AFTER we’d done as much damage to birthdays (Many Bloody Returns) and to the Christmas holidays (Wolfsbane and Mistletoe) as we could, we started brainstorming about our next anthology’s theme. What hadn’t we covered? We’re sort of saving Arbor Day, and so many paranormals don’t celebrate the Fourth of July.

Toni brought up the summer holidays. Since we’re both moms with kids in school (albeit kids of very different ages), the idea made us gleeful. But we decided to broaden it a bit to include all vacations, because we didn’t want to leave out the possibility of a really good vampire skiing story. Unfortunately, as it happened, none was turned in to us by our stellar list of authors.

But we got some great stories, with settings as varied as a hotel in California, a family reunion in Ireland, the headquarters of a mysterious sect in Paris, and other interesting locales ranging from the exotic to the ridiculous . . . and we love them all.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve lined up house sitters, and we’ve packed our sunscreen and paperbacks. We’re officially on vacation. We’ll send you a postcard!

Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author, has been writing for twenty-seven years. Her body of work includes many novels, a few novellas, and a growing body of short stories in genres such as mystery, science fiction, and romance. Married and the mother of three, Charlaine lives in rural Arkansas with her family, three dogs, and a Canada goose. She pretty much works all the time. The HBO series True Blood is based on Charlaine’s Sookie Stackhouse novels.

“SO why are we going to Tunica?” I asked Pam. “And what are we supposed to do when we get there?”

“We’re going to see the sights and gamble,” Pam said. The headlights of a passing car glinted on Pam’s pale, straight hair. Pam was paler than her hair and approximately a hundred and sixty years old, give or take a decade. She’d become a vampire when Victoria was still a young queen.

“It’s hard to believe you’d want to go to Mississippi. For that matter, it’s hard to believe you’d want to take me along.”

“Are we not friends, Sookie?”

“Yes,” I said, after a little hesitation. Though it didn’t seem polite to say so, I was closer to being a friend of Pam’s than I was of any other vampire. “Somehow, I got the feeling you really didn’t think enough of humans to want to claim one as a friend.”

“You’re not as intolerable as most,” Pam said lightly.

“Thanks for the glowing testimony.”

“Oh, you’re quite welcome.” She grinned, flashing just a bit of fang.

“I hope this is fun, considering I’m using my two days off to make this little trip.” I sounded a little grumpy, with good reason.

“It’s a vacation! A chance to get out of your rut. Don’t you get tired of Bon Temps? Don’t you get tired of hustling drinks at Sam’s bar?”

Truthfully, no. I love my little Louisiana town. I feel as comfortable as a telepath can be among the people I know so well (better than most of them will ever understand). And I love working for Sam at Merlotte’s. I’m a very good waitress and barmaid. My life brings me enough excitement without me having to leave town to get more.

“Something always goes wrong when I go out of town,” I said, trying not to sound whiny.

“Such as?”

“Remember when I went to Dallas? All those people got shot? When I went to Jackson, I got staked.” Which was pretty ironic, since I’m human. “And when I flew up to Rhodes with you-all, the hotel got blown up.”

“And you saved my life,” Pam said, suddenly serious.

“Well,” I said, and then could think of nothing more to add. I started to say, You would have done the same for me, but I was by no means sure that was true. Then I started to say, You would have been okay, anyway, but that wasn’t true, either. I shrugged, at a loss. Even in the darkness, Pam saw me.

“I won’t forget,” she said.

“So, we’re really just going to see the casinos and gamble? Can we go see a show?” I wanted to change the subject.

“Of course we’ll do all those things. Oh, we do have one tiny errand to perform for Eric.”

Eric and I are—I’m not sure what we are. We’re lovers, and in an unofficial vampire way, we’re married. Not that I had anything to do with that; Eric maneuvered me into it. He had good intentions. I think. Anyway, it’s not a straightforward situation, me and Eric. Pam is gung-ho Eric, because she’s his right hand. “So what do we have to do? And why do I need to come along?”

“A human is involved,” Pam said. “You can let me know if he’s sincere or not.”

“All right,” I said, not caring one little bit that I sounded reluctant. “As long as I get to see all the casinos and a good show that I pick.”

“It’s a promise,” Pam said.

As we went up Highway 61, we started to see casino billboards flashing by in the night. Pam had been driving since darkness had fallen . . . That had been at five thirty, since it was February. Though I remembered February as being the coldest month when I was a child, now it was an eerie sixty degrees. Pam had picked me up in Bon Temps, then we’d gone through Vicksburg to turn north on Highway 61. There were a few casinos in Vicksburg and a few more in Greenville, but we kept driving up the western side of Mississippi. It was flat, flat, flat. Even in the dark, I could tell that.

“Nowhere to hide, here,” I said brightly.

“Even for a vampire,” Pam said. “Unless one found a bayou and crouched down to bury oneself in the mud.”

“With the crawdaddies.” I was full of cheerful thoughts.

“What do people do here?” Pam asked.

“Farm,” I said. “Cotton, soybeans.”

Pam’s upper lip curled. Pam was a city girl. She’d grown up in London. England. See? We couldn’t be more different. City girl, country girl. Experienced and well traveled, inexperienced and stay-at-home. Bisexual, heterosexual. She’s dead, I’m alive.

Then she turned on the CD player in her Nissan Murano, and the Dixie Chicks began singing.

We did have something in common, after all.

We saw the first turnoff to the casinos at two in the morning.

“There’s a second turnoff, and that’s where we’re staying,” Pam said. “At Harrah’s.”

“Okay,” I said, peering at the signs. To find these street lights, this traffic, and all the neon in the distance in the middle of the Mississippi Delta was like finding out Mrs. Butterworth had pierced her navel. “There!” I said. “We turn there.”

Pam put on her blinker (she was an excellent driver) and following the signs, we pulled up in front of the casino/hotel where we had a reservation. It was large and new, as everything in the casino complex seemed to be. Since there wasn’t a whole lot going on at that hour, several jacketed young men made a beeline for the Murano.

Pam said, “What are they doing?” Her fangs popped out.

“Chill. They’re just going to valet-park the car,” I said, proud that I knew something Pam didn’t.

“Oh.” She relaxed. “All right. They take the keys, park the car, and bring it back when I require it?”

“Right.” A high school classmate of mine had had that job at a casino in Shreveport. “You tip ’em,” I prompted, and Pam opened her purse, a Prada. Pam was a purse snob.

She laughed when one of the young men wanted to carry her luggage. We both entered the hotel with our weekend bags slung over our shoulders. Eric had given me my bag as a Christmas gift, and I really, really liked it. My initials were embroidered on it, and it was red with blue and gold flowers. In fact, it coordinated with the coat he’d given me the year before, the coat I didn’t need this unseasonably warm night.

Pam had reserved one of the designated vampire rooms, a no-window space with two sets of doors. Our rooms were on the same floor at the back of the hotel. Of course, I’d gotten one of the much cheaper regular human rooms. I was glad we were here on a weekday, because one glimpse of the weekend rates had almost rendered me speechless. I really didn’t travel much.

Very few people turned to look as we made our way to the elevator. Not only were vampires seen pretty frequently at casinos—after all, they were open all night—but everyone was absorbed in the gambling. The slot machines were in rows across the huge floor, and it was always night in here. Sunlight didn’t have a hope of penetrating. The noise was incredible. The chiming and ringing and humming never came to a stop. I don’t know how the people working there managed to stay sane.

In fact, one of the servers wending her way through the chaos in a slacks-shirt-vest uniform was a vampire. She was a thin strawberry blonde with such large boobs that I suspected she’d had a little augmentation before she was brought over. She was carrying a heavy tray of drinks and managing it with ease. She caught Pam’s eyes and gave her a nod. Pam nodded back, giving her own head exactly the same degree of inclination.

On the third floor, Pam peeled off to find her room, and I followed the numbers to mine. Once I’d tossed my bag on my bed, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Pam knocked, and when I let her in she said, “My room is adequate. I’m going to go down and look around. Are you going to bed?”

“I think I will. What are our plans for tomorrow?”

“Do whatever you like during the day. There’s a shuttle that runs between the casinos, so you can go to whichever one you like. There are shops, and there are restaurants. If you notice a show you’d like to see, book us for the first one after dark. After that, we’ll run our errand.”

“Okay. I think I’ll turn in, then.” You notice I didn’t ask about the errand? That was because I wanted to enjoy myself the next day. I’d find out soon enough what Eric wanted us to do. It couldn’t be too bad, right? He was my lover and Pam’s boss. On the other hand, he was frighteningly practical about taking care of himself. No, I told myself. He wouldn’t risk both of us. At the same time.

“Good night, Sookie.” She gave me a cold kiss on the cheek.

“Have a good time,” I said faintly.

She smiled, happy at having startled me. “I plan on it. There are plenty of us here. I’ll go . . . network.”

Pam would always rather hang with her own kind than grub around with “breathers.”

It took me all of ten minutes to unpack and get ready for bed. I crawled in. It was a king, and I felt lost in the middle of it. It would be more fun if Eric were here. I pushed the thought away and turned on the television. I could watch a movie on pay-per-view, I discovered. But if I paid specially for a movie, I’d feel obliged to stay up. Instead, I found an old Western that I followed for maybe half an hour until my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.

About ten the next day, I was eating a wonderful breakfast at a buffet that was as long as the Merlotte’s building. I had sausage and biscuits and gravy, and some chopped fruit so I could say I’d eaten something healthy. I also drank three cups of excellent coffee. This was a great way to start the day, and no dishes to do afterward. That was the kind of vacation I could appreciate.

I retreated to my room to brush my teeth, and then I went outside to catch the bus. The sky was overcast, and the temperature was as unnaturally warm as it had been the day before. One of the valet-parking attendants told me where the shuttle bus would pick me up to take me to the other casinos, and I waited for it with a stout couple from Dyersburg, Tennessee, who had cornered the market on chattiness. They’d won some money the night before, their son was going to the University of Memphis, they were Baptists but their pastor liked to visit the boats (all the casinos were theoretically boats, since casinos couldn’t be built on solid land) so that made a little gambling okay. Since I was young and alone, these two decided I was applying for a job at the casinos. They assured me someone as young and perky and pretty as me would have no trouble.

“Now, don’t you go to that bad place north of here!” the woman said, with mock admonishment.

“What place would that be?”

“Henry, close your ears,” she told her husband. Henry good-naturedly pretended to hold his hands over his ears. “There’s what’s called a gentleman’s club up there,” she said in a stage whisper. “Though what someone calling himself a gentleman would be doing there, I don’t know.”

I didn’t say that I was pretty sure real gentlemen had sex urges, too, because I understood what she meant. “So it’s a strip club?”

Mrs. Dyersburg said, “My Lord, I don’t know what all goes on in a place like that. I won’t ever see the inside of one, you can bet. Listen, our oldest son is twenty-four, and he’s single, got a good job. You dating anyone?”

Then, thank God, the bus came. Whatever casino the Dyersburgs chose, I’d pick another one. Luckily, they got off pretty quickly, so I waited to disembark at Bally’s. I went in, to be assaulted by the newly familiar chiming and clicking of slot machines. I saw a sign for a huge buffet. I got a discount coupon immediately from a smiling older woman with elaborate brown hair and lots of gold jewelry. There were three restaurants in Bally’s, and I could eat till I popped at any one of them, according to the material on the coupon. I wondered how much of an appetite I could work up playing a slot machine.

Out of sheer curiosity I walked over to an empty machine, looked at it carefully while I worked out what to do, fed it one of my hard-earned dollars, and pulled the lever. There, I felt it—a distinct frisson of excitement. Then my dollar was lost for good. Was I willing to spend my money on that thrill? No.

I wandered around for a while, looking at the people who were so intent on what they were doing that they never glanced at me, or smiled. The casino employees, on the other hand, were full of good cheer.

Over the course of the day, thanks to the shuttle, I discovered that all the casinos were basically the same. The “décor” changed, the staff uniforms were different colors, the layout might vary a bit, but the noise level and the gambling facilities . . . those were constant.

I had lunch at yet another casino in the middle of the afternoon. Each casino seemed to have two or three places to eat. I decided I couldn’t face another buffet. I made my way to the lower-priced restaurant that offered menus. When I tired of people-watching, I pulled out the paperback I carried in my purse.

At the casino after that, I had to fend off a persistent admirer, a man missing an important front tooth. He wore his hair pulled back in a long, graying ponytail. He was sure we could have some fun together, and I was just as sure we could not. I got back on the shuttle.

I returned to Harrah’s with a feeling of relief. I’d seen lots of new things, including a riverboat and a golf course, but all in all the casinos seemed kind of sad to me. The gamblers weren’t people like you see in James Bond movies, rich people dressed to the nines who could afford losing. Some of the people I’d seen today didn’t look like they could afford to waste even ten dollars. But I had to admit, they’d seemed to be having a good time, and after all, that was the point of a vacation.

It was lovely to shut the door of my room and enjoy the silence. I threw myself down on the bed and closed my eyes. It wouldn’t be long until Pam rose.

Sure enough, she knocked on the door thirty minutes later. “Did you get some tickets?” she asked.

“Hi, Pam, good to see you. Yes, I had an interesting day,” I said. “I got us tickets to the Mucho Macho contest.”

“What?”

“It’s a strongman competition. I wasn’t sure you’d like any of the music acts. The groups I actually knew, they were all sold out for tonight. So I got tickets to see big strong guys. I thought you’d like that? You like guys too, right?”

“I like men,” Pam agreed guardedly.

“Well, we have an hour before the show,” I said. “You want to go get some warm blood?”

“Yes,” she said, and followed me to the elevator, still looking dubious.

While Pam drank a couple of bottles of TrueBlood Type A, I had a bowl of ice cream. (Calories don’t count while you’re on vacation.) Then we went to the casino next door to watch the Mucho Macho contestants do their manly thing. I got to say, I really enjoyed it: muscular guys lifting heavy weights, swinging big hammers, pulling farm equipment with their teeth. No, I’m just kidding about the teeth. They used a rope harness.

It was like monster trucks, but with men. Even Pam got into the spirit, yelling encouragement to Billy Bob the Brawler from Yazoo City as he harnessed up for his second attempt to move the tractor a yard across the floor.

Of course, Pam herself could have done it easily.

She got a call on her cell phone as we were leaving the show.

“Yes, Eric. Oh, we’ve just finished watching big, muscular, sweaty men move large things around. Sookie’s idea.”

Her eyes went sideways to meet mine. She grinned at me. “I’m sure you could, Eric. You could probably do it without your hands!” She laughed. Whatever Eric said next got her serious attention. “All right, then. We’ll go now.” She handed the phone to me. I didn’t like the compressed lips and narrowed eyes. Something was up.

“Hey,” I said. I felt a surge of lust down to my toenails just knowing that Eric was on the other end of the connection.

“I miss you,” he said.

I pictured him in his office at Fangtasia, the nightclub he and Pam owned. He’d be sitting in his leather office chair, his thick golden hair falling in a waving curtain past his shoulders, and he’d be wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Eric had been a Viking, and he looked like it.

“I miss you, too,” I whispered. I knew he could hear me. He could hear a cricket fart at twenty paces.

“When you return, I’ll show you how much.”

“I look forward to that,” I said, trying to sound brisk and businesslike, since Pam could hear the conversation.

“You’re not in any danger tonight,” he said, sounding more businesslike himself. “Victor insisted you go with Pam. The vampire you’re meeting has a human companion. You will know if Michael is dealing with us in good faith or not.”

“Can you tell me what this is about?”

“Pam will brief you on the way. I wish I’d had time to discuss it with you myself, but this opportunity came up very quickly.” He sounded, just for a second, like he was wondering why it had come up so quickly.

“Is something funny about that?” I asked. “Funny strange, I mean?”

“No,” he said, “I was considering that . . . but no. Let me talk to Pam again.”

I handed the phone back. A glimmer of surprise crossed Pam’s face. “Sir?” she said.

Whatever transpired in the rest of the conversation was lost to me, because the Ittabena Hulk plowed through the crowd in his street clothes, looking neither to the right nor the left. He was intent on the stacked brunette who was waiting for him by the “wait to be seated” sign at the entrance to yet another buffet. She curved in all the right places. She was wearing a tight leopard-print stretch top and a black leather miniskirt grazing the tops of her tan legs. Four-inch black heels completed the ensemble.

“Wow,” I said, in genuine tribute. “I wish I had the guts to wear something that bold.” The cumulative effect was literally stunning.

“I would look excellent in that,” Pam said, a simple statement of fact.

“But would you want to?”

“I see what you mean.” Pam looked down at her own silk blouse and well-cut pants, her low heels and conservative jewelry.

“So where are we going?” I asked, after the valet had retrieved Pam’s car. We turned north on 61. The traffic was heavy. Though it was a weekday, everyone seemed to be in a great hurry to lose their hard-earned cash and experience something a little different from their everyday lives.

“We’re going to a club that’s just west of this highway, about ten miles north of here,” Pam said. “It’s called Blonde, and it’s owned by a vampire named Michael.”

I remembered my conversation with the couple on the bus. “This would be a ‘gentleman’s club’?”

Pam looked massively sardonic. “Yes, that’s what they call it.”

“Why are we going there? Eric said a vampire runs it. We’re across the state line in Russell Edgington’s territory.” Russell Edgington was the vampire king of Mississippi. Though most humans didn’t know it, there were other systems of government in the USA besides the one in Washington, D.C.

Not every state has its own vampire ruler; some states are populous enough to have two or even more. (New York City has its own king, I understand.) Visiting vamps were supposed to check in when they had to cross into another vamp’s territory. I’d met Russell, and he was no joke.

“This must go no further, you understand?” Pam gave me a very meaningful look before turning her attention back to the road. The oncoming traffic heading south from Memphis was moving easily, but it was also nonstop.

“I understand,” I said. I didn’t sound enthusiastic. Vampire secrets are unpleasant and dangerous.

“Our new masters have been chipping away at Edgington’s control of Mississippi,” Pam said.

This was very bad news. Louisiana, where Bon Temps lay, had been taken over from its previous management by the vampires of Nevada. Since Arkansas had previously allied with Louisiana (long story), the king of Nevada (Felipe de Castro) had gotten two states for the price of one. His ambitious lieutenant, Victor Madden, had apparently decided to go for the trifecta.

“Why would they want to do that?” Felipe owned two poor states. If he added Mississippi, he’d have the equivalent of one prosperous state, but his people would be spread thin.

“The casinos,” Pam said.

Of course. The big business in Nevada was casinos, and there were lots of casinos in Mississippi. Felipe had already acquired casinos in Louisiana, and had the state of Arkansas thrown in for free.

