LITMIR.BIZ

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started my dash into the kitchen from the living room. He hadn’t run from the hall to intercept me or somehow leapt those fifteen feet, he’d simply been at the door one moment and in front of me the next. In the split second between those two positions he’d slid sideways…not across the floor but through the air, like a chess piece being moved by an invisible hand onto a more offensive square.

      As he looked down at me, I saw space between his feet and the floor, but when he spoke, the fact that my fiancé was defying the laws of gravity fell to second place in the creepy sweepstakes.

       “Forget your sisters, bitch! Help yourself!”

      His voice was still velvet, but now it was dirt-stiffened velvet. It was velvet that had been used as a corpse-cloth and was stained with unidentifiable fluids. And if that sounds as though I was still feeling the effects of the appletinis, all I can say is that by then I was stone-cold sober and desperately wishing there was a stiff cocktail within reach to numb my senses. All five of them were telling me stuff I didn’t want to know, and my sixth sense had gone to Def-Con One with the alarm bells again.

      “Uh-uh.” From my seat on the floor, I forced the words past my stiff lips. “You can’t be. They don’t exis—” Dean’s canines, razor-sharp and gleaming, lengthened past his bottom lip and I couldn’t deny the evidence any longer.

      My fiancé was a vampire. And if he was, then it was perfectly possible that Lance and Todd were, too. Kat and Tashya were still screaming, but even as I decided to make it a triplet thing, Dean lunged.

      He hadn’t been a vampire for very long, as I’ve since learned. Maybe his newbie status was the reason for his coordination being off just enough that I had the chance to roll out of his way. I cracked my kneecap a good one against the Sheraton table in front of the sofa, scrambled backwards on my splinter-stabbed butt, and suddenly realized I still clutched Popsie’s revolver. I cocked it and fired.

      If any goth-types reading this are thinking, God, how stupid can this chick be not to know vampires can’t be killed with lead? I have two things to say to you. One: I hoped the books and movies were wrong on that; and two: a couple of black dresses are admittedly a good starting point for a wardrobe, but at a certain stage, why not consider adding a few pale neutrals?

      The books and movies weren’t wrong on the lead bullet thing. Dean looked down at his six-pack torso where the entry wound was already closing up. “It’s all true.” His voice had gone back to sounding sexy, but it wasn’t working on me anymore. I glanced frantically at the Sheraton table, which in the past I’d dismissed as a fake antique Grammie had paid too much for, but which my newly-appreciative gaze now saw as a flat surface supported by four legs that might just work as stakes. “I’ve got a ripped body, a full head of hair and I can’t be killed. This is the best investment I ever made in my life!”

      “Correction—you can’t be killed by an ordinary bullet.” I jumped to my feet, hoisting the Sheraton table and smashing it against the floor. The table leg I held broke free. “But from all I’ve heard, a stake’ll do the job just fine!”

      Not the snappiest line, but the best I could manage under the circumstances. Dean’s expression was one of unholy glee, unholy being the operative word. His eyes no longer looked sapphire, but black, and the snarl erupting from him didn’t sound like anything human.

      I plunged my makeshift stake into his heart.

      That was the plan, anyway. The problem was that Grammie’s Sheraton table turned out to be the real deal and not a sturdy fake. Even as I drove the leg against his muscled chest it broke, leaving me with a stub of worm-eaten oak in my hand.

      Dean snarled again and attacked.

      I had one quick glimpse of his face, distorted by rage into something out of a nightmare, and then his right palm came blurring toward me. It connected with my cheekbone so solidly that my head whipped sideways and the rest of me followed. I fell onto the sofa, bounced once and tumbled to the floor.

      “She said there was a price!” He yanked me up by my blouse. It ripped and he transferred his grip to my shoulder, his fingers digging into me like knives. “We’d get everything we’d ever dreamed of in exchange for killing you three and I’m not about to let you screw up my part of the—”

      My knee came up instinctively. Here’s a tidbit of information you might thank me for one day: vamps react to a kick in the family jewels just the way any human creep would. Dean gave a high-pitched scream and doubled over. I turned to run.

      “You bitch!” He grabbed me by my hair. My feet flew out from under me, but as I fell I felt a tug at the back of my head and I was free. I saw Popsie’s revolver sticking out from underneath the sofa, and stupidly I reached for it again. It caught on something but I didn’t let that stop me.

      “What the hell?” As I twisted around to face Dean I saw his rage-filled expression temporarily replaced by one of pure male bafflement. I took in the object he was holding and pure female irritation temporarily replaced my fear.

      “It’s a hair extension,” I said coldly. “I had some woven in for the wedding.”

      He let it drop, his brief flash of non-undeadness falling away with it. “Maybe they’ll bury it with you. Or maybe there won’t be enough of you to bury when I’m finished.”

      He was on me before I had chance to do anything more than thumb back the hammer on the revolver, but as I felt my ribs start to give way under the pressure of his embrace when he pulled me to him and went for my neck, I knew it didn’t matter. Gun or no gun, from the moment I’d invited him into the house I hadn’t had a chance of getting out of this alive. From the absence of screams coming from the kitchen and the upstairs, Kat and Tashya hadn’t had a chance, either.

      The thing that had once been Dean Hudson the Third crushed me to its chest, the tips of its teeth poised against the thudding pulse in my neck. I closed my eyes, prayed Grammie wouldn’t be the one to discover her granddaughters’ bodies, and felt my former fiancé go in for the kill.

      Which is when Popsie’s old revolver went off.

      The explosion was deafening, even muffled as it was by the fact that the gun was jammed between us. Dean jerked backwards, his gaze mocking. “You’re supposed to be the smart one, Megan, but you’re just as blond as your sisters, aren’t you? I already told you, I can’t be killed with a—”

      Surprise crossed his chiseled features. He opened his eyes wide, looked down at the still-smoking hole in his pumped left pec, and then looked back at me. “Fuck!” he said in an aggrieved tone. “I only had eternal life for a couple of hours, damn—”

      He didn’t finish his sentence because his mouth turned into dust. His mouth and every other part of him, to be exact. For a moment dust-Dean just stood there. Then the dust lost its shape and fell in a greasy heap to the floor by my hair extension.

      The only reason I can give for what I did next is that I was in shock. Instead of fainting dead away or throwing up or forcing my rubbery legs to move, I bent down to look at the Dustbuster-fodder my ex-fiancé had turned into. The thought flickered briefly through me that I should feel something at Dean’s demise, since to quote my earlier words to Tash, I’d been planning to do the till-death-us-do-part thing with him.

      Except death hadn’t parted us. Not even his undeath had, although his becoming a vamp had definitely widened the chasm. But if the events of this evening hadn’t happened and we’d spent our whole lives together, there would have been a big, empty gap where our marriage should have been. As Kat had admitted about her and Lance, we’d just been a means to an end for each other. As I peered closer at what was left of Dean, I realized all I felt was relief that I’d killed him before he’d killed me.

      His remains were as yawn-inducing as he’d once been—just a greasy pile that looked like something Smokey the Bear would want you to kick sand over if you were on a camping trip, except for the misshapen silver blob capping the lead bullet in the middle of the ashes. The melted blob was attached

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