Undead and Unwelcome

by Davidson, MaryJanice

  And as he’d said, Cooper heard things. Chances were he’d already known I was walking around dead. He was just miffed that Jessica hadn’t told him three years ago.

  And you know, he wasn’t revolting looking. Tall—my height—with eyes the color of new denim and a shock of pure white hair that he wore over his shoulders, he was like an ancient hippy, albeit one who had never touched drugs nor alcohol.

  He was wearing what Jessica teasingly called his uniform: khaki shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that read, JESUS SAVES. HE PASSES TO NOAH. NOAH SCORES! He had tons of weird Jesus shirts. People picked fights if he wore the wrong T-shirt to the wrong place. Fights Cooper always won, despite his age. It was unreal, yet cool . . . sort of like Cooper himself. Jessica had fired him dozens of times for his own safety, but he always showed up the next day.

  “Okay, then.” I stood, forgetting I had been sitting under a bulkhead, and banged my head. “Ow!”

  “Luckily being dead hasn’t dulled your natural grace.”

  “Shut up, Cooper.”

  He smirked and tipped two fingers in a mock salute.

  “All right, so I’ll see you in another hour or so. They’re, um, they’re done loading Antonia and my husband’s pulling together some paperwork . . .”

  For what, I had no idea—Sinclair had his fingers in a lot of pies, and I wasn’t interested enough to ask. He might answer, and then I’d have to listen. Or look like I was listening, which was harder than it sounded.

  “Anyway,” I finished, having almost lost my train of thought (again), “we’ll be back a little later.”

  “I’ll be ready, mum.”

  Oh, it was mum now? What was I, the queen of—never mind. “And for the zillionth time: Betsy. It’s Betsy.”

  “Whatever you say, mum.”

  Polite as always, he didn’t turn his back on me while I scuttled out of the plane and down the stairs. My car was parked on the west end of the tarmac of the Minneapolis International Airport; I had no idea what strings Sinclair had pulled so that I could park there. I didn’t want to know, frankly.

  Okay, “my car” was a bit of an exaggeration . . . I’d driven one of Sinclair’s to the airport for my little hey-guess-what-I’m-dead meeting. It was a Lexus hybrid, the only SUV I could drive without feeling like another planet-polluting asshole. Also, it had seat-warmers.

  There! One unpleasant chore out of the way—Cooper knew the scoop and, even better, hadn’t tried to jam a cross down my throat. He’d agreed to fly us to the Cape, and best of all, hadn’t tried to offer me a washcloth soaked in holy water. Another sneezing fit I so did not need.

  Have I mentioned there are some actual perks to being the long-prophesied vampire queen? I’m so used to bitching about my unwanted crown I tend to overlook the positives.

  Holy water, crosses, and stakes can’t hurt me. Nor garlic. Antonia, my dear dead friend, had no idea if bullets would kill me, and refused to risk my life to find out. Which is why she was riding in the cargo hold instead of the plush seats of a private plane.

  I shoved Antonia out of my head; it still hurt too much to think about her sacrifice.

  And speaking of sacrifices, there was Garrett, Antonia’s late lover, to think about. Once he’d realized that Antonia was dead—in part due to his own cowardice—he’d killed himself right in front of us. Messily.

  I didn’t quite dare broach the subject with Sinclair; he felt unrivaled contempt for a lover who would jam someone up and then not face the consequences.

  Me, I wasn’t so sure it was that black and white. Garrett was never strong. He was never even brave. But he had loved Antonia and couldn’t live without her. Literally.

  Tina and Sinclair had taken care of his body, dragging it off the broken staircase (poor Garrett looked like he’d been caught in a giant set of teeth), cutting off the head, and burying it at Nostro’s old farm (where the Fiends . . . the ones still alive . . . lived).

  But that was enough of that for now—Garrett was dead, and I couldn’t change that. But I was going to have a word with my alleged best friend about her irritating, insulting, and idiotic memorandum (memoranda?).

  I mean, jeez. Narcissistic? Didn’t she stop to think how I would feel if Cooper read that about me? Not to mention, I wasn’t even cc’d on the thing.

