Undead and Unstable

by Davidson, MaryJanice

  “I’m legally dead,” Marc mused. He’d given up with the ice pack, and sat back down at the kitchen table. “What does that mean? Does my social security card work? Has my license to practice medicine been invalidated or revoked? How about my driver’s license?”

  “I had a lot of the same questions when I died the first time.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Uh … nothing. The whole queen gig came up, so I never really had to worry about that stuff.”

  “Worry about what stuff?” Antonia had stepped into the kitchen, Garrett on her heels. They weren’t carrying bags of yarn or needles or what-have-you, but they were both flushed and bright-eyed. “What’s the vampire sewing circle bitching about now?”

  “Ah-ha! You were having sex in the spoon, admit it!”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging. Her black hair had been pulled back into a messy ponytail, which for Antonia was practically a smooth chignon. “Why d’you care? Aren’t you dead?”

  “Well, I’m a vampire, so technically—”

  “Not you, moron.” She pointed. “Him.”

  “Hi,” Marc said. “I’m back.”

  She stepped closer, her nostrils flaring. “You’re dead,” she said, as if accusing him of drinking milk out of the carton.

  “Yeah.” He smiled and went for the lame joke: “But I got better. Time is a wheel.”

  “What? You said that before, I think.”

  “Said what?”

  “What you just said.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Before I could answer, Antonia was right up in his face. She was prowling around him, sniffing like a dog with a scent. Which, I s’pose, she kind of was. “You’re not a vampire—you’re not blank like these three.”

  “Blank? Oh, very nice, Antonia, just because we’re not all shape-shifting seers who—”

  “I mean vampires don’t smell like anything, dummy. Why d’you think Pack members get so rattled around you? It’s creepy, not knowing what dumbass move you’re gonna pull.”

  “You know, some people are afraid of me.” I tried not to whine, but didn’t pull it off. “Some people wouldn’t dare call me dummy, or dumbass, or idiot, or asshat, or moron, or dumb shit, or—”

  “You’re not one of them,” she continued, ignoring me so thoroughly I wondered if I was even in the room. “You’re just a dead guy. Except you’re walking around. Ummm … why?”

  “Zombie?” Garrett asked. He’d walked right past Marc to rummage through the fridge. Since Antonia was alive, he didn’t give a shit about what was happening in any other phase of his life. At most, Zombie Marc popping up was mildly curious. “Did you make him a zombie, Betsy?” He held up a can of V8. He was crazy for the stuff. I tried not to think about why. “Can I have this?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s not even the last one.”

  “No to me doing that, not no to the V8—drink all the V8 you want, what do I care? It wasn’t me … it wasn’t on purpose,” I said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Pretty sure. But I was getting a bad feeling. A bad intuition, call it. Because who could have done such a thing? The list of candidates was laughably short. And I was on that list.

  So was my sister, the Antichrist.

  “You’re dead, but you don’t smell bad,” Antonia informed a bemused Marc. “There’s no rot. There’s not anything. You’re just you. Only dead.”

  “Thanks for the analysis,” he said wryly. “Welcome back from hell, by the way.”

  “Mmmmm.” She looked at Sinclair and me. “I assume you two are on this?”

  I opened my mouth to say, “Not a chance, so plan to stick around and help, for God’s sake!” but Sinclair beat me to it with, “Assuredly.” So I decided not to argue. For now.

  “Antonia, there has not been time to address this, but I feel I must put it to you now: have you let your Pack know you’re alive?”

  “Nope! Too busy having sex in the Walker Center spoon, right?” God, I’d forgotten the pure pleasure of tattling. How come we have to give up all the fun things about being a kid when we grow up and die? “I bet it hasn’t even occurred to you.”

  “It’s none of your business, queen of the monkeys,” she said with a scowl.

  “Hey, hey,” I warned. Monkey was the werewolf equivalent of nigger. “Put a lid on that Pack potty-mouth.”

  “Antonia,” Sinclair said in a tone full of reproach. “It’s not only careless to keep this from them, it’s quite cruel.”

