Undead and Unstable

by Davidson, MaryJanice

  “And you tried to save the other Fiends after you saved Garrett. It wasn’t your fault they—”

  “Were disgusted with my lame leadership and turned on me in rightful fury?”

  “Well, you found out your sister was the Antichrist,” the Antichrist reminded me. “And you took that pretty well.”

  If memory served, I’d had a giant tantrum when I found out she was two inches taller and ten times more beautiful than I was, but what the heck. They were trying to be nice. It wasn’t their fault they were completely totally utterly wrong when they thought I sometimes maybe knew what I was doing.

  “I think we should get out of this kitchen,” Jessica announced. “Am I the only one who feels like we’ve been in here half a day?”

  “You have to admit, it’s pretty interesting.”

  “Nope. I don’t.”

  Laura shrugged. “Okay, but there’s just one other thing I want to get cleared up…”

  “Aw, shit!” Jessica sat up straight and put a hand on her belly, looking puzzled. “What was that?”

  “Gas? You’ve eaten … um … everything, I think.” Multiple smoothies on top of the chocolate chips on top of the grapes on top of the Peanut Buster Parfait on top of the Filet-O-Fish on top of the Cinnabon with extra frosting.

  “I don’t think it’s gas…” She rubbed her stomach and frowned.

  “It’s absolutely gas. You said yourself you’re not due until next summer.”

  “I thought you were due next month,” Marc commented.

  “It depends on where I am,” Jessica explained, like that would make sense to any of us. She must have been getting light-headed from, I dunno, not enough carbs? Too many carbs?

  “Owwwww! Guys, I think … I think I might be in labor.”

  “No you’re not. You are not! This is not a wacky premise for a Thursday night sitcom. This is a mansion full of the damned and the pregnant, and you are not in labor!”

  “Oh, shit, here comes another … ahhhhh … son of a bitch.” Marc was getting to his feet. And I was getting into my ninth panic attack of the week. “Betsy, this is labor. These are labor pains. I am in labor, which will eventually result in—aaaahhh, cripes!—a baby.”

  “Well, stop it! Stop it right now.” Once again Jessica was trying to make it all about her. The woman had no shame. “I mean it: quit that.”

  She sat up so abruptly I flinched. Then she grinned. “Gotcha.”

  Startled silence, broken by my wheezing, “You bitch.” The relief was actually making me light-headed.

  “Hey, it worked. For a few seconds you forgot all your problems.”

  “For a few seconds, I knew terror the likes of which I had never known in life or death, you bitch.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and I honestly didn’t know whether to punch her or hug her. So I just got the heck out of there.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  An hour or so later, I’d thought of some great rebuttals for their “you probably wouldn’t totally suck at ruling the world, maybe, at least not too much” arguments, but before I could run back to track them all down and berate them with my logic, Sinclair came out of the library and basically scooped me up and tossed me over his shoulder, caveman style.

  “This might work on other vampire queens,” I said to his ass as he steadily climbed the stairs to our bedroom, “but it’s leaving this one cold.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “Smug bastard.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t love you,” I told his ass. His marvelous, marvelous ass. Jeez, how many friggin’ stairs were there, anyway? “Not even a little bit.”

  “Liars get spanked.”

  Oooh, really? That could be all sorts of dirty nasty fun. And frankly, we’d been a little short of dirty nasty fun around here lately. It was high time, no, past high time to get naked with the vampire king, naked and sweaty and rude, among other—

  Sinclair stopped, two stairs from the top. I could tell he was listening, but had no idea for what. At least I knew better than to shrill, “What is it?” the way annoying movie heroines did when the good guys were trying to listen for the bad guys, only the annoying movie heroine’s “What is it?” comes at just the wrong time for them to—

  There was low growling from far down the hall, growling that was getting steadily louder. Lame. And who’d be growling, for God’s sake? Jessica was probably napping by now. Nick/Dick was also napping, unless he’d finished and had gone back to work. Laura didn’t growl. I was pretty sure Marc didn’t, either. In fact, the only logical candidate for a growl was—

  “Oh, shit. The full moon!”

