Undead and Unstable (5 page)

“Sure, but I’m always cold.” I instantly forgave him his asshat-ery. I tried not to take for granted the things I could do that no other vampire could, but I messed it up sometimes. Sure, I was constantly bitching to myself the whole time I was looking for shovels and racing away from a canine lynch mob, but at least I could go out. At least I could stand in a backyard during the day and ponder which tree to inter my cat beneath. At least I could be snuck up on by sneaky dumb dogs in broad daylight. At least I could feel the sun on my face and not burst into flames.

Sinclair, though … my husband was the strongest vampire I knew (also the sexiest, and most irritating), but he couldn’t do any of those things.

I’m not sure what you’re up to, God, but some of it seems pretty mean. Why don’t you lay off for a while?

I still prayed. Sure I did.

I just wasn’t sure anyone was listening anymore.

FIVE

After sulking for three hours and twenty minutes, I decided
Sink Lair should bang me. Because I realized that five minutes into my 3.20 sulk I was probably punishing myself more. So I begrudgingly accepted his apology, then let him fuck my brains loose.

That oughta learn him.

“Ummmm,” the vampire said sometime later.

“Yeah, what you said. Ummm, I agree. One of these days we’re gonna really hurt each other. Or break the bed again. Or not be paying attention and break the window again, and then fall out of the window. Again. Thank goodness the sun was down.” I shuddered … Jessica had had a complete hormonal meltdown over the broken window, claiming that The Belly That Ate the World would one day be playing in the yard, and she wouldn’t stand for him toddling over broken glass. No one dared argue, or point out that of course by then we’d have the glass cleaned up … no. Nope. We’d all fled, my husband leading the charge. Wise man. We were the king and queen of the undead, and we were scared to death of a skinny woman who was maybe 101 pounds dripping wet … when she wasn’t gestating, anyway.

“You’re still chilled.” He propped himself up on an elbow and stroked my back. I’d sort of passed out facedown right around the time my third orgasm raced through my limbs. Chilled? Numb? Satiated? Freaked? Still smelling dog? Yeah.

“I forgot. Or never noticed.” It could be either … since I’d died the first time, I was always cold. It was impossible to look sexy in wool knee socks, by the way. Scarlett Johansson could not look sexy in my navy and red striped wool socks. Which was all I was wearing right now. Sinclair bitched, to no avail. I would tolerate all kinds of nonsense, except having freezing cold feet during sex. “You did a good job trying to warm me up.”

His knuckles were stroking my spine. “Yes indeed. It was kind of you to cut your sul—”

“Careful,” I warned. “One of the parlors can still be turned into your permanent sleeping residence at half a moment’s notice.”

“—ah—your quiet time. Kind of you to cut it short by…” He squinted at his watch, the only thing he was wearing. “Two hours! What can I say, my own, but that I feel blessed.”

“Blessed. Sated. You say toe-mah-toe, I say drop dead.” I yawned into the pillow. “Stupid dogs.”

“Why were you out there at all?”

“Jess didn’t tell you? Giselle died.”

“Ah…”

“My cat.”

“Oh?” Sinclair hadn’t had much use for my antisocial (even for a cat) cat. She, natch, hadn’t much use for my dead husband. I doubt they’d even crossed paths in this place more than half a dozen times. “I’m … sorry?”

“Yeah, I’ll take that. She was a pet, if not a terribly beloved one.”

“Ah, but if memory serves, she is responsible for your journey from your world to mine.”

“Well … yeah. Except…” I thought about it for a minute. I’d been thinking about it, for a lot longer. Meanwhile, Sinclair was still stroking up and down my back, which was—there was no other word—delicious. “If I was supposed to be the vampire queen, if the Book of the Dead saw all this coming, I would have died, anyway, right around then—around my thirtieth birthday. Right? Because I was able to come back … the way I came back … you know, able to be in sunlight and not a total savage when it came to drinking blood…”

“Not a
total
savage,” he teased.

“The Fiends had already nibbled on me outside Khan’s—the Mongolian barbecue place on 494. They’d—infected me, I guess? So I would have died somehow right around then. Right? If I hadn’t tried to go after the cat in a snowstorm, I would have slipped while crossing against the light, or fallen down the stairs looking for the
TV Guide
and broken my neck, or gone off the road and frozen to death in a snowbank on the way to the Mall of America … right?”

“I imagine.” Sinclair looked a little appalled at how I’d reeled off all sorts of dumb ways to die. “Yes.”

“So no matter how it was gonna happen, it
was
gonna happen.”

“Yes.”

“So what chance do any of us have,” I griped, “if it’s all ordained? Except it’s not. Because Marc’s dead … and not vampire dead.
Dead
dead. And it’s all a mess, and I don’t know how to fix any of it.”

“My own, you must give yourself more credit. What Marc did, he did on his own. He chose it. And as wretched as it is to be in this house without him—”

Wretched? Wow. I knew my husband had liked Marc well enough, but was still surprised at the hole the big idiot left when he OD’d.

“—we must respect his choice. I know you wish to fix it, but perhaps this is the event you must leave alone. You have inadvertently changed the timeline once, and we have no real concept of what damage has or has not been done. I tell you in all truth, my queen, I fear what havoc you may wreak when you really set your mind to such things.”

“Anything sounds bad when you say it … say it like that.” I tried a smile and burst into tears instead, startling both of us.

