I exhaled.

“Now, get your filthy paws off my Prada,” he joked, pushing my hand off his arm.

I looked down my nose at his flannel shirt. “If that is Prada, then I am the queen of England.”

“Ah, the queen!” Reg tipped his head back. “So tasty. I do miss a good royal feeding.”

“Stick with me. I’ll have you back to drinking royal blood in no time.”

“I believe it,” Reg said. “You’re better at it, you know—being vampire.”

I ticked my head to the side, trying to figure out if he was teasing still.

“Better at the hunt. Better at the bleed.”

“Except when it mattered most,” I said, my thoughts on the boy we had nearly killed.

“I didn’t say you don’t get carried away sometimes, but you’re still good at it. I thought I might be good at this.”

“At being human? You are,” I conceded, eyes on his plaid flannel. “Not that I would brag about it.”

“I’m certainly better at interacting with humans than you are,” he said.

“Why, because you get along with Sal? He’s hardly human.”

“Slayers are human,” Reg argued. “But I was talking about Dexter.”

“Who is Dexter?”

“The boy from school—the one who was so helpful this morning. At least I didn’t go mute when we met him.”

I was about to say that I couldn’t recall anyone being helpful at all, but then a flash of green eyes filled my vision.

Tall, Tan, and Blond.

“His name was Dexter?”

Reg laughed. “So, you went mute and deaf. Wow, he really made an impression!”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.” I sniffed.

“Please! The way you were ogling him . . .”

“Reg, I was so distraught over the hideous fashion train wreck in those hallways, I could barely remember my own name, let alone some human boy’s. And in any case, I do not ogle.” I tossed my hair and let the last of the sun’s rays warm my face. “It’s not a good look.”

“No,” he agreed. “It wasn’t.”

I pushed him over, laughing.

But as Reg rolled in the grass, I let myself picture the tall boy with the green eyes once more. If I had to endure being human a while longer, I might not mind another face-to-face with this Dexter to see just who ogles whom.

Reg settled with his back on the hill, staring out at the empty pink sky where the sun had been only seconds ago.

“I wonder why they didn’t take our immortal memories,” he said.

“Probably to torture us.”

It was a time-honored ritual to perform a memory fade on new vampires—a courtesy that apparently could not be extended to us.

“I’ll bet they want us to remember exactly how fabulous our lives were before,” I said. “Make sure we know what we’ve lost—Ouch!”