Undead and Unpopular, page 9
part #5 of Undead Series
“Yeah, uh, Betsy, we’ve been meaning to talk to you about this.” This from myeloma. I was pretty sure I could smell it now.
“About what?”
“Your no blood-drinking thing.”
“It’s not a thing, it’s a lifestyle. You know,” I added brightly to Marc, “like yours. I’m choosing not to drink blood.”
Marc almost dropped the grenadine. He turned to give me his full attention when Jessica jumped in with, “Nuh-uh! Picking a fight to get out of talking about this won’t work.”
“Right,” Marc said, looking less convinced. “That won’t work. Bitch.”
Nuts. “Oh, come on, you guys!” I rested my forehead on the table. “I figured you’d be supportive.”
“Supportive of you breaking Sinclair’s heart and making yourself nuttier than you usually are? Honey, your temper these days is almost as bad as mine.”
“Well, why don’t you shut your fucking face, then?” I straightened up in a hurry as my vision cleared. “Sorry. That sort of slipped out.”
“Great,” Marc mumbled. “Vampire Tourette’s syndrome.”
“And Sinclair’s heart isn’t broken. And even if it was, it’s none of your business.”
“How’s he supposed to feel when you tell him not only are you going on a hunger strike, he is, too, unless he cheats on you with other people?” Marc demanded.
“What part of ‘none of your business’ do you not get?”
“Ha!” Marc wiped off his lips and began refilling another glass with yet another perfect rainbow. “We have to live with you guys, you know.”
“No,” I said pointedly. “You don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jessica asked.
I rubbed my eyebrows. “Nothing. It’s not supposed to mean anything. Sinclair’s heart isn’t broken.”
“He’s been moping around this place like he heard yellow was the new black,” she added.
“We worked that out. We have a plan for him getting his blood.”
Marc snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s not awful.”
I threw my hands in the air. “So, what? What are you telling me? Start drinking again? Hurt more people? Maybe kill someone by accident if I go too far?”
“What happened between Alonzo and Sophie won’t necessarily happen to you.”
“I knooow,” I said. I was a little astonished. One thing had nothing to do with the other. I had started my hunger strike way before Sophie even got to town. Right?
“Moderation,” Marc was babbling. “Everything in moderation. Besides, aren’t you the only vampire who only has to drink once or twice a week? How are you going to kill somebody doing that?”
“I plan,” I said grimly, “on being the only vampire who doesn’t have to drink at all.”
“Well, it’s making you nuts,” Jessica snapped, “at the worst possible time for me. And if I find one more piece of chewing gum on the banister, I’m evicting you. I figure you’ve gone through twenty packs in the last two weeks alone.”
“You’re counting my gum wads?” I felt my eyes narrow. I didn’t make them do it; they sort of went all squinty on their own. “That doesn’t strike you as, oh, I dunno, anal-retentive?”
“Doesn’t your depositing them all over the house,” she snapped back, annoyingly unafraid, “strike you as incredibly selfish and slovenly?”
“For the lasht time, thish ish none of your bithneth.”
What the—? Horrified, I felt my mouth.
Marc was pointing at me, eyes big. “Your fangs are out! You got so pissed your fangs came out!”
“I thought they only came out when you smelled blood,” Jessica said, still remarkably unmoved.
“They do,” I replied, feeling. Cripes, it felt like I had a mouthful of needles. “But Sinclair can make his come out whenever he wanth. Maybe thith ith part of a new power.”
“And maybe you’re, I dunno, losing it!”
“Calm down. Thereth nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about?” Marc was as hysterical as a woman who missed all the really good Thanksgiving sales. “You should see yourself!”
“Well, maybe I’ll go take a walk.” Oh, and run into that cute Mrs. Lentz in her bouncy, thin-strapped jogging bra while she walks her border collie. Normally I went for guys but her shoulders were so lovely and bare—
“You can’t go out looking like that.”
I was hurt. Well, pretending to be. “Are you thaying I thould be athamed? Thith is who I am now.”
“Yes,” Marc said, and Jessica swallowed her laugh. “You should be very, very ashamed. You should go to your room and hide your head until the shame passes. And until you don’t look like you’re trying out for the next Dracula remake.”
A sly thought popped into my head, there and gone, one
Eric would understand, and so would Alonzo
too slippery to hold on to. Probably just as well. These days, none of my thoughts were nice ones.
“Doeth anybody have thum gum? I’m freth out.”
“Sure,” Jessica said brightly, as if a wonderful idea had just occurred to her, “and hey, maybe this time you can stick the wads in a garbage can, if you want to avoid eviction.” She slid a brand-new pack of strawberry Bubblicious toward me.
“I’ll second that motion,” Marc mumbled. “Honestly, Betsy, do you know what they put in that stuff? The artificial gunk that slides down your throat, leaving the hard, gray crud behind?”
“Thut up,” I told him, reaching for the pack. “Thith ithn’t very conthructive.”
“Yeah? Constructive is the last damned thing on my mind. This place drives me nuts sometimes: nutty vampires, a bitchy werewolf, a zombie, a grumpy billionaire, and a vampire on a hunger strike.”
“You have to admit,” Jessica said, starting to put away the liquor bottles, “there’s never a dull moment. What’s the polar opposite of a dull moment? ’Cuz that’s what we got around here. All the time.”
“I don’t think you should call Garrett a zombie. He’s a little slow, but—hey! Don’t take the vodka.”
“You can have it back,” she said in her annoying Mommy voice, “when your fangs go away.”
“I can have it back right now, honey.”
Marc put his hands over his eyes. “Don’t fight, you guys. No more. I’m sincere here.”
She slapped my hand when I reached for it. “No! Bad vampire!”
I glared. “You know, most sensible people would be scared of me.”
She laughed at me. “Most sensible people haven’t seen you dancing the Pancake Dance in your granny underpants on New Year’s Eve.”
“Hey! Your fangs are gone.” Marc digested what she’d just said. “Granny underpants? You?” Apparently me doing the Pancake Dance wasn’t so hard to believe.
“It was just that one time,” I grumbled, the last of my mad-on vanishing as quickly as it had come upon me. “All my thongs were in the wash.” What had I even been so mad about, anyway? I couldn’t remember. Jessica and Marc were the greatest. I was lucky to have friends like them. They were—
The kitchen door swung open, framing the former head of the Blood Warriors. “I don’t understand,” Jon Delk said. “You’re saying I published a book?”
—sunk. We all were.
Chapter 19
Thanks for coming so quickly.”
Delk hadn’t taken off his coat, and had tracked mud all the way (groan) to the kitchen. His full name was Jonathon Michael Delk, but too many people in his life called him Jonny. So he was going all tough guy now and insisting on the moniker Delk. I couldn’t blame him: I had a silly first name, too.
“She said you were in trouble,” J—er, Delk was saying. “But it sounds like that was just another vampire trick to get me to—”
“I said the Queen needed you,” Tina corrected him with more than a little sharpness. Tina didn’t care for Delk, given his vampire-slaying past. No doubt the car ride up from the farm had been a carnival. Not least because she and Eric thought it was perfectly fine to leave Jon out of it. But I just couldn’t do it. He had written the book. It was being published. How could I keep my mouth shut about it?
“Delk, sit down.”
“What’s going on?” He shook the catalog at me, dropped it on the table, and rubbed his hands together; they were red with cold. “One minute I’m home, the next I’m in the car with Tina—”
“Do you want something to warm up with?”
He gave me a look I supposed he thought was subtle. I was feeling sicker and sicker by the moment, and it wasn’t all the failed rainbows. Delk had a bit of a crush on me, and if he had come charging up to the Cities because he thought I was in trouble—well, that was just too damned sweet.
In fact, he’d shown up here a few months ago when he heard about my impending unholy nuptials. The gist of our conversation:
DELK: You can’t marry Eric Sinclair.
ME: Just watch.
DELK: He’s a bad man.
ME: You don’t know from bad.