  “They weren’t all that fond of me before I went to hell, and you both know it. So who cares?”

  “Antonia.” Sinclair knew she was right, but he also was a huge believer in all things family. His parents and sister had died when he was still in his teens. I think that was part of the reason he liked my mom so much. It didn’t have as much to do with her as it did the fact that I still had a mom.

  She rolled her eyes and stomped to the phone on the wall. “Fine, fine. You won’t quit bitching until I do, so let’s get this over with.”

  “Thank you so much for your cooperation.”

  She dialed, listened, then put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Got his voice mail … yeah, Michael? This is Antonia. Betsy went to hell and brought me back to life, so I’m alive again and living in the mansion in St. Paul with her and the rest of the weirdos. And I’m not dead anymore. Anybody you gave my stuff to had better cough it back up. So … just FYI.” She hung up. “Happy?”

  Sinclair was as horrified as I’d ever seen him. Which I understood because I was sure I had the identical expression on my face. “Oh, Antonia…” He shook his head. “You cannot.”

  “What?” She slashed her hand through the air like Sinclair was a giant fruit fly and had to be swatted away. “You butted into my business—”

  “You live under my queen’s roof,” he said sharply, “and thus your business is my business, as are all things that happen in our home, and your liking of that fact is irrelevant.”

  “Fine, fine, don’t get your undead skivvies out of joint. You said I should tell the family. I told the family. Are there any of those caramel brownies left? There better be. I’m starving.”

  “So…” I admired the shit out of her, while at the same time found her terrifying. Oh, and if anyone was keeping score, Antonia had been like this before she went to hell. “So, is it appealing to not be hindered by a conscience? I guess it is. It must be … So is sociopathy all it’s cracked up to be?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You just don’t get it.”

  “Yep. I don’t. Werewolves are weird.”

  “Come on,” she said to Garrett, and he followed her out of the kitchen. “Way to not stay dead, jerk,” was her parting comment to Marc.

  Garrett’s was, “Hi again. And bye.”

  I sighed and raked my fingers through my bangs. “Where were we?”

  “Trying to figure out how I emerged from my dirt nap.” Marc spotted the newspaper on the counter, got up, and grabbed it. “You guys done with this? I kind of need it.”

  “Nobody but Sink Lair reads newspapers, so yeah. What do you need it for? Are you potty training yourself? Eww, does that come with the whole zombie thing? Are you potty training yourself in my attic?”

  “Gross. And no.” I hadn’t realized until that moment that a zombie could look reproving. “I don’t think I can ‘potty’ anymore. But I need to keep busy,” he replied, tucking the paper under his arm. “Dissecting the cat. Crossword puzzles. Sudoku. Stuff I have to think about.”

  “Okay.” Weirdo. “Listen, I had a thought. I think it’s time we tracked down the Antichrist. She’s one of the people on my short list of who could have done this to Marc. And even if she didn’t do it, she might have some ideas. Plus it’s making me kind of nervous how she hasn’t popped by or called in almost a week.”

  “Things were left somewhat tense between you,” Sinclair pointed out, which was an astounding understatem
ent.

  “Things are always tense when the Antichrist is keeping secrets. Lucky for us she’s a terrible liar.” Secrets were, by definition, her mother’s purview. So ask me how glad I was that that skipped a generation. “I’ll call her again. I’ve been leaving messages—hi, how are you, started up any new timelines lately—like that. But if I ask her straight out to come over, or have us over, I think she’d do it.”

  She’d better. Because the last thing I wanted to do today was break into hell without an invitation … or an escort.

  FOURTEEN

  Sinclair and I were rigid in our bed. For one of the very few times in our marriage, we had no interest in banging each other into semiconsciousness.

  Nope. Thanks to the zombie who had the run of the house now, sex was the last thing on our minds.

  “Okay, it’s weird, right?” We were both staring at the ceiling. “It’s just so creepy. He’s our friend and I wanted him back—”

  “Monkey’s paw,” Sinclair muttered.

  “—but there’s a zombie creeping around our house.”

