“Please don’t help,” I said, turning to Jolene. “And you, you’ve got to draw a line somewhere. You’re marrying Zeb. His safety and happiness have to be your priority, no matter what your family does. Stand up for him, if not to show your family that you’re going to be the first McClaine to break this weird-ass cycle of human abuse, then to show Zeb that you’re on his side.

“Apologize,” I said. “And then go perform some physical favors for him that I never have to think about. And both of you have to stop coming to me when you have relationship problems. I barely have time for my own problems, and yours are, well, weird.”

“You’re a really good friend, Jane,” she said, shoving the remains of pizza into her mouth.

I patted her arm. “I know. I was serious about that last part.”

Gabriel’s home on Silver Ridge Road would have been the crown jewel in any historical home tour … if anyone in town knew about it. Gabriel had worked for years to erase the house, with its white clapboard, big wraparound porch, and Corinthian columns, from public memory. The house was cozy and way less intimidating than you would expect inside. The rooms I’d seen were done in subtle, muted colors, soft fabrics, little knickknacks that spoke of Gabriel’s years of travel, the kind of rooms where you wouldn’t expect to find your boyfriend plying your best friend with liquor.

Poor Zeb looked absolutely miserable, splayed on the maroon leather couch with a glass in one hand and his head in the other.

When he looked up, I saw he was wearing an eye patch. This could not be good.

“OK, I heard about the bear trap. Did something happen to your eye?”

“No, I’m considering a career as a pirate,” Zeb snarked as he gingerly adjusted the patch strap. He winced when it snapped back into place over his eye. The elastic had given him a quailish cowlick in the middle of his dark blond crown. “Some of the boys out at the farm were shooting off bottle rockets a few days ago. Jolene’s cousin Vance wanted to show them how to use them to knock cans off the fence, and somehow one of the rockets went astray.”

“You got hit in the eye with a bottle rocket?”

“No, I got hit in the eye with the bottle. Vance wasn’t watching where he tossed it when they were running from the bottle rocket.”

“So, that combined with bear trap is why you’re doing the full-on Dean Martin routine?” I asked, looking at the bottle between them.

“I’ve been evicted,” Zeb said, turning away two fingers of very nice bourbon.

Gabriel huffed and slugged it back himself. Considering the average vintage in his wine cellar, I wasn’t surprised he wouldn’t let it go to waste.

“This has not been your day, huh?”

“My landlord left me a notice today,” Zeb said, making a face when Gabriel held up a bottle of vodka with a Cyrillic label. “I was supposed to renew my lease next week.”

“He can’t do that! Jolene worked so hard to leave her mark on that place,” I exclaimed. Gabriel gave me a cringing, questioning look. “With throw pillows and paint, I mean. Nothing gross.”

“I went to sign the papers with Mr. Dugger, but he’s decided to rent to another family,” Zeb said, his pale face stretched in tight, miserable lines. “He said Jolene’s fixed the place up so nicely he can charge more than we can afford. And somehow, Jolene’s uncle Deke just happened to call today to remind her that her plot of land on the pack compound is still available. He even offered us a brand-newish trailer as a wedding gift.” Zeb sighed, planting his face in his hands as Gabriel stood to pour him a scotch. “I don’t know how they did it, but they got to Mr. Dugger.”

“I think you might be giving them a little too much—yeah, you’re probably right,” I agreed, slipping an arm around his shoulders. “What are you going to do? Starting with, will you please pry the crying werewolf out of my shop? She’s starting to disturb the customer. Emphasis on customer; we only have one.”

“You saw Jolene?” Zeb grimaced. “She was crying?”

“Um, you kind of broke off your engagement. That can bring out the emotion in a gal.”

“I know, I need to apologize,” Zeb said. “But I’d like to have a home to offer her when I beg and plead.” He took a sip of Gabriel’s liquor, blanched, and coughed. “Seriously, that’s what it tastes like?”

“Zeb can only drink stuff that tastes a little like alcohol and a lot like fruit punch,” I told Gabriel.

“I’ll start keeping some around,” Gabriel said. “Until then, try to finish the expensive single-malt I just poured for you. Peasant.”

“I would insult you back, but you seem to own or know about all of the good rental properties around town.” Zeb snorted.

Giving new meaning to the words “saved by the bell,” Gabriel’s cell phone began singing. His face when he saw the caller ID stopped me from making a joke about voice mail, which Gabriel didn’t know how to use. Without a word, he left the room and said hello quietly into the receiver as he walked out onto the back porch.

For lack of something better to say, I told Zeb, “I wish I could help.”

“Aw, I appreciate that,” he said, leaning his head against mine. “But you’re, you know, broke.”

My jaw dropped. “You know about that?”

“I’m your best friend,” he said. “And you haven’t had a full-time job in months. I can do math above the kindergarten level. Besides, I would never take money from you. We’ve never mixed money into our friendship before.”

“We never had money before,” I pointed out.

“And so far, that’s worked out for us,” he said. “Besides, if we’re not going to take that kind of ‘help’—emphasis on the sarcastic invisible quotation marks—from Jolene’s family, it would be hard to justify taking help from you.”

