Author: Molly Harper

“I regret this,” she repeated. “But I also regret the loss of Dick Cheney. Once upon a time, we were…close acquaintances.”

“Am I the only person in the Hollow who hasn’t slept with Dick Cheney?”

“Possibly,” she admitted.

“Sorry,” I said. Shrugging my shoulders was a painful gesture that let me know there were bits of glass embedded somewhere near my shoulder blade. Gabriel was right, it itched.

Gabriel.

“My sire, Gabriel Nightengale, does he know I’m here?” I asked as she opened my cell door.

She nodded. “You’re not allowed visitors,” she said, shutting the very solid door behind her.

And for the first time since being shot and left for dead, I was truly frightened.

Whenever those horrible “women in prison” movies were played on Lifetime, I thought, what’s the big deal about prison? I could handle solitary. Even if I couldn’t read, I could daydream. I could write. I would take naps.

Well, like many of my predeath preconceived notions, that one was destroyed. There was no window, so I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. There was no clock, so I never knew what time it was. I couldn’t sleep, because the healing burns on my arms itched like crazy. And my daydreams were interrupted by pesky questions such as, “Where is Gabriel?” “Why does this keep happening to me?” “Am I going to die for real this time?”

I spent half my time trying to figure out where the hell I was. When I pressed my ear against the wall, I could hear traffic. I heard voices at least twenty feet above my head, but I couldn’t make out any actual words. And there was a rat somewhere in the plumbing.

The only good thing I could say about the clink was that the blood (served in a paper cup shoved through a slot in my door) was fresh and tasty. It was also of an indeterminate origin, but I decided not to ask questions.

I was halfway to drawing “LOVE” and “HATE” on my knuckles, when Ophelia returned. She was wearing black silk pants and a top that may, at one point, have been a handkerchief. I stood up, grateful for any sort of interaction, even if it could mean I was facing a spookily titled punishment.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked, not sounding as if she actually cared.

“Bored, mostly. How long have I been in here?” I asked. “Two days, three days?”

“Nine hours,” she said, looking as if she were suppressing a giggle.

“Well, that’s embarrassing,” I muttered, scratching at my arms.

We sat there and stared at each other. It was like a staring contest with a really hot statue.

Finally, she said, “The tribunal has voted against a trial.”

I sat up, feeling something like hope rising. “Really? That’s good news.”

“They voted against it because Missy has challenged you to trial by battle, which is her right as Dick’s consort.”

“You guys are just making this up as you go along!” I cried. “Dick and Missy weren’t even in a real relationship. Hell, if everyone he slept with could challenge me to a duel, I’d be fighting half the county. You could challenge—”

She crossed her arms and glared at me. Probably not good to give her ideas.

“Never mind,” I said. “Is it going to be pistols at dawn? Swords at sundown? How does this trial-by-battle thing work?”

“The last battle was fought with sharpened snow shovels,” she told me.

“Now I know you’re screwing with me.” I snorted. Her expression didn’t change. “Oh, come on!”

“Missy will choose the weapon,” Ophelia informed me.

“She’s going to accessorize me to death?”

“Or she can choose hand-to-hand combat.” Ophelia nodded.

“I stand by my statement,” I deadpanned.

My arms finally healed up about an hour after Ophelia left me. She said she would come back an hour before my appointment with Missy the grieving ex to let me feed and update me on the duel arrangements. She even promised to serve as my second. How did I get to a point in my life where I needed a second?

Semierotic fisticuffs with Gabriel aside, I didn’t have any faith in my fighting skills. Walter had nearly splintered my skull with his bare hands, and from what I heard, he’d spent most of his time watching Battlestar Galactica in his mother’s basement.

After pacing, humming, yoga, and playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the entire cast of Good Times, exhaustion finally got to me, and I managed to fall asleep. I dreamed that I was walking along that long, dark country road and felt the pain of Bud McElray’s bullet all over again. Only instead of finding me and turning me, Gabriel drove by in a big black Cadillac. He laughed and pelted me with cigars and drove away. Anyone care to interpret that?

I jolted awake, yelling, “Freud!” Dick was sitting in the corner of my cell, smirking at me. “I can’t leave you alone for two seconds, can I?”

“Dick?” I said, wiping an alarming amount of sleep drool from my cheek. “Wait, are you a ghost?”

He sat on the cot and grasped my knee, so I could feel he was substantial. “Nope, still as undead as ever.”

I removed his hand and put it back on his own knee. He gave me a blithe grin, which, Lord help me, made me hug him. He was clearly caught off guard by this and, after hesitating, gave me a completely innocent squeeze.

“Hey, you’re not trailer dust!” I exclaimed. “And your hand is on my knee again.”

“Sorry,” he said, not looking the least bit so. “And no, I’m not dust. I had a fireproof sleeping compartment built under the trailer a few years ago. I smelled the gas and jumped into it just in time.”

“Your sleeping compartment is fireproof?”

