Undead and Unwary Read online

  “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.”

  “Trust me, the baby doesn’t give a shit.” I chortled. “Except, of course—”

  “Don’t even.”

  “—when she shits! Heh.”

  “Scatological humor,” Laura commented, unimpressed. “A mark of true class.”

  “I’m full of surprises.” Scatological. Probably something to do with poop, right? Scat = poop, taught to me many years ago by my mom (she hunts; geese, deer, ducks, and wild turkeys are not safe from her). Which wasn’t even true, since I don’t even like poop humor and if I ever did, Family Guy would have killed that part of me long before now. If there had been no Family Guy, South Park would have taken care of the job. But there’s no level I won’t sink to in order to get the Antichrist off her “you promised, and also it’s ‘bring your sister to work’ century” thing. If that meant poop references, I was fully prepared to make them. It was, after cornering my husband and banging him senseless, my number two priority. Ha! Number two. Get it? (It’s possible I need professional help.)

  I’d been lucky so far, and I knew it. This place, our St. Paul mansion (dubbed Vamp Central about a day after we moved in), was a madhouse even on good days. Normally I disparaged that. Normally I bitched about it like I was getting paid. I never wanted the queen-of-the-vampires gig, but was slooowly becoming used to it. (Used to it = dead inside.) Or resigned, I guess—that’s probably a better word. And I sure never wanted to live with assorted vampires, werewolves, and babies, but again: resigned. Didn’t want to be married to a vampire, didn’t want to go time traveling. Didn’t want to be haunted, literally haunted, by several ghosts (spirits? shades? life forces? pulse challenged?), including that of my loathed stepmother. Didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t.

  And now, when it was too late to fix it and too early to properly mourn my pulse-accompanied lifestyle, I missed the normality of everyday life. Predeath my biggest problems had been not strangling my boss, saving my hard-earned pennies for the new Louboutins, avoiding my stepmother while trying to get my father to pay attention to me (yes, pathetic, and yes, thar be daddy issues ahoy), watching Jessica go through more boyfriends than a cat through cat litter, and trying to vote Republican without feeling like a traitor to every female ever conceived. All those things were a huge pain in my ass back in the day (back in the day = about three years ago), but now that I had to worry about death threats, death attempts, navigating a timeline I screwed, kind-of-sort-of raising my half brother/son, accepting that my mother is (groan, shudder) dating and (argh!) possibly having sex, and now cohosting Hell with my half sister, it seemed like my old life was laughably carefree.

  It wasn’t, of course, but that’s how we are about older, smaller problems when faced with newer, awfuler ones: ah, the good old days! Which weren’t so great, and certainly not all the time, but I’m going to pretend they were perfect.

  “But that’s enough murder talk around my baby,” Not-Nick continued, reminding me that I was in the middle of a conversation, kind of. “Not a sentence I thought I’d be saying ever,” he added cheerfully. “I was pretty convinced I’d die alone.”

  “That’s the spirit, Dick-Not-Nick.”

  A word about Nicholas Berry and his annoying name. In the old timeline, we’d known him as Nick. Which made sense, since it was shorter and more efficient and short for Nicholas, his actual name. For some unexplained, illogical, silly-ass reason, wh
en I returned to the changed timeline, he informed me no one ever called him Nick, no one ever called him by his full first name, and furthermore, his nickname was and always had been Dick so I’d better get with the program, and also, we’re out of milk so the next time I’m out and about could I please bring home a gallon of skim?

  Outrageous! First of all, skim? That’s white water. That’s all skim milk is: they take out all the wonderful stuff that makes milk taste like milk and replace it with white water and people actually drink that shit. Second, Dick? How? How did his family get Dick from Nicholas? It makes no sense. And nothing against the Dicks and Richards of the world, but I always disliked that one. Call me immature if you like—I’ve earned it many times over—but come on: The word. Is slang. For penis. If he was a woman named Virginia, would he insist we refer to him as Vag? I think not! (God, I hope not.)

