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But all that stuff at the bridal shop happened months ago, and I was only thinking of my friends because I was all alone. Worse: all alone at a double funeral.

My father and his wife were dead.Advertisement

I had no idea how to feel about that. I'd never liked the Ant-my stepmother-a brassy, gauche woman who lied like fish sucked water, a woman who had shoved my mother out of her marriage and shattered my conception of happily ever after at age thirteen.

And my father had never had a clue what to do with me. Caught between the daily wars waged between the Ant and me, and my mom and the Ant, and the Ant and him ("Send her away, dear, and do it right now"), he stayed out of it altogether. He loved me, but he was weak. He'd always been weak. And my coming back from the dead horrified him.

And she had never loved me, or even liked me.

But that was all right, because I had never liked her, either. My return from the dead hadn't improved our relationship one bit. In fact, the only thing that had accomplished that trick was the birth of my half brother, Babyjon, who was mercifully absent from the funeral.

Everybody was absent. Jessica was in the hospital undergoing chemo, and her boyfriend, Detective Nick Berry, only left her side to eat and occasionally arrest a bad guy.

In a horrifying coincidence, the funeral was taking place where my own funeral had been. Would have, except I'd come back from the dead and gotten the hell out of there. I was not at all pleased to find myself back, either.

When I'd died, more than a year ago, I'd gotten a look at the embalming room but hadn't exactly lingered to sightsee. Thus, I-we-were sitting in a room I'd never seen. Sober dark walls, lots of plush folding chairs, my dad and the Ant's pictures blown up to poster size at the front of the room. There weren't coffins, of course. Nothing that might open. The bodies had been burned beyond recognition.

"-a pillar of the community, and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were active in several charitable causes-"

Yeah, sure. The Ant (short for Antonia) was about as charitably minded as that little nutty guy in charge of North Korea. She threw my dad's money at various causes so she could run the fund-raising parties and pretend she was the prom queen again. One of those women who peaked in high school. It had always amazed me that my father hadn't seen that.

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I looked around the room of mostly strangers (and not many of them, either, despite the two of them being "pillars of the community") and swallowed hard. Nobody was sitting on either side of me. How could they? I was here by myself.

Tina, Sinclair's major domo, had gone on a diplomatic trip to Europe, to make sure everybody over there was still planning to play nice with everybody over here. The European faction of vampires had finally come to visit a few months ago, murder and mayhem ensued, and then they got the hell out of town. Me? I thought that was fine. Out of sight, out of mind. . . that was practically the Taylor family motto. Sinclair the worrywart? Not so much.

Since Sinclair and I were wrapping up wedding arrangements, Tina had agreed to go. Since Tina was never very far from Sinclair, a solo trip for her was sort of unheard of. But her exact last words as she left the house were, "What could possibly go wrong in two weeks?"

Famous friggin' last words. pqdm.com