Undead and Unwary

  To say I had been happy to make Eric Sinclair’s acquaintance would be a bigger lie than just the tip, just to see how it feels. I had fought him every baby step of the way, even more so after he tricked me into making him king. Not that tricking me was ever a challenge. I still resented it, though, and it had taken a while to admit to myself I was in love with the controlling, ruthless asshat.

  The ruthless jerkass had been patient. The ruthless asshat knew time was on his side.

  So here we were, married in the eyes of vampires and, eventually, the State of Minnesota, boning on our superking in the late afternoon, winter sunshine splashed across the bed. I probably don’t need to explain that the first thing Sinclair had done in our bedroom was rip all the curtains down.

  He drank from me and divested me of my clothes at the same time, a good trick and one I’d had cause to celebrate before. I grabbed a fistful of that thick dark hair and jerked his head up, then bit him, hard, in the sweet spot just to the left of the hollow of his throat. Warm heavy blood trickled into my mouth, which should have been revolting and wasn’t ever, not once. I think in a lot of ways that’s the worst thing about being a vampire: I am doing things I know are disgusting and/or wrong and can’t stop. Or won’t stop.

  His hand gently cupped my right breast, long fingers curving around the nipple while he buried his face in my hair (strawberry shampoo + Sinclair’s love of fruit smoothies = irresistible) and trembled while I drank.

  I pulled off and gasped (how many more years would I need to be dead before I stopped reflexively grabbing for oxygen?) while his thumbs stroked the undersides of my breasts. Sinclair knew the undersides were much more sensitive and responsive, because he was a clever, clever man. I arched into his hands while fumbling with his—oh. Oh, that was good. That was excellent.

  How do you do that? How do you get both of us naked without me noticing?

  I would tell you, but you have insisted that hearing of my decades of sexual conquests “like, totally squicks you out.”

  I have not! Okay, but I probably didn’t lead with “like.” Stop that. Stop laughing in my head.

  He didn’t. Bastard. Thank goodness Sinclair was the only one I could hear in my head (vampire queen perk, except when it wasn’t), because he was enough of a handful. Headful?

  I reached down and found his lovely long length as he gently kneed my legs apart, his fingers slipping through the curls between my thighs, stroking so lightly it was more a brush of fingertips than anything else. And thank goodness, because the brush alone was enough to send me through the ceiling.

  Sometimes we spent hours exploring each other, indulging in edge play until we were both shaking like we were enduring malaria relapses. And sometimes we didn’t.

  He slid into me with a sigh and I could actually feel my eyes roll into the back of my head, which, for reasons unknown to me, my husband found intensely erotic.

  Oh yes. Oh yes, ah, Elizabeth . . .

  Mm-mm. I wanna drive.

  ?????

  I gripped him with my thighs and rolled us over until I was on top, which was fun on a superking and a potential for broken bones on a twin. Then I was grinning down at him while his hands slid down my back until resting just above my ass. He shifted beneath me and grinned back.

  Go on, then.

  You bet.

  I rocked against him, slowly at first, adjusting to the intensity, then leaned forward to grip the headboard and sped up. He’d thrown his head back, unconsciously (or not?) baring his throat, my bite already healing and his neck covered with drying blood. I ran a finger through the blood trail and he shuddered and flashed his fangs. I pressed one with the ball of my thumb and it pierced like a needle, that fast and that sharp. When he sucked, I felt it between my legs.

  And speaking of between my legs, terrific things were happening there. Sinclair was quite tall, with big hands and big feet, and yep, that cliché, at least, was true. The former farm boy was built. This will sound hokey beyond belief, but it was like he was built just for me, only for me, and me for him and only for him, and no one and nothing else would ever be that suited to us.

  He was gripping my hips hard enough to bruise and thrusting up, forcing a gasping moan out of me. I leaned forward far enough for his tongue to flick across my nipple, then jerked back.

  Wanton tease.

  Was that wanton, or wonton? Are you craving Japanese food?

  Chinese food, my lovely idiotic darling—ow!

  More where that came from.

  Oh, please yes.

  I smiled. “Now who’s wanton?”