DELK: You’re making a mistake.
ME: Shut your head.
Not exactly Tristan and Isolde, but it passed the time around here.
Then, inexplicably (except I was pretty sure I knew why) he hung around the mansion. Started interviewing me for a class project. Eventually produced a book. But then Sinclair—
“Tina, would you leave us alone for a minute?”
“I’ll go see if the king is available,” she said, backing out of the kitchen, looking at Delk the way a cat looked at a really big rat. I can take you. I might get hurt, but that’s all right.
We were alone. Except for Marc and Jessica, shamelessly eavesdropping outside the kitchen door. I couldn’t do anything about that, so I addressed the problem at hand. “You wrote the book. It’s coming out this fall as a paperback everyone thinks is funny fiction.”
“You’re saying someone used my name on their book?”
Oh, boy. He was standing there, so earnest and flushed and blond and young, I almost couldn’t bear it. He was a nice kid. I liked him a lot. There never would have been anything between us, and not just because of Sinclair, but I still liked him and sure didn’t want to upset him.
I could almost hear Sinclair in my head: Then don’t.
Too bad.
“I’m saying you wrote this book, this Undead and Unwed. Someone—probably you—turned it in to a publisher, and now it’s going to be on bookshelves this fall.”
“But—I mean, I did a paper for class before holiday break—”
“You turned the paper into a book. You followed me around for days, transcribing my life story, putting your own spin on it. You had, like, three hundred pages.”
He was blinking so fast, for a second I thought he had something in both eyes. “But I don’t remember that! I’d remember if I wrote a book, right?”
“Yeah, normally. Except Sinclair made you forget you’d written it. And since you didn’t remember writing it, you didn’t think to warn us that you’d sent it in to get published.”
“Warn you? I—” He walked dazedly back and forth by the table for a moment, not quite pacing. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. “Sinclair made me forget?”
“Well.” Tell the truth and shame my sister’s mother, wasn’t that how the saying went? Sure, we could be done now, but I didn’t want any part of this conversation left undead. Whoops—Freudian slip. Unsaid. Another surprise down the road I didn’t need. “Tina found the electronic version of your manuscript—she was looking for it, or something like it—and told Sinclair. He mojoed you into forgetting all about it, and then they deleted your work. They thought all of your work.”
“Did you call me down here,” he whispered, “because you just found out and you want my help to stop them?”
“Ah, no. See, after they did all that, they told me. This was around Christmas. And at first I told Sinclair to undo his undoing, if you get what I mean. But then I remembered.”
“What?”
“I remembered I’m the queen and I’m responsible for all the vampires,” I said simply. “So I let it all stand. It was shitty for you, but I thought if the book got out that would be shitty for all vampires.”
He was clutching the back of one of the kitchen chairs and I saw all the knuckles had gone from pink to dead white. All the color had fallen out of his face, except for two patches of red way up on each cheek.
“Are you okay?” I asked, dumbest question of the year, no doubt. “Maybe you better sit down.”
“You—you let—him—do that? To me?”
“Well, I didn’t know about it until afterward,” I began lamely, “but—”
He actually swayed a little while he hung on to the chair. I edged a little closer, figuring I could catch him if he fainted. He looked like he was going to faint. After he threw up. “You let him do that—let him into my fucking mind—and then you had the chance to help me and you took their side?”
“I—yeah. That’s more or less it.”
“You didn’t help me—you let him—and you didn’t—”
“Delk, I think you should sit down before you—”
“Shut! Up!” he screamed at me, the cords standing out on his neck. “You aren’t even sorry! Because if you did it, if you fucked me over to help all of goddamn vampire-kind, you can’t be sorry.”
“I’m sorry you got stuck in the middle. I’m sorry there’s a book out there that you don’t remember writing. A funny book the critics like,” I added, trying to find a speckle of good in this whole awful nightmare. Oooh, and there was something else! “You kind of got the last laugh, because the book is coming out anyway, and the vampires who know about it are pretty annoyed, so—”
“So everything you let him do to me was for nothing.”
