Authors: MaryJanice Davidson

Undead and Unfinished (16 page)

BOOK: Undead and Unfinished

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Mostly what came to my ears were raised voices. Angry voices and frightened voices. Shouts and threats. Begging. Crying. Hectoring.

And it was all coming from the church, which appeared to be the focus of the town ... it wasn’t off to the side or tucked away. It was smack in the middle of everything, and it sounded like most of the townies were inside. Which made sense, since there were a number of horses hitched just outside the big white building. Lots of wagons “parked.” And nobody but us time travelers on the street. No, the action was inside the church, which was a huge break for us.

“Okay, so ... should we go?” I let Laura haul me to my feet. “Do you know where we are?”

“Sure. We’re in Salem, Massachusetts,” she said.

“I’m not
that
ignorant.” Well, I would have guessed a state that started with M for sure, though my first guess might have been Michigan. “Is that one of your supersecret devil powers? You always know where we end up?”

“No.” Laura pointed over my left shoulder. I looked.

Plastered on what would be a bulletin board if it had been made of cork was the front page of the
Salem News.

17 WITCHES HANGED; 58 MORE ARRESTED
TRIAL TODAY
June 10, 1692

“Ohhhh, shit.”

Laura nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“This is not a good place for two gorgeous and unhanged chicks like us to be.”

“Betsy, I’m with you a zillion percent.”

“Excellent! So. We know you can time travel. Good job, by the way. Remind me to mention your name to the Nobel committee. Now cut a door with your evil sword from hell and bring us back to your mom’s house. In hell.”

“Okay.” Laura sucked in a breath and nodded. “I’ve never done this before. But now would be a good time to learn, I think.”

“Please! It is not true!
Please!”

“A very good time,” she added. And all at once, her sword was in her right hand. It was like watching a bunny leap from a magician’s hat. An evil, horrible bunny from a hat of purest evil. And as always, her sword glowed so fiercely, I could hardly peek at it. It was dazzling and dangerous. Rather like my kid sister.

“I am no witch! I am innocent! I know nothing about it!”

I glanced at the closed church doors.

“I do not hurt the children. I scorn it!”

Laura’s lips were moving. “What?” I asked, most of my concentration elsewhere.

Again that same voice, the high pitch of a woman with her back to the corner and nothing but hyenas in front. “If I must tell, I will tell. It was no spell, it was a Psalm.”

“Okay, Betsy. Here goes.”

“Great, good, that’s fine, whenever you’re ready.”

“It is all false. I am clear!” Whoever was speaking was still afraid but now beginning to be angry as well. Which I thought was kind of cool.

“I never afflicted a child. Never in my life. And all here know this!”

Laura was waving her sword around and talking. Probably to me. I was pretty sure to me. She was prob’ly ready to take us back to hell, or maybe she wanted to steal a horse.

“You do not know my heart. But I know yours. A sad thing, your vengeance. A pitiful thing.”

She had some balls, this ancient woman from a zillion years ago.

“The only devil I ever saw was you, William Putnam. And you only saw the devil in me when I would not sell you our farm.”

“What?” Ye gods! I knew the Salem witch thing was a bunch of uptight, sex-starved, religiously obsessed idiots killing dozens of innocent men, women, and children, but I hadn’t known some people got killed—got hanged!—because other townspeople coveted their property.

“If I am guilty, God will discover me. So hang me, coward. Kill me, butcher. Send me to God, thief. But never will I admit to a sin I did not commit.”

“Awesome!” Then, to Laura, “Stop waving that thing around. We’re staying for a few more minutes.”

My sister lowered her weapon at once. “What are you talking about?”

“Can’t you hear that?”

“Hear
what?”

“Then for the horrible crime of witchcraft, which you practiced and committed on several persons, it is the ruling of this court that you shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

That’s what you think, fuck-o.

Chapter 35

B
etsy, no! You can’t!” Laura started to scurry after me. “Nobody’s seen us and we can get out of here safely, and even if we couldn’t, we can’t interfere. Are you
nuts?”

“All sorts of men and women and kids, kids, Laura! Hung for no reason at all. No. Worse than that. Hung because nobody could be bothered to stand up and say, ‘Cut the shit, you Puritan fucks.’ Well, I’m gonna.”

I’d gone up exactly one step to the church doors when Laura tackled me from behind.

“Ow! Laura, if I get tetanus from splinters, I’m gonna have to walk for a long time to find an appropriately stocked ER.” I tried to stand—I’d fallen right against the steps—but she was hanging on to my calves like grim death.

“We can’t interfere!”

I stifled the urge to stomp on her knuckles. “Why not?”

Laura opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Unfortunately, that had no effect on her grip. For a cutie in jeans and her dad’s belt, she had the grip of a crack-addled anaconda. “Come on, have you never seen a movie or read a book about time travel? Things always get worse when people meddle.”

“Meddle?” I squatted and started gently prying her fingers off me. “You sound like you’re channeling a villain from
Scooby Doo
. ‘And I would’ve gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids and your stupid talking Great Dane.’ ”

“You could make things worse!”

“Worse than this?” I gestured at the church, supposedly a symbol of light and love, but right now nothing more than a prison run by asshats.

“You could really screw things up. What if you accidentally kill—um—Benjamin Franklin’s grandfather?”

“Jeez, Laura, I’m not going to kill anybody.” Probably. “I’m just gonna give that awesome witch a helping hand. Not that she’s a real witch.” Probably.

“Please don’t make this worse!”

“Oh
that’s
nice! Do you recall me spending most of our field trip to hell explaining to you, multiple times, that we should not time travel, we should not teleport, you should not grow wings, and we should not go to hell in the first place? Huh? Because I remember it all very vividly, Laura. So don’t get in my way now unless you’re running for hypocrite of the year.”