  “It seems—it must—be me.” Every pause was punctuated by a thrust and it was like feeling his cock in the middle of my chest. Which probably sounds awful but was pretty swell. I could feel my orgasm start to sneak up on me. With Sinclair, I often had stealth orgasms. It would feel far away, like I had to work a lot harder to reach it, and then all of a sudden . . . surprise! There it was.

  “My God, my God, don’t stop. Ah, God, Elizabeth. Look at you.” Sinclair lived to break the third commandment, now that he could without feeling like he was gargling hydrochloric acid. “Look at you.”

  I ignored that; I could be doing him wearing a Hefty bag and a baseball cap and he would find it insanely hot. Instead I focused on my stealth ninja orgasm, which was still pretending it was waaaay off in the distance. It reminded me of that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when Lancelot is running to the castle to kill pretty much everyone inside, and the guards watch him run and run, and he always seems far away, and then all of a sudden he and his sword are right there. Yep, I’m comparing my orgasms to a goddamned Monty Python movie. It makes sense that I’m dead. I deserve to be dead, what with all that going on in my head while having incredible sex with a sexy vampire king.

  Speaking of the king, he was giving me a somewhat incredulous look, no doubt picking up on the Python weirdness going on in my brain.

  Are you—?

  Never ask me. Never.

  He shrugged in my head (yep, that’s a thing) and tightened his grip on my hips, which was fine with me. I leaned in again, let his mouth barely brush my nipple, and when I jerked back it pulled a groan from both of us. When I heard the creaking, I realized I was holding on to the headboard so hard I was tearing it loose. I didn’t care, and Sinclair didn’t care, and the headboard definitely didn’t care, but it was a distraction. Let go or let loose?

  I let loose—yanked the thing free and tossed it to the left. Probably should have thought that through a little more, since it took out the bedside lamp and the side table on its way to the floor. The crashing and thumping and broken glass worked like a hormone shot on Sinclair, and now I was riding him, brushing splinters out of his hair, and cornering my orgasm while he laughed and shook beneath me.

  . . . you are . . . you are . . . ah . . .

  Oh, hush up. I tried a scowl. It didn’t take. He knew his laughter delighted me.

  Do not dare to stop.

  Dude, I didn’t let our antique cherry headboard stop this. Nothing short of a nuke dropped in the kitchen will stop this.

  I loathe when you call me dude.

  Don’t care. Do. Not. C—

  Surprise!

  Nnnnn . . . ninja orgasm . . . ahhhh . . .

  Oh yes oh God oh my Elizabeth oh—what? Did you—what?

  ( ) . . . ( )

  Are you thinking about ninjas right now?

  “Shut up, coming, I’m still coming,” I slurred, and his hands gripped, brutally tight, and then

  ( ) . . . ( )

  he was, too. The timing was outstanding, because I could watch his face while I came down from mine, just as he rose to his. His eyes, which had been narrowed in concentration (and consternation, when he picked the Python out of my thoughts), now widened and his eyes rolled back. It was unfair, dammit, it was
hot when he did it. When I did it, I suspected I looked like I was drunk off my ass or struggling with the People magazine crossword.

  Please. Please, my love, my all, please. Stop thinking. Right now.

  “Bossy,” I gasped as he arched so hard only his head and heels were touching the mattress.

  “Nnnnnfff,” was his rebuttal. Pretty good, considering.

  When he came back down, literally and figuratively, it was to tug at me until my face was tucked into the hollow of his shoulder while he stroked my back with hands that shook.

  “C’n I start thinking now?”

  “Dunno,” he mumbled. “Would not dare assume—ouch!”

  “More where that came from.”

  “So I devoutly hope,” he replied, and I could hear the smile in his tone. He pinched me back, but I let it go. One of us had to be the mature one. A sad, sad day when it was me.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  “So, about Jessica.”

  Sinclair groaned. “Please. I never beg, unless it is for you, or to you, and I am begging now. Allow me to enjoy more than thirty seconds of postcoital bliss.”

  “We’ve got to talk about how you talk. ‘Ruffians’ and ‘postcoital bliss’ . . . I dunno. Sometimes I despair.”

