“I told you what I planned to do if I ever turned vampire. It’s time to put that plan into effect.”

I raised my hand to touch Van’s cheek. “When I looked at my sisters, it took all my control not to attack them…and I don’t know how long my control can last. Just say goodbye and let me walk away from you, please.”

“Not this risk-taker, honey.” He gave me a tight smile. “I told you two nights ago how I felt about you, Megan. Nothing’s changed for me.” He tipped my chin up so that my gaze couldn’t avoid his.

I tried to smile, but the tears that had been brimming in my eyes splashed over. “I didn’t plan to tell you like this, but I think I’m falling – ”

Kill him now while he’s vulnerable!

The terrible thought tore through my mind with such cold intensity that I reeled backwards. I could tell from his alarmed gaze that my horror was mirrored in my eyes.

Harper Allen, her husband and their menagerie of cats and dogs divide their time between a home in the country and a house in town. She grew up reading Stephen King, John D MacDonald and John Steinbeck, among others, and has them to blame for her lifelong passion for reading and writing.

Dressed to Slay

By

Harper Allen

MILLS & BOON®

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To the members of the Syracuse,

New york, chapter of RWA

Dear Reader,

Sisters.

They fight with each other, dis each other and know each other’s most secret weaknesses. But when the chips are down, they’re there for each other. That’s usually the case…but what happens when your sister is under the power of an ancient curse that might turn her into a vampire? And what if you might be the sister who’s about to turn vamp?

Personally, those are questions I’ve never had to face with my sis, but it’s one that’s suddenly disrupted the lives of the fabulous Crosse triplets…and changed their pampered existence of shoe-shopping, dating and partying into a fight against the dark side with their lives and souls on the line. Enter Megan, Kat and Tashya’s world of Manolos and cocktails, stakes and vampires…and learn for yourself just how binding the bonds of sisterhood can be.

Harper Allen

Prologue

It’s one of those questions that yank me back from the edge of sleep: was there any way things could have turned out differently? If Angelica Crosse had lived long enough to pass on to her daughters some of the knowledge that had been drummed into her from birth, would it have helped? Or if she hadn’t wanted so badly to give the three of us the ordinary life she’d been robbed of that she’d left instructions in her will for Grammie and Popsie to have custody of us, would that have changed anything?

Problem is, once you start playing this game, there’s no good place to stop, leaving a girl slathering on way too much Bobbi Brown concealer to hide the bags under her eyes when her alarm goes off in the morning. Or in my case, simply resigning myself to the possibility of needing my first mini-facelift before I hit the ripe old age of twenty-two. If Katherine and Natashya and I hadn’t been triplets. If we hadn’t gotten engaged when we did. If Grammie and Popsie hadn’t raised us to be indulged, shop-till-we-drop princesses, if—

As I say, no good place to stop; and on those nights, when all this is going through my head and making it impossible for me to get back to sleep, I get the sinking feeling that everything that did happen probably would have happened anyway. Lance and Todd and Dean still would have gone to Dean’s stag party, the stripper who called herself Zena still would have shown up, and our cheating jerks of fiancés still would have said yes to getting down-and-dirty lap dances from her.

Which all added up to Kat and Tash and yours truly, Megan, being totally unprepared when the men we were supposed to walk down the aisle with turned into undead creeps and tried to kill us.

As Tash says, don’t you just hate when that happens?

Chapter 1

“My point is, these days girls are supposed to get a wild and crazy send-off the night before their wedding, like guys do.” With a drama-queen toss of her curls as she entered the house, my sister Natashya flounced through the foyer into the living room and plopped herself onto a sofa. “Yet here we are, home before midnight like a bunch of nuns or something, while Dean’s stag is probably just getting to the smoking cigars and watching X-rated DVDs stage. If I were you, I’d be totally pissed, Megan.”

My other sister Katherine didn’t pause in the entrance hall, either. “The brat’s right for once, sweetie. As bachelorette parties go, yours blew bigtime,” she drawled over her shoulder as she headed toward the kitchen, leaving me to punch in the Crosse mansion’s security code. I don’t know if it’s because I’m technically the eldest of the three of us, beating Kat in the getting-born race by ten minutes and Tash by half an hour, but that task always falls to me.

“Somehow I don’t think breaking out the Monte Cristos and popping Dick Does Dallas into the DVD player is Mandy Broyhill’s idea of appropriate entertainment.” I turned from the security keypad and shrugged at Tash. “Or Lance and Todd’s idea of entertainment, to be honest. It’s more likely that they took my darling hubby-to-be to a strip club.”

“They wouldn’t. The only one around is the Hot Box, that sleazy dive on the outskirts of town, and Toddie knows I’d kill him if he ever set foot in there,” Tash said dismissively. She frowned. “Besides, there’s been some weird stories going ’round about that place lately. I know a girl who says after a couple of her brother’s friends went there they ended up calling in sick to work the next few days and the next thing you know, they quit their jobs and just dropped out of sight. I wouldn’t be surprised if the police raid that dump and find some major drug-dealing going on. But my point is that even if you don’t care if your last night as a free woman is a blast or not, I do. When it’s my turn in a couple of months, I want those totally babalicious cowboy dancers who entertained at Brittany’s stagette party.”

“The ones who stripped down to their six-guns?” Silver-blond hair swinging like satin around perfectly tanned shoulders, Kat returned from the kitchen carrying a pitcher full of something frosty-looking in her right hand, with stemmed glasses wedged adroitly between the fingers of her left. She set the glasses and pitcher on the spindly Sheraton table in front of Tash. “Appletinis, anyone?”

She didn’t wait for a reply, but started pouring. I sank onto the sofa beside Tash and eased off my shoes with a sigh of relief. My middle sister, as languidly elegant as her nickname, can power-shop all day in a pair of Manolo stilettos and dance till dawn in strappy Jimmy Choos, while Tash’s idea of casual footwear is a pair of Chanel heels, but I occasionally feel the need to reconnect with my baby toes.

“Right, and when you tucked a bill into their holsters, they said, ‘Much obliged, little lady.’ What I don’t want is a dreary little get-together at Mandy Broyhill’s without a square inch of naked male flesh in sight,” Tash insisted. She was indulging in one of her favorite irritating habits—running the silver cross she wore back and forth along its delicate chain. It was irritating because it always made me want to do the same to the identical one around my neck and I couldn’t, because then she’d know she’d irritated me. “Anyhow, I’ll bet tonight had something to do with Grammie being voted president of the Maplesburg Reading Club instead of Mandy’s mother. I mean, Mandy’s the social leader of our set, so she couldn’t very well not throw a party for you, Meg, but maybe she accidentally-on-purpose forgot to arrange any entertainment, as a kind of payback for her mom.”

My irritation turned to annoyance. Dottie Crosse had indulged us, petted us and spoiled us rotten from babyhood after her only child, our father, died. And when three eligible bachelors had popped the question in the same week to her three granddaughters, she hadn’t batted an eyelash at the prospect of arranging June, July and August weddings, so I certainly wasn’t going to let Tash take out her sulks on Grammie when she and Popsie arrived home tomorrow. He’d insisted on a weekend in New York after she’d exhausted herself planning my big day. I opened my mouth to say so but Kat beat me to it.

“Mandy didn’t arrange for half-naked cowboys to show up at the bachelorette because she had her eye on Dean before he started dating Megan, and being the social leader of our set, she’s also a prime bitch. But if you think tonight was dreary, just wait until your party, sweetie. According to the grapevine, most of your so-called bosom buddies don’t intend to show up to give you a send-off—and don’t even dream of trying to blame Grammie for that, because it won’t have anything to do with her.” She drained her glass. “Remember Bev Simmons? The mousy little brunette your darling Toddie was about to propose to before you decided you wanted to be a cosmetic surgeon’s wife?”

I glanced at Kat. Was it my imagination, or was her drawl just a tad slurred? “Kat’s right. You stole a boyfriend and most of our friends are on Bev’s side. You better hope that being Mrs. Doctor Whitmore, wife of a rising young liposuctionist, is enough to buy you a committee seat on the Maplesburg Hospital charity drive next spring, because right now, little Tashie isn’t exactly the most popular girl in town.”

“Not get on the charity committee next spring? But that would be social suicide.” Tash looked appalled and then annoyed. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not at all,” I informed her with sisterly callousness. “Read the rule book.”

“Under Boyfriends, other girls’, penalties for filching,” Kat corroborated obligingly.

Tashya exploded. “If you two knew this would happen, why didn’t you tell me? I never would have bothered with Todd if I’d thought it would make problems for me! Why would I?”

“Uh, because you love him?” I ventured. “Just a crazy possibility, seeing as how you’re going to go through the till-death-us-do-part thing with the guy.”

“Tha’s right. Till death us do part,” Kat echoed with a hiccup. “You know, I just realized what a creepy phrase that is. Puts visions of twin burial plots in your mind, doesn’t it? Hot damn, girls, I can hardly wait till Lance and I tie the noose, I mean, knot, next month.”

She looked away, but not before I saw the flicker of desperation in her eyes. For a moment I was speechless, but then I found my voice. “Are you saying you feel the same as Tash? Because if you are, I’ve got news for both of you—there’s no way I’m going to let Grammie get humiliated by—”

“I won’t be a no-show at my wedding in August, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Tash snapped. “I wouldn’t do that to Grammie and Popsie. And Todd’s all right, I guess, even if he is stuck on himself a lot of the time. I just want—”

“You just want the kind of life Grammie has.” Kat nodded solemnly. “Same here. When Lance popped the question I had every intention of turning him down. You know me—so many men, so little time…” Her voice trailed off. “Except I found myself saying yes, even though I knew he proposed to me to get in good with Popsie’s old golfing buddy Thaddeus Bayer, of Bayer, Schwartz and Dunhill. But I can’t complain about being his fast-lane ticket to making partner, not when becoming Mrs. Lance Zellweger’s going to get me what I want.”

“A life like Grammie’s.” I didn’t make it a question. “Membership in the Maplesburg Country Club, a showplace home, the benefits of living in a pretty upstate town while still being able to make a day of it in the Big Apple for shopping and a show. That’s what the two of you want badly enough to marry men you aren’t in love with?”

