Undead and Unstable (17 page)

“Well, great. Thanks for the road trip to the past, we’ve got it all under control—”

“Ha.”

“So run along or drop dead again or whatever it is you do when you’re not stealing my clothes and sneaking around resurrecting my friends.”

“Satan is afraid of you.”

“And saying stuff like
that
! Stop it, will you?” I was tempted to beg. And shoot her. Or shoot her and then beg. Or just shoot her. A lot. In the forehead. A lot.

“Don’t you find that at all interesting?”

“More annoying, I bet, than interesting,” Marc volunteered.

“When I was you, I didn’t truly understand the breadth and width of my power. I was constantly underestimating myself. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d been my own biggest obstacle all along.”

“What a lovely story,” I said with
faux
admiration. “Does it end with you coughing up blood?”

“They’re tools.”

“What? Are you talking about actual tools, like the screwdriver, or are you being insulting again?”

She glanced at the ceiling as if praying for help from a higher power. “Try to pay attention. Your abilities. The strength, the speed, the fast healing. Those are the tools that can save you—and him, and them—but without the skill and experience to back it up, they’re tools that could get you killed. Get them killed.”

“You’re the tool that could get you killed.” Okay … immature, but so satisfying. Though I could see her point. How many times had I hesitated, or not even known what to do, because I was a thirty-year-old unemployed secretary who’d never taken a martial arts class?

“Until you have the experience, you have to look to your strengths. You do have some, you know.”

Marc was nodding like Ancient Betsy was making sense. “You need a Yoda! A vampire Yoda.”

“I can’t think of anything I need less. I really can’t.” Herpes flare-up? IRS audit? Both were better options than fuzzy undead Yodas cluttering up my mansion, and also my psyche.

“You aren’t suggesting I become her vampire Yoda?”

“Um…”

“No,” she and I said in perfect appalled unison.

“Don’t get your fangs in a twist. It was just a thought.”

“A dreadful one.” She sucked down half her milk in three gulps. “Ahhh. I miss fresh milk.” She looked up at us, then at Marc. “You look pretty good for a shambling zombie nearly a week dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Want to know why?”

“Uh …
yeah
.”

“It’s probably a trick,” I warned him. “Don’t trust her. Remember the Marc Thing!”

“What Marc became was as much his fault as mine,” she snapped. She made another of those visible efforts to calm down. “It’s because she loves you…” Pointing at (ulp!) me. “And she’s close.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Me, neither, and I’m supposed to be the neighborhood expert in this stuff.”

“Pity the neighborhood.”

“Cow!”

“Dolt.”

“Ladies! C’mon. What are you talking about, Ancie—um, Elizabeth?”

She sighed, as if greatly put upon. It was all for show, though … she didn’t have to breathe, much less let out with the long-suffering sigh. “As long as you’re in general proximity with her, as long as she loves you, you’ll always be freshly dead. As in seconds dead … maybe only half a second dead. You’ve noticed you can think and feel, right? You’re keeping busy … staying occupied. So you’re not decomposing. But if you were to, say, move to London, you’d start deteriorating. Always rotting, never all-the-way dead. If she ever decided you were more trouble than you’re worth, however, if she no longer subconsciously values you, the rot steps up.”

While Marc mulled that over, I asked, “But that poor zombie from the future … she was a mess.” She sure had been. And Ancient Me used zombies for slave labor in the future. Raised the dead and put them to work. Sweatshops! Of zombies!

She shrugged. “Well. I didn’t know that woman. I didn’t care about her. Why should it matter if she’s a shambling mess, as long as the work gets done?”

“And just like that, I start not liking you again,” Marc said, giving her a cold stare.

Ancient Betsy took it pretty well, I figured, since she yawned in response. “As I said earlier, which I will reiterate because you have the attention span of a fruit fly, I’m waiting. I’ll know when it’s time to leave. Until then, you’ll have to put up with me.”

“Want to bet?” I snapped.

“Uh, Betsy … Betsys … this is no time for a catfight. Or a vampire queen fight. Especially since it seems like you’ve got some of the same goals.”

