Undead and Unwelcome (5 page)

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) ankle biters, nose miners, whatever. But he wouldn’t look at BabyJon. And that was very

strange. So strange it was starting to make me nervous. “I hope the baby isn’t bothering

you,” I said, to which Michael had no reply. Now he was locking gazes with Derik. It was

like he hadn’t even heard me—which was bullshit, given what I knew about werewolf

hearing. Why ignore an infant? To what purpose? And why was it making me so nervous?

I was rocking BabyJon’s seat with my toe as he slept, trying to get a handle on my

feelings. Hey, it wasn’t like I had to worry about bad breath at the moment. Quite the

opposite, in fact. And sure, this was a stressful scene, but they had all seemed nice enough

when I’d met them earlier. After all, we could have gotten a much nastier reception. Much

nastier. But nobody had so much as waved a crucifix in our direction. No one had

attacked us yet, to be sure. So why was I practically shaking? Sinclair was frowning at me

picking up my nervousness, but not the cause. All I could do was lift my left shoulder in a

tiny shrug, the international “tell you later” gesture. Besides, I had other things to focus

on. Derik, for instance. He’d been so different when he’d come to the mansion looking for

Antonia a couple months back. Friendly and charming and funny and sooo cute . . . though

I usually didn’t go for blonds. In fact, the only time he’d gotten upset was when he

followed me to BabyJon’s nursery and—and— I could almost hear the
click
as the reason

behind my sudden nervousness clunked home: Derik kept giving BabyJon a wide berth,

and Michael didn’t even seem to
see
him. Which was impossible; you couldn’t hide a

twenty-pound infant surrounded by a pastel car seat, not when it was right out on the floor

and smelling like formula and stale powder. Now that I thought about it, Jeannie was the

only one who had acknowledged BabyJon; she had stroked his feathery black hair once we

had him buckled in the limo, and complimented me on his good looks. I wasn’t sure if I

could take the credit for those or not, so I’d just nodded. But Derik . . . Derik had

followed me to the nursery once, taken one look at the baby, and nearly broken his neck

on the stairs while trying to achieve distance. There was so much other shit going on at

the time, I’d completely forgotten about it until now. I dared not forget again . . .

something was wrong with this baby. Or with any werewolf who came in contact with

him. And I didn’t like that. At all. Now Derik
and
Jeannie were pacing behind us, which

was just as nerve-wracking as it sounds. But whenever Derik got near BabyJon, he would

veer off. And Michael, as I said, couldn’t see him at all. And
they weren’t even aware of it.

Derik could have been avoiding a mud puddle for all the emotion he showed, and Michael,

who could and did hold everyone’s gaze in the way only an alpha Werewolf could, wasn’t

looking at BabyJon. All of a sudden, I had a brand-new problem dumped in my lap. Just

what I needed. I’d have rather had a new pair of Prada pumps dumped on me.

Why did I seize so quickly on the possibility that BabyJon was special? Well, consider our

sister, Laura, who was still back in Minnesota but still very much in my thoughts as I

whispered super-minty breath across the mahogany expanse that separated me from the

alpha male of Antonia’s werewolf Pack. Laura, an impossibly beautiful, naïve, and sweet

blonde, was raised by a minister and his wife, which partially explained why she was

currently a tireless worker for charities, as well as a cheerful and frequent Goodwill

volunteer. Laura worked in soup kitchens and went to church on Sundays. She stuck

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) twenty-dollar bills into red Salvation Army buckets at Christmastime (and Laura was far

from rich; her folks made less in one year than Sinclair made in a month). In February she

had literally given the shirt (well, the coat) off her back to someone down on her luck.

