Undead and Unforgiven Read online

  Thus: meetings. But there were smoothies, too, so it wasn’t all bad.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  “Do we have the minutes of the meeting?”

  I bit down on a groan and rested my forehead on the table (also made of Lego pieces). Then, remembering that the last time I’d done that, I’d walked around in Hell with Lego dots on my forehead and no one told me, I jerked upright.

  “Do we even have those? Are we really trying to improve Hell by introducing more paperwork?”

  “I don’t know if ‘improve’ is the right—”

  “Plus, we’re not even all here yet,” I pointed out. Not “I complained.” Not “I bitched.” No matter what Marc wanted to call it. And speaking of my personal physician/zombie . . . “Where’s Marc?”

  “Here,” my personal zombie/physician replied, ambling into the room. He was in (un)death as he was in life: slouchy and comfortable in a pale gray scrub shirt (it used to be green but after a zillion washings was faded and almost velvety to the touch), faded boyfriend jeans (“Ironic,” he’d sigh, “since I haven’t had a date in . . . when did I die again?”), dark hair in a George Clooney cut (“He’s really locked into one style, isn’t he?”), pale skin (not because of his zombification; he died in winter in Minnesota, when sunlight is more rumor than anything else), and smiling green eyes.

  “What have I told you about wandering around Hell without an escort?” I hadn’t been running the place for even a few weeks. My “run it by committee” idea was only a week old. I was still figuring out my godlike powers of the damned. And I wanted to bite the shit out of somebody—anybody, really. When had I last drunk? Argh. Worrying about Marc on top of all that? It did nothing for my temper, which these days wasn’t great. “Well?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh.” Right. I’d been thinking he shouldn’t wander, but didn’t actually tell him. “Well, it’s a bad idea.”

  “What can they do to me?” he asked, reasonably enough.

  “It’s Hell! Who knows? Why would you ever want to find out?”

  “Because I’m bored?”

  Oh. Well, good point. If anyone needed to stay stimulated, it was Marc.

  “And,” he continued, “Hell is really depressing.”

  “Well, yeah,” Cathie replied.

  “Lord Byron is so boring.”

  Not good. Boring was bad. Marc being bored was the part of the horror movie where they establish the characters, the dumb stuff you have to sit through while waiting for the blood to spill. And it always spilled. Inevitable like the tides, or Transformers sequels being terrible.

  “Oh?” I asked with perfect fake composure, even as Cathie started to give him the side-eye.

  “Byron’s one of the greatest poets ever, maybe the greatest English poet—”

  Oh, good. Now I wouldn’t have to ask, Who’s Lord Brian? The name was familiar. Kind of. Poets weren’t my thing.

  “—and just a complete downer. First off, not gay. Bi, definitely bi.”

  “Which is a problem why?” Cathie asked.

  “Oh, bi artists are a dime a dozen.” Marc waved a hand, dismissing every bisexual artist in the history of human events. “All my life I’ve been reading about his complex sexuality, but there’s nothing complex about being able to pass for straight—he fathered a couple of kids. It’s not nearly the struggle it is to be in the closet, not into the opposite sex, but faking well enough to make babies while trying to fit into society without losing your mind, except a lot of them did lose their minds.”

  “Those bisexuals,” Cathie said dryly, “with their uncomplicated natures and many, many banging options.”

  “Oh, shut up,” he snapped. “I get it: where do I get off—”

  Don’t giggle at “get off.” Whew! Thanks, inner voice.

  “—marginalizing anyone’s sexuality, blah-blah. But it wasn’t just that. The guy’s supposed to be the first celebrity—I mean, how we understand the term today. Hordes of screaming fans; Byronmania kind of paved the way for Beatlemania. Sounds pretty interesting, right? He’s probably got great stories, right?”

  “I’m guessing no,” I said, “on account of how annoyed you sound.”

