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They streamed in, stepping smoothly over Nick's unconscious body. They moved like cats and had the hungry, feral look of same. At least, as far as I could tell from peeking over Sinclair's shoulder; I kept trying to elbow him out of the way, and he kept jamming me behind him.

"Uh, hi. You'd be, um, Garrett's friends, right?"Advertisement

Happy, Skippy, Trippy, Sandy, Benny, Clara, and Jane glared at me as one. Somewhere, they'd clothed themselves - probably at the farm, I was seeing an awful lot of flannel - but still had the rank smell of the unwashed. They were all too thin, even bony. Their hair was varying colors and degrees of snarled.

"Well," I plunged, "I'm sorry I wasn't here when you stopped by the other night - "

They weren't moving. Perhaps I was dazzling them with my ineptitude. It had happened before.

"But at least this gives me a chance to, um, explain and even, um, apologize - "

"Do not apologize to them," Sinclair snarled. "One such as you should not even speak to them."

"Shush! He's cranky," I explained, "no blood tonight, you know how it is."

"We know exactly how it is," Clara said.

"Oh. Right." Awkward. What was interesting wasn't their reaction so much as Sinclair's. He wasn't angry so much as - as - offended, that was the word. Their presence offended him. I guess the Fiends were the vampire untouchables.

"Anyway, the thing is, it has been a crazy couple of years. For me, I mean. First there was the whole 'you are the queen' thing, which I was so not prepared for. And, I might point out, a lot of people were telling me to kill all you guys when Nostro - when you ate Nostro - but I didn't. In fact, I saved you."

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"For imprisonment and slow starvation."

"I'm getting to that." I lowered my voice. "Okay, so then there was a serial killer - more than one, come to think of it - and then my half sister turned up, who was the daughter of the devil. The devil! I mean, please!"

"Yes, please," one of them said. "Let us end this."

"But I'm not finished! And then - before then, actually - all these ghosts started showing up looking for favors, like in that movie? Never mind, you didn't see that movie."

One of them was rubbing her temples. I sped up the This Is My Life portion of our program. "Then my friend got sick, lethally sick, and I had this wedding to plan, and all these werewolves showed up, and my dad and step mom died because I wanted a baby, and I had to kill a librarian, and it was just - just a crazy, crazy time. I mean, totally nuts."

"So. Essentially," Sandy - or was it Benny? - said, "you forgot about us."

"Well."

"Do not," Sinclair said through gritted teeth.

"Kinda," I admitted. "But I had all these really good reasons! I - yeek!" Sinclair had shoved me into the curtains as seven enraged vampires launched themselves at me. pqdm.com