Undead and Unwelcome Read online

  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.

  Chapter 9

  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 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 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.

&
nbsp; 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.

  Chapter 10

  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, 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 lurking in the back were lime, juniper, peppercorn, espresso, fennel, mint, garlic, cherry, sun-dried tomato, mustard seed, apple, and horseradish.

  Dude, I am not making this up, or exaggerating for humorous effect. In a household of oddities and the undead, Tina was everywhere and nowhere. She excelled at going unnoticed and she could pull that off anywhere in the world . . . except our kitchen freezer. Vodka was her vice; the more obscure the flavor, the more she had to try it. She drank it neat, using a succession of antique shot glasses, which were always kept chilled.

  Tina had offered to make me a drink once. I had accepted. Once.

  I did not have time to swing by Cub on the way to work and would be too tired after my shift; time to order pizza again. Green Mill was practically on my speed dial.

  Sighing, I swung the freezer shut and my senses, instantly overwhelmed by someone they hadn’t smelled, seen, or heard, but who was all of a sudden right there, went into overdrive. My adrenal gland dumped a gallon of F.O.F. into my system (what my interns called Fight or Flight juice) and for a long minute I thought my heart was going to just quit from the shock.

  She greeted me with “I am out of cinnamon vodka,” then grabbed my shoulder and prevented me from braining myself on the metal handle as I flinched hard enough to be mistaken for an epileptic.

  “Tina,” I groaned, yanking my hand out of her chilly grasp, “that’s the second time today. I’m putting a bell around your neck. Or sewing one into your scalp, I swear to—” No, don’t swear to God; just hearing the G word was like a whiplash to a vampire, the movies had gotten some things right. “I swear,” I finished.

  Tina looked mildly distressed. Most of her expressions were mild versions of what humanity could come up with. What would put you or me in a killing rage would cause her to raise one eyebrow and frown. Frown sternly, but still.

  The smooth efficiency and profound, almost unshakable calm were at odds with her appearance. Tina looked like an escapee from Delta Nu, the sorority Reese Witherspoon’s character made famous in Legally Blonde. (Great movie, dude. “All those opposed to chafing, please say aye.”)

  Tina had long, honey blond hair—past her shoulders in rippling waves—and big, dark eyes, what Tina called pansy eyes. Not only did Tina look too young to vote, she would probably get carded if she tried to buy cigarettes. And she dressed to play up her appearance in a never-ending variety of kicky plaid skirts, white button-downs, anklets, everything but a backpack full of high school textbooks. She looked like a walking, talking felony. One far older and smarter than any would-be college boy who might try out a little date rape.

  Also, she was about as noisy as an unplugged television. If you don’t believe that, dude, you couldn’t feel my heart just now.

  “I apologize, Marc. I honestly don’t mean to frighten you.” This was true, and scary in its own way—I hated to think what she could do to my nervous system if she really put some thought into it. “We’re just two peas rattling around in a can ’round here, aren’t we?”

  She laughed a little and I noticed she had slipped again. Most of the time, Tina had the smooth, accent-free tones of a weather reporter. But occasionally a Southern accent would creep in. I loved it when that happened because she seemed less a smooth-voiced butler and more like a walking, talking, feeling person.

  Don’t misunderstand; I have no problem with the undead, although I was dying to learn all I could and trying to work up the nerve to ask Betsy if I could autopsy the next Big Bad she would inadvertently kill with a heretofore unknown superpower. Nope; no real problem with them, I just thought they should get back to their roots a bit more often.

  Besides, Tina made me nervous.

  And she knew she made me nervous. This was nothing I could d
iscuss with Betsy, of course . . . my feelings were too vague and unformed and frankly, my best gal wasn’t what I would ever call a deep thinker. As Susan Sarandon said in the greatest movie in the history of cinema, Bull Durham, “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.” The world was made, in other words, for people like Betsy.

  She had no time for “Hmm, Tina’s a quiet one, huh? Perhaps we should ponder what that signifies,” particularly during the fall when she had to update her collection of winter footgear. But it was there and I couldn’t deny it: Tina gave me the creeps.

  I knew she had been born the year the Civil War had begun.

  I knew she had been a vampire long before Sinclair.

  I knew she had made Sinclair, had remained by his side all the years since then, and was his capable assistant.

  And that was all I knew about her. And I only knew those things because Betsy had told me. In other words, that was all Betsy knew about her, too. And she was the queen, for the love of . . .

  Dude, there are all sorts of etiquette rules for living with vampires. There had to be; there was etiquette for everything. But it was hard to come up with a tactful way to ask, “So, how’d you get murdered, anyway?” And that was only one of the things I would love to learn.

  All this went through my head in about eleven seconds. Meanwhile, Tina was still lurking—well, standing—by the fridge.

  “Will you have a drink with me?” She opened the freezer and reached for the first row of bottles. I saw she had extracted mustard seed-flavored vodka and, thanks to years of seeing man’s inhumanity to man via the emergency room, I manfully concealed my shudder.

  “I have to get to work,” I said glumly.

  Curious, I waited a beat, but Tina did exactly what I anticipated. “Oh, that’s too bad, Marc. A pity you won’t have time to shop first.”

  Dude, if I had been Sinclair or Betsy, her answer would have been something like, “Oh most wondrous undead monarch, please give me, your humblest, lamest, most slovenly servant, your grocery list and I shall fill your fridge with any produce, meat by-products, Little Debbie snack cakes, and dairy products you desire and also pick up your dry cleaning on my way home, unless you would prefer I simply run out to KFC for some original recipe chicken.”