Undead and Undermined (20 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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“Oh really? Busy is putting it mildly. There are over sixteen billion souls on this plane.”
“Sixteen billion?” If I’d had to guess, I would have tried . . . I dunno . . . ten million? “Get out of town! Sixteen billion?”
“Sixteen billion seven hundred ninety-four million eight hundred twenty-four thousand and three.”
“It’s so weird and gross that you know that.”
“And they all have needs, of course. Which is why we’re set up here. To meet their needs.”
“So they
need
to burn forever or whatever their personal hell is?”
“Exactly. We serve
them
. It’s not the other way around. I’m told it’s never been the other way around. All of which is to explain how busy the boss is. Of course,” she added, her tone softening as she looked at Laura, “I’m sure she’ll make an example for you, hon.”
“Don’t you mean she’ll make an exception?”
The Ant flapped her press-on nails at me, subtly painted Screeching Whore Red. “That’s what I said.”
“Because that’s kind of a big Freudian slip,” I tried again. Why was I the only one who found that unsettling? Simple: Laura had nothing to fear in hell . . . who’d be psycho enough to try to harm her? And Garrett didn’t care about anything, and could focus on nothing, until he had his werewolf gal-pal back in his big, strong, neurotic, undead embrace.
The Ant patted her tall yellow hair. “Don’t use words you don’t understand.”
“Okay. I understand
pummeled
. I understand
maimed
. I understand
acid
and
burns
and
deface
and
mutilation
and
disfigure
and
scar
and
damage
and—”
“Please find out if Mother will see us,” Laura asked with the flawless manners taught by her preacher dad. It was just as well . . . as fun as verbally kicking the Ant’s ass had been (Yahtzee!), it wasn’t getting us anywhere.
And there it was again. Mother. Not
my mother
. And was it me, or was Laura getting less annoyed when she spoke of the devil or found herself in the devil’s presence or found herself manipulated into a course of action by the devil?
Because she used to hate it. Her. Whatever. But now, even if she wasn’t seeking Satan’s company, these days Laura didn’t seem to
mind
the company, if you get where I’m going.
“At once,” the Ant said, and disappeared like a soap bubble: shiny and silent. Garrett was staring straight ahead, almost vibrating, but waiting for a command like a leashed rottweiler. Laura was trying not to look pleased, and I was trying not to freak out more than I already had.
I took my phone out of my purse—I’d pulled the beat-up handbag (I was a shoe girl, but gave not a shit for bags) from my (his) wrecked car, slung it over one shoulder, and brought it to hell, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I thought I’d want to buy a hot dog while I was here, pay for a few rides?
I looked at my phone and told myself, again, that it was good I didn’t let Sinclair know what I was up to. He’d freak, he’d order, he’d worry, he’d have a nervous breakdown, he’d yell at me from inside my head, then he’d yell at me in person. And the tiresome lecture when he found me again . . . I could feel myself yawn just thinking about the droning.
Also, he might have insisted on coming with . . . and Laura might have let him.
So I’d texted that I’d been delayed (truth) but would get back as soon as I could (truth) and there was nothing to worry about (untruth).
Because knowing he’d want to come . . . well. That made it easy. Sure, I was acting like a scary movie heroine, someone from, say,
Saw XXXVII
. I went to hell with the Antichrist and a feral vampire on the spur of the moment and didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I deserved to have my head cut off or my face eaten or whatever a script writer (if my life were a horror movie, and I were a busty starlet) could think up. And it was all fine as long as it meant Sinclair was (relatively) safe.
Sinclair? In hell? No way. Only one Sink Lair family member was going to hell three times in the same week, and it
wasn’t
the guy whose entire family had been murdered before he was voting age.
Oh. Oh. Oh. Did . . . did I just refer to myself as a Sink Lair? Have things gotten as dreadful as that? Back in hell in the same week looking for Antonia while dealing with the other Antonia (a hellish curse all its own), a summerless future lurking a thousand years down the road, no Louboutin shoes since there was no Louboutin, and now this?
Curse you, Satan, for poisoning everything you touch!
“I gotta sit down,” I managed, seconds before I did so. And for the first time I was glad hell was a waiting room. No shortage of chairs, so that was good. But they sure were uncomfortable and that, I figured, went with the territory.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
 
“Unexpected guests,” Satan called breezily as she swept in,
the Ant right behind her. “Lucky, lucky me.”
As usual, Satan looked beautiful and fearless. It pleased her to take the form of an older woman—a really gorgeous older woman—and as usual, her designer suit and shoes were dazzling. I tried to avert my eyes but, like Lot’s wife (Laura told me who that was and what happened to her), I always, always had to check her footgear.
This time she was dressed in a smartly cut tan suit; it looked like wool. In hell! Well, I suppose if the heat didn’t bother Satan . . . which, given her job description, made sense.
The skirt was a black high-waisted pencil skirt with the hem stopping just above the knees . . . a risky move for an older woman (or fallen angels who chose to look like older women) but Satan had the legs to carry it off. The sleek jacket had long sleeves and crisply notched lapels. Her blouse was cardinal red and, from what I could see, silk, with a soft, almost scooped neckline and mother-of-pearl buttons. No makeup, no jewelry. And she didn’t need either, dammit.
“To what do I owe this unexpected intrusion?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then looked at her feet again.
The devil was wearing my shoes. My red Christian Louboutin honeymoon flats.
My shoes.
The devil had my shoes.
The devil. Was wearing. My honeymoon shoes. In hell.
“Something catch your eye, vampire queen?”
I had no memory of deciding to move, of wondering what I should do. Somehow I’d made it all the way across the room while “catch” was coming out of her mouth. Somehow my hands were around her throat and squeezing. There was a dim sound behind me—like muffled waves hitting a beach made of cotton, not sand. Faint and not important.
I felt and heard the crunch as Satan’s vertebrae shattered. Her eyes were brown and bulging. She had her hands locked around my wrists. Somebody had ahold of the back of my shirt and was trying to pull me back. Too late.
Then a distinct sound, one I couldn’t remember ever hearing before but recognized all the same: death rattle.
Best sound ever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
 
