Undead and Unstable (30 page)

Authors: MaryJanice Davidson

Infant Me was gone. Infant Laura was gone. My (live!)
husband also. I was still here, but not for much longer: it was time for me to be gone, too.

But I wanted to savor this feeling, I wanted to savor the emotion I was enduring for the first time in centuries: I was afraid.

Time to go back, and yet I lingered. I wasn’t worried about the ’port … centuries studying at Lucifer’s knee, and then Laura’s, so to speak, had left me almost as skilled as she was. Would be.

But when I went back to my time, what in the world/worlds would I find?

I had not killed the Lady of Lies, my sister’s mother. But she was dead by my hand.

Jessica had not lived to have children, and I, of course, had killed Nick for what he had done to her, and never mind that it had been a senseless accident. But he had done nothing to her here, and she would have children, a miracle I could still hardly believe. Interesting that in a life filled with vampires and weres and Undersea Folk, portents and spells and magic, that a rather ordinary occurrence, a normal, nonparanormal pregnancy, seemed wondrous to me. Although on reflection there did seem something odd about her gestation. A problem for the other me, another time.

I
had
killed my husband. Except he wasn’t dead. And though I had no certainty Sinclair wouldn’t die years from now, without the BoD warning him, we would not have fallen out. It wasn’t the coming ice age that would wipe the globe of human locusts, but humanity’s overreaction to it. Globally speaking, few worried about the steadily dropping temps until the first of the catastrophic crop losses began. Bad growing season followed worse growing season and only when millions had starved to death (in Texas and Maine and Kentucky and Florida and Wyoming), only then did humanity act. Or over-react. They meant to
carpe
the
diem,
not
morte
the
diem,
but guess what?

Sinclair reacted to my plan with horror. But how else to save the remains of a starving nation than fix it so those millions didn’t need to eat? Or pee or bleed? And when the newly dead rose, who best to lead them? The ones who had led for centuries, of course. It wasn’t megalomania, no matter what my husband declared. It was logic.

Sinclair disagreed. A lot. And so he died. Except maybe this time…

Somehow Infant Me had changed things. I had no idea how. I barely knew why: she saw the end, not why it had to be so. It was the reaction of a child: fix it, Mommy! And like a child who didn’t understand what was impossible, perhaps she—
we
—had.

Time to go back. Time to go home. What was waiting for me?
Who
was waiting for me? I felt a bit like that movie character from ages back—Sarah Connor. For the first time in a long time, I hadn’t read ahead. I didn’t have the dubious comfort of foreknowledge. The instruction book hadn’t been lost, or even destroyed: now there had never been a Book of the Dead.

I was afraid.

I was happy.

And beyond everything, beyond all the miracles, I dared to dare to hope: was it possible I was returning to a world where, once, Christian Louboutin had designed the most glorious shoes in the history of footgear? Could God be that good?

Time to find out. I was going home.

I had to lie to get out of the house, of course. I told Sinclair
I wanted to hit the Blue Wednesday pre-Thanksgiving sales at the Mall of America. Anyone who has ever shopped at any time in America, ever, knows there’s no such thing as Blue Wednesday, just Black Friday. But the vampire king was too busy setting up lawn chairs on the south side of the yard so he could sunbathe in thirty-degree temps to care where I flitted off to. When I left he had the lawn chairs arranged to his satisfaction, and was sorting through the half dozen pairs of sunglasses he’d dashed out to get after our snow/stairs/sex shenanigans.

Delk still wasn’t home from his book tour (that was a fish to fry for another day, and fry I would … just not this week), but his dog sitter was. I cheated a bit and mojo’d her into selling, but I was paying what the dogs were worth and then some, and Delk would never miss two pups out of a thousand. Or however many blobs o’ fur were lurking on the Delk puppy farm. From the way they liked to swarm my ankles, there were at least a hundred of the things.

I gave her a check and left contact info for Delk in case he wanted to talk, and she gave me leashes attached to small black dogs. I tucked each one under an arm like fuzzy wiggly footballs and took them to the car, picking my way through gravel and snow while Fur and Burr squirmed and yapped in my grasp.

“It must be Betsy Makes Tons of Sacrifices week,” I muttered at the two blobs of black fur. “This is so nuts. They’ll be in my house. My
house
. There’ll be no escape.” As I pulled out of the driveway and headed home, Burr relieved herself in the backseat, and I knew I’d been right to take Sinclair’s Mustang. Not only could he fully care for dogs again, but he could wash his car in the driveway at high noon if he wanted. As Fur begin nibbling on the leather piping, I figured he’d want to get on that pretty quickly.

“That’ll learn him to leave me to fend for myself on the porch while a thousand of your fuzzy brethren are chasing me in my own yard while I’m trying to bury the dead cat my zombie friend is cutting up so he doesn’t rot,” I told Fur and Burr, who took a few seconds from their peeing/chewing to look at me with their big dark eyes and yap in shrill response.

Aw. Okay. They
were
kind of cute. In a slobbery incontinent way. But it wasn’t about me; Fur and Burr were about cold cruel vengeance. My wrath would go forth into the world as black lab puppies! Beware, beware, the heck-bound puppies come for
thee
!

You’d think the king of the vampires, of all people, would catch on: you don’t mess with the vampire queen.

Table of Contents