Undead and Unwelcome Read online

  Alas, it was not to be: not only was I alive and well, I was neither the vampire queen nor the vampire king. Tina was their willing and untiring slave, not mine.

  Still, we were roommates. You would think that would lead to some kind of bond. The Sacred Roommate Bond. Would it kill her to bring home a gallon of milk once in a while?

  Chapter 11

  The words wife or queen seemed almost to hang in the air over our heads. I had the sense that they weren’t asking these questions out of idle curiosity, or to be polite. No, no. Michael was a predator, of course, as Antonia had been, which meant he was constantly on the lookout for weakness. He couldn’t help it. Probably he didn’t even know he was doing it.

  Wife or queen? A question I had asked myself on more than one occasion. Sinclair was bigger, stronger, faster. Older. Richer. Better educated. More even-tempered, more in control. Frankly, there were times—lots of times—when I wished I could just be the wife, and leave the whole vamp royalty thing to him.

  But I could do things no other vampire on the planet could. Seemed dumb not to take advantage of that, or at least acknowledge it. So we existed in an interesting state of love and respect.

  Well, occasional respect, when I wasn’t giving him a Wet Willy or poking him in his flat belly when we showered together—the man wasn’t ticklish! Talk about an unnatural creature.

  He’d bowed to my authority on more than one occasion, too—usually just before I started hurling heavy objects at his head to emphasize whatever point I was making. You want to see something funny? Eric Sinclair, following one of my orders. Believe me, it didn’t happen all that often. Whenever it did, he always had an odd expression on his face: part admiration, part annoyance.

  Now where the hell was I? Dammit! It was three A.M., I was tired out from being on edge all night, and was having more trouble than usual following the conversation, which had veered from funeral rights to religion to atheist vampires to my title.

  “Funny thing for you to ask, Jeannie,” I finally said. I guess it wasn’t exactly unheard of for a werewolf to marry a—you know, a regular person. But it was rare enough so that the two of them caused a stir now and again—I’d gotten that much from Antonia, and that only after she’d been living with us for a while.

  Get this: not only was it rare for werewolves to marry boring old humans, it was considered super-lucky for the Pack, and the offspring were usually exceptional Pack members. For example, Antonia—

  But I wasn’t ready to go there again. Call me a chickenshit coward; that’s fine. I just couldn’t do it again right now.

  “Mmm.” Jeannie grinned, but didn’t rise to the bait, just shrugged. “Good point.”

  I cleared my throat, because I was having trouble swallowing the whole—the whole mundaneness of the thing. Mundaneness? Mundanity? “So there are Presbyterian werewolves, and Catholic ones, and Lutherans—”

  “And Buddhists and atheists and Hindus,” Derik added.

  “Will you please stop that pacing and sit the fuck down? Ow!” I yanked my poor sore ankle out of reach of Sinclair’s foot. “You look like a cheetah on crack.”

  “Back off, blondie,” Derik snapped back and, if anything, sped up the pacing.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t draw your own conclusion,” Michael said loudly, clearly trying to distract us. I think he was clearly trying. It was hard to know what the guy was up to. “Because clearly, all vampires are Christians.”

  “No,” Sinclair said.

  No? What, no? How did we get off the topic of werewolf retribution for Antonia and on to religion? I got enough of the “let’s all pray to Jesus meek and mild” stuff I needed from Laura.

  “No?”

  “No. We, too, have Muslims and Catholics and pagans. We, too, have—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jeannie interrupted. “That makes no sense at all.”

  “We do not go about our lives with the objective of making sense to strangers,” my husband said with terrifying pleasantness.

  “Fuck.” Derik, thank God, had grabbed a chair, dragged it over, turned it so it was facing backward, and sat. His blond hair fell into his eyes and he shook it out of his face with a quick, impatient movement. “Why would a cross work on an atheist vampire?”

  Sinclair and I traded a glance. Jessica, I noticed, was all ears as well—she’d been so quiet I’d almost forgotten she was in the room.

  “Or someone Jewish?” Derik continued.

