I laughed.

"There's us," he said, finally swinging open the gate and entering the garden, "and there are them. The two cannot mix. No good comes of this. Your situation—forgive my boldness, Your Majesty—I see your situation as the inevitable, and unfortunate, end result of your unreasonable attachment to your human friends. Someday, you will end up in the same place with your doctor friend. Each of these endings will devastate you, weaken you—and to no good purpose."

"I don't see it that way at all." I felt a little defensive, but also grateful to this vampire. Which was amazing in and of itself. But Alonzo was giving me the first chance I had really had to organize my thoughts. A rare and wonderful thing, in my case.

"How do you see it, my queen?"

My thoughts assembled rapidly as I said the words, and I felt more secure in my opinion with each new idea. "I gain strength from my friends, not weakness. My 'situation' with Jessica is not the 'end result' of anything. It's a step in our journey together. Maybe she dies, maybe she lives. But she is an essential part of me, either way. What am I without these friends?"

"Faster, stronger, generally superior," he suggested.

"Superior," I muttered. "I'm afraid I don't like that word very much.

Especially when vampires use it."

"Oh dear." He gave a knowing smile as he walked beside me on the dead garden path. The baying of the dogs faltered in the distance. "No wonder you had a problem with the former regime."

Chapter 17

We slipped into the back entrance of the house and just sort of stood around for a moment in the mudroom. I wanted to go to the kitchen and hang out with Jessica for a while—give her a chance to maybe tell me how the doctor's appointments were going. How everything was going. The thing about Jess—you couldn't force information out of her. She'd tell you

or she wouldn't. I planned to make the atmosphere as welcoming as I could.

Anyway, I was pretty much done with Alonzo. I'm sure he was done with me. And Sinclair wasn't the "hey, let's go play golf in the dark" kind of guy. In fact, I had never seen Sinclair with one man friend. In further fact, as far as I knew, Tina was his only friend.

Anyway, Sinclair was done with Alonzo. Tina probably wasn't even there—she was tracking Jon down for us.

So it was that part of the party where you want your friends to leave, and they want to leave, but it was too early to look at your watches.

"It's getting late," Alonzo said, stealing another glance at his big silver watch.Thank God ! Normally that weird tic of his made me wonder if a bomb was set to go off somewhere. But this time I welcomed it. "And unlike some, I must feed before dawn. With your permission, Majesty… ?"

"Of course. Um, try not to kill your food." I tried to say it as a joke, but it probably sounded like an order. Enough—I was too emotionally exhausted to try to explain. Let him figure it out. "Thanks for coming over."

"The pleasure was mine." He smiled at me, showing me how very pleased he was. "I was waiting and waiting for the phone to ring. And now, I will go back and wait some more."

"Hmmmph." I was 98 percent sure he was fucking with me, but he had enough slipperiness in his tone that just made it quicker to repeat, as I did, "Thanks for coming over."

He went. I listened for Sinclair but he didn't pop out from a hidden shadow the way he usually did. Nobody was pulling up in the drive. Tina was standing unobtrusively in the short hall to the kitchen, ready to spring forward with a cup of tea. Guess she'd quit looking for Jen for the night.