So anyway, my tombstone had been in storage the last six months. (My stepmother had been pushing for plain, cheap granite, with my initials and my dates of death and birth; a penny saved is a penny earned, apparently. My dad, as he always did when my mom and Antonia were involved, stayed out of it.)

  After a few months, the funeral home had politely contacted my mother and asked what she’d like to do with my tombstone. Mom had the plot and the stone paid for, so she had them stick it in the dirt the day before yesterday, and mentioned it at lunch yesterday. You know how it goes: “Waiter, I’ll have the tomato soup with Parmesan croutons, and by the way, honey, I had your tombstone set up in the cemetery yesterday.”

  Jessica and Laura had been morbidly curious to see it, and I’d tagged along. What the hell, it made for a break from wedding arrangements and Christmas cards.

  “Your mom,” Jessica commented, “is a model of scary efficiency.”

  Laura brightened. “Oh, Dr. Taylor is so nice.”

  “And just when I think your stepmother can’t get any lamer…no offense, Laura.” The Ant was technically Laura’s birth mother. It was a long story.

  “I’m not offended,” she replied cheerfully.

  “Have you two weirdos seen enough?”

  “Wait, wait.” Jessica plopped the bouquet of cream-colored calla lilies on my grave. I nearly shrieked. I’d sort of assumed she’d picked those up for one of the eighty thousand tables in our house. Not for my grave. Ugh! “There we go.”

  “Let’s bow our heads,” Laura suggested.

  “No way. You’re both fucking ill.”

  “Language,” my sister replied mildly.

  “We’re not praying over my grave. I’m massively creeped out just being here. That would be the final, ultimately too-weird step, ya weirdo.”

  “I’m not the one on a liquid diet, O vampire queen. Fine, if you won’t pray, then let’s book.”

  “Yeah,” I said, casting one more uneasy glance at my grave. “Let’s.”

  Chapter 2

  Good evening, Your Majesty.”

  “Tina, baby,” I called, dumping more cream in my tea. “Have a seat. Have a cup.”

  “How long have you been up?”

  “Two hours or so,” I said, trying not to sound smug. God had answered my prayers and lately I’d been waking up around four in the afternoon. Of course, I lived in Minnesota in December, so it was just as dark at four as it was at eight, but still.

  “But you…you haven’t seen the paper?” Tina sat down across from me, the Trib folded under her arm. She put it next to her and ignored the teapot. “Not yet?”

  “I don’t like the sound of that. Not one bit.”

  Tina hesitated, and I braced myself. Tina was an old vampire, ridiculously beautiful like most vampires, totally devoted to Sinclair and, to a lesser extent, me. She had made Sinclair, way back when, and helped us both win our crowns more recently, protected us, lived with us (not like that, ewww!)…she was like a major domo, except little and cute. So I guess she’d be a minor domo.

  She had long, taffy-colored hair, which she usually piled up in an efficient knot, and enormous dark eyes. Big brownish-black anime eyes. Though she barely came up to my chin, she gave off an almost noble air. Like Scarlett O’Hara’s mother, Ellen, I’d never seen Tina’s shoulders touch the back of any chair; I’d never seen her even slouch. She was also insanely smart and never forgot anything. She was a lot more queenlike than me, to tell the truth.

  Anyway, my point was, she handled with aplomb the sort of situations that would drive most of us clinically insane or at least irritable. And she was hesitating. She was nervous.

  Lord, help me be strong. “I guess you better tell me.”

  She silently unfolded the paper and handed it to me. Births and deaths. I read the announcement. “Huh,” I said with total unsurprise. “My brother was born days ago, and they didn’t bother to tell me. How about that.”

  Tina was actually cringing in her chair and opened her eyes wide at my remarks. “That’s…that’s all? That’s your only comment?”

  “Oh, come on. I grew up with those people. This isn’t exactly atypical behavior. I guess I better get over to the house and pay my respects. Let’s see…we’re supposed to meet with the florist tonight, but I seriously doubt Sinclair’s gonna mind if I reschedule that…and Jess and I are supposed to have a late supper, but she won’t want me to miss this…yeah, I’ll go see the baby tonight.”

  Tina’s perfect, smooth forehead was wrinkled in surprise. “I must say, Majesty, you’re taking this much better than I anticipated.”

  “I was sort of expecting it. I’ve been keeping half an eye on the birth announcements…just haven’t had a chance to get to them today. The baby’s early…I didn’t think the Ant was due until January.”

  “She might have gotten her dates mixed up,” Tina suggested. “It’s possible she miscalculated the date of her last menstrual—”

  “I’m trying to kill my unholy thirst, here,” I reminded her.

  “Sorry.”

  I took another look at the paper. “So brother Jon. You know, the last baby the Ant had was the daughter of the devil. Wonder what you’re gonna be like?”

  Chapter 3

  Your father’s not here,” the Ant said. Although she looked haggard, her pineapple-colored hair helmet was in perfect shape. She was clutching a baby monitor in her unpolished fingers, and a steady, monotonous crying was coming out of it. “He’s not back until tomorrow.”

  “I’m here to see the baby, Antonia. You know, my brother? Congratulations, by the way.”

  She was still hanging in the doorway, keeping me standing on the front step. “It’s not a good time, Betsy.”

  “It never is. Really, for either of us. You look terrible,” I said cheerfully.

  She glared. “I’m busy now, so you’ll have to come back.”

  “Look, Antonia, how do you want to do this? I can keep calling and keep coming by and you can keep blowing me off, and I can bitch to my father who will eventually get tired of being in the middle and make you let me see the baby, or you can let me in tonight and get it over with.”

  She swung the door open wide. “Fine, come in.”

  “Thank you so much. You’re too kind. So have you gained a ton of weight lately?” I asked, shrugging out of my coat. Then I remembered that I was constantly cold and wouldn’t be staying long and put it back on. “Not that you don’t look, you know, good.”

  “I have to check on Jon,” she said, scowling at the monitor. “The doctor says it’s colic. Your father left me with him.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of his thing.”

  “We named him after your father,” she added proudly, if inanely.

  “But Dad’s name is John. With an H. The baby’s name is Jon, which, as I’m sure you know, being his mother, is short for Jonathon, which is spelled totally differently.” My lips were moving; could she understand me? Maybe it was time to get out the Crayolas.

  She glared. “Close enough. He’s Jon Peter, just like your father.”

  I gave up. “Which bedroom have you set up as a nursery?”

  She pointed to the south end of the hallway at the top of the stairs…the bedroom farthest from the master bedroom. Surprise. I mounted the stairs, and she was right behind me.

  “You’d better not bite him,” she snarked, which I didn’t dignify with an answer. The Ant felt (and said, loudly, all the time) it was really thoughtless of me to not stay dead, and felt my fellow vampires were a bad element. That last one was a tough case to argue against. “You just better not. In fact, maybe you shouldn’t touch him at all.”

  “I promise, I don’t have a cold.” I opened the door—I could hear the baby yowling through the wood—and walked into the nursery, which was overdone in Walt Disney Pooh. “Ick, at least do the original Pooh.”

  “We’re redoing it next week,” she replied absently, staring into the crib. “All my Little Mermaid stuff showed up from eBay.”

  Yikes, no wonder he was screaming. I looked down at him and saw nothing special: a typical red-faced newborn with a shock of black hair, little eyes squeezed into slits, mouth open in the sustained “EeeeeeYAH eeeeeeYAH eeeeeeYAH” of a pissed-off young baby.

  He was dressed in one of those little sack things, like Swee’ Pea, a pale green that made the poor kid look positively yellow. His little limbs didn’t have much fat on them; they were sticklike. His teeny fists were the size of walnuts.

  Poor kid. Stuck in this overly big house with a Walt Disney theme, the Ant as his mom, and green swaddling clothes. It was too much to ask of anybody, never mind someone who hadn’t been on the planet for even a week. If I could have wept for him, I would have.

  “Here,” the Ant said, and handed me a small bottle of Purell.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not contagious.”

  “You’re dead. Ish.”

