Undead and Done (3 page)

She figured out what he was (not) asking and shook her head. “Strawberry smoothie.”

“Oh.”

“It's less gross than blood,” she explained, “though there are more seeds to contend with.”

“Okay.”

“I
love
blood. But I don't like it. Y'know?”

“Yes.”

“So then. Let's have it.”

“What?” The slurping. The slurping was working on his nerves like a small string of firecrackers tossed into a dirty street, just
pop pop pop poppoppop and smoke and more unbearable loud sharp sounds and dust everywhere, filth all over this was a bad idea this was a VERY BAD IDEA.

“Hey! Stay away from the light, pal. Keep your focus. Your life story,” she prompted.

So he told her, and she nodded here and there and grimaced a few times, but mostly she let him talktalktalk, and when he was done he felt a little better, not clean, exactly—only Cathie could make him clean—but a bit less wretched.

“Wow,” was all she said after a long moment. She sucked in more smoothie and then

(thank you thank you)

put the cup on the desk, leaned back in her chair, and stretched out her long, long legs. “Your entire life.”

“Yes?”

“Was severely fucked up.”

“Yes.”

“Which you decided to take out on several innocent women who had never harmed you in any way.”

He said nothing. It seemed safest. And they weren't
several women
, they were his loves, his terriblewonderfuls.

They sat in silence for a moment, until she broke it. “So . . . dying didn't get rid of the crazy.”

He blinked. “The crazy what?”

“I mean, this is exactly how you thought when you were killing short, dark-eyed blondes in their driveways, right? D'you know, my friends were worried you'd come after me?”

“I would never,” he protested, trying not to stare at her legs, ugh, the gangly things took up half the office it was so off-putting women were supposed to be short so men could

(help them have them save them use them and GET HOLD RIGHT NOW)

“You're not my type,” he managed, and oh thank God she seemed more amused by that than anything else that had happened in the last half hour.

“No? You'd never have tried to bag me for your collection?”
She grinned at him and he noticed how white her teeth were. And . . . sharp. Of course. “That's too bad. My friends were worried, but I'd kind of hoped you'd try something.”

He shook his head. “Never.” He felt like retching; her legs alone were problematic; he would have needed an extra suitcase at the least. And her eyes were wrong, wrong, all wrong.

“A discerning serial killer!”

“I— What?”

“Picky. Is that better?”

He had no idea. And now came the strangest thing in a very strange day; he could feel himself warming to her. Liking her, even, and it was so strong it almost

(almost)

buried the fear. “I . . .”
Almost don't loathe and fear you
, but even he wasn't such a glutton for a beat-down that he'd say such a thing. “You're very patient.”

“Sure.” She shrugged and shifted in her chair, looked down and smiled, and he thought her self-deprecation and modestly lowered gaze were charming until he realized she was smiling at her shoes. They were purple high heels with a purple cuff around each ankle, which made it look like she was wearing two festive electronic tracking devices. “I'm still learning myself. As you maybe noticed, I'm new in town.”

Well, yes. He'd noticed that.

“So,” he began, but she cut that right off.

“You're not getting out.” Her tone was hateful because there was no malice, no glee; she took no pleasure out of it, out of any of this, and that was worse than malice. You can't fight calm indifference. “No way. Not for a long,
long
time. Even I couldn't tell you how long.”

Of course you could!
he wanted to shout.
You're the only one who could! You could snap your fingers—like that!—and I'd be free.
He kept it behind his teeth, thank God, and what came out
next was purest truth, if not sanity. “Please. I've been here too long. Your horriblewonderful mall is—is—”

“Horrible and wonderful?”

“—but I should go.”

“It hasn't even been three years.”

No, that wasn't—no. Impossible. No. Decades, centuries. Not three years. No. “I need to go. I have to, it's so—” He made a vague gesture, hoping it encompassed the room, Hell, the universe in general. “Out there. They need me. They're filthy until I find them. There are so many. They're lost without me.”

“No, they're doing fine without you.”

“Lie!” he shouted, then shoved his fingers in his mouth and bit down, hard. “Y'don' 'aveta 'orry,” he managed around his fingers.

She winced. “All right, no need to devour yourself right in front of me. And it's literally my job to worry, especially about whatever it is you'd get up to if I let you out. You're staying. For a long time.”

He saw the truth of it in her words and posture and her calm-yet-firm polite regret. But that just raised more questions. “But—why? Why meet with me? You knew. You knew in the food court. So . . . why?”

She looked at him for a long, unblinking moment. (No one had to blink, but everyone did. An impossible habit to shake.) He wanted to cringe away from her stare. He managed to hold his body still as his gaze skittered everywhere: her eyes her chin her nose her shoulder the wall behind her her eyes her eyes her—

“Well, I suppose I wanted to meet with someone with
no
chance of parole. See how different that meeting is from the other kind—the kid who ended up in here at age ten because
he stole a pound from the collection plate in London in 1886. If you can call someone who's lived over a century a kid.”

