Wolf at the Door (22 page)

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Authors: MaryJanice Davidson

BOOK: Wolf at the Door
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“You look like a hoot owl when you do that. One with a degree in accounting. I’ll stop primping if you promise to never primp again. And as far as having to be somewhere, I’m going to return the shoes the vampire queen lent me.”
“Awesome! Let me find a shirt and I’ll be ready.”
“I’m certain my plans for returning footgear to its rightful owner don’t include you.”
“Too bad! The last time you went there, they threw a knife at your head. Who knows what they’ll do next time?”
“Technically they threw the back of a knife at my head. You have to admit, it sounds much less dangerous if you think of it that way.”
“Yeah, you can consider me
not
comforted. I’m goin’.” He had found his shirt, dark green with white lettering: “I’m Not Unemployed, I’m a Consultant!” “Want to call first? We could call first. Although they apparently don’t mind the pop-in. Would you believe her friggin’ phone number is on the newsletter? At least, a number she says she can be reached at.”
“I saw that as well.”
Edward shook his head. “That’s no way to run an undead empire. Accessibility? Keeping polite zombies and lending shoes to werewolves while making sure pregnant women get proper prenatal care? The whole thing’s too weird and twisted for words.”
“Phoning ahead. Hmm. That’s not a terrible idea.” She’d let Edward call, and while he was killing time playing around with a voice mail account, she could give some thought to the pros and cons of
not
knocking him unconscious and leaving without him.
She was an accountant, and almost any problem, any situation, could be broken down into numbers. So: would letting Edward meet the vampires be good for him or bad for him, and to what degree?
Oh, and the other thing she’d been wondering about: where did he get all those terrific shirts?
Forty-three
 
“It’s ringing!” Edward clutched the phone and kept half an eye on Rachael, who was just too cute for words in her little blue dress. With matching shoes, even. Rachael could look good in a dress made from Filet-O-Fish boxes. “It’s ringing. I’m gonna—hello?”
“Hello?”
“Uh, yeah, could I speak to the queen of the vampires? Please,” he added.
They probably see being polite as classy, not weak. Right? Hmm. Better hope so.
“You’ve got her.”
“Oh. Oh! You’re her? I mean, it’s you?”
“It’s me.”
“Well, listen good, sweetheart!” He ignored Rachael’s groan. “I don’t know what cataclysmic world-killing nefarious plan you have for taking over the world now that I know you’re not secretly my girlfriend, but I’m here to tell you it’s not gonna happen. I’m gonna make you regret the first dark thought you ever thought! Had, I mean!”
“Is this the host from the Hastings Green Mill?” a pleasant contralto asked.
“Uh, no.”
“Satan, then?”
“Really? You think I could be Satan? My voice must be
much
deeper and scarier than I thought.” It was wrong to find this terrific fun, right? He never dreamed his voice could be confused with the Lord of Lies.
“Satan is . . . uh . . . yes, the person who is Satan can be very dark and scary, and yes, you do sound a little bit like . . . like the person who is Satan.”
This is getting weirder even faster than I thought it would.
“Does Satan honestly have your number?” he asked breathlessly. This was the most interesting conversation he’d had in months. “Satan? The Dark Prince himself, he
calls
you?”
For what? Nefarious doings with the queen of the shambling eternally thirsty undead? Playdates? To talk about which movie based on a Marvel superhero or a Disney World ride they would go see together? What? Oh, he had to find out! Actually, if the things he’d heard about the queen were true, she’d probably tell him.
“Seriously, I think that’s amazing. I know it’s not cool to own that, but I’ll admit it: that is seriously cool.”
“What is?”
“Satan having your number. He’s got it, right? Don’t let this all be for nothing. Don’t let me get my hopes up like that.”
The woman laughed. “The landline, sure. Everybody’s got the landline.”
“So it’s true! This is so typical. The bad guys always act like they’ve never read a bestseller or seen a movie.”
“Bad guys? Now listen here, mister,
I’m
not the bad guy!” The pleasant contralto had a slight midwestern twang.
Now
was
now-oo
,
here
was
hee-er
,
bad
was
bee-ed
. Hilarious! “And I don’t appreciate random phone calls from fellas who tell me I
am
the bad guy.”
“Don’t get huffy. If you don’t want random calls, don’t list your number in a nationally mailed newsletter. Besides, you
are
the queen of the vampires.”
“Okay, yeah, I’ve got that going against me, but if you overlook that one little thing, you’d see I’m a good guy. Oh . . . who is this, anyway?”
“Listen, despicable vampire queen—”
“Oh, now that’s just rude.”
“Sorry,” he said, immediately chastened. Meanwhile, Rachael had buried her head in her hands and was moaning and rocking back and forth like someone trying to find her happy place. He gave her a big smile and flashed her a thumbs-up, but, weirdly, she wasn’t comforted. “It’s just, I always had a feeling I’d meet you someday, or somebody like you, so I kind of wrote the script for that meeting in my head.”
“And I’m not following your script?” she said, sounding like she was cheering up.
“No, not at all,” he soothed.
“Really?”
“Oh, we’re totally beyond my script. Years beyond.”
“Well, okay then.” Hmm, the queen of the vampires could turn a frown upside down in no time. “No harm done. What’s your name again?”
“I’m Edward B—” Rachael was making slashing-acrossthe-throat motions. Now she was miming hanging up the phone. Now she was miming strangling him. “Hey, it’s none of your business what my name is, Miss Nosy Parker Vampire Queen! But I
am
gonna be stopping by your lair with my hot new werewolf girlfriend, who wants to return some shoes, and we wanted to show we’re civilized by calling first. So we’re calling first. Bask in how civilized we are. Go on. Bask!”
“
Some shoes
. . . is your hot new werewolf girlfriend a medium-tall brunette? With big brown pansy eyes? And kind of a permanent tight-ass expression until she smiles?”
Wow. “Yeah, but it’s more a serious expression than a tight-ass one. Like a sexy librarian.”
“I pray she was careful with them.”
“You
pray
? With what?” A rosary? Shyeah. A Bible? Ha!
“The shoes! And I’m praying for them, not with them. I’ve never even met you, but I can already tell you’re incredibly weird. Are they okay? She didn’t scuff them or step in dog shit or anything, did she?”
“How should I know?” He covered the phone. “The vampire queen wants to know if the shoes are okay.”
Rachael, who’d given up with the slashing motions and just stood there listening with an appalled look on her face, nodded. “Sure. They’re fine. I’ve barely worn them. Just to here from her house. And now to her house from here.”
“Hear that? The blue thingies are safe and sound.”
“They’re not thingies. Little boys have thingies. You probably have a thingy.”
“Uh . . .” Out of nowhere, the queen’s voice had gotten deep and scary.
“Those are Beverly Feldman Bonvivant flats in navy blue.”
Little girl from
The Exorcist
deep and scary. “Okay.”
“With a satin underlay!”
James Earl Jones deep and scary. “Okay.”
“And a cushioned footbed!”
“O-
kay
!” He ignored Rachael’s renewed gestures of impending death. “My point was, they’re fine. In fact, we’re bringing them right over, so just chillax.”
“Oh, Edward.” Like magic—it was, probably!—the queen’s voice was back to the pleasant contralto of earlier. “Nobody says
chillax
anymore.”
“Hey, when I need to update my trends and pop culture refs, I’m not gonna check with a vampire. For all I know, you think zoot suits are trendy and you like to relax by doing the Charleston.”
“Voh-doh-dee-oh-doh, baby.” She laughed. “We’re cranking up the blender at four. See ya.”
He clicked off the call and looked at Rachael. “She’s either super-evil or super-cool.”
“Can’t she be both?” Rachael rolled her eyes. “You realize after that surreal chat, I have to take you. I’m sure she’ll have all kinds of questions. Dammit!”
“Aw, c’mon. It’ll be fun.”
Rachael had slipped on the blue Beverly Feldman Bonvivant flats and now gave him a look. “Fun? This isn’t Dungeons and Dragons, Edward. You could get hurt. You could get dead.”
“What about you?”
“They most likely wouldn’t dare. They know my cousin sent me out here to keep an eye on things. And they know who my cousin is.”
“Yeah, well, they also know who my friend Boo is, so I’m just as well protected—or poorly protected—as you are.”
“Careful, Edward. That was almost clever.”
“Hey, I’m almost clever lots of times. And now with my hot werewolf gal pal looking out for me? Evil doesn’t stand a chance. Besides, if they kill us in horrible grisly protracted ways, Boo will avenge us.” He snapped his fingers. “She could be here any hour. If she got a flight out this morning, she could be here any minute. That’s the other reason I had to come with. I want to give Boo all the intel I can.”
“And you want to give me all the stomach ulcers you can. Come on.” She sighed and jerked her head toward the door. “Do you want to walk to our horrible grisly protracted deaths, or drive?”
“Walk. Let’s try to keep our deaths as green as we can. Even in death, I try to watch out for planet Earth.”
He could tell she didn’t want to laugh but couldn’t help it. In fact, Rachael laughed so hard she almost fell down on the porch. Which got him started. What with one thing and another, their giggles didn’t dry up until they were climbing the steps to the vampire’s lair.
If we end up mutilated and murdered, at least we could say we had fun on the way over
. It was weird that stuff like that was important to him, right?
Forty-four
 
