UNDEAD AND UNWARY IS COMING; THERE IS NO WAY TO AVOID YOUR FATE

As I threatened--promised, as I promised--here's another sneak preview from UNDEAD AND UNWARY, released on an unsuspecting world October 7. The Anti-Christ is still trying to get Betsy to step up and help her run Hell, but Jessica's been acting weird. Weirder. Sinclair is revealed to be deathly afraid of Jessica's super soft bed, and some of my annoyance from previous day jobs creeps into the text. Also, this chapter is positively stuffed with Sinclair and post-coital snuggling.
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CHAPTER SIX

     “So, about Jessica.”     Sinclair groaned.  “Please.  I never beg, unless it is for you, or to you, and I am begging now.  Allow me to enjoy more than thirty seconds of post-coital bliss.”     “We’ve got to talk about how you talk.  Ruffians and post-coital bliss...I dunno.  Sometimes I despair.”     “As do I,” he muttered, seizing my wrist before I could tickle him in the ribs.  “Knowing you as I do, I have resigned myself to twenty-eight seconds of afterglow and...”  He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds.  “End afterglow.  Proceed.”     “How do you do that?  You don’t have a watch.”     “Decades of needing to know precisely when the sun rises and sets has left me with an excellent sense of time.”  He brought my wrist to his mouth and kissed the underside, teasing the veins with his tongue for a second.  “This is a skill it would be useful for you to learn.”     “Don’t start something you can’t finish, tongue boy.”  I yawned.  “And can’t I master making lumpless gravy first?”     “Come now, you have escaped death, and Hell, and Jessica’s wrath any number of times.  You survived The Incident.  You can do this,” he encouraged.  “What time is it?  Look at the sunshine on the bed, look at the shadows, and tell me the time.”     “How would I know?” I complained.  “This place is like Vegas, there aren’t any clocks.”  There really weren’t.  There was a creaky ancient grandfather’s clock on the main floor which hadn’t worked for, hmm, when did we declare independence from England?  Yeah.  It had been awhile.  Everyone had laptops and cell phones.  I assumed millennials didn’t actually know what a wall clock was.     Sinclair sighed.  “Darling, you’re a creature of the night—““Except when I’m a creature of the day.”“—and should at least pretend to be interested in things like sunrise, sunset, and—hmm, I had a third, and it escapes me—ah!  Helping the Anti-Christ run Hell.”     “That’s it.  I’m out.”  I sat bolt upright like Frankenstein’s monster coming alive on the table, and started to swing my legs over the side.  “I don’t have time to have this unnff!”     Sinclair, the sneaky bastard, had snaked an arm around my waist and yanked me back before I could flee.  “Stop wriggling.  Are you frightened because you feel you must do this alone?”     No, I’m frightened because it’s absurd I’m faced with this AT ALL, have any of you MET ME?  This whole thing was ridiculous from inception.  I glared at the wall, since he had now spooned behind me and my glare of hate couldn’t reach him.  Too bad my glares of hate didn’t ricochet.  “I’m not frightened.  Not exactly.  Jeez.  It’s not like that.”     “Because you know I stand ready to assist you in this, as in all things.”     I’ll bet.  I loved my husband, all right?  I had killed and died for him.  But he was not the king of the vampires by accident.  He had grown up poor and loved, and started over after he asked Tina to kill him.  He never wasted an opportunity and he never backed off; he was like a pit bull, he never dropped a bite.  Sinclair did want to help me, I knew that.  But he also wanted to get his fingers into the smoking hot Hell pie.  (Oh, God.  Terrible metaphor.)  And there was a good chance he would give in to his dark side, his Fred Flintstone side, and try and take over the place.  All the while determining it was for my own good, and that he was doing it for love.And he would have been.  But.  This was a man who forbade me to work.  Before we were married.  When I still loathed the sight of him.  And then was mystified when I laughed my ass off.  He was as modern a monarch as he knew how to be, but that didn’t mean we both didn’t still have some growing to do.  And something else—when did I turn into the mature, far-seeing one?  I didn’t approve of any of this.     “I know you want to help,” I said carefully, “but this is for Laura and me to figure out.”     “Ah.”  He stayed relaxed behind me and pressed a kiss to the back of my neck.  At least he wasn’t hocking loogies into my hair.  “And will you?”     “What?”     “Figure it out.”     “The minute I find out what’s wrong with Jessica and also plan Tina’s surprise party.”     He laughed.  Sinclair didn’t do the ha-ha laugh thing.  It was more like a deep chuckle that rumbled through his chest.  You felt it more than you heard it.  “Oh, a surprise party, now?  Yes, that will certainly eat up still more of your time.”     I elbowed his arm off me and flopped over on my back, and let his last comment go.  “Something’s wrong, and I couldn’t get Jessica to tell me.  And then she left again on another fake errand.”“Jessica has many errands, none of them fake so far as I know.  She keeps a close eye on her business,” he said approvingly.  “I would have offered her some investment advice, except I have the niggling sensation that she may have more money than I.  But if you were concerned, why didn’t you stop her?”“Her bed ate me.  And then you did.”He shuddered.  “I cannot imagine the crippling back pain they must awaken with.”“Knock it off, farmer boy.  We didn’t all grow up sleeping on two by fours.”“Nor did I, but back support is a must.”“It really isn’t, and come on!  You’re could sleep on a bed of nails and wake up refreshed and ready to bang, and can we get back to my thing now?”“You can only avoid this for so long.”“That’s not the thing I wanted to get back to.  And yeah.  I know,” I replied glumly.“At the risk of boring you with observations I have repeatedly shared with you—““Oh, boy.  Really hate when you start sentences with that.”“—the longer you avoid your responsibilities, the more difficult it will be to perform them.”“I know.”  I did.  But it was so hard to wrap my brain around.  Five years ago I’d been an administrative assistant, avoiding my father and stepmother as needed and trying not to strangle colleagues who thought the sign on the copy machine(IF JAMMED DO NOT FIX YOURSELF!  IF JAMMED FIND ME!  I WILL KILL YOU IF YOU DO NOT OBEY!  YOU WILL NOT BE MOURNED!  THE COPY MACHINE PEOPLE HAVE QUIT SENDING PEOPLE TO FIX IT!)didn’t apply to them, oh, hell no.  Now I was dead and a reigning monarch, happily married (a huge improvement over resentfully married) with a houseful of friends and family, fending off death threats and resigned to living through the next several centuries with highlights and lowlights.  Oh, and I was supposed to help run a dimension that was an afterlife of never-ending torment for billions.  In over my head didn’t begin to cover it.  In over my head wasn’t even on the same planet as my new responsibilities.  The same universe.  The same galaxy!  Wait, which one was bigger, galaxy or univ—never mind.  My point:  the whole thing was ludicrous.“I can’t tell if I need your help yet,” I finally said, breaking the long silence.  “But if I figure out that I do, I promise to come get you.”He shifted, and I knew he hadn’t gotten what he’d wanted.  But I also knew that he was content to wait for me to ask.  In this, we were well matched, since I normally had the patience of a toddler hopped up on Oreos, while Sinclair had the patience of a trapdoor spider:  come on over, take your time.  You know I’ll get you eventually.That shouldn’t have been comforting, but it was.