Undead and Unforgiven by MaryJanice Davidson Page A

faith. And I had faith without proof until my thirteenth birthday, when Mother appeared and explained my destiny. Then I knew. And we can help everyone know. We’ve time traveled; we’ve seen Hell; my mother was the devil; you’re the
new
devil! We know the Bible’s right, we can tell people! We can save everybody!” 7
    â€œWhy . . . why would we do that?” Was she talking about us going on some sort of . . . lecture circuit of the damned? Would we be copresenters, or would it be her show and I’d be trotted out like the miniature elephant in
Jurassic Park
:
Look what we made! Give us money and we’ll make more!
(The book, not the movie. I loved that stupid dwarf elephant. The scientists should have skipped the dinosaurs and just engineered a huge park of thousands of dwarf elephants. If they escaped, it’d be annoying but also adorable.) “Laura?”
    â€œWhy
wouldn’t
we do that?” she replied, puzzled. She was leaning toward me, our hands were almost touching, she was as friendly and excited as I’d seen her in weeks. Our last meeting
    (“I’ll take over your job, your destiny, the one you tricked me into and lied to get out of. But there are strings, Laura. You don’t get to dump this on me and walk away withoutmajor strings. I’m giving you the same deal I gave our dad: we’re family or we’re not. This isn’t something you can change your mind about later. And you can’t half-and-half it, either. No flitting down to Hell to check on me, or catch up on family gossip . . . If you’re giving up your birthright and dumping your responsibility on me, then do it, and do it all the way.
    â€œYou’re done, you’re out. Hell’s not your inheritance anymore, it’s not yours in any way anymore and that means everything that comes with it. You don’t get to jettison the responsibility but keep the perks . . . If I see you in Hell, I’m going to assume you’re dead.”)
    hadn’t been so pleasant. Was she—was she trying to forge a new relationship with me? Was setting up the “We Can Prove God Exists” lecture series her way of reconciling herself to what she’d lost? Was she regretting her choices less than a month after she had made them, or was this the plan all along?
    â€œI’ve barely started, and I wanted to tell you right away—”
    Really?
    â€œâ€”but you’ve been gone.”
    â€œWow.”
    â€œI know!”
    â€œYou actually managed to make me being
in Hell
, doing
your job
, sound like a character flaw, or like I was rude to keep your Great Idea waiting. I can’t even figure out the time thing between dimensions—”
    â€œConjure up a row of clocks, like in a brokerage firm.”
    â€œâ€”when I was—well, yes, that was Marc’s suggestion and it’ll probably work, but it’s not like I was off having fun!” Although listening to Dame Washington bitch about her kid
had
been pretty entertaining . . . and pissing off all the teens and twenty-somethings with my NoTweets rule (and confusing everyone else over fifty: “What’s tweets?”) had also been fun . . .
    I forced a calming breath (focus!) and decided to go with the least complicated objection first.
    â€œNever mind where I was or for how long or why I had to be there in the first place. I’m here now, right? And the thing is, about your Great Idea, our word isn’t proof.” I said it as nicely as I could, and not just because showing the world our trials and tribulations had zero appeal. In a future that will never come to pass, I ruled the world. And it was a huuuge downer. What little I’d seen of the other, ancient, grumpy, zombie-raising, Sinclair-killing me had been more than enough. I wouldn’t revisit it. And since I could time travel from Hell, I meant that