I felt my fangs extend, and I was this close to snapping them right into his jugular. I shoved him away.

“Listen to me, asshole. I’ve never killed a human before. I’ve never even bitten a human in anger. And you’re not going to screw up my record.” I grunted, shoving him against the truck in the next space.

He howled as the bone stretched toward snapping. With his other hand, he punched my cheekbone over and over until I released his wrist.

Ow.

I shook off the pain radiating through the entire left side of my head. Unfortunately, I shook a little too emphatically and ended up head-butting him … which just hurt worse. The pain gave me a sort of mental distance from the fight. I reached out to his brain, and the first layer of emotion was surprise. He didn’t expect this kind of fight from me. He felt foolish for thinking that I would be docile. Female predators were always the ones you had to watch. His brain was a tangled red mess of rage … and reluctance? He wasn’t angry with me. He was just using me for something. Message. That was the word he kept thinking. Message. I was his message. Hurting the vampire wasn’t enough anymore. Gabriel Nightengale had to be taught a lesson.

I saw two little boys, running in a field. I saw dog tags. I saw a house, a burned-out shell overgrown with weeds and long abandoned. I saw a tree, splintered and fallen. I saw a trailer parked in the middle of the woods. In the distance, I could see the Half-Moon Hollow water tower silhouetted against the full moon.

He shoved me back, slamming my head against Jolene’s SUV so hard it shattered the side window. Just as my knees hit the ground, the headlights of all of the cars in the next row popped on, illuminating my masked friend, who I had to assume was Ray McElray. Two vampires in black SWAT uniforms hopped out of the vehicles as if their polyester pants were on fire. Gabriel and Dick came running around the end of the row, sprinting toward me.

Ray shoved his hands into his pockets and pulled out what looked like two air horns. He held them out and pressed down on the triggers, releasing a curtain of silvery spray. Jamie and the uniformed vampires fell back, instinctually shying away from the noxious liquid. Gabriel and Dick ducked through it, their skin sizzling and smoking. I looked up to see Ray sliding behind the wheel of the truck I’d shoved him into. He’d fired up the engine and started pulling forward before Dick managed to throw himself onto the hood.

“Dick!” I shouted as Ray’s truck screamed out of the parking lot. The vampire SWAT guys jumped into their SUV and followed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Gabriel looked torn between following them and helping me. Finally, he and Jamie pulled me to my feet. “What are you doing here?” I asked as Gabriel swept me into a bone-crushing hug.

Jamie patted my shoulder awkwardly. He backed away and went to stand next to Ophelia, who was wearing another church-picnic outfit—a white and yellow sundress that tied with a big pretty bow on the back of her neck.

Ophelia said, “We thought Mr. McElray might be watching the house. He’d see if you left without any of the men. He would see you as being vulnerable and might follow. We wanted to see how far he would take the ‘stop hiding behind her’ sentiment.”

“And the two-man SWAT team?” I asked, feeling rather dizzy now that the head wound was catching up to me.

Ophelia’s nasty smile was a slash of white against the obscene red of the neon lights. “I thought it might be a good opportunity to meet with Mr. McElray and inform him of the proper etiquette of dealing with our undead citizens. I didn’t expect him to be quite so well prepared.”

“So you turned my bachelorette party into a sting operation?”

Ophelia shrugged. “It was either that or the wedding ceremony. I thought you would appreciate preemptive action.”

“I am sorry, Jane. This is not an effort to leave you out or keep you in the dark,” Gabriel said, glaring at Ophelia. “Had Ophelia not pulled rank and threatened me with certain anatomically specific punishments should I tell you about her plan, I never would have allowed it.”

“Well, that explains why you didn’t try to veto the party. How did Ophelia even know about it?” I asked.

Ophelia smiled. “Jolene invited me.”

I groaned. “I have got to talk to that girl about boundaries.”

The SWAT vampires came back empty-handed but for a scraped-up, sullen Dick. Ray McElray knew the roads of the Hollow better than they’d anticipated, they explained, and after throwing Dick off of his hood in a driving maneuver that would have made Dick’s beloved Dukes of Hazzard proud, he’d turned off his lights, sped through the treeline, and taken some winding, barely graveled path through the woods off County Line Road.

“What is going on with your super troopers?” I demanded. “How can one half-crazy human elude you for so long? What happened to ‘vampires are expert trackers’? Can’t you just get a scent on him and follow his trail?”

“Jane, I understand that you’re upset, but you need to adjust your tone before my patience wears thin,” Ophelia said, her own tone cold. “We don’t know how Mr. McElray was able to stay off of our radar for so long. My only guess is that he knows the backwoods of this area much better than we ever could, and it is giving him a distinct advantage.”

Ophelia yelled at the SWAT guys in several languages, and they slunk into the bar to scrape my drunken bridesmaids off the floor and hustle them outside. Andrea was confused by Dick’s appearance in the parking lot but was in no state to ask too many questions. Jenny was singing an eardrum-altering version of “Hot Stuff” at the top of her lungs. And Jolene was confused about why Ophelia had arrived so late to the party.

My wedding party, ladies and gentlemen.

The SWAT guys escorted us home and were instructed to keep watch over the house until dawn. Zeb had apparently lost the Wii tournament and therefore had to clean up the mess from the party while the others went on their strip-bar stakeout. He was more than happy to take his tired, sober wife home, while Dick had to carry tipsy but cheerful Andrea to their car. Jenny passed out on the couch, and we didn’t have the heart to do anything but put a wastebasket and some Advil near her head.

“I gotta say, as far as bachelorette parties go, the arrival of SWAT personnel was still more fun than Jenny’s party,” I murmured as Gabriel walked me up the stairs. Jamie was on our heels, recapping all of his favorite parts of the evening. Most of them involved me getting my ass handed to me by a masked redneck.

“Well, did you live the last moments of your single life to the fullest?” Gabriel asked, grinning wryly at me as Jamie split off to his room. “Is your last wild oat sown?”

“Hey, don’t get all superior with me. I happen to know for a fact that Dick plans to kidnap you into some poker night gone wrong this weekend. You’re the one who hasn’t bid good-bye to singleness.”

“Darling, I bid good-bye to singleness the moment I met you,” he said, before kissing me hungrily.

“Oh, if there wasn’t a mini-vamp with superhearing sleeping thirty feet away, that line would get you lucky,” I said, shaking my head in mock sadness.

“Thank you!” Jamie called. “And don’t call me a ‘mini-vamp’!”

15

Establishing dominance early in the relationship is key. Vampire children are like human children in that they can sense weakness. They will wait for you to be busy or too distracted to realize that you’ve given them permission to feed on the pizza guy.

—Siring for the Stupid:

A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Newborn Vampires

Wedding planning and personal security seemed to take up most of my time for the next few days. Jolene’s amazing wedding-dress save allowed Iris to devote her attention to finalizing the details. The fitting went well, because Jolene’s mama had forbidden Aunt Vonnie from speaking directly to me. And it may have been a panic-based delusion, but I thought the werewolves’ copy was even prettier than the original costume. This was a good thing, because, surprise of all surprises, all fifty guests we’d invited had RSVP’d yes, including my cousin Junie, who hated me. I suspected that my mother’s friends and family just didn’t want to miss the spectacle.

Ophelia’s badly trained goons—Thing 1 and Thing 2—still lurked in the woods outside my house, hoping that Ray would show up. Jamie amused himself by trying to track them while they were trying to track Ray. Because my childe was apparently too damn dreamy for Ophelia to get annoyed with, she declared that this was good practice for a baby vampire and that the goons weren’t to hurt him or allow themselves to be tracked too easily.

In an attempt to be supportive, I sat on the porch with Fitz and watched as he stalked them. I got a look at Thing 1’s face when Jamie jumped out of a tree and tackled him. He did not look amused.

We managed to talk Ophelia out of a full security escort when Gabriel finally convinced me that Big Bertha was never coming back and that we needed to return to the all-night car dealership. I grumpily agreed to purchase a Honda Ridgeline because it was comfortable to drive but had a truck bed big enough for Dick’s connections to install a full-sized hidey hole. The salesman, Marty, annoyed me by directing all of his questions to Gabriel, even though it was my check paying full sticker price. But given that I still wanted to be driving Big Bertha, I was probably going to be annoyed by the situation anyway.

I decided that drinking Marty dry and leaving his body draped over his desk would probably be bad form.

Because there were a few other accommodations, such as superstrength sunproof tinting, that we needed from the dealership, we left my new truck in Marty’s care. Gabriel drove us home in his car. I used my night vision to read the owner’s manual and brochures for my new truck.

“Is it wrong that I’m actually considering pulling over so we can have sex without worrying about being heard?” he asked as we turned on County Line Road.

“Not as wrong as the fact that I’m considering it,” I said. I looked out the window for a suitable make-out spot and found none. All I could see out the window was the county’s water tower, silhouetted against the full moon.

“Stop the car!” I yelled.

“Jane, I was only kidding. I know that having sex in a car in the middle of nowhere violates your ‘How to avoid being killed like a dumb-ass second-string character in a horror movie’ rules.”

“Stop the car!” I hopped out before Gabriel was able to pull to a complete stop. The distance from the water tower seemed right, and the moon seemed to be in the right position, but I was viewing it from the wrong angle. In his jumbled thoughts, Ray McElray had seen the lettering on the tower, “HALF-MOON HOLLOW.” All I could see was “HA.”

“Jane, what’s wrong?”

“I think I know where to find him,” I said, thankful that I’d worn my sensible sneakers while car shopping. “Come on.”

“Jane!” he called as I took off running in a wide arc around the tower. “Don’t you think we should call Ophelia and her team before we go chasing after Ray?” he yelled as we ducked through the trees.

“The same team that was so afraid of a little silver that they couldn’t catch up with him the other night? The same team that Jamie can track with no problem and catch repeatedly?” I called back.

“Good point,” he said. “So, if and when we catch up to Mr. McElray, what are we going to do?”

“No clue.”

“Excellent. We’re throwing ourselves into imminent danger without a plan. The usual.”

“Hey, I have enough sarcasm of my own, I don’t need yours.”

“Jane, stop.”

“I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of cars being set on fire. I’m tired of hired guns lurking outside my house. I can’t handle it anymore. You keep acting like you’re trying to protect me, like I’m the one in trouble again. But you’re the one he’s after. You’re the one in trouble. You’re the one in danger. And I refuse to accept that. I saw the trailer where McElray is staying. I saw it in his head, and I’m going to find it. I am going to go find him and take his damn ‘message.’ And then I’m going to shove it down his throat. Now, you’re either with me or you can go home.”