“You should talk, Megan,” Tashya shot back. “Or are you going to pretend that just thinking of becoming Mrs. Dean Hudson the Third makes you feel like jumping into your hottest Victoria’s Secret baby-dolls and waiting between satin sheets, instead of stifling a big ol’ yawn? You’ve got even less excuse than me and Kat. You’re smart enough to get into Harvard, but you don’t want anything more exciting than Grammie’s life, either.”

“That’s not—” I stopped in mid-denial, the breath going out of me. “Omigod, you’re right,” I said unevenly. “Dean’s an investment banker who’s already starting to lose his hair, and I don’t even think I like him, much less love him. But I’m going to marry him, for the same reason you’re going to marry Todd and Kat’s going to marry Lance…because marrying them is the surest way we know to have the dullest lives we can. What’s that about?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out.” Kat squinted at the pitcher. “Enough for one last round,” she said. I started to shake my head but she ignored me. “Uh-uh, you’re going to want this, big sister. Remember when Grammie was worried about me becoming anorexic and she sent me to Dr. Hawes?”

“Hawes the shrink?” Tash shuddered. “Gawd, everyone at school was whispering that you were going to be shipped off to the nuthouse. That’s why Tommy Baldwin backed out of taking you to the Christmas dance that year, wasn’t it?”

“And took you instead,” Kat agreed. “I always wondered if you had something to do with my appointments with Hawes losing their confidential status, Tash. But I got my revenge.”

Slow comprehension filled Tashya’s gaze. “You were the one who stuck toilet paper to the back of my dress the night of the dance? It took months for me to live that down!”

“Cool it, both of you!” I barked the command sharply enough to get their attention. “In seventeen—” I glanced at my watch and saw it was nearly eleven thirty “—no, sixteen and a half hours, I’m going to walk down the aisle. In the next couple of months, the two of you intend to do the same thing, even though all three of us have just confessed that we’re not real crazy about our prospective grooms. You seem to know why, Kat, so dish!”

She sat back. “Okay, Meg. When I went to see Dr. Hawes I found myself telling him about the nightmares we all had when we were little. I told him I always woke up convinced that you and I and Tashya had been in terrible danger.”

“Well, duh,” Tash broke in. “We were being hunted down in them. Whoever was after us had killed Mom and Dad and wanted to kill us. That might be the danger part, no?”

“You remember that much?” Kat turned her attention my way. “What about you, Megan?”

I guess I should explain something here. It doesn’t happen so much now, but when we were kids our dreams were practically always identical, even though we weren’t. So Kat’s question made perfect sense to me, I just didn’t have a good answer to it.

“When they stopped coming, I let the memory of them fade. All I remember was they left me terrified.”

“They were a bunch of dumb nightmares, for heaven’s sake.” Tash shrugged. “I never tried to suppress them, especially after Popsie told me they came from eating cheese before bedtime.”

“He told us that, too,” Kat informed her. “I guess you were the only one either dumb or logical enough to believe him.”

“Maybe both,” I added. “Sometimes you scare me, Tash.”

Unexpectedly, she grinned. “Sometimes I scare myself.”

Once in a while Tash comes out with a flash of humor that makes me wonder what’s really behind those china-blue eyes and under that cloud of red-gold curls. I also wonder if it isn’t my fault and Kat’s that she usually doesn’t reveal that side of herself.

My nanosecond of soul-searching ended with her next words.

“So the reason we’re all getting married is because of some stupid dreams that made you and Kat wee-wee the bed when we were kids and that made Kat go on an air-and-water diet when she was fifteen. That’s the big theory?”

For a moment I thought Kat was going to give one of those bouncy curls a sharp tug, but she got herself under control. “What I learned was that some girls who slip into anorexia are trying to exert control in the one area of their lives they think they can—their body image. And they do it because sometime in their past they’ve experienced a traumatic event. When Hawes told me that, it all clicked into place for me.”

“What clicked into place?” Tash sounded bored. “And what does your eating disorder six years ago have to do with us now?”

“Because this time we’re all trying to impose control over our lives,” I said slowly. “We’re choosing situations where we can pretty much predict what the next fifty years will be like. We’re almost certain those fifty years will be screamingly boring, and we’ll be spending them with a philandering cosmetic surgeon, a lawyer who’d sell his own mother and an investment banker who probably wears three-piece Brooks Brothers suits to bed, but that’s better than—” I stopped.

“Better than what?”

“Better than what used to cause the nightmares until we started wearing these?” Kat flicked a manicured nail at the tiny silver cross around her neck. It was a mirror image of the ones Tashya and I had on, and so much a part of us that I sometimes forgot we wore them.

“Now you’ve totally lost me.” Tash squinted at hers. “I never really liked having to wear this, not even when we were kids, and I always thought it was kind of dumb that it didn’t have a clasp. If it hadn’t been a present from Grammie, I would have snapped the chain long ago. Now you’re telling me that if I had, my nightmares would have come back?”

She reached for the chain around her throat. The next moment she dropped it beside her empty glass.

“Booga-booga,” she said complacently. “Guess who gets to wear Grammie’s antique pearls at my wedding. And don’t either of you dare tell her I broke her chain on purpose,” she warned.

When I think back on that night I tell myself that if I’d had any kind of premonition at the sight of Tash’s broken chain, I might have saved the three of us from our fate. But I didn’t get a premonition—I just got pissed off at Tash.

“Don’t worry, if I told Grammie anything, I’d tell her you broke the only thing you had to remember our grandfather by.”

“Popsie?” Tash made a face. “God, Meg, if I needed anything to remember Popsie by, which I don’t since it’s not like he’s dead, how about my little Mini sitting outside in the driveway? Or our sweet-sixteen diamond tennis bracelets, or—”

“Not Popsie, you birdbrain, Grandfather Darkzyn. Mom’s father.” There was a tight feeling in me, as if I was standing on the edge of a cliff. “Grammie once told me those crosses were a present from him on our second birthdays, and since he died not long after, I’d say you just broke your only bequest from him. But if you thought you’d be the first Crosse triplet to wear Grammie’s pearls down the aisle, think again. I’m the eldest, so I get them first.” I threw down the gleam of silver chain and the small silver cross I’d just snatched from my neck.

“You forgot to add nya-nya, sweetie,” Kat drawled, picking up Tash’s chain from the table. “And our grandfather’s name was Anton Dzarchertzyn, not Dark—”

Okay, time-out here while you try to put yourself in my place. Remember, I’m talking about Kat, for God’s sake—Kat, whose languid sizzle fells males like trees; Kat, whose favorite reading material is the Mr. Boston Guide to Cocktails. That’s what I tried to tell myself, anyway, but as her head jerked up without warning and her eyes suddenly darkened to dull cloudiness, the person standing between Tash and me no longer seemed to be my sister.

Or if she was, someone—or something—had temporarily done a pod-person number on her.

“One will be the striking talons of the eagle—she will begin the battle.” The harsh, guttural voice rasping from Kat’s throat was as chillingly alien as everything else about her. “The second will be the far-seeing gaze of the eagle, and she will warn of coming danger. The third will be our wings. She will fly us into the very core of the darkness; we pray she proves strong enough to fly us out again. These are our roles and our duty, and have been for all the unlit centuries of night. Without my presence the circle is dangerously open. I close it and form the three.”

Pod-Kat’s hand closed over the chain at her throat. With a sudden tug, she broke it free.

“I get it, all right?” Tash snatched the chain from her. “Just because I had the idea of wearing Grammie’s pearls at my wedding, you and Meg have decided to wear them to yours first. Well, be my guest. The last time she took them out of the safe, they looked like they needed restringing, anyway.” She glared at us. “And forget what I said about not wanting to marry Todd. I can’t wait to get away from your stupid insider jokes at my expense. I’m sure you both think this eagle thing is screamingly funny, but for once your dumb little sister isn’t hanging around for the punch line. I’m going to bed.”

“Somebody has trouble handling her cocktails,” Kat purred. “The punch line to what you call the eagle thing is that we don’t know what you’re talking about, right, Meg?”

She was Kat again, right down to her languid tone, and from what she’d just said, she’d totally blanked on her eerie little performance just now. With difficulty I found my voice. “Wrong, Kat. Striking talons, far-seeing gaze, core of darkness—Any of those sound familiar—?” I nearly jumped out of my skin as I heard the familiar chimes of the front door pealing.

Kat arched her eyebrows a fraction. “Tash is in a worse snit than usual, you’re as nervous as a cat…next time I make appletinis, remind me to cut waaay back on the vodka. Anyone planning on seeing who’s on our doorstep at this time of night? My money’s on a pizza delivery driver with the wrong address.”

“I will.” The glance Tash shot over her shoulder at us as she sped to the door was suddenly hopeful. She came to a halt in front of the mirrored doors of the French armoire that stood in the hall and fluffed up her curls. “Pizza guy my butt! Maybe that dreary party tonight was all part of Mandy’s maneuver to get us home in time to send Meg a totally hot strip-o-gram! I should have guessed she had something more planned!”

Okay. Remember what I said about not having a premonition when Tash took her chain off, and how, if I had, I might have been able to change our fates? Well, the premonition thing finally kicked in as Tash looked through the security peephole. Big whoop, since it was already too late to stop what was about to happen, but of course I didn’t know that at the time.

“Don’t open the door,” I said in a rush. “Those stories you mentioned that are going around about the strip club aren’t the only weird things that have been happening in Maplesburg, Tash. The other day I overheard Popsie telling Grammie that the police have gotten more than the usual number of complaints about Peeping Toms in the last couple of weeks. The thing is, more than half of the women insisted someone was standing outside the upper-story windows of their homes. And like you said, there’s been a rash of job absenteeism and disappearances lately, not just of young guys, but girls, too. Something’s going on in this town. I don’t care if Heath Ledger’s body double is standing on the front step, it’s midnight and we’re three women alone. We’re not going to open the door to a stranger—”

“Oh. My. God.” Tash’s hand was already groping for the doorknob. As I reached her side she turned towards me with an expression on her face that could only be described as glowing. “If I can’t answer the door to a stranger, how about to our fiancés?” she said, her tone oddly breathless. “Because that’s Lance and Todd and Dean out there, sis. But there’s something—” A flush of pink rose up beneath her skin. As her lashes swept down over the blue of her eyes, she bit her bottom lip, as if to stop it from trembling.

I’d seen her like this once before, when I’d barged in on her and Todd going at it hot and heavy in the cloakroom of the country club the night he’d proposed to her. Except that time I’d been pretty sure she’d been faking it, and this time I didn’t think she was.