“Vampires can’t own casinos,” I said. “It’s against the law.” A powerful human lobby had pushed that legislation.

“Do you imagine that Felipe doesn’t control what happens at the casinos in Las Vegas? At least in large part?”

“No,” I admitted. I’d met Felipe.

“In fact, our king is bringing a lawsuit to challenge that legislation through the human courts, and I’m confident he’ll win,” Pam said. “In the meantime, Victor told Eric to use us as an advance team.”

I had seen Victor much more often than the king himself. Victor Madden was Felipe de Castro’s man on the ground in Louisiana, while Felipe stayed at his castle in Las Vegas. “Ah, Pam, do you think this is all on the up-and-up?”

“What do you mean?”

I thought she knew perfectly well what I meant. “Victor specified us. Why do we have this top secret mission, instead of someone better at negotiation? Not that you’re not a great fighter,” I added quickly. “But you’d think if we’re trying to pinch off parts of Mississippi, Victor would send Eric himself.” Eric was the only remaining sheriff that the previous ruler had put in place. All the others were dead. I remembered Victor’s adorable, smiling face, and I got worried. “You sure this Michael is willing to ditch Russell?”

“Victor says so.”

“And Michael has a human companion.”

“Yes, a man named Rudy.”

“This is dangerous, no matter what Victor told Eric. We’re in foreign territory. This isn’t a real vacation. We’re poaching.”

“Russell doesn’t know why we’re here.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I told his headquarters that I was having a weekend here, so they wouldn’t think my presence was caused by business of any kind.”

“And?”

“Russell himself came on the phone to extend his hospitality. He told me to feel free to enjoy myself in the area, that Eric’s second in command was always welcome.”

“And you don’t think that’s fishy?”

“If Russell had any idea what Felipe was considering, he would have counterattacked by now.”

Vampires pretty much wrote the book on chicanery, double dealing, and what you might call drastic politics. If Pam wasn’t worried, should I be?

Sure. Pam could take a lot more damage than I could.

Blonde was not an attractive edifice. No matter how much female beauty might be on the inside (and the billboards promised plenty), on the outside it was a metal building in the middle of nowhere. It had a huge parking lot, and there were at least forty vehicles there. The ground had risen as we approached Memphis and its bluffs, and the club stood on top of a hill with a deep ravine behind. The whole area outside the parking lot was covered with kudzu, like it had been carpeted in the plant. The trees were covered, too.

“We go to the back,” Pam said, and she drove around the building.

The back was even less appealing than the front. The parking lot was poorly lit. Michael was not too concerned for the safety of his workers. Of course, I told myself, maybe he walks each of the girls to her car every night. But I doubted it. “Pam, I have a bad feeling about this,” I said. “I want to be on record as letting you know that.”

“Thanks for the pep talk,” Pam muttered, and I realized that she had more misgivings than she’d revealed. “But I have my orders and I have to do this.”

“Who issued those orders—Felipe, Victor, or Eric?”

“Victor called me into Eric’s office and told me what to do and to take you. Eric was present.”

“How do you think he feels about this?”

“He isn’t happy,” Pam said. “But he’s under new management, and he has to obey direct orders.”

“So we have to do this.”

“I have to. I am Eric’s to command.” Eric had made Pam a vampire. “You aren’t, though Eric pretends to Victor that you obey him in all things. You can leave. Or you can stay in the car and wait for me. There’s a pistol under the backseat.”

“What?”

“A pistol, a gun, you know? Eric thought you’d feel more comfortable with one, since we’re so much stronger than you.”

I hate guns. Having said that, I also have to admit that a firearm has saved my life in the past. “You’re not going in by yourself, armed or unarmed,” I said. I hesitated, because I was afraid. “Give it to me,” I said. We were parked at the very back of the lot, right by the kudzu. I hoped it wouldn’t take Pam’s car while we were inside.

Pam reached under the seat and drew out a revolver. “Point and shoot,” she said, shrugging. “Eric got it for you specially. He says it is called a Ruger LCP. It fires six shots, and there’s one in the chamber.”

It was about as big as a cell phone. Good God Almighty. “What if I need to reload?”

“If you have to shoot that much, we are dead.”

I got that feeling that had become familiar since I’d started hanging with vampires; the feeling that says, How the hell did I get into this? If you examined the process step by step, you could see how it had happened; but when you looked at where you’d ended up, you just had to shake your head. I was walking into a very dubious situation, and Eric thought I needed a gun. “Hey, at least we’ll match the décor,” I said at last.

Pam looked blank.

“Blondes,” I said helpfully. “Us.”

She almost smiled.

We got out of the car. I tucked the gun in the small of my back, and Pam checked to make sure it was covered by my fitted black jacket. I never looked as put-together as Pam, but since we’d been going to a show and then out, I’d worn my good black pants and a blue and black knit top with long sleeves. The jacket didn’t look ridiculous, since the temperature had fallen into the forties. Pam pulled on her white trench coat and belted it tightly around her waist, and then off she went.

I trotted along behind her, second-guessing myself every step of the way. Pam knocked once on the employee entrance. After a pause, the door opened, and I saw that the male holding it was a vampire. Not Michael, though, if I was any judge at all. This male had only been a vampire for a few years. He had a Mohawk, colored green and gelled to a high crest on his otherwise bald head. I tried to imagine going through the centuries like that, and I thought I might throw up.

“We’re here to see Michael,” Pam said, her voice especially cool and regal. “We’re expected.”

“You the ladies from Shreveport?”

“We are.”

“There’s a lot going on here tonight,” he said. “You going to try out after you talk to Michael? I’m in charge of the tryouts.” He was proud of that. “Just come right to this door when you’re ready.” He pointed at a door to the right that had a hand-lettered sheet of typing paper taped to it. Straggly letters spelled DANCERS IN HERE.

We didn’t say anything to that, and he cast a glance back at us that I couldn’t read.

“Let me see if the boss is ready,” Mohawk said.

When he’d knocked and been admitted through a door on the left, Pam said, “I can’t believe they let someone so deficient answer the door. In fact, I can’t believe anyone bothered to turn him. I think he’s slow.”

Mohawk popped back out of the door as quickly as he’d popped in.

“He’s ready for you,” he said, which I found an ominous way to put it.

Pam and I followed his sweeping gesture, which led into an unexpectedly luxurious office. Michael believed in treating himself well. The room was carpeted in dark blue and topped with a lovely Persian-style rug in cream, blue, and red. The furniture was dark and polished. The contrast with the bare corridor was almost painful.

Michael himself was a short, broad blond with a distinct Slavic look. Russian, maybe. A dull throb underlay all the polish of his office, and I realized the throb, which I’d been aware of since I entered the building, was the sound of the music playing in the club. The bass was turned up all the way. It was impossible to tell what the song was, not that the lyrics were the point.

“Ladies, be seated, please,” Michael said. He gestured toward the two very impressive guest chairs in front of his desk. He had a heavy accent and a bad suit. He was smoking. It smelled just as bad when a vampire did it. Of course, he wouldn’t suffer any consequences. An open bottle of Royalty Blended was on the desk by the ashtray. “This is my associate, Rudy,” Michael told us.

Rudy was standing behind Michael. He was the human I’d come to read. He was slim and black-haired, with an extensively scarred face. He looked as if he was eighteen, but I figured he was at least ten years older than that. He gave off a very strange mental signature. Maybe he wasn’t completely human. Everyone I know has a brain pattern: Humans have one kind, weres of all sorts have another, fairies are opaque but identifiable, and vampires leave a sort of void. Rudy didn’t fall into any of those categories.

“You can leave,” Michael said to Mohawk, his voice contemptuous. “Go back to organize the tryouts. We’ll be there soon.” Mohawk backed out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him. The noise level abruptly dropped, thank God. The boss’s office was soundproofed. But the drumbeat was pulsing in my head, and I swore I could feel it through my feet even if I couldn’t hear it any longer.

“Please let me offer you a drink,” Michael said, smiling at both of us. Rudy decided to smile, too. His teeth were very sharp; in fact, they were pointed. Okay, half-human at most. I was suddenly and deeply frightened. The last time I’d seen teeth like that, they’d bitten bits out of me.

“You’ve never met anyone like Rudy?” Michael asked. He was looking directly at me.

I’m good at schooling my face. Telepaths learn that lesson early in life, or they don’t survive, is my guess. How had he known?

“I sense your pulse speeding up,” Michael said charmingly, and I knew I didn’t like him at all. “Rudy is a rarity, aren’t you, my darling one?”

Rudy smiled again. It was just as bad the second time.

“Half human and half what?” Pam said. “Elf, I suppose. The teeth are a giveaway.”

“I’ve seen teeth like that before,” I said, “on fairies who’d filed them to look that way.”

“Mine are natural,” said Rudy. His voice was surprisingly deep and smooth. “What can I get you to drink?”

“Some blood, please,” Pam said. She loosened her coat and leaned back in the chair.

“Nothing for me, thank you.” I didn’t want to drink anything Rudy had touched. I hoped the human-elf hybrid would leave the room to get Pam’s drink, but instead he turned and bent down to a little refrigerator to extricate a bottle of Royalty Blended, a premium drink that mixed synthetic blood with a large dash of the real blood of certified royalty. He popped the top off the bottle and put it in a microwave sitting atop a low filing cabinet. There were odds and ends on top of the microwave: a bottle opener, a corkscrew, a few straws in paper wrappers, a small paring knife, a folded towel. Quite the home away from home.

“So, you come from Eric? How is the North man?” Michael asked. “We were together in St. Petersburg at one time.”

“Eric is flourishing under our new ruler. He wishes you well. He’s heard good things about your club,” Pam said, which was outrageous flattery and almost certainly untrue. Unless there was a lot below the surface, this was a sleazy little club catering to sleazy little people.

The microwave dinged. Rudy, who’d been fiddling with the items on top of the microwave, took the drink out, putting one of his thumbs over the open top of the bottle so he could shake it gently. Not the most hygienic way of doing the job, but since vampires almost never get ill, that wouldn’t make any difference to Pam. He came around the desk to hand the bottle to her, and she accepted it with a nod of her head.

Michael picked up his own bottle and raised it. “To our mutual venture,” he said, and they both drank.

“Are you truly interested in having a further discussion with our new masters?” she asked. She took another sip, a longer one.

“I am considering it,” Michael said slowly, his accent even heavier. “I am tired of Russell, though we share a liking of men.” Russell liked men as fish like water. I’d been in his mansion, and it was full of guys who ranked from cute to cuter. “However, unlike Russell, I also like women, and women like me.” Michael gave us an unmistakable leer.

This woman didn’t like him. I glanced at Pam, who also enjoyed sex with either gender, to see her reaction. To my dismay, her cheeks were red—really red. I was so used to her milky pallor I found the effect shocking.

She looked down at the bottle in her hand. “This was poisoned,” she said slowly, almost slurring her words. “What did you put in it, elf?”

Rudy’s smile became even more disagreeable. He held his hand up so we could see the cut in his thumb. He’d put his own blood into the Royalty Blended. The human blood had disguised the taste.

“Pam, what’s this going to do to you?” I asked, as if the men weren’t there.

“Elf blood isn’t intoxicating like fairy blood, but . . . it’s like taking a huge tranquilizer or having lots of alcohol.” Her speech was even slower.

“Why have you done this?” I asked Michael. “Don’t you know what will happen to you?”

“I know how much Eric will pay me to get you two back,” Michael said. He was leaning forward over the desk, his expression one of sheer greed. “And while he’s getting the ransom together, Rudy will be drawing up a paper about your mission in coming here, which you and the vampire will sign. That way, when we return you to Eric, he can’t retaliate. If anything happens to us, Russell will have the ammunition to start a war. Your new masters will be quick to dispose of Eric if he causes a war.”

Michael was as deep a thinker as he was charming. That was to say, not at all. “Do you have something personal against Eric, or are you always this double-dealing?” Keep ’em talking while Pam got in a little recovery time.

“Oh, always,” he said, and he and Rudy laughed. They were certainly two peas in the same pod; they were relishing my anxiety and Pam’s intoxication.

“Stand up, Pam,” I said, and she laboriously worked her way to her feet.

Rudy laughed again. My insides were burning with a huge brushfire of hate.

My friend’s face was mottled, her movements sluggish, and her eyes were frightened. I had never seen Pam scared of anything. She was a revered fighter, even among the vampires, who were known for savagery and ruthlessness. “Let’s try walking it off.”

“That won’t help you,” Rudy said with a sneer. He was lounging against the wall. “She won’t be feeling herself again for a couple of hours. In the meantime, we’ll have fun with you first, Michael and me. Then we’ll have her.”

“Pam, look at me,” I said sharply, trying not to picture their idea of fun. She did look. “You have to help me,” I said intently, trying to get a message into her addled brain. “These men are going to hurt us.” Her eyes finally focused on mine, and she nodded slowly. I moved my head slightly to the right, pointed a thumb at my own chest. Then I inclined my head oh-so-slightly toward Michael, pointing the same thumb at her.

“I understand,” Pam said clearly, but only with great effort.

Michael was still seated, but Rudy had pulled away from the wall at the moment I drew the gun. They smelled it as I was drawing (and they might have sooner if Michael hadn’t been smoking) and reacted with the quickness of their races. I fired into Rudy’s face as he grabbed for me, and Pam threw herself across the desk to grip Michael’s ears. He clawed at her arms and slammed her down onto the desk. Ordinarily she would have tossed him over her shoulder or something equally spectacular. But in her drugged state, she could only hold on to what she had. He was hitting her repeatedly, too angry to pry her hands away when he could be doing damage to her body. She’d have to loosen her grip, eventually.

While Rudy gurgled and grabbed at the hole in his face under his left cheekbone, I said, “Pull, Pam!” and she obeyed.

She pulled Michael’s ears off.

When he flinched back, his mouth open with the pain, she lunged again and stuck her thumbs in his eyes. Instead of throwing up, I shot Rudy again, this time in the chest.

Michael wasn’t dead, of course, but he was rocking in silent agony. While he was distracted, Pam pulled out his tongue. I averted my eyes as quickly as I could and swallowed down the bile that rose in my throat. This was Pam on a bad night.

I checked on my target. Rudy was down, though he wouldn’t stay that way. If elves were as tough as fairies, he’d be up within a half hour. I grabbed the towel from the top of the microwave and wiped off the gun, then tossed it on the desk. I don’t really know why—I just had to get rid of it.

“We have to get out of here,” I said to Pam, and she dropped the bloody ears. Slowly and deliberately, she wiped her hands on the chair cushion. The ears lying on the desk looked like discarded Play-Doh shells with red paint sprinkled on them. I wondered briefly if Michael could stick the ears back on, if the eyes and tongue would regenerate.

Whoops! Rudy was already up on his elbows, trying to drag himself toward us. I kicked him under the chin as hard as I possibly could, and he collapsed. Pam had started to waver, but I put my arm around her again and she steadied.

“I took care of him,” Pam said, enunciating with care. She smiled at me. Speckles of blood had landed on her pink silk blouse, so I told her to button her coat up again. I tied it shut. “That was fun,” she said guilelessly.

“I’m glad you had a good time,” I muttered, “since I planned all this for your benefit.” We stepped out of the office in the corridor and let the door shut behind us. If we could just make it to the car . . . Mohawk was staring at us from his place on the stool by the back door.

Then that door opened, and two cops walked in.

And we’d been doing so well.

The pulsing noise of the stripper music and the office soundproofing had drowned out the shots. I knew this, because no employees had come to check on the gunfire. So no one had summoned these guys; therefore, they must be friends of the management, since they’d entered through the rear.

I was trying to think, and think fast, and my brain was a little too crowded (what with shooting an elf, seeing a guy lose his facial features, and whatnot). One thing I was clear about was wanting to stay out of jail. These cops might not even be within their own jurisdiction, but we had to avoid coming to their attention.

After giving Mohawk a casual wave, they’d stopped to talk to a short, curvy stripper in a platinum wig, which meant they were blocking the rear exit. If we reversed direction and tried to walk out through the front, we’d attract even more attention, I figured.

“Whoops,” said Pam cheerfully. “What now, my perky friend?”

“You girls ready to try out?” Mohawk called, and the cops glanced at us before resuming their conversation. Mohawk pointed to the DANCERS IN HERE sign.

I said, “We sure are, sugar! We go in there to put on our costumes?”

He nodded, and his Mohawk swayed. Pam giggled. I’d never heard Pam giggle like that. “Course, most girls don’t even bother with a costume,” Mohawk said, grinning.

“I think you’ll find we’re not most girls,” I said, arch as all hell.

He was interested. “How’re you two different?”

“We’re always together,” I said. “Get what I mean?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said. His eyes darted from the clearly sloshed Pam to me. “So, go change. It’s audience night. They vote after you take your turn. You could end up on permanent staff.”

Oh . . . yay. I knew there were speckles of blood on Pam. Vampires could always smell blood. As we passed him in the narrow hall, I didn’t dare to meet Mohawk’s eyes.

I steered my drunken vampire friend into the designated room. It was a huge nothing. There were about twenty folding chairs set around at random, and about six of those were occupied by women waiting their turn. The others had already had their stage time and left, I assumed. No screen to change behind, no makeup table, no hangers—no clothes hooks, even. There was a full-length mirror propped against the wall, and that was it. The glamour just overwhelmed me.

The aspiring strippers were all blondes: At least, they’d achieved blonde-dom by some means. They glanced at us and looked away. One face looked vaguely familiar.

I helped Pam to a chair. She sat heavily. Her complexion was still hectic, but at least the red patches were fading and she looked more like a regular vampire and less like cherry vanilla ice cream. Speaking of red dots, I hastily spat on a tissue and dabbed at the specks of blood on Pam’s blouse. I’d been very fortunate; a quick glance into the full-length mirror confirmed that I was unbloodied. “All right, genius, what do we do now?” I asked myself, aloud.

Pam said, “I’ll, I’ll . . . appeal to her. She has two extra costumes.” She nodded toward the woman I sort of recognized.

Pam was oddly sure about what the wannabe dancer—who I realized was a vamp—had in her huge tote bag.

“Pam, you did great in there,” I whispered.

“So did you. You’re so cute,” she said. “No wonder Eric likes you.”

I glanced out into the hall. The cops were still there, still having a lively conversation with the curvaceous stripper. Crap.

Pam rose cautiously and went over to the vamp, who was sitting by herself, looking bored. She had the requisite blond hair (so did the only African American applicant, by the way) and enormous boobs, and she was a few decades old, I figured. She was thin, with the sulky expression of someone who’s used to being spoiled. She wore a yellow bikini top with a tiny pleated gray and yellow skirt, a take on the “naughty schoolgirl” image. Where had I seen her before?

