I reveled in the tingle of my skin, the pounding of my heart, the energy that threatened to lift me right off the ground.

Adrenaline might just be the best part of being human.

“Charlie!”

Dexter came flying through the melee, knocking both humans and vampires aside as he beelined for me. I noticed one of the bat slivers in his right hand and a cut of some kind on his left arm, but soon both hands and arms were out of sight and wrapped around me, as he scooped me up in a bear hug.

No, not just a hug. Dexter closed his green eyes and smashed his face against mine in a sloppy, too-wet, aggressive, all-over-the-place kiss. His energy collided with mine, and we exchanged heat and saliva and oxygen and a whole lot of unsaid things. It was a total mess . . . and the greatest kiss I’d had in more than a century.

Sorry, adrenaline. Make that second best part of being human.

“I want you to meet my parents,” Dexter said as he pulled away, one hand still in my hair, the other using his makeshift stake to gesture at a middle-aged couple clutching their own baseball bat shards.

I wiped my mouth. “Right now?!”

“Mom! Dad!” He waved them over with his wounded arm.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s actually kind of weird how okay I am. How okay everyone is.”

A woman raced past us just then with her hands in the air, shrieking for help at a glass-shattering pitch.

“Okay, not her,” Dex said. “But a lot of people seem okay with all this. You too, right?”

I coughed. “Uh, yeah, me too. Totally okay. Super weird.”

His parents had nearly reached us when a couple of humans tussling with a vampire slammed into them.

“I’ve got them!” Lina appeared, charging out from the crowd, but she was too late.

The dark smoke that used to be an Elder rose up before Dexter’s dad, his stake still outstretched and a look of wonder on his face.

“It’s all so familiar,” he said. “Like we’ve done this before.”

Lina took his splintery stick and replaced it with one of her own stakes from Sal’s fence. “You have done this before.”

What?

“I knew it!” Dexter’s dad exclaimed.

Introductions forgotten, Dexter dropped one last kiss on me with a command to be safe, then he joined his parents as they engaged a new group of vampires.

Cleanup outside must have been nearly over, because more Elders were flooding in through the windows, their faces already slicked with human blood. Not a good look, I thought, but then I remembered my face was still partly covered in Dexter’s spit, so I probably didn’t have much room to talk.