Her lashes swept dreamily up. “There’s something different about them,” she said in a purr Kat might have envied.

“They’re Lance and Todd and Dean,” I scoffed. “And we agreed earlier that they don’t exactly get our motors racing, so what’s with the cave-girl routine?”

“I’m with Meg.” Kat drifted up beside us, her hand at her mouth to cover a delicate yawn. “We all know what our hubbies-to-be are here for, don’t we? They’ve just come from a stag party. They’re probably a lot drunk and a little frisky—and from one or two unfortunate experiences with former boyfriends, I can tell you that drunk almost always wins out over frisky. If we let them in, we’ll be spending the next two hours stroking their—”

“Egos,” I said firmly. “So turn out the porch light, Tash. That should send the message they’re not getting any tonight.”

Tashya’s hand slid slowly from the doorknob, the dreamy look fading from her gaze. “I guess you’re right,” she said in a puzzled tone. “It’s not like I want Todd thinking he can have it any old time he wants it. What kind of marriage would that be?”

“You think one day Dr. Todd might regret dumping mousy Bev Simmons for our sister?” Kat mused as we turned away.

“Big-time,” I agreed promptly. I hesitated. “Kat, we need to talk. Are you sure you don’t remember spouting off about roles and duty and the closing of the circle by—”

“Oh, merde.”

Her disgusted response wasn’t directed at me, I realized as I followed her gaze and saw Tash looking through the peephole again. Even as I headed grimly back to the door, Tash’s fingers flew over the security keypad to disable the alarm.

“I can’t help it, Meg,” she said in the same breathy voice as before. “I mean, look—have you ever seen three hotter males in your whole life?” She flung the door open as she spoke, and I skidded to a halt. Two feet away, just over the threshold, stood Lance and Todd and Dean.

I tried to swallow, but my throat was suddenly too dry. Tash was right, they were different.

They were incredibly, sexily, irresistible.

Chapter 2

Better take another time-out here.

The thing is, our fiancés weren’t irresistible. Lance had a beefiness about him that even his Armani suits couldn’t conceal, and Todd had boyishly tousled chestnut curls that Kat and I suspected were the result of a body perm. Tash swore they were natural but even so, his eligibility stemmed more from his tax bracket than from devastating good looks.

As for Dean, the two times we’d done the horizontal mambo together I’d nearly nodded off while he’d sat on the edge of the bed folding his boxers and meticulously cuffing his silk socks into flat balls, as if he were packing for camp. When he’d finally joined me, I’d realized that watching him fold his clothes had been the thrilling part, and for the next five and a half minutes—oh, please, every girl checks her watch when she’s with a man like Dean—I occupied myself by weaving a highly creative fantasy that included a couple of gorgeous firemen from the Maplesburg FD, a cop whom I’d flirted out of giving me a speeding ticket the previous day and the sexy mechanic who’d worked on Popsie’s Mercedes the time I’d borrowed it and done something unfortunate to the steering. They’d been hot. Dean and Todd and Lance weren’t.

Except now they were. Dean’s open shirt revealed washboard abs that almost rippled as I looked at them, instead of the incipient little paunch I was used to seeing on him. His thinning blond hair was thinning no longer, but swept back from his forehead in a thick golden cascade that ended up somewhere around his collar. His cheekbones were more prominent than I remembered, hard slabs that matched the new firmness of his jaw.

This last one almost broke through my reverie. Dean’s weak profile had always been his least attractive feature, even trumping his hair. In the dim recesses of my mind a feeble alarm bell rang, telling me that if Dean Hudson the Third had suddenly acquired bone structure a supermodel would sell her soul for, something was really, really wrong with this picture. Instead of listening to it, I impatiently shut it off as my gaze strayed south of Dean’s belt. I sagged against the hall armoire.

My boyfriend had a package. I blinked, shook my head in disbelief, and looked again. It was still there. My boyfriend had a real, honest-to-God package, and it wasn’t the kind that came wrapped up in pretty paper and ribbons, it was the kind that usually came wrapped in a well-worn pair of Levi’s on a bad-boy biker in my daydreams. Dean’s investment-banker suit trousers were straining over the unmistakable bulge, and even as I watched, his zipper notched down a trifle.

I heard a tiny moaning sound, realized it was coming from me and sank my teeth into my lower lip in an effort to get control of myself. Beside me, Tash was making the same kind of low moan.

“So adorable of you boys to drop by.” Kat came up behind us, her sex-goddess drawl tinged with regret the way it always is when she’s about to puncture a male’s hopes. “But you’ll have to take rain checks all round, sweeties. You don’t—”

Her drawl cut off abruptly. I heard her swallow, heard her moan like Tash and I had, and then I heard her huskily ask Lance if he felt like a nightcap…and just as she did the mute button on the alarm bells in my head suddenly released.

“No!” I turned swiftly to her. “Whatever you do, don’t ask them in, Kat! They’re—they’re—” My protest sputtered off as I tried to figure out why I was making it.

“We’re what, honey?” Dean’s voice had a sexy note I’d never heard in it before. “A little bit drunk? A little bit horny?” His eyes, their normal pale blue now a glowing sapphire, met mine and again I felt heat lapping over me.

“A little bit…dead,” I said faintly.

I didn’t know where the words had come from. Confusion filled me, and I opened my mouth to begin an apology—but then I stopped.

Because just for a second I saw what was really standing on our doorstep.

Unbuttoned shirts fluttered open around three rotting chests. Lank clumps of hair barely covered brown, parchment-looking scalps. Even as I watched, Dean leaned casually against the doorframe and a chunk of greenish flesh detached from his fingers. They hadn’t been dead long enough to have become putrid corpses, of course. I realize now that what I saw in that instant was the essence of their deadness.

But the way they looked wasn’t the worst part. That came when I glanced down and saw what remained of their feet: Dean’s in polished Brooks brogues, Lance’s in Italian slip-ons, Todd’s in the ergonomically correct German loafers he swore were the only shoes that could stand up against hard hospital floors.

Admittedly, Todd’s uber-shoes always made me want to fling my hand across my eyes and cry, “The horror, the horror!” but not this time.

Because this time they were hovering an inch or so off the ground…and so were Dean’s brogues and Lance’s slip-ons.

And then they weren’t. All three of our gentlemen callers were standing on solid ground, and as my gaze traveled upwards I saw everything else was back to normal, too. They shimmered. They were gorgeous. They were walking wet dreams and they were here for the fabulously fortunate Crosse triplets. And even if that wasn’t normal, suddenly it seemed so to me.

“A little dead?” Beside me Tash gave a breathy laugh. “Don’t mind her, Toddie. Meg’s been chugging back Kat’s appletinis all evening.”

“So how about it, big guy?” Kat looked through her lashes at Lance. “You up for it? A nightcap, I mean.”

“And anything else you’re offering, beautiful,” her impossibly handsome fiancé growled back. “You inviting us in?”

BING!…Bing!…bing…I firmly shut off the irritating bells that kept fading in and out in my head as Kat replied.

“As tempting as the three of you are, lover, I don’t think my darling sisters would appreciate me poaching on their turf. I’ll let them hand out their own party invitations.” She crooked a pink-polished nail at him, gave him her most smoldering look and began sauntering back into the living room.

Lance looked at Todd and Dean. “The crooking-her-finger thing—unspoken but a definite legal invite, right?”

“Hell, don’t look at me.” Todd raked strong surgeon’s fingers through his chestnut curls, and even as Dean’s locked-and-loaded state sent erotic shivers down my spine, I indulged myself in imagining what Dr. Todd’s dexterous fingers could do to a girl. “I’m the schmuck who figured if a nurse’s aide was batting her eyes at me, I had the green light to hustle her sweet ass into the laundry cupboard and give her my best bedside manner, and we all know how that turned out. Sure, the little tramp was fired, but I almost got hauled up before the hospital board. I’d say the crooked-finger thing’s a tease.”

“That was a no-means-no situation, Whitmore.” Dean saw me watching him and gave me a devastating grin before turning to Lance. “Unlike our groping friend here, Zellweger, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a shot. See what happens when you try to cross the threshold.”

I can’t explain it. Tash says she can’t, either. We both stood there and listened to this conversation, and neither one of us found anything weird about it. All I felt was a kind of dizzy impatience to get Dean alone and out of his clothes, and I couldn’t understand why they were still standing there.

Neither could Kat, apparently. “Come on in and help me whip up more appletinis, gorgeous,” she murmured as she passed by on her way to the kitchen with the empty pitcher dangling from her fingertips. “Why waste time making nice with the brat and the brain when you could be with the only Crosse sister who can tie a cherry stem with her tongue in three seconds flat?”

“That’s my cue, boys.” A sharklike grin on his face, Lance stepped over the threshold and into the house. “Think you can perform that trick without the cherry, babe?” he asked as his hand slipped around to Kat’s tush.

Kat, who’s made it clear in the past that she doesn’t appreciate being handled like a melon being tested for ripeness, gurgled sexily. “I can try. Let’s find some privacy while your dreary future sisters-in-law are deciding whether they’re women enough to handle what their fiancés can give them.”

“Women enough? What a total bitch!” Tash sputtered in outrage as Kat led Lance down the hall into the kitchen.

My attention was temporarily diverted from Dean. “But being obviously bitchy isn’t like Kat. Do you think she’s—”

“She could be right.” Todd’s superheated look at Tash held a hint of dubiousness. “If you’re still set on waiting until after the ceremony tomorrow, princess, I can respect that. I think I’ll head on back to the Hot Box, okay?”

“The Hot Box?” Tash’s gaze narrowed. “Listen, Pookie, whatever my cherry-stem-tying slut of a sister says, I can show you a whole lot better time than some boob-job recipient in a G-string. Get in here and I’ll show you.”

Okay, the Crosse triplets could never be mistaken for Jo and Beth and Amy of Little Women. I mean, even now I was storing away the intriguing tidbit Todd had let slip about Tash rationing out the sugar until she was well and truly Mrs. Doctor. Tash had given the impression that her prowess in bed was so amazing her formerly tomcatting fiancé didn’t have the energy to look at other women anymore. But there’s a line we don’t cross, and both Tash and Kat had just jumped eagerly over it. First off, we never diss each other in front of anyone else—not seriously, that is. Secondly, we don’t use what Grammie calls “gutter-talk.” Bitch didn’t quite make that category. Slut did. And Kat’s slam about us not being women enough was unforgivable.