As soon as Pam acknowledged her, the vamp straightened in her chair, inclined her head, and dropped the sulkiness. When Pam murmured in her ear, she began rummaging around in the big bag. She handed Pam a handful of material and two pairs of shoes. I was amazed until I realized that she could have carried twenty costumes in there, if the size of the one she was wearing was any gauge.

Pam cocked her head at me, and I hurried to help.

“What you got?” I asked. She dropped the garments into my hands. She’d snagged a glittery gold spandex bandeau to go around the chest and a matching—well, it was flattering it to call it a thong. There was a pair of translucent heels to wear with it. Then there was a sort of sky blue leotard with black trim: a former leotard, since most of it had been snipped away. A little swath of blue for boob coverage, descending in a tiny strip to the bottom part, which was like an abbreviated bikini. Black heels and thigh-high black hose completed the look.

Pam sat down on a chair, hard. She giggled again. “Get ready, buttercup! I’ll take the gold; you take the blue. It’ll look great with your tan.” She shrugged off her coat, and when the speckled blouse came into view, she read the alarm on my face correctly. She turned her back to the room to unbutton it, then turned it inside out and tossed it on the floor, close to the vamp. To my amazement, the vamp waited for a moment, then in one quick movement picked up the blouse and stuffed it into her huge bag.

Pam was out of her clothes and into the costume as if it were her daily routine.

I turned my back on the room, though no one seemed in the least bit interested in my goodies. In the course of wriggling into the thing, I found out the descending strip Velcroed to the bottom of the costume. Convenient.

I looked at us together. “Wow,” I said. “Pam, we look great.”

“We do,” Pam agreed, with no attempt at modesty. We gave each other a high five. “I’m coming down,” Pam said. “Really, I’m feeling almost like myself.”

Mohawk called from the door. “Okay, the doubles act!”

I had no idea how we were going to get out of this, so we started toward the door. Even drugged, Pam managed walking in her platform shoes without a wobble in her step, but I had to concentrate ferociously to master the spike heels.

“What’s the names?” Mohawk asked.

“Sugar and Butterscotch,” I said, and Pam turned her head to give me a look that clearly said she thought I was an idiot.

“Cause she’s white and you’re brown,” Mohawk said. “Cute.”

I hadn’t spent all that time tanning for nothing.

“Okay, you’re on,” Mohawk said, opening the door at the end of the corridor to reveal a short flight of steps leading up into darkness. The noise surged out at us. A Latina blonde stomped down the steps, topless, followed by the sound of whistles and catcalls. She looked sweaty and bored.

The cops were still in the hall.

“Shepherd of Judea,” I muttered, and Pam and I looked at each other and shrugged.

“New skills,” she said. “Eric told me you are quite the dancer. You just have to try doing it naked.”

So we went up the steps, teetering in our high, high heels, to begin our careers as strippers. Suddenly we were on the stage, which was simply wood painted black, punctuated with three stripper poles.

The emcee was a brunette guy with a big white smile. He was saying, “Remember, gentlemen! The applause each girl gets is measured with our applause-o-meter, and out of all our dancers tonight, the three girls getting the most audience response will be hired to appear right here at Blonde!”

So we were supplying the audience with free entertainment in the faint hope that we might get a job out of it. Michael was an even bigger asshole than I’d thought, which was saying something.

“Here, straight from their record-breaking engagement in Vegas, I give you Sugar and Butterscotch!” the emcee said, with considerable drama. I figured he took drugs.

I put on my biggest and emptiest smile, and managed to make it to the front of the stage without falling down, thanks to Pam’s sudden grip on my hand. Together, we looked out at the men hidden in the darkness, catching a glint of beard here, shine reflecting off a belt buckle there. The hoots and whistles were deafening.

We hadn’t specified a song, of course. Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” came blaring over the sound system, and that was all right with me. “Move it,” yelled a rough voice.

We had to dance. NOW. And then we had to get the hell out of here before Michael and Rudy recovered enough to come after us.

I half turned to look at Pam flirtatiously, and she stared blankly back at me until she got my drift. “The pole,” I muttered, and she gave the audience a saucy smile and wound herself around the nearest pole. The cheering started. I felt the lust begin to dominate the men’s minds as I hugged Pam from behind. Pam got with the program, and we swung around the pole together as if we’d been glued. I caught a glimpse of Pam’s face. She was licking her lips in a lascivious way.

“You go, Pam!” I said.

“They want a show, we’ll give them a show,” she said. She bent me over her knee and pretended to spank me in perfect time to the music. In fact, Pam got a little carried away. But the guys loved it; oh boy, did they. I got spanked, licked in the ear, had Pam’s hands running over my barely covered chest, and more stuff I just won’t mention. We both ended up doing things the stripper pole had probably endured many times.

You know, it was kind of fun after I got the hang of it.

I wouldn’t go close enough to the side of the stage to get grabbed. And since I already felt naked, I wouldn’t take off my top. Since that was something the audience clearly expected us to do, it was lucky that at that moment the police pulled the plug on the music and switched on the house lights.

They weren’t the cops who’d been in the hall. “All right, everyone!” called a tall detective in a blue Windbreaker. “There’s been a murder here, and we need to talk with all of you.”

“Murder,” I said to Pam. “Murder?”

As our eyes met, I could see she was just as bewildered as I was. And I have to say here: With the lights up, we could see our audience, and they looked even worse than I’d expected.

OFFICER Washington, neat and shiny in his brown uniform, tried to look anywhere but at my chest. He’d been on the force long enough to have a kind of worn-out face, but he hadn’t become so world-weary as to be able to completely ignore the abundance of Pam and me that was on display. I learned that the idea of being with a white woman didn’t do a thing for Officer Washington, which helped him do his job.

“You ladies talked to the manager of this club earlier, I understand?” he asked. He had a pad and pencil out. By now we knew that the victims were Michael and Rudy.

“Yes, we had an appointment,” I said.

“What for? None of the other strippers had to talk to the manager.”

“We used to work at another vamp-owned club,” I said, improvising. I could give Fangtasia’s phone number. “We hoped if we told him that, we’d get the job. He said he’d take it into account.”

Pam and I shrugged, at very nearly the same moment. Pam seemed to be a little high even now, but there was more control in her movements and she was keeping her mouth resolutely shut. She was still holding my hand, though.

We’d waited our turn in the bigger room where we’d left our clothes. We’d been allowed to change, thank goodness. Pam was still wearing her gold bandeau top. In sympathy, I’d only pulled on my slacks.

Our friend the stripper vamp had passed by the door on her way out. She was escorted by a cop. She glanced our way, her face composed and indifferent. I finally remembered where I’d seen her: working at Harrah’s, carrying drinks, when we’d checked in. Huh. She had a sizable purse hanging from her shoulder; I wondered where the big bag was? Pam’s bloodstained blouse was in it . . .

As the other strippers had been questioned, they’d been released. We were the last ones to be brought to this room, which I figured had been Rudy’s office. Officer Washington had been waiting for us there.

“What else happened while you were in there? They want you two to give them a free sample?” Washington was young enough to look faintly self-conscious.

“They seemed more interested in each other,” I said carefully.

The policeman glanced at our linked hands and didn’t comment. “So they were both alive and well when you left the room?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “In fact, they wanted us to hustle out of there because they were about to talk to someone else, had a guy coming in from out of town, they said.”

“That right? Did they say anything else about this man? Vampire or human?”

“No,” Pam said, opening her mouth for the first time. “They were just anxious for us to leave so they could get ready.”

“Get ready? How?”

We shrugged simultaneously. “They wouldn’t hardly tell us,” I said.

“Okay, okay.” Officer Washington snapped his notepad shut and stowed away his pencil. “Ladies, good night to you. You can go pick up your personal items.”

But we didn’t have any. Pam only had the car keys in her pants pocket and her white trench coat. We had nothing we could have brought costumes in. Would Officer Washington or Windbreaker Guy wonder about that?

Now that the big room was empty, it looked even more depressing. Only a litter of tissues and cigarette butts showed that the women had been here at all. That, and the big bag the vamp stripper had carried, sitting on the chair that was draped with Pam’s white coat and my jacket. Windbreaker Guy was staring at the bag. Without hesitation, Pam strode across the floor in those incredible shoes and scooped it up by the shoulder strap.

“Come on, Butterscotch,” she told me, “We need to hit the road.” Her voice had no trace of the faint English accent I was used to.

And just like that, we left Blonde, doing our stripper walks all the way out to Pam’s car.

Mohawk was leaning against the driver’s door.

He smiled at us as we approached. His smile was not dim or goofy or naïve.

“Thanks for giving me the opening, ladies,” he said, and there was nothing slow in his speech, either. “I’ve been waiting a year to have them down long enough for me to finish them off.”

If Pam was as shocked as I was, she didn’t show it. “You’re welcome,” she said. “I take it you’re not going to tell the police anything about us?”

“What’s to tell?” He looked up at the night sky. “Two strippers wanted to tell the boss and his buddy something before they tried out. I’m sure you explained that. When you went on stage, that asshole Michael and his buddy Rudy were alive and kicking. I made sure the cops knew that. I’m betting you also told them something about Michael mentioning he was expecting someone else or expecting trouble.”

Pam nodded.

“And stupid, slow me, I was cleaning the toilet, like my boss Michael had told me to do. No one was more surprised than me when I went in the office later and found Rudy dead and Michael flaking away.” Mohawk rolled his eyes theatrically. “I must have just missed the killer.” He grinned. “By the way, I threw the gun in the ravine back there, right down into the kudzu, before I called the local law. The skinny blond vamp did the same thing with your blouse—Sugar.”

“Right,” Pam said.

“So off you go, ladies! Have a nice night!”

After a moment of silence, we got in the car. Mohawk watched us as we drove away.

“How long do you think he’ll last?” I asked Pam.

“Russell has a reputation for acuity. If Mohawk is a good club manager, he’ll get away with killing Michael, for a while. If he doesn’t earn money, Russell will make sure he doesn’t last. And Russell won’t forget that Mohawk is patient and wily, and willing to wait for someone else to do the dirty work.”

We drove for a few minutes. I was anxious to get back to my room and wash away the atmosphere of the Blonde.

“What did you promise the vamp that helped us?” I asked.

“A job at Fangtasia. I had a conversation with Sara—that’s her name—after you went to bed last night. She hates her job in Tunica. And she used to be a stripper, which gave me the idea of planting her here in case we needed some help. Besides extra costumes, she brought a number of handy items in her bag.”

I didn’t inquire as to their nature. “And she did all that for us.”

“She did all that because she wants a better job. She doesn’t seem to have much . . . planning ability.”

“In the end, the trip was for nothing. It was a trap.”

“It was a bad trap,” Pam said briskly. “But it’s true that because of Victor’s greed, we were almost in serious trouble.” She glanced over at me. “Eric and I never thought Victor was exactly sincere about his motives in sending us here.”

“You think he was trying to hamstring Eric by getting rid of both you and me? That he knew Michael really wasn’t going to defect?”

“I think we’re going to keep a very sharp eye on our new master’s deputy.”

We rode in silence for a couple of minutes.

“You think Sara would mind if we kept the costumes?” I asked, now that Eric was on my mind.

“Oh,” said Pam, “I’m planning on it. Without some souvenirs, it’s not a real vacation.”

Sarah Smith’s YA ghost thriller, The Other Side of Dark, will be published in November 2010 by Atheneum. She has written the modern stand-alone Chasing Shakespeares, about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and three historical mysteries: The Vanished Child, The Knowledge of Water, and A Citizen of the Country. Two of her books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. They have been published in twelve languages and have reached bestseller status in the United States and abroad. She is working on a novel about the Titanic and another YA thriller, A Boy on Every Corner.

for Yuki Miuma

TIME could lie lightly on Mr. Green. He could choose to be young, his face smooth, his hair black. He could catch an explosion in a force-field container. But under the weight of loneliness he is just another old man.

His friends have gone. Robin grew up, came out, moved to San Francisco, he’s in politics now. The Bat retreated into “scientific experiments.” The last time Green saw him, the Cave smelled and the Bat looked like Howard Hughes: long fingernails, dirty beard. Iguana’s dead. Atom, dead. Thunderbolt, dead.

And Lana. His girl, his only girl. He remembers every moment they spent together, but the good times are fading. They’re places he’s gone to in his mind so often he can’t see them anymore. The bad times don’t fade at all, the sonsabitches. Toward the last, when she could barely speak, he visited her in the hospital, changed his face and hair back to what he’d been, changed into the costume, the whole thing, the mask, the green cloak. “I remember you,” she whispered. But she really didn’t know him.

Sometimes it isn’t worth getting up in the morning.

“I need your help,” says the red-haired girl.

Her knocking wakes him. He squints out the door of his cabin into early-morning sunlight, sees a face that reminds him of girls in old comics. The sultry Chinese villainess. But the sultry Chinese villainess would wear a red silk dress cut up the side and she’d have black hair. This one has hennaed hair, cut spiky, and is wearing a parka from L.L. Bean.

The Thompson brothers’ rental SUV from town is parked by the fence. Whatever she wants from him, she drove forty miles on logging roads in the snow to get here.

Which means she’s trouble.

“Whatever it is, I don’t do it anymore.”

“Hi, I’m from Worldwide Travel? I left you voice mail?”

He doesn’t check his voice mail.

“I have a job for you. From some special fans.”

Special has only one meaning for him now. “I don’t do hospitals.” Never hospitals.

“Not that kind of special.”

“Or comic book conventions. Or”—he curves quotes with a finger—“ ‘media conferences.’ And I don’t talk with people who use the word special. Or supernatural powers or superhero. Town’s back there, you can get going.”

“You take people fishing,” she says. “They just want to go fishing.”

It’s been his cover for the past forty years: ice fishing. Up here, northern Maine, the lakes region. He doesn’t do summers, never joined the Ice Fishing Association, doesn’t have a Web site. People hire him, they don’t, it’s all the same to him.

Back when Lana was alive, he pissed clients off regularly, so none of the fishermen kept coming long enough to notice that Lana got old and he stayed young. Now he pisses folks off out of habit.

“They want to go fishing with you.”

He stands in the doorway, keeping her outside.

“They’re Talents,” she says.

“No, they aren’t. Those days are gone.”

“They are real Talents.”

“What do they do?” he jeers.

“They don’t know.”

This tugs at him. He knows about that kind of talent. Strength and special powers don’t cure AIDS or end a war, and they don’t keep a woman from dying. What does a Talent do, these years?

“I heard the story,” she says. “I heard about you and the other superheroes going fishing, once.”

For a moment he visits a worn old place in his perfect memory. He’s among old friends, laughing friends. Let’s go fishing like superheroes, boys. And they did, for the only fish worth having.

“Yeah? So?”

“They’ve heard, too,” she says.

“We were showing off.”

“Talents were heroes once,” she says. “Talents knew what to do with their powers.”

Super cleanliness isn’t one of his talents. He points back into the cabin at the pile of gear in the corner. “Auger,” he says. “Ice adze. Ice saw. That thing in the box, portable cabin. The ice gets thick. Fisherman bores holes in the ice. Cuts a bigger hole. Shines a flashlight through the hole. Waits for a fish to come investigate. Ice fishing. Boringest thing known to man unless you fall through the ice. ’S what I do now. That’s what I know to do with myself. They want to go ice fishing? I’ll take ’em ice fishing.”

She crosses her arms, purses her lips a little, disappointed.

“No,” he says. “They want pow, bang, thump. Big fights with big fish. Superhero fishing. There’s no fishing like that anymore.”

“Let’s just say they want pointers,” she says. “They’re looking for advice.”

“I don’t give advice.”

“What’s your rate?” she asks.

“For Talents? There’s a special rate.”

She nods. “They have money.”

“Not money,” he says. He knows what he wants. It’s what Atom got, the Captain. What Lana got.

“I want somebody to kill me.”

The little cabin gets airless. She opens her mouth to protest. Shakes her head. Closes her mouth.

“All right,” she says. “It’s a deal.”

He pads over to the stove, leaving her at the door. Pours cold coffee, scratches his bristly chin with his white china diner mug. (What does the last superhero drink his coffee out of? A diner mug. They really are unbreakable.)

“Yeah?” he says.

“I promise you. You will die.”

“Who’ll do it?”

“Me,” she says.

He figures he has a foot of height on her, a hundred pounds, a thousand years.

“You and who else?”

“Me.”

“How?”

She shakes her head. “No proof until it happens.”

He figures he’s being scammed.

Life is a scam.

Remembers his manners belatedly.

“You want coffee?”

“Do you have tea?”

“Nope.”

She looks around. The back ends of her hennaed hair waterfall to her shoulders. Green eyes, strange for Chinese, a green that reminds him of the color of the cloak gathering dust in his closet. He becomes suddenly conscious of dirty laundry on the sofa back and a winter’s worth of mud on the floor. He moves molecules, sorting for dirt, inching it toward a corner. He wonders where he put the laundry basket.

Special powers. Hah.

Daniel Stashower is a two-time Edgar® Award winner whose most recent nonfiction books are The Beautiful Cigar Girl and (as coeditor) Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Dan is also the author of five mystery novels and has received the Agatha and Anthony awards. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories and The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their two sons.

IN those days LifeSpan Books had offices in a three-story garden atrium building in Alexandria, Virginia. The building is still there. Across the street—in the middle of the street, actually—is a Civil War statue called Appomattox, marking the spot where seven hundred young soldiers marched off to join the Confederate cause in 1861. The statue shows a Confederate soldier with his hat off, head bowed and arms folded, facing the battlefields to the south where his comrades fell. Originally there was a perimeter of ornamental fencing and gas lamps, but over the years, as South Washington Street grew into a major artery, the fence came down and traffic in both directions simply jogged outward a bit to avoid the base of the statue. Every so often somebody clipped a fender, but the soldier stood his ground.

One night a van plowed into the base of the statue and knocked the soldier facedown into the street, opening the door to a vigorous public debate about whether a busy intersection was really the proper place for a symbol of the Confederacy. The city fathers ultimately fell back on a musty piece of legislation that the Virginia House of Delegates had passed in 1890. It stated, in part, that the monument “shall remain in its present position as a perpetual and lasting testimonial to the courage, fidelity and patriotism of the heroes in whose memory it was erected . . . the permission so given by the said City Council of Alexandria for its erection shall not be repealed, revoked, altered, modified, or changed by any future Council or other municipal power or authority.” So the statue went back up. Motorists beware.

