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For some girlish reason she didn’t care to analyze, she needed him to be the one to reach out first.

“Get. Dressed.”

She wasn’t going to win this battle. Which was how she found herself sitting on her usual stool at Curiosities not half an hour later, leafing through a deck of returned conversation cards emblazoned with red skulls on their front.

“‘If you were a ghost, who would you haunt?’” she read.

Toni closed the cash register and cocked her head to the side.

“I would haunt Kenton Morley for making my friend miserable.”

Alessandra laughed. And then sobered when she realized Kenton couldn’t haunt anyone because he couldn’t die. Which reminded her . . .

She jumped from the stool and made her way into the second room of the shop. Years ago, Birdie and her Uncle Jim had purchased the barber shop next door for an expansion, and though they’d renovated it, they’d kept some of the original features. The red leather chairs were now adorned with life-size skeletons, and the mirrored wall opposite them added to the gothic atmosphere.

The vampire section.

Alessandra had never paid much attention to it before, but now the model fangs and mini-coffins held an entirely different meaning to her. Sure, vampires didn’t sleep in coffins (as far as she knew), but the fangs weren’t totally inaccurate. She found herself picking up a pair, examining them with interest.

Putting them back, Alessandra wandered around the shop looking at each item and attempting not to listen to the whispers in the other room. Each day her hearing improved, but she also somehow knew how to block it out.

Eventually, she made her way back to the vampire fangs.

A tingling sensation skated down her spine. Someone was nearby. And not just someone.

A vampire.

She spun around to face the back door of the shop, watching it to see if her senses would prove accurate.

A woman stepped inside. The one she’d noticed the other day at Le Trousseau. She was even more beautiful up close.

“You felt me coming.”

“I did.”

“Who are you?” she asked. She was certain this woman, this vampire, was somehow related to Lawrence, but that was all she knew.

Smiling, the woman extended her hand. “Laria Derrickson. Lawrence’s sister.”

I knew it.

“Odd, aren’t they?” Lawrence’s sister gestured to the fangs in Alessandra’s hand.

“How so?” she asked, placing them back on the table.

“I guess I should say the idea of them is odd. That anyone would willingly put them in their mouth and pretend to be something so . . . monstrous.”

It was an odd thing for her to call herself. Then again, Kenton had insisted it was a curse.

“Maybe not so monstrous,” she ventured.

Laria shook the long bangs out of her eyes, revealing eyes as green as her brother’s. They reminded Alessandra of the rumored fairy pools in Scotland. Birdie had once shown her a picture of them in one of the books sold at the shop.

“Do not make the mistake of believing so,” Laria said, picking up the fangs. “For every appealing quality a vampire possesses, there is another, darker one which can be easy to overlook. There’s a reason the stories about them are considered horror.”

The shiver that ran down Alessandra’s spine had nothing to do with her Cheld abilities. This was pure, old-fashioned anticipation. And not the good kind, like the possibility of her damn phone buzzing with a text from Kenton.

Alessandra concentrated on her presence.