Sickening? Okay. Yes. A little. But still, it all made perfect sense. How else could

someone rebel against their parent? Laura fought back by being sweet and kind. Mostly

sweet. Although she had a spectacular temper. Also, her birth mother (not the minister’s

wife) was the devil. Yes. The devil. As in Satan. As in Lucifer. As in a woman who looked

weirdly like Lena Olin, except with better footgear. Either Satanic influence or Lena Olin’s

terrific fashion sense had endowed Laura with supernatural abilities—of course! She was

half angel, right? Lucifer’s lineage hadn’t changed when he/she was tossed out of heaven.

And I was beginning to suspect BabyJon had powers, too. Not that we could confirm this

by asking Lena-Satan—after possessing the birth mother long enough to experience

breast-feeding and stretch marks, she had fled for the easier comforts of hell. The minister

and his wife who adopted Laura had been the best thing to happen to her, and kept her

diabolic lineage in check.
So who will keep,
I wondered,
my half brother in check, if he

inherits anything unusual? Me?
It was the only thing that made sense in an increasingly

complicated family history. (I have a point. I promise.) Okay, I can see how some of

this—most of this—could be confusing. Shit, it’s my
life
and even I get mixed up

sometimes. So. The Cliffs Notes version: the devil possessed my stepmother, the Ant,

because she wanted to try the whole giving birth and raising a kid thing. My stepmother,

the late Antonia Taylor (I know, I know . . .
two
Antonias? Both dead? What were the

odds on something like that?) was so unrelievedly nasty, no one had any idea she was

possessed. Think about that for a minute. My stepmother was so horrible and nasty on a

daily basis that
no one noticed
when she was possessed by the devil for almost a year. I

know! It boggles my mind, too. Anyway, the devil had hated labor and delivery, not to

mention breast-feeding and stretch marks, and fled my stepmother’s body to get the hell

back to hell. When my stepmother realized that someone else had been running her body

for
almost a year
(remember: nobody even noticed!), she promptly gave the baby up for

adoption. And didn’t tell my father about it. Hey, the couple that lies together (no pun

intended) stays together. Or however that saying went. Only the Ant knew my dad had

fathered Laura, which is why she and I didn’t meet until two decades later. My late father,

who I’d always though of as a colorless coward, had fathered the Beloved of the

Morningstar (in other words, the Antichrist) and a vampire queen. God help us if it turned

out I had another half brother lurking out in the world somewhere; maybe he was the

reincarnation of Attila the Hun. Maybe I should have talked Dad into having some of his

sperm frozen. Yuck. Time to get off the subject of my father’s sperm. Anyway, back to

BabyJon. Now I was wondering—maybe it was silly . . . vampire queen or no, this stuff

really wasn’t my field—maybe my stepmother’s body had retained some leftover magic

from her days of possession. And maybe that had had a profound effect on her late-in-life

baby. Shoot, the poor kid had been conceived purely out of spite. The Ant had not liked it

at all when her spoiled bimbo stepdaughter returned from the dead, and tried to pull her

husband’s attention back to his second family with the age-old trick: she’d gotten pregnant

to jazz up her marriage. Michael was still talking. Jeannie and Derik were still pacing.

Sinclair’s face was serene and composed, but he kept glancing at me and I knew
he
knew I

wasn’t paying attention. Well, who could right now? Besides, Sinclair would give me the

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) scoop on anything I needed to know when we were alone. Meanwhile I, the Daphne of the

Undead, had a mystery to solve. I carefully nudged the car seat with the toe of my left

shoe, forcing it farther away from the desk and toward the middle of the floor. Again,

