pretext by another woman, babe?” I gave a short laugh. “News flash, Punk-girl—that’s not a tragedy, that’s a relief! Even if I were gay, you’re so not my type, with that dark-root look you’ve got going with your hair and that Salvation Army look you’ve got going with your clothes!” I raised my voice as she slipped into the shadows between two buildings and disappeared from my view without ever having looked back. “And another thing—”
Something brushed against my hair and fell to my shoulders. Startled, I looked down at myself and saw the starry shapes of small, white flowers against the black of my trenchcoat. Then the nausea hit me, ten times more powerfully than it had in reaction to old man Schneider’s garlic breath, and I realized what the flowers were.
“Wild garlic!” I choked the words out as I fell to my knees. “Get it off me!”
“Is unfortunate necessity, Granddaughter.” As the Russian-accented words reached my ears, my blurred vision made out the bulky shape of a caped figure reeling in the excess length of his wild-garlic lasso as he approached me. “Do not worry, this is not trap to stake you,” he said with hearty reassurance.
“Tha’s…good to know…” I mumbled as I pitched face-forward onto the ground and lost consciousness at Darkheart’s feet.
“It’s worse than we thought.” As I struggled upward through the fog surrounding me, I heard Kat’s worried voice coming from a long way away. “She keeps her shoes in a plastic garbage bag—Manolos, Jimmy Choos, all jumbled up together in a big pile! How could she?”
“What more proof do we need that she’s totally deteriorated? And if you think that’s bad, take a look at what I found under her bed, covered with dust bunnies.” Megan didn’t sound worried, she sounded pissed off. “My cream Chanel jacket, the one she swore she hadn’t borrowed.”
“Refrigerator is disaster area. Bag of stale doughnuts, two cartons take-out Chinese food, old slices pizza. In cupboards are cookies and candy bars.” The fog around me lifted enough for me to hear Darkheart sigh heavily. “Is typical symptom. She fights blood hunger but other cravings come upon her.”
They’d brought me to my own apartment, I realized, and while I’d been dead to the world my sisters and my grandfather—I couldn’t hear Mikhail or Jack, so I assumed they’d been left on patrol—had been searching the place. Outrage flickered in me but I still felt too lethargic to move.
“You mean she gets the munchies?” Kat’s tone went from worried to appalled. “The poor sweetie, she’s going to blimp out if she keeps this up. Honestly, Meg, if I can’t attempt a Heal on my own sister—”
Her words were like an icy wind blowing the last of my grogginess away. I sat bolt upright, realizing as I did that I was no longer bound by Darkheart’s garlic lasso, and the next moment I was racing across the room to the window that looked out onto the metal fire escape. I was steps away from it when I saw the wreath tacked to the sill, its starry white flowers wafting their deadly scent toward me. I changed direction in mid-dash and made for the door, only to see another garlic wreath festooning that escape route. Blindly I headed for my bedroom. The window by my bed didn’t open onto a handy fire escape, it looked out over the Dumpster that had been the scene of my embarrassing tussle with Bojangles, but although I hadn’t been able to bring myself to jump from St. Jude’s bell tower earlier this evening I thought I could manage a three-story drop into a pile of reeking refuse.
Given what the alternative was.
I came to a screeching halt. Megan was standing in the bedroom doorway, her stake in her hand. “You wouldn’t, Meg,” I said hollowly.
She looked thoughtful. “Probably not, brat. But do you really want to find out?”
“Sweetie, calm down.” I spun around to see Kat advancing on me, her perfect features shadowed with compassion. “As Darkheart said, we’re not planning a staking. This little get-together’s more along the lines of a—”
“Stay away from me, Kat!” I hissed, shrinking from her. In chagrin I realized my fangs were lengthening, and I tried to keep my top lip immobile—a look that might have worked for Humphrey Bogart, but which I was pretty sure wasn’t working for me. “I know what this is! It’s an intervention, and you can forget it—I’m not risking an attempted Heal unless you can guarantee it won’t go bad, sending me straight to hell and eternal damnation. But you can’t guarantee that, can you?”
Kat tossed a swath of silver-blond hair from her shoulders. I could see she was trying to hold on to her I’m-a-Healer-so-I-feel-love-for-all-living-things-even-the-undead serenity and fighting a sisterly impulse to snap at me. “Merde, sweetie, that’s only happened a handful of times in the whole history of Healing, and when it has it’s usually—”
“It’s usually been when the prospective Healee bears the mark of a Queen Vampyr,” I broke in. “Hmmm…who do we know like that? Oh, that’s right—me!”
I was backing away from her as I spoke, but I froze when I felt something sharp in my back, just below my left shoulderblade. I kept my gaze straight ahead. “Stake?”
“Yup,” Megan agreed from behind me. “I told you two she’d make a piss-poor candidate,” she said laconically to Darkheart and Kat. “Face it, Kat, we’ve always known our little sister’s got a few tiny character flaws, starting with being spoiled, self-involved and immature. Even her punky vamp friend’s figured her out. I say we drop this ridiculous plan.”
Her character assassination of me aside, I told myself, Megan was arguing my case for me. I should probably keep my mouth shut. Ignoring my own advice, I turned around and glared at her. “Ever since you’ve taken on the role of a Daughter of Lilith you’ve been a royal pain in the butt, Meg. You’re the self-involved one!”
“Really?” she said thinly. “Tell me, when you did your midnight flit from the Crosse mansion last week after we got that letter from Cyrus Kane, did it occur to you that we’d be worried sick when we found you gone? We wasted three patrol nights tracking you down to this crappy apartment and when we did I wanted to read you the riot act for scaring us the way you did, but Darkheart—” she nodded at Grandfather, who remained silent “—insisted we give you time to adjust to the realization that you were the one Zena marked when we were babies.”
“Of all the ingratitude!” I sputtered. “You’re on my case because I left home before I—” I stopped abruptly and Megan’s gaze narrowed.
“Before you what?”
Before I killed you and Kat, I told her silently. Before I slaughtered Darkheart and Mikhail and Jack. Before the hunger became stronger than I could handle, the way it almost did tonight. Once upon a time I would have blurted out the truth to her, I thought, taking in the firm line of her mouth, the hard steadiness that hadn’t been in her gaze before she’d become a Daughter. But now I couldn’t know for sure if she’d react to my confession as a sister…or as the sworn enemy of me and my kind.
“Before I went out of my mind with boredom,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, things around here are getting so same old, same old. First Zena shows up in Maplesburg and you stake her, then Kane shows up and Kat Heals him—and by the way, Kat,” I added in an aside, “Cyrus fleeing to the ends of the earth all tortured with guilt over his evil past and dying in a Buddhist monastery isn’t the most reassuring demonstration of the benefits of a Heal. No wonder you don’t have vamps lining up to take advantage of the oh-so-special gift you inherited from Daddy Dearest.”
“Firstly,
