Annie of the Undead

By Varian Wolf

A fresh new voice in supernatural fiction, Varian Wolf pays homage to the genre without succumbing to its stereotypes. Her debut novel is as hilarious as it is thoughtful, as intense as it is irreverent. Annie of the Undead is a powerful opener to an edgy new series.

“Angry” Annie Eastwood is a hard-knock boxer who’s spent more time behind bars than inside the ropes, but it turns out that is exactly the kind of girl Vampire Miguel needs. When he plucks her off the frigid streets of wintery Detroit and whisks her away to steamy old New Orleans, not even the fearsome undead prowling the city’s streets are ready for her.
Hunted by witches, Miguel takes Annie on the run. They hole up in –of all places, a bed and breakfast with a blue FEMA tarp on its roof and a man who regularly runs naked up and down the street. Despite her hard-earned mistrust of pretty much everybody she’s ever known, she finds herself charmed by the come-as-you-are attitude of New Orleans’ residents. Once a loner skirting the fringes of society, she discovers that for the first time she longs to be part of the world, even as the beguiling Vampire Miguel would draw her away from it.
A couple years out from Hurricane Katrina, the city and its people are still covered with scars, but worse trouble is stirring in the city. A supernatural storm is brewing, and Annie and her vampire are about to be caught in the middle of it.

Book 1 in series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Varian Wolf
• Release date: Nov 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301256679

Varian Wolf

Varian Wolf never thought her first novel would be about vampires until the day a friend recommended she read a vampire book that turned out to be both amusing and bad, and she was inspired to write a vampire story of her own. She would bring to her vampire tale her love of good character writing, convincing worldbuilding, and riveting action sequences. Wolf's debut novel, Annie of the Undead, was written to be a great story that only happened to be a vampire story. Varian Wolf's second novel in the series, Vampire Annie, continues the adventures of "Angry" Annie Eastwood in a post-Katrina New Orleans inhabited by eclectic characters and plagued by supernatural problems. Vampire Annie will be available soon in print and ebook editions. Varian Wolf graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in Fine Art. She lives in Florida with her boyfriend and her enormous white fluffy dog.

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Annie of the Undead

Varian Wolf

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Varian Wolf

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of characters to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to my excellent friend Christina and to the people of New Orleans.

Special thanks to Nicole Tracey Prestin for her editing prowess, Ashley Taylor for her striking cover design, Charlie Cummings for his varied technical assistance and overall adorableness, Heather K. Wilson-Miller for being Annie for an hour, and Josh Kaufman and family for putting me up in their home in the heart of New Orleans.

Many thanks to Christina Power, Nicole Tracey Prestin, and Thomas Prestin for test reading.

Thanks to the folks at Smashwords for making this publication possible.

Cover art copyright 2013 Varian Wolf

Cover art and design by Ashley Taylor

Thanks and love to Chinook Wolf for foot warming, cuddles service, and her nearly infinite patience.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Every Story Starts Somewhere

Chapter 2 – Never Swoon (or How to Attract a Vampire)

Chapter 3 – Enter Vampire

Chapter 4 – Trust

Chapter 5 – Due South

Chapter 6 – Breathing

Chapter 7 – Gay Hippies

Chapter 8 – Shittin’ Kittens

Chapter 9 – Silence is a Virtue

Chapter 10 – Wrecked to Hell

Chapter 11 – Yell Fire

Chapter 12 – Walking Against the Wind

Chapter 13 – Death is the Maiden

About the Author

Connect with Varian online

1

Every Story Starts Somewhere

"Which way do you want it, puta? In the ass or in the pussy?"

The bitch who called herself Diva held the spoon she’d smuggled out of the canteen with the smug air of someone holding a real weapon.

I’m gonna stick it up you, puta, you two-tone trash. And what are you gonna do about it? Huh? You all alone now. Ain’t no bulls around to protect you.

So Diva had finally gotten me alone –if you call her and two of her ugliest bitches alone. We’d been inside together for months and she hadn’t managed to do it –not since that first night when she and her thugs and I had been discussing the finer points of raping me, and we were interrupted by a guard. Yes, folks, that happens in jail. If you’re a sorority girl on a one-night public-drunkenness-after-the-football-game foray into our lovely penal system, it’s just as possible that you will get something stuck where the sun don’t shine as it is for people like me –I mean, like I was. The guards had broken us up twice since that first episode, going for each other’s throats, but this secluded corner was a place where shit could actually go down. I wondered which one of the guards had helped her to make it happen, letting her and her lieutenants down the hall to the showers when they knew I was already down here, getting the jail funk off me before being released later in the day, when doing so was like dropping a match into a powder keg –or sending rats down a rattlesnake hole.