  Because vampirism was a virus. A virus that was very hard to catch, and even harder to pass on. This was Marc’s theory, backed up by Tina and Sinclair—again, not all of a sudden. After months and months and months. Tina and Sinclair couldn’t be much more tight-mouthed if someone sewed their lips shut with ultralite fishing line.

  Vampirism, as a virus, slowed your metabolism waaaaay down, but didn’t stop it. Good points: you no longer sweated, or peed. Aging seemed to stop altogether. You were faster, stronger. Heightened senses. Blah-blah.

  Bad points: vampires were highly susceptible to suggestion. (All of them—modest cough—except me.) Tina, my husband’s right-hand woman (she had been the one to turn him into a vampire in the early part of the twentieth century . . . yup, I was in love and regularly boinking a man old enough to be my grandfather), had eventually advanced this theory with Marc.

  Marc went into MD mode and had tentatively concurred (on the grounds that he could change his mind if further proof emerged) that yes, it was a virus, and yes, a Jewish vampire would cringe away from a cross. Because we all know that’s what vampires do. They are vampires; ergo, crosses and holy water can hurt them.

  I know, sounds stupid, right? Give it a minute. If you catch a disease that makes you highly suggestible, and you have the weight of a zillion horror movies telling you holy water burns . . . then holy water burns.

  But we were getting off the point.

  And it was driving me so nuts, I was practically biting the tip of my tongue off so I wouldn’t point out that Derik had made the same silly assumptions about vampires that we had about werewolves. After calling us morons.

  “—explain what happened?”

  Eh? Aw, shit. Michael was looking right at me. I jerked my foot away in time and Sinclair’s Kenneth Cole-shod shoe clunked into the back of Michael’s desk.

  “Explain what happened?” I repeated with what I hoped was an intelligent question on my face.

  “Yes, to the Council.”

  Council? What council? That didn’t sound good at all. Nobody had said anything about a council—I think. Damn. I really should be paying attention to the goings-on in my life. “Can’t you tell them what happened? You’re the boss around here.”

  “No.” Click. Closed. End of argument. I knew that tone—I’d heard it in my husband’s voice often enough—to know when it was no good to protest. “We’ll be meeting on the grounds just after sunset tomorrow. I’ll need all of your testimonies, so do not send one representative to speak for the group.

  “Then what?” I asked nervously.

  He just looked at me, almost like he was sorry for me.

  Somehow, that was even worse than his cool fury.

  Chapter 12

  Dude,

  Here I am again, shift over (and I managed to leave the hospital on time, a miracle of parting-the-Red-Sea proportion), writing the day after Betsy and the others flew away to Cape Cod to face whatever music there was to face. I’d asked to go and had been gently refused. Jessica got to go, but then, it was her airplane.

  That left Tina—as I mentioned earlier, she was a sort of super-secretary to Sinclair—and Laura and me.

  I didn’t have a chance to go into Laura much before I had to leave for work (and grocery shopping). Now I’ve got some time and, as it’s daytime, Tina won’t be lurking in a shadowy corner of the kitchen, waiting to startle me to death and then smoothly apologizing.

  So. Laura. A word or two about her, yes, please. Very, very nice girl. Young . . . not even drinking age. Sh
e studied hard at the U of M and was a credit to her parents. Excellent health, and conventionally beautiful if you liked slender, fair-skinned blondes with terrific breasts, long legs, and big blue eyes.

  She was also occasionally homicidal and cursed (or was it more of an inheritance?) with an unbelievably bad temper. When she’s upset about something, you can practically feel the air get heavier and warmer. One thing I hated to see was Laura’s hair shading from buttercup yellow to auburn, as it always did when she was infuriated.

  According to the Book of the Dead, a sort of vampire bible, Laura is fated to destroy us all, something Betsy seems to keep overlooking or forgetting. Or forgetting on purpose (she’s not quite the ditz she’d like us to believe . . . at least I think she isn’t).

  A digression for a minute: the Book of the Dead was kept in the mansion’s library, on its own stand. Betsy didn’t talk about it much, but she practically babbled about it nonstop compared to how much Tina and Sinclair discussed it. So you can imagine how frustrating it was to just get a minor detail or two about the vampire bible.

  It was bound in human skin, and written in blood by a crazy vampire a thousand years ago. Everything in it (so far) came true. And (here comes the fun part!) anyone who read it too long went clinically insane. Scariest of all, Betsy had tried to destroy it—twice—and it always found its way back to her.

  I wasn’t dumb enough to try to read it, but I did want a look at it. I waited for a night when I had the mansion to myself (Betsy and the others were off trying to catch a serial killer—or maybe it was the time that crooked cop set the Fiends free? Who could keep track of their nocturnal crime-fighting habits? Well, it doesn’t matter now.), then went into the library.

  I didn’t sneak. I live here, too. I was not sneaking, nor being a sneak. I walked. I walked right up to the stand. I reached out a hand. I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t. I just wanted to—

  Wait.

  Okay, I’m back. I had to take a second and go throw up. Which is what I did those few months ago when I grasped the cover to flip the book open. I didn’t even get a good look at the title page, never mind the table of contents, before I started vomiting blood.

  As a doctor, I found this to be a somewhat alarming symptom, especially since I had felt perfectly fine ten seconds earlier. I made it to the nearest bathroom—thank goodness the mansion’s got about thirty of them!—and, between bouts, called my friend Marty (part-time EMT, full-time guy who could keep his mouth shut) for a ride to the hospital.

  By the time he got me there, I was fine again. His backseat was a mess, though. It cost me six hundred bucks to get it clean again.

  Sorry, dude, that was a major digression, not a minor one. So that’s enough about the vampire bible, which I now prudently stay the holy hell away from; let’s get back to Laura.

  It’s hard to believe that a gorgeous sweet Norwegian is the Antichrist. And even harder to imagine her destroying a cactus plant, much less the entire world. When she’s blond, anyway.

  When Betsy and Laura first hooked up, we had no idea she even had a dark side (which was silly . . . don’t we all?). Then she killed a serial killer. And then she beat a vampire almost to death. More worrisome was the fact that she could have done much, much worse. Because Laura’s weapons pop out of nowhere when she’s mad, and they show up express delivery from hell.

  And lately she’s been skipping church. She’d already been over here twice, and Betsy hasn’t been out of the state even twenty-four hours. I think she’s lonesome. Scratch that—I was familiar with all the symptoms. I knew Laura was lonesome.

  I also knew she was extremely dangerous. But I know better than to try to open a dialogue with her about the subject. Laura hated her birthright, her heritage, her mother. Hated knowing someone had predicted she’d destroy the world almost a thousand years before she was born. I was pretty sure she hated the fact that we all knew about it, too.

  So. Tonight we’re going out for drinks, and I’ll tease her and we’ll gossip about Betsy and Co. at the nearest smoothie bar and then Laura will be herself again.

  For a while.

  Chapter 13

  The last thing we did before going to bed was set up Sinclair’s laptop—

  Right, Sinclair, I forgot to explain that. I hardly ever call him Eric. He’s always been Sinclair to me (or Sink Lair, when he’s really pissing me off), just as I have always been Elizabeth (yech!) to him. I still can’t believe my mother stuck me with a first name like Elizabeth when my last name was Taylor. What, did she lose a bet?

  Anyway, I was Betsy to everyone except the man I loved.

  And speaking of the man I loved, he was rapidly typing something, probably an update e-mail to Tina. Then he showed me one of Marc’s typically annoying e-mails, which went like this:

  Hey, girrrrl! miss you guys already, i mean WTF? Hope the furry friends haven’t eaten any of you yet, LOL! love, marc

  Oh, boy. Don’t even get me started.

  Too late, I’m starting. What the hell was it about e-mail that made everybody forget the stuff they learned in second grade, like capitalizing I and proper names, and using periods? Hello? We all learned how to do this less than five years out of diapers!