  I swear, I didn’t know what had gotten into that girl since I’d cured her cancer and she had to dump her boyfriend because he hated my guts. Frankly, I’ve been having a terrible time this week.

  And now rogue memos! It was too much for anyone to expect me to handle, which I would be pointing out to her the minute I saw her.

  Self-centered? Me? Sometimes that girl doesn’t know me at all.

  Chapter 3

  Dear Myself Dude,

  I can’t remember the last time I tried to write in a diary. This one will go the way the others went, I think. I’ll write like gangbusters for a week or two, then lose all interest in writing about my life and get back to living my life. But here I am again, starting a diary for the first time in over twenty years.

  That’s a lie, of course. One of my psych profs told me in college that we lie best when we lie to ourselves.

  The man knew his shit. I know exactly when I quit writing in diaries: it was right around the time I realized I had zero interest in girls, but plenty of interest in boys. I was fourteen, and kept waiting to grow out of it. Kept wondering what was wrong with me. Hoped it was just a phase. Prayed my father wouldn’t find out. Prayed no one in high school would find out.

  The trouble with being a closeted homosexual is exactly this: you live with the agonizing fear you will be found out.

  I hid until I was old enough to drink.

  When I was sixteen, I tore up my last diary for the simplest and most cowardly of reasons: I didn’t want my dad to find it. Colonel Phillip P. Spangler’s only son a bum puncher? A faggot? A crank gobbler? He would have killed me, or I would have killed me, so best to stop writing things like “I wish Steve Dillon would dump that idiot cheerleader and blow me for an hour or two.”

  So. Diaries. Specifically, new diaries. No chance the colonel will find this one; he’s in hospice, crankily dying of lung cancer.

  It’s pretty rotten that I wasn’t sad when I heard. It’s worse that I reran his labs myself to confirm it. I was relieved. Poor excuse for a man’s only son.

  My name is Marc Spangler. I’m a doctor, an ER resident at one of the busier Minneapolis hospitals, and I live in a mansion. No, I am not rich. Not yet . . . and probably not ever unless I specialize in cardiology, oncology, or face-lifts. Fortunately, this is not the sort of job you go into in order to make money. Which is a good thing, because I found out (quite by accident) that when you break down my shifts into hourly rates, every receptionist in the building makes more money than I do.

  But back to the mansion. My best friends are a vampire and the richest woman in the state of Minnesota (and, as Jessica herself would point out, not the richest black woman . . . the richest woman). In fact, they are my only friends. Once I left the shithole I grew up in, I never went back. And I never will.

  I haven’t gotten laid in a while, but on the upside, I lead the most interesting life of anyone I know . . . except maybe for Betsy and Sinclair, the King and Queen of the Vampires.

  Ooooh, Sinclair. Don’t get me started. Tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair, dark eyes, long fingers, and when he and Betsy go at it, the entire mansion shakes. Those are usually the nights I go out and get drunk.

  Mostly because I’ve always been wildly attracted to him, and partly because Betsy has unconsciously worked her charm on me . . . she’s about the only woman I’ve ever seriously considered sleeping with. And—don’t get me wrong, dude, because I love her to death—it’s just as well we didn’t hook up. What with the shoe shopping and the bitching about being stuck in a job she didn’t ask for and didn’t want, and the way she manages (quite unconsciously, I’m sure) to make everything about her . . . nope, nope, nope. If she was
my girlfriend, I probably would have jammed a needle full of potassium into my heart before the end of the first week.

  She has twenty-eight pairs of black pumps. Twenty-eight! I counted them myself. Then I counted again to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, and got twenty-nine. Those twenty-eight or -nine pairs were maybe a third of her collection. Her love for fine footgear . . . it’s almost pathological.

  Thing is, while I was debating trying sex from the other side of the fence, Betsy didn’t even know she was doing it. Getting into my head, inspiring me to wear a bit more aftershave than I usually do, making me want her . . . she did it completely unknowingly and by accident. My inner scientist wished I could have known her in life, so I could compare her premortem charisma with her “vampire mojo,” as she called it.