There was some question as to who the guard was trying to fuck, me or them.

She wants it in the ass, Diva, screeched the skinny bitch beside her, That’s the way little Hamtramck putas like her take it.

I wasn’t actually from Hamtramck, but one shithole’s as good as another.

Look around, puta, Diva spread her flabby arms. You see a way out? You see your salvation?

Fuckin’ Catholic.

What did you say?

I looked back and forth from the skinny bitch on the left, the ugly-bat-beat bitch on the right, and the corpulent one in the middle with six inches of roots showing above a bad dye job to tell of the twelve-months she’d been inside.

Fuckin’ religion gives me indigestion. Can we just get on with this?

Diva scowled at me, the expression doing the worst possible things with what gravity and years had made of her face. She was maybe forty, but the poorly-maintained kind of forty. She wasn’t street-worn. She had long since given up her years on the street hustling for some gang, and taken up some of the cushier occupations of the urban antisocial. She was currently in on a variety of soft charges including identity theft and fraud. Business must have been good; I never saw so many chins.

All the droopy flab had to radically reorient when her scowl turned to a laugh.

What, you gonna try some of that boxing shit on me? Let’s see what you got, little puta, before I cut you a bigger one.

You cut the Grand Canyon, and it’ll still be smaller than your mama’s.

Puta!

With that, Diva lunged at me. The your-mamas can usually be trusted to elicit that response. I didn’t meet her head-on. She was a big girl, maybe six feet tall and pushing three bills, but she was all flab and no finesse. I just let her careen on past, and I hit the ugly one in the liver a couple of times, getting that satisfying pain-grunt out of her before turning to Mina, the skinny one.

Mina was quicker than the other two and a scrapper, but she didn’t know how to dance. I feinted right and nailed her with a left hook on the chin. It was no haymaker, but she went straight to the floor like a wet noodle. Glass jaw.

I was grabbed from behind. Diva had turned on me quicker than I had anticipated. She took hold of my shirt. The much-hyped spoon went immediately out of play, falling to the floor.

I tried to twist out of her grasp, but only succeeded in nearly throttling myself. She was hanging on like a bloated tick. I elbowed her hard in what I thought was the gut, but she was huge, and her fat absorbed the blow.

Then the ugly one was coming for me. Diva shouted instructions at her, and she tried to grab my legs. I doubled up and, using the bloated one for leverage, kicked out hard with both legs. I nearly missed but caught Ugly in the arm with one foot, sending her staggering backwards.

Now Diva was trying to choke me, which wasn’t the worst of it. She was cursing indecipherably and spitting in my hair as she did so, which was. The fro-like entity that lived on my head may have been a mess already and in need of all kinds of salon intervention, but you don’t mess with a girl’s bush. You just don’t.

Choking, I punched at Diva’s head behind me, but she was too tall for the effort to be effective. Then I just grabbed for whatever I could and twisted savagely. It only felt like flab, but she cried out in pain.

Just then Ugly punched me in the face.

It was a square blow, delivered as hard as Ugly could punch. She was a stocky girl in her twenties, with forearms as big as those of the average man her height. The blow was jarring, probably more so under the circumstances than it would have been on its own –I had this little oxygen problem at the moment. I tasted blood in my mouth, and my lips stung over my teeth. Chick could hit.

But I knew how to be hit. While Ugly was doing the shit-that-hurt-my-hand dance that people do who aren’t used to meeting bare knuckles with bone, I was doing my damnedest to gouge Diva’s eyes out. They were buried deep in the fat of her face, but, with the added freedom of her weakening grip, I had finally located them. I would blind the bitch. I wouldn’t think twice about it, and Diva knew it.

Diva let me go, or shoved me away from her, rather. I went sprawling, gasping for air. As I started to get up, somebody kicked me in the ribs. I went down again. Someone tried to kick me again, but I grabbed her by the ankle and pulled as hard as I could. Diva hurtled down like a tractor-trailer going over an overpass. Floor met flab with a loud smack, sending waves rolling over the fat sea, and all the air out of her lungs.