Derik veered. He didn’t look down. He didn’t frown at the baby, or at me. He just kept

giving the sleeping BabyJon a wide berth. And it looked like Jeannie hadn’t noticed the

phenomenon, which didn’t surprise me. She’d just lost a family member; her mind was

definitely on other things.
Hmmmm.
“—know when the service will be,” Michael was

saying. I was instantly diverted.
Ah ha!
Now we would find out the secret of werewolf

funeral rituals. Did they burn the body on a pyre? Loft it into the ocean? Cremate it and

scatter the ashes over sacred moss? Bury her while in wolf form with some yowling ritual

under the yellow glow of a full moon? Preserve her in spice-soaked cocoon wrappings

underground, like mummies? Everyone was staring at me, and I would have died if I

hadn’t already. I hate when I think I’m
thinking
something only to find out I’ve been

saying it out loud. “Pyres?” Michael asked. “Yowling ritual?” “Oh, fuck me twice,” Derik

said, throwing his hands in the air. “Did you really think we were going to bury Antonia in

the woods like she was a dog treat?” “Well, how’m I supposed to know what you’re

going to do?” I snapped back as I leaned over and pulled BabyJon’s car seat closer.

“That’s why we’re
here
. To do things
your
way. Ow!” Sinclair had kicked me none too

gently in the ankle. I glared at him, then returned my attention to Derik. “Sorry. Muscle

spasm.” “Mummies,” Derik was muttering. “Funeral pyres.
Burial at sea?
Antonia was

Presbyterian, mo rons.”
How anticlimactic.
“You may call me whatever you wish,” my

husband was saying in a voice more smoke than sound. “But do not insult my wife and

queen.” “Well, which is it?” Jeannie asked. I heard the clinking rattle of more ice as she

filled her glass with something. Her tone was okay; she didn’t sound mean or anything.

Sort of half-teasing/half-curious. “Are you here wearing your wife hat or your queen hat?”

Huh. Hope they had a few hours to kill, because it was a long story.

Dear Future-Self Dude,
Fifteen minutes ago I nearly experienced the heartbreak of fecal

incontinence. I was in the kitchen, staring glumly at the near-bare refrigerator shelves

and wondering if I had time to swing by Cub Foods before my shift started.
Living with

vampires and the Antichrist isn’t the constant fun and games you must imagine. To begin,

I don’t technically live with Laura; she’s a student at the U of M and has a place of her

own in Dinkytown (That’s what we called the small batch of apartment buildings and

restaurants near the U of M. After I gave this some thought, it made perfect sense that

the Antichrist lived in Dinkytown. She was probably right down the block from a

Cinnabon chain, too. As Jim Gaffigan said, “Tell me that place isn’t run by Satan.”).

Anyway, Laura has her own place and I imagine she eats most of her meals there. And

since she’s alive, she buys food. Which she keeps in her fridge.
Our fridge, nearly big

enough to use in a restaurant, is not so lucky. Today its contents revealed four bottles of

Diet Peach Snapple (as a doctor, I never touched Diet anything . . . why not just drink

gasoline and be done with it?), a carton of strawberries (which, as they were not in

season, tasted like tiny, fuzzy raw potatoes), two pints of cream, half a box of Godiva

truffles (I knew, without looking, that Betsy had already scored the raspberry ones,

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pureeing them with milk in one of the six blenders), an open box of baking soda that was

not doing its job to defunk the fridge, fourteen bottles of water, a near-empty bottle of

Thousand Island dressing, a cellophane-wrapped chunk of parmesan cheese so hard it

could be used successfully as a blunt instrument, an unopened jar of lemon curd

(whatever the hell
that
was), two cans of Diet Coke (Jessica was addicted to it; why is it

that the chronically underweight were drawn to drink diet soda? And am I the only one to

notice someone who drank seven cans a day ended up with cancer?), and something foul

lurking beneath the tin foil on a paper plate . . . I just wasn’t up to exploring (I didn’t

even know we had paper plates), so I let it be.
This is what comes of living with vampires

and a woman who seemed to consume nothing but salads and Diet Coke. Unlike the

community fridge, the freezer was full, but still weird. It fairly bulged with bottles of a

vodka brand I’d never heard of—Zyr—in various flavors. The flavors were alphabetized.

The bottles were perfectly lined up; they were like cloudy glass soldiers at attention.
As

these were typical contents of the mansion’s kitchen freezer, I knew some of the flavors