“They’re eighteen or twenty. Still pulsing with adolescent hormones. They don’t really know what they’re doing yet.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said. “Except, when you’re going down on them, it takes forever. You know what I mean?”

I forced a straight face. “It’s one of the mysteries of the universe, Tawny. You just gotta roll with it.”

“But my mouth gets sore,” she whined. “Makes my jaw ache the next day! Isn’t there any way to speed it up?”

My immortal friends would die if they could hear this conversation. “You can try the ‘don’t stop’ trick. Or maybe tell them you want them to come on your face. That’ll get things moving.”

“Ew! That’s disgusting.”

I shrugged. “Don’t ask the question if you don’t want to hear the answer.”

“But how can I even say anything when my mouth is, well, you know . . .”

Thus went the rest of our lunch conversation, and blow jobs turned out to be the mildest of topics. Fortunately, no one sat within listening distance. I ate my chicken salad as fast as I could, eager to be on my way. As we were paying the bill, a thought came to me.

“Hey, Tawny. You’re practically on top of Cedric’s turf here. You ever see any signs of him and Jerome fighting?”

She shook her head. “No. I’ve never even met Cedric. But there’s a vampire here in town who’s mentioned them fighting before. He seems to think it’s a big deal.”

“Everyone seems to, and yet . . . I don’t know. I have a weird feeling about all this. Like that someone’s trying to cover up something.”

Tawny placed some cash on the table, her clawlike nails lacquered and red. For half a moment, she looked remarkably wise. “Back when I was doing cons, the best way to pull one past people was to make a big deal about something else. Misdirection.”

It was quite possibly the most intelligent thing I’d ever heard Tawny say. “Yeah, but if so, what are we being misdirected from?”

“Hell if I know. That’s for smart people like you to figure out. I’m just trying to get college guys to speed up their blow jobs.”

My first minute in Canada, I got pulled over.

Right after you go through customs, there’s a short stretch of the freeway with an incredibly low speed limit. Every time I drive through there, I try to drive that speed. And I’m the only one who ever does it. All the locals zip through that area, already driving the speed that the freeway clicks up to about half a mile (or kilometer or whatever) later. Every time, just before I officially hit the higher speed zone, I finally crack and speed up too—and that’s always when the cops get me. I’ve been pulled over three times.

This was my fourth.

I handed over my license and other pertinent paperwork to the cop. “American, eh?” he asked, like it wasn’t perfectly obvious.