I got to my feet and hit Ugly with a combination to the midsection and face. Then I kicked Diva twice in the head. Then I hit Ugly some more. I beat her right down to the ground, and she stayed there.

Diva was struggling to get up. Her nose was bleeding. She was breathing hard from exertion. The bigger they are, the harder it is for them to get up.

I picked up the threatened-with spoon that Diva had dropped during the fracas. I got down on the floor beside her, put my arm around her neck, and jabbed the handle end of the spoon into her ear. I held her there.

She inhaled sharply when she realized the position she was in.

Where do you want it, bitch? In the eye or in the ear?

No! No! she yelled. You’re loca! Loca!

Ugly lay dazed on the floor, and, just beyond her, Mina was moaning herself into wakefulness.

I’m supposed to get out today. How the fuck am I supposed to do that now? Today was my release. Do you hear me, you fuckin’ bitch? My goddamned release.

I hear you! Diva shouted at my shaking her, Please, just don’t…don’t…

Don’t what? This?

I jabbed the spoon harder in. Diva squealed.

I gotta stay in here over this –over you, it ain’t gonna be for love taps. I want a pound of flesh, I pushed the spoon again, From right here.

No! Please! she wailed, This didn’t happen! I swear to you. We won’t say anything.

Don’t you fuckin’ lie to me. I’ve got a spoon in your ear, remember.

No! Don’t! Maria, tell her you won’t say nothing. She has nothing to worry about. Tell her!

Ugly Maria looked irritated. She wasn’t very bright, but she was bright enough to know that the person she had looked at as a leader had been reduced to utter spinelessness and was now asking the same of her.

There’s spoon for you too if you ask for it, I warned her.

Maria looked at me then, considering.

I won’t say nothing.

She wasn’t that stupid after all.

I turned my attention back to Diva.

You don’t want me in here. If I stay, we finish this. You want me gone.

Gone, yes. You’re already gone. You’re gone today. Just go away, Diva affirmed.

But I didn’t move. I crouched there, spoon in fist, considering. Killing this bitch would make me feel all warm inside, and what was waiting for me on the outside? The streets of rotting old Detroit, a parole officer, all the enemies I’d made, the unemployment of the previously incarcerated, a boxing career interrupted by half a dozen stints on the inside –it was nothing to look forward to. And the alternative? State lockup. I’d been there before. It didn’t have the chaos of jail, the frequently altering population as people got arrested, sentenced or released, and arrested again, the sleeping on the floor when overpopulation and underfunding of the local penal system maxed out the number of beds, the constantly reevaluating how big you are in an ever-changing pool of angry little fish. Maybe that was Diva’s problem. She’d do better in the pen where the rigid social hierarchy would keep her in check, providing her powers and people to pick on, as well as people to be afraid of. Diva would do well in a place like that, in society.

I, on the other hand, wanted no part of it.

I left the spoon in her ear and stood up. Diva didn’t move. She just laid there looking up at me. Maybe she was afraid I would change my mind. Maybe I would.

The other two were staring at me, Mina with the dazed expression of someone who has missed the whole thing, but who can see from the circumstances that things have gone very wrong.

You’d better go wash up, I said.

I spat blood at their feet, then turned and left.

Angry Annie, said Fred, a guard, when he saw me emerge from the door to the hall. He looked startled.

Surprised to see me?

No, he lied. You look like you hit your lip on something. Did you slip in the shower?

I ran into something…ugly.

I hope you don’t take it personal, he said. Things happen around here.

It’s nothing, I said after a moment. As long as it stays nothing.

If you say it’s nothing, it’s nothing, he said, sounding relieved. Why don’t you go get some ice from the canteen to put on that lip? People might ask questions if you let it swell up.

Never knew you could be so friendly. Guess I should have run into something sooner.

Fred was a manipulative bastard and a troublemaker. He’d had his eye on me from the start. He knew I was a troublemaker too. We can smell each other –troublemakers, not bastards. Bastards smell the same as everybody else.

He shrugged at me.

You better get out of here.

I obeyed because ice sounded nice right now, not because he was a guard, was six-foot-two, and had a taser. He let me pass because he’d satiated his current thirst for trouble, and because a little more might not be the kind he wanted. He had the law behind him, making the action seem like generosity rather than the calculation that it was.

