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“Fine, I’m going to do this one from now on just to spite you,” he tells me, his sentence trailing off into what can only be described as a British actor’s version of someone from the Deep South. It makes my hair just about stand on end.

“Oh my god, don’t you dare. Oh, good lord, that is ear nightmare fuel.”

“Well, boy, howdy, I rightly don’t know what you mean, little lady.”

“Fuck. Why does it show so much of your normal non-vampire teeth when you do that voice? That is so unsettling,” I exclaim—because somehow it does. Though after a second, I realize why. “I never noticed before how much you talk with your lips almost closed. Like a ventriloquist.”

“I prefer to think of it as cultivating an air of cold mystery.”

“Honestly I don’t think you need your lips to do that. The giant fangs do it the moment you let them jump out of your incisors and attempt to chew off my face,” I say, much to his deep irritation. He rolls his eyes, like I’m a student who just refuses to learn anything from his many worldly lessons.

“I’ve told you a million times before they don’t jump out of my incisors. How would jumping out of incisors even be possible? Teeth are solid, they would break apart the moment my razor blades tried to burst out of them. No, they come from the gums above, like so,” he tells me.

And even though he gives me warning of what he’s going to do, even though I’m safe behind the barrier of no invitation, I still somehow fucking jump the second he does it. Though, to be fair, it’s quite a bit more gnarly than it looks in most movies and shows. They’re so large and sharp they sort of distort his upper lip. You can see the curved shape of them just underneath the flesh between his nose and his mouth, and not just because they emerge from the gum.

There’s more than two.

More like six, total—four of them smaller than the incisors and so, less visible, but still definitely there. And the sound he makes when he snaps forward to show them off. It’s like the hiss of some ancient and enormous reptile. I jerk just hearing that, never mind anything else.

But I think I hide it well.

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I boring you? Would you like me to do the eye thing, as well?” he asks, and when he does I have to force myself not to think about it. They’re worse than the teeth, in some ways. Feral seeming somehow, and pale as winter. Like evil sucked all the color right out of them.

“Sorry, I’ll have to pass,” I say, in as withering a way as I can manage. “I have four episodes of Gilmore Girls to watch, and I need my eyeballs intact for that. But you know, enjoy your lurking around outside the home you’re not invited into.”

Then I turn, and head toward the stairway up to my apartment.

Folder behind me, of course, to make sure he doesn’t get too much of my ass.

Though I get the feeling he doesn’t much care about what I’m almost flashing. And doubly so when he laughs. Oh, I know that laugh. It’s the one he uses when he knows something I don’t, and it makes me freeze. It makes me look back over my shoulder, just in time to hear him speak.

“Right. Well. About that,” he says.

And I watch, in horror, as he lifts one big boot and just levers it right over the barrier I assumed was there. You know what they say about that word, I think, mindlessly.

As my monster steps fully inside.

CHAPTER TWO

Of course I know right away the mistake I made. Never trust zoning laws when it comes to identifying the boundaries of your home, in order to secure it from vampires. Because, sure, the paperwork says the domicile starts at the door of the building. But supernatural shit doesn’t care about paperwork. It cares about whatever nonsense it’s randomly decided on.

And in this case, it has apparently decided that my home is up two flights of stairs and through a different door altogether. The door I do, admittedly, treat like a different entrance. I have deadbolts on it. Keys to get into it. A spy hole.

Oh god, is the spy hole the reason I’m fucked?

I don’t know. I don’t have time to know. I am nearly nude in the offices of the Gazette with a six-foot-five-inch psychotic vampire, about ten minutes after I shot an arrow through his head. If I give him even a second he’s going to wrench my arms off and use them to play my body like a pair of bongos.

He even tells me so. He says something that sounds like: “I cannot wait to turn you into the percussion section of my own personal orchestra” as he stalks toward me. And it doesn’t take much stalking, either. Two massive strides and he’s within spitting distance of me. Two more and he’ll have me by the throat. Yet all I can do in response is stumble, and then scrabble backward on my butt, too flabbergasted to come up with anything better.

Though, to be fair, fleeing while half naked is no joke.

My stockings are in shreds, and they dig into my thighs when I try to scramble onto my front. I think one of my bra straps is gone because I can feel things sliding around in a real distracting way. Part of me wants to grab the cup and hold it up, but I know I don’t have time for that.

If I flash my tits, I flash them.

That cold I can feel is him leaning down to get ahold of my ankle. He almost grabs it, in fact. I sense something brush my heel about a second before I manage to snatch it toward my body, get my foot under me, and push off. I practically lunge for the stairs and fling myself up. Two at a time, almost on all fours, hands scrabbling for purchase as much as my feet are.

And it’s still not enough.