Undead and Unwary Page 11

  Not this idiot heroine, boys and girls. Nope. I pretty much always know when something is over my head and can’t wait to fob it off onto someone else. This has been a habit of mine since . . . oh, about first grade. I have always owned my uselessness. Which was why I’d been avoiding the Antichrist like I was getting paid. But acknowledging my complete uselessness for a job didn’t always mean I should avoid the job. I’m bad at washing dishes by hand, too, but when the dishwasher broke . . . hmm. I’m not sure who handled that. I know we started using plastic cups for smoothie time, and there were a lot of explanations from individuals about why it wasn’t their problem, and then more threats, but if I’d had to, I would have stepped up. Same with pledges to younger sibs and otherworldly realms.

  The time for cowardly scurrying into corners was over. Now was the time for cowardly scurrying into a realm I knew nothing about and had no business running.

  Right, then. To Hell! But in a good way!

  Laura, who never flaunted her abilities, simply walked out of the kitchen, where she presumably vanished. Or kept walking out until she got back outside to her car; I dunno, I hadn’t even noticed when she’d arrived. Not my job. I, on the other hand, since my middle name should have been Flaunt, gave my pals a cheery wave. “I’m off! Don’t wait up.” As exit lines went, it was lame, but I hadn’t had a lot of prep time.

  Then I dramatically disappeared.

  Except not.

  I’d thought this was mind over matter, I had gotten myself back from Hell just by thinking about it a few weeks ago. (Maybe it had worked more because of my desperation to get away from the Ant, the worst spirit guide ever.) But I was still in the mansion, dammit, while Laura was probably halfway (or all the way) to Hell by now, and several of my alleged loved ones were trying not to smirk. The babies, at least, were respectfully silent except for the occasional milk-snore.

  “Well.” I took a long look around the kitchen. “That was anticlimactic.”

  “Perhaps physical contact with the objects with which you focus your no-doubt formidable concentration?” Sinclair began in a helpful murmur that barely held back his snicker.

  Of course! Dorothy’s shoes! How could I teleport without Dorothy’s silver slippers? I’d been a fool to try. Also it was weird that these were the problems I faced these days. I left the kitchen, came back, hollered, “Okay, bye! Again!” darted back down the hall and up the stairs, then all but flew into my room. If I wanted to get back and forth from Hell—and I did, I wasn’t going to be an exchange student and live there, and I sure wasn’t going to do the Hell equivalent of lunch at my desk—I needed to focus.

  In other words, I needed Dorothy’s silver shoes from The Wizard of Oz. The enchanting book, not the terrifying movie. I kept them in my closet, in the safe along with my marriage certificate (and gawd, Sinclair had bitched about that incessantly, saying we were already married in the eyes of the undead, which meant, as you can imagine, jack shit to me), my (useless? maybe?) social security card, and some of Sinclair’s paperwork, I dunno, looked like stock certificates and stuff. JPMorgan Chase stock was worth a lot, right? Especially when you bought it in 1955, when it was the Chase Manhattan Bank? And Coca-Cola stock from 1919 at forty dollars a share had probably aged well, too. Wait, how old was my husband again? Maybe his dad had really liked Coke.

  No time for distractions, dammit, and no time for paper millions or government-issued ID; I needed something much more valuable. I tapped in the code (“sink lair sucks”) and popped the safe, spotted the gleaming beauty of my unreal shoes, yanked them out, then slammed the door before the baggie of diamonds—did diamonds even come in red?—could fall out.

  No time to get distracted by pretty colors; I had to get focused on my pretty shoes. They weren’t really there, you know. They weren’t real. They were my will, a piece of my wanting made solid by . . . what? I didn’t know. Magic, I guessed (note the lack of k in magic, please). Or science so advanced and beyond my understanding it might as well be magic.

  It goes like this: as a card-carrying member of undead royalty, I could travel back and forth between dimensions. Hell, it seemed, was one such dimension.