So, as a panting Tash yanked Todd into the house, I reached out to do the same to Dean…and then let my hand drop. I turned to watch her flounce up the stairs, Todd so close behind her you couldn’t have slipped a piece of paper between them.

Weak-kneed lust warred with sisterly concern in me. I credit Grammie’s steel-under-marshmallow upbringing with the fact that concern won, at least, temporarily. “I should go after them,” I sighed. “If she’s been holding out all this time only to let Kat goad her into it at this late date, she’s going to hate herself in the morning.”

“Sooner than that.” Dean’s voice was velvet. “Honey, let her and Todd play doctor while you and I occupy ourselves with our own game. Wanna start out on the sofa, maybe move to the floor when things start heating up?”

My mouth went dry and every other part of me felt hot and wet. “The floor?” I repeated huskily.

He held out his hand. “You’ll need room to go crazy while I lick every inch of you. You’ll need even more room to go out of your mind when I give you your big present, little girl.”

I ask you: who listens to a line like that with a straight face? Okay, all of us, at one time or another, but inside we’re doing a mental eye-rolling, if not actually gagging. But gazing adoringly at Dean, I bought into it unquestioningly.

“Big…present?” I extended my hand. His fingers folded over mine tightly enough that I winced, but somehow the pain was exciting. “So what are you waiting for? Come in and let’s start unwrapping it.” I felt the standing-on-a-cliff sensation shudder through me for the second time that evening, gave his hand a tug—

And felt my bones turn to ice as my sisters’ screams tore through the house.

I ripped my hand from Dean’s and yanked open the hall armoire’s doors. “Hit the alarm monitor beside you!” I shrieked, reaching to the back of the hat shelf. “Someone’s broken into the house! Tash and Todd must have walked in on someone upstairs and maybe Kat and Lance surprised someone else in the kitchen!”

Where I came up with the double-set-of-intruders scenario is still a mystery to me, but at the time my glamyr-fogged mind seized on it as the only possible explanation for my sisters’ screams. My fingers found the objects I was looking for at the back of the hat shelf—Popsie’s ancient revolver and the box of ammunition that went with it. A few summers ago he’d insisted all three of us receive qualified instruction on how to handle it, overriding Grammie’s objections with the argument that in the time it took for the police to arrive, knowing how to use a gun could save us from being raped, or worse. Bullets spilled to the floor as I loaded it. “I’ll take the kitchen, you go upstairs for Tash! The police should get—”

“You really are as dumb as I always thought you were, aren’t you?” Dean gave the armoire a careless push. It gouged its way across seven feet of Colonial heart-pine floorboards before coming to a halt in front of the alarm keypad on the wall by the open front door. The next moment he’d batted Popsie’s revolver halfway across the room. “Get the picture now, sweet thing?” he asked in the velvet voice that only minutes ago had been turning my knees to rubber.

I stared at him, my mind not processing the fact that he’d one-handedly shoved across the floor a piece of furniture that had taken four able-bodied men to move when Grammie’d had it delivered. “What’s the matter with you? We’ve got to help Kat and Tash!” Without waiting for his reply I ran to the living room, grabbed the gun from where it had landed on the sofa and began sprinting to the kitchen.

I hit the floor so hard that one of my shoes flew off. Pain pierced my left butt cheek as a heart-pine sliver inserted itself through my skirt into my tush. I looked up in shock.

I’d run full tilt into Dean’s washboard abs…which was impossible. He’d been standing a good fifteen feet away from me as I’d started my dash into the kitchen from the living room. He hadn’t run from the hall to intercept me or somehow leapt those fifteen feet, he’d simply been at the door one moment and in front of me the next. In the split second between those two positions he’d slid sideways…not across the floor but through the air, like a chess piece being moved by an invisible hand onto a more offensive square.

As he looked down at me, I saw space between his feet and the floor, but when he spoke, the fact that my fiancé was defying the laws of gravity fell to second place in the creepy sweepstakes.

“Forget your sisters, bitch! Help yourself!”

His voice was still velvet, but now it was dirt-stiffened velvet. It was velvet that had been used as a corpse-cloth and was stained with unidentifiable fluids. And if that sounds as though I was still feeling the effects of the appletinis, all I can say is that by then I was stone-cold sober and desperately wishing there was a stiff cocktail within reach to numb my senses. All five of them were telling me stuff I didn’t want to know, and my sixth sense had gone to Def-Con One with the alarm bells again.

“Uh-uh.” From my seat on the floor, I forced the words past my stiff lips. “You can’t be. They don’t exis—” Dean’s canines, razor-sharp and gleaming, lengthened past his bottom lip and I couldn’t deny the evidence any longer.

My fiancé was a vampire. And if he was, then it was perfectly possible that Lance and Todd were, too. Kat and Tashya were still screaming, but even as I decided to make it a triplet thing, Dean lunged.

He hadn’t been a vampire for very long, as I’ve since learned. Maybe his newbie status was the reason for his coordination being off just enough that I had the chance to roll out of his way. I cracked my kneecap a good one against the Sheraton table in front of the sofa, scrambled backwards on my splinter-stabbed butt, and suddenly realized I still clutched Popsie’s revolver. I cocked it and fired.

If any goth-types reading this are thinking, God, how stupid can this chick be not to know vampires can’t be killed with lead? I have two things to say to you. One: I hoped the books and movies were wrong on that; and two: a couple of black dresses are admittedly a good starting point for a wardrobe, but at a certain stage, why not consider adding a few pale neutrals?

The books and movies weren’t wrong on the lead bullet thing. Dean looked down at his six-pack torso where the entry wound was already closing up. “It’s all true.” His voice had gone back to sounding sexy, but it wasn’t working on me anymore. I glanced frantically at the Sheraton table, which in the past I’d dismissed as a fake antique Grammie had paid too much for, but which my newly-appreciative gaze now saw as a flat surface supported by four legs that might just work as stakes. “I’ve got a ripped body, a full head of hair and I can’t be killed. This is the best investment I ever made in my life!”

“Correction—you can’t be killed by an ordinary bullet.” I jumped to my feet, hoisting the Sheraton table and smashing it against the floor. The table leg I held broke free. “But from all I’ve heard, a stake’ll do the job just fine!”

Not the snappiest line, but the best I could manage under the circumstances. Dean’s expression was one of unholy glee, unholy being the operative word. His eyes no longer looked sapphire, but black, and the snarl erupting from him didn’t sound like anything human.

I plunged my makeshift stake into his heart.

That was the plan, anyway. The problem was that Grammie’s Sheraton table turned out to be the real deal and not a sturdy fake. Even as I drove the leg against his muscled chest it broke, leaving me with a stub of worm-eaten oak in my hand.

Dean snarled again and attacked.

I had one quick glimpse of his face, distorted by rage into something out of a nightmare, and then his right palm came blurring toward me. It connected with my cheekbone so solidly that my head whipped sideways and the rest of me followed. I fell onto the sofa, bounced once and tumbled to the floor.

“She said there was a price!” He yanked me up by my blouse. It ripped and he transferred his grip to my shoulder, his fingers digging into me like knives. “We’d get everything we’d ever dreamed of in exchange for killing you three and I’m not about to let you screw up my part of the—”

My knee came up instinctively. Here’s a tidbit of information you might thank me for one day: vamps react to a kick in the family jewels just the way any human creep would. Dean gave a high-pitched scream and doubled over. I turned to run.

“You bitch!” He grabbed me by my hair. My feet flew out from under me, but as I fell I felt a tug at the back of my head and I was free. I saw Popsie’s revolver sticking out from underneath the sofa, and stupidly I reached for it again. It caught on something but I didn’t let that stop me.

“What the hell?” As I twisted around to face Dean I saw his rage-filled expression temporarily replaced by one of pure male bafflement. I took in the object he was holding and pure female irritation temporarily replaced my fear.

“It’s a hair extension,” I said coldly. “I had some woven in for the wedding.”

He let it drop, his brief flash of non-undeadness falling away with it. “Maybe they’ll bury it with you. Or maybe there won’t be enough of you to bury when I’m finished.”

He was on me before I had chance to do anything more than thumb back the hammer on the revolver, but as I felt my ribs start to give way under the pressure of his embrace when he pulled me to him and went for my neck, I knew it didn’t matter. Gun or no gun, from the moment I’d invited him into the house I hadn’t had a chance of getting out of this alive. From the absence of screams coming from the kitchen and the upstairs, Kat and Tashya hadn’t had a chance, either.

The thing that had once been Dean Hudson the Third crushed me to its chest, the tips of its teeth poised against the thudding pulse in my neck. I closed my eyes, prayed Grammie wouldn’t be the one to discover her granddaughters’ bodies, and felt my former fiancé go in for the kill.

Which is when Popsie’s old revolver went off.

The explosion was deafening, even muffled as it was by the fact that the gun was jammed between us. Dean jerked backwards, his gaze mocking. “You’re supposed to be the smart one, Megan, but you’re just as blond as your sisters, aren’t you? I already told you, I can’t be killed with a—”

Surprise crossed his chiseled features. He opened his eyes wide, looked down at the still-smoking hole in his pumped left pec, and then looked back at me. “Fuck!” he said in an aggrieved tone. “I only had eternal life for a couple of hours, damn—”

He didn’t finish his sentence because his mouth turned into dust. His mouth and every other part of him, to be exact. For a moment dust-Dean just stood there. Then the dust lost its shape and fell in a greasy heap to the floor by my hair extension.

The only reason I can give for what I did next is that I was in shock. Instead of fainting dead away or throwing up or forcing my rubbery legs to move, I bent down to look at the Dustbuster-fodder my ex-fiancé had turned into. The thought flickered briefly through me that I should feel something at Dean’s demise, since to quote my earlier words to Tash, I’d been planning to do the till-death-us-do-part thing with him.

Except death hadn’t parted us. Not even his undeath had, although his becoming a vamp had definitely widened the chasm. But if the events of this evening hadn’t happened and we’d spent our whole lives together, there would have been a big, empty gap where our marriage should have been. As Kat had admitted about her and Lance, we’d just been a means to an end for each other. As I peered closer at what was left of Dean, I realized all I felt was relief that I’d killed him before he’d killed me.

