Undead and Unforgiven Read online

  I’d been raised Presbyterian by a mother with agnostic leanings and a father who tried to spend every Sunday he could out of town “on business.” When my mother started getting suspicious, he converted to Judaism so he could ostensibly worship on Saturdays (often in hotel rooms).

  But once Mom saw I had the basics down (“A talking snake tricked a rib lady into eating bad fruit and that’s why women need epidurals for labor and it’s also why the world is jam-packed with sinners, but the baby born of a virgin who later came back as the Holiest of Zombies fixed it so anyone, no matter how skanky, can get to Heaven if they know the secret passwords.”) we hardly went anymore. Ironically, I had prayed to God a lot more after my death than before. I wondered if that was true of everyone or just vampires. It was really something to consider when you thought about it, a complicated—

  “Ow!”

  “Come on.” My sister had bequeathed the Ritual of Coffee and Nondairy Creamer to a scowling old man who looked like Mr. Burns after he’d been embalmed, then she’d crossed the room and sunk her fingers into my arm like it was Play-Doh and her nails were nails. “We can talk upstairs.”

  Upstairs was the nave, where the lectures/sermons were heard. It was gorgeous, as I found most churches to be (I had a thing for stained-glass windows; they really classed up a joint). The ceiling was quite high, at least two stories, so every footstep and whisper echoed, and the place smelled old and clean, like a library when someone had cleaned the shelves with Pine-Sol just a few hours earlier. The only person who hadn’t bolted for fellowship to nom-nom-nom some brownies was an elderly lady with stacks of programs, which she was sorting at a small table at the rear of the room. What was it with church programs and how there are always at least a hundred left? Gotta give the church props for optimism. She nodded at the Antichrist, who smiled back, then returned to her sorting.

  We went to the front, just a few feet from the altar, and my butt had barely settled on the pew before she rounded on me.

  “What do you think you’re doing, coming here of all places and at all times? This is very inappropriate!” This from the woman who had killed, and/or tried to kill, almost every vampire she’d ever met (including me), as well as the occasional serial killer.

  “There are, what? At least five hundred churches in Minnesota?”

  “Thousands,” was the dry response.

  “So why does whatever it is you’re up to—”

  “Repenting sin and asking for forgiveness?”

  “And for brownies, yeah. So why do you have to do that here? Heck, Hastings has a dozen churches, but why this town and this church?”

  “Because your husband contaminated this church with his filth.”

  “Are you talking about his money, or did he whiz in the corner during prayer circle?”

  “Don’t make fun.” Her mouth turned down and for a few seconds she looked like the sad kid picked last for kickball. Dammit! I didn’t have time to feel sorry for the Antichrist!

  “Okay, okay. Just . . . help me understand your thought process. So because Sinclair—whom you’ve never liked, but that’s okay, he’s not on Team Antichrist, either—has started going to this church again, his dead family’s church, suddenly you need to be here, too?”

  “No one forced him to become a vampire,” she snapped back. “Quite the opposite: he demanded Tina turn him.”

  “Yeah, to avenge his dead family.”

  She waved that away. Poof, buh-bye, Sinclair’s dead family, we’ve got more important things to obsess over. “The fact that you’ve found some undead loophole so he could return doesn’t mean he should be here.”

  Well, that was fair. It was a loophole. Before I’d killed her, Satan had granted me a wish (that was when I started to suspect it wasn’t so much that I’d killed her as she’d let herself die). I’d been tempted to go with what’s the secret ingredient that makes Orange Juliuses so delish? but came to my senses and went with let Sinclair live in the light again.

  But! “You’re wrong about the second one. He’s got every right to be here, more than any of us. His grandfather rebuilt this church way back when . . . when there was a fire? Or something? There’s probably Sinclair rules! from a hundred years ago scratched on a wall or under a pew around here.”