  Sinclair sighed and put me down.

  “With all the crap going on, I totally forgot about the full—”

  And here came Antonia, like she’d been cued by the god of missed sexual opportunities. In her wolf form, she was all black, her lush fur the exact color of her messy hair. Her eyes were glowing pools I tried not to stare into—Antonia was pretty touchy on two feet. On four, she was a goddamn hurricane of fur and teeth.

  It didn’t help that she’d only recently been able to even turn into a wolf during the full moon. See, she’d been born into their Pack, but some Pack members (you can hear the capital P, right?) didn’t ever Change. Just looked human all the time, though they weren’t. And these poor guys, they were treated like dying invalids by the ones who could turn into wolves. You know the drill: Oh you poor thing, I’ve gotta go turn into a wolf now, see ya later … or never. Like that.

  Anyway, when the librarian had kidnapped Sinclair before our wedding, Antonia had gotten snatched, too. And when I killed the librarian (“You can choke and die on those overdue books, bitch, and fuck your late fees!”), I’d somehow fixed it so Antonia could, for the first time in her life, turn into a wolf.

  We were all still adjusting. Case in point: a big-ass ebony-black scary-ass werewolf with about a thousand gleaming teeth was racing down the hall toward us, her growls like tearing velvet, and she probably wouldn’t hurt us, probably, but this was Antonia, a woman whose idea of a polite greeting was, “Why don’t you get the hell out of the way?” A woman the entire Pack had feared before she’d ever figured out how to Change. A woman the devil wanted to get rid of because she’d been such a pain in the ass in hell. The devil. In hell.

  Maybe we should just hit the carpet and cower like crying little babies?

  Believe me, darling, I’m giving it serious thought. She likely would not hurt us, but…

  Before we had to indulge in our mutual cowardice, Antonia ran right up to us. Then we saw her legs bunching as she gathered herself, saw her sort of screwing herself into the carpet, and then she launched herself right over us.

  We turned in staring unison to see her sail over our heads and fly down most of the steps, hitting the fourth from the bottom, catching herself, and then one more light leap … and then she was galloping for the front door, only there was a great big picture window in the—

  KKKSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH!

  Exit Antonia.

  “Aw, son of a—”

  More footsteps. And now here came Garrett, racing down the exact path Antonia had just taken, zipping past us with a panted, “Sorry!” Then bounding down the stairs, taking them four and five at a time like a big skinny pale gazelle, bounding through the new hole in the picture window with a final, “She’s got issues with claustrophooooooooobia!”

  Oh, and he’d been naked. Did I mention that?

  I turned to my husband, who was, like me, pretty much frozen in startlement. “So now we’ve got a bitchy werewolf running around in our sleepy neighborhood, with a naked sometimes-feral vampire hot on her trail.”

  “Yes.”

  “We should probably go do something, I dunno, royal and leader-ish.”

  “Yes,” my husband said, with a last mournful glance at my cleavage. Then he sighed, turned, and started down the stairs. “I shall attend to it, my own.”

  “Don’t be dumb,
I’ll help.”

  “Please.” He turned and held up a hand. “I continually worry for you, now more than ever. Please stay here where things are relatively safe.”

  “Here? Safe?” I laughed. “C’mon, I’ll help. We’ll see the funny side of it,” I added, trying to cheer him up. “You know, eventually.”

  He shook his head but smiled at me, and the smile was almost enough to make our sexless trek through the neighborhood something to look forward to.

  THIRTY-SIX

  That was how I ended up getting arrested. You know how things seem weird and disconnected at the time the madness is happening, but later, when you can sort of step back and take a good look, you see how they were really linked?

  Yeah, none of that happened. Sinclair and I (and Tina, and then Nick) went after Antonia and Garrett, and I got arrested, and the whole thing was stupid and a huge pain in my ass, and it didn’t help that Sinclair found the whole thing sort of hilarious. The rate we were going, the thought of turning him into the Book of the Dead wasn’t so repugnant all the time, how’s that for weird and sad?