I know all this because Thaddeus Palgrave told me. He was a senior editor for LifeSpan Books, and he made a point of knowing such things. Actually, Palgrave didn’t tell me directly, he just let it bubble out of him when I happened to be in the room. He had a way of leaning up against the tall window of his office, with his head resting against his forearm, giving impromptu disquisitions on matters of art, commerce, and history. He would usually wrap things up with a pithy moral, sometimes in Latin. Aquila non captat muscas. The eagle doesn’t capture flies. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

It never seemed to matter to Palgrave whether anyone was in the room with him when he made these learned remarks. At first it struck me as a sort of foppish affectation, like an ascot or an ivory-tipped swagger stick, meant to suggest a man of rare breeding set down among the heathens. I imagined him practicing at home, leaning against a bedroom wall, sighing deeply as he tossed off Latin epigrams. But in time I came to realize that he genuinely didn’t care what anyone thought of him—didn’t even consider it, in fact. There were a lot of people like that at LifeSpan Books.

You may not remember LifeSpan. They were the people who produced “multi-volume continuity reference works” on various subjects—low-fat cooking, home repair, World War II—and sent them to you in the mail, once every two months. You’d sign up for a series on, say, gardening, and soon the books would begin to arrive, filling you with optimism and resolve. They’d start you off with Perennials, followed two months later by Flowering Houseplants, then Vegetables and Fruits. You’d dip in here and there—do a little aerating, maybe visit a garden center—and congratulate yourself on making such a good start. Perhaps next year, you’d tell yourself, you might even be able to grow your own carrots and tomatoes. And the books would keep coming and coming. Annuals. Ferns. Lawns and Ground Cover. You never realized there would be quite so many. Still, some of them look quite interesting. Maybe a little more detail than you bargained for, but it’s good. Really, it’s good. And besides, you’ll be able to get back out to the garden after the Little League season ends. Bulbs. Herbs. Evergreens. It begins to dawn on you, at the start of the third year, that perhaps you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. For one thing, you’re running out of shelf space. You start stacking the books up on the worktable in the garage. You’ll sort it out in the spring. Shade Gardens. Orchids. Vines. One night around ten thirty, during tax season, you try phoning the toll-free number where operators are standing by, in an effort to take them up on the offer of “cancel anytime if not completely satisfied.” Your resolve crumbles as you spend forty-five minutes on hold listening to “Gospel Bluegrass Classics,” available now from LifeSpan Music. Pruning and Grafting. Shrubs. Wildflowers. The last of your children goes off to college. There will be time now for some serious gardening; you might even make a start on a pergola, if only your back weren’t giving you so much trouble. Roses. Miniatures and Bonsai. Rock and Water Gardens. Over the winter holidays a sudden snowstorm drives your grandchildren indoors. They use the stored cartons of books to build a fort. Cacti and Succulents. Winter Gardens. Heat-Zone Gardens. It is a beautiful day in late September and your eldest son is walking a real estate agent through the house. “Yes,” he says, “it was very sudden, in the garden. He would have wanted it that way.” As they’re signing the papers, they hear the soft thump of a package at the door: Organics.

A. Lee Martinez has published six novels, most of which involve either monsters or armchair metaphysics. Usually both. He has a reputation as a “humorous fantasy” writer that he’s not always comfortable with, but as long as the checks keep coming, he’ll keep cashing them. If you see him on the street, please, don’t call him zany. His first name is Alex, but he sometimes goes by Lee (presumably) to confuse and beguile his many enemies.

THE box held horrors beyond imagining, papers inscribed with hopeless-ness and pain. All men faced it on a daily basis, praying to whatever gods might be, cruel and indifferent to the suffering of mortals, that it would not be the end that they found when they reached into its darkened interior. That ever-present box, haunting every house, every apartment, every place where civilized men dwelt, reminding all that they were not masters of their fate, that no matter how much a man might want to deny it, the universe demanded its pound of flesh and would never be satisfied, would never stop sucking the life from a man, would feed on misery and sweat and blood until a man’s death. Sometimes, even beyond that.

Philip, like all civilized men, had learned to live with the box. Even become somewhat expectant of its demands. Lately, though, he’d realized just how much it had enslaved him. How he trudged to it every morning and bowed before it like a puppet without a will of his own. But even knowing that didn’t free him from its tyranny.

So this morning, like always, he walked to the box, that maddening box, and reached into its shadowy depths and withdrew its unholy commandments.

“Shit,” he groaned. “Bills.”

He slammed the mailbox shut ruefully. He thought about getting an ax and chopping the damned thing down. But you couldn’t kill the thing. The box wasn’t the beast, not even the head of the beast. It was just a tentacle, reaching out from the great unknown, from that horrible place where credit card bills, junk mail, and despair were spawned.

A chill wind swept up from the ocean below. The clouds parted to allow a glimpse of sunshine. But it was only a glimpse before the sky became that endless broiling gray.

Philip ran inside. Vance was making breakfast. The smell of eggs and bacon was the first encouraging moment of the day.

“It’s the last of the eggs,” said Vance, ruining the moment. “Anything good in the mail?”

Philip grunted, unable to articulate in words what Vance already knew. It was easier for Vance, though. He’d just come along with Philip on this venture, but it was Philip who’d thought of it.

Why the hell did he think anyone would want to visit a bed-and-breakfast in this chilly cultural wasteland? There were areas in New England, plenty of them, with quaintness to spare, with color-changing leaves and folksy folks full of folksy homespun wisdom accompanied by folksy accents.

And then there was Clam Bay. Cold even when sunny, gloomy even during the four weeks of “summer,” trees without leaves all year long, and full of weird people. And not in the quirky way. No, these were just weird. Quiet, not unfriendly, but wary of strangers. And anyone whose family hadn’t lived in the town for at least five generations was a stranger. It didn’t help any that Philip’s great-great-grandfather had been one of Clam Bay’s citizens. And that the house Philip had inherited had been a literal ruin until he’d invested thousands of dollars into fixing it up in hopes of attracting tourists. He was still an outsider.

It was kind of hard to hide. Not just because everyone in Clam Bay had a tendency to wear gray, shuffle slowly as if dragging themselves reluctantly across the land, and speak in a slow, halting, decidedly non-quaint, nonfolksy way. They also looked alike. It was a small gene pool in this town, and it hadn’t really worked out that well for any of the citizens of Clam Bay.

Also, the clamming was lousy in Clam Bay.

Philip and Vance ate breakfast in near silence. There was no need to remark on their growing pile of bills and the lack of tourists. Without looking at the budget, Philip estimated they had another four months before the all-consuming debt . . . well . . . consumed them.

The bell attached to the front door jingled. Philip and Vance jumped up and ran to greet the visitor. Their hopes were dashed by the sight of the Clam Bay constable.

“Hello,” said Philip halfheartedly.

The constable nodded and tipped his gray hat. “Mornin’, fellas. I’m afraid we have us a slight little problem here.”

Philip tried to place the accent. It wasn’t New Englandish. Not quite. Clam Bay had its own special dialect. It really was a world of itself. Too bad it wasn’t in the charming Old World way, but the creepy, skin-crawling fashion. But for all their creepiness, the folks of Clam Bay hadn’t done anything to Philip or Vance.

And now there was a problem.

The constable led them outside and pointed to a hanging sign posted by the road. “Want to tell me about this?”

Vance said, “I found it in the attic. Thought it looked Old World. Kind of cool.”

The icy wind made the sign swing. The constable steadied it. “We’d like you to take it down, if you could.”

“Why?”

The constable made a snorting noise and spat up a wad of green phlegm. “We just would rather if you did.”

“Excuse me,” said Vance, “but this isn’t a police state, is it? We can have anything we want on our house, can’t we?”

The constable frowned. It wasn’t easy to detect, because the citizens of Clam Bay had mouths bent downward naturally. “Ehyah. It’s just, well, we don’t like to think about it. About the old town name, huh.” He worked his jaw as if testing to see if it still functioned properly.

“You can barely read it,” said Vance.

“It’s a memory,” said the Constable. “A bad memory that we would rather forget.”

He gazed out toward the ocean with a strange combination of yearning and dread. Nobody swam in Clam Bay’s waters. They were too cold. But sometimes, Philip would catch a citizen or two standing on the beach. Always with that same unsettling expression.

“We’ll take it down,” said Philip. “No problem.”

The constable nodded. “Ehyah.” He rubbed his face. “Ehyah.” He shuffled away, never taking his eyes off the sea.

“Why’d you agree to that?” asked Vance. “It’s a free country.”

“Oh, stop it,” said Philip. “Who really cares? We gotta live here, right? At least for another few months.”

“It’s censorship. It’s bullshit.”

“Yeah, yeah. You can fight the good fight when we go back to New York.”

Grumbling, Vance wrestled with the sign, stubbornly trying to uproot it with his bare hands.

Jeff Abbott was once involved in a taxicab race with Charlaine Harris in North Carolina (he did not win). He is the internationally bestselling author of twelve suspense novels, including Trust Me, Panic, Fear, and Collision. He is published in more than twenty languages. He is a three-time Edgar® Award nominee, a two-time Anthony Award nominee, a Thriller Award and Barry Award nominee, and a past winner of the Agatha and Macavity awards. He lives in Austin with his family. You can read more about Jeff and his work at www.jeffabbott.com.

IF Jason Kirk was still alive on the tiny island of Sint Pieter, that happy news would boost Nora Dare’s ratings to a level that made media presidents tremble, rewrote the rules of news coverage, and produced new business case studies at journalism school.

Nora Dare sat at her Constant News Channel (CNC) desk, lacquered talons skimming the notes on the most recent police report. Her camera-men readied themselves in the gleaming studio, the sound checks ringing in her ears. She put her carefully mascaraed gaze on the computer screen buried in her desk, scanning for any breaking updates. The interview had to be played carefully—to make the story last longer, without seeming exploitative of a missing young man’s tragedy. But, Nora knew, no one walked that line better than she did.

Of course during those treasured moments when she interviewed Jason’s family—which was roughly every other night on her cable-news show, Dare to Fight Back—she pleaded for Jason’s safe return, and she meant every word. Because if the young man turned up safe and sound, well, then, that was ratings gold. Not gold: better, platinum. Maybe even uranium. For three months, college student Jason Kirk’s disappearance while on vacation with his family had made for a deliciously high market share.

Stories as long-legged as Jason Kirk’s did not happen every day. It had all the elements Nora considered key to a ratings grabber: a highly attractive, sympathetic victim with an easy-to-remember name; a photogenic mourning family stunned by tragedy’s random sideswipe; an exotic locale; incompetent local police; a mysterious, exotic woman who had last been seen with the missing young man.

The theories had come up, and Nora had dissected them with the care of a coroner. Jason had been kidnapped (an early favorite and still the feeling of the Kirk family); Jason had been sold into slavery (popular for two weeks); Jason had been murdered by the mysterious woman, robbed, his body dumped into the ocean (more likely); Jason had drowned, drunk, in a swim off a Sint Pieter beach and the woman had simply fled the scene (the preferred theory of the local police); or Jason had committed suicide (Nora quickly slaughtered that theory; it would savage her ratings).

But now, everything had changed, and the story had fresh life. A witness from a small town on the far north tip of the island claimed that a young man fitting Jason’s description had been spotted near her house. The eyewitness was a young woman who could have been a little more photogenic (didn’t they, Nora wondered, have dentists in Sint Pieter?) but was earnest and heartfelt in her sureness that she’d seen Jason.

The makeup director tended to Nora’s eyebrows with the gentlest of touches while Nora’s director, Molly, slipped an update onto Nora’s interview pages.

“Um, Nora, I’m not really comfortable with your headline theme tonight.”

“ ‘Hope or Hoax’ is perfectly accurate.” Nora didn’t flinch as a stray hair was plucked away from her near-immaculate brow. It was a point of honor for Nora that she never flinched. She made other people flinch. It had been a rocky road on the climb to ratings glory and the multimilliondollar book deals. There’d been that suspect in one case who’d killed himself after Nora grilled him (could his guilt then be clearer? Nora had saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial, in her mind), and the other one where the man she’d proclaimed guilty for five months for killing his wife had, well, been found innocent via DNA evidence. Nora still had her doubts, as did any right-minded viewer. “ ‘Hope or Hoax’ is what tonight is about,” she said with an air of irritation.

Molly raised an eyebrow. “I see your point, but I think it’s a bit cruel to the Kirks to call this hope.”

“If it’s hope,” Nora explained with a smile of infinite patience, “then the viewers have a reason to tune in tomorrow. If it’s hoax, then they get to see me rip this little lying bitch to shreds.”

“It just seems a bit . . .”

“What?”

Nora thought for a minute Molly’s mouth was forming the fatal word tasteless, but Molly crossed her arms. “Opportunistic. We’re walking a very fine line here, Nora.”

“The only opportunistic person here might be this witness, this”—she glanced at her notes—“hotel worker, Annie Van Dorn. She could just be an attention seeker, a publicity hound. You know how I despise those loathsome people.”

“I know, feeding on tragedy. The vultures.”

Nora thought she detected sarcasm lurking in the vicinity of Molly’s tone but decided Molly wasn’t that stupid. “The intro stands.”

“All right, Nora.” Molly turned and walked back to the director’s seat in the control room.

Nora watched her go. She’d have to keep an eye on Molly. That girl was an unappealing mix of judgmental and ambitious. Most unbecoming. Opportunistic? No one was a greater friend or advocate to the Kirk family than Nora was. And poor lost Jason. She was truly his only friend, the person doing the most to keep his face in front of millions each day. She waved away the makeup artist.

They went live thirty minutes later, and Nora, after her standard setup on the missing Jason’s history, cut straight to the satellite interview with the young woman who’d supposedly (Nora wove this knotty word into every sentence; it was her second favorite, after allegedly) seen Jason on the far side of the island.

Annie Van Dorn’s skin was a caramel color; her voice lightly accented, her English excellent. Slightly crooked teeth, but otherwise a nice face. She’d put on what Nora surmised was her Sunday best for the interview: a neat white blouse, three years out of fashion. Annie stood in front of a gnarled, wind-bent divi-divi tree in her yard that, to Nora, evoked an air of mystery and danger and Caribbean intrigue. The tree looked like a hand, reaching to clutch the young woman.

“Annie, tell our viewers about yourself,” Nora said. Her voice was bright, open, and friendly.

“I work at a hotel on Sint Pieter, in housekeeping.” Annie had a quiet, mild voice. A servant’s voice, Nora thought.

“But not the hotel from which Jason vanished?”

“No, ma’am, another one.” Annie wisely did not try to work the hotel’s name into her answer. Nora frowned on free advertising.

“And what exactly do you claim you saw last night?”

“Well.” Annie swallowed. “It was close to midnight, and I was at home in Marysville, on the other side of the island from where young Mr. Kirk vanished. I was getting ready for bed—and I thought I heard a noise in the yard. I live with my sister, but she was asleep already. I went to the window, and I saw, in the moonlight, a young man standing in the yard. Close to this tree.”

“Describe him to me.” And at these words, a picture of Jason appeared on the split screen: blondish, handsome enough to be a model, six three, with a wide grin and broad shoulders, dressed in a T-shirt and baggy shorts. Smiling the smile of a man who has his entire and likely quite-happy life before him, and is savoring a particular moment of fun.

“I couldn’t see him well in the shadows. I thought maybe it was an old boyfriend of mine, at first. He was sticking close to the trees, not drawing closer, not really stepping out into the moonlight.” The camera panned across Annie’s yard: The viewers could see a dense growth of the divi-divi trees, dark and close; a neighbor’s fenced yard; a clothesline with athletic jerseys, jeans, and a checkered tablecloth snapping in the twilight air. Rustic, Nora thought, yet ever so mildly forbidding.

“Do your old boyfriends often stop by late at night?”

“Only one. Who might need money now and then and doesn’t understand I won’t loan him any,” Annie said with a little more spine in her tone, and Nora nodded. Her viewers would like Annie for her moral stance.

Annie continued: “So I went outside and called out ‘Who’s there?’ then the moonlight broke from the clouds, and I saw it wasn’t my old boyfriend. This man was tall, he was white, with blond hair, wearing a dark shirt, baseball cap, and muddy jeans. I thought he was a prowler then, and I stepped back toward my house.”

“Were you afraid?” Nora pounced.

“Not exactly. When I could see him, I just felt this . . . sadness. I can’t describe it; it was strange. He looked lost, like he needed help. Like he was confused. I wanted to comfort him. It’s like I could sense his need—like when you see a lost child.”

Nora’s voice sharpened into a needle. “And then what happened?”

“Well, my neighbor’s dog got roused; it started barking really loud, and the neighbor’s porch lights switched on, and the man just sort of vanished into the divi-divi trees.”

“He ran off?”

“I guess. I didn’t hear him. He stepped back into the shadows and then he was gone. I ran to where he had stood and there was no sign of him.” Annie swallowed.

“And you’re sure this was Jason Kirk?”

“At first, ma’am, I wasn’t. Then when I saw his face in the moonlight, clear as day—I knew it was him. He’s been all over the TV here, and the newspapers. I am sure it was him.”

Nora took a moment to let that grab her viewers by the collective throat. “And how did he—this man you thought was Jason—look to you?” Nora said, leaning forward.

“Heartbroken. Pale, like he was ill. Lost, I thought. Strange that he seemed lost when a whole island is looking for him.”

“Did you see anyone else with him?”

“No, ma’am, but it was very dark, cloudy; the moonlight kept coming and going.”

Nora let the words sink in. “Annie”—and here she knew it was important at this single moment to be kind and understanding—“are you sure about what you saw? Because you can understand”—dramatic pause, Nora gave her most sympathetic head tilt (patent pending)—“how very cruel it would be to give Jason’s family false hope.”

“Yes, ma’am, I do understand. It was him. I’m as sure of it as I can be.”

“Have you talked to any tabloids or other papers about what you saw?”

“No. I wouldn’t. I’m not selling a story, Ms. Dare. I only wanted to help . . .” Annie bit her lip. “I called the police, and I called your people, because you’ve been the one talking about him every night on the TV.”

Nora allowed herself a satisfied smile. Her efforts, as always, were for the public good. “But you see how hard it is to believe that if Jason was in trouble, and you were willing to help, that he ran away simply because the neighbor’s dog started barking.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“And how did the Sint Pieter police respond?”

“They did come out to the house. But I don’t think they believed me, at least not at first.”

“Thank you, Annie.” Nora switched to act two now: Inspector Abraham Peert. He was the third head of the Kirk investigation in three months; Nora’s reports had made it clear that his predecessors either were incompetent or actively wished the Kirk family—and by implication all tourists—ill. Peert had a lean, angular face that looked like he was always biting hard into a lemon. This would be only his second appearance on the show. He’d been her guest right after his assignment to the case but had refused Nora’s demands (requests was entirely too soft a word) for further interviews.

Nora gave Peert a quick introduction and said, “Is it possible that this young woman’s story is true?”

“I suppose that it is, but we can find no supporting evidence.” He kept his tone carefully neutral.

