Free Undead and Unwary by MaryJanice Davidson Page A

only drawback was the way the ice tended to settle, sometimes with a shudder, and you remembered that this was a hobby that could kill you. But the same is true of bowling, so live dangerously, dammit! Embrace life!
    (Was all that a metaphor for something? I hoped not. Unless it was a metaphor for how much I missed ice fishing. In which case, it was pretty perfect.)
    Anyway. Back to Jessica. Cornering her had been tricky, mostly for the reasons I was complaining about earlier, to wit: it’s not nice to brain-rape your best friend and force her to vomit up all her secrets. But if she wasn’t avoiding me outright, she was physically absent from the mansion, doing who-knew-what. DadDick professed to know nothing, and since I figured he was running on about four hours of sleep on a good night, I believed him. It was possible DadDick didn’t know his own middle name.
    But at last she fell into my clutches and could not escape. I knew this because when I walked into the kitchen for midnight smoothies, she was waiting and greeted me with, “I have to talk to you. Right now.” Ha! She should have known she couldn’t escape my grasp for long.
    And she’d started with asking me how Dad had died. Like she didn’t know. Like I didn’t know.
    More worrisome, the others—had she called a meeting? sent out a memo?—were watching me like it was an ordinary question, up there with “Are we friggin’ out of ice again ? It’s Minnesota in winter! Is it some kind of ironic joke? Is anybody listening to me?”
    I gaped for a few seconds and fumbled for the answer that, to me—and I assumed to them—was obvious. “I—you know. You know what happened, you all know what happened.” I looked around the butcher-block table at all of them. Jessica and DadDick looked tense, but they were new parents, so natch. Tina looked politely curious, but that was her default expression. Marc was wide-eyed, but he was always up for family gossip of any sort, or anything that would engage his interest and thus stop his rotting. DadDick was on Jessica’s left, idly scraping at what looked like a pureed peach stain on his T-shirt. And Sinclair, immaculate in Armani gray, was on my left and watching Jess with an unblinking gaze. He was in socks, his concession to the late hour and informal setting.
    “Dad and the Ant were in a car accident,” I continued, wondering why I was explaining stuff they all knew. “He got the gas mixed up with the brake—I inherited his brains, so I get how that happened—and plowed into the back of a garbage truck. You”—pointing to Jess—“you were in the hospital, and you”—to Sinclair—“you’d been kidnapped; my badass vampire husband was overpowered by a little-old-lady librarian.”
    “Not that little,” Sinclair muttered, the memory still rankling.
    It had been a terrible time. Like, Black Death terrible. My father and stepmother were dead in a silly accident, and their double funeral had been held where mine would have been, earlier, if I, as the “corpse,” hadn’t woken up pissed and vamoosed. (Wait. Since I was literally a corpse, the quotation marks might not be necessary.) Being back in that funeral home had been awful beyond belief. I could still see their poster-sized pictures at the front of the room, Dad with his vacant country club grin and the Ant looking like a blond piranha, pineapple-colored hair standing tall. And I was pretty sure her eyes followed me. There was no escaping that poster.
    No coffins, by the way. No chance. The bodies had been burned beyond recognition. I thought about my father, weak and nonconfrontational to the end, and my stepmother, Antonia, who threw his money at charities so she could plan balls and be the prom queen all over again. My return from the dead had horrified both of them. Their deaths had left me feeling bad that I didn’t feel bad.
    Jessica had been battling cancer from a hospital bed, a tormented DadDick (except he was Nick then—this was