Undead and Undermined

Chapter SEVENTEEN



“What?”

“I took it.” Laura smoothed her bangs and tried not to look rattled. The library, which had always seemed dark and dusty to me, with the dark paneling and yucky apricot carpeting and dusty, dark, overstuffed furniture, seemed to loom, then shrink, around me.

Remember wishing there was a cobra on the loose? Now I felt like there really had been one, only she’d been with me the whole time.

“You what?”

“I took the book.”

“But why? Did you need some light reading while waiting in line at Goodwill?”

“I took it after I got here.”

Right. I remembered—after she realized the Marc Thing had followed us back, she put on a big show of being revolted and horrified. Or maybe she really had been revolted and horrified. Either way, she’d left the kitchen on the premise of making sure he hadn’t left us any other surprises. Then . . . took the Book? But . . . “How come?”

She glanced at the carpet, the window, the sofa, her feet, my feet, my neck, and finally my face. “You don’t need it.”

“What?”

“Am I not speaking clearly?” she snapped. “Why are you having trouble following this?”

“Are you seriously asking me that, you Antichristing sneaky jerkoff asshat?” (I’ll admit it: I was stressed out. It had been a terrible week. Or three centuries. Or future.)

“Ah . . . Majesty . . .”

“Elizabeth, perhaps cooler heads could—”

“You bop in from freakin’ Goodwill and then steal the nastiest thing in the house, and don’t say anything until we need it and have to look all over for it? Who does that?”

“You checked one room,” Laura said. “Barely, I might add. You came, you glanced, you bitched.”

I gargled with fresh rage. “After being all egging-on with the killing of the Marc Thing?” I had thought at the time it had been out of character for her, but didn’t follow up. Also, stealing and lying? Also out of character.

From several rooms away: “I don’t mind! Really!”

D-Nick/Jessica/Still Human Marc: “Shut up!”

“Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?”

“Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking leech when I was minding my own business in the past.”

“Don’t you call me dim!”

“Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began.

“Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help me out.”

“Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.”

“I was getting to it,” I whined.

“Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternal nuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!”

“An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing my husband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum.

“—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?”

“You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.”

Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned.