Undead and Unforgiven (3 page)

She looked at the clipboard again, then up at him. “Oh. Jeez. Look, not to be a hard-ass, but the only crackers we have for you are saltines.”

He nodded, resigned. Definitely Hell, then.

“And all cheese except spray cheese,” she said, reading from the clipboard.

Dammit.

CHAPTER

ONE

“Elizabeth!”

I was doing my best to ignore the dead priest, and it wasn't going well. Had I thought he was persistent in life? Pshaw. In death he was indefatigable. That's the word, right? Indefatigable? Never gets tired? Always nagging? Huge downer on my downtime?

“We've rescheduled the meeting three times.” He skidded to a halt in front of me, panting lightly.

Yeah, well, it's about to be four times.

“I'm sorry, but I just can't debate Smoothiegate even one more time. You guys are just gonna have to accept that blackberries are gross and suck it up with raspberries instead.”

I got an exasperated blink. (That man can say more with his eyelids than most can with their mouths.) “Not that meeting. The, uh . . .” He trailed off, then made himself say it. “The Ten Commandments Redux.”

Heh. It was a great idea, if tedious in execution, and for no other reason than Father Markus really,
really
hated the name. “It's Remix, and you know it.”

“Regardless. We have to get started.”

“I know.” (I did know.) “And while I was researching—”

“You researched?” he said, sounding shocked. Then he instantly corrected his tone. “Of course you did. Good for you.”

“Well, I had an idea for what to do with some of the souls that have been here for a while.”

“Which is?”

“I have to keep working on it.” I had no idea how my plan would go over: probably like an anvil. It meant big change. It meant changing the very nature of Hell. Father Markus was a good enough guy, but he was also a traditionalist. Baby steps. That was key. “I'll tell you more about it. Later.”

He made a
ttkkt!
noise of disapproval. “Procrastination is another word for cowardice.”

“It's really not.”

He'd switched from Reminder Mode to Cajoling Mode. “Now, Betsy.” Ohhh, I knew that tone. “You know the hardest part is just sitting down and getting started.”

“Mmm.” (No, the hardest part was keeping out of his way so I could avoid his eight zillion meetings. My own fault for being in Hell's food court again!)

Father Markus, though he'd ended up in Hell after he died, still thought of himself as a priest. You could look like anything you wanted here, but most people stuck with what they were familiar with: how they looked in life. In Father Markus's case, that meant the traditional priest garb: all in black except for the collar. He had a little bit of hair left, all white, which went around his head in a fringe, leaving the top bald and shiny. Like, really shiny. The king of the vampires once checked his reflection in it.
His hands and feet were small and sleek; he was in comfortable black shoes, dull leather Dockers. He'd lived his whole life in Minnesota and had the same flat Midwestern accent I did.

But I liked his eyes the best: small and brown, intent and expressive. They scrunched into smiling slits when he was happy, and focused like lasers when he wasn't. In life he'd been in charge of a pack of teenage vampire hunters, and since most vampires were murderous assholes, I couldn't entirely blame him for assuming
all
vampires were murderous assholes. I broke up the decapitation-happy team and Father Markus went his own way until he died. Now he was stuck working with me, in case he didn't already know he was in Hell. To his credit, he decided it was an honor, and never indicated what a pain in his ass I was. (Out loud, anyway.)

“The first meeting,” he was rambling, “is always . . .”

The dullest. The lamest. The boringest. Wait. Boringest?

“. . . the hardest.”

“Yeah, y— Wait.” I realized he'd put a hand on my elbow, and while we talked, he was gently nudging me toward the Lego store, where we held most of our meetings. “Are you steering me, you sly, nagging s.o.b.?”

“No, no. Escorting.”

“Just because you're dead doesn't mean I can't kill you again.” As threats went, it was about a 4.2 on the Lame-O-Meter.

“Just take a deep breath,” he suggested with a small smile. “It'll be over soon.”

“Totally pointless; I don't have to breathe.
You
don't have to breathe.”

“It'll all be over soon, then,” he said again. “I'll stick with that one.”

“Every time I think that, something new and terrible happens. I get fired. I get run over. I die. Someone I live with
dies. I die
again
. I become a queen. I get tricked into running Hell. I'm forced to wear humiliating name tags. I—”

“I miss the blowout sale for summer sandals. I get shriller and shriller rather than learning from my mistakes. I go all dictator-ey and banish blackberries from smoothies.”

“That doesn't affect you one bit, Cathie! (A) You hated smoothies in life—”

“How has the smoothie industry tricked you into thinking pulverized fruit and yogurt and old ice cubes from the back of the freezer is a terrific plan?”