  “Lord, I hope not,” she muttered. Couldn’t tell if she was blaspheming or actually praying. “This church is where your husband and I talked, and it’s where I got my Great Idea.” Great Idea. You could hear the caps.6

  “Uh-huh.” I’d been here five minutes and still hadn’t gotten to the crux of it. I knew why. I didn’t really want to know what Laura Goodman was up to. At all. “So, speaking of great ideas that probably aren’t, what’s this about you trying to out vam—”

  “I’ll definitively prove there is a God!”

  “—pires to the— What?”

  She nodded at me with a big smile that wasn’t scary at all. “I’m going to prove there’s a God. Prove it to the world.”

  I just sat there and tried to let that seep into my brain. It was so far from what Sinclair and I had assumed she was up to, but I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.

  There she sat, my half sister, Laura Goodman (subtle, fates or God or whoever), dressed in her Sunday best (she had a horror of people who wore jeans to church): a high-necked pink blouse, a rose-colored knee-length skirt, cream-colored tights, chunky black loafers. Chunky loafers were what women wore in the winter when the weather wasn’t bad enough for boots or good enough for pumps. Laura’s were especially hideous, like lumps of tires fashioned into a vague shoe shape. We had a few things in common; our fashion sense wasn’t one of them.

  Besides, she was so irritatingly, thoroughly gorgeous, she could have been wearing newspapers. Light blond hair halfway down her back, perfect fair complexion with a natural rosy blush, big blue eyes that went poison green when she was angry, or murderous, or murderously angry.

  Nobody ever looked at Laura Goodman and thought, Spawn of Satan? Oh, sure. Knew it the minute I laid eyes on her.

  I stopped pondering her annoying good looks and managed, “Could you say that again, please?”

  “You cheated me of my birthright.”

  “No, no, the other thing.” So not in the mood for the “Satan and I tricked you into running Hell but now I want to bitch about the consequences” chat. I’d warned her at the time that getting your own way was often as much a curse as it was a blessing. See: Sinclair’s life, death, and afterlife; also mine, the Ant finally landing my father, and anyone who voted for Hitler back in the day.

  “This is the other thing,” she corrected. “You want the background, don’t you?”

  Not really.

  “I can’t do what I was born to do—”

  “Be effortlessly gorgeous while sitting in judgment on pretty much everybody as you ignore your own sins?”

  Her lips thinned but she continued. “But I can do this. I can bring faith to the world.”

  “How?”

  “Any way I can.” She leaned forward, warming to her subject. Leaning away from her would probably be interpreted as unfriendly. Maybe I could pretend I didn’t want to catch her cold. If she had one. And if I could still catch colds. “Lectures, videos, websites. I already started a few while I was waiting for you to get back.” Was there a tiny hint of reproach in her tone? No. I decided there wasn’t, because if there was, I’d have to slap the shit out of her with a hymnal. “So I’ve been preparing the ground, so to speak, talking about our adventures and Hell and such while waiting for you.”

  “That’s why Sinclair thinks the plan is to show the world vampires exist,” I said, thinking out loud.

  She shrugged. “Yes, I imagine his undead spies keep him well-informed.” When I raised my eyebrows she added, “Yes, he called me a couple of times, but I’m not obligated to explain myself to him.” Adding in a
mutter, “I don’t know how he keeps getting my number . . .”

  “So he was tipped off after he heard about the ‘Betsy and Laura: Time-Travelin’ Cuties’ show.” God, Marc would have a field day with this . . .

  “What, every other sinner can have a YouTube channel but I can’t?”

  “Um . . .” Stay focused. I was already envisioning the conversation my husband and I would have: Good news! She’s not outing vamps. There’s a teeny bit of bad news, though. Why don’t you lie down while I tell you about her Great Idea . . .

