Free Undead and Undermined by MaryJanice Davidson Page A

though I had a time-traveling sister.
    “Laura, listen. You know all those cute stories about people moving and then their pets following them across the country to the new house? Or a kitten takes a liking to a family and follows them around until they give in and feed it before the ASPCA gets involved, and the new family ends up taking care of it so it doesn’t go feral and kill everyone in the neighborhood?” I gestured to the trussed Marc Thing. “Guess what followed us back?”
    “OhdearGod,” Laura said, and missed when she reached out to grasp the back of a kitchen chair to steady herself. Her arms pinwheeled for a hilarious second until N/Dick reached out to steady her.
    “Well put.”
    “How did I not notice he was sitting right there ?”
    “I was wondering that, too,” Tina admitted.
    “The gut,” she replied absently. “I’m not used to Jessica weighing more than seventy-eight pounds. I couldn’t help be mesmerized by it. I couldn’t not look at it.”
    “No one can not look at it,” I soothed, ignoring Jessica’s glare.
    “Oooh, yuck!”
    “Disgusting,” I agreed.
    “I’m sitting”—the Marc Thing sighed—“right here.”
    “We actually weren’t talking about—” I began, but fortunately wiser heads than mine (that would be every head in the room) were better able to stay on track.
    “This isn’t . . . our fault?” Laura looked horrified.
    “Only in that I was able to follow you back to your loved ones because you burst onto my timeline with no right or invitation, after gaily running amok in my past and yours and instigating catastrophic change in the very fabric of the universe.”
    “Anything sounds bad when you put it like that,” I snapped. Then, “Wait. How did you know we’d been in the past before falling into the future?”
    “You told me,” the Marc Thing replied.
    I hate time travel.
    “Why haven’t we killed him yet?” N/Dick asked. As a cop, this wasn’t an idle question. “He’s already dead, so I can probably keep us out of trouble. And he’s only here to fuck us or kill us.”
    “Or kill us and fuck us,” Laura said. That was somewhat out of character, and from Sinclair’s surprised glance, I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
    “I’m going to do a quick sweep around the house, make sure he didn’t sprinkle any other surprises around before he let you grab him,” Laura said, and darted off.
    “Okay, that was . . . heroic, I think.” Though what Laura would know about sneakiness that Sinclair and Tina wouldn’t . . . oh, who cared? Back to business.
    “Shall we kill him?” Tina was saying. “We could empty a clip into his head or put that shiny new axe to use—the one I ordered from Cabela’s?—and chop him up into many, many pieces, or bleed him out and then set the corpse—”
    “Uggghh,” Jessica said, and rapidly waddled from the room, both hands crammed over her lips. Her eyes were practically bulging out of her head, and I knew exactly how she felt.
    “—or burn him with acid or tie weights to all his pieces and drop him in lakes all over the world and be done with it.”
    “That sounds extreme,” I said, and it was a sorry-ass day when I was the voice of reason. “It’s not really our thing.”
    “But you know he isn’t here to help us. Come on, really? He’s come all this way to not hideously murder us in a number of gruesome ways?” Dee/Nick asked. “You’ve seen vengeance flicks, right?”
    “Point,” Tina admitted.
    “I’ve gotta think about more than my safety, or yours,” he continued as we all tried not to hear Jessica throwing up in the small bathroom down the hall. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to just stand around talking about this. We need to make a decision and then get it done.”
    Wow. I was still having trouble getting used to Nick/ Dick liking me again, never mind him using his awesome cop-powers to keep us safe, or out of trouble.
    The Marc Thing seemed pretty cool about his