Undead 8, Undead and Unwelcome - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,16

occasionally homicidal and cursed (or was it more of an inheritance?) with an unbelievably bad temper. When she’s upset about something, you can practically feel the air get heavier and warmer. One thing I hated to see was Laura’s hair shading from buttercup yellow to auburn, as it always did when she was infuriated.

According to the Book of the Dead, a sort of vampire bible, Laura is fated to destroy us all, something Betsy seems to keep overlooking or forgetting. Or forgetting on purpose (she’s not quite the ditz she’d like us to believe . . . at least I think she isn’t).

A digression for a minute: the Book of the Dead was kept in the mansion’s library, on its own stand. Betsy didn’t talk about it much, but she practically babbled about it nonstop compared to how much Tina and Sinclair discussed it. So you can imagine how frustrating it was to just get a minor detail or two about the vampire bible.

It was bound in human skin, and written in blood by a crazy vampire a thousand years ago. Everything in it (so far) came true. And (here comes the fun part!) anyone who read it too long went clinically insane. Scariest of all, Betsy had tried to destroy it—twice—and it always found its way back to her.

I wasn’t dumb enough to try to read it, but I did want a look at it. I waited for a night when I had the mansion to myself (Betsy and the others were off trying to catch a serial killer—or maybe it was the time that crooked cop set the Fiends free? Who could keep track of their nocturnal crime-fighting habits? Well, it doesn’t matter now.), then went into the library.

I didn’t sneak. I live here, too. I was not sneaking, nor being a sneak. I walked. I walked right up to the stand. I reached out a hand. I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t. I just wanted to—

Wait.

Okay, I’m back. I had to take a second and go throw up. Which is what I did those few months ago when I grasped the cover to flip the book open. I didn’t even get a good look at the title page, never mind the table of contents, before I started vomiting blood.

As a doctor, I found this to be a somewhat alarming symptom, especially since I had felt perfectly fine ten seconds earlier. I made it to the nearest bathroom—thank goodness the mansion’s got about thirty of them!—and, between bouts, called my friend Marty (part-time EMT, full-time guy who could keep his mouth shut) for a ride to the hospital.

By the time he got me there, I was fine again. His backseat was a mess, though. It cost me six hundred bucks to get it clean again.

Sorry, dude, that was a major digression, not a minor one. So that’s enough about the vampire bible, which I now prudently stay the holy hell away from; let’s get back to Laura.

It’s hard to believe that a gorgeous sweet Norwegian is the Antichrist. And even harder to imagine her destroying a cactus plant, much less the entire world. When she’s blond, anyway.

When Betsy and Laura first hooked up, we had no idea she even had a dark side (which was silly . . . don’t we all?). Then she killed a serial killer. And then she beat a vampire almost to death. More worrisome was the fact that she could have done much, much worse. Because Laura’s weapons pop out of nowhere when she’s mad, and they show up express delivery from hell.

And lately she’s been skipping church. She’d already been over here twice, and Betsy hasn’t been out of the state even twenty-four hours. I think she’s lonesome. Scratch that—I was familiar with all the symptoms. I knew Laura was lonesome.

I also knew she was extremely dangerous. But I know better than to try to open a dialogue with her about the subject. Laura hated her birthright, her heritage, her mother. Hated knowing someone had predicted she’d destroy the world almost a thousand years before she was born. I was pretty sure she hated the fact that we all knew about it, too.

So. Tonight we’re going out for drinks, and I’ll tease her and we’ll gossip about Betsy and Co. at the nearest smoothie bar and then Laura will be herself again.

For a while.

Chapter 13

The last thing we did before going to bed was set up Sinclair’s laptop—

Right, Sinclair, I