Oh, Nora thought, I shall enjoy this. He’s done nothing to follow this lead. Get me my cross and nails, boys, it’s hammering time.

“Is it possible that Jason Kirk is alive? Perhaps ill, perhaps wandering in the wilderness on the north side of Sint Pieter?” Nora said.

“Again, we can only postulate,” Inspector Peert said. “Ill and wandering freely for three months seems most unlikely. Surely there would have been other reports of him; our search crews would have found him if he were rambling insensate. If he is alive and roaming the hills, then that suggests that he does not want to be found.”

Nora had to decide whether to play that comment as a hurtful blow to the Kirk family or as an exciting, intriguing new twist in the story’s worn fabric. She tilted her head again—she was known for the beauty and forcefulness of the head tilt—and decided the audience was hungry for a bit of the inspector’s flesh. “Why would Jason Kirk be in hiding? Nothing in this boy’s past suggests a desire to be away from his family. They are an absolutely wonderful, upstanding family, Inspector.” She said this with a convincing thunder, as if Peert held the opposite view.

“No one knows what goes on in the human heart,” Peert said quietly. “But I will say that I believe Annie Van Dorn believes she is telling the truth. We administered a lie detector test; she passed it.”

That was a news bomb. Nora was speechless for a minute; Molly should have known that tidbit and warned her about it.

Peert pressed on: “If she saw him, then Jason Kirk is not in trouble; he is hiding from us.”

It was not fair. It was not what Nora was expecting. It was not a dodge. And if Jason Kirk was simply hiding out on the island—well, then, he was simply a spoiled brat who’d driven his parents nearly mad with grief. And made Nora look like a fool in front of millions.

This could not be. All of this emotional calculus played out in Nora’s mind in less than five seconds. “If he is hiding, then why?”

“I do not know. We cannot know his reasons. If he has been kidnapped, there is no reason for his abductors to wait three months and not ask for a ransom.”

Nora went back on the attack. “How soon will you expand the search in that area?”

Now she heard the steel in Peert’s voice—even through the distance of the satellite hookup—and it infuriated her. “What choice do we have? You have turned American opinion against our entire nation. We have searched for this young man as if he were one of our own. We have followed every slim lead, and we have allowed your federal agents to comb our sovereign territory. We have endured your abuse and your innuendo as to our competence”—here Nora tightened her lips and straightened her papers, which was Nora’s signal to Molly to cut to commercial now—“and in short, we have done everything possible. You cannot hurt us more, Ms. Dare, but if we do not pursue a lead, we will have to live with ourselves. So every lead will be pursued.”

“I would hope so, and I think it’s a shame that you have not already expanded the search.”

Peert made his tone as sharp as hers. “We did search the area around Miss Van Dorn’s house; there was no sign of an intruder. None. No footprints, no broken grass, nothing.” Now his voice was rising. “So. She believes what she saw, but we can find no evidence.”

Nora thought Peert didn’t know his place; he was ruining the story’s next phase of life. “Or you simply can’t find what might be right in front of your eyes. What police academy did you attend again, sir?” One useful weapon in her arsenal was to make people justify themselves. It never failed.

“What journalism school did you attend, madame?”

Nora blinked, and for a moment the head tilt wavered. She’d never experienced anyone successfully biting back. Her lips narrowed into a slash. “I attended law school, which makes me uniquely qualified to report on cases regarding justice.” The cameras were still live; that idiot Molly hadn’t cut off Peert. “I will hold you to that promise to expand the search, Inspector. Let’s go to Jason’s parents . . .”

In her earpiece she heard Molly hiss: “They backed out. They’re too upset. They want you to quit hammering Peert.”

“I’m told we’ve got satellite difficulties in Los Angeles, where the Kirks live, so we’ll wrap it up for this evening.” And then she ended the Jason Kirk segments as she always did: “Jason, I will never stop searching for the truth, and I hope we can bring you home, safe and sound.” And she held her noble, dignified stance—she was justice without the blindfold—letting the viewers drink her in as they cut to her theme song and logo.

Christopher Golden is the author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, Of Saints and Shadows, and (with Tim Lebbon) The Map of Moments. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including Poison Ink, Soulless, and the thriller series Body of Evidence. He cowrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire with Mike Mignola. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.

TIM Graham woke slowly, the sounds of raucous sex drawing him up into the waking world. He frowned sleepily and looked around in the darkness of his hotel room, as though he expected to find the perpetrators of the disturbance screwing acrobatically on one of the floral-patterned chairs near the balcony slider. He liked to keep a room as dark as possible for sleeping—something he’d picked up from Jenny—so the heavy curtains were drawn and the only light came from the ghostly glow of numbers on the alarm clock. If someone had been screwing in his room, he would barely have been able to see them.

But the sounds, he quickly realized, came from the room next door. The bed in there must have been head to head with his own, for he heard the lovers far too well, their grunts and moans and exhortations, the slap of flesh on flesh, the rhythmic tap of the headboard against the wall. Most hotel chains had long since learned to attach the headboards to the wall so they wouldn’t knock against it when guests got busy, but apparently that bit of logic had been overlooked here.

At first, Tim smiled. Half asleep, he felt a mixture of envy and arousal.

“Yes, like that!” the woman sighed, repeating it several times, making it her mantra. Then she started to plead, almost whining, urging him on.

After several minutes of this, Tim’s erection brought him fully awake. He closed his eyes and put a pillow over his head, trying to force himself back to sleep, but he could not drown out the sounds. His pulse quickened. He wondered how long they could go on. Unless the guy was young—or old and using Viagra to regain his youth—it shouldn’t take that long.

He had heard people having sex in hotel rooms before. More than once, he and Jenny had been the people making too much noise. One time an angry old woman had banged on the wall and shouted at them to keep it down, and they had laughed and made love even more vocally. Tim had never banged on the wall himself. He didn’t like the idea of interrupting, and he had always felt a little thrill at overhearing.

So he listened, his erection painfully in need of attention. Jenny had been gone for just over a year. He was tempted to masturbate, but the image of a sad little pervert jerking off on the other side of the wall disturbed him, so instead he got up and went to the bathroom. With the light on, the bathroom fan drowned out most of the noise from next door. He splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror at the dark circles under his eyes. He had to wait for his erection to subside before he could aim for the toilet, but at last he managed to piss, then washed his hands and returned to bed.

The fucking continued.

“Christ,” he muttered.

He wanted sleep more than cheap thrills. The voyeur inside him seemed to have given up and gone to sleep, because though his cock stirred and rose once more, it only achieved half mast, apparently tempered by his growing irritation.

He laid his head back on the pillow and stared up at the darkness of the ceiling. Had they heard him go to the bathroom? The sound of the fan and the flush of the toilet? If so, it had not troubled them at all. If anything, the lovers had gotten louder. The man started to call her filthy names, making her his slut, his whore, his bitch, and she rose to what she seemed to consider a challenge, agreeing with him at every turn. If he’d ever tried that with Jenny, he would never have had sex again, but for these two it seemed a huge turn-on.

Long minutes passed. Tim’s throat was dry, his breath coming a little quicker as his erection returned, more painful than ever. He could not help but start to imagine the scene taking place next door, picturing positions and stiletto heels. In his mind the guy was a blur, but the woman had a body sculpted by desire, with round, heavy, real breasts and hip bones perfect for gripping.

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, not daring to look at the clock, though he felt sure he had been awake at least half an hour by now, and had no idea how long they had been going at it before they had woken him.

And still they went on.

Tim lay on his side, listening closely. There was no alternative except leaving the room or hiding in the bathroom, and so he surrendered to eavesdropping, trying to pick out each word. Mostly it was repetition, dirty talk, and baby-oh-baby-come-on from him and give-it-to-me from her. The classics, he thought, chuckling tiredly. Unoriginal but much beloved the world over.

And then a break in the rhythm, a pause.

“Can I?” the man asked.

The answer, when it came, sounded clear and intimate and close, as if she had whispered the words into Tim’s ear.

“You can put it anywhere you want.”

Jesus, he thought, breath catching in his throat. It really had sounded like she was there in bed next to him. He listened as the sounds started up again, but soon the man lapsed into silence broken only by wordless grunts. His lover continued to urge him on—demanding, pleading for him not to stop.

Then the man let out an almost sorrowful groan and the woman cried out in triumphant pleasure and, at last, the thumping of the headboard subsided.

Tim’s heart was still thudding in his chest and his face felt flushed, but he figured if he just lay there in bed, he would calm down enough to go back to sleep. He closed his eyes and took a breath.

And she spoke again, there on the other side of the wall.

“Thank you, baby,” she said, and he heard it as though she were whispering it right into his ear. “That was exactly what I needed.”

The hunger and the pleasure in her voice did him in. He threw back the sheets and went back into the bathroom, where it took only seconds for him to get himself off.

Afterward he lay in bed, ashamed and frustrated and missing Jenny so hard he felt ripped open inside.

Eventually, he slept.

Lilith Saintcrow is the author of the Dante Valentine, Jill Kismet, and Strange Angels series. She lives in Vancouver, Washington, with her two children and assorted other strays.

MOST gargoyles go to Paris. It’s ridiculous. When you spend all your time hanging on the sides of buildings, why go to a place where you just do more of the same? Even if the Heart is there beating under the streets. Even if it is, for pretty much any stoneskin, home.

No, I didn’t want to spend two weeks of vacation hanging on to the side of a building. I was gonna go to Bermuda. Had my plane tickets and everything. I was even packing. Suntan lotion, BluBlocker sunglasses, flip-flops. It was an adventure buying the flip-flops at EvilMart. I was thinking about how in my trueform I only had three toes, and flip-flops are built wrong for that kind of foot. Then I figured I wasn’t going to be fighting any evil on the beach, so it didn’t matter that there aren’t three-toe flip-flops out there. It’s too bad there aren’t. Someone could make a killing.

I guess I shouldn’t say things like that, should I?

I got to the front of the EvilMart, wincing at the bright fluorescent light, and for once the Heart was kind to me. She was there.

Blond. The kind of blond that looks dishwater under tubes of buzzing EvilMart light but lights up in island sunlight. Blue eyes, usually tired and bloodshot, and an aristocratic nose under them. She’s got a pretty mouth, too, though it’s always pulled tight with something like pain. I think if she ever relaxed, she’d be a knockout.

Who am I kidding? Even in a blue polyester EvilMart vest that does nothing for her va-va-vooms, she’s a knockout. I like ’em juicy. Give me a girl with real hips any day, not a stick with mosquito bites.

As if I’ve ever gotten close enough to smell a girl. But I can still look, right?

I’m not dead. Just gargoyle.

Her nametag says Kate. And there are always dark circles under her eyes.

She was just reaching up to turn off the light over her register when I shambled up. It was about two A.M., quitting time. She hesitated, one hand in the air, and I wished I were shorter. Or at least less broad in the shoulders. We stoneskin are built like linebackers—wide and stupid. The sloppy brown hair, hat pulled down to hide my ears, stubble to hide my gnarled skin, and the smell of concrete and rain on me probably isn’t very pretty either.

A tendril of that blond hair was falling in her face, and I stopped dead, planting my cheap canvas shoes. My heart made a funny jumping noise inside my ribs, knocking at the cathedral arches.

Then she smiled. It was her usual pained smile, the mouth pulled tight, but her eyes lit up and my heart not only banged on the old ribs, but splashed in my guts. My skin felt too tingling-small, and I had to take a deep breath, reminding myself that my real form wasn’t something anyone here would want to see.

“Come on up,” she said, and flipped her light off. “I’m just about to go, but I can fit in one more.”

“Oh. I . . . Gee. Thanks.” Yeah, I actually said gee. Her smile widened a bit, and I had to make my feet move. They were tingling, too, just like the rest of me.

I stumped up to her checkout stand and started unloading the carrying basket. Two beach towels, both printed in big block colors. Two pairs of orange flip-flops, size fourteen wide. White socks—you can’t ever have too many socks. Two family-size bags of CornNuts. Sunblock. A two-liter of Coke. A pair of ragg-wool gloves. And three jumbo tins of Bag Balm.

Hey, when your skin rasps against rock and concrete all the time, it gets cracked and stuff. Bag Balm is the best.

Her hands sorted the items without any real effort on her part, the checkstand beeping and booping. Her nails were bitten down, and she wore a thin gold necklace. It looked cheap but it smelled real—I’ve got a nose for metal. The small gold ball earrings she wore were real, too. And this close her skin was dewy even under the glare.

I bulged shapelessly, like a balloon without quite enough air. I’ve got a boxer’s face, including pointed cauliflower ears—not that boxers have pointed ears, you know. I’ve got a mushroom nose that looks like it’s been broken one too many times, and the scarred, pitted skin of any gargoyle past puberty. My eyes are too small, and they’re yellow. And my hair is okay—thick and dark—but I must be the only curly-headed stoneskin on the continent.

I’m even ugly to my own Heartkin.

“You must like CornNuts.” A quick flutter of a glance from under her long blond-brown lashes. Her hands kept working, bagging everything. “I see you getting them all the time.”

She was talking to me.

My brain went absolutely fucking blank. “Um,” I managed. “Yeah. Like ’em a lot.”

Her smile widened a bit. The tips of her two front teeth showed, very white. “I could never eat them. They make my teeth hurt.”

It’s real fun when you spit ’em at pigeons. Knock ’em right on their little heads; you can feed yourself that way for a while if you’re awful poor. You can even spit a CornNut right through them if you get it going fast enough. “You can just suck on ’em until they’re soft,” I mumbled, and blushed when her eyebrows went up a little. Her smile hovered between genuine and embarrassed for a half second, and a round of cursing went off inside my head.

“Maybe I’ll give that a try,” she finally said. Uncomfortable silence bloomed between us.

She took the cash, her skin brushing mine. “Is it still raining out there?”

So soft and warm. They don’t feel hard and cold like us. No, they’re soft and pink and perfect. Especially her. “Pouring.” It was raining as if it wanted to drown the city, in fact.

“Well, you’ve got towels.” She grinned, but I only caught the very beginning of her smile because I had to look down in a hurry or I might’ve grinned back, and a crooked yellow picket fence of teeth is not something she’d want to see. “All right, there you go. You always have exact change. It’s nice.”

Because I have to. Any gargoyle does; it’s a compulsion. Once a gargoyle gets a hoard, we like counting exact change. Each penny is taken from muggers or other Bad People. But that’s no reason to waste it, and the count makes us irrationally happy.

Plus, you have to pay in cash when you don’t have a real name or a social security number.

My pulse was pounding so hard. Was I going to have an attack right here? Heart, I hoped not. I muttered something and took my bag, almost tripped in my hurry to get out. I left her standing there in the glare, and it wasn’t until I got outside that I realized I wasn’t having a cardiac arrest or a reaction. I was just stupid.

I loitered outside under the awning for a little while, breathing deep lungfuls of wet, smog-laden air. The cars all hunched their shoulders and turned their backs to the storm, wet metal and rubber moving only under protest. I hung around near the end of the covered section, waiting to see if the rain would slacken. It probably wouldn’t until I was halfway home no matter how long I waited, that’s just my luck.

Besides, about ten minutes after, Kate came out through the sighing automatic doors. She walked straight out into the rain, her thin denim jacket completely inadequate for the weather, and I saw that one of her sneaker soles was flapping a little at the heel.

The sight of the heel rubber sticking to the wet ground, then flopping as she lifted her foot, made something inside my chest hurt. I guess they didn’t pay her enough to buy a new pair, even at EvilMart prices. She hunched her shoulders and hurried.

Who was I kidding? I followed her, drifting behind and staying on a parallel course as if I were looking for my own car. I’d done it every night I’d come in for the past month. She had a rusted-down blue Chevy Caprice, and I usually made sure she got in and it started before I faded into the shadows.

Hey, it’s a dangerous world. If there’s not the Big Bad out stalking, there’s other bad waiting right around the corner. Sometimes it’s Evil with a capital E. Other times it’s grim luck, predators, accident, or just plain human foulness.

I swung my bag a little as I walked, kept her in my peripheral vision. She parked way the hell out in the farthest regions of the lot—I guess EvilMart doesn’t want the employees snuggling up to the store.

Kate walked with her head down, her steps slowing as she got out near her car. She looked nervous, and I wasn’t sure but I thought she was shaking. It was certainly cold enough. Even I was a bit chilled, and stoneskin don’t feel it the way the soft pink ones do. She jangled her keys slightly, sweet music.

The lights were out here in the corner of the lot. That was the first wrong thing. The next was the thickness in the rainy air, like rancid soup. Last was the shadows crowding around, and the red pinprick lamps of eyes blinking on and off.

What the hell? I dropped my plastic bags and my trueform shredded out through the mask of disguise. There went another cheap pair of canvas shoes—my real feet tore out through them, claws spreading lightly on concrete. My legs burned a little as I crouched, gathering myself. The darkness reached down from the sky to touch the ground in a thick, wet curtain.

The Big Bad likes to take its victims in the dark. So Heartkin have infrared and other ways of seeing. She was like a lamp, heat and life shining along my skin, and for a moment it was so bright I was confused but already committed to my leap.

The thing after her was a kolthulu. I hit in the middle of the nest of rubbery, snakelike tentacles. They’re lined with dry hairy suckers that can strip flesh off bone, but that’s no match for gargoyle skin. They give reluctantly under claws, so just brute force is needed to tear the things apart. There was Kate screaming, but I wasn’t worried about that just yet because it was a terror sound, not a pain sound. And who wouldn’t be terrified in the dark with the sounds of ripping and crunching all around?

The kind of light she was giving off didn’t cast shadows, so it was a type of blindness all over me. My coat flapped; I dug my hind claws into concrete that gave like butter and pulled. The heartstring of the beast ripped out with a sound of gristle tearing from bone, and the screaming didn’t diminish as the tentacles lost their will and life, and became just twitching meat.

There were other sounds, too. Soft sliding sounds, and her voice choked off hard.

Where there’s kolthulu, there’s always bloodsuckers, too. I whirled, the battlefield drenched with directionless illumination that didn’t come in through the regular visual spectrum. The Heart in me gave a single loud knock against my meat and bone, thrilling up into hypersonic, and I tore through their hard, thin bodies. They were clustered around her, and the not-light of her dimmed and faltered.

Holy shit. It was only then I realized what was happening.

They were clustering her, and a soft sucking sound echoed against wet pavement and the dark curtain holding the world away. The not-light dimmed even further, infrared taking up the slack in a deep crimson haze. Six of them, one of me, bad odds when I could smell coppery blood.

But bad odds aren’t something that worries a gargoyle. The Heart always wins, that’s what we say. Even if I fell here, others of my kin would get these things. I’d go into the Heart and come back stronger and better.