“So I was right. You weren't—you never—you wouldn't—”

She shook her head.

He
stared
at her. “You're . . . worse,” he finally choked out. “Worse than the other. She never—she'd never dangle getting free and then yank it away.”

He waited for the flash of temper, the pain. What next? More scourging? Boiled alive every day for a few decades? Not even boiling would get him clean. It would be pointless agony—the very worst kind.

“Me being worse than Satan would be a good thing to mention to the other residents down here,” she said.

“Residents?” He'd never heard the term—at least, not in regard to Hell. It sounded vile.

“Sorry. The damned? The screwed? The thoroughly, thoroughly fucked? Whatever you want to call yourselves.” She said this in a tone of perfect courtesy, then smirked. “Anything else?”

“I might have to love you,” he choked, and it was true, and he hated that it was true. The beautiful blondes he had made his, he loved them, too, but it was always the gift he gave them; the reward was his deep affection.
This
one, though. He felt like she was taking his love. Robbing him of it. “I hate it, but . . . yes, I might have to really, really love you.”

“Annnnnd we're done,” she replied, the smirk long gone (which was a relief). “Run along,” she said, and between one unnecessary blink and the next he was back in the food court.

“Oh, hey.” It was Jennifer Palmer, the girl who ran Orange Julius. She was the devil's friend, kind of. Not as untouchable as a committee member, but the new devil was frequently seen chatting with her. “You forgot your lunch, so we got you a fresh
one.” She held out the new tray, completely unmoved by the way he'd blinked into existence between the Dairy Queen, whose soft serve was too soft and slightly sour, and the ladies' room, which was always out of toilet paper. “Here you go.”

“No!” he wailed, warding it off with an elbow. Serving food in Hell had given Jennifer quick reflexes, though, and though she had to juggle the tray for a second, everything righted. “No,” he said again, and ran away from her. He found a seat as far away from the food as he could and sat and tried to be still and tried to quiet his brain and definitely didn't think about anything that had happened in the last hour.

It took him a half hour to stop shaking.

You know the cliché about your life flashing before your eyes
just before you die? It's true, and it's terrible. In those moments before death, you don't see loved ones or birthday parties or graduation or falling in love or your wedding day or your best vacation or anything, anything good.

No, you see your mistakes. All of them. Every missed chance, every bungled opportunity, every wrong choice, every consequence, every error in judgment, every left when you should have taken a right. In an endless parade, right before your eyes, right at the end, and it should take years, but it doesn't; it takes only a few seconds. And it pretty much guarantees that when you die, you'll go out regretful and deeply depressed.

That's what happened to me, anyway: my well-deserved, miserable death.

ONE

I hung up on the bitchy mermaid and waited for the gate to
slide back. That was new. The reporters huddled on the sidewalk, though? They'd been there for three weeks. Long enough for me to remember their names, if I were the type to remember names. There was Needs Highlights, and Enough with the Aftershave, and This Isn't My Real Job, and It's Not Like I Stepped on You on Purpose, and Seriously with That Hair? Oh, and my personal favorite: Those Shoes Aren't Terrible. I referred to all the camera personnel by the same name: Get That Thing Out of My Face.
*

I parked in the garage, which was also new. Before the deluge

(“Onslaught,” my assistant/friend/devoted vodka guzzler, Tina, corrected. “Deluge means flood.”

“Have you been out there? I'm sticking with deluge.”)

we'd had an outside, unconnected garage that was really long and weirdly deep (it used to be a stable that held the carriages and the horses). It was too vulnerable to Enough with the Aftershave and his ilk, though, so Tina had pulled a zillion strings and gotten a modern, safe, connected, impenetrable garage put up in less than a week. Luckily, the mansion sat on a corner lot and almost took up the block by itself; our yard was still big enough for Fur and Burr and smoothie picnics. Ah, the carefree days of smoothie picnics, before vampires went viral.

I made my way into the mansion, waking up Fur and Burr when I passed through the mudroom. I had to amuse them for only a minute; given the yawns and round bellies and bad breath, they'd just eaten, and I'd interrupted nap time. (Fur and Burr were not reporters. They were black Lab puppies.)

What was waiting for me inside the mansion was almost as scary as what was lurking on the sidewalk, though: a jittery zombie, a pissed-off Southern belle, the guy who saw dead guys (Bill? Sam? Something short, anyway), and a vampire king, all under siege.

