right? Excellent.
“Okayyyyyyyyyyy.”
I could almost see him in the gloom . . . and I was reminded of someone. There was something about the line of the jaw . . . too bad this was all happening at super-hypersonic speed, instead of real time. If I had five minutes, I’d be able to sit down and figure this out. I was not, at the best of times, a fast thinker.
“Hope you’re ready for round two, bitch!” Which sounded much more badass in my head than out loud. I could never pull off the generic “the price is wrong, bitch!” vulgarity. “Don’t be fooled if I didn’t sound as badass as I could have. You’re about to get a face full of badass! Then you’ll be sorry.”
That’s when somebody grabbed my sweater (argh! A gift from Jess . . . red cashmere!) and hauled me backward. I again flew through the air with the greatest of ease, at what I assumed was the speed of sound, but didn’t break anything on this landing. Woo-hoo! In fact, I’d mostly slid along the highly waxed mellowly aged floors.
That’s when I realized: Sinclair had grabbed me and jerked me out of harm’s way. That was my husband in a nutshell: he’d commit felony assault on me. To save me!
“If this were the kind of movie my wife enjoys,” Sinclair said coldly, standing—looming, really—and almost entirely blocking the doorway, “I would make an inane announcement. Something silly and time-wasting like, ‘if you touch my wife again, I will kill you.’ Except you did touch my wife. And I am going to kill you. Because no one gets a chance to hurt her twice.”
“Really?” There was obvious delight in the thing’s voice. “Will you really? You’ll kill me? That would be woooooonderful.” Then, lower and much more sly: “Betsy, I seeeeee youuuuuuuu.”
“Who the hell—” Marc began. Dick had managed to keep Jessica in the kitchen, but he’d had no luck with Marc, who wasn’t above a knee in the ’nads to get from point A to point B. His lust for excitement had gotten him into jams worse than this.
Seeing Marc alive and well socked the memory home for me; I knew who our unwelcome visitor was.
“Do you seeeee meeeeee?”
The Marc Thing, from the future. Somehow he’d followed Laura and me back to the present. And now he was in my house.
Shit.
CHAPTER NINE
“Following me back was a bad idea,” I told the Marc Thing as I manfully cradled my cracked ribs. “The sort of idea that will get you staked a zillion times in the balls.”
“Don’t tease,” it said.
I glanced at Marc. His color was high; he had a look of avid curiosity on his face. He smelled like—it’s hard to explain; he smelled like hot wiring. You know how you sometimes taste metal when you get an adrenaline rush? He smelled like how that tastes. Excited. A little afraid. But not enough afraid, and was that a good thing or a bad thing?
How to explain this to him? Say, Marc, in the future I turned into Supremo Bitch-o of North America and tortured you for decades—after not saving you from being killed, oopsie!—until you went batshit nuts and now the you from the future is here to do all sorts of disgusting things to all of us, which is all my fault. Sorry. I owe you one, okay?
“My queen is quite correct . . . you will be staked. Only not in the balls.” We all jumped; I jumped and groaned . . . reeeally wish the cracked ribs would heal already. Tina, one of the awesomest vampires I knew (I didn’t know very many awesome vampires; shame it was such a short list) had snuck up on the Marc Thing and stuck the barrel of her 9mm Beretta in his ear.
“Wonderful,” the Marc Thing and Marc said in unison, which was just creepy.
It always surprised me to see Tina wielding firearms; she was an expert with all sorts of guns and had been ever since I’d known her.
Because she’d been born, or died, or whatever, during the Civil War, I was always amazed to see her handling modern weaponry. Which was dumb . . . it wasn’t like I expected to see her running around in hoopskirts brandishing mint juleps. Such a capricious nature has man. Or something.
Tina always looked good, but tonight she looked like an angel. And could have passed for one—she’d been killed in her late teens, or early twenties . .