  “He has to keep busy.”

  Boy, did he. Marc had explained that he needed tons of mental stimulation as a zombie, and thus was doing everything he could to keep his zombie brain sharp. Apparently the modern zombie fed from mentally taxing work (like accountants, I guess), which kept him from needing brains. Excuse me: Braaaaaaaains. Marc was a modern cuddly zombie as opposed to a revolting terrifying George Romero creation.

  Okay. Fine. We could adapt. We had to adapt to weird stupid things all the time. But we still had the problem of knowing a zombie was creeping around the house trying to keep busy so he wouldn’t rot.

  I wriggled around on our new bed (Sinclair and I occasionally broke our beds, which was why we were on bed no. 7 … thank goodness Sinclair was rich!), which mussed our sheets.

  “Now I’m apprehensive and my feet are cold,” Sinclair sighed.

  “You think I’m any happier? It’s so creepy knowing he’s creeping around being all creepy.”

  We stared at the ceiling for a few more minutes. “It may be psychological,” Sinclair said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I cannot actually hear anything. We did not know he was in the house before he revealed himself. Now we know he is not only here, he is a zombie. Perhaps our tension is psychological.”

  “I have no idea what you just said. Oh, fuck.”

  “Was that a request, or an epithet?”

  “My mom’s supposed to drop BabyJon off tomorrow.” BabyJon was my half brother/ward/son, kinda. But because I was a vampire, and all sorts of bad shit tended to happen around me, I often fobbed him off on my poor mother. The good news was, she’d had to baby-sit so often she was actually getting attached to the kid. “This is gonna be so lame … hey, thanks for watching our baby yet again, and by the way, you can’t drop him off because now there’s a zombie in the house and we’re not sure he can be trusted, here’s more money for diapers. Ugh.”

  “The alternative is even less pleasant.”

  “Dammit!”

  We stared at the ceiling some more. “At least Laura called me right back.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah. But she wants to meet at this farm outside the Cities, God knows why.” My husband flinched at the G word, and I muttered an apology. To all vampires except me, the G word was like the lash of a whip, or a summons to traffic court: unbearably painful. “She said she’s got stuff to show me and she wanted to meet on neutral territory. So some farm on the outskirts of Mendota Heights qualifies, I guess.”

  “I shall accompany you.”

  “Figured as much.”

  We examined the ceiling in silence for a few seconds, broken by Sinclair’s hopeful “Perhaps, to take our mind off the problem, we could—”

  “Uh, no. It’s just too weird. I won’t be able to not hear him while we’re—nope. Sorry.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  Stupid Thanksgiving.

  FIFTEEN

  “It’s here, okay? Turn left here, that’s what her directions say.”

  “Her directions do not say anything; they read.”

  “Oh, you’re channeling Alec Baldwin in Malice now?”

  “I do not know what that means.”

  “Means you’re being a jerk.”

  “Is that more or less desirable than being a bitch?”

  “God God God God God God God.”

  “Stop that at once!” My husband shuddered all over and we nearly went into a ditch. Served him right for taking the Volkswagen. He had a garage full of really cool cars and he picked the Jetta? The romance was dead. “Really, Elizabeth. That is beneath you.”

  “Ha! Shows what you know. There’s not much that’s beneath me.” Wait. Did I just insult myself?

  “Indeed,” he muttered, finally turning left. We were in the boonies somewhere south of Mendota Heights, and the farm my sister wanted to meet us at looked deserted.

  And it wasn’t much of a farm, either. There were no barns, no outbuildings of any kind except a big cream-colored garage, no livestock, no hay sheds, no corn cribs, no bores (except the one I was married to—hee!). Just a garage, a driveway, a short sidewalk leading to the house, and the house: two stories, cream siding with dark blue shutters. The place was dark except for what I assumed was the living room.

  “Why’d Laura want to meet us here?”

  “I dare not guess.”

  “Well, dare not to park crooked again, too.”

  “I have never once parked ‘crooked.’”

  “Except for last week.”

  “I was following the lines! That was a forty-five-degree parking spot!”

