Chapter 47

Have you lost your damned mind?" Laura hissed. "You led that poor man on and-and seduced him! With your evil! So we can crash the funeral of your dead in-laws!"

"Anything sounds bad when you say it like that. Eyes front, Mikey."

"Okay." Our driver, Michael something-or-other (it was Smith or Thompson or Freidricksson ... something catchy but forgettable) obediently looked ahead, clucked his tongue at the horses, and our wagon jolted ever forward. We were last in the procession, which was just the way I wanted it.

Also? My kingdom for some shock absorbers. No wonder someone got fed up and invented the car.

"You are very, very, very pretty."

"It's my conditioner," I assured him. "I don't think it's been invented yet. That's why you're attracted to me. Sexually, I mean. Also, I'm a vampire and I've bewitched you into giving us a ride to the funeral of, as the Antichrist put it, my dead in-laws."

"Anything sounds bad when you say it like that," Laura snarked. Her arms were folded across her chest and she was in full-on brat mode.

"You don't really think all this stuff is a coincidence, do you? Your mother said so herself-you need my blood, and then there was something about how I'd draw you. No, that wasn't it. How you'd be drawn toward stuff in my life that was stupid or weird."

"I don't-"

"Can't say she didn't warn us, but she definitely downplayed this whole thing. She could've just said, 'For a while, it will seem like you're trapped in a really bad episode of Lost,' and I would have understood perfectly. But yeah, you're supposed to be drawn toward weird dumb stuff from my life."

"I don't think that's a precise quote." But Laura was nodding; I could see that, in fact, she had thought a lot of this was coincidence but was rapidly revising her opinion. "I see your meaning. We've seen your husband, and now we've seen his poor family. And if Tina is supposed to turn him-"

"Then she's here, too! She's in town right now, and this is too good an opp to let go by. Look!" I pointed and Michael obediently turned the horses in that direction. Unfortunately, the largest river in the country was also in that direction. "Ack, quit it! Drive us to the cemetery, the boneyard, duh!"

"Sorry, miss."

"And keep us out of the Mississippi River, if it's not too much to ask."

"Yes, miss."

"And even if it is."

Laura was shaking her head. We were huddled on either side of Michael, trying to keep warm. Stupid open wagons with no heaters. "If this all means something, what was that business in Salem?"

"What, you're asking me? You forget, I'm just as piss ignorant as you are. Salem was practice, maybe, or maybe your mom lost a bet, who knows? The important thing is, we're here now. I bet we're supposed to do something. Or fix something. Or find something. Or kill something."

"But this isn't a TV show. This is just me, getting practice so I can one day run hell if I want. All this extra stuff-" She gestured vaguely toward Michael, who had (once again) stopped watching the road and was instead watching me. I could see no way to avoid ending up in a ditch this evening, or a river, really I couldn't.

"Eyes front, Michael!"

"Okay."

"No," Laura said, still working on her train of thought. "It's practice for sure, but we're getting bogged down with the day-to-day human stuff."

"Bogged down?" Didn't care for that phrasing one little bit.

"Well, if I wasn't half human, my mother would have come up with some other way for me to learn this stuff. But I am. So she needed you. And because I need you in order to learn, I'm getting bogged down in things like your in-laws' murder and such."

"Maybe you didn't catch my shrill bitchy tone, so I'll try again: bogged down?"

She flapped a hand to show what she thought of my bitchy tone. "You know what I mean. Don't make it into a thing."

"I'll make it into anything I-Michael, will you please drive these fucking horses straight before I kill one of them to drown you in their blood?"

"You're really, really pretty."

"No, I'm not! I'm filthy, I'm not wearing any makeup, I haven't seen a hairbrush in well over a hundred years, I'm covered with ancient dust from my dead in-laws' farm, and somebody thought I looked so ghastly they figured I was going swimming earlier today. I am the polar opposite from really, really pretty and it hurts, Michael, it hurts. An entire frontier town full of people," I groaned, burying my face in my hands, "and I had to get the one they invented the short buses for."

"Actually, frontier town is a misnomer, since-"

"Oh, enough, history girl. You do understand that if I committed felony assault all over your skull, there wouldn't be a jury in the world that would convict me. You get that, ri-well, finally!" I could see glimpses of headstones sort of peeking out from all the trees ... I'd have been able to spot them sooner if someone had gotten off their lazy butts and invented flashlights. And headlights for wagons. And brake lights for wagons. "And check this-almost dark!"

"That's odd. They normally had funerals during the day. It's not like they can haul out a bunch of klieg lights and turn them on in another hour."

"Maybe they're in a hurry to get the Sinclairs into the ground."

"Yes," the Antichrist said. "Maybe they are." Then she shivered. "Brrr! I gave myself the chills with that one. Do we know how they were murdered?"

I squirmed. "No," I admitted. "I just know they were murdered the same week his sister was. It might even have been the same day. But I don't know the circumstances or anything. Hey, Michael, do you know what happened to Erin Sinclair, and Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair?"

"Yup."

We waited for a long moment, but Michael had started humming under his breath. A simple creature, our driver, not overtaxed with many of life's burdens.

"Well?" we asked.

