Free Undead and Unwary by MaryJanice Davidson

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.
    And then for all of spring and summer and fall, the lake was just a lake. It wasn’t a community, and no one had much interest in getting to know the tourists. And then winter would come back, and . . . and it would be a town again.
    The