  “You know what the number one thing on his mind is? Art, poetry through the ages, reminiscing about commanding a rebel army despite having no military experience, feeding your muse from Hell, maybe moving on from Hell, looking up his descendants . . . anything like that? No. The fever that killed him. That’s what’s on his mind all the time. He died over two hundred years ago and he’s still bitching because Advil and NyQuil weren’t invented in time to save his whiney ass.” Marc slumped into his red Lego chair, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Never meet your heroes. Or people you read about once and thought would be really cool to meet in real life.” He raised his head and looked around at the ghost and the vampire queen surrounded by Lego furniture. “This is real life, right?”

  “Nonsense,” came a voice that managed to be soft, brisk, and polite all at once. Tina (real name: Christina Caresse Chavelle, which was hilarious) had popped up out of nowhere (she was like a census taker that way), representing herself and the vampire king.

  You’d think the vampire queen (moi) could do that, but trust me: it’s better for everyone that Tina handle these things. She’s been doing it for decades; she’d known Sinclair since he was a li’l farmer kid with grubby knees, and had been a friend of his family for generations. She was descended from a not-witch I’d saved from being burned during the Salem witch trials in sixteen hundred whatever, because time travel.1

  So anyway, she was used to repping my husband at meetings, smoothie oriented and otherwise. She was also used to incredibly long boring meetings. Plus, to be honest, I trusted her to be in Hell a lot more than my husband, a man I loved dearly but knew to be sneaky, manipulative, controlling, and murderous. (God, he was so dreamy!)

  Since we were all new to the business side of running Hell, and thus equally clueless, Tina was using fashion to soothe us, dressing the part of Demure Majordomo in Charge of Meetings N’Stuff: a virgin wool Armani skirt suit in deepest midnight blue, with a two-button long-sleeved jacket, matching camisole underneath, black panty hose, and kitten heels the same shade of blue as the suit.

  The deep, dark colors set off her pale (vampire) skin and enormous dark eyes to perfection, the dark hose made her look taller (a good trick, since she was almost a foot shorter than I was), and she had scraped her long, Southern-belle-ringleted blond hair into a severe bun. She was right out of the “Hot for Teacher” video and it was glorious. If she had to fight, or jog, the suit was a disastrous choice. If she had to look like she knew exactly what she was doing in a business capacity, it was brilliant.

  I need a suit like that. But in red. No, black. No, red. Purple? Purple could be great . . . except I’d look like an eggplant wearing pumps. Does Sinclair think eggplants are sexy? Must research . . .

  “If you want to meet some extraordinary men and women,” she was telling Marc, who had instantly cheered up at the sight of her (they were pals bordering on besties), “I can introduce you to several, assuming they’re here.”

  “Guess it depends which side they fought on,” Cathie said, and since Tina had lived through the Civil War, that was a fair point.

  “General Sherman?” Father Markus asked with a disapproving air. I jumped; he’d gone so long without speaking I’d forgotten he was there, even though he’d brought me to the meeting. “Jefferson Davis?”

  “You knew the president of the Confederacy?” Cathie asked, sounding impressed, which was a rare and wonderful thing.

  “No, that’s the other Jefferson Davis; this one murdered his commanding officer and never saw a trial, much less prison.” Hmm, who knew Father Markus was a Civil War buff? (It’s worth noting that Tina wasn’t, since that’d be like saying
, “I live in Minnesota, so I am a Minnesota buff.”)

  “Robert Smalls? Wait, there’s no way he’d be in Hell. Right?” It was a fair question, since people who had done good things all their lives were in Hell. One of many things to be discussed in (argh) today’s meeting (argh-argh).

  “Ooh, I got this one,” Cathie enthused, warming to her subject. “This is the guy who stole a military transport, steered it past a bunch of Confederate forts, gave the ship and the signal codes to the Union, then went on to find and get rid of land mines he himself had been forced to plant. And he did all this while he was a slave!”

  “Robert Smalls!” I cried. At last, I could contribute something to a historical conversation that didn’t sound asinine. “I saw that episode of Drunk History!”

  “Actually I was thinking of notables from the Revolutionary War,” Tina corrected gently. She gave us a moment to chew that one over

  (she looks so young and hot but is ancient! weird! we know this, but keep forgetting! weird!)

  before adding, “Nancy Hart, for instance. Half a dozen British soldiers accused her of protecting a Whig leader (she was), and didn’t believe her when she said she hadn’t seen him (she was lying). At the end of the night, all those men were dead. They found the bodies—”

  “Thanks, but I don’t actually have to seek out sociopaths, I hang out with plenty on my own.”

