Read Online Undead and Undermined by MaryJanice Davidson - Free Book Online Page B

two hundred years old is super smart. Me, I would have threatened him with a chainsaw nose job, followed by a lawn mower enema, but Tina instantly saw one of his weaknesses and moved in. You couldn’t teach that stuff, man. That shit had to be innate.
    “It’s supposed to rain later,” she continued, sauntering across the room until she was leaning against the sink with the big window right behind her. “We are having an unseasonably mild November.”
    N/Dick and Jessica and I all fell all over ourselves agreeing with her—my, yes, super unseasonable, unbelievably unseasonable, and the most beauteous November any of us could remember in the last thirty years because it was just all so gorgeous and cool and we wanted to go outside, too! Jeepers, maybe, when certain unpleasant interrogations were over, maybe we could all go outside! How cool would that be?
    “Do you remember,” she asked kindly, “how the air smells just before it rains?”
    “No,” it said shortly, and it didn’t say another word until Laura showed. That was a long seventeen minutes.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
    A word about vampire superpowers: mostly I don’t notice them. (This actually explains many things in my life. I’m too busy livin’, baby! Who has time to contemplate every damn thing? Life is for living! And gobs of sex.) That probably sounds strange, because I haven’t been undead very long. But it’s true. After a while you realize you were bitching about somebody snoring . . . and they were doing it seventeen rooms and three floors away. Or you’ll whine about food going bad . . . and the garbage was already triple bagged and taken out into a sealed-off garage.
    It’s scary how fast you get used to it. These days I took it for granted almost all the time. Like lumpless gravy. (It’s surprisingly easy.) But tonight I was listening hard, so even though we were all still in the kitchen, I heard Laura’s little sewing machine engine–powered Kia pull in.
    “She’s here,” Sinclair and I said in unison. Tina, who must have known, hadn’t taken her gaze off the Marc Thing. If that bothered him, he didn’t let on. It probably took a lot more than an eyeballing from Tina to scare someone who used to have a Caesar haircut and was tortured for decades.
    Jessica and Marc both jumped. “That’s creepy,” Jessica said. “And it always, always will be.”
    “Yeah, knock it off,” Marc added.
    “Children, children,” the Marc Thing said, still staring out the window.
    “Tell me she’s not still driving that Kia,” N/Dick begged.
    “Who cares?” I asked. “You’ve got something against good gas mileage?”
    “It’s the Soul,” he explained. “Kia’s new miniwagon is called the Soul.”
    “Oh, lame!” This time I had spoken in unison with the Marc Thing, which was beyond blech. “Get your own lines,” I hissed to him. To the others: “That’s just bad. Lame, and bad. And lame! The Soul. Please. We don’t have enough problems? The Soul.”
    “We’ve had this conversation before,” D/Nick reminded me.
    “Well, I don’t remember it, so back off.” As if I didn’t have waaaay more important things to remember than keeping track of Laura’s vehicles. Well, I did, dammit. In my old timeline, Laura’s dad had saved for over a year to get her that Kia, which she loved almost as much as I loved new Manolos. Her adopted dad, is what I meant; her real dad, also my dad, was dead.
    Wait, was he? Maybe in this timeline, he and (barf) my stepmonster, Antonia, were alive! And yes! I know how silly it is to have two people in the same house with the same weird name! So shut up!
    How could I find out? Sure, everyone in the room knew what a moron I was, but that didn’t mean I, you know, was in a big hurry to reinforce and advertise it. Was there a way to just casually ask, “So, is my dad alive?”
    The kitchen door swung open, and in came the Antichrist. “Goodwill used to be more grateful,” she said by greeting. “Now