Or so they said. I didn’t want to put it to the test.

Metal crunched as I flung one of them. A car alarm went off, the sound knifing through the other din that I ignored because it wasn’t the screaming. The screaming had stopped, and that was a bad sign. A snap of greenstick neck-breaking, and the three remaining bloodsuckers fled, one of them limping badly and hissing in their weird piping tongue. They can’t talk right when their teeth are out, the little idiots.

The darkness fled with them, the Big Bad picking up its toys and going home. I stood, half snarling, stone flexing over my skin and the strength of the Heart thudding underneath it. Regular sight returned, and I looked down.

Kate lay sprawled on the wet concrete, rain beading on her pale skin. One of them had ripped her shirt open, and there were her breasts in a cheap black-lace bra.

Hey, I looked. I might be ugly, but I’m not dead.

“Oh, shit,” I said. My ears tingled, and I stared at her chest. There on the pale slope of her left breast, a sinuous fleur-de-lis curved. The lines were sharp black, as if they’d been inked by a master. But it wasn’t a tattoo. It ran with its own odd light, a dark fluorescence human eyes wouldn’t see.

She was a Heart candidate.

And I heard running feet and shouts behind me, as black-looking blood mixed with rain and threaded down from the puncture wounds in her throat. She was bleeding. She was a candidate, and she’d been bitten with a gargoyle right next to her, and there were people coming.

It was a moment’s work to scoop her up and cradle her close. Her purse fell free, its patent-leather strap broken, and her jacket was in shreds. The sole of her sneaker had been almost torn off. Her sharp chin tipped back, the blood on her skin doing funny things to the inside of my head.

“Jesus!” someone yelled, and I compressed myself like a spring, ready to leap. Situation: One parking lot, people beginning to cluster now that the excitement was over and the cloaking darkness was worn away. One gargoyle, shifted fully into stoneskin and hulking inside his raincoat, his hat knocked off and his hair unraveling away from high-pointed ears. One mortal woman, bleeding from a vampire bite. Her car was a shattered hulk of metal and glass, and just before I sprang I heard sirens in the distance.

Wow, someone actually called the cops this once? Figures.

The world turned underneath me. There was a scream as I vaulted over the heads of the gathering crowd, a sound of effort like grinding boulders escaping me, muscles and bone working overtime. I bounded like a springheel jack, Kate’s unconscious head bouncing against my shoulder, and all I could think of was that she might get a concussion if she hit her head on me too hard.

I’ve never claimed to be the smartest gargoyle in the world. But just that once, maybe I did the right thing.

On the other hand, she was bitten. And things were about to get even more interesting.

Chris Grabenstein did improvisational comedy in New York City with Bruce Willis before James Patterson hired him to write advertising copy. He is the Anthony and Agatha award-winning author of the John Ceepak/ Jersey Shore mysteries, Tilt-A-Whirl, Mad Mouse, Whack-A-Mole, Hell Hole, Mind Scrambler, and Rolling Thunder; the thrillers Slay Ride and Hell for the Holidays; and the middle-grades chillers The Crossroads and The Hanging Hill. His dog Fred has even better credits: Fred starred on Broadway in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. With five brothers, most of his summer vacations growing up were pretty scary, but the only paranormal creatures Chris encountered were the mermaids at Webb’s City Drug Store in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the whole family went every August to visit his grandparents. The humidity was pretty monstrous, too. You can visit Chris (and Fred) on the Web at www.chrisgrabenstein.com.

I don’t know why I’m lying here dreaming about 1975 and the demon in the dunes.

It’s summer. Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Saturday. August sixteenth. 1975. The night I first saw the demon lurking in the shadows at the dark edge of the sand.

Kevin Corman and I are running down a moonlit street away from the Royal Flamingo Motel and our families.

“You score?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah.” I held up two warm beer cans. “Schlitz.”

“Your old man won’t notice?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered—nervously as I recall. I wasn’t a big rule breaker when I was a teenager. I usually stayed quiet. Stayed out of trouble.

“Far out,” said Kevin, taking my two Schlitz cans and stuffing them up underneath the flapping coat of his leisure suit. He was dressed to score that night. Dressed like John Travolta would dress a few years later when he had the same sort of Saturday night fever.

Kevin and I were on our annual two-week family vacations down the shore. We were neighbors back home in Verona, New Jersey, went to the same high school.

“Uhm, were you able to get any, you know, booze?” I stammered as we tried not to look too conspicuous: two teens—one nervous, the other cocky—skulking down Ocean Avenue at 9:30 at night. When we were younger and on vacation, this is the time of night when we would’ve badgered our parents into taking us up to the boulevard for swirled soft-serve ice cream cones. Now, our mothers and fathers stayed by the motel pool to play cards, smoke cigarettes, and drink highballs out of indestructible plastic cocktail glasses while we lied about heading over to Funtown Pier so we could go out drinking ourselves.

“My parents drink whiskey, Dave,” said Kevin. “Extremely hard to rip off, man. Doesn’t come in a can.”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes, my dad snags miniature bottles off airplanes. Doesn’t bring ’em on vacation, though.”

“Cool.”

“Hey, you ever even drink whiskey?”

“No. Not really.”

“Word to the wise: Beer and wine, mighty fine. Beer and whiskey? Mighty risky.”

I nodded as if I knew.

“So, where’s Jerry?” I asked.

“Said to meet him over on K Street.”

“Cool.” We had two more blocks to go. “What about, you know—the girls?”

“Relax, dude. They’re college girls. Means they’ll have their own wheels.”

“Yeah.”

“And Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“Chicks this hot? They definitely know how to find the dunes, bro. Probably been going down there to make out since we were like in junior high.”

I shuddered to think about all the things the curvy college freshmen we had met eight hours earlier might know. They were both nineteen. Kevin and I were infants: sixteen-year-olds with pimples when we ate too much pizza. Our buddy Jerry McMillan was a little older. Seventeen. He’d been “held back” a year. Always said he liked second grade so much, he took it twice.

We reached K Street.

“I did score these.” Kevin flashed me a half-empty pack of Kent cigarettes he had undoubtedly stolen out of his old man’s Windbreaker. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“You ever try one?”

“Nope.”

He shook the pack. “More taste, fine tobacco.”

I waved him off.

Kevin shrugged and lit up. He smacked down a long drag and let it out in a series of billowing smoke rings. I remember I was impressed.

“We are looo-king goooood,” Kevin said between deep tokes, doing a pretty good Chico from Chico and the Man. A lot of guys did the same imitation back in the seventies, but Kevin had the shaggy Freddy Prinze hairdo to go with it.

We waited. Kevin smoked. He looked pretty damn cool doing it, and that made me wonder if I could ever look cool enough for the night’s coming attraction: my first blind date.

The two girls we had met on the beach had a friend.

That’s why I had splashed on some of my father’s Hai Karate cologne. Found it in his Dopp kit along with some foil-wrapped condoms. My parents having sex. That was something I definitely didn’t want to think about when I was sixteen and being fixed up with a college coed who probably had sex several times a day between classes.

“Where the hell is Jerry?” Kevin said as he ground out his cigarette butt in the sand at the crackled edge of the asphalt. “College chicks this hot won’t wait forever. They’re from Philly, man!”

My heart beat faster.

We’d first met the two Philly girls when they were half naked on the beach and Jerry McMillan had had the balls to stroll over to their blanket and talk like a letter straight out of Penthouse magazine: “Is it hot out here or is it just you two?”

They should’ve laughed or groaned or even puked at Jerry’s lame pickup line. But, no. They both thought our somewhat older friend was cute. Most girls did. Jerry McMillan was lean and lanky with droopy eyes that made it look like he was half asleep at all times. He kept his shiny helmet of hair sleekly combed over his ears, its slanting divide always parked directly over an ironically arched eyebrow.

As it turned out, the girls Jerry had randomly decided to hit on were looking to get down and boogie. They eagerly volunteered their names (Donna and Kimberly) and local phone numbers. They were staying at the Bay Breeze Motel with another friend, Brenda. Three college girls in a single room. No parents. They were all probably on the pill. A lot of girls were popping birth control pills in 1975 because “makin’ love with you is all I wanna do,” at least according to Minnie Riperton’s big hit single on the radio. Everybody who was sixteen or over that summer had already lost their virginity.

Everybody except me.

“We’ve already done the Boardwalk,” sighed the girl named Donna, arching her back, stretching her double-D cups to the max. If Jerry McMillan was a Penthouse Forum letter, this Donna was the Pet of the Month without the staples.

“So,” said Jerry, “I take it you two are bored with the Boardwalk?”

Incredibly, the girls laughed at that lousy line, too!

“Yeah,” said Donna, who had Farrah Fawcett’s winged hairstyle from the pinup poster. “We want to have some real fun, you know? We are ready to feel the funk and party hearty!”

“Then, ladies, you came to the right beach,” said Kevin, who had been pumping iron on a bench in his garage all winter and spring so his chest and stomach would be ready for just this moment. I hung in the background. When you’re a timid teen, it pays to have brazen friends like Kevin and Jerry.

“So, Sunshine,” said Jerry, crouching down so the girls could gaze dreamily at his droopy eyes. “You ever heard about the dunes down south? In the state park?”

“Sure,” said the other girl, Kimberly, as she rolled over to tan her back. She was wearing a very small bikini spotted with Wonder-Bread-wrapper-colored polka dots. The bottom was actually two tiny triangles held together by white plastic rings at her hips. She reached around to unsnap the hook holding her skimpy top in place so she wouldn’t have an unsightly tan line racing across her back to add to the white doughnuts the sun-blocking circles would definitely be leaving on her flanks.

“Meet us down there,” said Kevin. “Ten P.M. We’ll bring the liquid refreshments.”

“We’ll find some driftwood, too,” added Jerry. “Rub a couple stiff sticks together and see if we can start a fire.” Every cheesy thing the guy said made these girls giggle.

I said nothing.

When I was sixteen, girls terrified me.

“Can we bring Brenda?” asked Donna, whose bikini was full of burnt-orange and harvest-gold flowers. Reminded me of the coffee percolator back in our motel kitchenette. “Brenda’s different. Likes to read books and junk.”

“No problemo. She can hang with Dave. He reads books, too. Finished the summer reading list like back in June.”

It was true. In books, I could be cool like Jerry and Kevin.

“You sure?” giggled Kimberly. “What if Brenda is like a total dog?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Kevin. “Dave will bring his leash and walk her while the rest of us get down and get funky!”

Sharan Newman is a medieval historian. That is a constant in her life. As a writer, however, she has published fantasy (the Guinevere trilogy), eleven historical mysteries (the Catherine LeVendeur series), three nonfiction books, and a number of articles and short stories in several genres, including one in the Stephen King issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. For her most recent book, The Real History of the End of the World (Berkley, 2010), she was able to use all of these genres to find how people through history have envisioned the end of time. She lives on a mountainside in Oregon.

PATRICK Anthony O’Reilly had dark curls, deep blue eyes, and a smile that could bewitch any woman from eight to eighty and beyond. He had the gift of gab, a hollow leg for porter and poteen, a fine tenor, and a cheerful readiness to join in any brawl going. Every St. Paddy’s Day he was sure to be found at Biddy McGraw’s pub, weeping in homesickness for Galway and cursing the English. In short, he was as fine an Irishman as ever came out of Cleveland.

When his friends pointed out to him that his family had come over to America in 1880, Patrick brushed the fact aside as unimportant.

“That doesn’t make me a whit less Irish,” he’d brag. “Four generations in America and not one of my family has ever married out.”

“Who else would have you?” his friend Kevin once countered. “Might have done you some good if they had. They breed runts in your clan.”

That was a low blow. Patrick hadn’t spoken to Kevin for a month after that. But what did you expect? Kevin was a typical American mongrel: Polish, Italian, and Irish. The best you could say about his family was that they were all Catholic. But it was the jab at his size that cut Pat so deeply. He was barely five foot two, with hair gel. His parents were even shorter; his mother not even five feet. Pat had had to develop a lot of charm to get himself noticed in a world of hulking football players and long-legged women.

His size and youthful looks also meant that he could never get a pint without his ID being scrutinized with a magnifying glass. And sometimes even then, nervous bartenders shooed him out.

At twenty-five he still lived with his parents and worked at the post office alongside his father, Michael, and his cousins, sorting mail from all over the world while never leaving his own neighborhood. The O’Reillys tended to stay close, enduring the teasing about their size as a unified and slightly daunting group. Over the generations, they had made the local post office their own, and it was rare that anyone over five and a half feet tall was given a job there.

Pat rebelled inwardly at this extreme clannishness, but his secret desire was not to escape to a more varied culture. What he dreamed of most, with all his heart, was to return to the old country, not the Ireland of industry and high tech, but the land it had once been. Patrick O’Reilly really lived in a world of Celtic glory, of valiant battles and ancient adventures. He saw himself as the heir to Cu Chulainn and Niall of the Silver Hand. He was the navigator for St. Brendan, sailing beyond the edge of the horizon. He was one of the Wild Geese, following his king into exile. He was Michael Collins and Charles Parnell and Eamon de Valera, fighting tyranny.

He was anyone but himself. Anywhere but the post office, watching stamps fly by from places he’d never see.

Since he paid little for his room and board, Pat had spent years squirreling away his paychecks until he had enough to finally make the trip to Ireland in style. But now that there was a tidy sum in his account, he still felt uncomfortable taking anything out, even for the trip of a lifetime. The whole family was like that, not exactly miserly, but reluctant to spend on anything but the necessaries. Pat thought he’d escaped the trait until the time came to make a withdrawal. The only thing any O’Reilly ever spent money on was shoes. Not one of them would dream of appearing in knockoffs. The finest leather and the best construction were essential. Most of the family spent more on shoes than food.

Perhaps he delayed the trip simply because he’d never gone anywhere without at least a few other O’Reillys. He’d tried to suggest to his parents that they make a family pilgrimage back to Ireland, but they always laughed and asked why he’d want to do that, when America had been so good to them all.

“We were driven out of Ireland,” his mother, Eileen, reminded him. “No one wanted us there. We were starving and forced to work for nothing.”

“That we were,” his father, Michael, nodded sagely over his briar pipe. “Here we’ve made our own Ireland, one that no one can invade. I wouldn’t go back there for all the gold in the world.”

Eileen gave him a sharp glance of warning that Pat didn’t notice.

“But you’ve never been there, either of you,” he whined. “Nor have your parents or anyone in the family. I just want to see the auld sod. I want to find my roots!”

“Don’t be a muggins!” His dad cuffed him gently. “You don’t need to look for your roots. The trees are all around you.”

Pat didn’t ask again, but he never stopped dreaming.

Toni L. P. Kelner is the author of the “Where Are They Now?” mysteries, featuring Boston-based freelance entertainment reporter Tilda Harper, and the Laura Fleming series, which won a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award. She’s also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which have been nominated for awards. Her story “Sleeping with the Plush” won the Agatha Award. This is the third anthology Kelner has coedited with Charlaine Harris, and she looks forward to many more. Kelner lives north of Boston with author/husband Stephen Kelner, two daughters, and two guinea pigs.

FROM as early as I could remember to the year I turned eighteen, my parents and I spent part of every summer at Bartholomew Lake. We always stayed in a hotel made up of lakeside cabins, which was naturally called Lakeside Cabins, and spent our days swimming in the lake, eating fried fish, and making at least one expedition to the local amusement park.

So when I decided to get out of town to get my head together before making a decision that would affect the rest of my life, it only seemed natural to head for that same lakeside hotel. My psychologist would probably have suggested that I was trying to recapture my lost girlhood, but I hadn’t seen my psychologist since the attack that nearly killed me.

While I was in the hospital recovering, a delegation had come to tell me the truth about the thing that had attacked me. After that, I stopped going to therapy. Though my guy had done a great job helping me deal with the loss of my parents, I didn’t think he’d have much insight into the loss of my humanity. In fact, he’d probably have tried to put me away if I’d told him I’d become a werewolf.

I spent most of the first part of the week at Lake Bartholomew swimming and sunning and eating ridiculous amounts of food. My days were freakishly normal, something I hadn’t felt since the attack. I didn’t mind being alone. I hadn’t been alone much since the local pack took it upon themselves to start easing me into my new life. Naturally they hadn’t wanted to risk me losing control, but since I’d gotten the hang of making the Change, I thought I was entitled to some downtime. Alone.

But by the end of the week, the pack was concerned that I was lonely. In fact, several of the packs in the area were concerned, and they wanted me to know how concerned they were. I’m sure their feelings had nothing to do with the fact that the annual Pack Gathering was to be held on the next full moon or that I’d be choosing my pack affiliation at that Gathering. Surely it was only interest in my welfare that led to the phone calls, cheery letters, and cards with cartoon wolves, plus three flower arrangements, two fruit baskets, one cookie bouquet, and a box of frozen steaks. There were countless e-mails, Facebook messages, and tweets. It was flattering at first, but since the point of the vacation was to get away from it all, the flood of attention got old fast.

It wouldn’t have surprised my former psychologist a bit when I decided to retreat further into my past, which is how I found myself at Pirate Dave’s Adventure Cove.

The amusement park was as campy as ever, starting at the gate with the ticket taker’s red-and-white striped shirt and the jaunty kerchief on his head. The entrance to the park was a giant pirate ship shaped out of concrete, with sails permanently hoisted and a Jolly Roger flying proudly above. The graffiti on the sign was new, though. Though an effort had been made to remove the spray-painted words, it was still easy to see that somebody had X’ed out the word Adventure and scrawled Haunted instead. I briefly considered texting the woman who’d presented the “Other Supernatural Species” slideshow at Werewolf Orientation to ask if ghosts were real but decided it might lead to a support group rushing to Lake Bartholomew to be there for me.

The posted park rules—no running, no bad language, no cutting in line—were the same as always. Well, nearly the same. For one, they’d added a rule about turning off cell phones during performances and, for another, instead of “Ship’s Articles,” the list was labeled “Keep to the Code.” I wondered how much the Pirates of the Caribbean movies had added to the park’s popularity.

The influence of the movies was even more obvious when I made it inside the park, where Pirate Dave himself was standing atop an ersatz crow’s nest to greet arriving guests. In my day, Pirate Dave had been a dapper Captain Hook type, with a red coat and abundant black curls. This version was an homage to Johnny Depp, complete with guyliner and scruffy braids. He even wobbled a bit as he bowed to the ladies, though that might have been because the platform was getting a bit rickety.

Still, I waved and enjoyed the appreciation in Pirate Dave’s eye when he bowed in my direction. After all the diets I’d endured and the exercise regimens I’d abandoned, it had taken being turned into a werewolf to give me the figure I’d always wanted. Though my denim shorts weren’t outrageously short and my tank top showed only a modest amount of cleavage, I knew I looked good. So it was gratifying to finally be noticed by Pirate Dave.