  Old habits were hard to break, and I had enough trouble remembering people’s actual names, never mind their nicknames both pre- and post-timeline-fuckery. Trouble was, for some silly reason Nick disliked being called Nick and called me on it. A lot. (My vamp queen title never seems to impress or intimidate the people I want it to impress or intimidate.) Which was his prerogative, but I dunno. Seems like his time could be spent on pretty much anything else.

  “Sure, she doesn’t understand now,” the Roommate Formerly Known as Nick was saying, “but it’s never too early to get into the habit of watching absolutely everything we say all the time around the babies constantly.”

  Oh, goody. “Yeah? Well, let me give you a tip, No-Longer-Nick—”

  “God, will you stop with that?” Exhausted, but not too exhausted to glare and correct me. I had to admire that. “You know what year all your favorite shoes came out but can’t remember which four-letter word I prefer being called?”

  “—it’s kind of hard to accept your authority on anything when you’re dressed like . . . um . . .”

  DadDick was dressed in a stunning ensemble of gray sweatpants (which I suspected had been black about a decade earlier), vomit-stained T-shirt (I assumed it wasn’t his vomit, but here at Casa de los Weirdos you could never be sure), and bare feet. And God, did his toenails need trimming, and don’t get me started on how much his heels were crying out for a pumice stone. The bags under his eyes told the world that he hadn’t slept in a thousand days. The smell coming off him told the world that he hadn’t showered in a thousand days. I didn’t know how it was even possible, but he was barely even cute anymore. The babies had sucked all the cuteness out of him.

  “Are you honestly telling me you’ve got no need in your life for an internal censor of any kind?” he argued, pretty coherently for a zombie. (Not a real zombie, of course. That was Marc, one of my other roommates.) “Think of watching what you say around the babies as excellent practice for future vampire queenery.”

  “Making the horror that is now my life complete,” I finished.

  DadDick rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Don’t talk to me about horror. You got more sleep in one night than I’ve had in a week. Do not talk to me about horror.”

  “Fair point,” I conceded. It was. Jessica had told me it wasn’t that the babies didn’t sleep for long; they’d known that was coming. It wasn’t the three a.m. feedings or the multiple daylight naps or the midnight diaper change. It was never knowing, when she or DadDick did get a chance to lie down, if they would get a twenty-minute nap or six blissful uninterrupted hours or something in between. It’s the not knowing that exhausts you, she’d told me. I had listened in horrified fascination; all she needed was a flashlight to shine in her face as she finished her story with, “And the call was coming from inside the crib!”

  “Look, we don’t have to talk about this now,” I conceded while trying to make it look like I wasn’t conceding a damned thing. “Let’s wait until the babies are out of earshot.” And maybe puberty. How long could I stretch this out?

  Unfortunately, the Antichrist was not only too nice (when she wasn’t killing serial killers, proving an overreaction is not always a bad thing even as she terrified me) but she saw through me too well. Which wasn’t that impressive; it’s not like I was some inexplicable force whose every thought was cloaked in mystery. Laura found me as mysterious as a dartboard.

  She pointedly shifted her gaze from the baby and speared me with her blue-eyed gaze. “Do you know how many people die every day?”

  “I know it’s more than twenty.”

  “About one hundred fifty thousand.”

  “At once?” I asked, appalled.

  “It works out to about six thousand people an hour.”

  “That,” I said, “is a lot. Let me guess where this is going . . .”

  “Yes, please. It would be so great if you knew where this was going.”

  “. . . at least some of those dead people end up in Hell?”

  “At least,” she replied dryly. “The backlog since you murdered my mother—”

  “Justified homicide!” I yelped and pointed to DadDick, who was nodding and droopy-eyed. I thought it was cool how the sleepier he got the tighter his grip on the baby, like even his subconscious was devoted to its safety. He could be snoring and still have her cradled safely in his arms. I couldn’t multitask for shit, so I found that impressive. “He said!”

