Undead and Unwary by MaryJanice Davidson Read Free Book Online Page A

look at it another way, this is nothing new. All you have to do is what you’ve done since you woke up dead. Suck it up and get it done.”
    “Easy for you to say.” I was trudging toward the door.
    “It’s not, actually. You could get out of it if you really wanted, but you’re choosing not to.” He rubbed in more Purell and sort of waved me away, as if I were a six-foot-tall mosquito. “Just tell Laura you only agreed to help her to get her off your back,” was his parting advice, which I ignored, and rightly. It wasn’t my fault there was a crisis around here every ten minutes, a wonderful chaotic weird crisis. I was only one vampire queen, dammit! I was doing the best I could.
    What? I was.

 CHAPTER  
    FOUR
    A flight of stairs and several hallways and doors later, I found Jessica in her room up to no good. Not “are you hiding up here because it’s your turn to change a poopy diaper?” no good but clandestine-research, followed by hurriedly-shoving-papers-under-the-bed-when-she-saw-me no good.
    “Jesus!” She finished shoving papers and glared up at me from her spot on the floor beside her and DadDick’s bed. “Scared the hell out of me.”
    “Uh-huh, and that’s not furtive at all. Jess, what’s going on?”
    “What? I’m just sorting. And thinking. And then more sorting. Yes.” She got to her feet and began prowling around the room. She’d stuck a clipping in her back pocket, but I couldn’t think of a subtle way to grab it other than tripping her, sitting on her, and emptying her pockets. For which I would pay and pay and pay. I was stronger and faster; Jess was smarter. Just the thought of all the terrible things she could do to me was enough to make me feel guilty for even thinking of assault as a way to get to the bottom of this, however careful I would have been. And even though she’d made her view on being turned into a vampire mucho clear before I cured her cancer (long story), I could absolutely see her nagging a vamp into turning her just so she could keep punishing me through the centuries. Also, the tripping and sitting and pocket rifling wasn’t a nice thing to do to a best pal. It’s very wrong that I thought of that one last.
    She looked startled, but that could have been the ’do—she kept her black hair pulled back so tightly her eyebrows were always arched. Her manicure (lime green, urrgghh) was chipping, something pre-twins/not-insane Jess would never have allowed, and her T-shirt had splotches on it that, luckily, were only spit-up formula. (I hadn’t given one thought to enhanced vampire senses + newborns = gross and really, I should have. Ohhhhh, I should have.) Her jeans were so faded they were nearly white, and she was annoyed that skinny jeans were out again. She was so painfully thin (when carrying Thing One and Thing Two, she’d looked like a tent pole someone had hung a bag of volleyballs on), any jeans she pulled on were skinny jeans, even just a few weeks after popping twins.
    “Why are you in here?” she barked.
    “Because I’m lonesome?”
    Jess snorted but didn’t kick me out. “Mm-hm.”
    I sidled closer to the bed but knew I was no match for Jessica’s chaotic pile-everything-into-a-box-beneath-the-bed filing system. For a modern businesswoman, she was a Luddite when it came to paperwork. A big fan of old-fashioned file cabinets and long plastic containers that she stuffed with newspaper and mag clippings, she still shopped at Hallmark, for God’s sake.
    Unless I was willing to sneak in here when she and DadDick were out, or sleeping the sleep of the deeply sleep deprived, rummage endlessly through decades of clippings while trying to figure out which story had grabbed her interest (I wasn’t), or worse, which story was missing and now riding in her back pocket, I’d have to finesse it out of her. Subtlety, that was key.
    “Tell me what’s wrong or I’ll sit on you!”
    “What?”
    Okay, I could see it now. My finesse sucked. Time for a