  Meanwhile she was obliviously babbling. “I’d be different from the regular preachers . . . they’re talking about faith, which is all well and good for someone who isn’t us. I can offer proof. Look what just you and I have seen in . . . what? Less than four years? I always believed in Him, and I think you did, too—your mother failed you in your teenage years but she did make sure you went to Sunday school long enough to—”

  “Do not say one

  (church you’re in church)

  dang word against my mother.”

  Laura cut herself off and even flushed a little. “You’re right. That was inappropriate. I like your mom.”

  “I know you do.” I had to shake my head at my little sister’s many dichotomies. Skirts in church and brownies in the basement when not plotting to dump Hell on the vampire queen and murdering random serial killers. Genuinely fond of my mom—she called her Dr. Taylor and occasionally stopped in just to chat or to play with our half brother, BabyJon—but wouldn’t shed a tear at my funeral. Blithely ready to shove God onto the world whether the world wants it or not, but gets embarrassed when called out for being rude.

  “You were telling me,” I prompted without grimacing or clutching my temples, “about your Great Idea.” God, now I was using the caps. At least it wasn’t pronounced in all caps, like when fifty-somethings or thirteen-somethings got on social media for the first time and felt every post had to be a scream.

  “Okay, so you always believed in Him, but before your—uh, unfortunate death—it was strictly faith. And I had faith without proof until my thirteenth birthday, when Mother appeared and explained my destiny. Then I knew. And we can help everyone know. We’ve time traveled; we’ve seen Hell; my mother was the devil; you’re the new devil! We know the Bible’s right, we can tell people! We can save everybody!”7

  “Why . . . why would we do that?” Was she talking about us going on some sort of . . . lecture circuit of the damned? Would we be copresenters, or would it be her show and I’d be trotted out like the miniature elephant in Jurassic Park: Look what we made! Give us money and we’ll make more! (The book, not the movie. I loved that stupid dwarf elephant. The scientists should have skipped the dinosaurs and just engineered a huge park of thousands of dwarf elephants. If they escaped, it’d be annoying but also adorable.) “Laura?”

  “Why wouldn’t we do that?” she replied, puzzled. She was leaning toward me, our hands were almost touching, she was as friendly and excited as I’d seen her in weeks. Our last meeting

  (“I’ll take over your job, your destiny, the one you tricked me into and lied to get out of. But there are strings, Laura. You don’t get to dump this on me and walk away without major strings. I’m giving you the same deal I gave our dad: we’re family or we’re not. This isn’t something you can change your mind about later. And you can’t half-and-half it, either. No flitting down to Hell to check on me, or catch up on family gossip . . . If you’re giving up your birthright and dumping your responsibility on me, then do it, and do it all the way.

  “You’re done, you’re out. Hell’s not your inheritance anymore, it’s not yours in any way anymore and that means everything that comes with it. You don’t get to jettison the responsibility but keep the perks . . . If I see you in Hell, I’m going to assume you’re dead.”)

  hadn’t been so pleasant. Was she—was she trying to forge a new relationship with me? Was setting up the “We Can Prove God Exists” lecture series her way of reconciling herself to what she’d lost? Was she regretting her choices less than a month after she had made them, or was this the plan all along?

  “I’ve barely started, and I wanted to tell you right away—”

  Really?

  “—but you’ve been gone.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know!”

  “You actually managed to make me being in Hell, doing your job, sound like a character flaw, or like I was rude to keep your Great Idea waiting. I can’t even figure out the time thing between dimensions—”

  “Conjure up a row of clocks, like in a brokerage firm.”

  “—when I was—well, yes, that was Marc’s suggestion and it’ll probably work, but it’s not like I was off having fun!” Although listening to Dame Washington bitch about her kid had been pretty entertaining . . . and pissing off all the teens and twenty-somethings with my No Tweets rule (and confusing everyone else over fifty: “What’s tweets?”) had also been fun . . .

  I forced a calming breath (focus!) and decided to go with the least complicated objection first.

