“WE’RE coming, too,” Jessica said stubbornly.

“Indeed, no,” Sinclair said politely.

“Hey, sidekicks tag along. It’s, like, the rule. Besides, I want to watch Vampire 101,” Marc gushed.

Dennis and Tina both looked appalled. “It’s against all our laws,” Tina explained. “And—and—”

“It’s completely inappropriate,” Dennis said, offended. “We’re not circus monkeys. We don’t perform for breathers.”

“This is a private thing,” Tina added. “Between Her Majesty and us.”

“About that ‘Her Majesty’ stuff,” Jessica said. “I mean, the girl’s something special, no doubt…I’ve always known it.”

“Awwwwww,” I said.

“Shut up. Anyway, it was more a personality thing than anything else. Why is she the queen? It can’t be her brains.”

“Yeah, that’s a very good—oh, thanks, creep.”

“Look, honey, you’re just not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is all. There’s no shame in it.”

“Just because I don’t have a 142 I.Q. like some rich bitches doesn’t mean my arms drag on the floor when I walk.”

Sinclair was scowling. And so was I! “I can assure you, she wasn’t elected. I certainly wouldn’t have voted for her.”

“Did I miss the memo that declared today ‘take a big steaming shit on Betsy’ day?” I griped.

“S’not my fault you don’t check your in-bin,” Jessica retorted. “So anyway, Eric, what’s the deal with Queenie here?”

“Ugh! Do not even think of getting in the habit of calling me that. Seriously.”

Sinclair sighed. It was a good effect, since I knew he didn’t have to hardly ever exhale. “It’s a long story, it’s none of your business, she’s leaving with us, good night.”

At “good night,” Marc and Jessica both folded bonelessly to the floor. I leapt aside so as not to be crushed by their falling carcasses. “Hey! Will you stop doing that to my friends? And how do you do it? Because I’ve got Easter dinner coming up with my father and stepmother…”

Sinclair actually shuddered when I said Easter—not sure if it was the Jesus angle, or if he was battling some sort of phobia of rabbits—but he quickly recovered. “We will cover that later. Come, Tina. Dennis.”

“Good dogs, arf, arf,” I muttered.

Sinclair picked up the dozing, dried, and dressed Nick, slung him over one shoulder like a sack of grain, and took him out to the Jaguar. Ignoring my protests, he unceremoniously stuffed him into the trunk, slammed it shut, and got behind the driver’s seat. “Coming?” he asked politely, while Tina and Dennis got into the other car, a red Maserati.

“I must be out of my fucking mind,” I muttered, climbing into the passenger seat. The neighbor’s dog started to run up to the car, tongue already lolling and ready to lick, but I slammed the door in time. “Completely nutso bonkers.”

Meanwhile, Sinclair’s knees were up to his ears and he looked decidedly aggrieved as he fumbled for the seat latch. “You have completely destroyed my interior,” he complained, fussing with the rearview mirror. “You look tall but you apparently have legs like a platypus.”

“Jeez, whine some more. Sue me for wanting to reach the pedals.”

He started the engine and jerked in his seat as Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl” blared through the speakers.

“This is intolerable,” Sinclair shouted in a vain attempt to be heard over the music. He lunged for the volume control, then stabbed irritably at the preset buttons. The car was instantly flooded with—gag!—serene string quartet music.

“Yuck,” I commented.

“You took the word right out of my mouth.” He rubbed his ear. “For pity’s sake, Betsy. You have enhanced hearing. There’s no need to turn the music up so loud.”

“Are we gonna take Nick home, or are you going to keep bitching?”

“I plan to do both,” he said wryly, pulling out of my driveway so sharply I lurched forward.

In no time at all, we were pulling up outside a small ranch house I took to be Nick’s. I wasn’t about to ask how Sinclair knew where he lived. Some stuff I just didn’t want to know. Actually, most stuff I just didn’t want to know, but people kept telling me anyway.

Sinclair got out, pulled Nick from the trunk, took him inside, did whatever hypnosis trick he had in his pocket for such occasions, and we left Nick dozing.

To my alarm, Tina and Dennis did a fade. “You don’t need all three of us to teach you how to hunt,” Tina said, waving as Dennis pulled out of Nick’s driveway. “Luck!”

“Don’t leave me alone with this asshole!” I shouted at the retreating taillights. Then, “Hunt?”

“You did promise,” he said silkily. “Come.”

“Come. Sit. Stay.”

“Oh, if only.”

“VAMPIRES don’t exist.”