“Okay, that’s another way to look at it.”
He wiped his nose with the back of the hand not holding the chair. “I can’t believe this,” he whispered.
“I’m really sor—”
“I can believe that bitch snuck around in my files, and I can believe that prick jumped into my mind, but you! You’re supposed to be the good one! I-I thought you—you aren’t supposed to be a bad guy! You’re supposed to look out for me, and for vampires—they’re all the same to you, right?”
I stammered, trying to say five things at once.
“Right?”
“Delk, I—”
He wheeled around and almost slipped in one of the little puddles he’d made.
“Please don’t leave! Please, let’s talk some more.”
He barked an incredulous laugh, staggered for the door, and shoved against it, hard.
Unfortunately, it only moved about a foot before it thudded into something.
“Aagghh!” I heard Jessica say from the other side, then another thud as she fell down. I rushed over, held the door open, and saw her rolling back and forth on the floor, hands cupped around her nose. The blood, it was—it was sheeting down her throat and onto her shirt; the blouse was already wrecked.
Marc was crouched beside her, doing the doctor/ mom chant: “No, I won’t touch it, just let me look, no, I’m not going to touch, just get your hands down so I can see, let me see.”
That was no ordinary nosebleed. It was just—it was everywhere. I whirled upon Delk. “She’s sick! And you practically broke her nose—she didn’t do anything. And she’s sick, you asshole!”
Before I knew what was happening, I had seized him by the shirt and was holding him right up to my nose. “You thouhd have kept your handth to your-thelf.”
“Betsy, don’t! It was an accident, come on, it’s—” Jessica choked a little from her spot on the floor and spat blood. “It’s a swinging door, for heaven’s sake. I’m surprised this doesn’t happen every week. Come on, put him down.”
I threw him away from me. He bounced off the wall (and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it felt good to watch him fly like a paper airplane, and where had all my sympathy for him gone?) and crumpled to the floor in a heap.
I knelt by my friends. “Jeth, are you all ri—”
“Look out!” she screamed, and I turned just in time to get shot.
I’ll bet Marc is sorry he skipped work today, I thought, toppling into Jessica’s bloody face and knocking her down again.
Chapter 20
I woke up just in time to hear Jon’s bellow of pain and the instantaneous dull “snap” that came with it.
Get up
I tried to move.
Get up or they’ll kill each other. Really kill each other.
My entire chest felt like it had been drenched in kerosene and then lit. And not in a good way, either. I tried to sit up.
“Better not,” Marc said, and I realized he and Jessica were both kneeling over me. “I think your heart’s busy growing back.”
“Help me up,” I groaned.
“Bad idea,” he said, but he carefully pulled me to my feet. It seemed to take a long time.
“Jess, you okay?”
“I’m fine. Nothing’s broken.” She looked awful—blood all over her clothes, blood drying across her face—but at least it wasn’t fresh blood. “I know this isn’t the time or place, but that really squicks me out.”
“What?”
“You’re licking blood off the back of your hand,” Marc murmured.
Yeesh! “Sorry.” I made myself stop. Just as well; it hurt to move. Luckily I didn’t need to breathe, because I bet that would have hurt like crazy, too. Now where was I? Something important. Like, life or death important. Oh, yeah…“Stop, you guys! Cut it out. Sinclair, let him go.”
Not that I could see what was going on, but it wasn’t hard to guess.
I limped toward the kitchen door (which had started all the trouble, come to think of it) and pushed it open. Sinclair was just leaning down to pick Jon up off the tiles, ignoring the loaded gun pointed at his nose.
“Ah, you’re up and around,” Sinclair said, looking over at me. “Splendid.”
“Just…stop. Okay? Come on. I got shot, you broke Delk’s arm, Jess got a nosebleed. We’ll sprain Marc’s ankle and make Tina have a haircut and then everybody’s even, okay? Please don’t,” I pleaded, as Sinclair reached for his prey again. “It’s so awful right now; please let’s not make it worse. Besides, aren’t you dying to rush over here and make sure for yourself that I’m all right?”
