MaryJane Davidson - Undead and Unwelcome

It should have been over.

But it wasn’t. We’d earned a temporary respite, that was all.

Between Marc and Sinclair, they pulled enough strings to get the wounded to the hospital without us having to fill out reams of paperwork or answer unanswerable questions. Not for the first time I appreciated being married to a rich man who knew people . . . not to mention having Dr. Spangler as a roommate.

Sinclair carried Laura to the room she’d been staying in and laid her on the bed. She was going to have an unattractive shiner, but Marc checked her over and pronounced her merely unconscious.

We still had no idea where Tina was, so I stayed in the room listening to Laura’s soft breathing, waiting for her to wake up.

After about half an hour, her eyes opened and she stared at the ceiling, then at me.

“Welcome back.”

“Is it true?” she asked hoarsely, and I realized with a stab of pity that she was afraid. “Did my mother have something to do with all this?”

“Yeah, Laura. It’s true.”

“I was so sure it was a good plan, the right plan. Instead of running from those—those people, I thought I was—oh, Betsy! How am I ever supposed to know what’s my idea, and what’s part of her plan for me?”

The time was past for comforting lies. “I don’t know.”

“I’d rather be dead than be her puppet.”

“Can’t we find a happy medium between those two?”

She suddenly seemed to notice my ruined suit, the blood, my mussed hair, the way I was covered with bits of soot, wallpaper, and plaster.

Her face crumpled and she clapped her hands over her eyes. I leaned forward, grasped her wrists, and gently pulled her hands away from her face.

“Come on, Laura. It’s not fatal. This is why God invented dry cleaners. Also, it’s going to be really, really awkward between us for a while. It might even ruin Christmas.”

My lame-​ass joke fell flat—deservedly so—and Laura burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” she managed, pulling free of my grip. “I’m just so, so sorry.”

She rested her forehead on my shoulder and I stroked her (blond) hair while she sobbed all over my already filthy suit. “It’s all right, Laura. We’ll figure it out. Come on, enough with the waterworks.”

“I could have killed you.”

“But you didn’t.” You just killed a bunch of my people. But I’d have to address that later. I wasn’t looking forward to it, that was for damned sure. “You let me hurt you—punch you out like we were brawlers in a Western—rather than killing me. You know what that makes you?”

“No.”

“One of the good guys. Your white hat is in the mail.”

“No, it’s not,” she said again, and wept harder.

Traffic was light at this time of night, and Sinclair rode the gas pedal like he was in the race of his life. Which wasn’t far off.

In next to no time (objectively, subjectively it seemed to take a week), we were at Laura’s apartment in Dinkytown, opening the door to the spare bedroom.

Marc, Sinclair, and I all stared. Laura was studiously not staring.

Finally I said, “Devil worshippers brought a coffin up here and nobody noticed?”

Laura shrugged. I moved forward and stripped the crosses off the coffin, off the inside door handle, and the windows—no wonder Tina had disappeared from the picture so completely. The crosses were more effective than bear traps.

I popped the top off of the second coffin in the same week. “Hey, Tina? Rise and shine, it’s time to—gggkkk!”

Tina’s hands had shot up and out and she was briskly strangling me while I gurgled and grabbed her wrists. “Help me, you idiots,” I choked, which seemed to break the spell . . . Marc and Sinclair both sprang forward to prevent Tina from snapping me in half.

The perfect end to a perfect week.

They pulled her off me and Sinclair helped her sit up. She was terribly wasted, terribly old, but I knew some blood would fix her right up. She kept beating her withered hands at Sinclair’s shoulders and trying to speak.

“Be calm, Tina.”

“Yeah, be calm already,” I added. “We’ll take care of you.”

“Laura,” she whispered, so faintly I had to strain to hear. “You have to watch out for Laura.”

“They know,” Laura said, staring at her shoes.

Then Sinclair and Marc and I had our hands full keeping Tina from ripping out my sister’s throat and taking a shower in the blood.

Oh, come on, you guys.” Everyone but Laura was in our kitchen . . . it was the next evening, and I didn’t think Tina was going to not try to kill my sister anytime soon. And who could blame her? Laura had tricked her, trapped her, and starved her. Something other than a Hallmark card was definitely called for. “We won! The bad guys are vanquished. Why so glum?”

Sinclair was giving Marc his “you idiot” stare, but Marc was so happy we were all back home he was overlooking a few things.

Sure, we had friends among the werewolves now . . . including Michael and Jeannie, which was quite a coup. I could practically hear Sinclair trying to figure out how to turn their goodwill to our advantage.

And yes, we’d found out BabyJon was no ordinary baby—which was a great relief, given our dangerous lifestyles. If he was going to be raised by vampires, it was excellent that he couldn’t be hurt by them.

The vampires Laura and her minions had killed were all pretty bad characters . . . Sinclair and Tina knew each and every name, and couldn’t deny the planet was better off without those particular undead walking around.

However, the ends don’t justify, etcetera.

Worse, I didn’t think Laura had learned her lesson. She had never regretted killing the vamps, she only regretted hurting me. There was still work ahead.

The only thing worse?

She threw the fight. She let me win. Let me. Which meant she could probably kill me whenever she wanted. If the devil decided to whisper in the wrong ear again, I could be in very serious trouble.

But even if that never happened (ha!), I had discovered something knew and awful about my sister.

Despite my earlier assurance, Laura wasn’t necessarily a good guy. In fact, I was pretty sure she was the worst kind of bad guy. She was a bad guy who thought she was a good guy.

I was normally pretty sanguine about the future, but I wasn’t going to be able to relax for a while.

I didn’t think any of us were.

Dude,

This will be my last entry for a while. I think part of the reason I wrote so much this week was because Sinclair and Betsy weren’t here, and it helped fill my days.

They’re back now, and things are sort of back to normal. Tina’s still not speaking to Laura. Laura’s avoiding all of us. BabyJon apparently has superpowers. And Betsy doesn’t seem quite so bubbleheaded.

Only Sinclair is the same: cool, calculating, untroubled. Thank God he loves Betsy—I’d hate to think what would happen to us if he didn’t.

Meeting the devil—that was a new one for me, even for the funhouse we all live in.

I can’t get what she said out of my head.

So I’m going to call my dad tonight. Maybe even go see him.

The devil might have told me he knew my secret to fuck me up, and that’s fine—that’s the devil’s job.

I plan to use the information to make my life—and maybe my dad’s—a little better.

That ought to fix that rotten bitch. And hey, Satan, since you’re so busy watching me, let me be the first to say: not even those Vera Wangs can hide the fact that Lena’s got better ankles than you.