Fuckin’ politics. We had elected sons of bitches on the outside, and shits like Fred on the inside. Every shithole has to have its politicians. The only thing I hated more than preachers was politicians –and Pit Bulls. Hate those too –and the Insane Clown Posse, and those little paper cups that you’re supposed to squirt full of ketchup. I couldn’t wait to get out and have to face those things again. Fuckin’ little things…

I first discovered the world of the bloodthirsty undead on the day I was released from jail. All the clichés played out before our eyes on television and on the pages of trashy novels hold true: it is a world of macabre seduction, decadent revelry, ancients so beautiful it hurts your eyes to look at them, power in its oldest form, and of course, egregious night-stalking, throat-ripping, violence. That is to say, it suited me just fine.

As you have seen, I wasn’t then the empathetic, socialized, companionable individual you’d meet today. That Annie might have more happily exchanged a knife in your kidney for your wallet than a ‘hello’ for your ‘how do you do’. That Annie, Angry Annie Eastwood, had issues. But I’m much better now, thanks to vampires, voodoo queens, and assorted other individuals of supernatural affiliation, as you will see in a bit.

Election Day is the climax of this my first foray into that crazy world, but the story begins on the earlier date of October first, the day I decided not to ram a plastic spoon into someone’s brain and was subsequently spat by the penal system back onto the dirty streets of Detroit City. If I had not laid down my spoon, I never would have met my vampire, never would have left Michigan or moved south, and never would have gotten into all the bloodsucking nonsense. I never would have swum the Big Muddy with the gators in the middle of the night, never would have driven a wooden table leg through anybody’s heart, and I never would have found myself half naked on a bathroom floor next to a dead Spanish guy with my shirt wrapped around his head –okay, maybe that last part might have happened eventually anyway –but, point is, it’s the little decisions that can change your life.

Now don’t start looking down your nose at me. I still reserve the right to put that blade in your kidney, or something worse.

Later that day, I was called for release processing.

I made kissy faces as I walked passed Diva. She tried not to look like I had beat the shit out of her a couple hours before. She had a reputation to maintain. She was going to be in there a while.

The guards were happy to see me go, even if it was to freedom and not to do hard time. I had worked to ensure that this group of jail hawks respected me. I figured the more strong-arming they had to use on me in the beginning the scarier I was. Yep, five-foot-five, one-hundred-forty-five-pound Annie Eastwood: the Big Bad.

The guards didn’t strong-arm me as they led me out to the room where the wide woman with the hair growing out of her mole would give me my belongings, the last staging area between incarceration and the freedom to get incarcerated again. They sort of kept their distance. I wasn’t worth the trouble that pissing me off would cause. If there was an altercation, we might just be stuck with each other for a while longer. Yeah, keep back, you under-educated, dead-end-career power-trippers.

The wide woman’s big mole was particularly moley today.

She shoved a familiar triplicate layer cake in front of me under her protective window. On top of the stack was a plastic bag containing a black sport bra, a crushed box of Marlboros, and nothing else. I looked at her.

Where’s the rest of my stuff?

She looked at my paperwork, then through her glasses at me unsympathetically.

You came in with an unregistered Ruger, half a box of .40 caliber bullets, and a pair of jean shorts so nasty they had to be incinerated. You aren’t getting any of that back, Miss Eastwood.

You’re telling me that you would send a girl out onto the street in the middle of downtown Detroit in this outfit without a firearm?

Take it easy, Eastwood, said one of the guards.

We have some clothes for you to change into, said the Mole. Now go put your bra on.

I got out of my jailbird orange and into the bra –the final remnant of my last shift on the outside, and the faded khakis, Red Wings T-shirt, and nondescript gray hooded sweatshirt the jail had supplied from their bank of third-or-fourth-hand clothes from God knows where. They even gave me a pair of junk tennis shoes that deserved incinerating more than my old shorts could have. I felt like a concentration camp survivor being clothed in the raiment of the dead. Nothing fit right. The bra was too small, a result of not working out and jail food, the pants and shirt were too big by a couple of sizes, and the shoes were too narrow for my wide feet, even without socks. It all felt like scraping into someone else’s skin. Come to think of it, the last twenty-five years had felt like that.

And now I looked like a damned Red Wings fan. What a thrill.

Phil, a big guard who looked something like a red-headed Santa Claus with a snide streak, reached for the door to the outside. Before opening it he looked at me and asked, Anyone here to meet you?

I shrugged.

Maybe that son of a bitch whose girlfriend I knocked the hell out of, or maybe that shit who thought paying for my training meant I’d be his sex toy, or maybe that Pit Bull that used to attack me every time I came out my front door down on Birch Street who I cracked a couple of times with a bat and kind of walked sideways ever since. Other than that...probably no one.