“Barf.”

“I suppose.” She drank the rest of her milk, then studied her empty glass for a moment, and asked in a surprisingly diffident tone, “When is Jessica due?”

“Next—” Marc began.

“None of your fucking business.”

My venom didn’t seem to bother her at all. Of course not. She’d dealt with much worse. She usually
was
what was much worse. “She’s happy, though? With that man?”

“Sure.”
“That man”?

“I didn’t expect that,” she said in such a low voice, I had the impression she was talking to herself more than us. “That’s … nice. It’s really nice.” She looked at me again, and her eyes lost that look Sinclair had immediately noticed. For a second it was like I was looking at me, and not a shark with my face. “You’ve got to figure it out. You’ve got to fix it … I don’t want to go back to that.”

“You get that you’re not the victim here, right?”

She didn’t rise to it. Just looked at me with eyes exactly like mine and near whispered, “Please help me. Please help yourself.” She didn’t even flinch when the glass exploded between her fingers, just looked at the mess of shattered glass splinters and milk and a little bit of her sluggish vamp blood. “Damn.”

“Let me take a look,” Marc said, extending his hand. He’d said it with such authority that even as she let him grab her by the wrist, she looked bemused. “Huh. Not too bad. Let’s get it rinsed out first.”

“I’ll be fine. You must know that.”

“Humor the Walking Dead Doc, willya? This is the perfect way for me to keep busy. It’s not like if I fuck up I could do any real damage to you.”

“How comforting,” she said wryly, but suffered herself to be pulled to her feet, and obediently followed him to the bathroom down the hall, the one with the first aid kit.

Then I was in the kitchen by myself, with toaster innards all over the table and a mess of glass splinters and milk.

What just happened?

TWENTY-NINE

“So she managed to stop being evil for three seconds and
begged you to help her?” Jessica was strolling beside me down the aisle, popping green grapes into her mouth. “Weird. Or a trick. Or a weird trick.”

“Tell me,” I said gloomily. “I think I like Wrinkly Me better when she’s being an imperious asshat.”

“Glad I was napping and missed it.”

Say it twice, honey
. “Yeah. I sort of wish
I’d
missed it.”

“Nope. That’s why you get all the queen perks.” She popped another grape into her mouth. “Comes with the job.”

“Oh, perks? Is that what those are?” I reached out a hand and tumbled two cans of cranberry jelly into our cart. “Perks, my luscious white butt.”

“Don’t make me think about your butt. No, not that kind. Get the real stuff.”

I eyed the two cans rolling around with the can of sweet potatoes. “That is the real stuff.”

“Cranberries are not can-shaped.
Ergo
, those aren’t proper cranberries.”

I thought about running her down with the cart, then reconsidered. Probably couldn’t displace her mass with one measly grocery cart, anyway. “I’m hanging on by a thread here, Jess. A goddamn thread.”

“Oh, here we go.”

“I’ve gotta keep Zombie Marc occupied while Decrepit Me is slumming in her past for mysterious reasons she won’t explain while you’re furiously gestating, Sinclair’s hiding from me so I don’t accidentally skin him and then write on him, Nick keeps changing his name, I stupidly decided to host Thanksgiving, my mom’s dating a guy who looks like a giant baby, and I haven’t seen my brother-slash-foster son in days and don’t dare let him anywhere near the mansion right now. A goddamn thread!”

“Canned cranberries are lame.”

“Canned cranberries are the only thing I like about Thanksgiving.” I whipped two more cans into the cart. “Canned cranberries are the only thing letting me hang on to the shreds of my so-called sanity.”

“At least buy real sweet potatoes.”

“Canned sweet potatoes are real, you enormous harpy!”

She shook the bag of grapes, now half empty, at me. “Are you trying to make me body conscious? I’m creating life here.”

“Yeah, listen, that reminds me. There’s no way in heck you can be due next summer.”

“Sure I can.”

“Jessica. Seriously. Look at you—and I say this with love—but look at you. You’re huge!”

