Ouch. She had a good point. I didn’t know Cyrus. At least, not as well as she did. I tried to imagine what it would be like if I were in her shoes. She clearly had some affection for him, to stay after all the violence I’d seen him inflict on her.

I cleared my throat. “I suppose I meant evil. I don’t want to be evil.”

She rolled her eyes, not bothering to cover her impatience with me. “News flash, not everything is good or evil.”

“I don’t follow.”

She tossed her magazine aside and twisted her body toward me, pulling one meaty leg up on the couch in a very lewd manner. “Okay, let’s pretend there was a tornado, and it destroyed like, half the town. That’s bad, right?”

I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this analogy, but I nodded in agreement.

“So since the tornado did something bad, by your logic, it’s evil?”

“I wouldn’t call a tornado evil, no.”

“Why?” she asked in a way that suggested she knew what my answer would be.

“Because it’s just a tornado. It’s part of nature.”

“Just like vampires are a part of nature.” She didn’t seem very pleased to prove her point, but more annoyed at having lost precious seconds of her life teaching me. “Some things aren’t good or evil. Some things just…are.”

With that, she stood and gathered her magazines. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d rather drive nails through my eyeballs than have to sit here and play nice with you anymore.”

“Well, fuck you, too,” I said under my breath as she charged up the stairs.

So we weren’t bound to become Best Friends Forever, but at least she could talk to me without trying to kill me. And to be honest, if she got so sick of being polite that she did drive nails into her eyes, well, that would be a bonus.

I looked to the magazine in my lap, the one Dahlia hadn’t bothered to collect on her way out. Beauty magazines didn’t usually appeal to me, but I didn’t usually have so much time on my hands, either. I flipped to an article about the bacterial hazards of tanning beds and assured my horrified brain that it was medical research.

I’d only read the first paragraph when the study doors burst open, admitting the sounds of male exertion and clashing steel. Cyrus glided into the room dressed in tight black leather pants and a billowy white shirt that was unbuttoned to the waist. His long hair was pulled back and he carried a fencing foil. All he needed to complete the ensemble was an eye patch and parrot. I tried not to laugh as the image formed in my brain.

Wiping droplets of bloody sweat from his brow, he tossed the foil to the guard that followed him. I pretended to be too interested in my magazine to notice their presence.

Cyrus sat next to me with an exhausted sigh as he tugged the black leather gloves from his fingers. “Good evening, Carrie.”