“You’re going to have to answer some questions,” the cop who lived with the vampire queen told them.
Whoa.
Edward was still reeling from the intros, never mind the murders. Not that he thought murders should go on anybody’s back burner. But a
lot
of shit had been going down lately. Murders just made it grittier.
He was so proud of Rachael . . . she was aces at everything, absolutely everything she did, and playing diplomat with the undead was the least of it.
She’d knocked on the door, cool as you please, and when the zombie answered, she was all, “Hey, how are ya?” and “Have you met my friend Edward?” and “Do you think we could talk to the lady of the house?” All relaxed and polite! Like this was an everyday thing for her!
Which it might be. He had no idea what her life in Massachusetts had been like, but he planned to find out. Because apparently, Cape Cod was
infested
with werewolves! And really, it explained so much . . . all that numb shit people usually put on tourists was probably numb werewolf shit.
Then . . . then! Off they go, and Edward wasn’t sure what he was expecting—nothing like a throne room, natch, but something special, like a big fancy living room with thrones instead of sectional couches . . . at the very least, something like that. He was not expecting an industrial-sized kitchen with fruit scattered everywhere and three—three!—blenders cranking out fruit smoothies every ten seconds.
So that’s how he ended up drinking a strawberry-banana smoothie with the queen of the vampires and her ilk at five o’clock in the afternoon.
Right, he’d almost forgotten . . . it was only afternoon, but all the vampires were up! None of them knew they were supposed to lie in their coffins and do impersonations of dead people until full dark. They must not be reading the right legends.
Oh, and can we tell the studio audience that the vampire queen’s lair is also a COMPLETE BABE FACTORY? Because it is!
First he got a look at the one Rachael had referred to as Jailbait. And yep, she was. Looked it, anyway; God (and maybe the vampire queen) only knew how old she really was. Long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail that ended in the middle of her back. A sleek black headband keeping her bangs out of her eyes. A dark red pleated skirt, spotless white blouse (a good trick in a kitchen that had fruit
everywhere
), red cardigan, spotless white tights, little tiny black flats. And that face! Zow. Pale, perfect, with luminous dark eyes that were almost as pretty as Rachael’s.

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