Accidentally Dead, Again Part 25

Nina held up a finger before putting it against her pursed lips. "Shut up. Shut up now. Who is Penny, Phoebe?"

And there it was. There was no way to avoid it. So she just said it. "My sister. Your sister, too, if you want to be technical."

Wanda pretended to cough to cover her gasp, and then she muttered a warning growl. "Nina ..."

Instead of going for Phoebe's throat, Nina put her hands behind her and felt for the edge of Sam's bed, sitting down. "Say it. Tell me f.u.c.king all of it. Do it without whining and carrying on, or I swear to you, Phoebe, I'm going to smash your face in."

Phoebe instantly backed down. This Nina. The one who spoke words that were relatively calm, and succinctly enunciated wasn't the openly angry Nina. The one who made threats that were, for the most part, just empty threats. She had no doubt Nina could do some damage, but she'd never follow through on one of her I'll-pull-your-d.i.c.k-through-your-belly-b.u.t.ton war cries unless she absolutely had to.

But this Nina? The one who hadn't called her Fill in the Blank Barbie but Phoebe, wasn't the Nina who yelled and carried on at a very predictable level of ire. This was a bone-chilling Nina.

She was also a Nina whose world had been turned upside down-a Nina that was feeling the true sting of betrayal by the father she'd so loved. Huge chunks of her life were now accounted for in a much different way than she'd thought, and it had defeated her. Sadly, Phoebe read it. In her words. In her actions.

And for the first time since she'd met her sister-Phoebe hurt for her. She hurt for the Nina who'd been kidney punched by one secret after the other.

Sitting on the edge of the bed near Nina, Phoebe put her hand on her sister's stiff arm and began. "Penny is twenty years old. She was late in life for my mother and our father. A total surprise, but not one that wasn't a happy one, if you heard Mom and Dad talk about it. She was conceived just before Dad died. He knew about her, but he never had the chance to meet her."

"So one less secret he didn't have to keep, right?" Nina sneered, though it was a weak attempt at hiding her sadness.

Phoebe's response was quiet, measured. "My mother didn't know about you for a long time, Nina. Not until just before Dad died, according to her. When he told her, she wanted to incorporate you into our lives, and I know she would have loved you just the same way she loved Penny and me. Whether you liked it or not. I think Dad was about to give in ... but then he died. I only found out about this just after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's two years ago."

"Your mother had it, too?" Nina choked out the words, stiffening her spine.

Phoebe's nod was tight, her eyes hot and grainy. "She said she told me about you because she didn't want me to be alone when she ... was gone. I don't know why she never tried to find you after Dad died. I think it's because she was too busy trying to keep it together for Penny. And then Penny had a horrible accident and ..." Her voice choked on the words of that terrible moment in time.

Nina's head shot up so fast the bones in her neck cracked. "What happened to her?"

She retold the events of that devastating day her mother had called her in a state of hysteria when Phoebe was just twenty-three.

She'd known the moment she'd heard her mother's voice, one that was rarely p.r.o.ne to raise even an octave, that something awful had happened. "Penny needs twenty-four-seven care. Her brain injury was more than I could handle and manage work at the same time after my mother pa.s.sed. Without help, without someone to take her for her physical therapy and all of the things required to care for her, I decided to use the insurance money my mother left me and the money I made from the sale of our old house to put Penny somewhere where she would be cared for properly until I could hire someone to live in with us full-time. I did try to keep her with me. I tried so hard. Mark helped, but finding good, reliable help was almost impossible. I'd come home from work to find she hadn't moved from her wheelchair all day-"

"She's in a wheelchair?" Nina asked, her voice unusually thin and shaken.

Wanda moved to sit near her friend, pulling Nina's hand to her lap, silent tears streaming down her face, catching the streetlights from the window.

Phoebe's stomach tightened at the question. Whether it was really there or not, she still felt the bitter ache in her gut when it came to Penny's condition. "She is-one she's so self-conscious about around other people her age, it makes me want to lay down and die. She wants to be like everyone else, is all. And who at ten doesn't? She also has the mental capacity of a ten-year-old, and she always will. It's the brain damage. But she's the sweetest thing in the whole wide world, and my heart. She's trusting and loving and-and-if-" Her words broke again. She squeezed her eyes shut to relieve the grainy pulse of them.