  * * *

  “And just what the hell is that?”

  “A Kimber Custom semi-auto, Majesty,” Tina replied, always soooo polite. She did something to the pistol, which was all shiny and steel-ey, and it made an ominously cool ratcheting sound. I was a shotgun girl (goose and duck hunting with my mom when I was a teenager) and a rifle girl (just because it was always so fun to try for a target two hundred yards away, and even more fun to hit a target two hundred yards away). Beyond that, I knew poop-all about guns.

  It shouldn’t, but it always did: I always found it freaky to see tiny delicate looks-like-a-sorority-escapee Tina matter-of-factly reload ammo (Sinclair had set her up with a whole reloading bench in a corner of our vast disgusting basement, and that thing clanged and banged half the night sometimes), tote rifles and shotguns around in gun cases, produce pistols like magicians made doves appear, and clean said pistols in the kitchen. I guess I sometimes expected her to spend time sitting on our porch in hoopskirts and a bonnet, sipping mint juleps.

  I’d mentioned that to her once, and her reply had been succinct and respectful: “Mint triggers my gag reflex, my queen.” Not a sentence I heard much, even around here.

  “Ooooh, pretty!” I mock-gasped as she popped the clip and examined it.

  “Yes, well.” A small, demure smile was on her face. “You do like shiny things.”

  “But why do you have that one?”

  “Because I always try to buy American.” I had no idea if she was kidding or not.

  “You think we’ll need a gun? We’re just going after Antonia to make sure she doesn’t eat anybody. And Garrett because he’ll scare the neighbors with his nudeness more than a big black slavering wolf will.” (Minnesotans had a strong streak of the prude, especially in November.)

  “Oh, this is just the gun I had on me, Dread Queen,” she assured me.

  Oh. How silly of me. Of course. That was just the gun she had on her.

  “Shall we split up?” Sinclair asked, his rumble of a voice more than a little comforting against the dark Antonia and Garrett had fled to.

  “Sure. We’ve done almost every other stupid horror movie cliché over the last few years. Why not? Is there a lake where sexy teens were killed, say, ten years ago tonight? Because that’d be the perfect place to split up.”

  “I love you,” the king told me, “but I do not always understand you.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s no need to split up. Antonia went that way, and of course, Garrett is right behind her. If we get moving, we’ll—”

  Which was when the cop car pulled into our drive, flashing cherries.

  “Oh, shit!” Then I cheered up. “It’s just Nick.”

  “What the hell?” he asked, practically leaping out of the vehicle. He looked more wild-eyed than he had in the kitchen during our showdown, which was alarming. “Jess said something broke the big window on first? And is running around the neighborhood?”

  “Yeah, but it’s—”

  “She texted me 9-1-1! And she only does that when Byerly’s is out of chocolate-covered bananas! And they aren’t because I was there this afternoon and bought her a bunch more! So she’s really freaked, you guys!”

  “It’s just Antonia,” I soothed. Frazzled freaked Nick was making me nervous. “Um, in her incredibly dangerous huge wolf form during the—”

  Nick/Dick groaned. “I knew it was the goddamned full moon and I forgot!” He was so distraught and stressed, he didn’t notice Tina’s and Sinclair’s mutual flinch. Instead he slammed his hand down on the hood of his car, and this time I was the flincher. I was used to him being pissy in the old timeline, but not hysterical. Was I destined to screw up his life no matter what timeline we were in? Depressing thought. “All those witnesses we had to interview again, and then Jess hasn’t been sleeping well so I haven’t been sleeping well, and then the thing with the bananas, and with the you from the future, and the devil—”

  “We get it. You’re swamped.”

  “We are having a baby!” he reminded us, like any of us could forget The Gut That Walked Like Jessica.

  “When? Because there’s been some confusion.” He just stared, like he had no idea what I could mean. Fine, I’d deal with that issue later. “Look, it’s being handled, okay?”

