Undead 10, Undead and Undermined - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,12

rage. Her standard greeting (“What’s up, dumbasses?”) and her standard farewell (“Bye, losers.”).

“Right. Right! Good thinking, Garrett. You’re a man of few words and mucho brains in both universes. So, your dead wife is in hell. And you want to go get her, like an Orpheus thing?”

My husband’s eyebrows arched. “My love, you never cease to amaze. You know of Orpheus and Eurydice?”

“Duh, Sink Lair.”

“Wonderful,” he muttered. “Another dreadful holdover through both timelines?”

“Yeah, well, in both timelines you secret name is Sink Lair, and I’m a total badass when it comes to Greek mythology.”

“It’s true,” Jessica told N/Dick. “She’s won contests. She’s won Trivial Pursuit tournaments.”

“It’s fascinating, once you get over the ick factor of all of them marrying their brothers and sisters. And killing their dads. Anyway. So you want to go to hell to bring Antonia back here. Even though she’s dead.”

“You will fix it,” Garrett said firmly. I was both flattered and horrified by his faith in me. “You are the queen. And you also know Greek mythology.”

“And I agreed to this?”

“Yes.”

It sounded authentic. I wasn’t exactly known for my careful deliberation and cautious tactics. Assuming we could even find Antonia, could we bring a dead person out of hell and back to earth?

Never mind: I’d said I would do it. And I was a woman of my word in every universe, dammit. “Uh . . . so we, what? Pack a lunch? And then I, what? Summon Satan?”

Silence, though I could almost hear the clicking eyeballs as we all stared at each other. Nobody said anything. Which, for this group, was scary and weird.

After a long moment of stare downs: “Maybe you could just call the Antichrist on her cell first,” Jessica suggested.

“Yes! Excellent plan. Much better than sacrificing shoes.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said in my best I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it tone. Some things were just too painful to discuss, even with my best (fat) friend.

“And I am not fat!” she cried, reading my mind in the way only a best friend can, which never failed to make me feel cared for yet freaked out. Two people knew what I was thinking most of the time: one of them was the richest woman in Minnesota, and the other one was a dead farmer. These are the things I faced weekly, if not daily.

“Well, you certainly aren’t—ow!” I stared at Sinclair. “Did you . . . did you just grab my ear and yank?”

“I tripped,” the king of the vampires responded, suaver than usual.

“And your finger fell on my ear and pulled it?”

“If you were about to say ‘you certainly aren’t thin,’ then he saved your unworthy white butt, because I would have cut your ear off your head!”

“She would have,” D/Nick said, nodding hard. “The hormones, Betsy. You have no idea. It’s a rare week when she doesn’t cut something off somebody.”

“Gross,” was my only comment.

“Are you going to call the Antichrist or not?”

“Don’t call her,” a new voice answered. Just what we needed . . . a new, sneaky vampire.

And everything went from sucky to beyond sucky, if there was such a thing.

Who am I kidding? Of course there was.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I know why I assumed it was a vampire. Sneaking up on me is easy. Sneaking up on Sinclair, not so much. So I think it’s fair to say I knew what I was getting into when I sprinted toward it.

All I could think was, Dick isn’t carrying, and neither is Nick. Marc smells like blood . . . stupid scrubs! And Jessica . . . my God, Jessica and the baby . . . her enormous fat unborn baby . . . oh Jesus . . .

So I was out for blood the minute my big white butt was out the door. Except so was the bad guy, because although I was moving pretty quickly, he managed to grab my shoulders and shove me back, so hard and fast I couldn’t even get a glimpse of his face in the shadows of the long hallway.

I flew down the hall—like Supergirl! And crashed through a wall that was, luckily for me, over a hundred years old. Yerrggh, the smell of mouse poop was almost enough to distract me from the stabbing pain of my newly cracked ribs.

A low chuckle out of the gloom. “Don’t worry. It won’t leave a mark.”

Jessica . . . the baby . . .

I crawled out of mouse poop, plaster, lath, and dust and stumbled . . . I’d been