Undead and Unfinished

by Davidson, MaryJanice

  She shrugged sullenly at me and tried to haul my undead carcass toward the retail Hellmouth, but I wasn’t having it. And not just because of the obvious reason.

  “Speak, Laura! You don’t mind doing it when strange children are around. Why clam up now? It’s part of what you can do, isn’t it? You don’t like talking about your mom, you don’t like other people talking about your mom—and you sure don’t like talking about what you got from your mom. You just—you know every language. On earth.”

  Oh, the deals she could haggle in Paris! I was momentarily dizzy at the thought. Every language. On earth. Every spoken language on earth ... so she was fluent in Latin and all sorts of other dead languages. Zow! And typical of Laura, she’d never said shit. In any language.

  “Just like in that movie!”

  “What movie?”

  “The Devil’s Advocate, That one where A1 Pacino is the devil.” The awesomest devil ever.

  She looked away. If it was possible for someone so gorgeous and nice and smart and occasionally insane to look ashamed, she was pulling it off. “I never saw it. My parents wouldn’t—and then I didn’t want—it was about—you know.”

  Her! It was about her—or her if she’d been Keanu Reeves in that movie. She didn’t just dislike movies about Satan, she disliked movies about spawn of same. She disliked movies starring ... herself! “So you haven’t seen any—”

  She shook her head, making shiny blonde waves obscure her face. Her demonically pimple-free face.

  “The Omen? The Omen II? The Omen III: The Final Conflict? Or Rosemary’s Baby? Or Little Nicky? Or Bedazzled? No, you’re not in that one, just your—”

  “No, I haven’t!”

  Except she didn’t sound mad. Well, she did, but she also sounded ... interested?

  I peered at her. I knew that look. That was a my-God-those-Pradas-are-on-sale! look.

  “Well, you’re gonna,” I decided, clamping down on her demonically clammy palm and hauling her—praise Jesus!—away from Payless. “I’ve got at least half those, and we’ll Netflix the rest. You’re gonna learn all about your heritage—at least, what Hollywood thinks it is. Which, given that they greenlit sequels for Speed, Teen Wolf, Legally Blonde, Dumb and Dumber, Jaws, and The Fly, you should totally take with a ton of salt”

  “Have you seen all those—”

  “One of my many superpowers,” I assured her, hauling her away from the Hellmouth.

  Chapter 4

  l have to tell the truth,” the Antichrist said through a mouthful of popcorn. “A1 Pacino is a terrific Satan.”

  “Tell me about it” I was on my seventh strawberry smoothie, furtively slurping because my snobby fink husband thought frozen berries were worse than early morning Mass. In the summertime that was fine; all the good stuff was in season. In the winter, I had to be stealthy with my smoothie fixins. “Although tell me anything A1 Pacino isn’t terrific at—ah! Cool, I love this part. Look, he’s gonna jam his finger into holy water and make it so you could boil an egg in there.”

  “What is the purpose of that?” Laura asked, aghast and amused.

  “Who cares? He’s A1 freakin’ Pacino!”

  Munch. Crunch. “He is A1 freakin’ Pacino.”

  We’d gone through The Omen (“Have no fear, little one. I am here to protect thee.”), Rosemary’s Baby (“We’re your friends, Rosemary. There’s nothing to be scared about. Honestly and truly there isn’t!”), and now we were coming in on the homestretch with Big Al.

  Laura, after her initial resistance, was gorging on these movies the way I wolfed down chocolate shakes (or strawberry smoothies out of season). It definitely had the look of forbidden fruit. And whenever we heard a door slam in another part of the house, she’d jump a little, as though she were afraid of getting caught.

  Her parents—her adoptive parents, I mean—knew she was the devil’s daughter. Laura had told them. Satan had told them (she’s a big believer in partial disclosure at the worst possible time).

  And I think ... I think Laura tried to make it up to them for being the Antichrist by pretending indifference or even dislike toward any pop culture Antichrist references.

  Because she sure as shit couldn’t get enough of these movies now. Presumably this wouldn’t come back to bite me in the ass. Right? Right.

  Sure.

  “What’s your favorite?”