Phil shook his head.

You’re too smart for all that stuff. A girl like you should be going to college, not squabbling with pimps and substance abusers.

White people always say shit like that.

Hating white people won’t do you any good either.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I hate black people too.

Phil tried to ignore what was too confusing for him to understand.

Well, just think about it. School’s the way out, you know.

I did my time in school. Wasn’t a good fit.

Well you’d better find something that does fit. Don’t get yourself thrown in here again, Eastwood. You’re the kind they burn the book on.

What, are you gonna take me in? Rehabilitate me like I’m some angel in the rough?

He showed his teeth in a miserly smile.

No. You’re no angel. Only person who’s going to take care of a girl like you is you. You’re just rough all over. I’m just sayin’.

Well stop sayin’ and open that damn door.

He shook his head.

See what I mean? What good’s that going to do you, talking like that to someone like me? All your time in here, and you still haven’t learned to shut your trap long enough to help yourself. You know, one of these days…

I didn’t stay to hear the rest. He had opened the door, and I didn’t hang around one more second to hear an overweight jail employee’s preachifying. I walked through the lobby, past the people society labeled good or bad, distinguishable by their uniforms: the clean-pressed suits of the normative and socially acceptable people here to do their honest work for the system and the drab garb of the underprivileged. They all really looked the same to me.

I stepped outside into the exhaust-perfumed, harshly-lit streets of nighttime Detroit. I shuddered immediately against the cold. When they had dragged me into the can, it had been summer, but there was no sign of summer now. What was it, five o’clock? Six? The sun was already spent. Rain had dragged all the leaves from the few trees that sprang from their caged holes in the sidewalk. And the cruel wind ripping through the flimsy cotton sweatshirt I was wearing warned that a cold front was moving in. The front might bring rain, snow, or some devilish combination of the two. Ma Nature spares Michiganders little of her diabolical creativity.

Shivering in the cold at the top of the steps was a transvestite who had been regurgitated from the belly of the penal beast just before me. He was leaning against the wall, hiding behind his collar from the chill wind wailing down the street, waiting for his ride, smoking a cigarette. He was skinny and his bare legs looked cold in their tight leather skirt and red high heels.

I fished the box of Marlboros out of my pocket. There were three cigarettes left inside. I extracted one and straightened out the ninety-degree bend as well as I could. I naturally hunted for a lighter. I didn’t have one.

Need a light? asked the transvestite by the wall.

I went over, accepted the light. Sucking in that good, cancer-invoking smoke for a second almost made me forget about the biting cold and wind that blew the overgrown bush that I sometimes called my hair into my face. I held hot smoke in my lungs for a moment, then exhaled and went for seconds.

After a minute, the transvestite said, Well you could say ‘thank you’.

For some reason, I’m just not in the mood.

Well, I just got out of jail too, and you don’t see me being a bitch.

I looked at him, at his tragic over-bleached, over-ironed hair, his denim jacket and his fuck-me heels, and, for some reason, I just laughed.

Well, fuck you, cunt! he shouted, and continued to shout, but I was already walking away, down the cold, gray sidewalk and into the grim world of concrete and overcast, indifferent skies. That was the second idiot today to think I needed to hear something he had to say.

So I was out. I had kept myself busy in jail. I had twiddled my thumbs and watched some shitty movies. I had briefly considered reading some like I had on previous visits, but couldn’t work up to it for some reason, and then didn’t consider it anymore at all. I contemplated life, the universe, and everything. I counted flowers on the wall, played solitaire ‘til dawn –you know, all that stuff. But mostly I got out of shape and made other people’s lives miserable, or at least a little more miserable than they already were. If you’re in jail, your life probably isn’t exactly the berries to begin with. I had gotten so good at doing all that that I now wondered what to do with myself.

One thing I could do was get out of the clothes the penal system had put me in. I didn’t have any money for new ones, but I didn’t want new clothes. I wanted Chris’s clothes. Chris was my brother, or he had been before he’d been killed by an IED in the desert fighting someone else’s war. His clothes and my memory were all that was left of him, if indeed any of his clothes were left. If there were any left, they would be at his ex-girlfriend’s house halfway across town.

I didn’t have any money for a cab, but I had never been afraid of hoofing it. I needed the exercise anyway after eating all that jail slop and lying around like