  “As do I,” he muttered, seizing my wrist before I could tickle him in the ribs. “Knowing you as I do, I have resigned myself to twenty-eight seconds of afterglow and . . .” He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. “End afterglow. Proceed.”

  “How do you do that? You don’t have a watch.”

  “Decades of needing to know precisely when the sun rises and sets has left me with an excellent sense of time.” He brought my wrist to his mouth and kissed the underside, teasing the veins with his tongue for a second. “That is a skill it would be useful for you to learn.”

  “Don’t start something you can’t finish, tongue boy.” I yawned. “And can’t I master making lumpless gravy first?”

  “Come now, you have escaped death, and Hell, and Jessica’s wrath any number of times. You survived the Incident. You can do this,” he said encouragingly. “What time is it? Look at the sunshine on the bed, look at the shadows, and tell me the time.”

  “How would I know?” I complained. “This place is like Vegas, there aren’t any clocks.” There really weren’t. There was a creaky ancient grandfather clock on the main floor that hadn’t worked for, hmm, when did we declare independence from England? Yeah. It had been awhile. Everyone had laptops and cell phones. I assumed millennials didn’t actually know what a wall clock was.

  Sinclair sighed. “Darling, you’re a creature of the night—”

  “Except when I’m a creature of the day.”

  “—and should at least pretend to be interested in things like sunrise, sunset, and—hmm, I had a third, and it escapes me—ah! Helping the Antichrist run Hell.”

  “That’s it. I’m out.” I sat bolt upright like Frankenstein’s monster coming alive on the table and started to swing my legs over the side. “I don’t have time to have this—unnff!”

  Sinclair, the sneaky bastard, had snaked an arm around my waist and yanked me back before I could flee. “Stop wriggling. Are you frightened because you feel you must do this alone?”

  No, I’m frightened because it’s fucking absurd I’m faced with this at all. Have any of you met me? This whole thing was ridiculous from inception. I glared at the wall, since he had now spooned behind me and my glare of hate couldn’t reach him. Too bad my glares of hate didn’t ricochet. “I’m not frightened. Not exactly. Jeez. It’s not like that.”

  “Because you know I stand ready to assist you in this, as in all things.”

  I’ll bet.

  I loved my husband, all right? I had killed and died for him. But he was not the king of the vampires by accident. He had grown up poor and loved, and he’d started over after he asked Tina to kill him. He never wasted an opportunity and he never backed off; he was like a pit bull, he never dropped a bite.

  Sinclair did want to help me, I knew that. But he also wanted to get his fingers into the smoking hot Hell pie. (Oh God. Terrible metaphor.) And there was a good chance he would give in to his dark side, his Fred Flintstone side, and try and take over the place. All the while determining it was for my own good and that he was doing it for love.

  And he would have been. But. This was a man who forbade me to work. Before we were married. When I still loathed the sight of him. And then was mystified when I laughed my ass off. He was as modern a monarch as he knew how to be, but that didn’t mean we both didn’t still have some growing to do.

  And something else—when did I turn into the mature, farseeing one? I didn’t approve of any of this.

  “I know you want to help,” I said carefully, “but this is for Laura and me to figure out.”

  “Ah.” He stayed relaxed behind me and pressed a kiss to the back of my neck. At least he wasn’t hocking loogies into my hair. “And will you?”

  “What?”

  “Figure it out.”

  “The minute I find out what’s wrong with Jessica and also plan Tina’s surprise party.”

  He laughed. Sinclair didn’t do the ha-ha laugh thing. It was more like a deep chuckle that rumbled through his chest. You felt it more than you heard it. “Oh, a surprise party, now? Yes, that will certainly eat up still more of your time.”

  I elbowed his arm off me and flopped over on my back and let his last comment go. “Something’s wrong, and I couldn’t get Jessica to tell me. And then she left again on another fake errand.”

  “Jessica has many errands, none of them fake so far as I know. She keeps a close eye on her business,” he said approvingly. “I would have offered her some investment advice, except I have the niggling sensation that she may have more money than I. But if you were concerned, why didn’t you stop her?”

  “Her bed ate me. And then you did.”

