Undead and Unwelcome

Chapter 11

The words wife or queen seemed almost to hang in the air over our heads. I had the sense that they weren’t asking these questions out of idle curiosity, or to be polite. No, no. Michael was a predator, of course, as Antonia had been, which meant he was constantly on the lookout for weakness. He couldn’t help it. Probably he didn’t even know he was doing it.

Wife or queen? A question I had asked myself on more than one occasion. Sinclair was bigger, stronger, faster. Older. Richer. Better educated. More even-​tempered, more in control. Frankly, there were times—lots of times—when I wished I could just be the wife, and leave the whole vamp royalty thing to him.

But I could do things no other vampire on the planet could. Seemed dumb not to take advantage of that, or at least acknowledge it. So we existed in an interesting state of love and respect.

Well, occasional respect, when I wasn’t giving him a Wet Willy or poking him in his flat belly when we showered together—the man wasn’t ticklish! Talk about an unnatural creature.

He’d bowed to my authority on more than one occasion, too—usually just before I started hurling heavy objects at his head to emphasize whatever point I was making. You want to see something funny? Eric Sinclair, following one of my orders. Believe me, it didn’t happen all that often. Whenever it did, he always had an odd expression on his face: part admiration, part annoyance.

Now where the hell was I? Dammit! It was three A.M., I was tired out from being on edge all night, and was having more trouble than usual following the conversation, which had veered from funeral rights to religion to atheist vampires to my title.

“Funny thing for you to ask, Jeannie,” I finally said. I guess it wasn’t exactly unheard of for a werewolf to marry a—you know, a regular person. But it was rare enough so that the two of them caused a stir now and again—I’d gotten that much from Antonia, and that only after she’d been living with us for a while.

Get this: not only was it rare for werewolves to marry boring old humans, it was considered super-​lucky for the Pack, and the offspring were usually exceptional Pack members. For example, Antonia—

But I wasn’t ready to go there again. Call me a chickenshit coward; that’s fine. I just couldn’t do it again right now.

“Mmm.” Jeannie grinned, but didn’t rise to the bait, just shrugged. “Good point.”

I cleared my throat, because I was having trouble swallowing the whole—the whole mundaneness of the thing. Mundaneness? Mundanity? “So there are Presbyterian werewolves, and Catholic ones, and Lutherans—”

“And Buddhists and atheists and Hindus,” Derik added.

“Will you please stop that pacing and sit the fuck down? Ow!” I yanked my poor sore ankle out of reach of Sinclair’s foot. “You look like a cheetah on crack.”

“Back off, blondie,” Derik snapped back and, if anything, sped up the pacing.

“I’m surprised you didn’t draw your own conclusion,” Michael said loudly, clearly trying to distract us. I think he was clearly trying. It was hard to know what the guy was up to. “Because clearly, all vampires are Christians.”

“No,” Sinclair said.

No? What, no? How did we get off the topic of werewolf retribution for Antonia and on to religion? I got enough of the “let’s all pray to Jesus meek and mild” stuff I needed from Laura.

“No?”

“No. We, too, have Muslims and Catholics and pagans. We, too, have—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jeannie interrupted. “That makes no sense at all.”

“We do not go about our lives with the objective of making sense to strangers,” my husband said with terrifying pleasantness.

“Fuck.” Derik, thank God, had grabbed a chair, dragged it over, turned it so it was facing backward, and sat. His blond hair fell into his eyes and he shook it out of his face with a quick, impatient movement. “Why would a cross work on an atheist vampire?”

Sinclair and I traded a glance. Jessica, I noticed, was all ears as well—she’d been so quiet I’d almost forgotten she was in the room.

“Or someone Jewish?” Derik continued.

Because vampirism was a virus. A virus that was very hard to catch, and even harder to pass on. This was Marc’s theory, backed up by Tina and Sinclair—again, not all of a sudden. After months and months and months. Tina and Sinclair couldn’t be much more tight-​mouthed if someone sewed their lips shut with ultralite fishing line.

Vampirism, as a virus, slowed your metabolism waaaaay down, but didn’t stop it. Good points: you no longer sweated, or peed. Aging seemed to stop altogether. You were faster, stronger. Heightened senses. Blah-​blah.

Bad points: vampires were highly susceptible to suggestion. (All of them—modest cough—except me.) Tina, my husband’s right-​hand woman (she had been the one to turn him into a vampire in the early part of the twentieth century . . . yup, I was in love and regularly boinking a man old enough to be my grandfather), had eventually advanced this theory with Marc.

Marc went into MD mode and had tentatively concurred (on the grounds that he could change his mind if further proof emerged) that yes, it was a virus, and yes, a Jewish vampire would cringe away from a cross. Because we all know that’s what vampires do. They are vampires; ergo, crosses and holy water can hurt them.

I know, sounds stupid, right? Give it a minute. If you catch a disease that makes you highly suggestible, and you have the weight of a zillion horror movies telling you holy water burns . . . then holy water burns.

But we were getting off the point.

And it was driving me so nuts, I was practically biting the tip of my tongue off so I wouldn’t point out that Derik had made the same silly assumptions about vampires that we had about werewolves. After calling us morons.

“—explain what happened?”

Eh? Aw, shit. Michael was looking right at me. I jerked my foot away in time and Sinclair’s Kenneth Cole-​shod shoe clunked into the back of Michael’s desk.

“Explain what happened?” I repeated with what I hoped was an intelligent question on my face.

“Yes, to the Council.”

Council? What council? That didn’t sound good at all. Nobody had said anything about a council—I think. Damn. I really should be paying attention to the goings-​on in my life. “Can’t you tell them what happened? You’re the boss around here.”

“No.” Click. Closed. End of argument. I knew that tone—I’d heard it in my husband’s voice often enough—to know when it was no good to protest. “We’ll be meeting on the grounds just after sunset tomorrow. I’ll need all of your testimonies, so do not send one representative to speak for the group.

“Then what?” I asked nervously.

He just looked at me, almost like he was sorry for me.

Somehow, that was even worse than his cool fury.