“And (2) you're always in Hell.”

“Truer words,” my “friend” Cathie replied. She was already building another conference room out of Lego bricks. (The one she built yesterday had too good a view of the amusement park, or, as we called it, the Vomitorium. If you hated amusement parks or were prone to severe motion sickness, and subconsciously decided you needed punishment after you died, guess where you ended up? With a permanent season ticket?)

“Almost done,” she added, like I had an enduring interest in her temporary architecture. She could whip rooms up in no time. It helped that each Lego (or would that be LEGO®?) block was the size of a stereo speaker. One of the ancient ones, two feet high and a foot wide. Not one of the new ones you can't actually see. “You'll be bitching about the things you constantly bitch about in no time.”

“Drop dead,” I replied, which was redundant at best, lame at worst. Her evil snicker proved it was on the lame end of the meter. Cathie had faced down the serial killer who'd killed her; as a ghost, she wasn't scared by bitchy vampires even a little.

I'd never known her in life, but in death she was pretty great. When she first appeared (manifested? intruded? trespassed? stalked?) she was mega-pissed over being murdered.
So employing the “unlikely partners” trope, we'd teamed up. The end result: a dead serial killer, a vengeful ghost's revenge, and the Antichrist's temper tantrum, which resulted in a dead serial killer and a vengeful ghost's revenge.

(I'll go into the whole estranged-from-the-Antichrist thing in a bit. Really can't stand even thinking about her right now. Long story short: she's as dead to me as my dead father, who isn't dead.)

Unlike a lot of new spirits, Cathie had no problem looking different from how she looked on the day she died. As she explained, “I got foully snuffed on laundry day; I am
not
plodding through eternity in granny panties and a sweatshirt. Besides, my clothes aren't real. Probably I'm not real. So why not embrace it?” Excellent advice, and today she was in boyfriend jeans, a blue T-shirt with
If you don't sin, Jesus died for nothing
in white letters, hair in an elaborate French braid (“Finally! The trick to mastering French braids is not having a body, or hair that grows on the body!”), and battered blue loafers,
sans
socks. Why she refused to manifest nice shoes would be an eternal mystery.

“Gang's all here?” she asked, still messing with Lego pieces. She'd made the room, I slunk inside, and she was now working on the table.

“Mostly.” I sighed. “We'll have enough to get through the meeting.”

“Which you're seeing as a disaster for some reason.”

“Kind of.”

“Suck it up, buttercup.”

“Y'know, you could pretend to be intimidated by me. Or even acknowledge that I'm your boss and am chock-full of sinister powers.”

“Nope.”

Well, good, I guess. Throughout history, most dictators became douches because they were surrounded by yes-men or, in my case, yes-roommates/ghosts/vampires/zombies. Having
people around who aren't afraid of you is crucial if you want them to tell you what they really think, instead of what they think you want to hear. Though on days like this (nights? what time was it? Hell was like Vegas: no clocks), a
little
nervous deference wouldn't be the worst thing in the world . . .

I'd known running Hell wouldn't be easy, but hadn't planned on it being boring. It had everything I hated about my old office job (meetings, organization, meetings) and none of the stuff I liked about my old office job (paid vacation, holidays, all the Post-it notes I could steal).

But meetings, like the IRS and the DMV, were a necessary evil. It was a whole new ball game since I'd killed the devil, banished the Antichrist, yelled at my father for faking his death (badly), banished my not-dead father and the Antichrist, and taken over the care and feeding of Hell.

Luckily, I had something the devil never had, not in her five million years of punishing the damned and being pissed at God: friends willing to pitch in and help.

Thus: meetings. But there were smoothies, too, so it wasn't all bad.

CHAPTER

TWO

“Do we have the minutes of the meeting?”

I bit down on a groan and rested my forehead on the table (also made of Lego pieces). Then, remembering that the last time I'd done that, I'd walked around in Hell with Lego dots on my forehead
and no one told me
, I jerked upright.

“Do we even have those? Are we really trying to improve Hell by introducing more paperwork?”

“I don't know if ‘improve' is the right—”

“Plus, we're not even all here yet,” I pointed out. Not “I complained.” Not “I bitched.” No matter what Marc wanted to call it. And speaking of my personal physician/zombie . . . “Where's Marc?”

“Here,” my personal zombie/physician replied, ambling into the room. He was in (un)death as he was in life: slouchy and comfortable in a pale gray scrub shirt (it used to be green but after a zillion washings was faded and almost
velvety to the touch), faded boyfriend jeans (“Ironic,” he'd sigh, “since I haven't had a date in . . . when did I die again?”), dark hair in a George Clooney cut (“He's really locked into one style, isn't he?”), pale skin (not because of his zombification; he died in winter in Minnesota, when sunlight is more rumor than anything else), and smiling green eyes.

