Undead and Undermined (2 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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Betsy “Please Don’t Call Me Elizabeth” Taylor was run over by a Pontiac Aztek about three years ago. She woke up the queen of the vampires and in dazzling succession (but no real order), bit her friend Detective Nick Berry, moved from a Minnesota suburb to a mansion in St. Paul, solved various murders, attended the funerals of her father and stepmother, became her half brother’s guardian, avoided the room housing the Book of the Dead (
Book of the Dead
, noun, the vampire bible written by an insane vampire on flesh, which causes madness if read too long in one sitting), cured her best friend’s cancer, visited her alcoholic grandfather (twice), solved a number of kidnappings, realized her husband/king, Eric Sinclair, could read her thoughts (she could always read his), and found out the Fiends had been up to no good (
Fiend
, noun, a vampire given only animal [dead] blood, a vampire who quickly goes feral).
Also, her roommate Antonia, a werewolf from Cape Cod, took a bullet in the brain for Betsy, saving her life. The stories about bullets not hurting vampires are not true; plug enough lead into brain matter and that particular denizen of the undead will never get up again. Garrett, Antonia’s lover, killed himself the instant he realized she was dead forever.
As if this wasn’t enough of a buzzkill, Betsy soon found herself summoned to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Antonia’s Pack leaders lived. Though they were indifferent to the caustic werewolf in life, now that she was dead in service to a vampire, several thousand pissed-off werewolves had a few questions. (“What, now? You care,
now
?”)
While Betsy, Sinclair, BabyJon, and Jessica were on the Cape answering well-it’s-a-little-late-
now
questions, Marc, Laura, and Tina remained in Minnesota (Tina to help run things while her monarchs were away, Marc because he couldn’t get the vacation time, and Laura because she was quietly cracking up).
They hadn’t been gone long before Tina disappeared and Marc noticed devil worshippers kept showing up in praise of Laura, the Antichrist.
In a muddled, misguided attempt to help (possibly brought on by the stress of his piss-poor love life—as an ER doc, Marc worked hours that would make a unionless sweatshop manager cringe), he suggested to Laura that she put her “minions” to work helping in soup kitchens and such.
As sometimes happens, Laura embraced the suggestion with zeal. Then she took it even further, eventually deciding her deluded worshippers could help get rid of all sorts of bad elements . . . loan officers, bail jumpers, contractors who overcharge, and . . . vampires.
Meanwhile, on the Cape, Betsy spent time fencing with Michael Wyndham, the Pack leader responsible for three hundred thousand werewolves worldwide, and babysitting Lara Wyndham, future Pack leader and current first grader.
With Sinclair’s help (and Jessica’s cheerful-yetgrudging babysitting of BabyJon), Betsy eventually convinced the werewolves she meant Antonia no harm, that she in fact liked and respected the woman, that she was sorry Antonia was dead and would try to help Michael in the future . . . not exactly a debt, more an acknowledgment that because she valued Antonia and mourned her loss, she stood ready to assist Antonia’s Pack.
Also, Betsy discovered her half brother/ward was impervious to paranormal or magical interference. This was revealed when a juvenile werewolf Changed for the first time and attacked the baby, who found the entire experience amusing, after which he spit up milk and took a nap.
Though the infant could be hurt, he could
not
be hurt by a werewolf’s bite, a vampire’s sarcasm, a witch’s spell, a fairy’s curse, a leprechaun’s dandruff . . . like that. Betsy was amazed—she suspected there was something off about the baby, but had no idea what it could be. (“I was thinking . . . bred-in-the-bone Republican. Just really, really evil.”)
Sinclair, who until now had merely tolerated the infant, instantly became besotted (“That’s
my
son, you know.”) and began plotting—uh, thinking—about the child’s education and other necessities.
Back at the ranch (technically the mansion on Summit Avenue in St. Paul), Laura had more or less cracked up. She had fixed it so Marc couldn’t call for help (when he discovered their cells no longer worked, he snuck off to find another line, only to be relentlessly followed by devil worshippers who politely but firmly prevented this), and she and her followers were hunting vampires.
Betsy finally realized something was wrong (via a badly garbled text secretly sent by a hysterical Marc), and they returned to the mansion in time to be in the middle of a Vampires vs. Satanists Smackdown.
Betsy won, but only because Laura pulled the killing blow at the last moment.
People went their separate ways, for a while. And nobody felt like talking.
Three months later, Betsy decided to take the Antichrist by the, uh, horns, and invited her to go shoe shopping at the Mall of America. It was at this time she learned the Antichrist was fluent in every language on earth and had little or no working knowledge of big-screen devils. Thus, Betsy hauled her sis home for a devil-a-thon (including Al Pacino’s Satan, Elizabeth Hurley’s sexy devil, the baby in
Rosemary’s Baby
, and Damien Thorn in
The Omen
)
.
It was at this time Laura confessed that she feels guilty whenever she’s interested in finding out more about herself, her capabilities, or her mom, Satan. (“It’s like I’m slapping my adopted mom and dad in the face by wondering about her.”) It’s also at this time that Betsy realized she was sick of having a never-fail resource in her own home, the Book of the Dead
,
which she doesn’t dare use because anyone who reads it for longer than twenty minutes or so goes insane.
So she and Satan struck a deal, which actually made sense at the time: Betsy would help Laura embrace and use her supernatural powers, and in return the devil would fix it so Betsy could read the book without the accompanying nut-jobbery.
In addition to Laura’s weapons (stabbing weapons or a crossbow, which normally stay in hell unless she calls them up), she learned she can teleport almost anywhere. Cool, right? Yeah, not so much. In fact, that turned out to be a huge problem, as any
where
encompasses any
when
. In rapid, annoying succession, Betsy and Laura found themselves in Salem, Massachusetts, during the witch hunts of the 1600s; Hastings, Minnesota, before the spiral bridge was replaced (so, anywhere between 1895 and 1951); and the future.
A thousand years in the future. Also, the future? Sucks. There was some sort of cataclysmic global thingummy and Minnesota in the future has winters even worse than the ones it has now. Nobody wants to worry about heat exhaustion on the Fourth of July, but frostbite and hypothermia are just as bad . . . and since the average temperature in July 3015 is thirty below, nobody’s getting rich off selling sunscreen.
In fact, nobody—except Future Betsy—is getting rich, period. They’re mostly hanging out in belowground enclaves and focusing on not dying.
To make matters even yuckier, Future Marc is a vampire. And not just any vampire . . . after hundreds of years of being Betsy’s personal whipping vampire, he’s dangerously insane. So much so that Laura and Betsy can feel how
wrong
he is after a glance. In fact, neither of them can bear to look him in the eyes, or even be around him.
BabyJon was there, too, and he’s as charismatic and charming as Marc is creepy and nutso. He wouldn’t tell Betsy how he could be walking around one thousand years in the future and not be a vampire, though she tried and tried to wheedle it out of him.
In the forty-five minutes or so they were in the future, they discovered Future Betsy had taken over (most of) the country, could raise and control zombies, and had a crippling lack of empathy for anyone. More troubling, Sinclair and Tina were
nowhere
to be found. Worse, no one would even talk about them . . . except Undead Marc, until Ancient Betsy shut him up and sent him away. And BabyJon was wildly uncomfortable about the subject.
They returned, vowing to figure out a way to save the future. Or undo it. Laura teleported Betsy back to the mansion and went on her merry, hell-bound way.
Betsy returned to find out Tina and Sinclair remember meeting her in the past. They explained that they’d always known Betsy would be headed on a time-travel romp, and the only way to help her was to stay out of the way.
To Betsy’s amazement, Jessica is heavily pregnant (wedding ring?) by Nick Berry. And Nick is happy to see her . . . since Betsy prevented her younger self from feeding on him, he didn’t experience any vamp trauma this time around, so now they’re very close friends.
Now Betsy has to explain to her loved ones about the future, about the fact that they’re living in a tampered timeline, and figure out a way to, as Betsy would put it, “Get bad shit done.”
Dishonesty is a thief of time, of energy, of pride. We must remember—and teach our children (and perhaps our political figures)—one essential: the truth shall make you free.
—MARTHA STEWART
 