Nina's eyes, penetrating Phoebe's right through the skin of her eyelids, forced her to open hers. She took Phoebe's chin in her hand. "Who f.u.c.king did this to her?"

Phoebe bit the inside of her cheek. A regret she'd always live with. If living was what she was doing when this was all over. "We never found out."

Nina's fists clenched. "The f.u.c.k better hope I never get my hands on him." She paused, then closed her eyes and rolled her head on her neck before she spoke again. "And you didn't tell me about this, why, Phoebe? Forget all the other bulls.h.i.+t about how angry I was about finding out about you and give me the real reason."

Sorrow burrowed deep in her soul. "Wasn't I enough, Nina? It wasn't bad enough that you knew nothing about me-add in my Alzheimer's and ice that cake with Penny? As difficult as you are, even I didn't think that was fair to you. But once I saw your reaction to me, I didn't want Penny to be shunned, too. There really was no point to telling you about her. I figured once this was over, we'd part ways and it would be done with you never the wiser."

Nina's eyes narrowed. "You better not have done this because you're ashamed of her-or I'll kick your a.s.s, Phoebe."

How odd that she'd thought Nina would be insensitive to Penny, but also that Nina thought she hid Penny away in shame. "No! No. It's nothing like that. People can be very cruel. I've experienced it firsthand and so has Penny. She might be disabled, but she still understands when people stare at her or make rude remarks. She's not deaf. Just disabled. Sometimes when I take her out for the day, kids ... They just don't understand-some people just haven't taught their children about differences. But I hurt for her. So much that I want to beat all the mean kids up at the park-which is ridiculous. I'm the adult."

"I'm fully in control of myself at all times, and I'd want to do the same, Phoebe," Wanda offered, her eyes warm and sympathetic.

Nina flashed a hand between them. "And the a.s.sholes from this clinical trial know about Penny how? I thought they thought you had no family?"

Her hands twisted in her lap. Because she'd done something foolhardy in her surge of I am vampire, no one f.u.c.ks with me. This was all her fault. "Sam said it's because they have my phone. The hospital's in my list of contacts. I never, ever listed her on any of the medical forms I've filled out-which is probably why they didn't think I had any living relatives. But she's there ..."

Nina nodded, but her teeth were clenched. "f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.kerly, f.u.c.k."

"Sam said he has someone looking out for both her and Mark. I don't know who, and I didn't ask questions. But I trust that he's done what he said." Even if she wasn't so sure she trusted anything else about him.

"I won't feel better until I know she's safe," Nina spat. "End of."

Phoebe let her eyes fall to the floor. "Anyway. I'm really sorry. She's all I've got. There's nothing I wouldn't do for her. Nothing. I just wanted to protect her."

"From big, bad me," Nina seethed, some of that familiar anger seeping back in the way of apparent self-recrimination.

"Oh, Nina," Wanda said with watery tones, wrapping her arm around her friend's shoulder and giving it a squeeze so hard Nina bucked forward. "While I don't condone Phoebe not telling you, talking to you isn't exactly like sitting down at a Gandhi-Oprah hosted tea party, sweet face. It's more like taking a meeting with Ted Bundy. So don't pull the martyr stuff, miss. I call foul."

Nina flipped her the bird, but she followed it with a smile. "Fair enough, but f.u.c.k you anyway, Wanda."

Wanda chuckled, reaching over to squeeze Phoebe's hand. "You've had a lot on your plate, Phoebe, but no more secrets. Got that? Auntie Wanda's not terribly fond of surprises, okay? We can't protect what we don't know is ours."

That Wanda had used the word ours made Phoebe's eyes sting. For the first time since her mother died, she didn't feel as alone in the world. "That's all of it. I swear." The tight knot in her chest began to subside.

Nina nodded with a firm shake of her head. "So, after the commotion in here, and the phone call from Siberia telling me to ask you two to keep it the f.u.c.k down, obviously Sammy told you about his s.h.i.+t."

Phoebe looked down at her hands in her lap. "Too much?"

Nina laughed with a hoa.r.s.e snicker. "Even I let him explain, Melodramatic Barbie. Christ."

Her chin fell to her chest, her head shaking from side to side. "I said f.u.c.k you to him." And now she regretted it.

Nina snorted and clapped her on the back. "Yeah, I heard, bada.s.s. Honest to s.h.i.+t, I just don't get how we can be related," she remarked, her tone dry.

"What?"