  Wait. I’ve got to back up. It wasn’t just because I was a vampire, or any of the hundred thousand (or however many there were; we were still working on a census) vampires on the planet would be zipping back and forth to Hell. I could do it because my half sister was the Antichrist. Which made no sense, because we were related through our father, an ordinary man who was now dead. Whoever my half sister’s mother was should have had zero effect on my otherworldly abilities.

  See? It’s like I’ve been warning for ages. Any attempt to apply logic to this supernatural stuff was pointless. Not that I didn’t try. Okay, I didn’t try. But I thought about trying. Sometimes.

  Anyway, some of the religions were right, Hell was a real place. (Which called into question: which religions? And if some of them were “right,” did that mean others were “wrong”? Also, I was using quotation marks too much.) Not one near the planet’s core, but an actual place nonetheless, one hardly anyone got to until they died. Except lots of dead people didn’t go there. They went somewhere else (Heaven? Dairy Queen?) or didn’t go anywhere (hung out where they’d died, occasionally tracked me down to demand favors, and that was just the ones I knew for certain). The whole thing was migraine inducing.

  But knowing this, any of this, wasn’t enough. It can be tough work, overcoming a lifetime of conditioning that assured me, over and over, that I could not teleport, Hell wasn’t a job share, every bit of my afterlife was over my head, and knowing there is life after death solves little and explains exactly nothing.

  Thus: the shoes. The pinnacle of my ambition, the Holy Grail of footgear, Dorothy Gale’s silver shoes. Not ruby red, mind you. In the book, they were silver. MGM fucked with that because a) it’s inherent in movie people to fuck with great books (*cough* My Sister’s Keeper *cough*) and b) red = pretty! Honestly, movie people should just get it over with and have “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” printed on their business cards.

  I slipped them on and, because they weren’t real, they fit me perfectly and didn’t pinch even a little bit. Then I clicked my heels three times and murmured with wide, hopeful eyes, “There’s no place like Hell, there’s no place like Hell, there’s no place like Hell,” except not really. Once I had the focus, I didn’t need magic words. I thought, This is so, so stupid. I can’t believe this even works. And shut my eyes.

  And, a second later, opened them in Hell.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  “Well, one of the Taylor sisters takes her responsibilities seriously and, in a shocking turn of events, it’s not my stepdaughter. It’s the Taylor girl I gave birth to.”

  Just like that, I wanted to shut my eyes again. And maybe gouge them out. Followed by the completely sane decision to ram knitting needles into my ears. “Proof, like I needed it, that this was such a bad idea,” I muttered, glaring at Mrs. Antonia Taylor, she of the pineapple hair (in height and color) and complete lack of maternal instinct. “Shouldn’t you be screaming in agony in a lake of fire somewhere?”

  “It’s Monday,” she replied, like that was an answer.

  I was uneasy, no surprise, given where I was and who I was talking to, but putting that aside, I’d forgotten the worst thing about being in Hell: my telepathic link with Sinclair didn’t work here. It had been so upsetting last time, I’d shoved the unpleasantness right out of my head. If denial and repression were Olympic sports, I’d clank at every step what with all the medals.

  And here it was again, here I was again, remembering the worst reason why Hell was Hell.

  It was amazing how fast I’d gotten used to the impossible. I had gone three decades without Sinclair but these days he was the air I no longer breathed. Not being able to feel him inside me4 was like losing a tooth. One of the import
ant ones, an incisor or something. When I was younger I used to dread the inevitable loose teeth and subsequent losses, mostly because my mom was a fan of the “tie one end of a string around the loose tooth, the other around a door handle, then slam the door” school of thought. (Don’t judge; it was surprisingly painless. Didn’t make the whole ordeal any less stressful, though.) Once the slackass tooth was gone, I’d constantly tongue the hole where it used to be, unable to stop prodding the spot even though it felt weird. Now I kept reaching for that mental link, knowing it was gone but unable to leave it alone. Sinclair was like a tooth in my brain, only now he had been yanked like a cavity. Wait, cavities aren’t yanked. And it isn’t one of my better metaphors, either, so insult to injury.