 
 
Undermine (un*der*mine): 1) to excavate the earth beneath; 2) to wash away supporting material from; 3) to subvert or weaken insidiously or secretly; 4) to weaken or ruin by degrees.
—
MERRIAM-WEBSTER
 
 
 
Yeah, they’re undermining me. Not digging underneath me. The other thing. The weakening me behind my back thing. It just sucks.
—BETSY TAYLOR, QUEEN OF THE VAMPIRES
 
 
 
Paranoid? Well, that just confirms all my suspicions!
—JENNA MARONEY,
30 ROCK
 
 
 
Retroactive Continuity: Refers to the deliberate alteration of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. Retcons may be carried out for a variety of reasons, such as to accommodate sequels or further derivative works in the same series, to reintroduce popular characters, to resolve chronological issues, to reboot a familiar series for modern audiences, or to simplify an excessively complex continuity structure.
—WIKIPEDIA, OCTOBER 4, 2011
 
PROLOGUE
 
When the awful racket started up, when the coroner got
ready to open my skull with what I later found out was a Stryker autopsy saw, I was fine with it.
No, more than that . . . it seemed like a really, really good idea. Not just a good idea for me. It would be great for everyone involved. And if you took the long view, it would be good for humanity. Because I’d had enough. Case closed, everybody out of the pool, time to shut off the lights and lock up, hit the trail, shake a leg, beat feet, get gone, get out.
I was out.
How sucky was it that I knew,
knew
the one thing worse than waking up on an embalming table was waking up inside a body bag? I did not ever want to know that.
No one should know that.
Oh, and while we’re compiling a list of things no one should know? No one should know that they grow up—grow old, anyway—to torture their friends. That they either brought about (or didn’t bother to prevent) a scary-ass nuclear winter apocalyptic event resulting in the very real possibility of freezing to death on the Fourth of July.
No one should know that, on the off chance they turn into an ancient evil vampire crone, they forget all sense of fun and, worse, fashion. Gray dresses! What the
fuck
?
So even though the buzzing whine of the saw felt like the coroner was
already
slicing me open, I laid still and did my impersonation of a corpse.
Hey, everybody’s good at something.
 
 
Graham Benton lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. He did
not smoke but had been able to score a butt and a lighter from a member of the I’m-Cutting-Back-I-Swear tribe. Graham did not smoke, had never smoked, but was determined to start immediately.
The door to the doctor’s lounge wheezed open and Graham observed his attending, the extraordinarily hairy Dr. Carter (and didn’t the two of them get shit, Dr. Benson and Dr. Carter? Like he needed another reason to hate NBC), practically tiptoe into the close, windowless, burnt-coffee-and-disinfectant-smelling room.
Carter’s beard had recently been trimmed, so the ends merely brushed his throat instead of his nipples. His dark, curly chest hair was trying to burst through his scrubs shirt. He had begged permission to jettison the de rigueur lab coat and, after he’d proven to the other chief residents that his mat of body hair kept him adequately warm, they relented. Hairy Carter was perturbing enough; Sweaty Red-faced Hairy Carter was an abomination unto the Lord.
“Sooooo.” Carter coughed. It sounded like a truck laboring uphill in the wrong gear. “Bad night, Dr. Benson?”

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