Authors: MaryJanice Davidson
Undead and Unwary (2 page)
“Dee, are you seriously bragging about sleeping with a married man?”
“I’m not the one who’s married. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You let him buy you a car.”
“Well, Frank, I’m not going to go passing on free cars.”
—FRANK AND DEE,
IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA
“I was visiting Carol in Las Vegas and there was . . . a performance issue.”
“I’m Reaganing, Lemon. Let me solve this.”
“It’s not him, it’s me. I’m the one with the performance problem.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I freaked out and my junk closed. It’s like Fort Knox down there.”
—LIZ AND JACK,
30 ROCK
“My father loves this car more than life itself!”
“A man with priorities so far out of whack doesn’t deserve such a fine automobile.”
—CAMERON AND FERRIS,
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF
“Blood and gore all over the floor / And me without a spoon.”
—OLIVER SPURGEON ENGLISH,
FATHERS ARE PARENTS, TOO: A CONSTRUCTIVE GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL FATHERHOOD
“Okay, gross.”
—ELIZABETH “BETSY” TAYLOR, QUEEN OF THE VAMPIRES
CHAPTER
ONE
You know how you see someone you love stuck with a job they don’t know how to do? Or maybe they do know how, but they don’t like it, maybe even hate it? And you watch them struggle with a kind of dread because you know if they can’t pull it together you’ll end up offering to help them, even if the job’s over
your
head? Even if you know you’ll probably suck at it but you can’t just leave
your loved one stuck with something awful? Even though you’re pretty sure it might devour your lives?
Yeah, that’s how I ended up working at Walmart the summer my friend Jess and I were eighteen, which was just so stupid. Among other things, neither of us needed the money, and also, Walmart is evil. I knew that long before I became a creature of the darkness. But that’s a whole other story and we come off pretty drunk in it.
Also, it’s why I’m cobitch in charge of Hell.
I’m just too nice, dammit. It’s one of my biggest character flaws.
Fortunately I’ve been able to avoid my cobitch responsibilities for a couple of months now, and I had my brother/son’s—the vampire king’s—new churchgoing activities (he’s on the Historical Preservation Committee and running the cookie exchange, which—I can’t even), my dead dad, the never-ending quest to housebreak Fur and Burr, and the entire household being a slave to Thing One and Thing Two to thank for it. (Off topic, lately I’ve realized we are dangerously close to being outnumbered by babies. Which just . . . yikes.)
All this to say it’s pretty chaotic around here. Our normal is other people’s chaos. Actually, it’s other people’s fever dreams. I was legitimately busy. Which I told myself as often as I could. It’s not like I just lolled around the mansion, talking my sexy husband into role-playing Scarlett and Rhett having passionate, pre-rape foreplay on our sweeping huge staircase. I
loved
scooping him into my arms and darting up those stairs only to ravish him in our bedroom and talk about how, frankly, my Sinclair, I don’t give a damn.
Lots to do, no time to hang around Hell. Except Hell had shown up in the form of my sister, Laura. Half sister, technically; we had the same dad, but Laura’s mom was Satan, making my little sister the Antichrist. Or the Anti-Antichrist, I guess, since she used to rebel against the devil by being good. Because how else would you do it? How can you outdevil the devil? It’d be like trying to outvapid any one of the Kardashians: no matter how determined and driven you are, no matter how much time you devote to what you suspect is the impossible, it cannot be done.
And I had to give my little sis props: Laura never once tried outdeviling the devil. Instead, she was (and is) a fixture at various local soup kitchens, food banks, church banquets, shelters, and the occasional Democratic fund-raiser.
Plus, there was no need for passive-aggressive maternal rebellion anymore, because I killed Satan (crazy week—don’t get me started). If nothing else, there was no point in rebelling against the devil when you
were
the devil.
Anyhoo, Laura was here, she wasn’t queer, and I’d better get used to it. Or however that was supposed to go.
“Share,” she said again, tapping her Payless-shod foot on the faded peach-colored carpet. Black flat, rounded toe, made of some horrific plastic/pleather hybrid; I reminded myself that it wasn’t nice to tackle the Antichrist for the purpose of confiscating her shoes and then blowing them up.
Mind you, this was a woman who could literally travel through space and time using only the force of her will, a woman who, it was foretold, would take over the world, and she can’t bring herself to wear footgear that isn’t wretched.
Also, round-toed shoes have creeped me out ever since I read Roald Dahl’s book
The Witches
. The way Mr. Dahl tells it, witches
have
to wear round-toed shoes because . . . they have no toes! Their feet just
stop
at the end of the . . . whatever the bones are just before the toe bones start, that’s where their feet
stop
. They just
stop
! Even thinking about it summons my vomit reflex. “We agreed. Sharing, remember?”
Eh? Oh, right. I shook off my case of the creeps and tried to focus. Running Hell.
Sharing
running Hell. Which was an unfortunate word choice, since I had been an only child for most of my life (my half sister/work buddy/occasional nemesis didn’t pop up on my radar until I hit thirty—an age I’ll be for centuries, so it’s a good thing I never got that tattoo), so “sharing” wasn’t something I’d had much practice with.
“We agreed,” she continued, being as dogged as I was when I tried to talk her into some decent shoes, “we’d run Hell together.”
Agreed? Run it together? Hmm. Didn’t sound like me. I tended to avoid work, not blithely agree to it. Unless I was trying to get back on someone’s good side. Which, given that I’d killed my sister’s mom, was something I would have had to do. Dammit. I probably
did
agree to share. The things we do in moments of weakness: recycling in a desperate attempt to save the earth, obsessively updating Amazon wish lists, agreeing to run Hell with the Antichrist.
