Dead Ever After

Chapter 13

Amazingly, the meal went well. There was just enough room for us at the kitchen table when I opened two folding chairs my gran had kept in the living room closet.

Amelia had obviously been crying, but she was calm now. Bob touched her every chance he got. Mr. Cataliades explained that he and Diantha had recalled an errand in town, and after we’d shared hamburgers and French fries and beans and watermelon, they took off.

We all helped clear away the kitchen. After dinner, Barry sat in a living room armchair with his feet propped up, focusing on his e-reader. Bob and Amelia cuddled on the couch watching a rebroadcast of The Terminator. Cheerful. After consuming three cooked hamburgers and a quart of French fries, Quinn loped outside to conduct a fruitless search of the woods. After an hour, discouraged and filthy, he returned to the house to tell me that he had smelled two vampires (presumably Bill and Karin) and a faint trace of fairy in the place we’d been when we were followed. But there was nothing else to find. He was leaving for a motel by the interstate.

I felt hostess guilt over not having a bed to offer him. I did tell him I’d be glad to pay for his hotel room, and he gave me a look that would’ve made paint peel.

The two part-demons returned after dark, while I was reading, and they didn’t look happy. They said good night very politely and clattered up the stairs to their room. With everyone in for the night, I decided my day could officially come to a close. It had been a pretty damn long one.

It’s always possible for human beings to spoil their own peace of mind, and I did a good job of it that night. Despite the friends who had shown up with no expectation of reward, the friends who’d come a long way to help me, I worried about the friend who hadn’t tried. I just couldn’t figure Sam out any more than I could figure out why Eric had posted my bail when I was no longer his wife, or even his girlfriend.

I was sure he’d had some reason for doing me that large good turn.

Does it sound like I was labeling Eric as ungenerous, uncaring? In some respects, and to some people, he was never those things. But he was a practical vampire, and he was a vampire about to become the consort of a true queen. Since dismissing me as his wife apparently was one of Freyda’s conditions for marrying Eric (and frankly, I could sure understand that), I couldn’t imagine her accepting Eric’s decision to put up an awfully large amount of money to secure my freedom. Maybe that had been part of some negotiation? “If you’ll let me bail out my former wife, I’ll take a decreased allowance for a year,” or something like that. (For all I knew, they negotiated how many times they would have sex.) And I had the most depressing mental image of the beautiful Freyda and my Eric . . . my former Eric.

Somewhere in the midst of wandering through a mental maze, I fell asleep.

I slept twenty minutes too late the next day and woke up to the awareness that my house was full of guests. I threw myself out of bed, aware of other brains firing into thought all over the house. I was showered and out in the kitchen quicker than greased lightning, and I fixed pancakes and bacon, put the coffeepot on, and got out the juice glasses. I listened to Amelia being sick in the hall bathroom and sent a groggy Diantha into mine to speed up the shower process.

As the pancakes came off the griddle, I slid them right onto plates so my guests could eat them while they were hot. I put out all the fruit I had, for the healthy minded.

Mr. Cataliades loved pancakes, and Diantha was not far behind him in pancake consumption. I had to make up some more batter in a hurry. Then there were dishes to wash (Bob helped) and my bed to make. So I had plenty to do, but throughout the busyness of my hands and thoughts, I was unhappily aware that I hadn’t heard from Sam.

I e-mailed him.

I chose that format so I could say exactly what I wanted to say without having to restate it several times. I worked on my composition for a while.

Sam, I don’t know why you don’t want to talk to me, but I wanted you to know that I’m ready to come to work any day you need me. Please let me know how you’re feeling.

I read this message over several times and decided it put the ball in Sam’s court pretty firmly. It was perfect until I impulsively typed, “I miss you.” And then I clicked Send.

After years of having what I considered a happy relationship with Sam—for the most part—with no effort at all, now that I’d actually made a sacrifice for him, we were down to e-mails and mysterious silences.

It was hard to understand.

I was trying to explain this to Amelia a few minutes later. She’d come upon me staring at the computer as if I were trying to will the screen to talk to me.

“What did you sacrifice?” she asked, her clear blue eyes intent on my face. When Amelia was in the right mood, she could be a good listener. I knew that Bob was shaving in the hall bathroom, Barry was out in the yard doing yoga stuff, and Mr. C and Diantha were having an earnest conversation at the edge of the woods. So it was safe to be frank.

“I sacrificed my chance to keep Eric,” I said. “I gave it up to save Sam’s life.”

She bypassed the big important part of that to go straight to the painful questions. “If you have to use big magic to keep someone with you, was it really meant to be?”

“I never thought about it as an either/or,” I said. “But Eric did. He’s a proud guy, and his maker began the process of hitching him to Freyda without consulting Eric at all.”

“And you know this how?”

“When he finally told me about it, he seemed . . . genuinely desperate.”

Amelia looked at me like I was the world’s biggest idiot. “Right, ’cause it’s nobody’s dream to go from managing a backwater area of Louisiana to being consort of a beautiful queen who’s hot for you. And why did he end up telling you?”

“Well, Pam insisted,” I admitted, feeling doubts overwhelm me. “But he hadn’t told me because he was trying to think of a way to stay with me.”

“I’m not saying anything different,” she said. Amelia has never been tactful, and I could tell she was making a huge effort. “You’re pretty great. But you know, honey . . . Eric is all about Eric. That’s why I was so willing to encourage Alcide. I figured Eric would break your heart.” She shrugged. “Or turn you,” she added as an afterthought.

I jerked, involuntarily.

“He did mean to turn you! That asshole! He would have taken you away from us. I guess we’re lucky all he did is break your heart!” She was absolutely furious.

“In all honesty, I don’t know that my heart is broken,” I said. “I’m depressed and sad. But I don’t feel as bad as I did when I found out about Bill’s big secret.”

Amelia said, “With Bill—that was the first time, right? The first time you’d found out someone important to you had been deceiving you?”

“It was the first chance anyone had ever had to deceive me,” I said, a new way to look at Bill’s betrayal. “With humans I’ve always been able to tell, at least enough to be wary or mistrustful . . . not to buy into whatever line of bullshit they’re handing out. Bill was the first sexual adventure for me, and he was the first man I ever said ‘I love you’ to.”

“Maybe you’re just getting used to being lied to,” Amelia said bracingly, and that was so much like Amelia that I had to smile. She was self-aware enough to look a bit abashed, “Okay, that was awful. I’m sorry.”

I mimed amazement, my eyes wide and my hands held open by my face.

“Bob told me that I needed to work on my people skills,” Amelia said. “He said I was pretty blunt.”

I tried not to smile too broadly. “Bob might be handy to have around after all.”

“Now that I’m pregnant, especially.” Amelia looked at me anxiously. “You sure we’re having a baby? I mean, when I thought about it, I could kind of see that my body hadn’t been working the way it was supposed to for a little while. And I feel thicker. But I’d never thought of having a baby. I just thought I was hormonal. I’m all weepy.”

“Even witches sing the blues,” I said, and she grinned at me.

“This is going to be one awesome baby,” she said.