I'd gotten no farther than a single step into the kitchen when I was seized, backed into a wall, and kissed so hard my feet left the tile. I wiggled my toes so my left shoe didn't fall off and clop to the floor. That sound was so distracting. “Finally,” Sinclair murmured against my lips. “I loathe your interminable shopping trips.”

“I filled up the tank and got ice, jackass; I was gone maybe twenty minutes mmmpphhh.”

Should have said a vampire
queen
under siege.

I managed to fight off my husband (not without regret, but time and place, man, time and place) and put away the ice. This took, subjectively speaking, about five years, since the freezer was crammed with flavored vodkas

(Sriracha-flavored vodka, Tina? PB&J vodka? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?)
*

and dead mice stuffed into neatly labeled Ziplocs. Only in this place would the mouse population go down
after
the cat died.

“Yes, but I missed you this morning as well. I dislike rising alone.” Don't worry—the king of the vampires definitely wasn't pouting.
I'm not pouting,
he'd correct while I tried not to giggle at his protruding lower lip.
I'm concentrating.
Not even a little tiny bit. Borderline pout at most.

“Yeah, well, I haven't seen Jess and her weird babies in over a week. Unacceptable! I'm still getting used to not living with her.” And it
sucked
. It sucked rocks. It sucked like Trump's hair.
*

Jessica had been my best friend since our training-bra days. We'd lived together since college. But since I'd accidentally changed the timeline, she was
stuck with
blessed with a boyfriend and baby twins.
*
It was a measure of her loyalty that she was willing to put up with her friend rising as a vampire queen and eventually taking over Hell, willing to put up with vampire roommates and werewolves who loved the pop-in, willing to put up with a zombie doctor and a perpetual shortage of ice . . . it was all fine, until the Antichrist outed vampires.

No one—least of all me—knew what would happen now. There was constant news coverage. The block was infested with reporters and had been for weeks. We were also hearing
from a
lot
of vampires who were super pissed to rise one night and discover that, while they were sleeping, their queen had confirmed to the world that they exist.

So: exit Jessica, Dick, and their twins, Elizabeth and Eric. Also, I totally didn't cry like a wimp when I realized she'd named her babies after my husband and me.

It was for their own good. That's what I kept telling myself. When I weakened and started to call to beg her to move back in, Sinclair and Tina reminded me.

(“Darling, must I confiscate your phone?”

“Try it. You ever gotten a fang in the testicle?”)

Laura Goodman, the Antichrist—dumbest name for the Omen ever, by the way—motivated by a combo of spite and bitchiness, had used YouTube and social media and her legions of pathetic devil worshippers to expose vampires. And the vampires, under my direction, hadn't denied it. In fact, we'd done the opposite of denying it. Specifically, I had gone on live television and admitted that, yep, vampires were a thing and, yep, we weren't going anywhere.

Cue the deluge. Or the onslaught, if you like that word better. The interview went viral. Everything vampire-ish went viral. We were the goddamned swine flu of the Internet. That was a virus, right? Anyway, people were pretty evenly divided between two schools of thought: “That bimbo is lying!” and “That bimbo is a vampire!” The worst part? Nobody called the Antichrist a bimbo. Must have been the angel pin she wore on the lapel of the hideous blazer (corduroy!) she liked to wear on air.

“Stop that.” Eric Sinclair, king of the
pouters
vampires, was once again trying to corner me for some more five-star smoochin'. “I can hear all your exposition.”

“I can't help it,” I protested. “Also, Fred called again.”

“As I told you she would.”

“Yeah, yeah, you're freakin' Nostradamus. Is it any wonder I can't help thinking about all this junk? It's what's on my mind.”

“Easily fixed.” Eric Sinclair's smile, slow and dark like a stream of chocolate ganache, lit me from the inside out. Better than sunshine, even. And that was saying something. He made a grab for me and I let him, and he pulled me straight to him, up against his broad chest, and oh my God the
shoulders
on the man! He'd been a farmer's son in life, a hard worker who had loved his family. His family was long dead, and so was the farm boy he'd once been. Only the muscular frame and the keen, deadly mind remained. I sometimes wondered how much more terrifying a vampire Sinclair would have been if he
hadn't
been raised by loving parents.

“Darling, I meant it—stop narrating.”

“
You
stop narrating,” I retorted, because he was now pressing soft kisses to the slope of my throat and it was really, really hard to think. “I'm doing just flehhh burble menh mmmm.” The man's mouth was the textbook definition of sinful, and the sexy baritone was the cherry on the
oofta
sundae. (Hmm. Maybe he was right; maybe there was such a thing as too much exposition.)

But never mind! It was time—past time—to slip upstairs and try to break our fourth bed in two years. The Slumberland rep
loved
our asses.

Sinclair was now nibbling—very, very gently—on my lower lip, and I lightly bit him back and mumbled hopefully, “Upstairs?”