His remains were as yawn-inducing as he’d once been—just a greasy pile that looked like something Smokey the Bear would want you to kick sand over if you were on a camping trip, except for the misshapen silver blob capping the lead bullet in the middle of the ashes. The melted blob was attached to the one of the silver chains Tash and Kat and I had torn off our necks earlier this evening. They’d obviously ended up under the sofa when I’d grabbed the Sheraton table, and one of them had tangled around the barrel of Popsie’s revolver.

I was looking at a homemade silver bullet, I realized slowly, and somewhere under the sofa were the materials for two more. If Lance and Todd hadn’t sunk their fangs into my sisters’ necks yet, I might still save them.

Even as the wild hope ran through me, I dropped to my knees and began feeling under the sofa. I snagged one chain, scrabbled farther under the sofa to snag the other and leapt to my feet. The next moment I was racing to the kitchen, dropping the first chain and cross down the barrel of Popsie’s revolver as I ran.

“Nuh-uh.” The scornful tones of Tash came from halfway up the staircase. “Bullets don’t work. Neither does Mace, as I found out. You gotta use one of these, apparently.”

She held up a broken length of wood. From the pineapple carving that topped it, I recognized it as part of one of her canopy bed’s posts but I didn’t waste time with questions.

“Throw it here! I’ll use it to stake Lance—”

“Sorry, sweetie, I already took care of him.” Kat’s drawl sounded a little ragged around the edges and her Alexander McQueen bustier top was destined to join my ruined skirt in the garbage, but she mustered a weak smile as she brandished a broken wooden mixing spoon. “I thought you two might need backup, but it looks like all three of us did good on the vamp-slaying, no?” She made a little moue with her lips. “Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever say. I don’t know about you two, but I really need normal right now. Anyone up for a little drink—”

“Foolish!”

The thickly accented rumble came from the doorway. It says volumes for the Crosse triplets’ state of alertness that we simply stared at the figure who had delivered it instead of rushing at him with our weapons. Tash recovered first.

“We deny you entrance to our home’s threshold,” she said swiftly. She frowned. “And that means to our home, too, if you need it spelled out. Like, you can’t come in. You need our permission and we totally withhold it and deny it and—”

“Did you remove holy protections out of vanity? Did you think they were simple baubles?” As our unexpected visitor thundered across Tash’s babbling he stepped forward and entered the house. “I believed those who bore my blood would have more wisdom, but I was wrong. Your foolishness almost brought you death!”

Whoever he was, since he’d been able to enter without our permission, he wasn’t a vamp. He looked to be about Popsie’s age or maybe a little older, and his accent sounded Russian. A homespun cloak was flung over his shoulders and a heavy gold ring glinted on his left hand, but the most striking thing about him were his eyes. They were dark and piercing, and right now they were regarding us with less disapproval than when he’d entered.

“However, your courage and skill saved you, so I pray is still hope for you.” He swept off his cloak and inclined his head in an oddly formal gesture. “Forgive me, I have not properly presented myself. My name is Anton Dzarchertzyn…but if is easier, you may call me Grandfather Darkheart.”

Chapter 3

“And you can call me from hell when you get there, creep!”

“No, Tash! He’s not a vam—” Before I could finish my warning my youngest sister launched her pineapple post in an overhand throw. As I leaped toward the old man, hoping to push him out of the way, I saw the missile slice unerringly through the air at his chest.

Something huge and black blurred across my sight line. I heard a furious growl as the shape propelled itself upward, and then the hell beast was upon me, Tash’s post between its slavering jaws. I fell backward, my attention fully focused on the enormous dog standing over me, his teeth no longer clamped into part of Tash’s canopy bed but bared inches from my throat.

Wolflike golden eyes held mine. A wolflike silver-tipped ruff stood up around a snarling wolfish face and massively muscled wolflike front legs were planted on either side of me.

“Call off your damn wolf.” Kat’s voice was steady, but then, she wasn’t the one in danger of becoming a canine snack. “This gun might not be much use against vamps but I’m pretty sure it could blow White Fang there to kingdom come.”

“Mikhail, release!”

The man who was trying to pass himself off as our dead grandfather gave the command sharply. The animal—I really wished Kat hadn’t used the W-word—let a low growl trickle from its throat. It slowly backed up until it was standing by its master and gave me a final burning glance before bounding out through the open front door into the night.

I got to my feet. I had a sliver in my butt, I’d ruined an outfit and I’d gotten way too up-close and personal with pointed white teeth in the past hour. Add in the fact that my fiancé had made a deal that included him getting turned into a vamp in return for killing me and you’ll understand why my party manners were a little the worse for wear as I turned to our visitor.

Doing a good impersonation of a marine drill instructor minus the flying spittle, I shoved my face close to his and pointed at the door. “Your scam’s not going to work. We happen to know that our Grandfather Darch…Grandfather Dzark…”

“He said we could call him Darkheart,” Tash supplied from the stairs.

I ignored her. “We know our mom’s father died years ago, so whoever you are and whatever you’re after, you screwed up! You’re lucky you happened to catch us in the middle of a situation that puts you near the bottom of our headache list for now, but if you and your highly illegal pet aren’t off this property in three seconds I’m calling the police!”

“And the dogcatcher,” Tash threatened. “Even if you can afford to bail Cujo out of the pound, they’re still going to make you pay for the snip-snip operation they give all strays. So if you don’t want—”

From the darkness outside came a growl. I cut Tash short. “One.” I folded my arms. “Two.” The old man stared steadily back at me and I felt my confidence begin to evaporate. He was obviously some kind of kook, dressed the way he was and with a semi-tame wolf as a sidekick. What if he refused to leave? I glanced sideways at Kat and saw from her frown that she was thinking along the same lines as I was.

The three of us had just whacked our fiancés. Granted, there weren’t any bodies lying around, but there was definite evidence something had happened here tonight. And although Dean’s no-show status at our wedding tomorrow might be chalked up to cold feet and Todd’s and Lance’s absence at the same function as solidarity with his sudden desire to stay a bachelor, eventually an investigation would be launched into their disappearances. Did I really want a report on file stating that the night before the ceremony, the home of the missing men’s future brides had resembled a war zone, with said brides looking suspiciously like the survivors of said zone?

“If we call the police we’ll have to file a complaint and we won’t get to bed for hours, Meg,” Kat said with elaborate casualness. “Since we weren’t taken in by our visitor’s con there’s really no harm done. I say we let him leave—”

“One will be striking talons of eagle!” the old man interrupted harshly. “One will warn of coming danger and third will fly into core of darkness! By blood of all slayers before you, including mother, is vital you believe. Battle has already begun and we have no time to waste!”

He didn’t know it, but he’d blown it. Halfway through his eagle rant I’d been one wide-eyed gasp away from throwing skepticism to the wind, even though I knew there was a possibility he’d been lurking outside the house and had heard Kat when she’d said those very same words. But by bringing our mother into his little scam he’d pushed the envelope too far.

Grammie and Popsie have always done their best to make Mom and Daddy real for us. But Kat and Tash and I have an unspoken agreement to leave the subject of our mother…well, unspoken between us. When the Russian made the mistake of trying to use her to convince us, my immediate reaction was fury.

And if behind the fury I felt an awakening dread, I didn’t bother to examine that, either.

I opened my mouth to tell him where he could shove his eagle, but he spoke first, his glare fading. “I should not blame you,” he said heavily. “You know nothing of duties that have been yours throughout all unlit—”

“‘Throughout all the unlit centuries of night.’” Kat’s face paled. “‘Without my presence the circle is dangerously open. I close it and form the three.’ Oh, God, it’s what I said just before everything went crazy, isn’t it? How could I have blanked something like that out so completely? And how you could you know those words unless—” she swallowed “—unless you really are our grandfather. What happened here tonight was connected in some way to our mother, wasn’t it?”

“Our mother the vampire killer. Yeah, right,” Tash said, her tone dripping sarcasm. “Don’t tell me you believe him, Kat. You’re probably still on edge from…” Her words trailed off. “From vamp-slaying,” she said hollowly. “Omigod…we’re hereditary slayers?”

“We’re hereditary normal American girls, is what we are,” I said tightly. “You said it yourself, Kat—Boris here’s a con man, using a few scraps of information he somehow gathered about our grandfather to pull a scam on us. We’re vamp slayers? Mom was a slayer?” The illogical dread I hadn’t acknowledged a moment earlier was suddenly as impossible to ignore as a grenade with its pin pulled. Desperately I tried to defuse it. “I’ll admit Dean and Lance and Todd behaved like total pigs when they showed up here tonight, and even that we had to fight them off. The rest just couldn’t have happened the way we remember.” In my mind I saw Dean crumbling to dust, but I thrust the vision aside and grabbed at the only acceptable explanation. “It’s more likely that the appletinis we knocked back are making us recall things a little foggily.”

“That you try to deny is no surprise to me.” The Russian shook his head, watching me closely. “But in your heart you know the truth, granddaughter. You must face it.”

“Megan’s the Queen of Denial, Grandpa Darkheart,” Tash broke in impatiently. She turned to me. “There’s a big ol’ pile of greasy dust upstairs that used to be my boyfriend, another in front of the sofa over there, and I’m betting there’s a third dust pile in the kitchen. I know it sounds crazy, sis, but since we now have proof that vamps exist, isn’t it kind of reassuring to find out we’re genetically equipped to handle them?” She frowned thoughtfully. “When I snapped off that bedpost and staked Todd, I was like Yes! You go, Tash! And I totally didn’t understand where that was coming from because I’m so against violence usually, but now that I know I’ve got slaying in my blood, it makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Kat contradicted. “But given that nothing else that’s happened in the past hour does, either, I agree with Tash, Megan. If Grandfather Darkheart’s correct and some kind of battle’s already begun, you’d better start believing in this triplet slayer business pretty fast, sweetie.”

The old Russian’s steel-gray eyebrows pulled together. “Nyet. Only one of you is true Daughter of Lilith—a slayer, as they say in your American televideniye shows. The other two may kill vampyrs, but through luck and determination, not because they inherit title from mother.”

Something inside me snapped. “Nyet to all of it, Boris! Our mom wasn’t a slayer, she was a part-time translator at the New York firm where our father worked after graduating from Harvard Law. Two weeks after she and Dad met, they got married,” I said, my voice shaking, “and Grammie’s told me a million times how happy Mom was in the role of a wife and mother—so happy that it was only at the urging of my father that she agreed to a trip back to her home country. Not as imaginative as your scenario of her being a cut-rate Buffy, perhaps, but that’s the way it was.”

