Undead and Undermined

Chapter SEVEN



“Please don’t tell me anything new for the next half hour,” I begged. I started to lurch to my feet; Sinclair simply grasped my hand and helped me. He was so strong it was like I was floating to my feet. His hand stayed in mine and I squeezed it. He squeezed back.

Okay. This was weird. This was all beyond weird, this was all extremely damned weird, but. But! Everything I’d seen, heard, and felt proved Sinclair and I were in love in this timeline, too. That meant I could . . . I could probably handle any other weirdness as long as I could count on that. Dear God, THAT WAS NOT A BET. I’m not daring you to freak me out more, God, okay? Okay. You’re not to consider that a challenge OF ANY SORT. In Jesus’ sake. Amen.

“How are we supposed to know what you know or don’t know?” Marc asked, aggrieved. When I’d pitched out of my chair, my drink had flopped (thick! like Greek yogurt) to the floor. Marc had picked it up, put it in the sink, and was now wiping up the mess.

“I have no idea, but please figure it out this instant.” I leaned against Sinclair, which was unnecessary but yummy. That boy was built like a barn door, all broad and hard.

Barn door? I must have hit my head harder than I thought. There was nothing sexy about a barn door. Unless I was jammed up against it while Sinclair played pirate (the swashbuckling kind from the 1700s, not the icky Somalian kind from right now).

“. . . help me?”

“Huh?” Okay. No time to think of pirates. Time to focus. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“When will you be prepared to help me?” Garrett asked again.

“Good question. Okay. Let’s figure this out. My big new plan was for you and me to go to hell,” I prompted him, “so we can get your wife.”

He nodded. He was still carrying his tote o’ knitting supplies, and it was super cute.

“Your wife . . . who is dead now. Here,” I clarified, “in this timeline.”

He nodded again. Ahhh, Garrett, how it all came back to me . . . like how he never talked. Shit, for the first few months he lived here, he couldn’t talk. But he fed on my blood, and the blood of the Antichrist (long story) and remembered all sorts of things. Like how to talk. And crochet baby blankets. And knit sweaters. He made a black sweater with yellow piping for Sinclair last year. My husband wore it once but, when I collapsed into laughter and spent the afternoon calling him Bee Man, never wore it again.

“Why do you think Antonia’s in hell?”

Garrett blinked, surprised. Then, “Where else would she be?”

I thought about Antonia’s near-constant pissy mood, her fuming anger, which was occasionally overtaken by spitting 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.