  And what was with all the increasingly stupid acronyms? Nobody with any sense would dare send out a snail-mail letter written in that odd, juvenile style. No one would send a business letter written like that. But I’ve seen executive VPs send out e-mails riddled with spelling and punctuation errors and LOLs.

  Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, somehow because it’s electronic mail, none of the basic grammar rules applied.

  Barf.

  Sinclair obligingly vacated the desk chair for me. I plopped into it and kicked off my pumps. However the werewolves might feel about us, they were pretty good hosts so far. This was the most beautiful bedroom I’d ever seen. No, not bedroom . . . suite. A sitting room. An office. A teeny kitchen. Two bathrooms. A living room with a piano in the corner. A freaking piano, who lives like this? And a bed so gigantic I felt as small as a saltine cracker when I lay on it.

  I clicked on REPLY and rapidly typed.

  Marc, you nitwit, how many times do I have to tell you, enough with the acronyms. I’m assuming since you made it through college and medical school that sometime before you left for college someone mentioned a cool new invention: punctuation. Try it sometime. You might like it.

  Clicked on SEND. Stretched in the chair like a cat, then got up and ambled over to my husband, who held his arms out to me. He was smiling his sexy, somehow sweet smile and I could see the light glinting off his fangs, teeth so sharp they made a rattlesnake seem like it had a mouthful of rubber bands.

  I grinned back, kicked out of my clothes, and pulled the sheet back. As my husband’s fangs sank into my neck and things began to go dark and sweet around the edges of my brain, I had a thought: What about werewolf hearing? Shit on that, how about their sense of smell, which was even better than a vampire’s? Even if they couldn’t hear us, they could sure tell what we were doing.

  Then Eric’s fingers were gently parting my thighs and stroking me in that luscious, insistent way he knew I loved, and I forgot all about werewolf hearing. Hell, I’d be lucky if I didn’t forget my own name.

  Chapter 14

  Dude!

  You will not believe this. I was there, and I almost don’t believe it. And there’s no way to pretty this up, so I’m just going to spell it straight out: a group of Satan worshippers found Laura.

  Yes! And yes, I know how it sounds! But it’s all true; my God, I can hardly type I’m so excited/freaked out/ amazed.

  Okay, so this is what happened. Laura called and asked if she could hang out at the mansion, and of course I said yes. It was daytime, so Tina was snoring away somewhere (not that she snored, or even breathed, but you know what I mean). So into the mansion I come, only to be greeted by a scene out of—of—shit, I have no frame of reference for this.

  Real Satanists had app
arently tracked Laura down via astrology (not my field, so much of the explanation I got later went right over my head). Apparently, just as there was a star of Bethlehem, there is also a Morningstar, which shows up just before the Antichrist comes into her maturity.

  ?????

  Seriously, dude, I know how it sounds. A star? Laura’s own star, shining down on the planet like a treasure map leading Satanists to our door? (And why not her apartment? Why Betsy’s place?) A star that didn’t show until her maturity, what the hell did that mean? The star didn’t show itself until she had a driver’s license? A passport? Until she was legal drinking age? What?

  Laura either didn’t know, or wasn’t saying, pardon me while I evince a complete lack of surprise. And I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is the star is here (I plan to dip into my savings first thing tomorrow and buy a decent telescope to set up in the yard . . . I simply have to see this puppy for myself) and people who have read the right books and worshipped the right demon and made the right sacrifices (I’m guessing on that last one, but the movies can’t be all wrong, right? Memo to me: Netflix Rosemary’s Baby.).

  Anyway, the right people can now track Laura down pretty much at will.

  Which is why, when I walked into the house after a milk run, I nearly tripped over the dozen people kneeling in front of Laura, who was blushing like a tomato. A demonic tomato. I was instantly alarmed; she was so fire-hydrant red, so incredibly flushed, I was afraid she was going to stroke out, and I almost dropped the milk.

  They had (not on purpose, I’m sure of that) backed Laura into a corner of the kitchen and were moaning and praying.