  “Handled as in you’re talking to me in our driveway while a werewolf who makes Howard Stern seem soft-spoken roams our neighborhood while being chased by her naked vampire lover who was tortured so thoroughly he has no idea how many innocent people he killed before clawing you up and turning you into a vampire queen?”

  I stared at said driveway. “Anything sounds bad when you say it like that,” I mumbled.

  He rubbed his close-cut hair so vigorously it looked like he was trying to knock himself out. Which maybe he was—he did admit to being sleep-deprived. “Are you in charge or not?”

  “I am,” I said firmly. I was. Right?

  “So you’re responsible.”

  Have a care, my love.

  I’ve got this, worrywart.

  “I am.”

  “Fine. Elizabeth Taylor, you are under arrest.”

  “I’m sorry?” Heh. Crazy night, because it almost sounded like—

  “You’re under arrest,” one of my roommates said, while two more of my roommates stared at each other in total bafflement.

  “For what?”

  “For sucking at your job,” he snapped.

  “Well, I’m doing the best I can!”

  “Yes! That’s the problem.”

  “Yeah? Tough, you fascist asshat! It’s me or it’s nobody, so it’s me.”

  Sinclair raised his eyebrows, and I could read the bum like a Lucifer graphic novel. Normally his alpha maleness would dictate he put himself in direct opposition to whatever Nick demanded. On the other hand, he was also a big fan of keeping me out of harm’s way. The local pokey was wall to wall with lawbreakers (sorry … alleged lawbreakers). Our home, on the other hand, where we were supposed to relax and feel safe and occasionally have sex, was crawling with werewolves and zombies and the devil and decrepit versions of me and grumpy fat Jessica. If he let Nicky-Dicky haul me away, he could appease a valuable asset (he’d always been a big fan of getting close to a cop) and track down Antonia without worrying about me—which was how he’d wanted to handle it in the first place. So he was stymied.

  “You have the right to remain silent.” In a jingly flash, his cuffs were off his hip. I was so astonished I stood still and let him cuff me. And I was having big-time déjà vu: this was prom night all over again, except with much less booze. “If you give up that right—”

  “You’re arresting me?”

  “Uh…” Tina began. I could read her like a comic, too … she was appalled, but couldn’t see a way out. Her king wasn’t moving an inch. But her queen was about to get hauled to the local hoosegow. She couldn’t back us both, so she
picked the route that led (probably) to my immediate safety. “Uh, my queen, perhaps until we, ah, secure your—the mansion. I think it’s better if the detective is occupied with you, rather than trying to be occupied with, ah, Antonia or Garrett.”

  “Stop talking,” I told her, and she did, looking faintly grateful.

  “What’s the charge? Sucking at being the queen of the undead?”

  “Sure, that’s a good one. You have the right to remain silent.”

  “Fat fucking chance!”

  “If you give up that right—”

  “I’m going to stab you in the face.”

  “—anything you say can and probably will be used against you in a court of law.”

  “A lot.”

  “If you can’t afford an attorney—”

  “You know I can, butt-munch.”

  “—one will be provided for you.”

  “Do you know what I’m going to provide for you, Nick?”

  “Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?”

  “I’ve mentioned the facial wounds I’m planning to inflict, right?”

  I could still hardly believe Sinclair was going along with this bullshit. Not being able to have sex with me was just ruining the man.

  “You had to still be a cop in this altered timeline, didn’t you?” I said bitterly. “You couldn’t have been an accountant? Or a clown? I should tear your head off your shoulders.”

  “Never happen,” Nick said, managing a smile. A sickly, stressed smile, but it was a smile. “You wouldn’t hurt me if someone stuck a gun in your ear, Bets.”

  What could I say? That one statement was why I found out what the backseat of a detective’s car looked like from the inside. I was pissed, but I kind of loved that he was betting his life that I wouldn’t hurt him.

  Which simply wasn’t true. I’d hurt him—I had hurt him plenty. But he didn’t remember it, because it had never happened to him in this timeline.

  Did it not happening mean it didn’t happen? I remembered everything, good and bad. I’d hurt Nick … except I hadn’t. Argh. I hated timeline-based Zen-isms.