  “See, Antonia?” Laura had met her biological mother around the time she met me, and wasn’t comfortable calling her Mom. She’d also rejected my many helpful suggestions (Jerkass, Homewrecker, Bilbo Bag, Knockoff, Fake Tan, Fake Boobs) and finally settled on Antonia, spoken politely with a dash of warmth. “We’re already making progress.”

  “We are?”

  Laura had appeared out of the ether (more on that in a minute) and walked up to slide an arm around the Ant’s waist. The Ant looked startled, then almost-but-not-quite relaxed. See above, no maternal instinct. Also, I wasn’t sure the Ant understood unfeigned affection. “I knew you were wrong when you said Betsy was a sociopath with tacky highlights and no sense of social responsibility.”

  “Tacky?” I yelped. Then: “Oh, are you actually lecturing me on social responsibility, you odious bitch? You told me you were glad you were dead when I told you about Obama!” Ugh, that reminded me of how Jessica’s awful dead parents had reacted, shades of “I can’t believe we’re dead and missing this!” I had no right, ever, to the moral high ground, which was another reason Hell was awful. I was the best of a bad lot around here.

  Except for Laura, of course, who worked at being good, frequently failed, and always came right back to dig in again. Even though it seemed to me that these days she valued good mostly as a terrific way to spite Satan, she still worked at it. I admired the tenacity, while owning the fact that I wasn’t up to it.

  “Let’s not fight,” Laura interjected, which was ironic because she wasn’t fighting at all. Now that she’d gotten what she wanted (she’d never learned to be careful what you wish for, a tiresome lecture for another time), namely, my presence in the pit, she had perked up. Way up; I hadn’t seen her looking so carefree in more than a year, and I ignored the stab of guilt that brought. “Let’s just get to work.”

  “How?” That wasn’t my usual dumbassery. I genuinely had no idea how we would make anything happen. We were standing in a big bunch of nothing. Not fog, not darkness, just . . . void. I couldn’t feel anything under my feet, but I was standing. I was taller than the Ant in Hell, as I had been in life, but again, we weren’t standing on anything. To add to the illogic, the Ant didn’t even have a body anymore! She was here spiritually, but Laura and I were here in soul and body. We were in the middle of a blank slate and I was in no mood for metaphors, even though the metaphoric slate was also a literal slate. (And when had I become so obsessed with metaphors?) What were the rules?

  Worse, I had a good idea about why the place was blank, why it was just a big old bunch of nothin’, which was making me uneasy as shit.

  “Yes, well.” The Ant let loose with a pointed cough. “Good point, Laura. Enough time has been wasted.” This with a typically unsubtle glare at me. I shrugged it off as I’d been doing since the Ant first tsunami’d into my life when I was a teenager. “So. Where do you want to start?”

  I stared at them, then at the nothing, and managed not to scream, “How the fuck should I know?” into their expectant faces.

  “I—I don’t—what? I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe with the ones who are leaving? Or the ones who haven’t left? Or—where is everyone? Aren’t there supposed to be a whole bunch of souls down here? Wait, not ‘down here’ since we’re not underground, it’s not Dante’s Inferno or anything. I—” I cut myself off before I could finish with “I got nothin’,” cringing at how idiotic I sounded.

  “They’re all here,” the Ant replied, answering one of my questions at random, “all the time. Hell has layers. Just because you can’t see everyone doesn’t mean they aren’t here.”

  Layers made sense. It was a concept I could grasp pretty easily and I was pretty sure Hell was designed with that exact thing in mind. On one of my trips (“one of”—argh, cue drawn-out groan) to Hell I’d seen all kinds of souls being punished.

  An aside, not to come off as a creepy voyeur (like there was any other kind), but getting a glimpse of Anne Boleyn cutting off Henry VIII’s head while he begged her forgiveness for knocking her up with Queen Elizabeth I was just too good. I wanted to linger and say, “Oh, so we’ve learned a little more about biology in the last five hundred years, you fat fuck? That’s right, it’s the sperm that dictates a prince or a princess, and the sperm comes from the guy! Meaning you! I know you don’t know who I am! Your hair is stupid! Hey, Anne, how about you pull another Red Queen and off with his head again?” Luckily I had been a model of restraint and just walked on without commenting.