“We agreed”—ah, cripes, she was
still
going on about this—“it was the least you could do after murdering my mother.”
That irked me, but not for the reason you’d think, which is why many people are (rightly) convinced I’m a bad person. “First off, the least I could do is nothing.” Huge
pet peeve of mine, along with people using
amongst
and
towards
and
synergy
, and people mailing Christmas letters instead of cards. And I’m saying that as someone who used to do the letter thing; I actually thought people were genuinely interested in the promotions I didn’t get, the shoes I did, the guys I didn’t marry, the babies I didn’t have. But even my puffy vanity couldn’t keep convincing me people wanted an envelope full of Who Cares, I’ve Got My Own Problems for Christmas, so now I don’t send anything.
Ironic, because I actually have cool (cool = weird/terrifying) stuff to write about now.
Well, we picked out our tree—had to go at night, obviously, and then helped ourselves to half a pint of B neg from a would-be Christmas tree thief. BabyJon is learning to walk, his parents are still dead, and I killed the devil. Happy holidays from all of us at Vamp Central! In lieu of gifts, donate blood. Because the Red Cross shouldn’t be able to hog it all, dammit.
“Okay?” I needled. “‘The least I can do,’ by definition, is nothing. Ergo the word
least
. Ergo the word
ergo
.”
“Which you’ve been doing! All across the board, nothing but nothing.”
“All right, fair point. It’s just I hate when people say ‘the least I could do’ without acknowledging—”
“Stop talking. Right now.”
“—that the least I could do
is
nothing.”
“It was really naïve of me to hope you’d stay on track for this.”
“You bet it was. Also, if the shoe fits.”
“That makes
no
sense.”
“And while we’re on the subject of shoes—”
“We aren’t!”
“—those things on your feet could make it through a nuclear winter, which, believe it or not, is not a selling point. That plastic/pleather doesn’t
look like it would ever break down. Cockroaches and those shoes, that’s all that would remain on the poor scorched earth.” The thought was so sad, I had to shake my head. “Also, killing someone in self-defense isn’t murder. Right, Dickie-Bird?” It was handy to have a cop in residence, and this wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought. “Not murder?”
“Justified homicide, yes, it
is.
Yes, it
is
.” Detective Nicholas Berry, one of my several thousand roommates, was perched on the peach-colored love seat as he cradled Thing One and cooed to him. We were surrounded by peach, which is why our nickname for the peach-colored parlor was Peach Parlor.
(Sometimes we had no imagination. Of any kind. Peach Parlor, my God.)
It was at the front of the mansion, just off the entryway, and we usually used it to entertain welcome guests and occasionally corner uninvited guests. But Dick and his full-time sweetie, Jessica, had taken into their heads that the color peach soothed their weird babies, and if it was true, those babies were probably going to be the most relaxed and laid-back on the planet because
everything
. . . couch, wallpaper, love seat, overstuffed chairs . . . peach. One hundred percent peach. All peach, all the time. We’re having a special in the Peach Parlor, and the special is peach.
Meanwhile, the Thing That Sired Lovers of Peach was still cooing at his baby. “Not a jury in the world, no, there isn’t, not a jury in the world and oooh! Look, she’s yawning. Come see, you guys.”
Damn . . . that was Thing Two, then. Dick had knocked up my bestie (which Jessica loves to pronounce “beastie” and which, since she is as sleep deprived as a POW, I let slide) with twins and even though they were fraternal, they looked identical to me. Except for the boy having a penis and the girl not, I mean. They were pale, like Not-Nick, with Jessica’s not-pale features. Same dark eyes (their besotted parents claimed the babies had big pretty eyes but whenever I looked, said eyes were squinched up in a yawn or a yowl or in sleep . . . they could be cross-eyed for all I’d been able to see), same teeny nose, same pointy chin, same weirdly gangly limbs. Yes, I will be the one to make that particular announcement: Thing One and Thing Two were pretty hideous.
“Guys? C’mere, loooook!”
Laura, still standing in her patented “arms akimbo in judgment” pose in the parlor doorway, didn’t move. I didn’t, either. “I’m not crossing the room to watch your kid do something she does at least five dozen times a day.” Yeah, Not-Nick and Jessica were doing that annoying thing parents did, to wit: come see my ordinary kid do ordinary stuff that we totally think is the opposite of ordinary and we’re sure you’ll agree, rinse, repeat. Repeat × 1,000.
Pass.
“You know how I know I need to get more sleep?” he asked and, since I was pretty sure it was rhetorical, I didn’t reply. Which worked out fine, because after a pause he kept going. “I couldn’t find the babies last night. Jess was asleep, and the babies were asleep, and you guys were out hunting, and I went to look in on them and for a few seconds . . .” The exhausted, slightly dazed smile fell off his face and I saw with a start that he was afraid. Not “what if they don’t get into a good college?” afraid but “I didn’t know what to do and was scared” afraid. “I couldn’t find them. I knew they were in the room—where else would they have been?—but they weren’t there. At least, it seemed like they weren’t. Gave me a hell of a start.”
“You’re right,” I decided. “You need more sleep. Your lazy babies are hogging it all.”
“I don’t think sleep works like that,” he said through a yawn.
Laura was now gazing thoughtfully down at father and daughter. “Maybe we shouldn’t discuss this in front of the baby.”