  “Never mind where I was or for how long or why I had to be there in the first place. I’m here now, right? And the thing is, about your Great Idea, our word isn’t proof.” I said it as nicely as I could, and not just because showing the world our trials and tribulations had zero appeal. In a future that will never come to pass, I ruled the world. And it was a huuuge downer. What little I’d seen of the other, ancient, grumpy, zombie-raising, Sinclair-killing me had been more than enough. I wouldn’t revisit it. And since I could time travel from Hell, I meant that figuratively and literally. There was no way to prove the good (Heaven is a real possibility!) without dredging up the bad (vampires take over the world!). “People don’t know who we are, and they shouldn’t, Laura.”

  She ignored this, so the bright-eyed enthusiasm continued unabated. “There are enough of us who know the truth; if we combine forces we can reach millions!”

  Sure, but so could Taylor Swift, and any Kardashian. In this day and age, reaching millions wasn’t unheard of . . . and oh boy, I hoped that wasn’t her point. That if ordinary mortals

  (sometimes I miss being an ordinary mortal)

  could make their presence known with just a video or a silly trick on YouTube, if the “Leave Britney alone!” guy and the ice bucket challenge could go global, the Antichrist and the queen of the vampires could, too.

  “Once we convince the rest of the world, things would change overnight! No more wars, no more murders.”

  Oh boy. She was only a few years younger than me and I felt every day of those years now. “People not knowing if there’s a God is not what causes murders and wars,” I said carefully, because she was glowing like a zealot-turned-lightbulb. “At least, not all the time. Anymore. General dickishness causes wars. Money causes wars.” I recalled one of my favorite lines from Gone with the Wind: All wars are in reality money squabbles. “I promise you, Laura. I promise. There will always be war and murder because there will always be assholes. They are not an endangered species. Even if every single person on the planet converted to Christianity, there’d still be crime.”

  She waved away war and murder and crime with a small, long-fingered hand. “We can quibble about the details later. Say you’ll help me with this.”

  “You mean in addition to being the queen of the vampires—”

  “Sinclair is perfectly capable of overseeing the vampire nation.”

  “—and running Hell—”

  “You’ve made a committee, and even if you hadn’t, Hell will run itself if you leave it alone.”

  I— Wow. Okay. Wow.

  “What’s the pitch, exactly? Assuming you could prove God’s existence? We somehow prove it and hey presto, everyone in the world becomes a Christian?”

  “Sure.”

  When I was little I’d wait for the bus
with a bunch of neighborhood kids. And after the first big frost, we’d kill time by easing across puddles that looked frozen, but weren’t—or at least, not all the way through. We’d inch across, freezing and giggling at every crack! Best case, you made it across and the kids gave you props. Worst case, you broke the ice and soaked your shoes, which was unpleasant but not fatal.

  Well, I felt like I was inching across a puddle that was bottomless. Like if I put a foot wrong I’d fall down so deep no one would ever find me. It looked safe enough . . . but probably wasn’t . . . and if I put one foot wrong . . .

  “Hell being a thing doesn’t mean every other religion is wrong.”

  Laura just looked at me.

  I sighed. “I get it. You’ve decided Hell being a thing does mean every other religion is wrong.”

  “We know the devil is real, ergo God is real, ergo Jesus is real.” At my expression, she plowed ahead with, “It’s not arrogance. I’m not saying it’s what I think. It’s what we know.”

  “But that doesn’t mean other things aren’t real. You’re like someone who’s red/green color-blind and thinks that just because you can’t see them it means red and green don’t exist.”

  “Your analogies are starting to suck less,” she said grudgingly.

  “Thank you!” Ugh, I was always so pleased when she complimented me. It was the dark side of being Miss Congeniality, the thing they don’t tell you at the pageant rehearsals. “Listen, Hell and the devil being real doesn’t disprove Allah and Buddha and, uh, Mohammed and Zeus and, uh—” Why hadn’t I taken a single religious studies course before I flunked out of the U of M?