Undead and Undermined, page 1
part #10 of Undead Series
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
Appendix
Titles by MaryJanice Davidson
UNDEAD AND UNWED
UNDEAD AND UNEMPLOYED
UNDEAD AND UNAPPRECIATED
UNDEAD AND UNRETURNABLE
UNDEAD AND UNPOPULAR
UNDEAD AND UNEASY
UNDEAD AND UNWORTHY
UNDEAD AND UNWELCOME
UNDEAD AND UNFINISHED
UNDEAD AND UNDERMINED
DERIK’S BANE
SLEEPING WITH THE FISHES
SWIMMING WITHOUT A NET
FISH OUT OF WATER
Titles by MaryJanice Davidson and Anthony Alongi
JENNIFER SCALES AND THE ANCIENT FURNACE
JENNIFER SCALES AND THE MESSENGER OF LIGHT
THE SILVER MOON ELM: A JENNIFER SCALES NOVEL
SERAPH OF SORROW: A JENNIFER SCALES NOVEL
RISE OF THE POISON MOON: A JENNIFER SCALES NOVEL
Anthologies
CRAVINGS
(with Laurell K. Hamilton, Rebecca York, Eileen Wilks)
BITE
(with Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Angela Knight, Vickie Taylor)
KICK ASS
(with Maggie Shayne, Angela Knight, Jacey Ford)
MEN AT WORK
(with Janelle Denison, Nina Bangs)
DEAD AND LOVING IT
SURF’S UP
(with Janelle Denison, Nina Bangs)
MYSTERIA
(with P. C. Cast, Gena Showalter, Susan Grant)
OVER THE MOON
(with Angela Knight, Virginia Kantra, Sunny)
DEMON’S DELIGHT
(with Emma Holly, Vickie Taylor, Catherine Spangler)
DEAD OVER HEELS
MYSTERIA LANE
(with P. C. Cast, Gena Showalter, Susan Grant)
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2011 by MaryJanice Alongi.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davidson, MaryJanice.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-51687-4
1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Taylor, Betsy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Sinclair, Eric (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.A949U52527 2011
813’.6—dc22
2011010153
http://us.penguingroup.com
To all the readers
who assumed I’d lost my teeny,
tiny mind after Unfinished,
but hung in anyway, my deepest thanks.
Acknowledgments
Where, oh where to begin? For starters, book ten? Book ten? Holy Fritos, Batman. Even as I typed that I felt my jaw sag. Book ten? How’d that happen? Am I proud? Am I freaked? Am I taking a bow? Am I talking to myself, and more important, can I stop? Or am I just ducking away from a well-deserved smack?
So, ten books! Weird. This is proof that goofing off in high school and not going to college were excellent decisions on my part. Who’s laughing now, Honor Society? Huh?
Anyway, thanks for reading ’em.
Thanks also to my terrific assistant, Tracy “You Don’t Scare Me” Fritze. She knows exactly what she’s getting into (for two years now!), yet she keeps coming back. It’s baffling to me.
My folks, for telling strangers about my books and urging people they’ve never met to buy them. My sister, who travels almost as much as I do, because she always calls me from whichever airport bookstore she’s seen my books in. “Add DC to the list!” she’ll chortle into my voice mail, “and you still haven’t given back my cake pan.” Yeah, well, you can choke waiting for that cake pan. It’s awesome and I’m not giving it up.
My dear friends Cathie Carr and Stacy Sarette, who are remarkably patient with me when I disappear off their radar for months at a time. I don’t deserve them, but at least I know it.
Special thanks to my friend Austin Robinson-Coolidge, who told me a decade ago when the tea craze was starting that, to him, chai tasted like Glade air freshener. I finally got around to stealing that and making Betsy think it. Ha! Ponder that next time you’re staggering your way through a marathon, ARC.
And finally, my in-laws and husband, who had a shitty year but never flinched. I’m always amazed by their core strength. It’s like their bones are lined with titanium or something. Oooh! Like Wolverine, except not tortured and angry and berserk-ey. Usually.
“My God, your mother-in-law beat a burglar to death with her walker!” “Yeah, she doesn’t like people touching her things.” My in-laws are like superheroes, except people are scared shitless of them.
—MARYJANICE, WINTER 2010
Author’s Note
The most luxurious RV in the world, which Betsy calls the Mansion on Wheels, and which Jessica refers to as the Mystery Machine, really exists! I didn’t make any of that up. I don’t know if that’s cool or weird.