"You swear like a sissy-la-la. Jesus. Work on that. I can't let anyone know you're my sister till you get that s.h.i.+t worked out."

Phoebe tamped down her excitement at Nina's use of the word sister. "Well, you are legend. Promise I'll work harder to live up to your legacy. Either way, I was just so angry with him for lying. And even if it was to protect us, it was a serious thing to keep from us."

Nina slapped Phoebe's thigh. "Agreed. On all counts. But then, you're just as guilty, Clandestine Barbie."

Wanda chuckled at Phoebe's silence.

"But don't think for one of your girlie seconds I didn't tell him as much either. Because I did. While he was pressed up against a wall and my fist was all up in his good-looking, I'm-so-innocent face."

Oh, she totally got that. "When it hit me that all that cute, Care Bear cuddly he throws around like it's free for the taking was just an act, I felt like I'd slept with a stranger. I know we haven't known each other long, but what attracted me to him was how sort of corny he was. I went into it with the hot nerd and came out with a cranky FBI agent. Now I just feel dirty."

Nina clucked her tongue in response. "You should, for all the screaming you two do in here."

Her cheeks would stain bright red right now if she were still human. "Is nothing sacred with you people?"

Nina tugged on Phoebe's ear. "Not when you have vampire hearing. And FYI, Betrayed Barbie, Gigantor didn't use you to do anything. You did that s.h.i.+t all on your own."

Her disgust with herself for even considering going in alone mounted by the second. "I know. I know. Archibald, in all his cheerio, Sam's an FBI agent, told me as much. I jumped the gun. I get it. But I'm just not sure the Sam out there, the real one who won't even look at me, is one I'm going to like as much as I did before I knew he was an FBI agent."

Nina tapped her with a light fist to her arm. "So you don't like dudes who'd do anything to protect their chicks?"

"And their family members?" Wanda chimed in with a wink and a giggle.

She still wasn't convinced. After some time to think about it, she'd come to the conclusion that when she'd offered herself to Sam like some sort of love-starved idiot, he'd stalled her because of his job. That he'd responded to her let's-get-it-on vibe just meant he was a man. "It still doesn't mean he meant what he said to me. He made this big thing about how he wanted to get to know me before we ... But that was a different Sam. Wouldn't you call me f.u.c.kwit Barbie if I just jumped right back in, eyes wide shut?"

Nina shook her head, pulling her legs up under her. "Nope."

"Did you get a bad batch of blood today? Has it turned your brain to oatmeal?"

"You forget what I can do. I can read minds, twit. Yeah, he added another element of danger to this bulls.h.i.+t by lying, but he ain't lyin' about how he feels about you."

Oh, again.

"And," Wanda added with a warm smile, "he certainly wasn't faking his feelings when he was calling my cell phone every twenty seconds to see if you'd somehow gotten back here. I know fear when I hear it, and he was afraid, Phoebe. Though, I'm sure he'd caveman that up and call it hesitant."

Nina lifted Phoebe's chin with a finger. "Look, kiddo. I'm gonna be straight up with you about something here. Sam digs you. He didn't want to at first, and that was probably the game he was playing when he said he wanted to take things slow. Now he doesn't want to because it just makes everything more complicated, but he's not lying. Am I cool with what he did? Not so much, but I get his reasoning. The less we all knew, the better. I think he stopped protecting his cover and started protecting you a long time ago. Not just you-all of us."

She was weakening. "How refres.h.i.+ng to know I'm not just some p.a.w.n in his paranormal game."

Nina leaned back on the bed on her elbows and stretched. "Figures you like soap operas. Knock it off with the drama. No. You're not his big supernatural coup or whatever other lame c.r.a.p you've thunk up in that pretty head of yours."

Phoebe batted her eyelashes at Nina and tilted her chin toward her shoulder with a coy smile. "You think I'm pretty?"

Nina's eyebrow rose, her expression bored. "I think you think you are. I'm just a playa in your game, yo."

"Would it be weak of me to tell you how relieved I am about Sam?" Phoebe asked, running her hands over her eyes.

"Yeah. So don't."

Phoebe smiled. "Okay. I'm relieved."

Nina palmed her head and gave it a light shove, but she followed it with a smile that was so close to warm, it almost made it to her eyes. "That's because your cootchie-la-la's all singin' a happy tune."

"I think it might be more than that." Which really worried her. Despite the Sam out there, the one who was anything but cuddly, she still found him ridiculously irresistible.

