Undead 11, Undead and Unstable - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,2
did so well that now there are books about the Game of Thrones. Or maybe the books came first—I dunno. I quit reading fantasy before I was voting age. There was just too much of “I shall draw the mystical sword of Eldenwurst, thus named Soulsucker, and with mine eldritch blade will smite all enemies of the fey, but fear not, all ye who tremble before Soulsucker, I shall rule with a just hand and also the council of Geeks, now ye and ye, bring me fifty virgins and lots of mead.” Those books lose me right around chapter two. Anyway, I’d never read the books, but the show was pretty cool, and I got hooked on it.
No. That wasn’t true. Marc had a huge crush on the Khal Drogo character, and he got me hooked on it. So he’d come off shift from the ER and we’d raid the DVR and rhapsodize about Drogo’s unbelievable shoulders and what a doucheboat Viserys was.
Wow, getting ahead of myself more than usual … okay, so, in the first season of Game of Thrones, the unborn baby of one of the main characters was called The Stallion Who Mounted the World, a scary yet cool nickname. Jessica was sporting The Belly That Ate the World. She claimed she wasn’t due until summer, but I had my doubts. She was just … gigantic. Gah: Twins? Triplets? Just what this place needed, three pissed-off newborns continually crying and pooping.
“I’m glad you didn’t trip.” I sighed and glanced back down at the dead cat. “She’s looked better.” An understatement. Giselle didn’t look like she was sleeping; dead bodies never looked like they were sleeping.
And Giselle, the cat who’d gotten me into this whole vampire queen mess in the first place, was most definitely not sleeping. Her eyes were cloudy slits. Her mouth was frozen, half-open, and she was thin, but not dangerously so … she’d always been scrawny. And she was old … I’d had her for over ten years. She just showed up one day and refused to leave, so I got in the habit of feeding and sheltering her. I guess that’s how babies and roommates show up, too. You feed ’em and they just never leave.
For ten years we pretended the other one didn’t exist. Our only interactions were during meal times. (Hers. Not mine.) And since I’d moved us into the mansion way back when, plenty of other people were happy to take over the chore. The mansion was so big, my pet (except I’d never really had that warm connection to her, and you couldn’t say I was her pet: see above, lack of connection) and I would go days without seeing each other, which suited us both.
I’d been killed the first time trying to coax Giselle into coming out of bad weather. I wasn’t paying attention during the snowstorm while I coaxed, and got creamed by a Pontiac Aztek. Giselle, natch, scampered off without a scratch. She was the only thing in my life that found my resurrection boring.
Now here I was, looking down at her skinny dead body and realizing I had one more task to finish before I could consider all my pet responsibilities fulfilled.
“Ugh.”
“Yeah.”
“Are there shovels in the shed?”
“Several.”
“There are? Really?” What terrible news; I couldn’t pull the old “I can’t do this unpleasant chore even though I really want to because we don’t have the right equipment” ploy. Another wonderful day in a shit week. Month, come to think of it!
Giselle, you insensitive jerk, you couldn’t have done this a month ago? Or a month later? You gotta do it now, while fate and/or karma is really piling it on, and Jessica wouldn’t have pedis without me, and we’d burned out the motor on one of the smoothie blenders? Typical cat: not one thought for how her death would inconvenience me. Andrew Vachss, the best noir-ey writer in the history of the genre, called cats the lap dancers of the animal world. Give them attention, they’re there. Stop, they’re outta there.
Well, she was outta here, all right.
“Next time,” I announced, “I’m getting a dog.”
Jessica snorted. She knew that was a lie. She knew why it was a lie, too, but was too nice to call me on it just then. “If memory serves, you didn’t exactly get Giselle.”
“Your memory serves.” I bent and gingerly picked up the body, then held it at arm’s length like a luau platter. “Yuck.”