“This is true,” I confirmed. “They're all like something out of theBoogie Nights prop drawer. I mean, what year is this? I'd pay two hundred bucksnot to wear them.”
“No need for that,” Eric Sinclair said, ignoring my yelp and Jessica's flinch. He was worse than Tina. Where she slithered silently, he teleported like an alien. A tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, dark-eyed, yummilicious alien. “You have a thousand pairs of sandals.”
“Do not. Leave me alone and read your papers.”
“Guest list?” he asked, leaning over my shoulder and peering at my pad. “But you don't want a party.”
“You're damned right I don't!” I slapped my notebook shut. In fact, I didn't. I was pretty sure. “How many times do I have to say it?”
Don't get me wrong: I can hear myself. And I'm very self-aware, regarding all my little tics and annoying quirks. Nothing triggers Maslowian self-actualization like getting body-slammed by a Pontiac Aztek.
But no matter how bad I sound to myself, I can't help it. My situation is impossible. You'd be amazed how often I'm ignored, even though I am the so-called Queen of Vampires. Repeating myself ad nauseum is one of the many ways I try to make myself heard. I am too new to the game to be quietly tough, like Sinclair. Not smart, like Tina. Not wealthy, like Jess. Not an all-seeing ghost, like Cathie. Not a clever doc, like Marc; or an indifferent psychic werewolf, like Antonia. You know what it's like to be called a queen and have the least to offer among all the people you know? It's a huge ego hit.
“We got it, Betsy,” Jessica was saying. “No party. Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Why are you—” Sinclair caught Jessica's frantic arm waving. “Never mind. Are you ready for our guests?”
“Guests?” I tried not to freak out. Theywere throwing me a party! Bums! And throwing me off by having it two weeks before my actual birthday.
He sighed, which was about as close as he got to a blitzing tantrum. “Please don't say 'guests?' like you don't remember the European delegation coming at midnight.”
“And Sophie and Liam,” Tina added, looking over her own memos.
“I know. Iknow .” I did know. Sophie and Liam I didn't mind—Sophie was a charming vampire who lived in a tiny town up north with her very alive, thirtysomething boyfriend, Liam. They'd been a couple for a few months, and a while back they'd helped us catch a real creep, a vampire who got his rocks off dating college girls, charming them into deep love, then talking them into killing themselves.
Sophie, in fact, had kind of renewed my faith in vampiredom. It seemed to me that most of us were jerks, men and women who found sexual pleasure in felony assault. But Sophie was made of purer stuff—the evil that supposedly consumed the undead didn't seem to touch her.
So her coming tonight, along with the pleasant (if somewhat dry) Liam, was great by me.
But this European delegation was just what I didn't need: a bunch of ancient vampires with stuffy accents dropping in to irritate me two weeks before my birthday. As if turning thirty last year (and dying) hadn't been traumatic enough.
“I didn't forget,” I said. Truth. I just had been trying hard to ignore it.
He smoothed his dark hair, which was already perfectly in place. Uh-oh. Something was up. “Um, Jessica, I wonder if you could excuse—”
“Don't even,” she warned him. “You're not kicking me out of my own house to have a dead-only meeting. Marc depends on me to pass on full reports of the crazy shit you guys are up to.”
Eric said something to Tina in a language I didn't know. Which meant, anything but English. She replied in the same gibberish, and they talked for a minute.
“They are totally debating whether to kick you out or not,” I said to Jess.
“Duh.”
“Let's speak our own language: we'll call it English, which really fucking rude vampires don't understand.”
I glared at the two of them, but Tina and Eric kept babbling. I wasn't sure if they were ignoring me or honestly hadn't heard, so I took the mature route and just spoke louder.
“IT'S PROBABLY A SAFETY ISSUE. YOU KNOW WHAT ASSHATS THOSE OLD VAMPIRES CAN BE. THAT'S WHY THESE TWO GET OFF ON INVITING THEM OVER. ANYWAY, ONE OF THEM WILL PROBABLY TRY TO CHOMP YOU, AND WE'LL HAVE A BIG WICKED FIGHT, ALL OF WHICH WE CAN AVOID IF YOU JUST HANG IN THE BASEMENT WITH GARRETT.”
“No, no, no. My house. No offense, Garrett.”
Garrett shrugged in response. He hadn't offered much since his Shah sandal observation, and stuck to his knitting. He had been spending more time than usual in the kitchen: his girlfriend, a werewolf who never turned into a wolf, was inMassachusetts . Apparently her pack leader's wife had had another baby. She bitched, but she went. Garrett stayed, which was fine by me—it wasn't like we didn't have the room. Antonia could come back with half the pack and we'd have the room.
I had to admit, I had no idea what Antonia (the werewolf, not my stepmother) saw in him.
Side note: how weird was it that I knew two women named Antonia? Jessica claimed it all had Some Deeper Meaning, but I figured I was just lucky.
Back to my fretting about Garrett. Don't get me wrong. I mean, he was great-looking (it was the rare vampire who wasn't), but I had the impression he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Not to mention, a few weeks ago he'd been running around on all fours and drinking blood by the bucket. Antonia was smart and, even if she'd been a drooling idiot, she could see the future. Hello?See the future . She could have had anybody, I figured.
She would have disagreed. Violently. It was amazing to me that a great-looking brunette with the body of a swimsuit model who couldsee the future had rotten self-esteem, but there it was. And who was I to judge? Garrett and Antonia had a good thing.
“Very well,” the questionable prize I was dating said at last, in English. “You may stay. But Jessica, please watch what you say and do. Don't look them in the eyes for long. Speak only when spoken to. Yes, sir; yes, ma'am.”
“Sit up. Arf,” I teased.
“What about her?” Jessica cried, pointing in my general direction. “She's more in need of an etiquette lesson than I am.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but I'm the Queen. With a capital fucking Q. Hey, you're looking me in the eyes for too long! Eric, make her stop!”
“Give me a damn break,” she muttered, and went upstairs making gagging noises.
Chapter 2
The doorbell rang as I watched Jessica rant her way up the foyer stairs. She had seemed especially prickly in the past few weeks. Not that I wasn't used to her speaking her mind; she was my best and oldest friend—we'd shared lipstick in junior high. Which, given our skin hues, was a true testament to our friendship (and more importantly, our ability to find common accessories). But it seemed like everything I said and did was going beyond surface irritation, and digging deep inside her annoy-a-meter.
“It's Sophie and Liam,” Tina informed us from the foyer.
“Oh, good,” I said, following everybody (except Garrett, who was deep in mid-afghan) out of the kitchen. “The fun meeting first.”
“Nonsense,” Eric said. “All meetings are fun.”
I snorted, but didn't say anything. Truth be told, I was too busy looking at his black-panted butt, which was very fine. He was wearing a dark suit as usual, a perfect complement to his dark hair and eyes. He was so broad through the shoulders I often wondered how he fit through doorways, and had long, strong legs. I pondered the fact that I'd resisted his evil charms for so long.