Undead and Undermined (7 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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Never mind: I’d said I would do it. And I was a woman of my word in every universe, dammit. “Uh . . . so we, what? Pack a lunch? And then I, what? Summon Satan?”
Silence, though I could almost hear the clicking eyeballs as we all stared at each other. Nobody said anything. Which, for this group, was scary and weird.
After a long moment of stare downs: “Maybe you could just call the Antichrist on her cell first,” Jessica suggested.
“Yes! Excellent plan. Much better than sacrificing shoes.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said in my best I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it tone. Some things were just too painful to discuss, even with my best (fat) friend.
“And I am not fat!” she cried, reading my mind in the way only a best friend can, which never failed to make me feel cared for yet freaked out. Two people knew what I was thinking most of the time: one of them was the richest woman in Minnesota, and the other one was a dead farmer. These are the things I faced weekly, if not daily.
“Well, you certainly aren’t—ow!” I stared at Sinclair. “Did you . . . did you just grab my ear and yank?”
“I tripped,” the king of the vampires responded, suaver than usual.
“And your finger fell on my ear and pulled it?”
“If you were about to say ‘you certainly aren’t thin,’ then he saved your unworthy white butt, because I would have cut your ear
off
your
head
!”
“She would have,” D/Nick said, nodding hard. “The hormones, Betsy. You have no idea. It’s a rare week when she doesn’t cut something off somebody.”
“Gross,” was my only comment.
“Are you going to call the Antichrist or not?”
“Don’t call her,” a new voice answered. Just what we needed . . . a new, sneaky vampire.
And everything went from sucky to beyond sucky, if there was such a thing.
Who am I kidding? Of course there was.
CHAPTER EIGHT
 
I know why I assumed it was a vampire. Sneaking up on me
is easy. Sneaking up on Sinclair, not so much. So I think it’s fair to say I knew what I was getting into when I sprinted toward it.
All I could think was,
Dick isn’t carrying, and neither is Nick. Marc smells like blood . . . stupid scrubs! And Jessica . . . my God, Jessica and the baby . . . her enormous fat unborn baby . . . oh Jesus . . .
So I was out for blood the minute my big white butt was out the door. Except so was the bad guy, because although I was moving pretty quickly, he managed to grab my shoulders and shove me back, so hard and fast I couldn’t even get a glimpse of his face in the shadows of the long hallway.
I flew down the hall—like Supergirl! And crashed through a wall that was, luckily for me, over a hundred years old. Yerrggh, the smell of mouse poop was almost enough to distract me from the stabbing pain of my newly cracked ribs.
A low chuckle out of the gloom. “Don’t worry. It won’t leave a mark.”
Jessica . . . the baby . . .
I crawled out of mouse poop, plaster, lath, and dust and stumbled . . . I’d been thrown so hard I’d been knocked out of my shoes. I abandoned them without a thought—
(Oh, my poor scuffed Beverly Feldmans! Pal, you are so GONNA DIE!)
—and ran past the door to the attic and back down the hall. Nothing good ever came out of the attic, and I was going to amend that to
nothing good ever came out of the attic or the hallway near the attic
. Whatever-it-was had lurked in that hallway, the longest one in the house, listening in on our conversation and smoothie-snorting. Creepy
and
lame.
“Okay. Let’s try that again.” That sounded cool and brave, right? Not at all like I was scared shitless, right? Excellent.
“Okayyyyyyyyyyy.”
I could almost see him in the gloom . . . and I was
reminded
of someone. There was something about the line of the jaw . . . too bad this was all happening at super-hypersonic speed, instead of real time. If I had five minutes, I’d be able to sit down and figure this out. I was not, at the best of times, a fast thinker.
“Hope you’re ready for round two, bitch!” Which sounded much more badass in my head than out loud. I could never pull off the generic “the price is wrong, bitch!” vulgarity. “Don’t be fooled if I didn’t sound as badass as I could have. You’re about to get a face full of badass!