  “—has been immense. Black Plague immense.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Immense means gigantic and—”

  “Jeez, I’m not that dim.” Polite silence was my response. I decided DadDick’s was because he was dozing and Laura’s was because she could be an immense bitch. Don’t tell me about pots and kettles; I know all about pots and kettles. “I’m not,” I finished, trying hard not to whine.

  “Then you get it. How this is an immense problem. And you understand that regardless of whatever nonsense is going on around here, it likely doesn’t trump sorting six thousand souls an hour.”

  “I don’t think you can generalize that,” I argued. “What if there was a nuclear bomb in the basement that only I could defuse? That’d be more important. That’d be loads more important.”

  Laura closed her eyes and kept them closed. Counting to ten, maybe, or reminding herself that killing her sister/colleague would be bad for workplace morale. Or maybe thinking about investing in a pair of shoes that weren’t horrible; I dunno. I was a vampire, not a telepath. “Is there. A nuclear bomb. In the basement?”

  “Not that I know of,” I admitted, “but obviously I need to make checking it a priority.” And anything else I could think of. “Safety first! That’s our new motto.” Which, come to think of it, we should have implemented the minute I woke up on the slab in pageant makeup and horrible shoes. “In fact, you—huh.”

  “What.”

  Yikes, the flat “what.” No upward inflection; it’s not so much a query for more information as a statement of being pushed too far. Kevin Spacey set the precedent in L.A. Confidential, the best movie ever based on the worst book ever. And now the Antichrist was picking up the “what” torch; I never should have made her watch it. Though her crush on Exley was super cute (I was a fan of Bud White, because a man who would kick the shit out of a wife beater hits my “isn’t that romantic?” buttons every time). Also, is it me or does the older Guy Pearce get, the more simian he gets? Watch L.A. Confidential and then watch Iron Man 3. Heartthrob to monkey. Weirdweirdweird.

  “Nothing, it’s just . . . I think Jessica’s back.” I’d been able to hear the car pulling into the driveway, of course, but the slow, plodding footsteps didn’t sound at all like Jess’s usual springy stride. Sleep deprivation could be an explanation, but I didn’t think . . .

  The front door creeeaked open. We should offer to rent out that sound for Halloween.

  . . . that explained . . .

  Jessica wandered in, not bothering to close the door.

  . . . everything.
/>   “Uh. Jess?”

  No answer.

  DadDick stirred on the couch, instinctively tightening his grip on Thing One (or Two . . . the whole problem was that I couldn’t keep them straight), which caused her to let out a small squeak. He absentmindedly soothed her as he rose to his feet. “Hey, babe. You okay?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Where’d you go?” I asked, curious. She was acting like she was in a trance or had been mojo’d by a vamp. I knew it wasn’t the latter because it was daylight hours and also, no vampire would fucking dare because I would kill them so much. And who’d want to put her in a trance if it wasn’t vamp related? “Jess? Where were you?”

  “Oh, I took the babies to see your mom.” Jessica had a peculiar expression on her face, a combo of impatience and worry and fatigue. Like, I didn’t think I’d have to talk about this, you poor thing, and stop bugging me and boy am I tired. “That’s what it was. Where I was. Yeah.”

  “The babies are here,” I couldn’t help pointing out. “Remember? Marc’s watching Other Baby in the kitchen while he . . .” Dissects things, but that was no way to end a sentence around Jess. The world’s biggest hypochondriac isn’t as paranoid about germs as a new mother. “. . . does stuff.” Also, DadDick was holding one of her babies. Five feet from where she was standing. Standing without the babies.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You—you do?”

  “So we didn’t stay long, obviously.”

  “You and the babies you didn’t actually bring,” I couldn’t help adding because weirdweirdweird.

  “Right!” she finished with a touch of her prebaby snapitude. Then she turned around and walked out. But it wasn’t Jessica’s brisk got-to-get-going-quick pace that she used everywhere. She just sort of . . . wandered off.

  Laura shook her head, a resigned expression on her face. “I don’t know what that is, but it’ll be more than enough to keep you occupied for a few days.”

  “You think?” I managed to keep the hope out of my tone.