I’d had crushes on quite a few Pirate Daves over the years, particularly the one who’d worked the late shift when I was in my teens. Neither a clone of Captain Hook nor of Captain Jack Sparrow, the nighttime Pirate Dave had worn a snowy white shirt with tantalizingly tight breeches. His auburn hair had been just long enough to pull back into a ponytail with a leather thong, and he’d had a way of looking at me that had made my teenaged hormones rise like a stormy tide.

The current Pirate Dave just didn’t compare. In fact, as I wandered through the park, I decided that very little in the place compared with my memories. Admittedly it was larger than it had been, with several roller coasters and thrill rides added, but two of the biggest draws were closed for repairs, and most of the others could have used a fresh coat of paint. The crew members were cranky, and the place just looked grubby. No wonder the crowds were smaller than I’d expected at the height of the season.

Still, I enjoyed not having to stand in long lines for rides, and the games were a lot more fun now that I had werewolf strength and speed. Though I didn’t particularly need a plush sea monster or mermaid, I couldn’t resist the temptation to shock the stuffing out of the pirates manning the games when I repeatedly knocked the milk bottles off the table and hit the gong at the test-your-strength booth seven times in a row. When I got bored, I handed my prizes to the nearest little girls and went in search of junk food.

As the day wore on, I told myself that the only reason I was sticking around was to watch the parade at dusk, with its fanciful floats, appropriately attired musicians and dancers, and cheap plastic doubloons thrown to the crowd. It had nothing to do with a yen to see if the night shift Pirate Dave was as good-looking as the one I remembered.

In years past, the parade had paused in front of the Shiver-Me-Timbers Ice Cream Shoppe, which was about halfway through the route. That’s when Pirate Dave would announce that it was time to choose a Sea Queen to join him on his voyage. Candidates would gather in front of the float, and he would toss a bucketful of coins. Most of them would be plastic, but one was supposedly an actual doubloon, and the girl who caught it would be crowned Sea Queen and get to ride on the float with Pirate Dave for the rest of the parade. Though it was supposed to be random, the Sea Queen was invariably a toothsome wench, as Pirate Dave would proclaim, never a gawky teenager in braces like I’d been.

I also told myself that I’d only stationed myself at Shiver-Me-Timbers because it was the best place to see the parade, but I couldn’t help noticing that quite a few other women were hanging around nearby. Maybe this meant that Pirate Dave was worth waiting for.

As night fell, the parade started and I got my answer. As I’d remembered, there were elaborate floats, dancing wenches, and a pirate band. Plus they’d added a lively calypso group. I enjoyed it tremendously, despite the delay when one of the floats broke down and a new tractor had to be brought out to tow it for the rest of the route. Finally Pirate Dave arrived in command of a spectacular reproduction of his ship, the Brazen Mermaid.

I think my heart actually stopped for a second. Unlike the rest of the park, Pirate Dave was just as gorgeous as ever. Maybe more so—surely he hadn’t dared to wear breeches that tight before. When the float stopped and he announced that he was seeking a Sea Queen, I joined the throng of eager women without thinking.

I was watching his every movement, as were all the straight women in the crowd, but now I had werewolf-sharp senses, so when Pirate Dave held up the coveted golden doubloon, I could tell he was only pretending to toss it into a bucket of plastic coins, when he’d actually palmed it. I could also catch the way his eyes scanned the available women, and that tiny hesitation when he chose his target. The lucky gal—a tall, buxom blonde in a halter top—was just behind me. Knowing that, I knew exactly when he threw the doubloon toward the blonde and used my better-than-human reflexes to jump at just the right moment to snatch it before she could.

I held it triumphantly over my head, smiling when I heard the blonde mutter, “Bitch!” After all, it was truer than she knew.

As for Pirate Dave, he was shocked but hid it quickly and said, “Arr, a toothsome wench indeed. Join me, my Sea Queen!”

The crowd cheered as I made my way to the float, where a pirate flunky waited to help me up the rope ladder.

“Permission to come aboard?” I asked.

“Oh, the boardin’ will come later,” Pirate Dave said with a roguish grin, and the crowd roared.

Once I climbed the ladder, Dave put his arm around my waist and pulled me to the front of the float.

“And what be your name?” he asked.

“Joyce.”

“Queen Joyce, then.” To the crowd he proclaimed, “All hail Queen Joyce, the fairest maiden to ever sail the seven seas!” The flunkies led the crowd in a chorus of “Arr!” and the float started moving again.

As we waved to the crowd, Pirate Dave said, “That were a worthy catch you made.”

“I bet you say that to all the Sea Queens.”

He laughed and dropped into the kind of small talk he probably made with all the Sea Queens. What was my home port? Was I traveling with a crew, or was this a solo voyage? Had I ever seen a port to rival the Adventure Cove? I answered appropriately, but I was finding myself increasingly distracted. It wasn’t because Pirate Dave wasn’t even better-looking up close—he was, with charisma to burn. But there was something odd about his scent. It wasn’t a hygiene issue or overdependence on men’s cologne, though I’d halfway expected Old Spice. It was strangely exotic, with a metallic tang. Short of sniffing him openly, I couldn’t figure out any more than that.

When we reached the end of the parade, Pirate Dave helped me down from the float, then looked deeply into my eyes. “Join me for the fireworks tonight,” he said with no trace of piratical lingo.

I hesitated, put off by the near command. “Actually I’ll probably be gone by then.”

“No, stay. Come to me at the pavilion.” His voice was oddly urgent.

I tried to decide if he was pushy or just extremely intense before finally saying, “I’ll try.”

He looked as if he intended to attempt to convince me further, when a park employee ran up and gestured wildly. I took that as an opportunity to slip away.

My first instinct was to head directly for the parking lot, but then I reconsidered. How often did I get a chance to spend time with a teenage crush, or at least a new version of him? A little necking with a pirate might be just the thing to wrap up my vacation. If Pirate Dave tried to go further than I wanted to, he’d find out that I was a whole lot stronger than I looked.

I grabbed a jumbo bucket of popcorn, or “parched maize” as it was listed on the menu of the snack bar, and wandered through shops. The crowds had thinned considerably once the parade was over, which was the opposite of the way it used to be, when people would come to the park when it was too dark and cool for swimming. Another one of the big rides had just gone out, and the people who’d been on board when it shimmied to a stop weren’t shy about complaining in ways that thoroughly violated the Code.

I had a good mind to talk to management myself. The trash cans were overflowing, the tables at the restaurants were sticky with spilled soda, and if I stepped in one more wad of gum, I was going to Change into something angry. The place had always been immaculate—was it that hard to find good help?

I was scraping gum off my sandals on the curb near the Kraken, the largest of the park’s roller coasters, when I saw a shadowy figure sneaking around where it wasn’t supposed to be. The Kraken had a long track with plenty of turns and two loop-de-loops, and the whole area was landscaped so there were plenty of places to hide. Some of the lights had gone out, so it was quite dark around there and a human wouldn’t have noticed, but I could definitely see somebody.

I probably should have called for a park guard, but I hadn’t seen any security people since the parade, and it would have been foolish to make a fuss if it was just somebody retrieving a ball cap that had fallen off during the ride. Besides, I was bored and had nothing better to do. So after making sure nobody was close enough to see me, I jumped over the low fence and followed. At least I tried to, but in between stepping around a bush and dodging a power pole, I managed to lose him and found myself behind the shed that housed the ride’s high-tech workings. I looked around for the intruder but decided he’d gone and was about to leave myself when I sensed movement behind me. Before I could turn, there was a sickening pain in my head and I fell.

I woke instantly aware, the way I had since being Changed. I was lying on a thin pad of some sort, like a futon only considerably mustier, and it did little to protect me from the chill of the concrete floor. It was dark, even to my eyes, so I could see next to nothing, and all I could smell was machinery oil and buttered popcorn. It was the popcorn that convinced me that I was still in the park.

I felt around for my purse but couldn’t find it, and the only thing in my pockets was spare change. I started to stand but hit my head on something. When I reached up, I felt some kind of pipe or bar. I scooted around on my butt, feeling around, and realized that I was totally enclosed by bars. I was in a cage! Just for a moment, I felt the wolf inside stirring. I didn’t like being in a cage, and it was all I could do to keep from throwing my head back and howling!

I pulled my knees close to my chest and inhaled deeply and slowly, the way I’d been taught by the pack. According to the instructor, I was supposed to gather my chi or find my center or something equally mystical, but for me, the breathing was enough to prevent me from Changing.

Just then I heard footsteps. A door opened, and dim light flowed into what now looked like a basement workroom. There were tools on shelves and tables around the edge of the room, but unfortunately nothing was close enough for me to reach. A moment later, Pirate Dave stepped inside, and his expression was far from friendly.

“I didn’t realize you were so adamant about my staying for the fireworks,” I said. “Or is this how you treat all your Sea Queens?”

He didn’t respond, just came closer.

Once again, I noticed that his scent was wrong. It was like nobody I’d ever encountered, and I finally recognized the metallic tang I’d noticed a hint of before. It was blood.

He stopped just out of my reach, met my eyes, and said, “I want to know why you’re here.”

“You tell me! You’re the one who locked me up in a damned cage.”

He seemed taken aback. He went down on one knee, so we were eye to eye. “Why are you here?”

“Hello? Because you put me here!”

Now he was clearly nonplussed. “Tell me who you are.”

“I’m Queen Joyce, remember?” Since I could see my purse on a workbench, I added, “You’ve got my stuff—go check my driver’s license.”

“Damnation!” he said as he stood. “What are you? Witch? Demon spawn? God, not the fae! Please don’t be one of the fae.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t bother to deny it—I should have known from the way you snagged that doubloon. You’re not human!”

“Well, neither are you,” I said, suddenly convinced that nobody with that scent could be.

“True enough.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. It was, however, toothy. Overly so, with two prominent fangs.

“You’re a vampire?” I’d been told about vampires during Werewolf Orientation, but I hadn’t really believed it. At that point, it had been hard enough for me to believe in werewolves, let alone all the other horror movie denizens. If the issue of immunity to vampiric influence had been mentioned, I hadn’t been paying attention.

He eyed me again. “You move too fast to be a zombie. Not foul enough for a ghoul. Too tall for a leprechaun. Werewolf?”

“We prefer to call ourselves Lupine Americans.”

“I knew my troubles had to be supernatural in origin—no human could cause so much chaos. But I hadn’t suspected werewolves. What are you after? The park? Or were you hired by some other power?”

“Because the whole supernatural world is dying to own a rundown amusement park. Let me explain this to you slowly. I. Am. On. Vacation.”

“I may not be able to glamour you, wolfling, but there are other ways of getting information, ways I don’t think you’ll enjoy,” he said, circling the cage slowly. Then he picked up a power drill from one of the workbenches. “I understand you heal quickly, but I wager that this would still hurt.”

“It would if you had an extension cord,” I pointed out. “Besides which, if you get close enough to try anything, I’m going to give myself a lesson in vampire anatomy. From the inside.”

He put down the drill. “I don’t have to get close. All I have to do is wait for you to get hungry. Hungry as a wolf, you might say.”

“What makes you think I’m going to stay in this cage?” I deliberately started to undress. Well, not completely—the pack members I’d met were comfortable with public nudity, but I wasn’t. I did take off my sandals and shorts and pulled my bra off under my shirt. The panties and shirt would withstand the Change.

“No wolf could tear through those bars,” Pirate Dave said smugly.

I concentrated, and the mist of the Change surrounded me, blocking both my view of the vampire and his view of me. One of the first things I’d had to unlearn was the idea that a werewolf had to become a wolf. After all, a wolf is genetically the same as a dog, and there were lots of breeds of dogs. When the mist cleared, I charged through the bars of the cage and leaped at him. Pirate Dave screamed like a little girl as I bit down on his ankle. Admittedly, a chihuahua wasn’t the most fearsome of canines, but my teeth were plenty sharp and I definitely had the element of surprise on my side.

He tried to kick me away, but I wasn’t nearly so interested in inflicting damage as I was in getting away. The door was still open, and I went for it. Unfortunately the vampire did, too, and I discovered that vampires move awfully fast. He slammed the door before I was even halfway there. I skittered to a stop, then turned to run as he reached for me.

The ensuing chase would have been ludicrous if it hadn’t been—Hell, it was just ludicrous. I couldn’t stop long enough to Change into something more useful in a fight, and he couldn’t catch me unless I slowed down. Finally I dove back into the cage, right back where I’d started from.

“Stalemate,” he said, as I scooted back into my shirt and Changed back to human. Of course, I ended up with one arm sticking out of the shirt collar, but eventually I got myself covered, though there was no way I could wriggle back into my bra.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “What’s your problem with werewolves anyway?”

“I’ve got no interest in werewolves as long as you stop trying to ruin my park. I’d always heard your kind were ill-educated thugs, but I never expected a pack to make a move on me.”

“For one, I’m neither a thug nor ill-educated. I’m a marketing exec, and I graduated from Harvard. Cum laude. For another, I’m not in a pack.”

“A lone wolf?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “How trite.”

“And lastly, I don’t give a shit about your park. The place is falling apart anyway.”

“Because of you!” he snapped. “I caught you red-handed behind the Kraken, which you were undoubtedly about to sabotage.”

“I was there because I saw somebody sneaking around.”

“Oh, that’s original.”

“And since I’ve only been in town a week, I couldn’t have caused any of the problems you must have been having all summer, given the lovely condition of this place. I’m surprised the board of health hasn’t shut you down.” I saw something almost guilty in his expression. “You used that look-deeply-into-my-eyes thing on the inspector, didn’t you?”

“I’d do a lot more than that to keep my park open. If you don’t start telling me what I want to know, I’ll show you just how much.”

“Your park? I thought you were just the figurehead.” A thought occurred to me. “Oh my God! How long have you been Pirate Dave?”

He actually managed to bow sarcastically. “I am the original Pirate Dave.”

“Have you been feeding off Sea Queens all these years?”

He shrugged. “None of them suffered from it. In fact, they quite enjoyed it.”

“Ew.”

“And how many humans have you murdered as a ravening beast?”

“The only human I’ve ever bitten was you. Scratch that, since you’re not human. Which reminds me. Could I have a glass of water to wash the taste away? Old meat is just rank.”

His face reddened, and I thought I might have gone too far, but suddenly a jaunty sea chanty echoed through the room. Pirate Dave reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone.

“What is it? . . . How? I was just there! . . . Was anybody injured? . . . I’ll be right there!”

He hung up as angrily as it was possible to hang up a cell phone and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

I said, “Whatever it was that just happened, obviously I couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

“All part of your plan, no doubt,” he said. “You kept me occupied while your littermates committed further acts of vandalism.”

“Right, I tricked you into knocking me unconscious. Just admit that I’m not involved, and let me out of here.”

“I don’t think so, wolfling. I’ll be back to deal with you later. Feel free to take any form you like to leave your cage—you still won’t be able to get out of this room.” In a breathtaking burst of speed, he was gone and through the door, and a second later, I heard the lock turn.

“What an idiot!” I said to the empty room. I waited five minutes to make sure he was really gone before Changing to a teacup poodle to get out of the cage. Next I went human so I could reach through the bars of the cage to get my clothes. Once I was dressed, I rummaged around in the tools on the workbench, found a power screwdriver—and an extension cord—and took the hinges off the door. Then I picked up my purse and left.

I saw plenty of park employees on my way through the building, which was apparently the park’s administrative headquarters, but not one said a word. I wondered how many other Sea Queens they’d seen making discreet exits after private visits with Pirate Dave. I’d been prepared to Change and make a dash for freedom if need be, but as it was, I just strolled back to the park’s public areas and out to the parking lot. The fireworks started as I got into my car, and I hoped Pirate Dave was going to go to bed hungry.

I considered getting in touch with somebody in one of the packs when I got back to my cabin, just to check out Pirate Dave’s powers and the whole vampire/werewolf dynamic, but then I saw the messages shoved under my door. Two more fruit baskets and a balloon bouquet were waiting for me at the front desk. I decided that was enough pack attention for one night. As long as I stayed away from Adventure Cove for the next couple of days, I shouldn’t have to worry about Pirate Dave again.

I might have been able to stick with it, too, had it not been for three things. One, when I read the local newspaper over breakfast the next day, I learned that two children had been hurt in the breakdown of the Kraken the night before. Though neither injury had been serious, one was bad enough to keep a little girl out of a softball tournament she’d been practicing for all year. There was also an article about the park’s recent troubles, complete with speculation about the number of people who’d be out of work should the park shut down.

Two, there were more pack offerings waiting for me when I went by the front desk to get the deliveries from the previous night: fruit, cookies, and a spa basket.

Three, and possibly the reason that would have convinced me all by itself, I’d spent all night having extremely vivid dreams about a red-haired pirate.

That’s why I was the first person in line when Pirate Dave’s Adventure Cove opened, and I spent the day looking—and sniffing—for signs of sabotage. I wasn’t exactly subtle, but nobody noticed. The news about the park’s problems had spread, so there were even fewer guests than there had been the day before, and the employees were clearly demoralized by impending unemployment. I paid particular attention to the area around the Kraken but got nothing.

I’m not sure exactly what I expected to find. Pirate Dave had been sure the threat was supernatural, and unfortunately my experience with the supernatural world was next to nil. At least I could be fairly sure that the saboteur wasn’t another werewolf—I knew what we smelled like.

The park was so empty that I wasn’t sure if they’d bother with the evening parade, but when night fell, I was at Shiver-Me-Timbers, waiting for the Brazen Mermaid to arrive. As soon as the float stopped, I joined the scant half dozen candidates for Sea Queen.

Pirate Dave’s reaction upon seeing me was priceless. His face flushed, and he glared at me as he gave his usual invitation in a harsh tone that scared off two teenage girls. When it came time to throw the doubloon, he didn’t even pretend to fling it to anybody but me. I walked past the same flunky as before to climb the rope ladder and wasn’t a bit surprised when Dave grabbed me before I was halfway up and yanked me the rest of the way.

“All hail Sea Queen Joyce!” he thundered, and motioned for the float to start moving.

“Miss me?” I asked as we waved mechanically to the pitiful excuse for a crowd.

“What the devil is your game, wolfling?”

“Shouldn’t that be Queen Wolfling?”

“You should be keelhauled after what you did to those children last night.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” I snapped. “Which should be clear even to you by now.”

“What’s clear is that you’re playing some kind of game with people’s lives.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that I’m just here on vacation? I don’t want the park to close. Why else would I spend the entire freaking day sniffing around for whoever it is who’s trying to ruin you?”

