"Before things go any further, we need to call Laura."

"Good idea," I replied. "We were going to anyway, because of . . ." I eyed the Marc Thing. Why give the psycho more info than we had to? "Because of the errand I need to run later."

"Don't you remember? You're not very bright in this century, but don't let that shame you for even a moment," the Marc Thing soothed. His tone didn't match his expression, so it was like being soothed by a rattlesnake. A creepy, well-dressed rattlesnake who would bite you, and be sorry after. Maybe. Needless to say, I wasn't soothed. "You need your sister to take you to hell."

"Anyway." I glared. The Marc Thing smirked. I wondered if Advil would work on a vampire. I was getting a real bitchkitty of a tension headache. Maybe a hundred Advil? Actually, since we weren't really prone to that sort of thing, my headache was likely psychological. How is it that, even if you know it's all in your head, it still hurts? "We were going to reach out to her anyway." I fumbled around in my pants for a good thirty seconds before I realized I must have lost my cell phone. Maybe . . . ?

My husband reached into his suit coat, extracted my phone, and silently (yet suavely) held it out to me. I had a dim memory of bursting, Hulk-like, out of my leggings a couple hours earlier when my cell phone flew with the greatest of ease . . . never mind. "Nobody say anything," I warned, and stabbed the button for Laura.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Marc assured me.

"Me, either!" the Other Marc said.

"It's ringing, it's-"

"Hello?"

"Oh, good, your cell works in hell."

"Betsy!" My sister sounded vaguely pleased. Well, just vague. Probably more distracted than anything else. "I'm heading to Goodwill . . . I've got a box of summer clothes I want to give away."

I was taken aback by the mental image her statement conjured up. "They have Goodwill in hell?"

"I'm not in hell. I'm in Apple Valley."

"Oh. Okay." I let pass all the comments I could make about Apple Valley, which was a perfectly nice Twin Cities suburb if you liked cities with no personality of their own. "When did you get back?"

"I . . . I'm just back now."

Weird. Was she trying my patience, or my temper? What was up with the vagueness? Oh, the hell with it. I had other fish to et cetera. "Listen, something's come up and I really, really, really need you to come over as soon as you can."

"Twenty minutes," she promised, and clicked off.

"Twenty minutes," I told them.

"What shaaaaaall we do until then?" the Marc Thing sang. He was made immobile by all the tape, but the creepy animation in his cold, cold face was jarring to say the least.

"We could take turns shooting you," N/Dick said. There was real distaste in his voice, and I couldn't blame him. Talking to the Marc Thing was like having a conversation with someone you couldn't see but knew would bite you if he got the chance. It was like being trapped in an elevator with a great white shark. Who had live grenades taped to his fin. And a toothache, which didn't help his mood. Baaaad shit.

"I am prepared-dying, really, no pun intended-fully prepared to undergo a grueling interrogation and scream out answers from a throat full of black blood."

"Jeez," Jessica complained, "do you have to?"

"Who killed me? And why? And what happened after? And why? And why did I follow you and the Anti-Laura back? And how? And how do I get my hair to look so good a thousand years in the past? I am," he said, looking around the kitchen, "surrounded by primitives. Not to mention primitive hair and skin-care products. Just because I don't have to shave doesn't mean I don't want to smell and look terrific. I can't remember the last time I . . ." His gaze had been darting around and his eyes reminded me of a weasel's . . . alert and mean . . . and hungry . . . at the same time.

But when he glanced out the kitchen window into the star-filled night, the nasty/fun tone went out of his voice and he just stared out the window for the next minute-I timed him, like Madonna timed Tom Hanks peeing in A League of Their Own, without saying anything.

Tina let out a delicate fake-cough to get his attention. "Oh, look. We're being dreadful hosts."

"Dreadful," Sinclair agreed, sounding about as interested as a corpse. Which he sort of-yeesh, never mind.

"Perhaps after our discussion you might like to go outside," she offered.

Awesome. That girl is smart. That girl who is almost two hundred years old is super smart. Me, I would have threatened him with a chainsaw nose job, followed by a lawn mower enema, but Tina instantly saw one of his weaknesses and moved in. You couldn't teach that stuff, man. That shit had to be innate.

"It's supposed to rain later," she continued, sauntering across the room until she was leaning against the sink with the big window right behind her. "We are having an unseasonably mild November."

N/Dick and Jessica and I all fell all over ourselves agreeing with her-my, yes, super unseasonable, unbelievably unseasonable, and the most beauteous November any of us could remember in the last thirty years because it was just all so gorgeous and cool and we wanted to go outside, too! Jeepers, maybe, when certain unpleasant interrogations were over, maybe we could all go outside! How cool would that be?

"Do you remember," she asked kindly, "how the air smells just before it rains?"

"No," it said shortly, and it didn't say another word until Laura showed. That was a long seventeen minutes.

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