  “Crooked. Very, very crooked is what it was, Sink Lair, crooked beyond belief, as crooked as your dark, dark heart, and you just can’t admit it, can you, how crooked it was?”

  “Darling, do shut up.” I could actually see his teeth in a snarl as he stomped on the brake and jerked the parking brake so hard I heard the metal groan.

  “We should probably have sex pretty soon.”

  “Agreed. Just not with each other.” He flung himself out of the car and slammed the door so hard, the entire Jetta rocked.

  “Oh, real mature!” I shouted at his back. I considered sticking my tongue out at him, then figured one of us ought to act like a grown-up. Proof! Proof things had gone from bad to terrible: when I was the one trying to set the example of adult behavior.

  Marc being a zombie was ruining my life. Also my sex life. I unbuckled my seat belt (old habits died, etc.) and followed my bitchy husband up the driveway. “This isn’t a farm, this is just a house and a big smelly garage out in the country,” I whined. “With dogs … I can hear yelping. Gross. Stupid farm dogs.”

  “Perhaps the Antichrist does not understand what a farm is.”

  “Oh, that makes a lot of sense,” I snapped. “She might be the AC, but she grew up on Planet Earth just like you and me. She grew up in Minnesota! Gah, all I can smell is poop.”

  Sink Lair muttered something I couldn’t quite catch … luckily for him.

  “Her car is here,” he said, eyeing the modest black Ford Fusion. “And there’s a light on in the house.”

  “Great job, Nancy Drew!”

  He ignored me. “Curious … why such a large garage for such a small house?”

  “Yeah, that’s the question that’s burning me up inside, too … come on, we don’t want to be late.”

  He was standing stock-still, sniffing like … well, like Antonia did when she was scoping out Zombie Marc.

  “Are you going to stand in the yard all damn night?” I could hear how shrill and bitchy I was, but couldn’t seem to stop. Who would have thought that not banging my husband would be so bad for our sex life? “Laura’s waiting, and we’ve got mysteries to solve and bad shit to stop, so c’mon already.”

  “Ah,” he said, then flipped the latch on the garage door and slid it ope
n. The smell of poop got much worse, much quicker.

  “Wait!” I cried.

  “See?” he said with the first happy smile I’d seen all night. He gestured and—what the?—bowed a little.

  “Don’t!” Seconds too late, I figured it out. “Sinclair, you crumb! It’s not a farm farm, it’s a puppy farm, do not open that door any—”

  Too late.

  SIXTEEN

  What sounded and smelled like a hundred black Lab puppies swarmed over me, barking shrill puppy barks and licking everything they could reach and suffocating me with their foul puppy breath.

  My cardigan! My Etienne Aigners! If one of those mangy little monsters so much as thought about taking a chomp on my shoes … oooh, just picturing it made me feel like I was going insane.

  And Sinclair had made this happen. The betrayal! He really screwed me after he didn’t screw me, the treacherous bastard.

  “Get them off. Get them off! Argh, it feels like they’re crawling all over me! Is this what withdrawal is like? Oh, those poor drug addicts! Why are you just standing there, you rat bastard? Help!”

  While I writhed in a sea of puppies, the king of the vampires fell to his knees. His sinister plan had worked beautifully, and he was so delighted he gave in completely. For a guy who prided himself on keeping things under control, he was letting loose an awful lot this week.

  “Stop it! You bum! Ack, get away…”

  He’d collapsed to his knees and was holding his stomach while bellowing laughter. Every time he tried to get up and help me, he fell back down again. This only increased my puppy-induced fury.

  A velvety black ear slipped into my mouth, probably because I was screeching threats at my husband, the puppies, the stars, the Antichrist for picking such a dreadful meeting place, and any bugs or telemarketers in the vicinity. I puffed it back out with a breath and struggled to sit up. Did I … was that? It was! My left shin was warm and wet. “Oh, Goddammit! That’s it. Gloves off. I’m gonna pull a Cruella de Vil and skin each of you. Starting with you!” I told Sinclair, and he finally stopped laughing.