“Yes.”

“You can hear me?”

Um, obviously. “Yes.”

“Oh. Okay.” A gusty sigh, which made Lara roll her eyes. Betsy didn’t have to breathe, so the sighs were solely for drama. “I miss my iPhone. So much!”

“What’s an iPhone?”

“Shut up.”

Sean clapped both hands over his mouth to squash the giggles. Where once there were Clouds for online storage, to keep data and e-books and files of enormous size, phones had gone the same way. From wire to wireless to Cloud, once the area in question was tech-prepped, people just had to raise their voices and say the right thing and/or the right numbers, and the Cloud would connect the call. No big clunky fifty-millimeter-by-one-hundred-millimeter phones; their voices were all the hardware they needed.

“What’s going on? I haven’t seen your folks in forever.”

“Yes, they’re fine . . . Betsy, there might be trouble headed your way. Something’s happened here.”

“Aw, what? Jeez, you’ve been the PIC for, what, thirty hours?”

Sean leaned forward. “PIC?”

“Hi, sweetie! Packer in Charge.”

“How’d you even know—” Lara slapped her forehead. She’d likely bruise soon, if she didn’t get smarter. “My dad told you.”

“He gave us a heads up, yeah,” Betsy admitted. “He didn’t anticipate any problems, it was just an FYI.”

“A what?” Sean was always interested in old acronyms.

“The worst thing about how there aren’t phones anymore is that you’re always, fucking always, on speaker phone,” the vampire fumed from fifteen hundred miles away.

“What’s a speaker ph—”

“Shut up.”

Sean stuck his tongue out at the air, and nearly bit it when Betsy shrilled, “I heard that!”

“Spooky,” he muttered.

“Listen, it’s not that I don’t find it flattering that a gorgeous young werewolf with her own Pack to run amok with is taking time out to chat with an old lady, but why are you calling really?”

“There’s not a whole lot to tell,” Lara began, “since we’re not really sure ourselves what’s going on. And my parents aren’t here, so—”

“Are you in danger?” Betsy asked sharply, all playfulness gone from her tone. “Lara, it is not weakness to ask an old friend for help, okay? There are ways to get me to visit that don’t involve letting your mom know you’re worried you’re in over your head.”

“How—” She looked at her brother and Jack, both sitting calmly, two of the six people out of billions she’d show uncertainty to. “What makes you think I think I might be in over my head even though nothing too terrible has happened yet?”

Betsy made an impatient noise and followed it with, “Because you’re not a raging sociopath. Anybody would be in over their head. You’re barely cloning age and you’re responsible for thousands. Or millions. However many Pack members are running around peeing on fire hydrants.”

“Oh, Betsy,” she groaned. “That’s awful. You’re awful.”

The vampire laughed and laughed. “Gotcha. Totally worth it; I bet that’s the first time you’ve smiled in days.”

“The third or fourth, actually,” she said, looking at Jack and ignoring Sean’s feigned vomiting. She explained what happened, and was a bit piqued to hear Betsy’s (overly dramatic) sigh of relief. “Excuse me?”

“A dead bat? That’s it?”

“I was concerned it was a symbol you or yours may be in trouble,” Lara said coldly, “and wished to take the time to inform you of same. So sorry to have bothered you.”

“Lara, wait.” A short silence, mercifully sigh-free; they could hear her murmuring to someone, probably the dead-sexy vampire king. “I did that badly. I’m sorry I said it the way I did, and I don’t mean to make light of your problems. I’m glad you called and I’m truly sorry you’re in difficulty. It’s just—trust me, I was afraid it was something else, something I thought I fixed. Something I’m pretty sure I did fix, so don’t worry. About that, I mean. Believe me, the world could be in much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much worse shape than it is now, even after the Kardashian Massacre. Those idiots—taking over every television network with their insipid ‘reality’ shows wasn’t enough? They had to try for the entire Eastern Seaboard? All because Kim lost the election to Tina Fey?”

This is the problem with the elderly; they love their tangents. Lara rubbed her eyes; low on sleep rations, exhausted from hours of astonishing sex. All right, there are worse problems.

