Undead 11, Undead and Unstable - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,15

up dead. No, really!) “Stupid moms who date stupid guys whose names rhyme with ‘beehive.’ Stupid Clive Liveley, who looks like a giant baby and wants to make out with my mom! And stupid Giselle the cat, who started all this by willfully choosing to drop—”

I stopped bitching. Stopped walking. Also stopped breathing (which I probably hadn’t been doing, anyway). My heart? Yep: stopped.

Because Giselle the cat was spread out on a clean towel on a carefully scrubbed section of the attic floor in all her dead-yet-pissed glory. And Marc, my dead friend, was busily dissecting her.

He looked up. His green eyes blinked slowly at me, like an owl. “Now, don’t freak out,” Marc said.

But I did, anyway.

NINE

“Who did it?” I screeched, pointing a shaking finger at him. A shaking finger with chipped Marshmallow fingernail polish (people have been dying, dammit, and Jess won’t go with me to the salon anymore; was it any wonder I needed a touch-up? Not for what the pedicurist actually did to my toes, but the pampering was essential to my mental well-being.). “Who did that to you? Did you figure out how to bring yourself back? If you did, you are so dead! You’re supposed to be dead until I’m damned good and ready to bring you back!”

Marc opened his mouth.

“Do you have any fucking idea how hard this has all been on me? Huh? I’m gonna guess no, dead guy! I’m gonna guess you don’t have the faintest clue!”

“Betsy—”

“I turn my back for five seconds and you kill yourself? That’s the thanks for being one of the coolest roommates in the history of human habitation, huh? No regard for how that’d make me feel, huh? Like I don’t have enough friends getting shot or ending up in hell or both? Huh? Oh, and that stupid nasty scary Marc Thing is dead, thanks to me, and you’re welcome!” Oh. Except the reason the Marc Thing existed at all was also because of me. Icky stoic cranky Future Me.

Irrelevant! Marc had a lot of nerve being alive, and I was going to explain just how much in loud and shrill detail.

“Betsy—” He sort of flowed to his feet … not fast, not like a vampire moved, but slow and not-quite-graceful. Like when you’ve given yourself a pedi and you sort of roll over and carefully climb to your feet so you don’t smear anything. You get there, the job gets done, but it’s not the most beautiful way to move. That was how Marc moved now.

My mind was ticking off possibilities even as I bitched and yowled at my inconveniently resurrected friend. Not a vampire. Not human—no way … he didn’t smell anything like his old cotton-and-blood-on-hospital-scrubs self. And you didn’t “catch” being a werewolf from a bite; I’d found out a couple of years ago that either you were born a werewolf, or you weren’t. Scratch lycanthropy. So that meant…

I brandished the stool at Marc like he was a zombie bull. “Back! Stay back! Do not lurch over here to try to eat my brains or I’ll bash yours right in. Why? Why am I even surprised to run into another zombie in this same attic? Again?”

“Betsy—”

“Don’t think,” I warned, taking a big step back. I hate hate hated zombies, and the only reason I wasn’t shitting myself in terror, other than the fact that I couldn’t, was because he wasn’t gross and goopy or trying to eat my brains. And because it was Marc. “Don’t think I won’t kill you again, buster. I’ll jam this stool up your ass so far you’ll barf splinters for a week! And then I’ll really make you sorry!”

“I believe you,” he said dryly. He’d stopped coming for me, just stood there with his hands up in the universal please-don’t-shoot-me-in-the-face position. His hands were bloody—no. The surgical gloves on his hands were bloody. Because he’d been—he’d been—“Listen, Betsy, I—”

“Oh my God! What have you been doing up here?” My brain was still cycling through reasons, and not liking anything it was coming up with. I stared at the cat with fresh horror, then back at Marc, who was staring at the floor in … what? Shame? Hunger? Anger? “Why? Oh, Marc, what are you doing here, and why are you cutting up my dead cat? How could you do this to me?” I wailed, then flung myself facedown on the floorboards

(ow!)

and burst into tears.

TEN

It wasn’t entirely Sink Lair’s fault. But I didn’t figure that out ’til later. At