Undead 8, Undead and Unwelcome - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,2

kill me, and refused to risk my life to find out. Which is why she was riding in the cargo hold instead of the plush seats of a private plane.

I shoved Antonia out of my head; it still hurt too much to think about her sacrifice.

And speaking of sacrifices, there was Garrett, Antonia’s late lover, to think about. Once he’d realized that Antonia was dead—in part due to his own cowardice—he’d killed himself right in front of us. Messily.

I didn’t quite dare broach the subject with Sinclair; he felt unrivaled contempt for a lover who would jam someone up and then not face the consequences.

Me, I wasn’t so sure it was that black and white. Garrett was never strong. He was never even brave. But he had loved Antonia and couldn’t live without her. Literally.

Tina and Sinclair had taken care of his body, dragging it off the broken staircase (poor Garrett looked like he’d been caught in a giant set of teeth), cutting off the head, and burying it at Nostro’s old farm (where the Fiends . . . the ones still alive . . . lived).

But that was enough of that for now—Garrett was dead, and I couldn’t change that. But I was going to have a word with my alleged best friend about her irritating, insulting, and idiotic memorandum (memoranda?).

I mean, jeez. Narcissistic? Didn’t she stop to think how I would feel if Cooper read that about me? Not to mention, I wasn’t even cc’d on the thing.

I swear, I didn’t know what had gotten into that girl since I’d cured her cancer and she had to dump her boyfriend because he hated my guts. Frankly, I’ve been having a terrible time this week.

And now rogue memos! It was too much for anyone to expect me to handle, which I would be pointing out to her the minute I saw her.

Self-centered? Me? Sometimes that girl doesn’t know me at all.

Chapter 3

Dear Myself Dude,

I can’t remember the last time I tried to write in a diary. This one will go the way the others went, I think. I’ll write like gangbusters for a week or two, then lose all interest in writing about my life and get back to living my life. But here I am again, starting a diary for the first time in over twenty years.

That’s a lie, of course. One of my psych profs told me in college that we lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The man knew his shit. I know exactly when I quit writing in diaries: it was right around the time I realized I had zero interest in girls, but plenty of interest in boys. I was fourteen, and kept waiting to grow out of it. Kept wondering what was wrong with me. Hoped it was just a phase. Prayed my father wouldn’t find out. Prayed no one in high school would find out.

The trouble with being a closeted homosexual is exactly this: you live with the agonizing fear you will be found out.

I hid until I was old enough to drink.

When I was sixteen, I tore up my last diary for the simplest and most cowardly of reasons: I didn’t want my dad to find it. Colonel Phillip P. Spangler’s only son a bum puncher? A faggot? A crank gobbler? He would have killed me, or I would have killed me, so best to stop writing things like “I wish Steve Dillon would dump that idiot cheerleader and blow me for an hour or two.”

So.Diaries. Specifically, new diaries. No chance the colonel will find this one; he’s in hospice, crankily dying of lung cancer.

It’s pretty rotten that I wasn’t sad when I heard. It’s worse that I reran his labs myself to confirm it. I was relieved. Poor excuse for a man’s only son.

My name is Marc Spangler. I’m a doctor, an ER resident at one of the busier Minneapolis hospitals, and I live in a mansion. No, I am not rich. Not yet . . . and probably not ever unless I specialize in cardiology, oncology, or face-lifts. Fortunately, this is not the sort of job you go into in order to make money. Which is a good thing, because I found out (quite by accident) that when you break down my shifts into hourly rates, every receptionist in the building makes more money than I do.

But back to the mansion. My best friends are a vampire and the richest woman in the state of Minnesota (and, as Jessica