  “Or Mary Ball Washington.”

  “Who?”

  “Washington’s wife.” Duh. I managed to keep the sneer off my face, if not out of my tone.

  “Washington’s mother,” Father Markus and Tina corrected; he colored a little and ducked his head while she kept the sneer off her face and out of her tone. I should learn that trick.

  Tina somehow sensed my rising boredom (the way I groaned and cradled my head in my hands may have tipped her off), because she said to Marc, “You come along with me later, darling. I’ll introduce you to lots of interesting people.”

  Marc perked right up. He’d been getting steadily more morose (moroser?) since Future Me had made him a zombie after he’d committed suicide to avoid being turned into a vampire (also by Future Me). Given that in life he’d been prone to depression, it was a concern.

  I loved Marc, but unfortunately it was one concern on a laundry list of a bazillion concerns. Tina, thank God, had been spending lots of time with him lately. He had a blanket nest for her in the trunk of his car (complete with reading lights, water bottles, a cell phone, an iPad, and chargers) and often took her out (in the daytime!) for what I called errands and they called missions. Sure. A mission to Cub Foods for raspberries and yogurt. A mission to the liquor store for Cinnamon Churros vodka.

  “Sorry I’m late,” one of the many banes of my existence said, booting an errant Lego brick out of her path.

  Father Markus warned me, “Behold, evil is going forth from nation to nation,” because that was how he liked to preface nagging me about the last meeting (or the next meeting), and he was probably talking about me, but I thought of my stepmother, Antonia Taylor, known to one and all (well, me) as the Ant.

  In life, we’d been deadly enemies. But in death, she had found a grudging

  “You look haggard. Is plastic surgery a thing for vampires? You might want to inquire.”

  a very, very grudging respect for me

  “Why would anyone want hair the color and texture of pineapple?” I batted back. “I don’t know what’s worse, your outfit or the fact that you’re freely choosing to look like that.”

  as I had for her.

  “And with that,” Cathie said after trying, and failing, to disguise a snigger as a cough, “let’s get started.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  “Monday’s minutes,” Cathie announced. “Betsy moved that meetings were dumb, but no one seconded it so it didn’t pass.”

  I glared at Marc. I’d counted on him, dammit! “I’ll never forgive you for letting me swing on that one,” I hissed, and I got an eye roll for my trouble.

  “She then remembered she’s supposed to be in charge and lead the way of reform, and we settled in to get some work done, when she moved that Hell no longer be eternal punishment from which there is no escape. But rather—and this is a direct quote—it’d be more like jail. Or detention! You can get out, but you have to be sorry for what you did and behave for a really long time, and when you’re out, we’re still gonna keep an eye on you so don’t go being an asshat or anything. Unquote.”

  Father Markus groaned, and not for the first time. Who knew a representative of the Catholic Church would be so resistant to change?

  “I stand by my brilliant idea,” I said modestly. “Look, I always thought that was the dumbest thing. I can remember having huge problems with this in Sunday school. Presbyterian,” I added before anyone could ask. I had liked Sunday school, but mostly because we got Peeps for correct answers. So . . . much . . . marshmallow . . . “We’re supposed to be good so we don’t go to Hell, right? So you make one mistake—depending on what religion you were raised with—and the rule is you spend a million years in Hell because you cussed out your mom while taking the Lord’s name in vain as you stole your neighbor’s wife and made her tell you how pretty you were?”

  “Um,” Marc began.

  “How many broken commandments is that?”

  “Four.” In unison around the table.

  “I think Hell should be where you learn what you screwed up, where you went wrong screwing it up, and, if you’re willing, how to make amends or just be a better person. Like, if you killed someone, and you were both here in Hell, you’d have to do nice things for your murder victim until they forgave you. It could take ten years or five hundred. And then you . . . you . . .” I was gratified, and horrified, to see I had their full attention. “Well, I don’t know. Get born again? Leave Hell but be a ghost? Go to Heaven?” Again, part of my idea that would change the face of Hell (assuming Hell had a face), if I could pull it off. If everyone here could help me pull it off. “That’s the other thing—”

  “Also from the minutes,” Cathie interrupted. “Quote, So, like, are the people leaving Hell controlling where they go or are they just vanishing or is it something Satan used to do but now I have to do even though I don’t know how? Oh my God, I must have been out of my mind to agree to this shit, unquote.”