“What have I told you about wandering around Hell without an escort?” I hadn't been running the place for even a few weeks. My “run it by committee” idea was only a week old. I was still figuring out my godlike powers of the damned. And I wanted to bite the shit out of somebody—anybody, really. When had I last drunk? Argh. Worrying about Marc on top of all that? It did nothing for my temper, which these days wasn't great. “Well?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh.” Right. I'd been thinking he shouldn't wander, but didn't actually tell him. “Well, it's a bad idea.”

“What can they do to me?” he asked, reasonably enough.

“It's Hell! Who knows? Why would you ever want to find out?”

“Because I'm bored?”

Oh. Well, good point. If anyone needed to stay stimulated, it was Marc.

“And,” he continued, “Hell is really depressing.”

“Well, yeah,” Cathie replied.

“Lord Byron is so
boring.
”

Not good. Boring was bad. Marc being bored was the part of the horror movie where they establish the characters, the dumb stuff you have to sit through while waiting for the blood to spill. And it always spilled. Inevitable like the tides, or
Transformers
sequels being terrible.

“Oh?” I asked with perfect fake composure, even as Cathie started to give him the side-eye.

“Byron's one of the greatest poets ever, maybe
the
greatest English poet—”

Oh, good. Now I wouldn't have to ask, Who's Lord Brian? The name was familiar. Kind of. Poets weren't my thing.

“—and just a complete downer. First off, not gay. Bi, definitely bi.”

“Which is a problem why?” Cathie asked.

“Oh, bi artists are a dime a dozen.” Marc waved a hand, dismissing every bisexual artist in the history of human events. “All my life I've been reading about his complex sexuality, but there's nothing complex about being able to pass for straight—he fathered a couple of kids. It's not nearly the struggle it is to be in the closet, not into the opposite sex, but faking well enough to make babies while trying to fit into society without losing your mind, except a lot of them did lose their minds.”

“Those bisexuals,” Cathie said dryly, “with their uncomplicated natures and many, many banging options.”

“Oh, shut up,” he snapped. “I get it: where do I get off—”

Don't giggle at “get off.”
Whew! Thanks, inner voice.

“—marginalizing anyone's sexuality, blah-blah. But it wasn't just that. The guy's supposed to be the first celebrity—I mean, how we understand the term today. Hordes of screaming fans; Byronmania kind of paved the way for Beatlemania. Sounds pretty interesting, right? He's probably got great stories, right?”

“I'm guessing no,” I said, “on account of how annoyed you sound.”

“You know what the number one thing on his mind is? Art, poetry through the ages, reminiscing about commanding a rebel army despite having no military experience, feeding your muse from Hell, maybe moving on from Hell, looking up his descendants . . . anything like that? No. The fever that killed him. That's what's on his mind
all
the
time.
He died over two hundred years ago and he's still bitching because Advil and NyQuil weren't invented in time to save
his whiney ass.” Marc slumped into his red Lego chair, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Never meet your heroes. Or people you read about once and thought would be really cool to meet in real life.” He raised his head and looked around at the ghost and the vampire queen surrounded by Lego furniture. “This
is
real life, right?”

“Nonsense,” came a voice that managed to be soft, brisk, and polite all at once. Tina (real name: Christina Caresse Chavelle, which was
hilarious
) had popped up out of nowhere (she was like a census taker that way), representing herself and the vampire king.

You'd think the vampire queen (
moi
) could do that, but trust me: it's better for everyone that Tina handle these things. She's been doing it for decades; she'd known Sinclair since he was a li'l farmer kid with grubby knees, and had been a friend of his family for generations. She was descended from a not-witch I'd saved from being burned during the Salem witch trials in sixteen hundred whatever, because time travel.
1

So anyway, she was used to repping my husband at meetings, smoothie oriented and otherwise. She was also used to incredibly long boring meetings. Plus, to be honest, I trusted her to be in Hell a lot more than my husband, a man I loved dearly but knew to be sneaky, manipulative, controlling, and murderous. (God, he was so dreamy!)

Since we were all new to the business side of running Hell, and thus equally clueless, Tina was using fashion to soothe us, dressing the part of Demure Majordomo in Charge of Meetings N'Stuff: a virgin wool Armani skirt suit in deepest midnight blue, with a two-button long-sleeved jacket, matching camisole underneath, black panty hose, and kitten heels the same shade of blue as the suit.