  He shuddered. “I cannot imagine the crippling back pain they must awaken with.”

  “Knock it off, farmer boy. We didn’t all grow up sleeping on two-by-fours.”

  “Nor did I, but back support is a must.”

  “It really isn’t, and come on! You could sleep on a bed of nails and wake up refreshed and ready to bang, and can we get back to my thing now?”

  “You can only avoid this for so long.”

  “That’s not the thing I wanted to get back to. And yeah. I know,” I replied glumly.

  “At the risk of boring you with observations I have repeatedly shared with you—”

  “Oh boy. Really hate when you start sentences with that.”

  “—the longer you avoid your responsibilities, the more difficult it will be to perform them.”

  “I know.” I did. But it was so hard to wrap my brain around. Five years ago I’d been an administrative assistant, avoiding my father and stepmother as needed and trying not to strangle colleagues who thought the sign on the copy machine

  (IF JAMMED DO NOT FIX YOURSELF! IF JAMMED FIND ME! I WILL KILL YOU IF YOU DO NOT OBEY! YOU WILL NOT BE MOURNED! THE COPY MACHINE PEOPLE HAVE QUIT SENDING PEOPLE TO FIX IT!)

  didn’t apply to them, oh, hell no.

  Now I was dead and a reigning monarch, happily married (a huge improvement over resentfully married), with a houseful of friends and family, fending off death threats and resigned to living through the next several centuries with highlights and lowlights. Oh, and I was supposed to help run a dimension that was an afterlife of never-ending torment for billions.

  In over my head didn’t begin to cover it. In over my head wasn’t even on the same planet as my new responsibilities. The same universe. The same galaxy! Wait, which one was bigger, galaxy or univ—never mind. My point: the whole thing was fucking ludicrous.

  “I can’t tell if I need your help yet,” I finally said, breaking the
long silence. “But if I figure out that I do, I promise to come get you.”

  He shifted, and I knew he hadn’t gotten what he’d wanted. But I also knew that he was content to wait for me to ask. In this, we were well matched, since I normally had the patience of a toddler hopped up on Oreos, while Sinclair had the patience of a trap-door spider: Come on over, take your time. You know I’ll get you eventually.

  That shouldn’t have been comforting, but it was.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  “How did your father die?”

  Of all the ways I imagined Jessica would start, that wasn’t anywhere on the list.

  I’d finally pinned her down, and the usual list of suspects was in the kitchen, enjoying a postsmoothie afterglow. It was just short of midnight, all the babies (Fur, Burr, Thing One, Thing Two, BabyJon) were miraculously asleep, and the adults—dead and alive—were awake.

  She’d wriggled on the hook, Jessica had, which told me that I should go ice fishing with my mom pretty soon. I hadn’t been in years, but we used to go all the time. I hadn’t thought I’d missed it so much, but fishing metaphors only cropped up when I was craving something fresh-caught, or Mom’s company, or her ice house. Since I had zero interest in a salmon smoothie, and the only time I saw Mom lately was when I was dropping off BabyJon, or she was, clearly it was past time for mother-daughter time.

  Also, my mom’s ice house was terrific. It was red and white, shaped and painted to look like a tiny barn, and heated with propane. She could haul it onto the lake with a ball hitch and her Ford Escape; took about a half hour to get everything set up. Inside there was room for three; a Coleman stove for soup, cocoa, and mulled wine; four rods with rattle reels—the good ones, with the wide spools—the drill, scoops, and nets; and a padded chest for sitting, filled with blankets, hats, and extra gloves. It could be ten below, and we’d be toasty inside, sipping cocoa and watching bobbers, and when I got bored I could go out into the temp village and see what was what.

  See, that was the best thing about ice fishing, the way a temporary town would pop up almost overnight. I always found it fascinating that Lake Mille Lacs (and other cold places, probably, I dunno, I’m not a geographer), while great for boating in the summer, took on an entirely new identity in the winter, sprouting towns of ice houses. So you had neighbors, and you saw the same people every season, but only for a couple of months or so. And when spring started to get close, the village gradually disappeared until there was nothing left to mark its passage besides tire tracks and iced-over holes.