on track.
“This isn’t . . . our fault?” Laura looked horrified.
“Only in that I was able to follow you back to your loved ones because you burst onto my timeline with no right or invitation, after gaily running amok in my past and yours and instigating catastrophic change in the very fabric of the universe.”
“Anything sounds bad when you put it like that,” I snapped. Then, “Wait. How did you know we’d been in the past before falling into the future?”
“You told me,” the Marc Thing replied.
I hate time travel.
“Why haven’t we killed him yet?” N/Dick asked. As a cop, this wasn’t an idle question. “He’s already dead, so I can probably keep us out of trouble. And he’s only here to fuck us or kill us.”
“Or kill us and fuck us,” Laura said. That was somewhat out of character, and from Sinclair’s surprised glance, I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“I’m going to do a quick sweep around the house, make sure he didn’t sprinkle any other surprises around before he let you grab him,” Laura said, and darted off.
“Okay, that was . . . heroic, I think.” Though what Laura would know about sneakiness that Sinclair and Tina wouldn’t . . . oh, who cared? Back to business.
“Shall we kill him?” Tina was saying. “We could empty a clip into his head or put that shiny new axe to use—the one I ordered from Cabela’s?—and chop him up into many, many pieces, or bleed him out and then set the corpse—”
“Uggghh,” Jessica said, and rapidly waddled from the room, both hands crammed over her lips. Her eyes were practically bulging out of her head, and I knew exactly how she felt.
“—or burn him with acid or tie weights to all his pieces and drop him in lakes all over the world and be done with it.”
“That sounds extreme,” I said, and it was a sorry-ass day when I was the voice of reason. “It’s not really our thing.”
“But you know he isn’t here to help us. Come on, really? He’s come all this way to not hideously murder us in a number of gruesome ways?” Dee/Nick asked. “You’ve seen vengeance flicks, right?”
“Point,” Tina admitted.
“I’ve gotta think about more than my safety, or yours,” he continued as we all tried not to hear Jessica throwing up in the small bathroom down the hall. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to just stand around talking about this. We need to make a decision and then get it done.”
Wow. I was still having trouble getting used to Nick/ Dick liking me again, never mind him using his awesome cop-powers to keep us safe, or out of trouble.
The Marc Thing seemed pretty cool about his impending dismemberment. “Don’t you want to hear my unexpected-yet-vital information that will change the course of your lives?” it asked.
“No/Uh-uh/Not really,” Tina, Dick, and I said at the same time.
And whoa! Dee-Nick and Tina had produced guns from nowhere. “How many bullets will it take?” Nee-Dick asked.
“Shall we find out?” Tina said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Everything looks fine,” Laura announced, coming back into the kitchen. “I don’t think—whoa!” She took in the scene: Sinclair and me silently looking on, Tina and Nickie/Dickie making like two of the Charlie’s Angels, and a greenish Jessica staggering down the hallway. “Okay. What’d I miss? And Tina, how many guns do you have?”
“Seventy-four. And let’s be honest. First, it’s a safety issue. Second, it’s what he wants—”
“Yes, yes, yesssss!” The Marc Thing was too thoroughly taped to bounce, but he wriggled happily. It was like watching a worm trying to do the Forbidden Dance. “I do, I do, I really, really do! Ah, Laura, truly the spawn of angels . . . one angel, anyway, I dooooo!”
“Ick,” Laura commented. Then, “So it’s like Tina said? It’s what he wants and it’s a good way to keep all of us safe so we should feel good about killing him and just get it over with?”
Jessica had almost made it back to the kitchen when we heard her turn around to return to the bathroom. Cue ralphing noises.
“So just . . . sayonara, sucker, and ka-blam?” D/Nick asked, looking doubtful. He’d made a gun from his thumb and forefinger (dumb, since he had an actual gun on the Marc Thing) and looked down at it with less than perfect confidence. “He’s a pretty old vampire. I don’t think it’ll be simple.”
“Mucho ka-blam will be required,” the Marc Thing agreed, then pouted. “It’s not nice