“Nicer than ‘Help, eeeeeek, stay away you horrible thing, no, no, noooooooooo, oh, God, please don’t kill me!’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that conversation.”

“Serves you right for being a walking wood tick,” she said. “Dinner, huh? On you?”

“Of course.” Possibly on you, he thought, suddenly dizzy with a vision of licking red wine off her stomach.

“Mmmm. All right. I’ll admit, it’s nice to be myself with a guy and not have him be such a fucking Nancy boy whenever I say something the least bit—”

“Fucking obscene?”

She giggled again. “But you gotta tell me all about waking up dead and what it’s like to be on a liquid diet. And how come my family didn’t know about you and your kind?”

“Why would your family know about my kind?”

“We’re pretty far-flung. There’s not much going on on the planet we don’t know about. So you’ll feed me, and we’ll talk. Deal, Dick?”

“Deal…Jane.”

“I find out you’ve got a dog named Spot, and dinner’s off,” she warned.

Chapter 3

The phone rang, that shrill “pay attention to me!” sound she hated. She groaned, rolled over, groped for the phone, and knocked it off the hook. She relaxed into the blessed silence, which was broken by a tinny sound.

“Hello? Jane?”

She burrowed under the covers.

“Jane? Are you there? Janet. Hello??”

She cursed her werewolf hearing. Tinny and faint the voice might be, but it was also unmistakable. “What?”

“Pick up the phone,” the voice coming through the telephone squawked. “I want to be sure you’re getting all this.”

“Can’t. Too tired.”

“It’s six o’clock at night, for God’s sake. Pick up the phone!”

She muttered something foul and obeyed the caller. “Whoever the hell this is, you’d better be on fire.”

“It’s Moira, and I practically am…the high today was eighty-two. In May!”

“Moira.”

“You should see what the humidity did to my hair.”

“Moira.”

“I look like a blond cotton swab.”

“Moira! This is fascinating, but you sure as shit better not be calling me to babble about your for-Christ’s-sake hair. What do you want?”

“It’s not what I want,” Moira went on in her irritatingly cheerful voice. “It’s Michael. The big boss wants to see you on the Cape, pronto.”

Finally, the silly bitch had Jane’s attention. Her eyes opened wide, and she sat straight up in bed. “Michael Wyndham? Wants to see me? How come?” And on the heels of that, a panicked thought: What’d I do? And resentment: Come, girl, good dog, here’s a treat for the good doggie.

“Mine is not to reason why, girly…and neither is yours. I suggest you get your ass out here yesterday.”

Jane groaned. “Aw, fuck a duck!”

“I’ll pass.”