Oh yes!
The upside to a telepathic link with your husband: you couldn't fake anything in or out of bed. The downside: you couldn't fake anything in or out of bed. But this time it was all good.

Then he did that corny thing I loved: bent and scooped me
into his arms and literally swept me off my feet. He was an undead Rhett, and I was his bitchy Scarlett, with better shoes! Oh, it was glorious, and I—

“Hey!” A familiar skidding sound followed by a thud. When he had news, Marc liked to sprint for the kitchen, nearly always misjudged the distance, and bounced off the swinging kitchen door like a Super Ball. I'd blame this on his zombie-ness, but he'd been exactly like that in life.

Sinclair closed his eyes, likely mustering patience, or reminding himself that zombies taste terrible and thus must never be chowed upon. We could hear Marc righting himself before shoving the door open and darting into the kitchen. It was really,
really
hard not to snicker. “Betsy, it's almost time for your— Again? God, you two are like rabbits.”

“We are not!” Rabbits did it at least a dozen times a week, right? Sinclair and I were both so busy that we'd only managed half of that, and it was Friday already.

“It's odd that you frequently feel compelled to comment on our sex life,” Sinclair pointed out with admirable calm.

“Because it's always in my face! Everyone's faces! All the time!”

Er. Not really, I was pretty sure. I think this had more to do with Bill Lesser, or whatever the guy's name was. When the “Vampires are, like, real! Whoa!” story broke, Marc ended up hanging out with one of the bloggers covering the story. Sparks flew, apparently? But Marc had this nutty idea that live people didn't want to date zombies. His old-fashioned prejudices were so quaint.

“Now you're just exaggerating and being shrill,” I said, keeping the reproach out of my tone. “Besides, I already told you guys about the stuff I said in the interview.”

“This isn't a lame YouTube video like your useless sister came up with; it's an actual interview on an actual news channel.”

“Aw. You're so cute when you're disparaging the Antichrist to stick up for me.”

“I've seen Hell and I've been audited. The Antichrist doesn't scare me.”

Even Sinclair had to laugh at that.

“Though why you settled for Diana Pierce when you prob'ly could have gone on
Larry King
—”

“King creeps me out. It'd be like talking to a giant grumpy cigarette. Besides, I like Pierce.” She looked great, her hair was always nice, pleasant voice, and she didn't make the sign of the cross at me when I came to the studio. Sadly, the same couldn't be said of her sound guy.

“So let's go watch it!”

“More exposition,” Sinclair muttered, and got an elbow to the ribs for his pains, which was tricky since he still hadn't put me down.

Still, an excited zombie was hard to deny, and anything that got his mind off pining for the blogger was good. So Sinclair set me back on my feet and we followed Marc to the TV room, formerly one of the mansion's many parlors. No one needed five parlors—honestly, no one needed one—so Marc had taken this one over and modernized it with a vengeance: wide-screen TV, stereo sound, a bar
with
a blender (the entire household was a bit smoothie obsessed), easy chairs, a sectional sofa that five of us could slump on at a time, new plush carpeting, soundproofing, et cetera.

(“It's definitely not a man cave,” Marc had insisted as we stared at it a month ago, startled into silence, “so don't ever call it that. God, I hate that word. Hate it.”)

Tina was already there, curled up at the end of the sectional, her short legs tucked beneath her, but she immediately unfolded and stood when she saw us. She'd known Sinclair all his long, long life—she'd been an honorary aunt to the entire Sinclair
family for generations, had turned him at his request, then stuck by his side like a blond barnacle with exquisite manners.
*

“Majesties.”

Years. Years of my life wasted, asking the woman to just call me Betsy already. “Seriously, Tina?”

She was too deep into her tablet to respond. “Ah, this is excellent; we're all here . . . once we're finished watching, I would like to discuss hiring a PR firm to handle more things like this.”

Yawn. Which wasn't out loud, but apparently my poker face sucked, because she followed up with, “I know it sounds unnecessarily dull, Majesty, but the vampire nation has never needed public relations before. We were rather more invested in the reverse.”

“What, you think I'll have to do more of those?” Well, going on TV wasn't
so
bad. I'd gotten to debut my new navy pumps, at least.

“Nothing to sweat,” Marc assured me. “You said yourself you thought it went fine.”

“Oh, you bet. At first I was worried the Casadei sling-backs would be too much for daytime, but then I realized they were appropriate, but now it's occurring to me that's not what you meant.” I shrugged. “It was, what? Two days ago, maybe? It was fine.”

Sinclair sat on the far end of the sofa, pulling me into his lap as he got comfy. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't kick up a fuss like calling him Handsy McGrabass and maybe dumping ice down his back, because that was the last bit of fun we had for a long, long time.