“I have my reasons,” he said, feigning indignation. “I just figured my place got torched by one of my less than civically minded associates. I laid low for a while. I didn’t know you’d been blamed for the whole thing until this evening when I heard about the duel. I couldn’t leave you locked up. With the public showers and the shackles—”

“Shh,” I said, holding a finger to his lips. “I’m glad you’re OK. Let’s not ruin that.”

He kissed the fingertip, which I then used to tweak his nose. He caught my hand and smelled my skin. He cocked an eyebrow and smirked, then rolled his eyes. If he could smell Gabriel on my hair before we had sex…

“If you say what is in your head right now, I will rescind my previous statement and kill you. For real this time,” I told him.

“Speaking of that, how about I give you a ride home?” he said. “There’s some stuff we need to talk about in private.”

“The stuff you cryptically referred to during your call? How did you get my cell-phone number, anyway?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, dragging me to the door.

“Dick, they’re not going to just let me walk out of here. They think I tried to kill you. It’s apparently one of the big no-nos.”

“And obviously, I’m not dead. No harm, no foul,” Dick said.

“That doesn’t change the fact that someone tried to kill you and I’m still a prime suspect. I’m actually the only suspect, which I find insulting and surprising.”

“Look, I vouched for you, OK? I said there was no way you could have done this. It took some convincing, but Ophelia has agreed to release you into my custody. They figure if you really did try to kill me and somehow you end up mysteriously disappearing, it’s a wash.”

“I don’t want to know what you did to convince Ophelia, do I?”

Dick smirked.

Ophelia, Sophie, and Mr. Marchand were waiting in the hall, ready to offer me an apology on behalf of the council. Well, Sophie and Mr. Marchand were apologizing. I didn’t need telepathy to know Ophelia would not bother with a “trial/no trial” vote the next time I got into trouble.

Dick managed to speed the process along and practically launched me through the entrance to the council office—which was actually a Kinko’s. I felt silly walking through a weeknight crowd of people copying their tax records in hospital scrubs and bare feet. But the patrons seemed used to this sort of thing.

Dick threw me into the front seat of his car, an old beat-up El Camino, and pulled out of town as quickly as our two stoplights would allow.

I crossed my arms and spoke with overly sweet clarity. “OK, I’m getting tired of being thrown in and out of shitty situations because people withhold information from me. What were you calling to tell me about? And why couldn’t you talk about it at the council gulag?”

“I couldn’t talk about it before because I didn’t know who was listening,” he said, turning toward my house. “Look, Missy has it out for you. I found these papers in her briefcase. I was looking for a light while she was in the shower. She’s got these sketches for a planned community thing out near your place. She’s got a clubhouse smack in the middle of your backyard.”

My head swam. “Use smaller sentences, please?”

“She wants to get her hands on River Oaks.”

I grabbed the door handle, not sure if I could manage a Charlie’s Angels roll on gravel. “Stop the car.”

“Why?”

“Stop the car!” I yelled. “It took me a while, but I finally caught on. You call me over to your trailer to give me mysterious information. The trailer blows up. I’m framed for your murder. Missy challenges me to a duel and stands to inherit my property. Do the math, Dick.”

He stared at me and nearly ran the car off the road. Somewhere in Dick’s brain, ten thousand chimpanzees had just typed the opening act of Hamlet. “Missy set fire to my trailer?”

“There you go.” I resisted the urge to pat his head.

He huffed. “Missy’s determined, but she’s not crazy.”

“She matches her cell-phone case to her shoes!” I yelled. “That’s one stop short of Hannibal Lecter territory in my book.” And as I realized the true depth of my stupidity, I sputtered, “Oh, for God’s sake, there’s no such thing as the new-arrivals welcoming committee, is there?”

“No, actually, there is,” Dick said. “I think she just does this other stuff as a side project.”

“OK, say Missy is the big bad blond evil force behind the shooting and the fires and the really hurtful rumors. How do I know that you’re not in on all of this?” I yelled. “You could be luring me into some sort of trap. You could be her little henchman. Or you could be under her thrall. Stop the car, Dick!”

“Let go of the door now,” he said in a soothing “talking down the crazy lady” tone. “I’m not a little anything. I haven’t been under anyone’s thrall since an unfortunate incident in 1923 involving a succubus from Baton Rouge without a sense of humor. The gravel would take a chunk of your hide and your pride. Just let me drive you home. And then you can call Gabriel, and we can all talk about this and decide what you should do.”

“I’m not calling Gabriel,” I said, far too shrilly. “I just want you to drop me off here, and I’ll walk home. Then I’m getting a gun and a much smarter dog.”

Dick reached out for my hand. “Oh, come on, don’t you trust me, Stretch?”

I stared at him for a long pause. “No!”

20

Dueling is a time-honored tradition among vampires and is closely monitored by the council. Do not enter into a battle without first consulting a Council representative.

—From The Guide for the Newly Undead

Dick did not stop the car.

Instead, he promised to drive me home, give me his cell phone, and let me call Gabriel the second I felt anything out of the ordinary. He had Gabriel’s number saved in his phone book under “Jackass.” Dick also offered to let me kick him in the goods if he let anything happen to me. If that wasn’t a guarantee of my safety, I didn’t know what was.