Read Online Undead and Unappreciated by MaryJanice Davidson - Free Book Online Page A

Scratch. Restraining myself from jumping Sinclair’s bones. Not that I wanted to do that anymore. I think it would be fair to say my desire for him had been thoroughly squashed. I didn’t want those big hands on me or those firm lips on me or that big—anyway, squashed, thoroughly squashed.
    â€œ Everybody’s got stuff, you’ve got to take care of your feet .”
    â€œAnd they’ll take care of you,” Jessica and I chorused obediently.
    The pedicurist was sawing at my heels with a pumice stone. “Right! See, girls, you listen to me. Never mind about stuff . Foot care has to come first.”
    â€œUh-huh.” Maybe I could take her a little more seriously if she’d been out of high school more than twenty minutes. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
    â€œOkeydokey then.”
    Jessica rolled her eyes at me, and I grinned back. “For a rich girl, you’ve got tough feet.”
    â€œOff my case, blondie. Yours aren’t better.”
    â€œYeah, but—”
    â€œDidn’t we just establish that there’s nothing—not a single thing—more important than foot care?”
    â€œGive me a break,” I muttered.
    The pedicurist dipped my feet back in the swirling water, then shook the bottle of nail polish. “Good choice,” she told me.
    â€œI like the classics,” I replied. Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow. A great, dark red. I didn’t like dark colors on my fingernails, but I liked them on my toes all right.
    â€œThere, now,” Jessica sighed as her pedicurist rubbed her toes. “Told you. You needed this.”
    â€œI’m not arguing. Heck, for a couple of minutes I forgot about the whole my sister is a child of Satan thing.”
    â€œHow are her feet?”
    â€œNot as good as yours,” I told the girl, which was probably the truth.
    Â 
    When I rose the next night, my feet were bare and unpolished. Unpumiced. They looked exactly the way they had the day I died.
    I cried for five minutes—not over my stupid toes but for what it meant—and then I went downstairs and locked myself in the library with the Book of the Dead.

Chapter 10
    I picked up the wing chair from beside the fireplace (carefully…the thing was probably ten times older than me) and jammed it under the doorknob. It wasn’t likely anyone was going to come looking for me—Tina and Sinclair were avoiding me entirely, and Marc and Jessica were probably asleep—but I wasn’t taking any chances.
    I was pretty damned sick of, “Oh, did I forget to tell you? That was in the Book of the Dead, too.” I was going to sit down with the awful fucking thing and read it cover to cover. No more surprises. No more worrying about Sinclair holding out on me.
    No having to go to Sinclair to get the whole story.
    I picked the thing up off the stand, already grossed out. It was bound in human skin, how perfectly yuck-o, and felt warm to the touch, though that was probably because it was only a few feet away from the fireplace.
    The Book. If the Bible was the Good Book, then this thing was the Terrible Bad Book. It supposedly had all sorts of vampire factoids within its nasty binding, and Sinclair had rescued it from his blazing mansion and stuck it in my house. We all avoided it like nobody’s business. At least, I used to think so. But apparently Sinclair had been coming in the library and reading bits of it now and then. And keeping the good parts to himself, the treacherous prick.
    I sat down, looking at the cover for a moment. Tabla Morto . The Book of the Extremely Creepy. Was that Latin? I didn’t know from Latin. I peeked in the back…Was there an index? Could I look up “Betsy’s sister” and save a lot of time? Nope, just a bunch of really disturbing pictographs back there. Never mind; I wasn’t here to save time, I was here to save aggravation.
    Chapter one, page one, here I come.
    I