's the cross I must bear when I'm not time traveling all over and saving the world. Worlds, maybe. Maybe I should get a plaque for all this grueling world saving."

"Pssst!"

"Two plaques. What?" I fell back a couple of steps so Laura and I were walking abreast. "What is it?"

"I think we should go."

"How come?" I was genuinely surprised.

"You fixed it so Tina will turn him. If there was a way to utterly destroy the future-our present-you've made sure we'll return to a smoking crater where Grand Avenue used to be. It's time to go."

"But I need to make sure he gets taken care of."

"Why?"

"Why?" I gaped. Laura wasn't normally this dumb. "Because-because I have to! What are you talking about, why?"

"You're only saying that because it's him. Your love is clouding your usually awful long view even more than usual."

"I can't just gaily hop back to hell without knowing he's going to be ... uh ..." Okay probably wasn't the right word. Set on his loveless track toward cold vengeance, enduring decades of isolation and loneliness until I pratfall into his life just sounded weird. "Look, I see your point, but-"

"Shhhh!" Laura hissed, grabbing my hand and yanking me off the dusty road. I knew it, I knew it! I was inevitably headed for a ditch tonight. "Look!"

We were cowering off the gravel road, sort of hunched down in the shallow ditch, and I could see Tina had caught up to Sinclair.

"What's she-?"

"Shhh! And duh, clearly she's talking to him."

"... dreadfully sorry."

"It doesn't matter now," Sinclair said, and I shivered. He sounded like a robot. An incredibly depressed robot. "They're gone. She's gone."

"Eric, I promise you, something will be done. These men won't get away with-"

Sinclair flinched. "Men? I thought-I thought she'd been raped-and there was an accident-?"

"There is-there are more things at work here than you can know."

"Explain them to me."

"Eric-"

"Right now."

I started to cheer up. Now he was starting to sound like the Sinclair I loved to loathe. Or loathed to love. He just needed a mission. All those Death Wish movies couldn't be wrong.

"Eric, there's no time. I need to get on their trail tonight. I'm only here for the funerals. But I couldn't leave without saying good-bye."

"Was it another vampire?"

Tina didn't speak for a moment, and Laura and I traded glances. I could tell she was rattled that he'd just come out with it like that. Are you a vampire? Are the stories about monsters true? What happened to you? And what happened to my family?

And how much of it is my fault, for never questioning anything?

"I-yes. How did you know?"

Eric, embarked upon his last night of life, started to laugh. I had never heard him laugh like that and hoped never to hear it again.

"How did I know? How did I know? My God, a better question would be when did Erin and I not know? Our grandmother's best friend? Who was always beautiful and clever, who never lost her wits or her looks?"

"Pretty big clue," I admitted, and Laura nodded.

"A friend who never seemed to leave her teenage years, who always seemed to relate to the elders far more easily than people her own age. People who looked her own age," he qualified.

"You never-"

"Our mother told us, when we started asking questions. Before we were invested in the Sinclair family secret. She said you were an angel. A dark angel, sent to protect us and watch over us." His hands flashed, and suddenly he was gripping Tina's shoulders and shouting into her face, "An angel!"

"She lied, of course," Tina said calmly, as if she wasn't being tossed around like a cocktail shaker on a gravel road in a small town in the middle of nowhere in 1920 (probably). "She lied because she couldn't reconcile the truth with her religious upbringing. She couldn't understand how a vampire could also be a friend of the family. She couldn't understand how a creature of darkness and blood could enjoy the company of farmers, could babysit and take vacations with you. Could love you.

"And rather than question it, she created a convenient fairy tale, as her mother had done for her, and her mother before her."

"Then why couldn't you save them?" he cried, and his voice cracked like the adolescent he still was. Though I was betting nineteen years old in the (maybe) 1920s was the equivalent of thirty-five in the twenty-first century.

"Because I'm a vampire, not a goddess, and we're not infallible. The reverse, if anything. Our appetites often lead us to trouble. Even our destruction. The only guarantee our state brings is freedom from aging bodies, never-ending thirst, and great strength and speed. Those are helpful much of the time. But they aren't a promise. They are no guarantee."

"You're off, then. After the killers."

"Yes."

"Not by yourself. I won't leave ugly work like this to a woman."

Ahhh, there was the charming chauvinist I often fantasized about strangling. And not in an auto-erotic way, either.

To her credit, Tina didn't go into gales of humiliating laughter. "I appreciate your concern, my dear. But I have been involved in ugly work long, long before you were born."

"Exactly. That's why you're going to make me one of you." Sinclair took a deep breath. "And teach me. Everything. You'll show me everything. And they'll pay. They will pay and pay, and when I've finished with them ... in time ... there may be more to live for than vengeance and a living death."

Another short silence, and I could have sworn Tina glanced at us pseudo-hiding in the ditch. "Yes, that ... that seems to be the thing to do, doesn't it? Eric, you must understand-"

"Vengeance. I understand vengeance. If I'm damned because of it, then so be it."

Again a glance in our direction. "I'm not sure damned is ... exactly ... the appropriate word."

"We should go," Laura whispered. "There's nothing else for us to screw up."

"Not yet."

"Why?"