  “Elizabeth Hurley. Bedazzled, ‘Most men think they’re God. This one just happens to be right.’ Also she was a great traffic cop. And candy striper! Giving M&Ms to the patients instead of their meds ... it’s kind of like belonging to a really sucky HMO.”

  “My mother ...”

  “Yeah? Your mother?” I tried not to sound too eager to prompt her; Laura never talked about this stuff. I was afraid to even move, sprawled on the love seat as I was with one of my shoes upside down on the floor and the other dangling from my big toe—I didn’t want to break the spell. “Your mother, Satan ...”

  Laura shook her head so hard, I couldn’t see her face for all the blonde strands whipping around.

  “Come on! Laura, you’re the Antichrist and I’m the queen of the vampires. You’re still a virgin and I lost mine after prom to a guy named Buck. Buck! You beat a serial killer to death and I once passed off a knockoff pair of Louboutins as the real thing. I’m just as sick and evil as you are. I’m in no position to judge.”

  “Oh.” Then: “Buck?”

  “Well, jeez, don’t judge me, either.”

  “Oh, never. Um. Really, your virginity? Well. I’ve been seeing her.”

  “Your biological mother.”

  Laura smirked. “I’m not even sure that’s so. I wasn’t born of her body; I was born of your stepmother’s body. The devil fled back to hell after I was born.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, living with a newborn just must be so incredibly awful, if hell seems like a respite.” Memo to me: be thankful you have BabyJon and quit bitching about never being able to get pregnant and force another human being through your uterus and out into the world.

  “I’m not her biological child at all.”

  “Do I look like a genetics expert to you? Or a theology expert? It’s just all kinds of supernatural fuckery. Who knows how it works? Not me; I’m still trying to get through the vampire queen manual. You’ll drive yourself nuts if you try to force all of this—Antichrists, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and half brothers who are wards, and weddings and funerals and suicides and kings and queens and coups—to make sense. So, your mom’s been popping in a lot uninvited?”

  “She’s always uninvited.”

  “Yeah, tell me.” The devil occasionally dropped in on me as well. Worse: the heartless cow tempted me with shoes! Wonderful, beautiful, sinfully delicious and hard-to-come-by shoes. Oh, she was a diabolical wretch. Also, she looked weirdly like Lena Olin: cougar hot, with sable-dark hair shot through here and there with gray strands. Killer legs. Great suits. And the shoes ... let me not get started on the shoes ...

  “She’s been telling me things.”

  “Eh?” Oh. Right. Laura was opening up about her mom. I should probably pay closer attention. “Okay.” I was fairly certain this was going to be bad with a capital B-A-D.

  “And I ... I’m curious about her.” Laura almost whispered that last. Like it was bad. Like it was shameful; like she was.

  I laughed. “Oh, honey, is that’s what’s bugging you? Shit. What adopted child hasn’t been curious about their parents? What, you think that makes you a bad daughter? Like it’s disrespectful of your folks who raised you?” I laughed again. I didn’t want to, but it was funny, and I was relieved. “Stop kicking your own ass for being normal, okay?”

  My sister instantly loosened up ... her shoulders lost the bowed-in look of somebody in the middle of a serious stress-out. She leaned forward and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Okay. So, Baal keeps—”

  “Whoa, whoa. I’m gonna have to ask the audience for a replay on that one. Ball?”

  “An o
ld name for my mother.”

  “Really old, because I’ve never heard of it. I guess it’s slightly less offensive than crack whore.”

  “Slightly.”

  “I prefer Beelzebub, personally.”

  “Call her Old Scratch if you like. Call her the Lord of Lies. Call her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Whatever name she uses, she wants me to visit her. To see her.”

  “Okay.”

  “See her world. Her lands.”

  “Your mom wants you to go to hell.” I paused, chewing that one over. “Literally.”

  Yeesh. And I thought my mom was a pill when she made me come to the all-faculty cocktail party when I was seventeen. There’s no group duller than a group of academics with inferiority complexes. So, not just any historians. Bragging historians.

  “And I won’t deny I’m tempted. I’d—I’d like to see it. I’d like to ... I don’t know. I’m just so curious, all the time. I have so many questions. And to think, if I hadn’t met you, I never would have thought it was okay to—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Nuh-uh. This is not my fault—it’s not going to be my fault. Do not drag me into this.”

  “I’m not blaming you. I’m thanking y—”

  “Well, stop it! Whatever happens after this moment, whatever happens the rest of November, none of it was my fault.” Being dead the last couple of years had made me paranoid beyond belief. And I was starting to smell disastrous situations that started out cutely innocent and ended up with me almost dying, or my husband almost dying, or one of my friends actually dying. Or a parent dying, or a thousand werewolves out to get me.

  What can I say? Fate likes me to keep busy.

  “I just think it would be an interesting trip.”

  “Wrong, oh sweetly deluded sister of mine. Chicago is an interesting trip. The Boundary Waters is an interesting trip, if you don’t mind hiding your food in a tree. Hell is a life sentence. More than that, actually.” She opened her mouth, and I made a slashing motion with my hand. “Don’t even. I’m not gonna talk you out of it—I know better than to try—and I am definitely not going with you. I’ve never done one thing in my life to warrant a field trip to hell.”

  This was a rather large lie. I could think of several reasons I might have earned a day pass to the Underworld, starting with burying my mom’s purse in the backyard when I was five, figuring that with no driver’s license, she wouldn’t be able to drive me to Payless Shoes. As gambits went, it was risky. As punishments went, it was lengthy.

  And we ended up going to Wal-Mart instead. Jesus, pity your humble undead servant.

  Chapter 5

  Disgusting, horrible, wretched, tremendously evil, evil, yuck-o, poop-ridden crap!”

  “I could hear your dulcet tones at the front door,” my husband, Sinclair, commented as he came into our bedroom smelling like secrets and blood. “However, you seem more, ah, agitated than usual.”

  “Agitated is putting it mildly.”

  “Yes, my love, but furiously foaming is not romantic in the slightest. Was that Laura just now leaving?”

  “Huh? Yeah.”

  “She did not seem inclined to chat”

  “She’s having mom issues.”

  Sinclair grimaced, his emotional equivalent of screaming hysterically and yanking out his hair by double handfuls. A taciturn man, the love of my life. “Laura’s mother issues? A sobering thought.” He shrugged out of his navy suit coat, stepped to our walk-in closet, and fussily hung it on a wooden hanger. “I missed you tonight, my own.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I was unmoved. Big, big perk of being the vampire queen: I didn’t have to feed every day. So when I could, I drowned my thirst with gallons of iced tea and blenders-full of smoothies. It didn’t help. Not really. But it made me feel better. Less freaklike. Not quite so movie-monster-ish. “I didn’t miss you, not even one little teensy—yeek!” I collapsed on our bed, giggling, as the king of the vampires zapped me with his evilly wriggling fingers of death-by-rib-tickling.

  “My understanding is that admitting to being ticklish is admitting you have no willpower of any kind.”

  “Oh, you I’m-not-ticklish thugs always fall back on that one. Like being some sort of weird genetic freak is, I dunno, proof of willpower or something.”

  “It is,” he said with an absolutely wicked smile, and then his fingers were skating over my ribs again. I thrashed and kicked and yowled. Do other queens have to put up with this shit? Did Victoria? Did Anne Boleyn? Elizabeth II? It seemed unlikely. Not that I envied Anne Boleyn. But I’m pretty sure that, although Henry I’m-never-satisfied Tudor planned her legal murder, he never tickled her until she felt ready to pee her pants.

  “No, quit, I’ve got a—stop that!” I wriggled and shoved and managed to extricate myself from his rubber-cement-esque grip.

  Okay. Lie. He let me up. I’m strong for a dead girl, but Eric Sinclair was one in a million. Literally.

  “I’ve got this humongous problem.”

  “Oh, so?” He, too, rose from the bed and kept methodically undressing and hanging everything up. I didn’t blame him—I saw his AmEx statement once and nearly went into shock on the spot. I’d hang up everything, too, if I spent over a hundred bucks on a single necktie.

  We were plenty rich—he was, I mean, and Jessica—my best friend—was, sure.

  The most I ever earned was forty thousand dollars a year, and that was as an executive assistant with seven years of experience the year I got run over by a Pontiac Aztek. But we lived in a mansion on the supertony Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Our mansion, in fact, looked right at home on the street with all the other mansions. Our mansion could give some of the other mansions a run for their money. Our mansion could freely taunt the other mansions. (Our mansion wasn’t very mature, though; it was built in 1860, I think.)

  See, the way things happened was—you know what? I actually don’t have time for the whole story. I’ll sum up: woke up dead, kicked ass, became queen of the vampires, hooked up with Eric Sinclair and made him king of the vampires (I still get mad when I think about how his having sex with me was the beginning, middle, and end of his coronation ... what kind of a sad-ass society planned for stuff like that?), moved into Vampire Central a couple years ago when my old house was teeming with termites, and have, at any given time, about half a dozen (uninvited) roommates, living, dead, and in-between.

  See? If I’d coughed up the whole thing, we’d be here all month. The awfulest month. November.

  (It was 3:18 a.m., November 1. The beginning of Hell-month. The awfulest month. November.)

  “Does this have something to do with your unreasonable hatred of the Thanksgiving holiday?” Sinclair the Uncaring asked, carefully removing cufflinks (gold beans by Elsa Peretti, and yeah, you read that right, the man wears gold beans at his wrist and then mocks me for indulging in jewelry by Target) and placing them in his cufflink drawer.

  Yeah. That was the sort of man I was condemned to live with for five thousand years.

  “Dude! Unreasonable? Anything but, you ruthless putz. My Thanksgiving hatred is extremely reasonable.”

  “How is it I have known you for—”

  “An eternity.”

  “—no, it only feels like that, dearest. I have known you going on three years—”

  “Absolutely, completely an eternity.”

  “—yet I never cease to be surprised by your absurd prejudices, in particular your dislike of a basically inoffensive holiday.”

  “Inoffensive? Spoken like an old rich white dude.” Annoyed, I swung my toe toward one of the bed legs and nearly fractured the thing for my trouble. Undead strength and speed did not mean invulnerable toes.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Of course you don’t understand; you’re a guy. A rich white one, if you didn’t catch that. All you’ve ever had to do for Thanksgiving is commit mass genocide, watch football, and wear turkey pants.”

  Sinclair blinked at me slowly. Like an owl. A big, pale, gorgeous, muscle-y owl. “Tu
rkey pants?”

  I waved his question away. “You know. Like sweatpants. Pants with tons of elastic so you can eat turkey until you vomit”

  “Thanksgiving was somewhat different in my home,” he said, looking amazed.

  “That’s the big lie, dude.”

  “Also, I loathe it when you refer to me as dude.”

  “Dude, like I care! Listen: from the first Thanksgiving up until three weeks from now, all the Thanksgiving pressure is on women. Cook, clean, stuff, eat—barely; we’re too busy jumping up and down with more gravy and cranberry sauce—clean, fall on face and pray for the strength to make it to Christmas, rinse, repeat. It’s inhuman. As an inhuman, I should know. Also it’s a conspiracy to keep us chained to our mops.”

  “Do we have a mop?”

  “We must” The kitchen was as wide as a football field; the counters were always shiny clean, the floors always gleaming. The place smelled like lemons and old wood. We probably had a dozen mops. A battalion of mops. And a discreet, overpaid housekeeping staff.

  “But, my own, you need do none of those things: cook, clean, stuff—you recall the litany, I pray. Frankly, I am certain you have never had to do those things.”

  “That’s not the—listen, I’m trying to strike a blow for feminism here.”

  “Feminism?”

  “Yes, you know, that pesky mind-set that assumes women are the equal to men. Don’t say ‘feminism?’ like you’ve never heard the word, you repressing bastard.”

  My husband had an expression on his face I knew well: he was amused, and annoyed, and thus looked as though he were coming down with a three-day migraine. “But I have heard the word, my sweet, and—”

  Too late! I was hip deep in lecture mode. “We feminists had to invent it to stop all the rampant repressin’ and stuff going on.

  “How are you repressed?”

  I gaped. “How am I—do you not see my boobs, which perkily classify me as a member in good standing of the repressed people?”

  “But you are not. You are wealthy—”

  “It’s your money.” I paused. “And before you, it was Jessica’s money.”