Also, I’ve never been to the Cook County Morgue, but I’m sure it’s very nice. And unfortunately, bodies have gone missing there in the past. But I’m sure they’ve got that all worked out by now.
Finally, this book is essentially a trilogy within a series, and Undermined is the second book. Undead and Unstable will follow. So if you finish this book and find you still have questions, there’ll be another Betsy book coming down the pike in about twelve months or so.
The Story So Far
Betsy “Please Don’t Call Me Elizabeth” Taylor was run over by a Pontiac Aztek about three years ago. She woke up the queen of the vampires and in dazzling succession (but no real order), bit her friend Detective Nick Berry, moved from a Minnesota suburb to a mansion in St. Paul, solved various murders, attended the funerals of her father and stepmother, became her half brother’s guardian, avoided the room housing the Book of the Dead (Book of the Dead, noun, the vampire bible written by an insane vampire on flesh, which causes madness if read too long in one sitting), cured her best friend’s cancer, visit ed her alcoholic grandfather (twice), solved a number of kidnappings, realized her husband/king, Eric Sinclair, could read her thoughts (she could always read his), and found out the Fiends had been up to no good (Fiend, noun, a vampire given only animal [dead] blood, a vampire who quickly goes feral).
Also, her roommate Antonia, a werewolf from Cape Cod, took a bullet in the brain for Betsy, saving her life. The stories about bullets not hurting vampires are not true; plug enough lead into brain matter and that particular denizen of the undead will never get up again. Garrett, Antonia’s lover, killed himself the instant he realized she was dead forever.
As if this wasn’t enough of a buzzkill, Betsy soon found herself summoned to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Antonia’s Pack leaders lived. Though they were indifferent to the caustic werewolf in life, now that she was dead in service to a vampire, several thousand pissed-off werewolves had a few questions. (“What, now? You care, now?”)
While Betsy, Sinclair, BabyJon, and Jessica were on the Cape answering well-it’s-a-little-late-now questions, Marc, Laura, and Tina remained in Minnesota (Tina to help run things while her monarchs were away, Marc because he couldn’t get the vacation time, and Laura because she was quietly cracking up).
They hadn’t been gone long before Tina disappeared and Marc noticed devil worshippers kept showing up in praise of Laura, the Antichrist.
In a muddled, misguided attempt to help (possibly brought on by the stress of his piss-poor love life—as an ER doc, Marc worked hours that would make a unionless sweatshop manager cringe), he suggested to Laura that she put her “minions” to work helping in soup kitchens and such.
As sometimes happens, Laura embraced the suggestion with zeal. Then she took it even further, eventually deciding her deluded worshippers could help get rid of all sorts of bad elements . . . loan officers, bail jumpers, contractors who overcharge, and . . . vampires.
Meanwhile, on the Cape, Betsy spent time fencing with Michael Wyndham, the Pack leader responsible for three hundred thousand werewolves worldwide, and babysitting Lara Wyndham, future Pack leader and current first grader.
With Sinclair’s help (and Jessica’s cheerful-yetgrudging babysitting of BabyJon), Betsy eventually convinced the werewolves she meant Antonia no harm, that she in fact liked and respected the woman, that she was sorry Antonia was dead and would try to help Michael in the future . . . not exactly a debt, more an acknowledgment that because she valued Antonia and mourned her loss, she stood ready to assist Antonia’s Pack.
Also, Betsy discovered her half brother/ward was impervious to paranormal or magical interference. This was revealed when a juvenile werewolf Changed for the first time and attacked the baby, who found the entire experience amusing, after which he spit up milk and took a nap.
Though the infant could be hurt, he could not be hurt by a werewolf’s bite, a vampire’s sarcasm, a witch’s spell, a fairy’s curse, a leprechaun’s dandruff . . . like that. Betsy was amazed—she suspected there was something off about the baby, but had no idea what it could be. (“I was thinking . . . bred-in-the-bone Republican. Just really, really evil.”)
Sinclair, who until now had merely tolerated the infant, instantly became besotted (“That’s my son, you know.”) and began plotting—uh, thinking—about the child’s education and other necessities.