  I debated arguing but then just gave up and gave my hands a quick wash. Baby Jon wailed the entire time. I felt a little like wailing myself as I handed the bottle back.

  I didn’t ask if I could pick him up; I just did it, carefully supporting his head. (I remembered that much from my baby-sitting days.) He finished up a final “EeeeeeYAH!” and then just laid there, gasping.

  “I don’t want you to—” the Ant began and then cut herself off and stared at her son. “My God, that’s the first time he’s stopped crying in hours.”

  “I guess he likes me.”

  “Give him back.”

  I handed Baby Jon over, and as soon as he was out of my arms he started howling again. The Ant hastily handed him back to me, and he quit.

  I grinned—I couldn’t help it. A new vampire power! Newborns did my unholy bidding. Even better, the Ant was looking as green as Baby Jon’s outfit.

  “Well,” I said loudly, because I’d handed him back again and I had to be heard over the shrieking, “I’ll be going now.”

  “Wait!”

  Heh.

  Chapter 4

  I popped open the kitchen door and practically leaped into the middle of the floor. “I have returned!” I cried.

  “Yeah, so have I,” Jessica said. She was still in her caramel-colored coat, a man’s coat that came almost to her ankles, and had her knitting bag in one hand and her gloves in the other. Nobody else looked up. Maybe I’d better rethink the dramatic entrance; too many people were used to it. “Thanks for canceling on me, you evil whore.”

  “Oh, come on, like you really cared that I went over there and bugged the shit out of the Ant. And I have to cancel on you tomorrow, too, because I’m”—I paused for dramatic impact—“baby-sitting my baby brother.”

  Jessica gaped. “You’re doing what to the baby?”

  Tina and Sinclair actually looked up. “We didn’t catch that one, dear,” Sinclair told me.

  “You all caught it. You heard exactly what I said.” I pulled my cold hands out of my pockets and blew on them, which did zero good. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m babysitting. The baby likes me, and even though the Ant doesn’t, she’s desperate to get out of the house. So I’m going back tomorrow night.”

  “Back…into your stepmother’s home.”

  “To be alone with her baby,” Tina clarified.

  “Your stepmother’s baby,” Sinclair added.

  “I know! It’s a Christmas miracle!”

  “Well, I’ll come with,” Jessica decided. “Keep you company. And I’d like to see—John, is it?”

  “Jon. Yeah. It’ll be fun! Weird. But fun. We can zap some popcorn and ‘forget’ it in the back of her closet.” I tossed my keys on the counter and crossed the room. “What are you guys working on?”

  Eric Sinclair leaned back so I could take a look. He was the king of the vampires, my lover, my fiancé, my nemesis, and my roommate. It had been, to put it mildly, an interesting year.

  As usual, I was so distracted by Sinclair’s essential deliciousness, I almost forgot to look at the book they were so engrossed in. He was just so…well, yummy. Yummy and great-looking and tall and broad-shouldered and so so fine. Should-be-against-the-law fine. Big hands. Big smile. Big teeth. Big everything. Oofta. After months of fighting my attraction to him, I didn’t have to anymore, and baby, I was gorging. We both were. It was nice not to be looking at him out of the corner of my eye all the time. We were getting married. We were in love. We were supposed to be drooling all over each other.

  I brushed some of his dark hair off his forehead, tried not to stare longingly into his black eyes, let my hand wander down to his lapel, and finally tore my gaze back to the table. In half a second, my good mood evaporated like the Ant’s taste at a sample sale.

  “What the hell is that doing here?”

  “Darling, your grip—” He put his hand on my wrist and gently disengaged me, because I’d twisted the cloth of his lapel in my fist and, knowing him, he was less worried about the damage to his windpipe than ruining the line of his clothing.

  “Don’t get upset,” Tina began.

  “Ahhh! Ahhh!” I ahhh’d, pointing.

  “The UPS man brought it,” she continued.

  Jessica and I stared at her.

  “No, really,” she said.

  “The UPS guy brought that?” Jessica squeaked, also pointing at the Book of the Dead.

  “And a box from your mother,” Tina added helpfully.