I bent down to loosen her grip again, but, stricken, she let go. Her big eyes were shining—she wasn’t crying, but only just, and I instantly felt seriously shitty. “I didn’t think of it like that. You’re right. It’s pretty mean for me not to support you when you’ve been doing so much to help me.”

Well, nuts. That took the wind out of my sails. Call me a dumbass, but I almost didn’t like it when people sincerely apologized while I was still mad. I’d be all puffed up and pissed, when,
whooooosh.
And you can’t keep bitching after you get the apology. That is not cool at all.

“It’s all right,” I said, because it also wasn’t cool to not acknowledge the apology I didn’t want at that time. “Just, you know. Watch it. Or something.”

“But I’m not going in there with you.” Which would have been more of a threat if she weren’t telling me this while following me up the stairs. “I’ll just sort of hang back.”

“Good idea. This won’t take long. Then we can shuffle off to hell again.”

Chapter 36

l
raised my foot, had a split second to admire my navy blue loafer (Misty Moccasin, Beverly Feldman, $265, because sandals didn’t seem a sensible choice for hell) before my leg pistoned out and the church doors flew open, slamming back against the walls with a satisfying double crash.

“Don’t even,” I said as Laura cowered behind me, groaned, and covered her eyes. “This is me being subtle, so don’t even say it. Hey! Asshats!” I stomped down the aisle, ready to kick some uptight bigoted Pilgrim ass. “You guys. All you old white guys. And also your uptight wives. And why are there
kids
in here? You want your children to watch you lie and get hysterical and trump up charges and scare and hang innocent people? Let me guess: there’s gonna be a potluck supper afterward.”

The woman on trial—it had to be her, she was standing in front—looked at me with eyes gone huge. And the first thing I noticed was how gorgeous she was.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I surround myself with the deformed. If anything, I usually found myself hanging out with men and women who were obscenely good-looking (I had yet to meet the fugly vampire). Hell, Tina alone could have won Miss America blindfolded with two black eyes and a runny nose. And pimples! Okay, maybe not with pimples.

The would-be witch was quite small—the top of her head was way, way below my chin. But then, I was tall for an undead heathen.

Her hair, a gorgeous rippling brownish red, was piled on top of her teeny head. She had so much of it, it seemed as though the weight of all those tresses would yank her head back if she let them down.

Her skin was pale, except for two hectic flares of color on her cheeks—
not
blush. (I was pretty sure Revlon hadn’t been incorporated yet.) It was the hectic color of anger or fright or excitement ... or all three. And her eyes seemed almost to take up half of her face, enormous and so deep a brown they were nearly black, with dark slashing eyebrows and long lashes.

Her outfit was right out of a museum exhibit: a big fat dress—fat because of the hoopskirt thing. Big-time modest, too; she wasn’t exposing so much as an elbow dimple. The gown, too, seemed to emphasize her tiny frame and delicate features; she looked like a kid playing dress-up.

Her dress was pale blue; her neckerchief thing was transparent white lace. Long sleeves, long skirt—I could barely make out the toes of her shoes when I glanced down.

She smelled terrific, like clean cotton and sunshine. If I could have bottled that scent and brought it back to the twenty-first century, Sinclair
and
Jessica could have thrown their zillions away.

She had only one piece of jewelry I could see: there was a black ribbon tied around her wrist, and from it hung a little painting of an older woman. It was so small I could only make out the woman’s graying brown hair and teeny-weeny face.

Taking in the would-be witch’s museum-exhibit clothing had only cost me a couple of seconds, which was good because it meant people were still astonished, and no one was sneaking up behind me to brain me with a hymnal.

I pointed to the gorgeously wronged Massachusetts resident who stared at the tip of my finger and backed up a step. “You think this is a witch? This is not a witch, jerk-offs.”

“Be gone from here, wretch, and cover yourself!”

“Okay, um,
no
. And is that any way to introduce yourself?”

“To be fair,” Laura called from the back of the church, “by their standards you’re wearing the Puritan equivalent of a garter belt and peekaboo bra.”

“Oh yeah?” I looked at the other person standing, the guy, I figured, who was after the lady’s farm. He, too, looked like he’d stepped right out of a colonial America clothing exhibit (“Gift shop on your left, and yes, we validate parking”), with a white linen shirt, black culottes (or whatever men’s suit pants that only came to the knee were called), and a matching black coat with dazzling gold buttons.

He was clutching a cane so hard his knuckles were white. So was his face, but from fear or rage I hadn’t yet figured. I was smelling lots of fear, sure, but it was coming from the pretty brunette, not to mention the thirty people sitting in pews behind us.

“Tell me, do my awesome leggings and Eddie Bauer shirt make you bitches nervous? Hmmm?” I wriggled my shoulders back and forth, shaking my tits at the head asshat, whose face went redder. Cool. If I flashed him, I could probably give him a stroke. Ah, good times. “Or is it just female sexuality in general that freaks you out?”

The congregation was too startled to so much as murmur, and they were shaking their wriggling fingers at me. At first I thought I was observing the invention of American Sign Language. Then I realized they were all forking the sign of the evil eye at me. Ha! If that didn’t work for my old babysitter, it sure wasn’t going to help them.

“This is what you do? Because TV and the Internet haven’t been invented? You make up lies and then hang your neighbors? Or rack them? Or crush them to death under big rocks? Pathetic, with a capital P.”

Dead silence. Nobody was even shifting their weight.

“Wow, really? Nothing to say? Because I heard plenty from outside. Cat got your tongue? Or maybe the devil?

BOOK: Undead and Unfinished

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