I blinked. “Er…sorry, wasn’t listening. Did you just say we don’t exist?”

“Pay attention. We are myth, legend, folklore.”

“Like the Tooth Fairy,” I suggested, “with fangs.”

“No, not remotely like that, because many children believe in the Tooth Fairy.”

“Did you?”

“I was never a child,” he said soberly. “Now. Because we don’t exist, we are allowed to operate at a level unparalleled anywhere else in the natural world. This is vital, as we—”

“Whoa, whoa. Back up, slick. Never a child?”

“Please, Elizabeth. Try to stay focused. Now, as vampires don’t—”

“I am focused. Why were you never a child?”

He didn’t say anything. We were walking through a nature reserve about seventy miles north of the Twin Cities. I could hear all sorts of life—squirrels, deer, rabbits, bats, bugs, gophers, snakes—rustling and fighting and fucking and eating and dying, all around me. It was interesting, if nerve-wracking. The forest was teeming with life and I could smell it as well as hear it.

“I was never a child,” he said at last, “because from the very beginning life was a struggle. I was regularly putting meat on my family’s table before I knew the alphabet.”

“How?”

“I was too small to use a gun effectively, so I learned how to set traps. Snares, and the like. And I could fish.”

“Huh.” I had to admit, I was impressed. Even if I absolutely could not see Mr. Slick as a toddler wandering down to the local fishing hole with a pole over one shoulder and a creel over the other. Opie he wasn’t. “What’d your parents do?”

“We were farmers.”

“No shit!”

“Surprised?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, you’re so—” Slick. Refined. Fancy. Rich. Slick. Non-farmeresque. Did I say slick? “You’re—uh—”

“Farming,” he went on as if I wasn’t still stammering, “is back-breaking work. Even now, in this century.”

“How d’you know what it’s like in this century?”

“I own several local farms.”

“Oh. How come? I mean, seems to me like you’d want to get away from it altogether, and—”

“After my parents were killed I couldn’t—I did not have the financial resources to—I just wanted to have the farms, and never mind the why of it! Now, back to business. Since vampires don’t exist, we are allowed certain freedoms. But access to those freedoms depends entirely on—”

“But we do exist,” I interrupted. I could take a hint—Sinclair was as rattled as I’d ever seen him, talking about owning farms, for goodness sake. So he wanted to get off the subject—I was hip to that. But not if he was going to babble a bunch of fantasy. “Hello? We’re walking in the woods, aren’t we? Just as undead as hell, right?”

Sinclair sighed. “Lesson one: Vampires don’t exist.”

“Lesson one blows.”

“The point is, we go about our business in secret.”

“Why?”

“Because that is the rule.”

“But why is it the rule?”

He stopped short, exasperated. “Really, Elizabeth, this is not unlike a conversation with a first-grader.”

“Oh, blow it out your ass. You can teach Vampire 101—I agreed, and I’m a girl of my word—but you have to make sense. That’s my rule.”

“Yes, and stubborn adherence to your rules is why the most powerful vampire in five hundred years wants your head on a plate.”

I made a face and kicked at a pile of leaves on the forest floor. Know-it-all creep.

“We. Do not. Exist. We do not seek out our parents. We do not return to our houses. We do not explain to strangers that we are undead.”

“Is that why we are such total losers?”

“That,” he said grimly, “will be taken care of. Now, about stalking—”

“Oh, cripes. Stalking? Do you hear how you sound?”

“How else will you eat?”

“It hasn’t been a problem,” I replied haughtily.

“Tell that to your policeman friend.”

He had me there, the crumb. “So,” I said sulkily, “about stalking.”

“We don’t breathe, our hearts don’t beat. Well…very often, anyway. And it’s surprisingly easy to steal up on someone without their knowing.”

“Yeah, the night I woke up in the funeral home—”

“A story you simply must tell me someday,” he interrupted smoothly. “As I was saying, if you focus, and practice, you can slip up on anyone—even another vampire.”

That was a cheerful thought. Maybe, if I got good enough, I could sneak up on Sinclair and give him a well-deserved wedgie. “So, how do we do it?”

“Do you see the deer?”

As a matter of fact, I did. There was a doe and a yearling, about twenty yards ahead. If I’d been alive I’d never have heard or seen them—it was dark out, for one thing, and they were pretty well hidden back in the woods, for another.

“Yup.”

“Let’s try to walk up on them. Try to touch the doe before she knows you’re there.”

“And give her a heart attack? Jeez, she’s a mom! Heartless creep.”