“My dearest, my own queen, please don’t.” Sinclair hated it when I cried. For someone who tolerated multiple tragedies in life, and tons more
after
life, for someone who could take a bullet to the heart and come away from it only mildly irked, my husband went to pieces when I cried. He tended to have the Fred Flintstone reaction: “Who made ya cry? I’ll murder him in the head!” Sort of comforting and Neanderthal at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sobbing harder. “I didn’t know I was going to do this. Stupid cat! Stupid dogs!”

“I am sure your shoes are fine,” he soothed. “I let you in before the neighborhood pack could defile them.”

“It’s not that.” For once in my life, I didn’t give a tin shit about my shoes.

“I know,” he replied sadly. “A poor attempt to distract you. You must not do this to yourself, Elizabeth. Marc made his own choice. No one blames you.”

Wrong.
I
blamed me.

“I don’t know what to do. I want to fix it—but like you said, what if things get more fucked up? But I don’t like lying around like a coward, hoping things will just work themselves out. Because they
don’t
, Sinclair. They
get
worked out, y’know?”

“Yes.”

So I bitched and griped and cried, and my husband held me and soothed me, and the whole time I was thinking, thinking, thinking.

I wasn’t queen by accident. Some of this shit was supposed to happen. Just like some of it
wasn’t
supposed to happen. And letting Marc stay OD’d was at the top of my “not supposed to happen” list. He had killed himself to save himself … he had OD’d so he wouldn’t end up the Marc Thing, so he wouldn’t be an insane vampire five centuries down the line.

Okay, fine. So: figure out how to bring him back … and never, ever turn him into a vampire. Why did we think one thing precluded the other? Him
not
being dead only meant exactly that: he wasn’t dead. It didn’t promise he’d end up the Marc Thing. Besides, that had been in the old timeline. Which I’d changed, as my husband pointed out, without even trying.

So: what could I do when I
did
try?

Time to find out. Past time, frankly.

SIX

It’s funny … life can sneak up on you. Your own life can do
that. Because when you’re inside all the weird stressful awful things that are happening, you can’t see the big picture.

But when you finally realize, when you get a chance, a glimpse, to really see the mess you’ve made … it’s like it’s happening all over again, only more terrible because you can see that, bad as you thought it was before, it’s much, much worse when you see just how much wreckage is in the middle of your life.

Some of my friends were dead. Some of them didn’t remember me (or remember a different me) because I accidentally changed the timeline. Some of them were well on their way to insanity, and some of them never, ever wavered in their love and loyalty to me, not for a second. Not for a blink.

Stepping back, thinking about that … it’s so fucking depressing, you know?

Which brings me to milk-shake time.

“Smoothies aren’t going to do it,” I announced, heading for the freezer for my go-to staple: half a gallon of Breyers Vanilla Fudge Twirl. Predeath, my go-to had been Hershey bars with almonds, or my mom’s risotto. I had been a simple, uncomplicated girl. Once.

Adding to my annoyance (which had never been difficult, since I had always been a bitchy girl), I first had to haul out half a dozen bottles of Tina’s weird, weird vodkas before I could extract the Precious. Just reading the labels was enough to make me shudder, but I also had to handle the things: hot pepper, three olives (like one olive wasn’t vile enough), root beer (good God!), triple-shot espresso (so you could take something that will make you sleepy and spazz you out at the same time), Absolut LA (which boasted acai and blueberry, and thus was good for you, except for the fact that it was alcohol, which is
poisonous
), and plenty others too hideous to mention, all nestled together like some unholy frozen army of booze. No, wait … Three Olives was a brand, not a flavor. The flavor was tomato. Why, why had someone decided to invent flavored vodka?
This changed nothing!

Finally, after a nice crop of frostbite was no doubt gonna show up any second, I found my go-to and restacked all the booze … upside down, so Tina would have to reach in and haul each one out to check the flavor. Ha! More proof that it doesn’t pay to mess with the vampire queen. My wickedness and lust for cold-blooded vengeance were endless.

The door swung in, and there was Jessica. For a woman who claimed she couldn’t hear me when I tried to explain why it was perfectly okay for a woman in her last trimester to wear high heels, she had no trouble hearing the fridge or freezer open from several rooms, or blocks, away. “Oh boy,” she said, seeing the blender and ice cream. “Pretty serious, huh?”

“Yeah, so let me get to work and then we’ll have a family meeting.”

It was out before I realized I’d thought it, never mind said it. And it was fine. Better than fine: it was
right.
Family meeting. Well … yeah. If these guys weren’t my family, what was any of it for? Jessica had always been my sister, and Nick loved me (I was pretty sure … he didn’t hate and fear me, at least) because Jessica did, and I knew Tina loved me, too.

Maybe even Garrett, the Fiend formerly known as George, and his girlfriend, the bitchy werewolf Antonia, did. (What? She
was
a werewolf. And she was also bitchy. Grumpiest person I had ever, ever met. Because in death, I was fated to be surrounded by weirdos.)

For sure they liked me. I didn’t think that was my considerable vanity talking, either: they’d moved from their lives to our lives to hell and then back to our lives. Of course, I
did
rescue Antonia from hell, so maybe that’s why they were hanging around, but like I said, that prob’ly meant they liked me. Or at least didn’t loathe and fear me. (I’ll take it. Believe me. And how sad is that?)

As for Sink Lair, his love had never been in question, though I was too bubble-brained and pissed to catch on right away, or realize I loved him back with everything. So, yep, my husband absolutely loved me.