“She did not want to make journey home?” I had to admit it, the old fraud was good. The rawness in his voice seemed almost real. “She still had not forgiven me,” he said in an undertone. “If she had never forgiven, tragedy might not have come so soon.”

His fake pain was the last straw. “My parents’ deaths are none of your business,” I said tightly. “It was a tragedy that their car went off a cliff during their visit home, but if you think you can use that tragedy to bolster whatever false claim you’re—”

“They did not die from car going over cliff.” He gave a firm shake of his head. “That is what everyone was supposed to believe, but—”

“But nothing!” I yelled. “She was killed in an accident, not by a vampire, and she was an ordinary woman, not a Daughter of Lilith or whatever you want to call it!” I rounded on Kat and Tashya, but they were a blur, because sometime in the last second my eyes had flooded with tears. “Don’t you understand, we have to keep believing that! In his version our nightmares were real!”

The words were out there and there was no way to call them back. My gaze sought Kat’s, hoping for her particular brand of languid reassurance, but it was Tash who broke the silence.

“But in my nightmares Mom died trying to save—” Her eyes widened and a shutter fell behind her gaze. “You’re right, Megan, they just can’t be real,” she said huskily. “They were just nightmares that I can blame on cheese or my imagination or watching a scary movie before bed. That’s the only way I can handle them.”

“Same here.” Kat’s fingers went to her neck, as if she expected to feel the familiar silver chain and cross around it and her other hand tightened on the revolver. “I think I’ll go with my sister’s version, Grandfath—” She caught herself and her voice hardened. “I dumped too much vodka into the mix tonight. You’re a fake. There’s no such thing as vampires, we’re not Daughters of Lilith, and the nightmares we used to have when we were kids were just that—nightmares. Now get out of our house before I’m forced to use this gun.”

The three of us were standing shoulder to shoulder. The old man’s hooded gaze swept from Tashya to Kat before coming to rest on me, but when he spoke it was obvious his words were directed more at himself.

“There is no strength in blindness, and without strength they will not live through another night. I must do what I had hoped not to do.” Before he finished speaking I took a step toward him, but as I took a second step I froze. “It is time, Mikhail.” The Russian didn’t look down at the wolf that had silently materialized from the darkness outside. “Show them!”

Like its master, the beast stared straight at me, but unlike the man’s gaze, the animal’s glowed with hatred. “Kat, get ready to shoot,” I said tensely, not looking away from the wolf. “I think Cujo’s about to—”

Watch!

The one-word command exploded in my head. I looked at the Russian, but his eyes were closed and his mouth was set in an anguished line. My glance darted from Kat on one side of me to Tash on the other, and the chill in me intensified. They were both staring straight ahead, and as I watched I saw tears glaze the china-blue of Tash’s gaze. From her parted lips came a low moan of terror. I broke through the paralysis gripping me.

“Stop it!” I tugged the revolver from Kat’s limp fingers. Turning back to the wolf, I jammed the barrel between his eyes, my hands shaking so badly that the gun knocked against his skull. His glare on me didn’t waver. I thumbed back the revolver’s hammer. “Whatever you’re doing to my sisters, stop it right now or I’ll blast you to—”

My throat slammed shut in midsentence. A giant hand seemed to squeeze painfully around my heart. As if I were in a speeding train rushing toward a tunnel, blackness suddenly blotted out everything but the hypnotically glowing gaze in front of me. From a long distance away I heard the gun hitting the floor, and at the sound I made a last attempt to struggle free from whatever was about to envelop me.

But I was already enveloped, not by darkness, because my vision was slowly returning, but by a thick, homespun…cape?

Instinctively I began to pull the heavy fabric from my shoulders. Then the same moan of terror I’d heard Tash make rose in my own throat. I thrust my hand out in disbelief.

It wasn’t mine. It was a man’s right hand—an older man’s, judging from the veining beneath the work-worn skin. That wasn’t all; the shoulders over which the cape was flung were broad and solid, like the rest of the body I seemed to be trapped in, and even my mind didn’t feel entirely my own anymore. When I tried to scream, the voice that came out of my mouth wasn’t mine, and although I had no trouble understanding the words, they were in a language I’d never spoken.

“Pridyl slishkom pozdno.” I have arrived too late. My—his—mutter was shot through with anguish. His—my?—feet stumbled on a rough path that led to a Hansel-and-Gretel cottage before carrying us up the stone steps to the cottage’s half-open door.

As I saw the heavy gold ring on the middle finger of the left hand that pushed the door fully open, any last doubts I had vanished and pure terror sluiced through me.

I was back in the nightmare that had haunted me as a child. But this time I was experiencing it as my grandfather had experienced it…

He was too late.

Bursting through the front door, Anton Dzarchertzyn almost fell over the body of the son-in-law he’d never met. He swept his travel-stained cloak aside and crouched quickly, his fingers seeking a wound he prayed not to find. He rose, relieved that his prayer had been answered, and pushed through the door at the end of the hall.

From the still-smoking spots on the floor, it was evident the young blond woman had killed two of them already. As he moved to her side she smashed a wooden chair against the wall and was left grasping a splintered leg that still had a partial rung attached. Quickly he held out the object he’d taken from under his cloak in the hall.

“Use this!”

If his daughter felt any surprise at seeing the father she’d once angrily thrust from her life standing beside her now, she showed no sign. She spun toward him and snatched the stake from his grasp, turned again to confront the thing rushing at her, and plunged the sharpened yew-wood into its chest.

The vampyr was a young woman with short black hair curving onto her cheekbones. Her paleness was an indication she hadn’t fed recently, Anton knew, and now she never would again. He turned away. A moment later he heard the rattle of wood striking wood and he turned back.

The stake lay on the floor. A few ashes clung to it, but as he looked they sifted into nothingness, leaving a third charred spot. His daughter grabbed up the stake and faced him.

“I told myself that if I was careful, my family would be safe,” she said, her voice ragged. “I let David convince me that even though you didn’t approve of our marriage, you had the right to meet your granddaughters at least once. If I hadn’t come back here, he’d still be alive, damn you!”

Anton shook his head, understanding that her anger at him stemmed from intolerable grief. “Eventually the one who calls herself a queen would have found you and yours, my daughter. While you grieve for your husband, console yourself with the knowledge that you fulfilled your destiny when you sent her to hell.” Revulsion swept through him. “God grant that the fiery hair she was so proud of is now truly alight for all eternity.”

His daughter’s face blanched. “I killed this one and two males. What do you mean, a queen vampyr with fiery red—” From a room upstairs came a faint mewling cry, swiftly cut off. Anton read the truth in her terror-flooded gaze a split second before her words confirmed it. “The triplets! She’s with my babies!”

She pushed violently by him, racing through the hall to the flight of stairs he’d seen as he’d entered the house. He sped after her, his heart a stone in his chest.

Red hair rippled down the back of the queen vampyr’s garnet velvet gown as she bent over one of the three cribs lined against the wall of the nursery. That much Anton glimpsed before his daughter pulled her from the crib and the stake in her hand sank into the vampyr’s breast. Blood, ancient and black, spilled over the velvet bodice, filling the air in the room with the stench of a charnel-house. Letting the stake fall from her hand, his daughter turned to the cribs.

The Queen of Darkness fell upon her.

“Nyet!” Anton grabbed up the stake. Even as his fingers closed around it his daughter fell backward into him, released from the vampyr’s grasp. Instinctively he caught her…and then instinctively he recoiled.

“Yes, staryj vrag.” The mocking whisper sounded like burning bells on a hell-steed’s bridle. Lifting his stricken gaze from the twin trails of blood running down his daughter’s neck, Anton Dzarchertzyn saw a smile curve the red lips of the thing standing in the doorway. “I have tasted her, as you see. When the Daughter of Lilith is one of my creatures I will insist her attacks be more on target, but this time her rash aim was to my advantage. Before another night passes she will be hunting with me, not against me.” A pale finger touched the already congealing blood high on her breast and was raised to parted red lips. A pointed red tip of a tongue flicked out and the blood disappeared. “Unless, of course, you do what you must to prevent her from becoming mine. I will be waiting to see if she comes to me, old man.”

A soft rustle of velvet and she was out of sight. A harsher rustle, like stiff wings unfolding, seemed to come from halfway down the stairs. Anton heard the front door slam shut.

Slowly he lowered his daughter to the floor. As he cradled her to him her eyes, blue and unfocused, met his.

“I missed her heart. I failed, Father!” The admission escaped her in a whisper. “I tried to forget who and what I was, and my skills grew rusty. I have shamed my heritage…but thank God I stopped her before she harmed my daughters.”

The trembling of her hand was a sign that the poison was traveling through her and unconsciously his gaze moved to the stake on the floor. He looked back to see her watching him.

“Now I ask you to keep me from further harm, too, Father, and protect me in the only way possible. But first give me your word that my daughters will be safe.”

“It shall be done. A home will be found for the little ones here in their mother’s country—”

“No!” Blue eyes blazed at him. “They will have the life I once thought I could have—an ordinary life far from the shadows and ancient blood-obligations of the old country! I want my daughters to have the opportunity to live without realizing such evil exists in this world…to live without ever knowing the burden of being Daughters of Lilith! Besides, the queen will anticipate you will keep them here. If you truly care for your granddaughters, deliver them to my husband’s parents and stay out of their lives!”

In her agitation she gripped his arm, her clutch upon him weak. Suddenly Anton felt faint strength flowing into her fingers, and from the fear that crossed his daughter’s face he knew she understood as well as he did what that growing strength meant. She released him.

“It is beginning,” she said flatly. “Do what you must, and do it quickly.”

“Yes.” His voice sounded like dry leaves blowing across a November landscape, Anton thought. Once it had thundered at her, argued with her, tried to bend her to his will, all to no avail. From childhood she had taken risks that had stopped his heart in fear, shown defiance that had made it beat faster in anger; and throughout all her days she had been the skylark of his mornings, the dancing firefly of his dusks, the glowing star that warmed his world.

Did she understand that? Was it too late to tell her?