“You have a well-thought-out and emotionally mature argument,” I admitted. “Dang it. On an unrelated note, here’s an interesting tidbit: Your mama kept trying to get me to eat at the funeral, which would have ended in my vomiting publicly. She does know that I’ve been turned, right? I assumed she has just refused to mention it because it interferes with her version of reality. But you did tell her, right?”

Zeb winced. “Every time I try, she repeats something stupid she hears on talk radio, like vampires should be rounded up and forced to live in communities far away from humans.”

“Still, you’re marrying into a werewolf clan, and you’re worried about telling her there’s a vampire bridesmaid? If anything, you could use me to take the heat off Jolene and Company.” I gasped as realization slowly dawned. “She still doesn’t know you’re marrying into a werewolf clan, does she?”

“No,” he admitted, covering his face with his hands. Whether it was from shame or to protect his eyes from my vampire death glare, I have no idea. “You know her. You know what she does with announcements like this. We’re talking Valium and screaming, taking to her bed for weeks at a time. I knew there was no way she’d accept you, much less Jolene and her family. I’m just trying to get through the wedding without her making a scene. I saw what it did to Jolene when my parents threatened not to come. Can you imagine how she would handle Mama’s werewolf meltdown? How much that would hurt her? Once we’re married, Jolene will realize that she’s better off with my family not liking her anyway.”

“Don’t you think your family will notice something’s off when the bride’s side mows through the buffet?” I asked.

“Oh, my family will be too drunk to notice,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Why do you think we’re having the open bar?”

“That’s not—actually, that’s brilliant.”

“I’ve tried everything to get Mama to behave, to be decent to Jolene,” Zeb said. “She says she’ll straighten up and be nice, and then I get a phone call from Jolene, crying about whatever Mama’s said now. I’ve told her to ignore Mama, but she just can’t. She can’t stand having someone not like her. And I’m exhausted. I’m tired of being the go-between. Why can’t she just handle this stuff herself?”

I arched my brows at the angry, exasperated tone Zeb was using. He seemed to shake it off after a moment, rubbing his hands over his patch and then moving them to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“In a few months, this will all be over,” he said.

“Because you will have succumbed to chronic stress headaches and bottle-rocket trauma?” I asked, taking one of his hands and gently pushing at the pressure point between his thumb and forefinger.

When he smiled, the skin around his visible eye crinkled. “Because in a few months, we’ll be married. And we can enter the witness-protection program.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, quirking my lips as I stared at him.

“What?”

I shrugged. “It’s just weird. Normally, I’d be the first person you’d call when something like this trailer deal comes up. But now it’s Gabriel. I think you’re entering into a functional adult relationship with someone besides me. I guess the wedding is the final sign that we’re growing up.”

“I don’t know how I feel about it,” Zeb said absently. He was looking at me intently; his good eye seemed glazed over, unfocused. This was not the way Zeb normally looked at me. This was the way Zeb looked at mint-condition, still-in-the-package GI Joe Battle Force dolls.

Since he was dealing with a traumatic injury, I was willing to attribute this bizarre behavior to a concussion. “It doesn’t suck.”

“It does a little bit.” He cupped the back of my head in his hand, bringing my face almost uncomfortably close to his. For a weird moment, it felt as if he was going to kiss me. Which, for our relationship, was highly unusual. I leaned away, pulling his hands from my neck.

Gabriel came in and found the two of us staring at each other, Zeb’s hands in mine. Zeb dropped his hands to his sides and looked vaguely guilty.

“If you weren’t Jane’s best friend and engaged to a beautiful and violently monogamous woman, I might find this upsetting,” Gabriel commented dryly.

6

Werewolf fathers insist on preapproving proposals of marriage. In fact, it’s rumored that the human tradition of “asking for a woman’s hand” came from a human who failed to ask for betrothal permission and actually lost his hand.

—Mating Rituals and Love Customs of the Were

“Why did I try to make more friends?” I muttered, shielding my eyes from my reflection in the Bridal Barn’s fitting-room mirror. “This is what comes of having girlfriends.”

If the picture of Jolene’s chosen bridesmaid’s dress was bad, the live version was horrifying. Basted together, the putrefied peach piecework was not just unflattering, it was insulting. My hips looked wider than my shoulders; wider than the dressing-room door, in fact. My preternaturally pale skin looked cheesy and almost blue. I actually looked dead, which was a first. At no time had I ever wished harder that vampires couldn’t see themselves in mirrors.

After much groveling on both sides, Zeb and Jolene made up, which meant I was still trapped in bridesmaid-dress hell. I took cold comfort in the fact that I wasn’t alone. I would be walking down the aisle with Jolene’s legion of cousins. The McClaines went with a “lene” theme in naming this generation’s females: Raylene, Lurlene, identical twins Charlene and Darlene, then triplets Arlene, Braylene, and Angelene. It was pronounced “Angel-lean,” by the way. That’s a mistake I didn’t make twice. All of them were gorgeous, redhaired, and green-eyed, with ridiculously high cheekbones. And all of them pretty much hated me. First, I was an outsider, which could have been overlooked if I was not also a vampire. Compounded by the injustice of my position as best maid despite being a relatively new friend, this created another sense of clan shame among the cousins. The fact that Zeb and Jolene chose me to avoid a blood feud among Jolene’s cousins escaped them.