Back at the ranch (technically the mansion on Summit Avenue in St. Paul), Laura had more or less cracked up. She had fixed it so Marc couldn’t call for help (when he discovered their cells no longer worked, he snuck off to find another line, only to be relentlessly followed by devil worshippers who politely but firmly prevented this), and she and her followers were hunting vampires.
Betsy finally realized something was wrong (via a badly garbled text secretly sent by a hysterical Marc), and they returned to the mansion in time to be in the middle of a Vampires vs. Satanists Smackdown.
Betsy won, but only because Laura pulled the killing blow at the last moment.
People went their separate ways, for a while. And nobody felt like talking.
Three months later, Betsy decided to take the Antichrist by the, uh, horns, and invited her to go shoe shopping at the Mall of America. It was at this time she learned the Antichrist was fluent in every language on earth and had little or no working knowledge of big-screen devils. Thus, Betsy hauled her sis home for a devil-a-thon (including Al Pacino’s Satan, Elizabeth Hurley’s sexy devil, the baby in Rosemary’s Baby, and Damien Thorn in The Omen). It was at this time Laura confessed that she feels guilty whenever she’s interested in finding out more about herself, her capabilities, or her mom, Satan. (“It’s like I’m slapping my adopted mom and dad in the face by wondering about her.”) It’s also at this time that Betsy realized she was sick of having a never-fail resource in her own home, the Book of the Dead, which she doesn’t dare use because anyone who reads it for longer than twenty minutes or so goes insane.
So she and Satan struck a deal, which actually made sense at the time: Betsy would help Laura embrace and use her supernatural powers, and in return the devil would fix it so Betsy could read the book without the accompanying nut-jobbery.
In addition to Laura’s weapons (stabbing weapons or a crossbow, which normally stay in hell unless she calls them up), she learned she can teleport almost anywhere. Cool, right? Yeah, not so much. In fact, that turned out to be a huge problem, as anywhere encompasses anywhen. In rapid, annoying succession, Betsy and Laura found themselves in Salem, Massachusetts, during the witch hunts of the 1600s; Hastings, Minnesota, before the spiral bridge was replaced (so, anywhere between 1895 and 1951); and the future.
A thousand years in the future. Also, the future? Sucks. There was some sort of cataclysmic global thingummy and Minnesota in the future has winters even worse than the ones it has now. Nobody wants to worry about heat exhaustion on the Fourth of July, but frostbite and hypothermia are just as bad . . . and since the average temperature in July 3015 is thirty below, nobody’s getting rich off selling sunscreen.
In fact, nobody—except Future Betsy—is getting rich, period. They’re mostly hanging out in belowground enclaves and focusing on not dying.
To make matters even yuckier, Future Marc is a vampire. And not just any vampire . . . after hundreds of years of being Betsy’s personal whipping vampire, he’s dangerously insane. So much so that Laura and Betsy can feel how wrong he is after a glance. In fact, neither of them can bear to look him in the eyes, or even be around him.
BabyJon was there, too, and he’s as charismatic and charming as Marc is creepy and nutso. He wouldn’t tell Betsy how he could be walking around one thousand years in the future and not be a vampire, though she tried and tried to wheedle it out of him.
In the forty-five minutes or so they were in the future, they discovered Future Betsy had taken over (most of) the country, could raise and control zombies, and had a crippling lack of empathy for anyone. More troubling, Sinclair and Tina were nowhere to be found. Worse, no one would even talk about them . . . except Undead Marc, until Ancient Betsy shut him up and sent him away. And BabyJon was wildly uncomfortable about the subject.
They returned, vowing to figure out a way to save the future. Or undo it. Laura teleported Betsy back to the mansion and went on her merry, hell-bound way.
Betsy returned to find out Tina and Sinclair remember meeting her in the past. They explained that they’d always known Betsy would be headed on a time-travel romp, and the only way to help her was to stay out of the way.
To Betsy’s amazement, Jessica is heavily pregnant (wedding ring?) by Nick Berry. And Nick is happy to see her . . . since Betsy prevented her younger self from feeding on him, he didn’t experience any vamp trauma this time around, so now they’re very close friends.
Now Betsy has to explain to her loved ones about the future, about the fact that they’re living in a tampered timeline, and figure out a way to, as Betsy would put it, “Get bad shit done.”
Dishonesty is a thief of time, of energy, of pride. We must remember—and teach our children (and perhaps our political figures)—one essential: the truth shall make you free.
