Undead and Uneasy

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Undead And Uneasy

Mary Janice Davidson

And the Queene shalt noe a living childe, and he shalt be hers by a living man.

—The Book of the Dead

A cat's a better mother than you.

—Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

A gloomy guest fits not a wedding feast.

—FriedrichVon Schiller

Lisa, vampires are make believe. Like elves, gremlins, and Eskimos.

—The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror IV"

With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.

—Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

To challenge the Queene, thou shalt desecrate the symbole.

—The Book of the Dead

Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and

then you still have to decide what to do

—C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

A Letter to My Readers

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First of all, thank you, dear reader. It's standard to refer to you as "dear" but you really
are dear to me, and I'll tell you why. Thanks to you, I've gone from the excitement of

never knowing when the power will be shut off (during a party? when my folks are over?

during my kid's science experiment?) to the staid, dull lifestyle of one who can actually

pay her utility bills. Because of my readers, I never go to a book signing unless I'm

sporting (a.) designer shoes or (b) a pedicure. Because of my readers, I've gotten to

research mermaids, ghosts, psychics, manta rays, the Caymans, Florida, Cape Cod,

Monterey Bay, Texas, zombies (Texas zombies?), vampires, were-anythings, Alaska,

royal lineage, Martha Stewart, bellinis vs. mimosas, bed and breakfasts, wax fangs, and

why nobody starts smoking at age thirty-five.

I've also learned how to write an ongoing series versus a stand-alone single-title novel.

Which brings us to Undead and Uneasy.

If you've been with me since the beginning, since Undead and Unwed, bless you. Your

patience is about to be rewarded, I think. If you're new to the series, you've come along

just in time: as one of the weird sisters in Hercules said, "It's gonna be big."

Everything in the Undead universe has been leading to this book (say it with me: poor

Betsy!). Yes, there has been a method to my madness. The support group she has so

carefully, if unconsciously, been building around herself, that I've been building for her,

is about to disappear. Everything she thought she knew about the undead? Totally wrong.

Marriage? Life? Death? It's all, like her favorite book and movie, Gone With the Wind.

That's not to say we won't have some fun along the way . . . those of you who've been with

me before know that the Undead universe is always a good time. It's just. . . we're not all

going to make it out alive. And I'm sorry. I know that sucks. But it's just . . . it's just how

life is sometimes. And death.

So, dear reader, thank you for coming along for the ride. Thank you for staying along for

the ride. You won't be sorry, I'm pretty sure. And if you are? Well, I can write fast or I

can write long, but I can't do both. This is the long version, so what say we give it a try?

So let's get going, shall we? As Betsy might say, "Pipe down and listen up, asshat."

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) Once, there was a beautiful queen who was as terrible on the inside as she was glorious on

the outside. She was vain, wicked, cold, and selfish. Her greatest pleasures were her

coalfire earrings, terrible wieldy things that swung past her shoulders. Each stone was as

big around as the ball of the queen's thumb, and it was said more than a thousand men died

mining the bloodred rocks.

So conceited was this queen, and so greatly did she love her coalfire earrings, that she

threatened a curse upon any who might steal them from her. So naturally, her people

waited until the queen died before taking them.

The four thieves (who in truth cannot be called grave robbers, because no one waited until

the hated queen was buried) went to her unguarded body and helped themselves. The

body was unguarded because the parties celebrating the new monarchs (the dead queen's

cousin, a plain but generous woman; and her husband, a shy healer) were in full swing, and

no one especially cared about guarding a dead jerk.

The first of the four dropped dead before he could mount his horse. The second of the

four died after his tent mysteriously caught fire the next night. The third made it to the

coast, sold the earrings for a splendid sum, and promptly dropped dead of a brainstorm,

what today is known as an aneurysm. What happened to the fourth is not known.

The man who bought the earrings had them in his shop for three and a half days. He sold

the earrings to a man of some wealth and standing, just before his shop was struck by

hundreds of successive strokes of lightning, sparing his life but driving him out of business

forever, and leaving him with a lifelong fear of flashing lights and loud noises.

The man of wealth and standing was the manservant of a European prince (history is

vague on which one). He delivered the earrings to his master, and one hour later, the

prince ingested a lethal amount of tainted meat, along with half of one of the earrings,

which was later extracted during the autopsy.

