Undead and Done by MaryJanice Davidson

on with relentless cheer, “you needed those shoes to figure out how to teleport back and forth.”
    â€œYes, you had to click your heels together.” From Jessica, who was also cruel. Because this was the life I had chosen: free of yes-men. “There’s no place like Macy’s; there’s no place like Macy’s—”
    â€œI hate you both,” I announced. “So much.” Why were these terrible women entrusted with infants? Was this why society was screwed?
    â€œBut now you don’t even need the shoes.”
    No, I didn’t need the shoes anymore. But for the longest time, no matter how often I practiced, I’d go from Hell and end up in the garden shed. Every damned time. Took weeks of practice just to ’port into the house. These days, my control was better, but I don’t think it was because I was improving. I think I just worried less, because we had bigger problems. And when I worried less, things just fell into place.
    â€œNo, I don’t need the shoes anymore.”
    â€œSo you just . . . what?”
    â€œI focus. I concentrate.” I waited for the scorn and guffaws. “And then I’m there.”
    â€œI’m not sure what’s stranger . . . how you’re changing or how quickly we’re getting used to the changes.”
    I shrugged as she popped BabyJon into the portable crib she’d set up in the corner. She had a point—five years ago, I was still alive; I had a day job; I was dateless and not a little aimless. My biggest worries were avoiding the Ant and not strangling the executives I worked with, the ones who thought dumping a box of paper clips into a copy machine meant the copies would come out clipped. * If this was a TV show, the “previously on the Betsy show” part would take hours.
    â€œHow come you’re here? Not that I mind, but I thought we agreed the babies were safer elsewhere until the ruckus died down.”
    â€œThey are,” Mom agreed, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t visit.”
    â€œActually, I thought that was exactly what it—”
    â€œDick had to quit the Cop Shop,” Jessica said abruptly, putting a twin down beside BabyJon. Port-a-cribs, I was coming to learn, were one of the greatest inventions ever to spring from the mind of (wo)man. They were right up there with the telephone in terms of convenience. Thirty seconds to set up! Ten to take down! Goddamned miraculous is what it was, and oh hell, that was bad.
    â€œWell, shit,” I said, dismayed. Detective Richard Berry, also known as Jessica’s boyfriend and sire of weird babies, had been in our lives before I’d died (the first time). I’d been attacked outside Khan’s Mongolian BBQ by a pack of feral, yowling, howling vampires, fended them off with well-placed kicks from the toes of my pointy shoes (thank goodness I’d avoided round-toed shoes that day) and my purse, like it was 1955 instead of the twenty-first century. I didn’t know it then, but that had been step one of my evolution from out-of-work administrative assistant to reigning queen of vampires/Hell. *
    Anyway, Detective Dick had been the cop assigned to my case. We’d flirted with the idea of flirting, but to be frank, wealthy blonds with swimmers’ builds didn’t do it for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I liked them tall, dark, and vampiric. (And also wealthy. But in fairness to
moi
, I had no idea Eric Sinclair was rich when we met. Mostly I was focusedon how much I loathed the very sight of him. We did not meet cute.)
    â€œBut Richard loves being a cop,” my mother said. She’d gone right over to Jess and patted her, and Jessica sort of leaned—casually, like she wasn’t consciously doing it—until she was basically slumped onto my mom like a gorgeous gangly leech. “He never needed that job.”
    Truth. Richard Berry was rich, rich,