I got in my truck, gunned the engine, and drove too fast down the hill and away from my own awful lust for blood and Ian and blood and Ian.

I stopped at the market. I bought juicy steaks and a bottle of Russian River zinfandel.

When I got to my loft, I tore into the packages, devouring the raw meat and sucking at the juices in a frenzy while Rosemary greedily chomped down a ribeye. I drank the wine from the bottle, the dark liquid spilling down my lips and throat, staining my dress red-black.

The blood was still roaring through me when I looked at the ripped packages and mess around me. I threw everything in the trash. I went to the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as I could stand it. As I pulled away the shower curtain, I caught sight of my blood-smeared face reflected in the mirror before steam saved me from looking at myself.

But nothing could save me from my own circular thoughts about Ian and Cricket, about sweet Ford and savory blood, about Mr. and Mrs. K, about my own monstrous appetites. Why did I feel so betrayed when I knew what Ian was, what he did?

I’d walked away from him before and it hadn’t hurt like this. Yet I still wanted him too much to think that our relationship was over.

I tried to expend my energy by cleaning the loft, until my neighbor banged at the wall while I was running the vacuum cleaner. I looked at the clock and saw that it was almost four in the morning.

My mind was still replaying the same agonizing scenes of Ian and Cricket when the phone rang at seven o’clock. I thought it must be Ian and grabbed it up so I could scream at him.

“Is this my pretty little bat?” asked an accented voice in chipper tones.

Only one person used that endearment and his accent was as fake as his name and his memoir. “Don Pedro Nascimento,” I said, using the honorific as sarcastically as possible.

“I am not forgotten!” he said happily. “I hope I am not calling too early, but I had a dream about you. You were in a field of flowers, drinking nectar from a lamb who was your friend.”

Don Pedro’s bag of con-man tricks included dream-telling, and he was especially gifted at inventing dreams that were easy to misinterpret as prophetic.

I said, “I’m not likely to forget the man who sold my manuscript for seven figures and goes on talk shows pretending to have written it himself.”

“I am terribly sorry that you have misunderstood events.” Don Pedro never used contractions in his speech, and I assumed he thought this made him seem more exotic and foreign than the SoCal car mechanic that he’d been. “I was most astonished when a publisher heard of my humble memoir …”