Then
you’ll be sorry.”
That’s when somebody grabbed my sweater (argh! A gift from Jess . . . red cashmere!) and hauled me backward. I again flew through the air with the greatest of ease, at what I assumed was the speed of sound, but didn’t break anything on this landing. Woo-hoo! In fact, I’d mostly slid along the highly waxed mellowly aged floors.
That’s when I realized: Sinclair had grabbed me and jerked me out of harm’s way. That was my husband in a nutshell: he’d commit felony assault on me. To save me!
“If this were the kind of movie my wife enjoys,” Sinclair said coldly, standing—looming, really—and almost entirely blocking the doorway, “I would make an inane announcement. Something silly and time-wasting like, ‘if you touch my wife again, I will kill you.’ Except you did touch my wife. And I
am
going to kill you. Because no one gets a chance to hurt her twice.”
“Really?” There was obvious delight in the thing’s voice. “Will you really? You’ll kill me? That would be woooooonderful.” Then, lower and much more sly: “Betsy, I seeeeee youuuuuuuu.”
“Who the
hell
—” Marc began. Dick had managed to keep Jessica in the kitchen, but he’d had no luck with Marc, who wasn’t above a knee in the ’nads to get from point A to point B. His lust for excitement had gotten him into jams worse than this.
Seeing Marc alive and well socked the memory home for me; I knew who our unwelcome visitor was.
“Do you seeeee meeeeee?”
The Marc Thing, from the future. Somehow he’d followed Laura and me back to the present. And now he was in my house.
Shit.
CHAPTER NINE
 
“Following me back was a bad idea,” I told the Marc Thing
as I manfully cradled my cracked ribs. “The sort of idea that will get you staked a zillion times in the balls.”
“Don’t tease,” it said.
I glanced at Marc. His color was high; he had a look of avid curiosity on his face. He smelled like—it’s hard to explain; he smelled like hot wiring. You know how you sometimes taste metal when you get an adrenaline rush? He smelled like how that tastes. Excited. A little afraid. But not enough afraid, and was that a good thing or a bad thing?
How to explain this to him?
Say, Marc, in the future I turned into Supremo Bitch-o of North America and tortured you for decades—after not saving you from being killed, oopsie!—until you went batshit nuts and now the you from the future is here to do all sorts of disgusting things to all of us, which is all my fault. Sorry. I owe you one, okay?
“My queen is quite correct . . . you will be staked. Only not in the balls.” We all jumped; I jumped and groaned . . . reeeally wish the cracked ribs would heal already. Tina, one of the awesomest vampires I knew (I didn’t know very many
awesome
vampires; shame it was such a short list) had snuck up on the Marc Thing and stuck the barrel of her 9mm Beretta in his ear.
“Wonderful,” the Marc Thing and Marc said in unison, which was just creepy.
It always surprised me to see Tina wielding firearms; she was an expert with all sorts of guns and had been ever since I’d known her.
Because she’d been born, or died, or whatever, during the Civil War, I was always amazed to see her handling modern weaponry. Which was dumb . . . it wasn’t like I expected to see her running around in hoopskirts brandishing mint juleps. Such a capricious nature has man. Or something.
Tina always looked good, but tonight she looked like an angel. And could have passed for one—she’d been killed in her late teens, or early twenties . . . something like that. Who can keep track of when everybody died? Anyway, she was mega-gorgeous, with a gorgeous fall of shiny blond hair and the biggest, prettiest brown eyes I’d ever seen. Pansy eyes, my mom called them.
“Have I mentioned,” Sinclair began, smiling for the first time since the Marc Thing made his presence known, “that I adore having you around?”
“Oh yes, my king. You are good enough to make frequent mention of it.”
“You’re
not
really
theeeeeere,” the Marc Thing sang. He acted like standing in a hostile house surrounded by enemies, and with an earful of gun, was all in a day’s work. Which it prob’ly was.