The deep, dark colors set off her pale (vampire) skin and enormous dark eyes to perfection, the dark hose made her look taller (a good trick, since she was almost a foot shorter than I was), and she had scraped her long, Southern-belle-ringleted blond hair into a severe bun. She was right out of the “Hot for Teacher” video and it was glorious. If she had to fight, or jog, the suit was a disastrous choice. If she had to look like she knew exactly what she was doing in a business capacity, it was brilliant.

I need a suit like that. But in red. No, black. No, red. Purple? Purple could be great . . . except I'd look like an eggplant wearing pumps. Does Sinclair think eggplants are sexy? Must research . . .

“If you want to meet some extraordinary men and women,” she was telling Marc, who had instantly cheered up at the sight of her (they were pals bordering on besties), “I can introduce you to several, assuming they're here.”

“Guess it depends which side they fought on,” Cathie said, and since Tina had lived through the Civil War, that was a fair point.

“General Sherman?” Father Markus asked with a disapproving air. I jumped; he'd gone so long without speaking I'd forgotten he was there, even though he'd brought me to the meeting. “Jefferson Davis?”

“You knew the president of the Confederacy?” Cathie asked, sounding impressed, which was a rare and wonderful thing.

“No, that's the other Jefferson Davis; this one murdered his commanding officer and never saw a trial, much less prison.” Hmm, who knew Father Markus was a Civil War buff? (It's worth noting that Tina wasn't, since that'd be like saying, “I live in Minnesota, so I am a Minnesota buff.”)

“Robert Smalls? Wait, there's no way he'd be in Hell. Right?” It was a fair question, since people who had done
good things all their lives were in Hell. One of many things to be discussed in (argh) today's meeting (argh-argh).

“Ooh, I got this one,” Cathie enthused, warming to her subject. “This is the guy who stole a military transport, steered it past a bunch of Confederate forts, gave the ship
and
the signal codes to the Union, then went on to find and get rid of land mines he himself had been forced to plant. And he did all this while he was a slave!”

“Robert Smalls!” I cried. At last, I could contribute something to a historical conversation that didn't sound asinine. “I saw that episode of
Drunk History
!”

“Actually I was thinking of notables from the Revolutionary War,” Tina corrected gently. She gave us a moment to chew that one over

(she looks so young and hot but is ancient! weird! we know this, but keep forgetting! weird!)

before adding, “Nancy Hart, for instance. Half a dozen British soldiers accused her of protecting a Whig leader (she was), and didn't believe her when she said she hadn't seen him (she was lying). At the end of the night, all those men were dead. They found the bodies—”

“Thanks, but I don't actually have to seek out sociopaths, I hang out with plenty on my own.”

“Or Mary Ball Washington.”

“Who?”

“Washington's wife.” Duh. I managed to keep the sneer off my face, if not out of my tone.

“Washington's mother,” Father Markus and Tina corrected; he colored a little and ducked his head while she kept the sneer off her face
and
out of her tone. I should learn that trick.

Tina somehow sensed my rising boredom (the way I groaned and cradled my head in my hands may have tipped her off), because she said to Marc, “You come along with me later, darling. I'll introduce you to lots of interesting people.”

Marc perked right up. He'd been getting steadily more morose (moroser?) since Future Me had made him a zombie after he'd committed suicide to avoid being turned into a vampire (also by Future Me). Given that in life he'd been prone to depression, it was a concern.

I loved Marc, but unfortunately it was one concern on a laundry list of a bazillion concerns. Tina, thank God, had been spending lots of time with him lately. He had a blanket nest for her in the trunk of his car (complete with reading lights, water bottles, a cell phone, an iPad, and chargers) and often took her out (in the daytime!) for what I called errands and they called missions. Sure. A mission to Cub Foods for raspberries and yogurt. A mission to the liquor store for Cinnamon Churros vodka.

“Sorry I'm late,” one of the many banes of my existence said, booting an errant Lego brick out of her path.

Father Markus warned me, “Behold, evil is going forth from nation to nation,” because that was how he liked to preface nagging me about the last meeting (or the next meeting), and he was probably talking about me, but I thought of my stepmother, Antonia Taylor, known to one and all (well, me) as the Ant.

In life, we'd been deadly enemies. But in death, she had found a grudging

“You look haggard. Is plastic surgery a thing for vampires? You might want to inquire.”

a very, very grudging respect for me

“Why would anyone want hair the color
and
texture of pineapple?” I batted back. “I don't know what's worse, your outfit or the fact that you're freely choosing to look like that.”

as I had for her.

“And with that,” Cathie said after trying, and failing, to disguise a snigger as a cough, “let's get started.”