Undead and Done by MaryJanice Davidson

shouldn’t guzzle holy water on camera. You’re the ones who said I wasn’t a circus performer.”
    â€œNo,” Marc agreed, “your outfit was all wrong for that.”
    I shot him an exasperated look. “Look, Laura made her little video, I went on TV to refute, end of story.”
    â€œNo one is saying that you did a bad job,” Tina began in that “treat the idiot with kid gloves” tone I hated. “But—”
    â€œBy denying we’re a nation, you just opened up the chance for any vampire to be arrested, charged, and tried in a court of law . . .
not
by our laws,” Sinclair said.
    â€œWhich is . . . bad?”
    Vigorous nods.
    Sinclair went on. “Every vampire who sees this will now wonder if you have not simply exposed them, but they will wonder if you made a deliberate decision to leave them without protection, either.”
    â€œWhich is super-
duper
bad.”
    â€œYes. Further, by mentioning vampire politics, you have raised the question among our people: Why
aren’t
we more political? Why do you and I rule? Perhaps we should embrace politics and hold elections.”
    â€œOh.” Huh. Okay. Hadn’t thought of it like that. What surprised me most was that my first impulse wasn’t:
You want the job? You can have it
.
Best of luck
. No, it was:
I’m not the queen by popular demand. I’m the queen because I’m the queen.
“Okay, well, this is how we figure out what else we have to do.” I refused to see this as a fuckup. “The whole point is that it’s time, right? Well, nobody ever promised it’d be drama-free. Or that it’d be easy.” Though I’d been hoping. “I still think you guys are making something out of nothing. I’m telling you, it’ll be fine.”
    Suddenly everyone’s phones shorted out at the same time.No, wait, they all started ringing and trembling at the same time. A cacophony of ringtones filled the air, startling everyone in the room. For the first time I wasn’t amused by Marc’s Darth Vader ringtone, or the
Pink Panther
theme, which sounded so
weird
coming from Tina’s phone. Sinclair used the old-fashioned bell ring—no, wait, that was the kitchen phone ringing, the one hooked into the landline. (Yeah, we still had one of those.) Sinclair had his set so only dogs and vampires could hear it.
    I cut off my own ringtone
    (“Piiiiiiiigs . . . iiiiiiin . . . spaaaaaaaace!”)
    when I answered and was greeted with, “Oh, you silly bitch. What have you done now?”
    â€œAntonia,” I groaned. There were two women named Antonia in my life and they were both pains in my ass. One was my dead stepmother, who helped me run Hell. The other was the bitch (literally—Antonia was a werewolf) on the other end of the line. She’d lived with us in the mansion for a few months until she fell in love with a feral vampire and they both moved west. (I know how it sounds. These are the days of our lives.) *
    â€œDid no one prep you, you shoe-obsessed moron?”
    This was Antonia-ese for
I’m a little worried about you.
    â€œIt was a ten-minute local interview,” I whined. “It went fine.”
    â€œI didn’t know it was possible for someone to have their head
that
far up their ass.”
As your friend, I’m concerned you haven’t thought through all the ramifications.
    â€œYou don’t call me for six months and when you do pick up the phone, it’s to yell at me?”
    â€œGod knows the cringing sycophants you live with won’t do it.”
With respect, the others lack my objectivity.
    â€œAlways so nice to hear from you, Antonia.”
    A rude noise, like she farted into her cell phone. I wouldn’t put anything past that bitch. “Look, when the gang gets to town, call me. I might be able to save your dumb ass from the well-deserved smackdown coming