I chuckled as my hand snaked down his body and wrapped tight around the length of him. His hips bucked, and his eyes widened as he looked down at me. Sensing his shock, I grinned back at him.

Gabriel moaned and pulled me into another kiss that had me reeling. In the tussle, my robe had come completely off, though somehow the belt was still tied in a tight, damp knot that refused to give. I pulled at it frantically. Gabriel laughed and ripped the material away easily.

He dragged my bra down to my waist, making me shriek when he gently bit the curve of my breast, drawing blood into his mouth the way human men might worship a nipple. He threw me back to the floor, and I cried out as shards of glass sliced into my back. Then Gabriel’s good, strong hands found the round weight of my cotton-clad rear and rocked me against him, showing me just how much he wanted me.

Gabriel’s lips skimmed my hip bones (my personal Achilles heel), and I let loose a very girlie squeal. I could feel the bow of his smile against my skin as he peeled away my panties. His hands explored lower, and I moaned gibberish as he slipped testing fingers into my warmth.

Gabriel slid between my knees, holding them firmly apart while he played me, stroking and coaxing while I chased his movements with my hips. It had been so long since I’d been touched, and I was shamefully ready. Within moments, I was throwing my head back and screaming his name as I shattered from the inside out. Later, I would take the time to be embarrassed at my hair-trigger response and the fact that I actually whined when he moved his hand away from me. I wrapped my legs around his waist, terrified of losing the sensations he was giving me.

Gabriel chuckled, and, kissing me with a gentleness that seemed impossible given our foreplay activities, he moved into me, testing how much I could take. I grabbed at his hips, needing more. He reared back and sank his fangs into my throat, thrusting up until he was completely inside me.

He drank from my throat as he moved slowly, timing each thrust to draw out the pleasant ache I felt every time he came back to me. I brought his wrist to my lips and sank my teeth into the spot just under his palm, all the while staring him down. It was a dark starburst on the tongue, singing to my senses in a way bottled blood never could. It was the sensation of his blood flooding my system that pushed me over the edge. My fingernails bit into his shoulders as I convulsed around him.

“Mine,” he whispered to my skin. “Mine. Mine.”

I lay there, boneless and sated, while he began moving in earnest, reaching for his own climax. Each stroke was more forceful, driving me into the floor. Using what strength I had, I pushed back, forcing him to work harder, fight for control. Eyes lit with some awful pride, he finally shook under me. He leaned his forehead against mine as his body stilled.

For a minute, it was almost normal. We lay there, wound around each other, my face resting on his chin. My head was empty, drained of all worries. I didn’t care what came next, as long as I was able to feel this way every once in a while. Then I wondered how much it would scare a man to tell him he’d given you your first-ever orgasm achieved with the help of another person. Then I realized we were lying on the broken shards of what used to be my coffee table.

I was stunned by what I’d done. I was a big undead skank. My feelings for Gabriel were a dirty gray miasma of lust, resentment, and the psychotic devotion of a teenage crush. Add to that the fact that I was still angry with him about his ironic vigilante routine. I couldn’t stand what he’d done. He’d killed a man in cold blood. And I’d responded by having sex with him. What sort of degenerate did that make me?

I lay there, the broken glass slicing into my skin, wondering what to do. Did we cuddle? Was I supposed to offer him breakfast? I wasn’t exactly well versed in the postcoital ritual of the living, much less that of the undead. I tried to reach out to his mind, pick up any emotion Gabriel might be feeling. Nothing. Stupid inconsistent powers. So I stared at the ceiling and prayed to the good Lord that Gabriel would say something, anything, to keep me from having to bridge the uncomfortable silence.

Maybe I could fake going to sleep? Sure, it was 2:34 A.M., the vampire equivalent of midday. But a sexual effort like that deserved a catnap, right? Plus, I’d lost a lot of blood earlier in the evening—

“If you don’t get up off the glass, your skin’s going to heal over it. It will itch for decades.”

That was…not what I expected.

He shifted to his feet, shaking debris out of his hair. His skin was ruddier, suffused with my blood. He looked almost tan. That must have been what he looked like in life, minus the splinters of table sticking out of his back.

Gabriel made a hesitant grab for his pants and slid them on. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t go all prom date on me, Gabriel,” I said, my voice harder than I intended. I got up, leaving a wake of glass tinkling to the floor. I grabbed my robe and yanked it over my back. “My father isn’t going to show up on your doorstep with a shotgun and a preacher.”

He touched my arm and made me turn to face him. “In light of what’s happened, I think you should come stay with me for a while.”

“I don’t think moving in together is the answer to our problems.”

“We don’t have problems,” Gabriel insisted.

“You killed someone!”

“I killed someone for you!”

“Well, pardon me if I don’t think that’s going to make it into the next collection of Hallmark cards!” I cried. “And don’t think that this changes anything,” I growled, fangs creaking to full length. I closed my eyes, tamping my temper down. “We are not back to normal, whatever normal is for us. I’m still—I just don’t want to be around you right now. I think you’d better go.”

Well, if punching him in the face didn’t hurt him, that certainly did. His lips parted, but he pressed them back together, reconsidering saying something that would probably piss me off even more.

“Jane, please, we can talk about this,” he said, stepping toward me. When he saw the anguish on my face, he stopped. “I’ll call you.”

“Please don’t.”

The door clicked shut behind him.

“Well, at least that wasn’t weird.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and surveyed the damage to my living room: chipped bric-a-brac, a shattered table, and a scrambled brain. And I didn’t know where my underwear was.

19

Remember, you’re much more flammable now than you were in life. So live every day as if you’re soaked in gasoline.

—From The Guide for the Newly Undead

Sometime between my sustaining multiple gunshot wounds and losing my panties, Dick had called my cell phone to leave me a cryptic voice-mail message.

“Hey, Jane, it’s Dick,” he said, his voice unusually quiet and subdued. “Do you think you could stop by my place sometime tonight? I need to talk to you.”

It was almost four by the time I heard the voice mail. And Dick wasn’t answering his phone, so I risked some early-morning exposure to drive to his trailer. Because if I was at home, I would be cleaning up broken glass and thinking about what I had decided to call “the incident.”

My phone rang as I jogged up the steps to Dick’s trailer. The caller ID said it was Gabriel. I debated picking it up but finally hit the ignore button. I knocked on the door and—

WHHHOOOOOMMMMMMPPFFF

Red and gold stars exploded at the base of my skull as I was blown off Dick’s porch and onto the hood of my car. My frustration at being thrown through yet another windshield was superseded by the fact that my sleeves were on fire. It seemed to be a more pressing concern. I slapped them out just before a secondary explosion knocked me back again. The blast threw me off the car, thwacking the back of my head against the cement blocks supporting a nearby El Camino. The flames burned orange behind my eyelids. I slipped into a soft black place where the burns on my arms didn’t leave me screaming.

I was still able to be knocked unconscious. That was comforting. What was not comfortable was the cot I was currently chained to. I was lying in a dimly lit room that smelled of bleach and cement dust. Someone had taken the time to remove my smoldering clothes and put me in blue hospital scrubs. I jerked at the handcuffs binding my wrists and shrieked. Though healing, the burns on my arms were the color and texture of barely cooked hamburger.

“Agh, I am fortune’s bitch,” I moaned. Not exactly Shakespeare, I’m aware, but I was operating with a concussion. I sniffed at the chains. Under the tang of steel, I smelled something stronger.

“They’re reinforced with titanium,” a smooth, young female voice informed me from the darkness.

“Fortune’s bitch,” I said again.

Ophelia was sitting in a folding chair in the corner. Her fangs glinted as she offered a thin smile. “You do have a way with words.”

“What is going on?” I asked, trying to sit up. My very sensitive equilibrium told me this was a bad idea. “Who let the mariachi band loose in my head?”

Ophelia, who I could now see was wearing an obscenely short plaid skirt and a schoolgirl blouse, crossed to the foot of my bed. “I told you to behave yourself. I told you to stay under the radar.”

“I did,” I protested, the slightest hint of a whine creeping into my voice.

“Then how do you explain your being found unconscious outside a burning trailer belonging to one of the oldest vampires in the region?”

Not that again. “Look, for the last time, I didn’t do anything. I walked up to the door, and the trailer exploded. Wait! Was Dick inside? Is he dead?”

There were the shark eyes again, which were even scarier when they were flashing at me from the dark. “Considering the hour, we’re assuming he was inside. Of course, we wouldn’t find him if he was inside. The fire would reduce him to dust. The question is why you were stupid enough to knock yourself out before you were able to leave the scene of the crime.”

The terror was giving way to anger, which I assumed was a good sign. I demanded, “Why would I set Dick on fire?”

“Why would you set Walter on fire?” she asked.

“I didn’t set Walter on fire!” I shouted.

“Give me an explanation, Jane. Give me something to take back to the other council members, to the vampires who will demand justice. Give me some plausible reason for two men you are rumored to be involved with—whether that involvement is real or imagined, it won’t matter to the community—having both been set on fire. Explain why you were found outside Dick’s burning trailer after you were recently seen having a lovers’quarrel with him at a party.”

“That wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel! That was a friendly conversation!”

“You were seen hitting him repeatedly.”

“It was a friendly conversation that involved me hitting him repeatedly.”

Ophelia did not look convinced.

I sighed. “What’s going to happen to me? Is a vampire detective going to come in here and question me with a phone book and a rubber hose?”

I could see the amusement reach her eyes, but she refused to smile. “A tribunal has been called to discuss your case. Depending on the outcome of that discussion, you may have a trial tomorrow.”

“A trial,” I repeated before realization dawned. “The trial? Wait, don’t I get a lawyer or a phone call or something?”

“No,” she said, uncuffing me. I sat up slowly. She was across the room and out of my reach in a glimmer of movement. Where was the trust? “You’re accused of immolating two of your own kind. The Bill of Rights no longer applies to you.”

She turned toward the door, then whirled back on me. She stood by the cot, peering down at me with those glowing black eyes.

“I regret this. You seem to be an interesting vampire.”

“Then don’t do this!” I yelled. “Stop making an example of me for other young vampires. I’m a terrible example. More weird stuff happens to me in a week than is foisted upon the average person in an entire lifetime.”