  My point, I just now remembered, was that on that particular trip, Hell was like a hive. The biggest, most complex, and fucked-up hive I’d ever seen. Each little cell contained someone’s personal Hell and they stacked up so high and so wide and the events in the cells just went on and on . . . boggling, the whole thing. Just trying to ponder everything going on was enough to make anyone’s head pound. Glimpses were all I got, and all I wanted. On that particular trip, anyway.

  On another trip, Hell was a waiting room with ready-to-burn-out blinking fluorescent lighting, and the only thing to read was years-out-of-date magazines. Unpleasant, sure, but again—a concept I could grasp, context I was familiar with.

  So maybe that was the key. Maybe the trick was to set it up however we want, in the best way we can think of, using relatable symbolism to help our (okay, my) tiny minds grasp ungraspable concepts.

  Okay. Well. I’d never tried to run Hell, but I’d been fired more than once, and I’d had to take over more than once from someone who’d been fired. And the first thing I always did in a new job was . . .

  “How did Satan do it?”

  . . . figure out what my predecessor did, then refine. “I don’t suppose she left us lists. Or suggestions for organization. You know, like how when you’re in a new job, the person you replaced left contact info and lots of memos explaining day-to-day ops. Anything like that around?”

  “At last, intelligent observations,” the Ant muttered, as if I didn’t have super vamp hearing and wasn’t standing four feet away. “I knew if I waited through enough years you were bound to—”

  “Oh, shut up. Look, you were the old boss’s secretary or whatever—”

  “Yes, or whatever,” came the dry reply.

  “—so you can take us through her routines and kind of go over the day-to-day running of Hell, right? That’s why you got right up in my face the second I showed up.”

  “There’s no place I would rather be less than right up in your face,” she sniffed, “and you know perfectly well why I was the first one to show.” Ugh, so true. Last time I was here, everyone I thought of eventually showed up, called to me by the force of my bitching. “I’ve got very little interest in helping you,” she added, all disdainful and pissy, but the fidgeting gave her away. In Hell, as in life, she was inappropriately dressed a good decade younger than her age: too-tight navy blue miniskirt, polyester blouse in an eye-watering floral print (yellow roses against an orangey-red background or, as I like to call it, ow, my brain), black wedge pumps (blech, wedges, they’re ugly and they always remind me of the terrible disco era which never should have been allowed to happen), de rigueur black stockings. Bright blond hair piled high, too much green eyeliner and
shadow, lipstick just a little too orange and bright to be flattering. If it had been anyone else, I would have assumed she was forced to dress like that as penance for her many sins in her wicked life, but it wasn’t anyone else and I knew she thought she looked perfect.

  But she still couldn’t keep her hands still. When she got nervous or edgy, she’d run her hands all over her clothes and hair, sort of patting with fluttering fingers to make sure everything was in place. Which would be understandable if she did it once or twice. But those hands were constantly moving. It was dizzying.

  “What’s got you so—” I began, deeply suspicious, when my phone buzzed against my hip.

  Wait, what?

  I plucked it out and stared. A text from the vampire king: I trust all is well. Return at once if you require assistance. Classic Sink Lair. I ran it through my translator and got, I’m sure you’re seconds away from an epic screwup so I’m ready to haul your delectable ass out of the fire and won’t tease you about it later except I probably will for a little while and I lurrrrrv you sooo much!

  Awww. What a sweetie.

  The implications took a few seconds to hit, but when they did: “Whoa.” I had been slow to embrace texting. Not to go on an old-lady rant or anything (if you’re over thirty, thirty is the new twenty; if you’re under, thirty is the new ninety), but texting was pretty much destroying civilization. As with Jessica’s bed, I’d been gradually sucked in (I only started hauling a cell phone around in the last three years) and even now, I sent maybe five texts a month, and those along the lines of How can we be out of ice AGAIN? What is wrong with all of us?

  But my telepathic link with Sinclair didn’t work in Hell. Which he knew, and had handled with his usual pragmatism.

  “Whoa,” I said again, not at my creative best. “I can get texts in Hell? AT&T, I have once again underestimated your vast scope and reach.”