“I know, Father.” Her eyes holding his, she put the stake into his hand. “Even when the rift between us was as wide as an ocean, I knew you loved me as I love you. I have your vow that my daughters will come to no harm?”

“You have my vow,” Anton said. He felt his heart break.

“Then strike the blow and deliver my soul to God,” his daughter whispered.

Anton Dzarchertzyn raised the stake. He saw the light begin to fade from the blue eyes fixed on his, saw the dark sickness start creeping across them, and he brought it down in a sudden sweeping plunge toward his daughter’s—

“No!” My eyes flew open as the scream tore from me, and I saw that I was no longer in the room where my mother had died twenty years ago. Even better, I was back in my own body again—although from the waves of disorientation passing over me and the fact that I was on my hands and knees on the floor, I’d forced my little astral projection jaunt or whatever it had been to end far too abruptly.

Tash had been right, our mother had died trying to save us. So had our father, but his violent death hadn’t been tainted with the fear that those he was fighting had turned him into one of them. I remembered my grandfather’s fingers checking for tell-tale puncture wounds on my father’s neck, and his relief when he’d found they weren’t there.

Comrade Boris was who he’d said he was: Anton Dzarchertzyn, or as he’d told us to call him, Grandfather Darkheart. It was no use trying to persuade myself he was a fake anymore, not after the proof Cujo had somehow just made me watch. And if Boris was the real deal, then his assertion that we were hereditary vampire killers was probably—

I jerked my head up in alarm. Where was everybody? My panic subsided as I heard Tash’s and Kat’s voices mingling with Darkheart’s somber tones in the living room. It made sense. They’d gone into the trance before I had, so they’d come out sooner. Now they had questions and Boris—I mean, Grandfather—was apparently answering them.

Which left one member of our late-night get-together unaccounted for. Cujo. White Fang. Mikhail of the glowing golden eyes.

I heard a noise behind me. My gaze fell on the revolver, still lying where it had fallen earlier. I lunged for it and did a sitting whirl on my butt.

The man standing before me was gorgeous. Six-three, at least, and every one of those inches prime, buff male. He was wearing jeans, a ripped white T-shirt and a beat-up brown hide jacket that looked as if there hadn’t been too many steps between the cow wearing it and the man putting it on. His hair was shaggy enough to graze his dark eyebrows, but short enough not to do more than brush the collar of his jacket, and its mixture of midnight-black strands tipped with pewter was ultrasexy in a funky, right-out-there kind of way. But everything else took second place to his eyes. They were an amazing hazel shade—sparks of green swirling in a to-die-for golden brown, although even as I let myself fall into them I realized that they were staring at me with the same implacable enmity I’d seen in—

The blood in my veins went from pleasantly heated to chilled. My arms shot out stiffly, aiming the revolver I was clutching directly at the man looking down on me.

“But how…You’re the…” I filled my lungs with some much-needed air and tried to form a complete sentence. “Cujo?”

Granted, a one-word sentence, but he seemed to catch my drift. His glare hardened. “Mikhail Vostor-off. I’m an oboroten—a shape-shifter. But even when I’m in human form I’ve got a wolf’s reflexes, so I advise you to put the gun down before you get hurt.”

God, I hate it when gorgeous guys turn out to be world-class jerks. The shape-shifter thing didn’t bother me after everything else I’d experienced that night, but the fact that tall, dark and handsome Mikhail was an arrogant prick did.

Put the gun down before I got hurt? Could the man be more patronizing?

“Yawn,” I said sweetly. “My reflexes are pretty darn fast, too, Mikey-baby. Us Daughters of Lilith are well-known for the fast-reflex thing, in case you hadn’t heard.”

I caught the gleam of white teeth before his smile flat-lined. “You should have stayed to watch the whole show. You missed the part where Anton goes to the cribs and realizes your mother was wrong. See, by the time Angelica pulled the bitch-vampyr away, she’d already left her mark on one of you—only one wound, not two, but that’s enough to pass on vamp blood. Problem was, Anton couldn’t find it in him to harm any of his granddaughters…so he kept his vow to his daughter and got all three of her triplets to safety.”

“He’s telling the truth, Meg.” Kat came into the hall from the living room, Tash and Darkheart behind her. They grouped themselves beside Mikhail, and even in my stunned state I was alert enough to realize I was being centered out. “One of us is part vampire. That’s why Mikhail’s here.”

“Shape-shifters can totally sniff out vamps,” Tash said with the air of an instant expert. She gave me the same commiserating look she’d used when we were little and I was about to catch heck from Grammie while she escaped scot-free. “Mikhail says—”

“If Mikey-baby’s got something to say, how about letting him tell me himself?” I stood up, my stomach feeling like I’d left it down on the floor. “Well?” I demanded, facing him.

His teeth flashed white, but not in a smile. “Your sister’s wrong, I can’t always tell for sure,” he said softly. “But as soon as I laid eyes on you I felt my hackles rising. My money’s on you being the one who received the kiss of the queen vampyr.”

Chapter 4

“I still think my idea of having a flower girl strewing rose petals in front of you would have been totally romantic. It might even have made up for the fact that it’s pouring down buckets on your wedding day.” Tash leaned closer to the full-length mirror in the church’s waiting room and scrubbed a fleck of lipstick from a front tooth before composing her expression into a shyly virginal smile, complete with downcast lashes. “I do,” she said tremulously, looking up from her bridesmaid’s bouquet of star orchids and meeting her own eyes in the mirror. “With all my heart, I—”

“Can it, sweetie,” Kat snapped from her position at the window where she’d been staring out at the rain. “Even if the guests waiting in the church right now haven’t grasped that the leading man in this farce isn’t going to show up, you know this wedding isn’t just missing a groom, it’s missing the groom’s best man and his head usher, as well. Or had you forgotten that what was left of our fiancés last night didn’t even fill a vacuum bag when we did our little clean-up job?”

“Keep it down, Kat!” I hissed, squeezing the ribbon-wrapped stems of my bouquet—in my case, white lilac and baby’s-breath—so hard that the heads of the pins securing the ribbon pressed into the palms of my lace demi-gloves. I glanced worriedly at the door, outside of which I assumed Popsie was pacing and looking at his watch, as he had been since four o’clock had come and gone a half hour ago. “We’ve got to appear devastated when we learn we’ve apparently been dumped by the men we love.”

“Don’t keep saying that!” Tash protested. “Toddie didn’t dump me, I staked him. I wish there was some way I could let people know, instead of going through the humiliation of—”

Kat was off the couch and in front of Tash in three strides. “Are you out of your tiny mind?” she demanded furiously. “If one whisper gets out about what really went down last night, I’ll stake you!” Her frown deepened. “I don’t believe it. You’re wearing Grammie’s pearls, you little weasel. With everything else that’s happened, you borrowed them for a wedding you know isn’t going to take place. That’s pathetic, sweetie.”

“As pathetic as the flask tucked into your garter that you’ve been taking nips from whenever you think no one’s looking?” Tash shot back. “If any whispers get out, they’ll probably come from you after a few more slugs of whatever you’ve got sloshing around in your handy little booze-carrier!”

A weird feeling of déjà vu swept over me. Then I realized why the scene playing out in front of me seemed so familiar. I’d seen it before in any number of heist movies—you know, the kind where the criminals make a daring score and get away with the diamonds, only to fall out among themselves and shoot each other up afterwards. I stepped in.

“We won’t have to worry about whispers if the two of you keep shouting insults at each other. Tash, borrowing Grammie’s pearls was weaselly. Kat, what’s in the flask?”

“Vodka martinis.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “No tell-tale smell. Want a nip, sweetie?”

I waited while she lifted her lemon satin bridesmaid’s dress, revealing the matching pale yellow garter encircling her thigh and the slim silver flask secured there. She handed it to me. I uncapped it, took a healthy swig, and turned to the partially open window beside us.

It was screened with rain-drenched cedar bushes. I dropped Kat’s little pick-me-up into them and closed the window.

“Damn you, Megan, I needed that!” Her voice was jagged with anger. “This waiting around is getting on my nerves!”

“It’s getting on mine, too,” I said sharply. “But unless we want to end up in a holding cell, we have to go through with this charade. We all agreed on that last night, remember?”

“Was that before or after we learned you were a vampire, sweetie?” she retorted sharply.

“After,” Tash butted in. “First Mikhail did his mind-thing with us, then he and Megan got into a big argument in the hall, then Grandfather Darkheart went all Carpathian on their asses and they shut up. Then we sat down and talked about how we were going to handle this whole situation.”

“Meg, I’m sorry.” Kat’s expression was stricken. “I don’t usually shoot off my mouth after a couple of drinks. You were right to toss the booze.”

“Especially since if she is a vamp, you don’t want to get her pissed at you,” Tash advised. “Just joking, sis,” she added over her shoulder to me as she turned back to the mirror.

“Don’t blame the martinis, Kat,” I said coldly. “I’ve seen you tipsy a time or two. I even recall holding your hair back when you got up-close and personal with a toilet at the country club the night of our engagement parties. Alcohol might loosen your tongue, but it’s never put words into your mouth you wouldn’t think of otherwise. You’ve bought into this whole stupid Kiss of the Vampire crap that our long-lost grandpa and his mangy sidekick shoveled at us last night. Has it occurred to you that it might be total fantasy?”

“Like I’ve said before, the Queen of Denial,” Tash mumbled at the mirror as she blotted the fresh lipstick she’d just applied. “So we’re back to the our-fiancés-didn’t-really-turn-into-vamps-it-was-just-the-appletinis thing again?”

“No,” I conceded, “I accept that they were vampires and we staked them.” I tossed my bouquet onto a small side table and sat down on the sofa. Folds of tulle rose up on either side of me like frothy surf and I beat them down, feeling overwhelmed. “I’m even willing to accept that Boris is our Grandfather Darkheart and our mother was a Daughter of Lilith or a vampire killer or whatever. What I can’t believe is that one of us is going to turn into—”

“Yoo-hoo, ladies, it’s show-time!”

Without warning, the door opened and Grammie Crosse burst in, her plump and powdered face beaming at the three of us. Even at such an inopportune moment, I felt my heart swell with affection for her, and I wished I could spare her the upset that my ruined wedding was going to cause her.

Unfortunately, my wish immediately came true with Grammie’s next excited words.

