Sinclair reacted to my plan with horror. But how else to save the remains of a starving nation than fix it so those millions didn’t need to eat? Or pee or bleed? And when the newly dead rose, who best to lead them? The ones who had led for centuries, of course. It wasn’t megalomania, no matter what my husband declared. It was logic.
Sinclair disagreed. A lot. And so he died. Except maybe this time…
Somehow Infant Me had changed things. I had no idea how. I barely knew why: she saw the end, not why it had to be so. It was the reaction of a child: fix it, Mommy! And like a child who didn’t understand what was impossible, perhaps she—we—had.
Time to go back. Time to go home. What was waiting for me? Who was waiting for me? I felt a bit like that movie character from ages back—Sarah Connor. For the first time in a long time, I hadn’t read ahead. I didn’t have the dubious comfort of foreknowledge. The instruction book hadn’t been lost, or even destroyed: now there had never been a Book of the Dead.
I was afraid.
I was happy.
And beyond everything, beyond all the miracles, I dared to dare to hope: was it possible I was returning to a world where, once, Christian Louboutin had designed the most glorious shoes in the history of footgear? Could God be that good?
Time to find out. I was going home.
I had to lie to get out of the house, of course. I told Sinclair I wanted to hit the Blue Wednesday pre-Thanksgiving sales at the Mall of America. Anyone who has ever shopped at any time in America, ever, knows there’s no such thing as Blue Wednesday, just Black Friday. But the vampire king was too busy setting up lawn chairs on the south side of the yard so he could sunbathe in thirty-degree temps to care where I flitted off to. When I left he had the lawn chairs arranged to his satisfaction, and was sorting through the half dozen pairs of sunglasses he’d dashed out to get after our snow/stairs/sex shenanigans.
Delk still wasn’t home from his book tour (that was a fish to fry for another day, and fry I would … just not this week), but his dog sitter was. I cheated a bit and mojo’d her into selling, but I was paying what the dogs were worth and then some, and Delk would never miss two pups out of a thousand. Or however many blobs o’ fur were lurking on the Delk puppy farm. From the way they liked to swarm my ankles, there were at least a hundred of the things.
I gave her a check and left contact info for Delk in case he wanted to talk, and she gave me leashes attached to small black dogs. I tucked each one under an arm like fuzzy wiggly footballs and took them to the car, picking my way through gravel and snow while Fur and Burr squirmed and yapped in my grasp.
“It must be Betsy Makes Tons of Sacrifices week,” I muttered at the two blobs of black fur. “This is so nuts. They’ll be in my house. My house. There’ll be no escape.” As I pulled out of the driveway and headed home, Burr relieved herself in the backseat, and I knew I’d been right to take Sinclair’s Mustang. Not only could he fully care for dogs again, but he could wash his car in the driveway at high noon if he wanted. As Fur begin nibbling on the leather piping, I figured he’d want to get on that pretty quickly.
“That’ll learn him to leave me to fend for myself on the porch while a thousand of your fuzzy brethren are chasing me in my own yard while I’m trying to bury the dead cat my zombie friend is cutting up so he doesn’t rot,” I told Fur and Burr, who took a few seconds from their peeing/chewing to look at me with their big dark eyes and yap in shrill response.
Aw. Okay. They were kind of cute. In a slobbery incontinent way. But it wasn’t about me; Fur and Burr were about cold cruel vengeance. My wrath would go forth into the world as black lab puppies! Beware, beware, the heck-bound puppies come for thee!
You’d think the king of the vampires, of all people, would catch on: you don’t mess with the vampire queen.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Epilogue 1.0
Epilogue 2.0
Epilogue 3.0
Undead and Unstable Page 21
