The tense atmosphere was getting to Immanuel, who was wavering in and out of his focus on his job . . . which was cutting my hair.

“Chill out, guys,” I said sharply.

“And what is it with all the crap sitting out in your driveway?” Pam asked, her original British accent peeking through. “To say nothing of your living room and your porch. Are you having a garage sale?” You could tell she was proud of getting her terminology correct.

“Almost finished,” Immanuel muttered, his scissors snicking at a frantic rate in response to the growing tension.

“Pam, that all came out of my attic,” I said, glad to talk about something so mundane and (I hoped) calming. “Claude and Dermot are helping me clean it out. I’m going to go see an antiques dealer with Sam in the morning—well, we were going to go. I don’t know if Sam’ll be able to make it, now.”

“There, see!” Pam said to Eric. “She lives with other men. She goes shopping with other men. What kind of husband are you?”

And Eric launched himself across the table, hands extended toward Pam’s throat.

The next second the two were rolling on the floor in a serious attempt to damage each other. I didn’t know if Pam could actually initiate the moves to hurt Eric, since she was his child, but she was defending herself vigorously; there’s a fine line there.

I couldn’t scramble down from the stool fast enough to escape some collateral damage. It seemed inevitable that they would slam into the stool, and of course they did in a second. Over I went to join them on the floor, banging my shoulder against the counter in the process. Immanuel very intelligently leaped backward, and he didn’t drop his scissors, a blessing to all of us. One of the vampires might have grabbed them as a weapon, or the gleaming scissors might have become embedded in some part of me.

Immanuel’s hand gripped my arm with surprising strength, and he yanked me up and away. We scuttled out of the kitchen and into the living room. We stood, panting, in the middle of the cluttered room, staring down the hall in case the fight followed us.

I could hear crashing and banging, and a persistent snarly noise I finally identified as growling.

“Sounds like two pit bulls going at each other,” Immanuel said. He was handling this with amazing calm. I was glad to have some human company.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with them,” I said. “I’ve never seen them act like this.”

“Pam’s frustrated,” he said with a familiarity that surprised me. “She wants to make her own child, but there’s some vampire reason she can’t.”