Undead and Undermined (10 page)

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Authors: MaryJanice Davidson

Tags: #Romance, #Fiction, #Religious, #Paranormal, #Vampires, #Taylor; Betsy (Fictitious Character), #Sinclair; Eric (Fictitious Character)

BOOK: Undead and Undermined
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Jessica had almost made it back to the kitchen when we heard her turn around to return to the bathroom. Cue ralphing noises.
“So just . . .
sayonara
, sucker, and ka-blam?” D/Nick asked, looking doubtful. He’d made a gun from his thumb and forefinger (dumb, since he had
an actual
gun on the Marc Thing) and looked down at it with less than perfect confidence. “He’s a pretty old vampire. I don’t think it’ll be simple.”
“Mucho
ka-blam will be required,” the Marc Thing agreed, then pouted. “It’s not nice to throw my age in my face. I’d never do that to you, Nick.”
“Shut up,” he replied absently. “Okay, sounds like we’re on the same page. Funny how when I got up this morning I figured Lamaze class would be stressful and bloody.” We all heard the click of the hammer dropping. “Let’s—”
“Right here in our very own kitchen? We eat smoothies in here! And since when are
you
so quick to not follow any of the cop rules?”
“Since I moved in with vampires and knocked up your best friend?” Nick replied, like it was a quiz.
“We can still have smoothies in here,” Laura soothed. “We’ll just mop. A lot.”
I glanced at my sister. She was taking this awfully well. Laura usually wouldn’t get on board for baiting mouse traps, never mind kitchen executions. Oh, sure, she sometimes snapped and murdered serial killers and vampires, and she had tons of devil-worshipping followers who would kill or die for her, but on the whole, she was in the Murder Is Bad category. “You’re taking this—” I began.
“Wait!”
We waited. When Sinclair used that tone, everybody played Statues. Even if I was half an inch from orgasm, it was Statue City. The opposite, if you’re wondering, of romantic.
“Marc?”
“Yes?” they both replied.
“The undead one,” Sinclair clarified. “You called him Nick.”
“Even as a sprat, your hearing is excellent.”
“Why did you do that?”
N/Dick started to open his mouth, but Sinclair made a curt motion with the flat of his hand.
“Because . . . it’s . . . his name?” the Marc Thing wondered, gazing at the ceiling.
“Not here it isn’t,” Tina said, her big eyes going all badass narrow. This was a hilarious effect uttered from someone in a cute T-shirt and capris.
“Holy shit!” Jessica gargled from the bathroom. Then: “Ohhhh, I shouldn’t have had that fourth yogurt.”
I never got sick of being the only one
not
to get something. “What? Are we still killing him? What’s wrong? C’mon, break out the hand puppets, somebody. What? Whaaaaaaat?”
“My name
isn’t
Nick,” Nick told me. “It’s Dick. I’m Nick in the other timeline.
Your original timeline
. I’m here, so I’m not here.”
“Talking with you makes me feel like I’m rereading
Alice in Wonderland
.” This was a lie. I’d never been able to make it through the book, and I thought the Johnny Depp movie was a little too pleased with itself.
“Which begs the question,” Sinclair said. “Who are you, really? And why are you here, really?”
And why wouldn’t Advil work on the undead, really? Someone should do a study. Unfortunately, I now had other things to worry about.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
“Wait, wait, wait. Wait.” Everyone waited. Unfortunately, that
was all I had. But wait! I had more. “So this Marc Thing, the dead guy in our kitchen right now, he’s not in his past. He’s in
our
past.” I turned to him. “Is that right? You don’t remember any of this?”
“I remember it,” he said. “Just not this way.”
I scowled. Maybe he could be
less
helpful. “So, no, then.”
“What difference does it make?” Laura asked. “He’s evil and he’s gotta go.”
“You are correct, but we need to talk about this for a bit,” Sinclair said. “Murder is an irreversible action. I try to avoid irreversible actions when at all possible.”
“Does this mean we can’t fix the past? His past?” I asked, pointing to the trussed vamp. “We’re on . . . what? A parallel route now? Separate events and they can’t ever touch in the way that parallel things can’t ever touch, which I learned in sixth grade and never thought I’d have a use for?”
“Fifth grade!” Jessica called from the ralph room.
“The past already happened,” the Marc Thing volunteered. “You can’t un-happen something. Hrrmm. That came out more ignorant than I intended. And duller! What I meant was—”
“Wait!” I leaped to my feet . . . then remembered I’d already been standing and almost pitched into a wall. I was too excited to sit still. “I mean, wait again. We don’t have to sit around and blah-blah this one to death.”
“But I wanted to,” Still Human Marc whined. “If I’m not in here, I’ve gotta go to work. I’ve mentioned it’s a full moon, right? There’ll be things to remove from rectums and lacerations to be stitched.”
“No, this is a good thing! Don’t you get it? I’ll check the Book of the Dead! That’s the whole reason I went to hell in the first place and let Laura beat me up for three centuries.”
“You let Laura beat you up for three—”
“No time, Jess. Anyway, that’s why I went through all that. So I could read the thing without going crazy. Finally, the stupid thing will actually come in handy instead of being awful and scary.” I whirled and practically ran out of the kitchen.
“Wait,” Laura began.
“What good is having an all-seeing creepy dead book of skin that’s always right if I can’t ever take advantage of it? Huh?” The hallway was narrow, so they were all stampeding behind me. Onward! I would lead my faithful minions to the path of the righteous, and also the library. “Right? Right? So I’ll read it and it’ll tell us what to do. Or at least what happened.
Then
we can make a plan. Then we can make another supper. Because I don’t know about you guys, but I’m wicked thirsty.”
“Betsy,” Laura called again, but I was one heedless queen of the undead. It was so rare for me to get a really good idea, I couldn’t wait to implement this one. I practically skidded to a halt in the library, which was harder than you’d think, what with the 1970s apricot shag. “Now we—shit.”
“What?”
I pointed; the unholy book stand upon which the unholy and smelly Book of the Dead evilly perched was empty.
The book was gone. And thank goodness. Wow, was I glad the thing had gone missing. Now I didn’t to worry about it, right? Because up until that point I had nooooo problems, right? And everything was working according to my plan, right?
Right. Gah.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 
There was a long, perplexed silence, broken by N/Dick’s,
“Was it insured?”
“We’re not putting in an insurance claim on the Book of the Dead,” Jessica said firmly. “First off, we never got it appraised.”
“Where is it?”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was at a total loss. Of all the problems I thought I’d have this month, releasing the hounds on a book bound in human skin was nowhere on the list. Don’t even get me started on insurance paperwork.
“Okay, who was reading the Book of the Dead in the tub and forgot to put it back?” Marc asked, but if his expression was any indication, his heart wasn’t in the teasing. He looked like I felt: rattled to the extreme.
“Wait.” I turned to Tina and my husband. “There
is
a book in this timeline, right? You didn’t follow me down the hallway to humor me? Or chase me?”
He smiled. “Though I will admit I have chased you from time to time, you are correct: there is a Book of the Dead in this timeline.”
“Okay, that’s something. So let’s think about this for a minute. Did you know it was missing?”
“I took it.”
“Of course not. I would have mentioned it straightaway.” Sinclair looked as offended as I’d seen him. “After properly greeting you.”
“Getting laid,” N/Dick volunteered with a grin. He was recovering from the shattering blow quicker than the rest of us. Cops: they live in a black-and-white world. He didn’t take it, he didn’t know who did, he was waiting for instructions, then he’d get back in gear. Boom. Simple.
“As I said.”
“I took it.”
“Did
any
of you know it was missing?”
“You’re asking
us
?” Marc said. “There’s so much weird shit going on around here I don’t even notice when my underwear’s missing.”
“Okay, first? Gross. And second, what now?”
“No one could have broken in here and taken it,” Tina thought aloud. “Perhaps that other Marc secreted it somewhere before making his presence known?”
Dimly, from several rooms away: “I did not!”
“I took it.”
“We gotta find it!” I was trying, and failing, not to freak out. What was worse than having the Book of the Dead in your house? Not knowing where the Book of the Dead was. I’d almost rather have a bitchy cobra roaming the carpets. “Whoever’s reading it is reading it and going insane right this minute and maybe they don’t even know it because they don’t know when they read it they’ll go insane! We have to save them!”
“Or punish them.”
“Vengeful is not a good look for you,” I told my husband. “Your nostrils get all flare-y.”
“I took it.”
“When did we last see it?” Tina asked. “If we can corroborate the last time it was here, we can then—”
“I took the Book of the Dead, you morons!”
We stared at the Antichrist. Nobody spoke for a few seconds, until the Marc Thing wailed, “Naaaaughty!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
 