  “None of that sounds like me,” I grumbled. “Those minutes are counterfeit, I bet.”

  Tina kept the smile off her face, but was unable to prevent her eyes from crinkling at me. “Every last word of it sounds quite like you, dread Majesty.” Sigh. No matter how often I said she could drop the “O Dread Queen” stuff anytime, she persisted. Who knew someone from the antebellum South could be so stubborn?

  “One thing at a time,” Father Markus said. “Else we’ll get bogged down in all the problems to surmount and not how to surmount them.”

  I liked how he said “we.” It was why I’d made the damned committee in the first place. I nodded and he continued.

  “Setting aside the idea of parole from Hell—”

  “Not for long, though,” Marc said quickly. “I think it’s a really great idea.” At the surprised looks, he added, “What? I’m a gay atheist who knows how to perform abortions and is now a zombie. Hell being permanent does not work for me.”

  “Oh, now you’re backing me up. When it’s political and stuff.”

  “Well, now you’re making sense,” the Ant cut in and Marc, who had never liked her, grinned anyway.

  “The seven deadly sins,” Markus said loudly, cutting off my whine. “That’s where we’ll start. I’ve been interviewing quite a few souls down here—sorry, not down here, of course—not anywhere, is my understanding . . .”

  I couldn’t blame him. The Hell tropes were hard to shake. We weren’t down anywhere; Hell wasn’t a physical place you could go to, like Dul
uth. It was an entirely different dimension with its own rules, and hardly anyone was burning alive in a lake of fire. Okay, a few hard-core Christians were burning alive in a lake of fire, and they ignored all my attempts to rescue them, shouting over the crackling flames that they’d earned their punishment. What could I do? They seemed fine. Well. Not fine. But not inclined to move, either. That was the stuff that made this job seem so overwhelming. You’d focus on one person or one punishment area and get totally overwhelmed. To think I found the vampire queen gig daunting!

  “. . . and most of the people here understand the concept of sin. They were unsurprised to find themselves here; they understand they sinned in life and this is their punishment in death. We’ve got murderers, thieves, false idolaters—”

  “I don’t think people should go to Hell if they don’t believe in the Christian God,” I interjected. “This is America, isn’t it? Freedom of religion!” Oh. Wait . . .

  Literal face-palms around the table, except for Tina, because at least one person in the Lego room was an adult who respected her sovereign. And, given all the religious talk, she was keeping her shivers and shudders under control. To most vampires, even hearing the word Jesus out loud was like a lash to the face.

  “That is the entire concept Hell is based on!” Father Markus shouted, leaping to his feet. Ooh, only five minutes in and I got the eyelid twitch and the forehead vein. A new record! (It’s not enough to set goals; you’ve got to reach them, dammit.) “You can’t just pitch everything and start all over, you gorgeous idiot!”

  “Sure I can. Wanna watch?” I hadn’t moved, just stared up at him, but he must have seen something in my face because he plunked back down in his Lego chair almost as quickly as he’d leaped out of it. Good thing he’d called me gorgeous, or I’d have been really pissed.

  “I’m sorry I raised my voice,” he managed, not quite looking at me.

  “No biggie. Yelling’s allowed.” Usually. “And you didn’t let me finish. I think I have a way that’ll make both of us happy. Just a reminder, though, for everyone here: I agreed to run Hell by committee for the most part, because it’s a huge job and I trust everyone in here.” Unspoken: Even you, Ant, much as it kills me to say it. “But I’ve got veto power over everything happening in this place, old rules and new, understand? If I don’t think a certain plan is the way to go, I’m open to discussion, but the final decision is always going to be mine.” This in my “how dare you try to sell me knockoff Jimmy Choos, you degenerate asshat!” tone.