Nina clucked her tongue. "Then I guess we'd better f.u.c.king figure out how to fix this so you have the chance to find out if it is."

There was that shooting stab of fear again. "What if we don't?"

"Then I'll die tryin'."

"That's unequivocal."

"What is?"

She gave her sister an astonished look. "You actually know what that word means?"

Nina held up her fist. "You know what this means?"

Phoebe clapped her hands and snorted. "You like me."

Nina made a face. "Oh, the h.e.l.l. I don't like you. I don't like anyone. We've been over this. Tell her, Wanda."

"You like me," Wanda teased, pinching Nina's cheek.

But Phoebe cut her off. "No, no. You like me. You don't want to, but you do. You've discovered, once you got past all that rage, that we're a lot alike. I'm just better dressed and I have a handle on my fits of rage."

Nina's face held a question. "How did you f.u.c.king do that anyway?"

"What?"

"Get a handle on your fits of rage."

Phoebe grabbed one of the throw pillows from Sam's bed and tucked it under her arms. "I wasn't always the girlie-girl you see before you. In fact, I was a lot like you. Sullen, moody, angry, badly dressed. It was a phase that came as quickly as it went."

"Because?"

"Junior year. I beat Danny Krackowski to within an inch of his pathetic, useless life for beating Mark up. He beat Mark so badly, he ended up in the emergency room with four st.i.tches and a fractured wrist. He didn't want to tell me who'd done it because he was afraid of Danny and his spineless thugs, but I knew. I knew because Danny cracked on Mark all the time because he's gay. I also knew because Mark managed to bite him and he had the bite marks on his arm the next day at school."

"And you flipped? Okay. So you're not that much different than me. I'd slap a b.i.t.c.h if anyone even considered touching one of these two fruitcakes." She thumbed her finger at Wanda.

Phoebe's look was far away as she remembered that day in the cafeteria. "I flipped like I was Mary Lou Retton going for the gold in an Olympic floor exercise. I lost my s.h.i.+t. Right there in the cafeteria. I cornered Danny and rammed my binder up under his jaw-I don't remember a whole lot after that. I just remember there was a lot of screaming and the word stop-or something. But I couldn't hear anything. I just wanted Danny dead. And I don't just mean that like when someone uses the euphemism I'd rather see you dead. I mean dead-dead, and I wanted to be the one to do it. I'd always had a temper, but to be honest, when I came down from that quest for the kill and Danny was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess on the floor, crying at my feet between lips that looked like tires on a four-by-four, it scared me."

Nina shrugged her shoulders. "He was a d.i.c.k. He deserved it."

"That's neither here nor there. I ended up suspended for two weeks, and as part of my reinstatement to school, I had to go to counseling. I didn't go willingly, but if you knew the first thing about my mother, you'd know for all her pressed faux silk s.h.i.+rts and makeup, she was as much of a bada.s.s as you. You didn't talk back to my mother and plan a future afterward. So I went, and the first couple of sessions I sulked. I whined. Once I even went in my pajamas because my mother came in to find I was still asleep when it was time to leave. So she dragged me out by my ear, slapped me in the car, and dropped me off. But then I learned something."

"Bed head sucks at the counselor's?"

Phoebe grinned. "I was just angry."

Nina c.o.c.ked her head in question. "About?"

"Our father."

Nina nodded her head but said nothing. Though, Phoebe sensed Nina had some residual anger with their father, too. Part of that anger had to do with the secret life he'd led.

"I was angry because he died the day before he was supposed to come and take me to a father-daughter dance. But I didn't know he'd died trying to get to the dance. I showed up in a dress my grandmother bought me. Mom even let me put lipstick on. I had a princess dress with big puffy pink sleeves and a skirt that twirled, and I waited on that curb for three hours-while other girls' dads swept them inside a room filled with big dis...o...b..a.l.l.s and fancy big-band music." And just saying it out loud now still hurt.

Nina slouched, letting their upper arms rest against one another.

"But Dad didn't show. I found out through that counselor that even though rationally I knew it wasn't his fault, somehow I'd made it his fault. Because I didn't see him much more than once a month. Our time was always limited when I did. I didn't know he had another family somewhere else. I'd grown up with only occasional visits from him anyway. But the dance meant a whole night with him. Just him and me. I'd spent two months building it up in my mind-and then it was gone, and when there was no chance for another dance, it hurt."