Free Undead and Done by MaryJanice Davidson

business?” Times like this, I
almost
missed Satan. She’d been the one who’d been a stickler for meetings starting on time. For meetings at all. Sure, she’d been trying to obstruct me at every turn, but by God, we stuck to an agenda and meetings ended on time. Not that I knew she was the devil then. Because nothing’s ever simple, y’know?
    â€œYes, yes, we can start,” the Ant replied, waving away my whining. “We just have to— Marc! Hoo-hoo!
Marc!
”
    â€œHey!” Cathie let out an eardrum-shredding whistle. “Over here, Marc! Get your butt over here!”
    Marc, who’d been hurrying through the food court, looked momentarily surprised to be greeted so enthusiastically. Heshot a cautious glance at me and I shrugged. It wouldn’t be fair to tip him off. Also, it would be huge fun to see my stepmother and favorite ghost falling all over him to figure out the state of his love life so they could decide which one would be the other’s slave for the next hundred years. Why would I ever stand in the way of that?
    With each step, Marc looked more and more bewildered. It was a good look for him, though, because Marc was criminally cute. Black hair he kept chopped in a Caesar cut (which he insisted on calling a George Clooney cut), bright green eyes, pale skin—like most of us, because (a) dead and (b) Minnesota—long legs, quick and clever hands. He usually wore scrubs so often washed they were almost velvety (as well as going from green to a washed-out gray). An ER doc in life, he didn’t trust his zombie reflexes to do much more than skilled first aid in death.
    I thought he was being overcautious—it’s not like the flesh was rotting off his bones or anything. He’d delivered Jessica’s weird babies with no trouble. (For him. Jessica was pissed that he was unable to rig an epidural in her bedroom. I can still hear her: “I
get
to push? What, like it’s something I won? How is that an incentive?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
”) In fact, as long as we hung out together, Marc would only ever appear to be seconds dead. Maybe just
one
second dead; that’s how (ugh) fresh he was. He could also heal with ridiculous speed, which made
no
sense.
    The trouble would start if I abandoned him. Or took my power away from him . . . not that I had any idea how to do that. I still had no idea how I’d turned him into a zombie in the first place. * Argh, hindsight! That’s how I should haveanswered all of Diana Pierce’s questions: “I have no idea how I did that.”
    Moot, anyway; I’d never leave him. He became my friend the day I woke up dead and has stuck by me ever since. Not to belittle my mom or Jessica, but they’d loved me before I died. Marc only knew me as a bitchy vampire and he still thought I was worth getting to know. So there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for him.
    Except warn him where this was going, of course. I got so few kicks from running Hell, I wasn’t keen on derailing this train until we knew who won.
    â€œâ€”just tell us why you were late already!” I could see the Ant had gotten tired of her version of subtlety and was just nagging the shit out of him so they could settle the bet.
    â€œBut why do you even care?”
    â€œOf course I care!” the Ant yelped. Boy, talk about a half-truth. She cared, but only because she didn’t want to be my compliment slave. Also,
I
didn’t want her to be my compliment slave.
    â€œWhat difference does it make if I had plans?” He was looking from one to the other with a dazed expression on his face, like he was trying to focus on a tennis match after several beers. “I’m here now.”
    â€œDid you have plans?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œJust answer the question.”
    â€œDid Will put you up to— No, wait. That’s idiotic. Right?” He looked at me. “Will