Betsy’s ramble was coming to an end. “. . . anyway, take my word for it: worse things might have happened, and now won’t, and so as terrible as things are right now, it’s not a tenth as bad as they might have been, so chin up, l’il werewolf.”

“This is one of those mysterious vampire things, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, hon, it is.”

She swallowed a yawn. “I hate when you call me l’il werewolf.”

“I know.”

Lara wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or irritated. She opted for the former. “You’ll tell me the whole story some day? Assuming I live through this?”

“Well . . . all right, but in one version I come off really evil and ancient and dress in truly ugly gear, the version that will never come to pass.”‡‡

“I’ll try to be brave throughout your torrid tale of ugly gear,” Lara promised. “You’re sure everything else is all right?”

“Everything else is hunky-dory. You have no idea what that means, do you? Sean will tell you.”

“No, I won’t,” he called.

“Don’t make me come out there,” the vampire threatened.

“I would love it if you came out here.”

She laughed. “Perv! I’m old enough to be your . . . um . . . big sister.”

“What bullshit,” Lara said.

“Come on, you haven’t visited in forever,” Sean whined. “It’s only twenty-four hundred kilometers.”

“Stop it! Stop using the metric system.”

Lara winced. Another pet peeve of the elderly. “Betsy—”

“I hate the goddamned thing! We shouldn’t have agreed to the switch and we shouldn’t be teaching it to our kids!”

“Hey, hey,” Lara soothed. “Come on. Canada really helped us out during the Kardashian riots. The least we could do was adopt the metric system and help Quebec gain independence and be its own country. In lives saved alone, it was worth it—you’ve got to admit.”

“I don’t have to do anything except stay hot and not turn evil,” she snapped.

“Well, you’ve done at least one of those things,” Lara said with evil intent, knowing the vain vampire would spend the rest of the night wondering which one she meant. “End.”

“Oh, now that’s just ru—”

Heh. Got the last word in, anyway. Betsy hated the new phone tech, and half the time chattered five minutes after the call ended. It was comforting: it was one of the few ways the vampire queen acted her age. It could be jarring to be with someone who looked thirty but was close to a century old.

“I’d like to meet her,” Jack admitted. “I think.”

“No, you would—I told you, you’d like her.”

“And she loves my sister,” Sean said. “It’s so annoying. I should be the one the dead queen loves! Why do dead queens only love stupid Lara?”

“Come on,” she replied, embarrassed. “You know she likes all of us.”

“She likes me. She likes Mom and Dad. She likes Jack’s folks—so, yeah, Jack, you should definitely meet her. But she loves Lara.”

Jack smiled. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“Do you have several weeks? My list is lengthy.”

“She likes me because she’s a vampire queen who’s not afraid to get her hands bloody or shitty. That’s all.”

“Oh, well,” Jack teased. “If that’s all.”

“The first time she came out here, she took me to the playground and I got into a fight with a local kid.” Lara shrugged; it was a story she remembered only because other people liked to tell it. She herself had no real memory of the incident; she’d still been a cub, and such power tussles were far more frequent for cubs than human children. “Apparently I made the turd my beta bitch and Betsy saw the whole thing and loved it. We were pals after that. And my folks liked her, once they got to know her.”

“Yeah, mine, too.” Jack smiled, remembering. “My mom liked how Betsy never held your mom shooting her against her.”

“Mom put three in her chest.” That she did remember, though she’d been even younger than at the time of the playground incident. “It just made Betsy mad. It . . . made an impression.” One way to put it. “But I’m just talking because I’m putting off what I don’t want to do.”

“I know it’s not starting to have sex while a your brother’s in the room . . . You sure didn’t put that off . . .”

Lara didn’t smile. “You know. The easy one’s done.” She raised her voice. “Call . . . Fredrika . . . Bimm.”

Jack’s eyebrows—the most eloquent brows she’d ever seen, frankly—arched again.

“Oh, yeah,” Sean said, noticing. “It’s a party around here allll the time. After we call the mermaid, let’s call a fairy or a banshee or something.”

“Actually, that—” Jack began, but just then the mermaid answered, and whatever he said was cut off.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN