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we keep it?”
    He volunteered to go to the DMV for Jessica, who gently pointed out that the State of Minnesota frowned upon citizens sending proxies to renew their driver’s license. “Are you quite certain?” had been the disappointed reply. “Perhaps they have changed the rule. I had better check, just in case, don’t you think? You need your rest; I will find this out for you.”
    “If you really want to help, you could change the babies’—”
    “Nothing will prevent me from aiding you in this,” he’d declared, snatching his keys. “I swear it.”
    “Please don’t try to bribe anyone in the DMV,” Jess had replied, not even trying to hide the horror. “It doesn’t work. It makes everything all the more awful. I know .” Not that Jess was speaking from personal experience; her dad was a shit of the highest order and did all sorts of unsavory things. He was in Hell now, which was excellent. That wasn’t a guess on my part, by the way. I saw him there. His stupid wife, too.
    Eric Sinclair, vampire king and devoted pet owner, former creature of the night and current creature of the day and night, was also a huge fan of alfresco sex. Me, not so much. Sex, yep; my husband was (almost literally) a demon in the sack. Bedroom sex, counter sex, basement sex, attic sex, bathroom sex, hallway sex, even stair sex ( argh, my back! this carpet needs to be thicker ). But outdoors? In January? Why?
    We lived in a mansion people would pay to bang in. (I think it used to be a B&B, even, so people literally have paid to bang in it.) It was like living in Honolulu and then going to Honolulu for vacation: maybe a little pointless. Also: cold. Very, very cold this time of year in St. Paul. Goose bumps on top of goose bumps wasn’t remotely erotic.
    So my husband could be scampering in the snow almost anywhere (car wash, DMV, bake sale, winter carnival), doing anything (washing cars, braving state employees, buying brownies, watching a guy chainsaw a likeness of a Dairy Princess from a block of ice), which meant that I was on my own when it came to solving the mystery of Jessica’s weirdness. Well, on my own besides the cop, the zombie, and the other vampire I lived with.
    “I imagine she’ll have gone for a nap,” Tina said with a vague expression. Oh, right. We were having a conversation. Luckily my tuned-out expression was the same as my tuned-in one. “And it’s just as well the king was absent for your sister’s visit.”
    “Ah . . . yeah. Good point.”
    Things were still tense between my husband and my sister. It had only been a few weeks since she’d kidnapped me, then dumped me in Hell and abandoned me with a “sink or swim” mentality. I swam, but she hadn’t known I would.
    My husband was many things; incapable of holding a grudge wasn’t one of them. Sometimes it was like he invented grudge holding, except I know for a fact that my stepmother did.
    Still, it made for tense get-togethers, which I loathed. “Guess Sinclair hasn’t forgiven Laura for leaving me in Hell,” I commented, because for some reason I felt like saying the obvious out loud.
    Tina did that thing where she glanced at me and then glanced away, so quickly it was like she hadn’t moved. “Mm-mm,” was her typically low-key reply. And a couple of years ago it would have fooled me and I would have dropped the subject.
    It wasn’t a couple of years ago. “‘Mm-mm,’ what? ‘Mm-mm, something smells delicious; oh, ham steaks, my fave!’? ‘Mm-mm, damn skippy he hasn’t forgiven her and he’s secretly plotting to eat her’? ‘Mm-mm, how can I prevent Betsy from knowing I wasn’t paying attention and have no idea what we’re talking about’?”
    Tina thought it over for a few seconds before coming up with, “I never call you Betsy.”
    This was as close as I’d ever get to outsmarting her, so I was gonna take that as a win. “Yeah, okay. Good point.”
    “If you do not require my assistance at this