The Ant and Laura had succeeded in pulling me off. This
helped mostly because I stopped resisting them. They yanked back so hard I ended up sitting on the floor. Garrett still hadn’t moved. When I glanced at him, wondering if I’d hear dismay or anger or fear or
something
, he said, “We’re going to go get Antonia now, right? Betsy? Right?”
“Jeez, you’ve got a one-track mind.” I wasn’t as annoyed as I sounded. For one thing, I was still high from throttling the Lady of Lies. For another, if I were in his place I’d have the same focus. Well. That wasn’t true; I could never, ever have that kind of focus. But I’d be anxious about Sinclair.
Sinclair! Thank you, thank you, thank you, God, thank you he wasn’t here. Thank you he wouldn’t be here when Satan came to.
Because I wasn’t kidding myself. There was no way someone who was once in the Miss Burnsville Pageant could have killed the devil.
I hope I startled the shit out of her, though. I hope the next time she thought about fucking with me, her neck throbbed like a rotten tooth.
“Look what you did!” The Ant was staring at the crumpled form of her boss, tossed in the corner like a new toy six months after Christmas. “You—I can’t believe what you did!” The Ant looked scared and exhilarated. But mostly scared. She’d always had an easy face to read, and I could see her wondering about which way to jump.
The devil was the big boss in town; it was safe to align with her. But her bitchy entitled stepdaughter had just kicked Satan’s ass all over Satan’s waiting room. So maybe the balance of power wasn’t as stable as she imagined. “What—what are you going to do next?”
“What, like I know?” Actually, I did know. I walked up to the (temporarily) prone body, bent, and slipped off first one shoe, then the other. I held them with the two fingers on my left hand. I could have put them on, but that would have meant abandoning my loafers (Ella Signature, Coach, black). With luck I wouldn’t have to choose between them.
With luck. I could have rolled my eyes at myself. I just bitch-slapped the devil on her home ground and I was worrying I’d have to leave a pair of shoes behind? If I was
lucky
.
Well, I wasn’t going to bitch (much). I wasn’t going to whine and blame Satan and snivel to myself that life just wasn’t fair for poor old me, boo-hoo, how come
my
life is so weird and dangerous and full of felony assault?
I wasn’t going to indulge because a) I wasn’t sorry, and b) I’d do it over again, which I guess is the definition of not sorry, and c) I was okay, probably, with sucking up the consequences of those acts.
“Oh. Oh, oh, oh. Betsy, what did you do?” Laura sounded shocked and scared. At least she wasn’t avenging her mom by getting strangle-y all over my ass. And her wings had popped.
Okay, that probably sounded odd. Let me back up. Laura was the daughter of an angel. See, the devil’s lineage didn’t change when she moved to hell. (That was
her
story. Got kicked out and had to go to hell, that was my story.)
Anyway, Laura had inherited her wings. I didn’t know if all those old painters were right (that angels were fair and gorgeous with snowy white wings and halos and long flowing robes), but this part
was
right. Angels had wings, half-angels had wings, Laura had wings.
They were lush and brown, like a sparrow getting ready for winter. And it was obvious Laura hadn’t noticed they were out. So I wasn’t gonna tell her.
“What are we going to do?” Funny . . . Laura had asked the question, but she and her biological mother had identical expressions of dismay on their faces. Looking at Laura was like looking at the Ant and seeing what she’d looked like when she was young. The way she used hair dye and loud clothes and vivid makeup to look like when she was young. “Should we call for help?”
“Who would we call?” the Ant pointed out. Good questions. Glad it wasn’t my problem.
What I thought was really interesting was that either the Ant saw Laura’s wings and decided not to comment, or she hadn’t noticed they were out.
Okay, I’d better explain
out
. The way I understood things, Laura always had wings . . . in hell, in the past, in the present, in the future. The way I always had my appendix. But people in an ordinary shithole realm like earth couldn’t see them.
Hell wasn’t necessarily a hot place beneath the earth’s crust (though it was nice and toasty warm here in the waiting room). It was another dimension, with different rules and different people and different customs and different physics. As in, “Ye canna change the laws of physics, mohn!” Except since this wasn’t earth, anything was possible.
Laura had been staring at me this entire time, and I could tell she was torn. Yell at me? Help her mom? Yell while helping? Kick me in the shins? Flap and fly away? Call hell’s version of 911? What?
None of us knew what to do, and that was a plain fact. Of the three of us, though, I was definitely in the best mood. I even hummed a little, waiting for them to decide what they were going to do.
“You . . . perfidious . . . violent . . . crude . . . hideous . . . wretched . . .
bitch
.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
 
The voice was raspy and weak and hissed more than spoke.
The voice sounded like nothing human, which made sense, because the person who owned that voice
wasn’t
human. And check out the list of insults! The devil must have kicked ass in vocab.
Everything inside me went cold, while my face got warm. I figured out what that meant after a second . . . I was scared, yet pissed. I patted my warm cheeks (which, due to my sluggish blood flow, were almost never warm). Yep, definitely getting hot under the collar. Hmm, wonder what could have brought that on? I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck not just trying to stand up, but trying to get the hell out of Dodge.

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