“I just got the word that a car with three tardy males in it has pulled up to the curb, darlings—such a relief! Not that I ever doubted they’d show, of course. Megan, dear, let me straighten your veil. Kat, shake out the creases in your sister’s dress. Your grandfather was all set to march outside and give Dean a piece of his mind for almost making us think he’d stood you up but I said, Edward Crosse, in a couple of months when all three of those young men are your sons-in-law, you can ream them out all you want. Megan, love, you look like an angel. You all do, darlings. Oh fudge, I promised myself I wouldn’t start crying before the ceremony!”

She was wearing a periwinkle-blue mother-of-the-bride dress with a chiffon overlay that floated around her as she flitted from one to the other of us. Abruptly, she stopped flitting and the chiffon stopped floating. “Oh, dear,” she said in a suddenly non-fluttery voice, looking at us.

I could understand why she was staring. Beside me, Kat looked the way she had the night at the country club seconds before I’d caught back her hair and she’d gripped the porcelain rim of the toilet. By the mirror, Tash had gone the same color as the pearls around her neck and I felt as if I’d just stepped into an empty elevator shaft.

“Toddie’s here?” croaked Tash. Her tone was thick with horror. “Wha-what does he look like?”

“Very handsome, I’m sure. I didn’t watch them get out of the car,” Grammie said, her gaze still encompassing us. “But those young men could be Robert Redford and Paul Newman all rolled into one, and I still wouldn’t expect any one of you to go through with her wedding if you were having second thoughts.”

I was so rattled that I almost reminded Grammie that Redford and Newman, as dishy as they’d been in her day, were Popsie’s age and definitely out of the running as suitors for her twenty-one-year-old granddaughters. Then I focused on the relevant part of her comment. “Second thoughts?” My voice was as hoarse as Tash’s.

Grammie took a breath. “It’s only money, darling, and your grandfather’s got oodles of it, so if you’re thinking about how much everything cost—the catering, the flowers, the cases of Cristal—then don’t. And as for Dean’s parents, it wouldn’t bother me in the least to tell them my granddaughter’s decided their son isn’t good enough for her. When they deigned to fly out from Philadelphia to meet us at the engagement dinner, they spent the whole evening making sure Edward and I knew their connection to every important Main Line family. I wanted to tell them that the only good thing I’d ever known to come out of Philadelphia was cheese steak—”

She was on a roll and I didn’t like interrupting her, but I knew if I was going to, sooner was better than later. “You think I’ve changed my mind about marrying Dean?” I asked in the cawing voice that seemed to be the Crosse triplets’ new and permanent method of communication.

She shook her head. “I’m simply saying that if you have, tell me. Nothing means more to me than the happiness of you three girls and I don’t intend to stand idly by and let any of you walk into something that might take away that happiness.”

That’s our Grammie Crosse—a slightly stout, cashmere-twinset-and-tweed-skirt-wearing lioness when she thinks her cubs are being threatened. In return, her cubs would do anything to protect her, as Kat immediately demonstrated.

“Meg hasn’t changed her mind, darling, and Tash and I intend to go through with our weddings later this summer, too.” Her desperate gaze strayed to the window I’d thrown her liquid courage out of, but then went back to Grammie. She gave a laugh that sounded like the noise a rusty cemetery gate might make if you pushed on it. “It’s relief you see on our faces, that’s all—shaky, enormous relief. We were a teensy bit worried that something might have happened to our hubbies-to-be, weren’t we, girls?”

“Yeah,” I agreed hollowly, “that’s it, Grammie. When they didn’t show up on time we began to think something terrible had happened. Like a car accident.”

“Or like an accident with a piece of wood.” Tash caught our glances. “Or a car, like Meg says,” she corrected swiftly. “I can see how a car accident would be more likely.”

“So now that we know they’re okay, we’re just…” Kat looked beseechingly at me.

“Relieved,” I ended unoriginally. I gave Grammie a smile that felt like a bad facelift and must have looked just as plastic. “So relieved that we’d like to take a second to say a prayer of thanks. Can you tell Popsie we’ll be out in a second?”

Grammie’s no fool. She knew there was something off-kilter about our reactions, and even if she hadn’t she definitely would have been alerted by my request for a moment of quiet communion with our Maker. I saw the questions in her eyes and didn’t know how I was going to answer them, but just as she opened her mouth to put them into words Tash saved our bacon.

“Oh, Lord, we most humbly thank Thee for what Thou has wrought,” she intoned, sinking to her knees in a cloud of yellow and closing her eyes. Kat and I hastily followed suit as she went on. “I mean with Todd and Dean and Lance. We were all like, omigod, maybe they’ve been in an accident, but then You were like, don’t worry, Natashya, your fiancé and those of your sisters, verily they hast—”

The door clicked softly closed behind Grammie. The three of us scrambled to our feet, Tash finishing off her impromptu prayer as she did. “Verily they hast been staked, right?” She looked from Kat to me. “Vamps can’t come back after you dust them, can they? And what about the whole daylight thing? Although I guess there isn’t much out there today,” she added with a worried glance through the window.

“Ask Grandfather Darkheart when we see him tonight,” I said shortly. “Correction: if we’re alive to see him tonight. But since we don’t have our resident expert here to answer those questions, we have to assume the worst. Help me find something to arm ourselves with—maybe a broomstick or—”

Kat pointed to the table beside the sofa. “Will that do?”

“It’ll have to,” I answered, moving to it and sweeping my bouquet to the floor. “Take a leg and pull, like at Thanksgiving with the wishbone.”

Thirty seconds later the three of us stepped into the vestibule of St. Barnabas, where a red-faced Popsie was waiting. Except for the red face, he looked dapper in a dove-gray morning suit, and when he saw us his expression softened.

“I’d like to horsewhip that young man of yours for not getting to his own wedding on time,” he said gruffly, crooking his right arm for me to grasp as Kat and Tash took their places. “Lucky for him your sisters’ fiancés slipped him in the side entrance without running into me. But I promised your grandmother I wouldn’t spoil your big day, so I’ll say no more about it. Are we ready?”

As if St. Barnabas’s organist had heard and taken Popsie’s query for a cue, the huge Hammond at the front of the church began booming out the opening bars of “The Wedding March.” I exchanged grim looks with Kat and Tash as two ushers opened the double oak doors leading from the vestibule into the church and Popsie began escorting me down the aisle.

Every female with an ounce of romance in her soul dreams of her wedding day. Even the most tomboyish little girl occasionally takes time out from picking scabs from her knees and beating up little boys to envision what she’ll wear and the kind of flowers she’ll carry. Now, as I solemnly step-paused, step-paused with Popsie down the velvety red carpet leading to the altar, I realized I was living the fantasy.

Sort of. Then again, sort of not.

Through the lace of my veil I could see packed pews on either side of me and Popsie. The fragrance of the gardenias festooning them was so heady it was like running the spritzer gauntlet in Macy’s perfume section. The florist had woven tiny crystals through the dark green leaves, and more crystals dripped in strands to brush the floor. Tash, Grammie’s pearls around her throat, the skirt of her yellow satin bridesmaid’s dress swinging like a bell and its short train falling from a flat bow positioned at the back of her waist, looked like a fairytale princess. Kat looked like a movie star, with her silver-blond hair worn down and the fishtail hem of her strapless silk organza swishing sexily behind her. I didn’t look like a movie star or a princess. In the Monique Lhuillier ball-gown-styled wedding dress I’d fallen in love with the moment I’d first set eyes on it, I looked exactly as I’d always dreamed of looking on my wedding day…elegant and beautiful.

That was the sort of part of living the fantasy. The sort of not part was the big hunk of broken table leg strapped to my leg by a frilly blue garter—totally Freudian, now that I think of it—plus the fact that as I slowly proceeded toward the three men standing with their backs to us at the front of the church, I felt like turning tail and running like hell.

Or do all brides feel like that?

Whether they do or not, most of them don’t bail on their own weddings and I wasn’t going to, either. Tash and Kat, as nervous as they were, would see this out for the same reason I intended to. Somehow Todd and Lance and Dean had risen after being staked. I wasn’t going to leave an unsuspecting Grammie and Popsie to face them, although right now, facing them wasn’t the operative phrase.

“This is so humiliating I could die,” Tash whispered across Popsie, whose hearing isn’t the sharpest. “They’ve still got their backs to us and everyone’s beginning to look really uncomfortable. I mean, even if they’re vamps, you’d think they could show some manners, right?”

“Sure, sweetie,” Kat said under her breath. “Just like the old-world courtesy they displayed last night when they were trying to sink their teeth into our necks.”

“They’re fudging with our minds, as Grammie would say,” I said tersely. “Or as I would say, fucking with our minds. They’re obviously using some sort of mojo to look normal to everyone here but they’ll show their real faces to us just before they—”

A couple of things happened all at once. Well, not all at once, but really close together. The first thing was that “The Wedding March” suddenly trailed off on a discordant note. The second was that Grammie, about fifteen feet away in the first row of pews, stood up and began to make flapping motions at us with her hands, as if she were shooing chickens. The third was that Lance and Todd and Dean turned around.

I stared at Dean in horror. Flames burned in his eye sockets, his canines were impossibly long, his face was dead-white…and no one in the church was screaming.

I didn’t bother wasting time wondering about that part. I began fumbling under my crinoline for my stake, determined to get to our undead grooms before they had a chance to take a step closer to Grammie, but even as I did I froze. My stake fell from my hand, bounced once on the red carpet, and clattered to the floor beside the nearest pew.

The three men standing at the front of the church and looking at us weren’t Lance and Todd and Dean at all. They didn’t have fiery eyes or vamp teeth or white faces—in fact, they looked absolutely ordinary. Two of them were in the familiar blue uniform of the Maplesburg Police and the third wore jeans, an unbuttoned sports jacket and a gold detective’s badge clipped to his belt. He narrowed his eyes at Tashya and Kat and me, but when he spoke he raised his voice so everyone could hear.

“Sorry, folks, the wedding’s been postponed. The groom and his buddies appear to have gone missing, as everyone here but the bridal party seems to have noticed.” In the hubbub that arose from the guests he lowered his tone, this time directing his words only to us. “I’m treating their disappearances as possible murders, ladies. Not that you’re suspects, but can the three of you fill me in on where you were and what you were doing last night?” His gaze went to my fallen stake and he went on smoothly, “And can you also explain why you’re carrying a concealed weapon at your own wedding, Ms. Crosse?”

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