He waved in silence for a moment. “You’re telling the truth? You really did that?”

“Can’t vampires sense lies?”

“That’s witches,” he said. “All I can do is glamour humans into telling the truth.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“But I do read body language, and yours . . . I believe you.”

“Finally!”

“Please accept my apologies for abducting you,” he said awkwardly.

“And for hitting me over the head?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then,” I said magnanimously. “Apology accepted.”

We waved more amiably for a minute, and then he said, “You must admit that having a werewolf show up is a remarkable coincidence.”

“I suppose. I don’t know how many of us there are.”

“None of the supernatural races are numerous—most of our numbers are in decline, and naturally women are particularly sought after.”

That certainly helped explain why all the packs were so interested in me. Fresh blood and all that.

“Well, I didn’t find anybody supernatural in the park today. Not that I’ve met enough to know what they’re supposed to smell like, but everybody I sniffed today was normal. Of course, that kind of thing is harder to do when I’m in human form.”

“I can imagine.”

“Why would somebody be so set on putting you out of business anyway? Is it vampire politics? I’d heard the infighting can get pretty nasty.” I was basing that more on books I’d read than on the orientation I hadn’t paid attention to.

“So I understand, but that doesn’t affect me.”

“Oh?”

“I have very little contact with my own kind.” I didn’t have to be an expert in body language to know he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not werewolves—that’s the one scent I know well. Witches? Ghouls? Space aliens?”

“Space aliens? This may be a joke to you, but I’m in danger of losing the park.”

“Sorry. I’m new to this. I’ve only been a werewolf for a few months. I’m not even in a pack yet.”

“I thought you’d belong to the pack that Changed you.”

“I was bitten by a rogue,” I said, though “bitten” was putting it mildly. “That means I get to pick a pack at the Gathering next month. That’s why I took this vacation—the packs have been courting me relentlessly.”

“Naturally,” he said.

I looked up at him in surprise. Had that been a compliment? I pushed the idea away. “But back to your problem. You said you have no enemies?”

“Of course I have enemies. I’m over three hundred years old.”

“You’re how old?” I did some figuring. “Jeez, were you really a pirate?”

“Not by choice,” he said softly. “So I sympathize with your curse.”

“My curse? You mean being a werewolf?”

He nodded.

“It’s not a curse—I love being a werewolf.” I loved roaming the woods with every sense on overload. I loved the strength in my body, the power in my movements. And God knew I loved being able to eat whatever I wanted and then run it off effortlessly. “The pack lifestyle is going to take some getting used to,” I admitted, “but being a werewolf rocks.” I was about to ask how he felt about being a vampire, but the float had come to the end of the route.

Pirate Dave helped me descend much more gently than he’d helped me ascend.

“I am sorry for suspecting you,” he said, “and when this is all over, I would very much like to spend more time with you.”

“As long as it doesn’t involve a cage.”

“Not until we know each other better,” he said with the wicked grin that I’d dreamt of.

It was the grin that made me reluctant to leave. “Isn’t there anything else I can do to help?”

He cocked his head to one side. “Not that I don’t appreciate your concern, but why? We’ve barely met.”

“True, but in a way I’ve known you for years. My family used to come to Lake Bartholomew every year, and coming to the park was the best part.” I left out the part about praying I’d catch the golden doubloon. “I love this place.”

He smiled incredibly sweetly. “Thank you.”

Dave leaned forward, and I was sure I was about to have another part of my dream come true, but an employee came running up. “The Octopus is making funny noises!”

With a quick squeeze of my hand, Pirate Dave took off, with the flunky trying in vain to keep up.

I started to follow, then stopped to think about the possibilities. If the sabotage had just happened, then the saboteur might still be around, which meant I might have a shot at sniffing him out, but it wouldn’t hurt to improve my chances. I went to a nearby souvenir booth, grabbed what I needed, and threw money at the cashier on my way to the closest ladies’ room. It took only a minute to strip and stuff my belongings into the tote bag I’d just bought—a canvas number with Keep to the Code! emblazoned across it. After a moment’s consideration, I Changed into a Scottish terrier so as not to look threatening, then zipped out of the bathroom, dragging the bag behind me. The only one who noticed me was a little girl waiting while her parents argued over whether or not to stay for the fireworks.

First I found some bushes to leave the bag under, hoping that nobody would find it. Then I pranced into the park, acting cute and friendly and perky as hell while I sniffed everybody I passed. I got whiffs of grape slushie, chocolate ice cream, numerous brands of sunscreen, and of course, body odor. I smelled smoke—both tobacco and other, beers that were being concealed in water bottles, and one diaper that really needed to be changed. But it was all human.

A small crowd was gathered at the Octopus, but I didn’t smell any blood, which was a good thing, and there didn’t seem to be any signs of panic, just major annoyance. Dave was speaking earnestly to a barrelchested man with a sour expression, but the expression gradually turned almost jovial, and I had a hunch Dave was using the glamour that hadn’t worked on me.

I’d always heard that criminals can’t resist returning to the scene of the crime, so I took my time sniffing all the people clustered about. I got popcorn and soda from the guests, and various metallic, oily, and acrid scents from the employees, presumably from running rides. But again, nothing supernatural.

Eventually Pirate Dave saw me and did a double take. I wagged my tail furiously, hoping he’d realize it was me and not some random pooch. A couple of guests noticed me, too, and I heard a little boy say indignantly, “Dad, you said I couldn’t bring Hershey to the park! You said dogs weren’t allowed!”

“That be my dog,” Pirate Dave said. “Ye must have heard tell of old sea dogs! That’s Salty, the Sea Dog!”

Okay, the “old” part didn’t thrill me, but I barked appealingly and came to rub my head against Dave’s leg until he patted me. The kid seemed satisfied, and though I saw a couple of employees looking confused, apparently a brand-new mascot wasn’t enough to worry them in the middle of other concerns.

Dave continued to appease the guests, using a mixture of glamour and comp tickets, while I worked the crowd. It took a good half hour for Dave to make everybody happy, and then he clapped the employees on the back, told them to keep up the good work, and whistled for “Salty” to come along.

When we were out of everybody’s earshot, Dave said, “Did you find anything?”

I understand some werewolves can manage speech in canine form, but I haven’t mastered the technique. So I whined in response.

“Bugger!”

After a quick stop for me to drag out my tote bag, which Dave then carried for me, he led me back to the admin building. Not the basement, I was happy to see, but his office. Unsurprisingly, it was decorated with nautical knickknacks and a glorious selection of Adventure Cove souvenirs.

“I thought you could use a place to Change,” he said.

I nodded, then looked at him expectantly. Eventually he got the idea and turned around. I quickly Changed back to human and pulled my clothes back on. “I’m sorry,” I said once I could speak again.

“At least nobody was hurt this time,” he said, and sat at his desk. “The devil of it is that one of those people is a reporter. I tried to glamour him, but he’s a hard-nosed sort and I don’t think it took.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

He rubbed his eyes wearily. “I may as well close the park down now and get it over with.”

I really just intended to pat his shoulder comfortingly when I went to stand behind him. The one-armed hug was a natural extension. Ditto for stroking his back. I think I went over the line when I started playing with his hair, and inhaling that increasingly addictive scent of his was no help. But he’s the one who kissed me, and that was enough to set our course. Every man should practice kissing for three hundred years.

We were about to move on to bigger and better things when there was a knock on the door. We hastily rearranged ourselves and our clothing, and Dave said, “Come in.”

A man in coveralls with that same acrid smell I’d sniffed in the park came in. “I heard about the trouble earlier. You sure you want to go ahead with tonight’s show?”

Dave shrugged. “We may as well. It’ll probably be the last, so make it a good one.”

“You bet,” he said. As he turned, I saw a company logo on the back for “Great Balls of Fire Pyrotechnics.”

After that, the mood was broken. “Time for one last Pirate Dave appearance,” he said. “Since you missed the fireworks last night, would you care to join me tonight?”

“I’d love to.”

We didn’t speak on the way to the fireworks pavilion. Of course, the fireworks would be visible from anywhere in the park, but the best place was the pavilion, a semicircle of bleachers in front of a small stage where Pirate Dave would announce the show. Directly behind the stage was the man-made lake that was the center of the park, and the moored barge from which the fireworks were shot.

We were about halfway there when the silence got to me and for lack of anything else to talk about, I said, “I never realized gunpowder had such a distinctive odor.”

“Oh?” Dave said politely.

“I assume that’s what I was smelling on the pyrotechnics guy.”

No response, not even an Arr, that be the way of it.

“I’d never smelled anything like that before tonight, but I noticed it on one of the other fireworks guys out in the park.”

“Hmm . . .” Dave said absentmindedly. Then he stopped. “What did you say?”

“I said that fireworks smell really strong, and I noticed them on one of the employees earlier.”

“None of the park employees have anything to do with the fireworks because of insurance regulations. We have a contract with a pyrotechnics company, and they never come until just before the show.”

We looked at each other as we both came to the same awful conclusion. The saboteur had done something to the fireworks! Dave took off, moving so fast I could barely see him, let alone keep up.

Since there was no way I could catch him, I ran into the nearest souvenir shop and buttonholed the salesclerk. “Have you got a walkie-talkie or a phone? Some way of getting in touch with security?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Tell them to stop the fireworks! Tell them there’s something wrong with them! Now!”

I was going to have to tell Dave to give that gal a raise, because she didn’t even hesitate.

I left her to it and started toward the pavilion. Then I stopped. Even if I could get to the fireworks in time, I wouldn’t know what to do when I got there, short of Changing and peeing on the lit fuses. Dave would take care of that part. In the meantime, I was willing to lay odds that the saboteur was waiting impatiently for disaster to strike. And I had his scent!

I ran back into the souvenir shop, to the door marked Ship’s Crew-members Only. The cashier was busy on the phone and didn’t notice me ducking into the back room, but she sure noticed when I burst back out after Changing.

Which way to go? I was going to assume that the saboteur was sticking around to see the havoc he’d caused, just as he had after the Octopus broke down. But I was also assuming he wasn’t suicidal, so he wouldn’t want to be too close to where the fireworks were going to explode or misfire or whatever he’d planned. Presumably he’d be somewhat close to the exit. What was the best place to watch the fireworks that was close to the exit?

Had I still had fingers, I’d have snapped them. The crow’s nest! The mocked-up section of a ship where the daytime Pirate Dave stood was high enough to see the fireworks from and right in front of the exit. And, unfortunately, halfway across the park. Still, though I may not have been as fast as a vampire, I wasn’t exactly slow, and I was close enough to see a shadowy figure in the crow’s nest when the first firework went off. As the purple chrysanthemum lit up the sky, I saw he was dressed in black from head to toe, complete with a black face mask, like a ninja. Did ninja count as supernatural?

I was listening for screams or some sign that something had gone wrong, but there was nothing. A minute later, I realized there’d been no second explosion either. Either Dave or the helpful cashier had stopped them in time!

The saboteur must also have figured out his plan had gone awry because he clambered down the ladder and sprinted for the exit. I put on a burst of speed and tackled him, and both of us rolled over from the impact. Lucky for me, I ended up on top, straddling him and growling. He looked up at me, covered his face with his hands, and whimpered.

Though I hated to admit it, just for an instant I felt a taste of that ravening beast Dave had accused me of being. I wanted to rip the bastard’s throat out, and I howled in pure triumph. Chihuahuas and Scotties are all well and good, but when you really want to make an impression, there’s nothing like a wolf.

Before the temptation to rip and devour could take over, the guy fainted. And peed himself.

That’s how Dave found us a few minutes later. Well, I’d switched back to Salty the Sea Dog, to keep from freaking out anybody else, but the saboteur was still unconscious. Dave took in enough of the situation to throw the guy over his shoulder without stopping to ask questions. I trotted along beside him until we got to his office.

Dave said, “Do you want to Change to human?”

I cleared my doggie throat and made a show of looking around. Though I was certainly considering the idea of being naked around Dave in the near future, it wasn’t the time.

“Oh, sorry.” He rummaged in a drawer and found an Adventure Cove T-shirt big enough to cover the basics and turned his back while I Changed and pulled it on.

“You stopped the fireworks in time?” I said, once I could.

“Barely. The pyrotechnician said he would have gotten to the shell that would have burned down the park in another four minutes.”

“Wow.”

“I take it this is the saboteur.”

“He smells like gunpowder, was standing in the crow’s nest watching the show, and started to leave after the second burst didn’t go off. And he’s dressed like a ninja. So I’m thinking yes.”

“Shall we see who or what it is?” He grabbed the mask and pulled it down from the guy’s face. “Son of a whore!”

“Do you know him?”

“Don’t you?”

I looked more closely but shook my head.

Dave reached for a cheap felt tricorner hat and put it on the guy, and then I recognized him.

“Oh my God, it’s Pirate Dave!”

My Pirate Dave made a sound that was suspiciously close to one of my growls.

“I mean, he’s the fake Pirate Dave.” The first time I’d seen this guy, he’d been dressed in full Captain Jack Sparrow regalia, greeting guests as they came into the park.

The ninja started to stir and opened his eyes. “Where am I?” he croaked.

Instead of answering, Dave fixed him with his gaze, and the hair on my arms stood up as the vampire spoke. “Why have you been ruining my park?”

It was like he’d flipped a switch, and the ninja—whose real name was Randy—let it all come out. “It’s your fault! If you’d let me take the night shift once in a while, I wouldn’t have done anything!” He saw me watching. “Great, another one of your Sea Queens. How many do you need, dude? Couldn’t you share? If you’d let me throw the effing doubloon once in a while, I could have gotten a piece of that.”

“As if!” I sniffed.

Randy went on. “How long does a guy have to work here to get a shot at the Sea Queens? Ever since high school, I’ve worked my ass off all summer long. When I hit college, I could have gotten a nice cushy internship, but no, I came back here to play Pirate Dave. Only you wouldn’t let me take the night shift, not once. For three summers, I’ve been sweating buckets in that damned wig while you swoop in as soon as it cools off and make off with the Sea Queens. Next year I graduate and get a real job, so this was my last chance. All I wanted was for you to switch shifts with me for one lousy season! But you wouldn’t even discuss it! Why wouldn’t you let me have a shot?”

Of course, it was obvious why once you knew Dave was a vampire, but just as obviously, Randy didn’t know.

“I thought if there were problems in the park, you’d be too busy to dress up every night, and you’d have to give me a shot.” He went on to describe how his years in the park had taught him the best ways to cause trouble and how to dodge the security guards. “But no matter what I did, you had to keep the spotlight to yourself. The park was going to close, and you didn’t care. Even when those kids got hurt, you still had to be in the parade!”

I couldn’t stop myself from blurting, “You jerk, you’re the one who hurt those kids, not—”

Dave held up a hand to stop me and said, “Go on, Randy.”

“So if I couldn’t be Pirate Dave, then I was going to fix it so you couldn’t either. I’m a chemistry major—fucking up the fireworks was easy.”

He actually smirked, and it was all I could do to keep from Changing back to a wolf and scaring it off of him. Dave had more control and got the rest of the details, including the fact that the ninja mask was just a black Captain Jack T-shirt turned inside out and tied around his head.

I think Dave really wanted to find something supernatural in the whole sordid mess. No grown-up would want to admit to being confounded by a horny college boy, and it was even worse for a three-hundred-year-old. Then again, it seemed to me that a college boy in need of sexual relief was pretty darned close to supernatural.

At any rate, Dave didn’t stop the interrogation until Randy was drained dry.

Not literally. I don’t think Dave would have had Randy for dinner if I hadn’t been there, but . . . Well, he was a pirate. At any rate, I was there and he restricted himself to glamouring Randy enough to make him forget about the wolf running loose in the park and to convince him that confession was good for the soul. Then he called the police.

In short order, the cops came, investigated, and left with Randy.

Afterward Pirate Dave showed me the captain’s quarters, and we had fireworks that night after all.

Unsurprisingly, I slept late the next day, and since I was due to check out of my cabin and head back home, most of the day was spent packing and distributing the accumulation of fruit baskets and cookie trays to the hotel staff. Then I loaded up my car before heading back to Adventure Cove.

The park was closed, temporarily according to the sign on the ticket booth, but I had my suspicions. I found a shady spot to park in, and sat and thought about the situation for the next few hours. As soon as it was dark, Pirate Dave came to me, wearing blue jeans, of all things.

“Ahoy,” I said as I got out of the car.

“Hi,” he said almost shyly. “I suppose you’ll be on your way out of town.”

“That was the plan. What’s the word?”

“Randy told the police everything.”

“And the park?”

He shrugged. “The newspaper printed the whole story, which I hope will reassure people, but there’s been a lot of damage to our reputation. People don’t want to come to an unsafe amusement park. I thought I’d close for a week, and then decide what to do.” He looked over at the concrete pirate ship. “Maybe it’s time for me to weigh anchor.”

“Bullshit!” I said. “You are not going to let some phony pirate chase you off your own ship. I mean, away from your home. Sure, you’ve had some bad publicity, but you can turn this around to your favor. Go ahead and stay closed for a week, but spend the time cleaning, freshening up the rides, brainstorming new attractions. I’ve got some ideas, too.” I pulled out the back of the envelope on which I’d been making notes. “I know this season is going to be mostly a bust, but what about staying open later in the year? A lot of parks do Halloween events—pirates are a natural for that. Not to mention vampires.”

“Pirate Dave’s Haunted Cove?”

“Why not?”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“I told you I’m in marketing. I’ve never worked with an amusement park before, but I could learn.”

“Are you asking me for a job?”

“Permission to come aboard?”

“What about the packs? Will they let you work with a vampire?”

“What I do is none of their business. This whole pack thing just doesn’t do it for me. I don’t even like fruit baskets!”

I could tell Dave was having trouble following my reasoning, but either he caught on or decided he didn’t care, because he switched from conversation to kissing.

After a wonderful few minutes, he said, “And tonight?”

“I thought we could go out for a bite. And for dessert, we can come back here for a bite.”

“Prepare to be boarded,” he said with the patented Pirate Dave gleam in his eye.

A week later, the park reopened, bright and shiny, and thanks to some hard work on my part and a little glamour on Dave’s, we had a good-sized crowd waiting to appreciate our efforts. We hadn’t had time for much more than cosmetic changes, but the employees were enthusiastic again, which made all the difference in the world.

The one big change we had made was the whole Sea Queen ritual. Pirate Dave still picked a Sea Queen during the parade, but now his selections were little girls, so naturally he’d stopped the suggestive banter. And if any of the Queens got nervous about being near the handsome pirate, they had Salty the Sea Dog right there to distract them. I still couldn’t really speak while in canine form, but I could manage to bark appropriately: “Arr-fff!”