“Maybe I got my dates mixed up.” She shrugged. Gulp, gulp, and more grapes disappeared down her gullet. What the heck … if she didn’t care, then I didn’t, either. She probably did have her dates mixed up, what with all the weirdness that had been in our lives the last few years.

“This is the kind of thing we need to put on the spreadsheet.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Never mind, we’ll talk about it later. Because right now, I’ve got bigger problems.” I glanced at her belly. Bigger emotionally, not bigger physically, clearly… “Oooch over, I gotta grab a turkey.”

“Do you even know how to make a turkey?”

“God makes turkeys, not me. I know how to cook ’em, though.” I’d gone through a Martha Stewart phase after I dropped out of college. Jessica (who’d been majoring in psych at the time) explained that I was trying to control my environment, since I felt so out of control after getting kicked out. I mean, dropping out.

I also knew how to make “real” cranberry sauce, but then found out the real stuff is overrated. Who wants to spend the night picking cranberry skins out of your teeth? Blurgh. A wiggly can-shaped pile of cranberry jelly was the way to go.

“Oh, come on! A Butterball?”

“It’s a turkey, Jess. We need one. And here’s a bunch of ’em.” I pawed through the frozen carcasses. “Let’s see, you’re supposed to figure on a pound per person, except the dead people won’t eat. So … um … Nick/Dick, and my mom, and BabyJon (but he’s barely onto solid foods), and you’ll eat about nine pounds, but Sinclair and Marc and Garrett and I won’t, so that’s … um…” Math had never been a go-to skill of mine. Did I forget to carry the 1? “… um…”

“Not a Butterball. At least get a fresh one. Or maybe kosher?”

“To get a fresh one would mean I would have decided two weeks ago to host T’giving, ordered a fresh one, and in general be an organized, responsible person. What, out of anything you’ve seen since we were in junior high, would suggest—”

“Right. Sorry. But Butterballs are so dry and boring.”

“Turkey is dry and boring; don’t blame the brand. Stop being a rich snob.” Given that she
was
rich, I almost never had to say that. Jessica lived in skinny jeans (long before they were trendy, and now again after they weren’t) and T-shirts. We used to share a duplex in Apple Valley, and shopped at discount grocery stores like Cub and Rainbow.

She could have bought a new Ferrari every month once she passed her driver’s license exam, but stuck with fuel-efficient four-doors like Toyota Camrys and Ford Fusions. The only reason she picked the mansion was because our old house had termites, and she figured a vampire queen should have a den, a basement lair, multiple guest rooms for entertaining, and a huge attic occasionally infested with zombies.

“I’m not being a snob. I’m pretty sure. I’m just trying to be superhealthy for the baby.”

“Or babies.” Triplets would explain the gut. So would septuplets.

“Baby,” Jessica corrected firmly.

I grabbed a 10-pound turkey and dropped it into the cart. My cart was pissing me off—one of those sneaky carts that seem fine at first, but then you find out one of the wheels sticks, so you have to pay attention or you’ll run into—

“Sorry,” I told the thirty-something woman steering one of those huge carts that lets the parent strap both kids into a big plastic contraption hooked up to the grocery cart. Nobody asked me, but wouldn’t it be easier to just leave the rug rats in a freezing cold car while you got the holiday shopping done? “Uh, Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah, right,” she replied with the exact right amount of tired despair. Here was a kindred spirit, between the Butterballs and the twenty-foot stuffing display. Which reminded me.

“Stove Top! Oh worse, Stove Top
Mushroom
? Come
on
, Bets. Are you trying to make this the least interesting meal ever?”

“It takes five minutes and nobody gives a shit, Jessica. This is not New England. This is Minnesota, and we’ve all got more important things to do than make homemade oyster stuffing with walnuts and, I dunno, Craisins.”

“Oooh. Craisins! That sounds good.”

I was slumped over my cart, resting my chin on the steering wheel and steering with my elbows. “The problem is, I don’t have a plan. I don’t even have a plan to come up with a plan. The only thing I see ahead is nothing.”