Better Off Undead: Book 4 by D.D. Barant

Author:D.D. Barant [Barant, D.D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Urban Fantasy
ISBN: 9780312545055
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-10-04T05:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

The afterlife isn’t like anything I imagined.

I’m on a bus. I’m sitting next to a chubby, almost-bald black guy who looks kind of familiar. “Lot of different ways to prepare kangaroo,” he says.

“Oh, no.”

“Kangaroo steak, kangaroo casserole, kangaroo fricassee, kangaroo consommé—”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“—kangaroo omelet, kangaroo shish kebab, kangaroo stir-fry—”

“Look, I refuse to believe that what’s waiting in the Great Beyond is a Forrest Gump rip-off.”

“Kangaroo ’n’ rice, kangaroo ’n’ taters, kangaroo ’n’ dumplings—”

I look around. “Hello? Driver? You can let me off here, please. I don’t need to hear the whole menu.”

“—kangaroo sushi, kangaroo ice cream, kangaroo à la king—”

And then everything gets all swirly the way things do when you’ve combined too much tequila with not enough food, and the bus and Kangaroo Guy fall away like a dream when you’re not quite awake yet; when you realize that hey, that wasn’t real at all, I was asleep and now I’m waking up and opening my eyes and—

And this isn’t what’s supposed to happen when you wake up.

I’m a wolf.

Of all the senses, the one we most take for granted is kinesthesia. That’s the sense of our own body, the overall, constant feeling of simply existing in a container made of flesh and blood and bone. It’s constantly telling us that we still have a head, a torso, and the appropriate number of limbs.

Right now, my kinesthesia is telling me something very different.

Everybody knows what a wolf looks like, so I won’t go through a laundry list of body parts. You’d think the weirdest thing would be having a tail, but it isn’t; that comes in second, with number three being the ability to consciously move my ears.

Number one? I now have junk.

Male junk, I mean. Bald dude in a turtleneck, kielbasa, Mister Boing Boing. I could go on—the only word with more euphemisms is drunk—but that’s not going to make it go away. It may be hairy, it may be lupine, but it’s dangling between my legs and it wasn’t there when I woke up this morning.

I blurt out the equivalent of “What the goddamn—” and naturally, it comes out as a high-pitched whine. I’m frozen in place, too freaked out to move—I’m not sure I even know how—and then I realize that what I’m staring at is worse.

I’m looking at my own body, lying sprawled in a boneless heap on the grass. Its eyes are open, and the same blazing yellow that Tair’s were as he—

As he killed me.

“You’re not dead, Valchek,” Tair says. The voice is inside my head, and sounds just a little tired. “This is part of the process. Call it a test drive—a little time behind the wheel before you get your license.”

I’ve had some experience with magical telepathy, so I know how to respond. “And you had to throttle me to do this?”

“Technically, no. We could have used meditation to get you into the right frame of mind, or I could have done it as you were falling asleep—really, anything that put you into a half-conscious state would have worked.

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