"Oh. Yup, ah, Erin, she took it in her head that she wanted to go to college. An' the Sinclairs, y'know, Henry and Bobbi, they always did like to spoil her-she's the youngest, y'know, by near four minutes. So they took her up there to sit for them exams. And I guess she wasn't even the first woman to sit for 'em! Haw!"

"Haw," we dutifully echoed.

"But there was this fella there, he didn't work for the college but he said he did, and he tried to lay with Erin but she wasn't having none of that, so he hit her, and they figure she fell, 'cuz her neck got broke."

Laura looked ill. I probably did, too, but I was more pissed than sick. "Then what?"

"She just shoulda stayed home. We all warned her."

"Oh, you mean stay on the farm and squeeze out a few babies and never try to learn anything new or visit anything new or see anything new?"

"She's not seein' nothing new now."

"Touche, Mikey. Let's go find Susan B. Anthony," I suggested to Laura, "and kiss her on the mouth." Thank you, thank you, Susie B., for getting the idea in your head that women were worth more than the theoretical children they might have. I knew we were in olden times and all, but cripes, that kind of talk made me nuts.

And if Erin was only half as independent as her twin, and half as stubborn ... well. No effing wonder she'd wanted to go to college. I thought it was pretty cool that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair gave her a ride, come to think of it.

"Then what, Fred Flintstone?"

"Well, you know Henry."

"Yes, we know Henry," Laura said, encouraging him to go on by not throttling him. "Whatta kidder, that Henry. Yes indeed."

"Yeah, well, he 'bout lost his mind when he found Erin all smashed up and suchlike, and he went charging up the stairs to get that fella, and nobody's really sure what happened next, but he an' Bobbi both turned up dead. Smashed." He gestured to his own head. "The bones in their heads were all smashed up."

"Excuse me, did you say smashed?"

"Do they know who did it?" Laura interrupted before Michael could elaborate on smashed.

"We know who sez he did it ... this fella claimed he was on the board what founded the university up there. 'Cept that was a lie, because the university got started back in fifty-one and this fella didn't look no older than Erin."

Laura's eyes got very big and she mouthed vampire at me. I nodded. "That's-that's very interesting, Michael, thanks for telling us. Laura, look, there's the crowd ... let's just sort of hang on the outskirts, see what we can see. Michael, you can let us out here."

"But you're so pretty."

"Yes, one of my many burdens."

"But you're so-"

"Good-bye, Mikey."

"But you are," he wailed as we hopped off the wagon and scampered into the brush like big blonde gophers. Breaking hearts wherever I went, that was the motto of the vampire queen. Also, never leave your own time period without a lint brush and a change of clothes.

Chapter 48

We'd been lurking, and freezing, for over an hour. The minister had come and gone; the townspeople had come and gone. It was full dark, and we were both shivering.

Finally, only Eric Sinclair was left beside the graves.

I wasn't quite sure why I was hanging out here. Sure, I felt shitty for the poor guy-his entire world, wiped out in, what? Half an hour? Less? But the only thing I could do by staying was screw up the time line.

I guess it was as simple as this: I knew my love was suffering. And even if I couldn't help directly, I just wanted a look at him. To, as Stephen King put it, "refresh my heart."

What was shocking was that I'd always assumed Sinclair had been turned in his late twenties or early thirties. But Erin, according to her headstone, had been only nineteen. ("Spinster territory," Laura had told me. "Probably one of the reasons she wanted to go to college. She knew nobody was waiting around town to marry her. Or she had turned them all down, which is another mark in Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair's favor. Not to mention Erin's.")

Eric Sinclair had never looked nineteen to me, and now I knew why: the shock had aged him, had carved lines around his eyes and mouth that weren't supposed to show up for another fifteen years.

And yeah. I won't deny it. I felt guilty, too. I'd never bothered to find any of this out. I could hide behind the well-Sinclair-keeps-himself-to-himself argument, but that would have been lame even for me. He would have told me if I'd ever pulled my head out of my own ass long enough to ask.

What was weird was seeing him alive, you know? We weren't having to be especially stealthy; he was in a world of his own. A world where his hearing was normal and he had zero interest in drinking blood. A world where he was mortal and hurting and, as of this week, entirely alone.

Laura nudged me and I looked. Tina had appeared from nowhere, it seemed, and was watching Sinclair with her big dark eyes. He hadn't spotted her; she was several rows back and standing so still I was a little surprised Laura had managed to spot her.

And Eric not only hadn't seen her, he wouldn't, I was surprised to see. He had turned and was sort of stumbling toward the cemetery entrance.

And Tina was watching him go!

"What the fuck?" I hissed, then yelped as Laura seized my ear and hauled me facedown beside her.

"Be careful! Remember vampire hearing."

"I'd like to remember my own hearing-ow, ow, ow, ow!" I jerked away and rubbed my now-throbbing ear. Cripes, at least it was still attached. Barely. "Since when have you been so grabby?"

"I think you must have gotten the story wrong," Laura breathed, so quietly I could barely make out the words and I was standing right next to her. "See?"

I saw, all right. Sinclair was leaving, and Tina wasn't doing shit.

"No way," I said, seizing the Antichrist's hand as I started running for Tina. "I got it right. She turns him. They both told me the same story at different times. And we're gonna make it right. Right now!" Hmm, that was a lot of rights in not very many statements.

I'd worry about evening it up later.