Undead and Undermined

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 thrown so hard I’d been knocked out of my shoes. I abandoned them without a thought—

(Oh, my poor scuffed Beverly Feldmans! Pal, you are so GONNA DIE!)

—and ran past the door to the attic and back down the hall. Nothing good ever came out of the attic, and I was going to amend that to nothing good ever came out of the attic or the hallway near the attic. Whatever-it-was had lurked in that hallway, the longest one in the house, listening in on our conversation and smoothie-snorting. Creepy and lame.

“Okay. Let’s try that again.” That sounded cool and brave, right? Not at all like I was scared shitless, right? Excellent.

“Okayyyyyyyyyyy.”

I could almost see him in the gloom . . . and I was reminded of someone. There was something about the line of the jaw . . . too bad this was all happening at super-hypersonic speed, instead of real time. If I had five minutes, I’d be able to sit down and figure this out. I was not, at the best of times, a fast thinker.

“Hope you’re ready for round two, bitch!” Which sounded much more badass in my head than out loud. I could never pull off the generic “the price is wrong, bitch!” vulgarity. “Don’t be fooled if I didn’t sound as badass as I could have. You’re about to get a face full of badass! Then you’ll be sorry.”

That’s when somebody grabbed my sweater (argh! A gift from Jess . . . red cashmere!) and hauled me backward. I again flew through the air with the greatest of ease, at what I assumed was the speed of sound, but didn’t break anything on this landing. Woo-hoo! In fact, I’d mostly slid along the highly waxed mellowly aged floors.

That’s when I realized: Sinclair had grabbed me and jerked me out of harm’s way. That was my husband in a nutshell: he’d commit felony assault on me. To save me!

“If this were the kind of movie my wife enjoys,” Sinclair said coldly, standing—looming, really—and almost entirely blocking the doorway, “I would make an inane announcement. Something silly and time-wasting like, ‘if you touch my wife again, I will kill you.’ Except you did touch my wife. And I am going to kill you. Because no one gets a chance to hurt her twice.”

“Really?” There was obvious delight in the thing’s voice. “Will you really? You’ll kill me? That would be woooooonderful.” Then, lower and much more sly: “Betsy, I seeeeee youuuuuuuu.”

“Who the hell—” Marc began. Dick had managed to keep Jessica in the kitchen, but he’d had no luck with Marc, who wasn’t above a knee in the ’nads to get from point A to point B. His lust for excitement had gotten him into jams worse than this.

Seeing Marc alive and well socked the memory home for me; I knew who our unwelcome visitor was.

“Do you seeeee meeeeee?”

The Marc Thing, from the future. Somehow he’d followed Laura and me back to the present. And now he was in my house.

Shit.