  And why am I going on and on about Betsy’s unholy sex appeal? That’s not what I wanted to say at all.

  Basically, I guess I’ve started another diary because things aren’t all happy-happy-yay-yay, the-good-guys-win anymore. I thought I’d learned that by the time I was in my fourth year of medical school, but I didn’t know shit about death back then.

  I know a lot more, now.

  People are dying. Good guys are dying. Friends are dying. And I just figure someone ought to be writing it all down.

  Because one of these days, I’m worried they’ll be flying me in a private plane and I won’t be riding in first class, if you know what I mean.

  The colonel might care. Might. I won’t be around to see it, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

  Chapter 4

  My husband grimaced as I plopped down next to him with BabyJon in my arms. Not particularly keen on fatherhood in the first place, Eric had found it an annoying shock that his wife was the legal guardian of her infant half brother.

  He was, like any man, jealous of anything that took his wife’s attention away from him (which was part cute and part irritating).

  Also, it was my fault my father and stepmother were dead (long story short: cursed engagement ring, grants wishes, and the cost is always high). And when I used the ring, my father was killed. As well as my stepmother.

  I had wished for a baby of my own and, like that story “The Monkey’s Paw,” my wish was granted in a rather grisly way: With BabyJon’s parents dead, guess who got custody? Bingo. Leaving me with an instant baby, zero stretch marks, and a ton of buried guilt.

  Since I had inadvertently made BabyJon an orphan, I figured the least I could do was raise him. He was my only shot at motherhood; obviously, dead people don’t breed.

  He squirmed in my arms. I smiled at him. Jet-black hair and crystal blue eyes, plump where babies are supposed to be plump. (Enjoy society’s acceptance of your body fat while it lasts, baby brother.) He had four teeth so far, and his lower lip was a waterfall of drool.

  “Why not put him in his seat?” my husband asked, shaking out the Wall Street Journal like it was a beach blanket.

  “Because we’re not going anywhere right this second.”

  “Not yet!” Jessica called from the cockpit. She took off her headphones—she thought they made her look cool, when I knew she was listening to the latest Shakira album—and headed toward us.

  She plopped into the seat behind us and curled up like a cat. She was so small, she actually pulled it off.

  “So we’re really doing this thing?”

  Sinclair looked around as if verifying the cockpit, the pilot, his papers, my magazines. “It appears so.”

  “Because, for the record? I think it’s nuts. What happened to that poor girl wasn’t your fault.”

  “Sure,” I said, shocked at how bitter I sounded. It felt like I was sucking on a psychic lemon. “I’ll blame the next-door neighbor’s dog.”

  “Not Muggles?” Jessica gasped, which made me snicker in spite of myself. She could always do that. I was awfully glad she hadn’t died.

  “Even if Elizabeth felt no sense of responsibility, bringing the body back is respectful.”

  And it lets you get a good look at the maybe-bad guys, doesn’t it, hot stuff? But I kept that stuff to myself; it was pillow talk, and none of Jessica’s business.

  She probably knew, though. Sinclair would no more let an advantage like that slip (meeting a powerful force in neutral territory) than he would go outside without pants.

  “But I would like to add once again—”

  “Oh, here we go.”

  “I don’t think you should accompany us, Jessica. It’s likely to be dangerous.”

  Jessica waved her sticklike arms around. She could put an eye out with one of those things. “Since Betsy came back from the dead, what isn’t? Shit. I can’t even go to the Mall of America without running into a sniper team.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “Yes, but not by much.”

  Sinclair shrugged. “As you like.” He knew, as we all did, that it was Jessica’s plane. And that she’d insist on coming even if it was his plane.

  In some ways, and I know this sounds terrible, but in some ways it was almost bad that I’d cured her cancer. Now she was in the middle of this whole “lust for life” thing and was being more of a tagalong than usual.

  I’d cured her by accident, which was terrific. But I’d also made her fearless by accident, which wasn’t. There’d come a day—the law of averages demanded it—when I wouldn’t be around to save her teeny butt.

  “You know, Sinclair’s got a point,” I began, knowing I was wasting my time (I had no actual breath to waste). “Who knows what the reception’s going to be like? There’s still time to get off this crazy train and—”

  “Taking off right about now, ma’am,” Cooper called.

  “You did that on purpose,” I muttered.

  Up front, Cooper was doing his flight check while Jessica climbed out of her seat, walked to the front (the fore? The cabin? I was many things, but a pilot wasn’t one of them), and took her seat next to Cooper.

  She couldn’t fly and only had a passing knowledge of the instruments Cooper used, but it was her plane. I figured someday she would summon the nerve to ask him to teach her.

  Jessica’s presence was less problematic for Cooper than for me, which is a horrible thing to say about a best friend. As I said, I’d cured her of a lethal blood disease, totally by accident.

  But while the vampire in me had once cured her cancer, it had also attacked her. It had also ripped her boyfriend from her and leeched off her generous spirit.

  Every time I looked at her I worried, and resolved to deserve her, and then worried again.

  To distract myself I stood up, popped BabyJon into his car seat, made sure it was secured to the airplane seat, and then sat back down to buckle my own seat belt. Little brother stared out the window without making so much as a peep.

  Wait. Buckle my seat belt? Should I bother? Could a plane crash even hurt me? I looked down at Eric’s waistline and saw that he hadn’t bothered.

  Huh. Well. Old habits, you know?

  “Aren’t you nervous?” I asked.

  “Extremely.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “Oh.” The newspaper slowly came down. “My pardon, dear one. Nervous about what? Facing down an unknown number of opponents as strong and fast as we are? Or surviving a plane flown by an Irish-man?”

  “Nasty! What’d the Irish ever do to you?”

  “Never mind,” he muttered darkly. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Just focus on not dying, and we’ll be fine.”

  He smiled and cupped my chin in his hand. In a second, our faces were only inches apart. “I shall promise not to die, but only if you do so as well.”

  “Deal,” I murmured, having no idea what I was agreeing to. Being this close to Sinclair often had this effect on me.

  “Taking off now, ladies and gents,” Cooper said, the party pooper.

  Sinclair took his hand away and picked up the paper; I just stared at the ceiling. That was how we began the long taxi toward a place I ha
d never been and didn’t particularly want to go.

  With a corpse somewhere under my feet. Mustn’t forget that.

  Chapter 5

  A few hours later, we were descending the stairs (except for Cooper, who stayed behind to do whatever it is pilots do after passengers exit) to the Logan Airport tarmac.

  I winced when I saw Antonia’s coffin brought out and carefully laid down.

  For such a huge airport, I was surprised at how quiet Logan was . . . it seemed almost deserted. I figured that was because we were at the part where they parked the private planes.

  Three people were waiting for us on the tarmac, clustered around a vehicle that was a cross between a limo and a hearse.

  I recognized them right away. Michael Wyndham, Pack leader (and, though this wasn’t the time or place, so so cute, with golden brown hair and calm yellow eyes). His wife, Jeannie, a blonde with a head full of fluffy curls (must be hell in the humidity). And Derik, one of Michael’s werewolves, also yummilicious with short-cropped yellow blond hair and green eyes. Was being gorgeous written into the werewolf genetic code?

  Well, wait. Jeannie was human, though the others weren’t. We’d met the week I got married (long, long story) and I’d gotten a bit of her history then. I guess, for Michael and Jeannie, it had been love at first sight.

  As opposed to the loathe on first sight it had been for Sinclair and me. Ah, memories.

  If nothing else, I hoped that my prior meeting with Jeannie might help smooth things over. The woman had helped me pick out my wedding gown, for heaven’s sake. There was a bond there, dammit.

  I’d met Derik and Michael that same week, and though Michael gave off “cool leader” vibes, Derik was a ball of good-humored energy.

  Usually.

  We faced each other through a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, I cleared my throat to say something when Derik walked over to the coffin and started to—

  Oh, man. He wasn’t. He wasn’t. He . . . was. He was lifting the lid off.