“The fawn, then,” he said impatiently.

“Scare Bambi? Sinclair, I swear, if you weren’t a vampire, you’d be burning in hell.”

He put a hand over his eyes and was silent for a long moment, his lips pressed tightly together. I knew the look. It was one I’d gotten from my father, various teachers, and bosses over the years. He was probably concentrating very hard on not strangling me. Hey, I am what I am. He’d better get used to it.

“Besides,” I added, “somebody’s coming.” A whole herd of somebodies, sounded like. The sound of leaves crunching was very loud; I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. It sounded like a giant chewing Rice Krispies. And their breathing sounded like a winded rhino. I watched fearfully, waiting for the hideous creature to emerge.

“Howdy there, folks. Lost?”

The hideous creature was the game warden, a man in his late forties. He was about my height, with thinning blond hair and watery blue eyes. He was sporting a pretty good tan for April, and wearing a brown uniform with patches bearing the logo of the Minnesota Game and Fish Commission.

“We were just taking a walk,” Sinclair said smoothly, shaking his head a little as we heard the doe and her fawn bound away. “Young lovers, you know.” He slung an arm around my shoulders and hauled me up against him.

“Ugh!” I said. “I mean, yeah. Young lovers.”

“Well, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave,” he told us sternly. “We’re doing some checking—there’s word that one or two of the deer in here might have CWD.”

“Chronic Wasting Disease?” Sinclair asked. “Are you certain?”

“No, that’s why we’re checking. Go on, now,” he added kindly.

“Good evening.”

“Okay, bye,” I said, struggling to remove Sinclair’s arm from my shoulders without being too obvious. It was like trying to dislodge a tree limb.

When we were out of earshot I pulled away. “Chronic Wasting Disease? Isn’t that like mad cow disease for deer?”

“Yes.”

“Ewwww! And you were gonna have us stalk mad deer!”

“Per the WHO, there is no evidence that CWD can infect humans, much less vampires.”

I wasn’t about to ask who the hell WHO was. “Nice going, Stalker Boy! Sucking the blood and getting mad vampire disease…so not on my to do list for the week! Not that any of this bullshit is,” I added in a mutter.

“Suck their blood?” Sinclair sounded appalled. “Absolutely not.”

“Oh, they were good enough to sneak up on and scare the crap out of, but not good enough to eat?”

He was actually shuddering. I didn’t think he could! “No. No. The animals were just practice. And don’t ask why; you know why.”

“Uh, no, I don’t.” Guess I’m not as bright as he thought. Dammit! “Why not drink from animals? It’s got to be easier, not to mention less traumatic. For all of us!”

“Have you not noticed the…effect…your mouth has on men?”

The effect my mouth…oh. Oh! If it was that sensual, that much of a turn-on, then if I tried to bite Bambi, the poor little deer would likely be climbing all over—“Oh.”

“Indeed.”

“Ugh.

“Yes.”

“So only people, huh?” I sighed.

“Yes. But never children.”

“Well, duh.”

“As long as we’re clear. What seems patently obvious to me often seems to take you quite by surprise.”

“Look, if you think I’m a dumbass, why don’t you just say it instead of pussyfooting around all the—”

“I think you are a dumbass.”

“You what?” The nerve! “Jeez, you can’t even pretend to be nice for five seconds?”

“Whenever I try to be—ah—nice, I get a broken rib for my pains.” He patted his left side.

“You deserved that, throwing down a lip lock on me without permission. And after being with them.”

“I disagree. I was simply being a good host.”

I sputtered while he laughed at me. “Sinclair, you’re the worst—the—oh, cripes, I can’t think of anything bad enough.”

“Public education?” he asked sympathetically.

“Probably better than yours, farmer boy,” I snapped back. “Where the hell is the car? I’ve had about enough of tromping around in the woods with you.”

“It’s up ahead. Now, you understand very clearly what I meant about taking blood?”

“Yeah, yeah, no need to whip out the hand puppets, I got it.” I spotted the car as we emerged from the woods. “Well, it’s not like I have to worry about it every night or anything.” I cheered up. “Not even the next couple of nights.”

Sinclair shook his head. “Truly amazing.”

I preened.

“And entirely without precedence. Or merit.”

“Cut it out, you’re just jealous. Hey, can I drive back?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Jeez, am I the Queen or not?”

“Queen you may be, but I draw the line at letting you behind the wheel again.”

“Men and their toys…”

I climbed in and sulked all the way back to his place.