“What?”
“I took it.” Laura smoothed her bangs and tried not to look rattled. The library, which had always seemed dark and dusty to me, with the dark paneling and yucky apricot carpeting and dusty, dark, overstuffed furniture, seemed to loom, then shrink, around me.
Remember wishing there was a cobra on the loose? Now I felt like there really had been one, only she’d been with me the whole time.
“You what?”
“I took the book.”
“But why? Did you need some light reading while waiting in line at
Goodwill
?”
“I took it after I got here.”
Right. I remembered—after she realized the Marc Thing had followed us back, she put on a big show of being revolted and horrified. Or maybe she really had been revolted and horrified. Either way, she’d left the kitchen on the premise of making sure he hadn’t left us any other surprises. Then . . . took the Book? But . . . “How come?”
She glanced at the carpet, the window, the sofa, her feet, my feet, my neck, and finally my face. “You don’t need it.”
“What?”
“Am I not speaking clearly?” she snapped. “Why are you having trouble following this?”
“Are you seriously asking me that, you Antichristing sneaky jerkoff asshat?” (I’ll admit it: I was stressed out. It had been a terrible week. Or three centuries. Or future.)
“Ah . . . Majesty . . .”
“Elizabeth, perhaps cooler heads could—”
“You bop in from freakin’
Goodwill
and then steal the nastiest thing in the house, and don’t
say
anything until we need it and have to look all
over
for it? Who
does
that?”
“You checked
one
room,” Laura said. “Barely, I might add. You came, you glanced, you bitched.”
I gargled with fresh rage. “After being all egging-on with the killing of the Marc Thing?” I had thought at the time it had been out of character for her, but didn’t follow up. Also, stealing and lying? Also out of character.
From several rooms away: “I don’t mind! Really!”
D-Nick/Jessica/Still Human Marc: “Shut up!”
“Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?”
“Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking leech when I was minding my own business in the past.”
“Don’t you call me dim!”
“Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began.
“Wait,
when
did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help me out.”
“Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.”

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