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) The earrings eventually reached London, but not after causing a series of increasingly odd

and gruesome disasters along the way, including but not limited to a pig plague, a tomato

blight, a series of foals born with five legs, multiple drownings several miles away from

any natural source of water, and a viciously quick mammal that no one ever saw clearly

enough to describe well.

The day the jewelry went on display at the British Museum in their Return of Egyptian

Antiquities Exhibit, the head of security suffered a fatal heart attack, the gift shop girl

went blind, and three tour guides were stricken with crippling dysentery.

The earrings stayed in the museum for many years. Probably. The earrings, it seemed,

disliked staying in one spot, and curators were known to snatch themselves bald looking

for the jewels.

They turned up once in the Neanderthal exhibit, twice in the men's urinal on the second

floor, six times in the gift shop (by now word of the "cursed" earrings had spread, and no

museum employee, no matter how long her hours or how low her pay, dared touch them),

and four times in the cafeteria (where an unwary museum guest nearly choked to death on

one). They also went on an unscheduled, miniature tour around the world, disappearing

and being found in no fewer than eight exhibits: Japan, Rome, Manila, Greece, the

Americas, Britain, the Pacific, and the Near East. Each of the other museums, aware of

the artifacts' history, returned the jewels to Britain quickly and without comment.

Eventually the British Museum came under new management (the last curator having

taken forced early retirement for mysteriously losing his fingers and his sense of smell)

who, in an attempt to score points with the House of Windsor, made a gift of the earrings

to Diana, the Princess of Wales.

Some time later, they came into the possession of a very old, very curious vampire who

had the idea of breaking the earrings into a series of smaller stones and shipping them in

twenty-five different directions around the planet. You know, just to see what would

happen.

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) One of the stones ended up in Minnesota, right about at the turn of the twenty-first

century. Nobody knows the exact date, because those involved in the shipment

arrangements simply cannot be found.

There are three things wrong with that card," the king of the vampires told me. "One, my

love for you is not anything like 'shimmering amber waves of summer wheat.' Two, my

love for you has nothing to do with adorable, fluffy cartoon rabbits. Three . . . " And he

sighed here. "Rabbits do not sparkle."

I looked at the shiny yellow card, aglitter with sparkling bunnies. It was the least

objectionable of the pile of two dozen I had spread all over our bed. What could I say? He

had a point. Three of them. "It's just an example—don't have a heart attack and friggin' die

on me, all right?"

"I do not have," he muttered, "that kind of good fortune."

"I heard that. I'm just saying, there will be a lot of people at the wedding"—I ignored

Sinclair's shudder—"but there will also be people who can't make it. You know, due to

having other plans or being dead, or whatever. So what you do is, you send a wedding

announcement to pull in all the people who couldn't come. That way people know we

actually did the deed. It's polite." I racked my brain for the perfect way to describe it so

my reluctant groom would clamber aboard. "It's, you know, civilized."

"It is a voracious grab for gifts from the crude and uncouth."

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"That's true," I acknowledged after a minute, knowing well where I was in the Wars of the

Couth. Come on, we all knew he was right. There was no point—no point—in all those

birth and wedding and graduation announcements beyond, "Hey! Limber up the old

checkbook; something new has happened in our family. Cash is also fine."

"But it's still nice. You didn't fuss nearly so much about the invitations."

"The invitations have a logical point."

"The invitations are weird. Just 'Sinclair,' like you don't have a middle or first name. Why

wouldn't you put your full name on the thing?"

"Our community knows me as Sinclair."

'Our' my butt. He meant the vampire community. I couldn't resist one last dig. "I'm

marrying Cher!"

"Don't tease."

I bit my tongue for what felt like the hundredth time that night . . . and it was barely 9:00

p.m. With the wedding only three weeks away, Sinclair, my blushing groom, was growing

bitchier by the hour.

He had never liked the idea of a formal wedding with a minister and flower girls and a

wedding cake frosted with colored Crisco. He said that because the Book of the Dead

proclaimed him my consort, we were already married and would be for a thousand years.

Period. End of discussion. Everything else? A waste of time. And money. Tough to tell the

greater sin in his eyes.

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) After what seemed like a thousand years (but was only one and a half) I'd gotten Eric (yes,

he had a first name) to profess his love, propose, give me a ring, and agree to a ceremony.

But he never promised to take his dose without kicking, and he sure never promised to get