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Marc and Jessica's apparent casual attitude toward death was partly my fault. Make that totally. I'd saved their butts so many times (from suicide, murder, cancer) they just naturally felt impervious around me.

It didn't help that none of us were talking about it in any real detail. See, I'd always been different from other vampires. So different than even Tina (the oldest vampire I hadn't killed; she had made Sinclair way back when) didn't know much about me, or what I could do.Advertisement

I had, completely by accident, cured Jessica's cancer and killed an eight-hundred-year-old vampire librarian. And I'd done it without laying a finger on the librarian. I just sort of - pulled her into me. What was left wouldn't have filled an urn.

That didn't bother Sinclair or Tina especially, since I'd saved Sinclair at the time. What did bother them was that I had no idea how I'd done it and had been unable to do so again. Not that I'd tried. God, no. I figured somebody would have to die for me to try out my nifty new power. Pass.

Sinclair had been spending some time in the library perusing the Book of the Dead. He thought I didn't know. But I understood his puzzlement, and I knew he was being careful.

Read that thing too long - written on human skin with blood by a centuries-dead insane vampire - and you went crazy. Upside was, it was always right. Downside, there was no index or table of contents. You just opened it and took your chances that you'd actually read something, y'know, useful.

Worst of all, it always came back to me. It had been set on fire and thrown into the Mississippi River (on two separate occasions!). It always showed up wherever I was. Fucking creepy thing that I didn't dare read and couldn't get rid of.

Or tell Sinclair I knew he was reading it. How could I bring that up without mentioning Jessica's cure, or what I did to Marjorie?

And don't even get me started on what I did to the Ant and my dad. I'd wished for a baby, and I got one - because they had been killed. It wasn't my fault, it was a Monkey's Paw situation. I'd been wearing a cursed engagement ring at the time. One gruesome car accident later, and I was the sole guardian of my half brother, BabyJon.

Thank God he'd been spending the weekend with the devil's daughter and didn't get ripped to pieces by the Fiends!

(I can't believe I just said that. This, this is what my life had become.)

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What was worse, that my distant dad and bitchy stepmother were dead, or that I didn't feel too broken up about it? Let's face it, he'd never been there for me, and she was a stiff-haired nightmare.

Who, last I checked, had been haunting me. Maybe I'd get lucky - maybe instead of an actual ghost, that vision of her was just a hallucination, the onset of permanent brain damage.

I sighed as we pulled into the driveway. I should be so lucky, I told myself. pqdm.com