I didn't know. I couldn't figure it out myself, much less explain to Laura. I couldn't shake the feeling that it would be a personal disaster to leave just now. But I didn't ... know ... why.

"Let me tell you what it will be like."

He made a curt gesture. "Irrelevant. There's nothing I wouldn't endure for vengeance. Losing my soul is the least of it."

You won't, though! I almost shouted. Soulless was so not how I'd describe Sinclair. He came off as chilly and indifferent, until you got his pants off. I mean, got to know him.

"The ... act itself isn't unpleasant. You'll get tired. You'll sleep. And, as I plan to steal your body, you needn't worry about waking in a coffin six feet in the earth. I cannot tell you how upsetting that is," Tina muttered.

Jeez. I could imagine. I was learning more about Tina in one night than I had in three years.

"But you'll be ... disoriented. You'll-it might take a while to ... to learn ... how to be strong ..."

I leaped to my feet. Strong! That's why we were still here!

I scrambled out of the ditch. Laura lunged but, since I was in superspeedy-vamp mode, missed by a mile (almost literally). I was moving so efficiently, Sinclair was only now starting to turn toward the racket I was making. And Tina, who could have stopped me, seemed frozen in surprise, or maybe disbelief.

Eric didn't turn quickly enough. I nailed him from behind, rode him all the way into the gravel, and sank my canines into his neck.

Chapter 52

What are you doing?"

"Oh, Betsy! This is so inappropriate," the Antichrist scolded.

The teenaged Eric Sinclair also tried to protest, probably, but since he was facedown in the gravel I couldn't make out what he was saying.

I won't lie: his blood? His live blood, electric with the high-fat diet of the 1920s (probably)? Unbelievable. His live blood was worth the huge pain in the ass our time traveling had been. At least, I thought so. Laura probably wouldn't agree.

Make no mistake: I always liked the taste of Sinclair; we often spent days and days where we only fed off each other. But live Sinclair, yummy with electrolytes and a healthy midwestern diet?

His blood sang with meatloaf and roast duck and buttery biscuits and lamb and chicken and radish roses and deviled eggs and potato salad and turkey and oatmeal and veal and beans and jelly and crumb cake and ham and gingerbread and beets and bread pudding and pork chops and rice pudding and oh, my, what is this? Teenage Sinclair was in excellent shape, what with all the farming and being gorgeous and suchlike.

Oofta.

Sinclair raised his head. "Uh, miss? I think you might have fallen on me by accident."

"Go to sleep," I told him, sitting up. Then I yelped and shoved my hands forward so his head didn't clunk facedown into the gravel, but rather onto my palms. Probably should have thought that one out.

"Okay," I said, looking up at Tina and Laura, who were staring down at us like they'd seen a woman in her thirties molesting a teen-oh. Huh. Ew. "Now you can bite him."

"All right," Tina said cautiously. "I'm not quite sure how to proceed. Do I take you to task for hurting a friend, a boy I think of as my grandson?"

"Could we stop with the 'boy' talk? He's a grown man. Right? I'm not gross and inappropriate. Right?"

"Or should I bite the boy-"

"Dammit!"

"-and teach him all the ways of a living death?"

"Trust me, he's not hurt. But he's sure out cold. Ooof! Laura, I'm gonna carefully put his head down and then stand up, so if you could-"

"Wait!" I heard a tiny clinking, and Laura bent and picked something up as I lurched to my feet. Sinclair's yummy rich blood was making my head swim. "This fell out of his pocket."

"Oh!" I managed not to snatch it out of her grip, just gently grasped it. "He's not gonna want to lose this; it's Erin's. I mean, it was Erin's." I held out the tiny cross on the gold chain to Tina. It would be mine, almost a hundred years from now. Sinclair would give it to me, his most treasured possession, and he wouldn't know why.

At the time, I wouldn't know why, either. Only that the jackass vampire I couldn't ever seem to ditch had given me something of great value, great personal value. And when he did, for the first time I was able to see him as a person instead of a pain in my ass.

Tina backed up very, very slowly. "I can't touch that. But you can." She leaned forward and seemed to peer at me. "You are a vampire! I couldn't tell before."

"She probably figured it out when you leaped on him and gnawed like he was your own personal Chew-eez."

"You're very unattractive when you're all sarcastic and snarky like that."

"Who are you?" Tina asked. She seemed as intrigued as she was startled ... maybe even frightened. Or just really weirded out.

"No one of consequence," I said, ruthlessly stealing a line from The Princess Bride. "So, we're out of here."

"Oh, thank God! I've had enough of Hastings."

"What've you got against Hastings, Laura? It's a perfectly nice river town. Um, now. Because I don't know that it's nice in the future or anything. I don't have a clue."

"Truer words," Laura muttered.

"So, best of luck with everything. With the turning and the training and such."

"Ah ... thank you, miss."

I knelt, tucked Erin's necklace back into Sinclair's pocket, smoothed his hair back from his dirty cheek, and kissed him. "See you in the future," I whispered, and it would have been an awesome and touching moment, except Laura grabbed my arm and hauled me off down the gravel road, so the last thing Tina heard was the vampire queen yelping like a stomped pup.