“On your knees. Slowly, if you please. And . . . yes.” Tina kept the barrel of the gun socked tightly in his ear as she bent at the knees to accommodate the Marc Thing getting on his. “Now on your stomach. Yes.” Sinclair shifted so his foot was resting lightly on the Marc Thing’s wrist. My husband smiled pleasantly at the Marc Thing, who leered back, and everyone in the hall knew that if the Marc Thing even twitched, Sinclair would grind his wrist into splintered bone. Which made it safe for Tina to pull back and step back. Still: maybe next time Sinclair should rest his foot on its neck. Call me hospitable.
For the first time I realized Garrett had also come out of the kitchen, which was something of a shock. In my timeline, Garrett had been a wreck, a shell, a disaster of a man. A coward, but not without reason. He’d been murdered, then driven insane, then murdered some more . . . and in my timeline, it drove him to suicide.
“Uh, maybe you should go back in the kitchen and keep an eye on Dee-Nick and Jessica. Back in the kitchen. And not in here.”
“Dee-Nick sent me out here.” Garrett correctly read my look of surprise, because he lifted his left shoulder in a slight shrug and added, “Antonia died right in front of me. There’s nothing to be scared of now.”
He was wrong, of course. But I didn’t have the heart to disabuse him of that sorry-ass notion. He was almost a hundred years old, but I’d always felt older than him in both timelines.
CHAPTER TEN
 
I caught Sinclair’s eye and tipped my head to the left,
indicating another hallway. Before things went even thirty seconds further, I had to talk to my husband.
“Tina, if you please.”
“Of course.”
“Garrett—”
“Yes, King Sinclair.”
King Sink Lair. Hee! It wasn’t the time or place (it so rarely was) but I couldn’t swallow my giggle. There was an annoying amount of
my king
and
Your Majesty
and
dread king
, but I didn’t think anyone had ever used
King Sinclair
in my hearing.
“I shall not even ask why you found that amusing,” he sighed as we stepped into the darkened hallway. “Are you well, my own? Not hurt, yes?”
“Not hurt, no. Okay. Real quick, because I don’t like being out of the sight line of that crazy fuck . . . one of the skatey-eight zillion things I haven’t had a chance to tell you about Laura and Betsy’s Time Travel Follies is that we went to the future, too, a thousand years in the future, and in that future Ancient Betsy tortured Marc for decades and drove him insane.”
Sinclair’s composure, as much a part of him as his Cole Haan loafers and big dick, slipped, and he stared at me with wide eyes and a shocked expression.
And I was ashamed . . . more than I had ever been in my life. Ashamed that I was capable of that, that I could grow into someone who could/would do that to Marc. And ashamed that, now, Sinclair knew, too. He wouldn’t be the last person I told, either . . . I’d have to warn everyone. I’d have to let my friends and family know about the awful thing I hadn’t done yet. Just when I thought their opinion of me couldn’t plummet further . . .
“I-I thought you should know.” I shook my head and stared at the floor. It was very hard to look my husband in the eyes just now. “I didn’t want to tell you.”
“No. I imagine you didn’t.” He put a finger beneath my chin and raised my head. “Do you know, I haven’t been afraid of anyone until you cured Jessica’s cancer? After my twin was murdered, I feared nothing. I
felt
nothing. Now the only thing I fear is you. I shall pause so you can make a sarcastic observation.”
“And a smoothie made with frozen, not fresh, strawberries! And having someone fill up your Jaguar with regular unleaded, not premium!” It nearly burst out of me. He knew me so well. “You’re afraid of lots of things.”
“Yes, thank you for comparing my fear to petrol. I don’t mind, you know.”
I was getting that surreal am-I-drunk-or-just-weirded-out feeling. “Don’t mind what?”
“Being afraid of you. Well. I
mind
, but it doesn’t prey on me. And the reason it doesn’t—”
“Maybe we should be getting back in there with Marc and the Marc Thing and the others.” How long had we been yakking in this secluded hall, anyway? Time was a-wastin’.

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