  “Christ, I’d hate to see what’s in the other box!”

  “I thought we—” Jessica glanced at Sinclair, who was as smooth-faced as ever, though his black eyes were gleaming in a way that made the hair on my arms want to leave. “I thought it was gone for good.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered. It was open—open!—and I slammed it closed. “Shit! Don’t look at it. Shit! Why were you looking at it?”

  “Oh, well, the best-laid plans and all of that.” Sinclair smiled, but he didn’t look especially happy. “Better luck next time, and by that I mean, don’t you dare try it again.”

  Long story short: I’d read the Book of the Dead around Halloween and had gone nuts for a while. Really nuts. Biting and hurting my friends nuts. Even now, three months later, I was still so desperately ashamed of how I’d acted, I could hardly think about it. I had punished myself by wearing Kmart sneakers for a month, but even that didn’t seem to strike the right note of penitence.

  The up side was, now I could rise from my deep, dark slumber in the late afternoon, instead of being conked from dawn to dusk. But it wasn’t enough of a trade-off for me, and I’d thrown the Book into the Mississippi River, and good riddance.

  Sinclair had been coldly furious, and Tina hadn’t been especially happy with me, either. Historical document, priceless beyond rubies, invaluable soothsaying tool, blah-blah. He hadn’t shut me out of his bed, but the entire time we were having sex that night, he never stopped with the lecturing. And in his head (I can read his mind, though he doesn’t know that—yet), he was pissed. It had been a new kind of awful. But at the time, I thought it was a small price to pay to be rid of it.

  And now it was back.

  “Shit,” I said again, because for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Well,” Jessica said, staring at the Book, “I have some good news.”

  “This is a really good fake?”

  “No. I’ve just finished my last crochet class. Now I can teach George another stitch.”

  “Oh.” I managed to tear my gaze from the Book. “Well, that is good news. That’s—really good.”

  “How was your grave?” Tina asked politely.

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “But it’s so tempting.”

  “What are we going to do with that?”

  “Jessica already changed the subject. And I thought we’d put it back in the library.”

  “Where it belongs, and should never have been taken from in the first place,” Sinclair added silkily.

  “Hey, my house, my library, my book.”

  “Hardly,” he snitted.

  “Besides, it’s our house,” Jessica said, which was kind, because she paid the mortgage. Sinclair paid a pittance in rent, and I didn’t pay anything. We’d used the proceeds from the sale of my old, termite-ridden place to put a partial down payment on the mansion.

  “It’s dangerous,” I said, which was futile because I knew when I was beat.

  “It’s a tool. Like any tool, it depends on how you use it.” Sinclair started to get up. “I’ll remove it to the library.”

  “Nuh-uh.” I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed. It was like trying to budge a boulder. “C’mon, siddown already. I’ll put it in the library. I promise not to pitch it into the river on the way.”

  After a long moment, he sat. I awkwardly scooped up the Book (it was about two feet long, a foot wide, and six inches thick) and shuddered; it was warm. The vampire bible, bound in human skin, written in blood, and full of prophecies that were never wrong. Trouble was, if you read the thing too long, it drove you nuts. Not “I’m having a bad day and feel bitchy” nuts, or PMS nuts. “I think I’ll commit felony assault on my friends and rape my boyfriend” nuts.

  “I’m going to the basement,” Jessica said after the long silence. “I’m going to show George the new stitch.”

  “Wait,” I grunted, hefting the Book.

  “C’mon, I want to show him now, so he can practice.”

  “I said wait, dork. You’re not supposed to be alone with him, remember?”

  “He’s never hurt me. He’s never even looked in my direction. Not since you keep him full of your icky queen blood.”

  “Nevertheless,” Sinclair said, free of the Book and now picking up the Wall Street Journal, “you are not to be alone with him, Jessica. Ever.”

  She scowled, but she was scowling at the paper, which was now in front of Sinclair’s face. I almost laughed. Dismissed. He did it to me all the time.

  “Let me dump this thing in the libe,” I said, staggering toward the door—it was hard to carry something and not gag at the same time—“and I’ll be right with you. Anything’s better than this.”