“The word on the street is that he’s got a major position with a master vampire.”

“‘Word on the street.’ Listen to you.” The implications of what she’d just said didn’t matter to me. I was not messing with vampires. A creepy human stalker was one thing. This was totally another. One: The undead aren’t easily tricked—stupid people aren’t allowed in their exclusive club. Two: You can’t sneak up on the undead—unless they’re distracted by, like, a hundred automatic machine guns firing at them at once or something equally bad like, say, the sun. And three: The undead aren’t easily…stopped. I say “stopped” instead of “killed” because they’re technically already dead.

“You’re the journalist. You have contacts of the lying-low kind, don’t you?”

“Of course, but you’re like a human resources specialist in a well-decorated office uptown. Not where the lowlifes tend to come to gossip.”

“I said lying-low, not lowlife. Big difference. All work and no play sucks.” Her voice dropped low. “My contacts and I play in the same hidden sandbox. I like it. And speaking of that, I’m going to be late.”

I walked to the bathroom and started prepping my toothbrush. “Hey, I didn’t mean any insult.”

“None taken.”

“Thanks, Theo…don’t get sand in your undies.”

She cackled again. “Okay. I’ll make sure to take them off first.”

I rolled my eyes. “Good-bye, Theo.” I put the phone down, did my dental duties, then found some cotton balls and stuffed them into my ears.

Back in my room, I opened the pajama drawer on the big white dresser and chose a tank top with the Lady of Shalott silk-screened on it. After changing, I jerked the covers down and sat on the bed, reaching automatically for the little chain to click off the light on the bedside table. My hand, however, stopped, and I stared at one of my prized possessions, a three-by-five photo of the man my mother had claimed was my father. The picture had once been a five-by-seven, but I’d trashed the half with Mom in it.

I didn’t touch the crystal frame; the hinge on the back was loose. Only the fact that it sat perfectly balanced on a doily kept it from sliding down.

He was Egyptian—his skin was dark, his hair black, and his eyes bright brown. Handsome features like high cheekbones and a well-formed mouth over a dimpled chin gave him an air of refined masculinity. The arched brows made him mysterious, a bit dangerous. His expression here was serious, but I’d always imagined that if he smiled, it would come easily to him, and that his teeth would be straight and glossy white.

Around his neck he wore an amulet of Anubis, jackal-headed god of ancient Egyptian afterlife. Seeing it had been what stopped me from clicking off the light. Though his picture sat on this table for as long as I’d lived here—the dust on it was proof—I didn’t look at it every day. I’d forgotten about his amulet, hadn’t put together my totem jackal and my father.

Amenemhab had said of the flowers, “…they are what their roots have made them. And they can be nothing else.” I’d laughed off the family tree issue, thinking only of Nana and my mother. I hadn’t considered the unknown other side of my family.

Now that I knew the killer was a vampire, though, everything had changed. I jerked the little string on the lamp and pulled the quilts up tight around my neck, peering at the dark through the skylights overhead. “Instrument of justice” or not, I wouldn’t even begin to consider going after a vampire.

Chapter 7

Hello?”

I could barely hear Vivian’s voice over the sobbing and screaming in the background. Though muffled as if her hand was covering the mouthpiece of the phone, Vivian’s exasperated scream—“Just shut up!”—came through anyway.

I hadn’t even gone downstairs yet; I was sitting on the end of my bed in the glow of an up-slanting sunbeam, watching dust float in the air. My ears itched from having cotton in them all night. Not that I’d slept much. The thick wads had successfully blocked out Poopsie’s whining, but my own thoughts couldn’t be stopped. Still, I had a speech ready for Vivian. A good one.

The sobbing grew more distant, and I heard a door slam. “Hello?” Vivian said again, trying to sound calm and collected.

“Vivian? It’s Persephone.”

“What do you want?”

I switched sides with the phone to rub the other ear. The background sobbing had caught me off guard, but then I guessed its source. “Is that Beverley?”

“Of course it’s Beverley…the little tyrant.”

Tyrant? I couldn’t keep the anger from creeping into my voice: “Is something wrong?”

“No. What do you want, Miss Alcmedi? Please keep it quick. Thanks to Beverley, I’m already late for work.”

Beverley’s screaming rose again, and various muffled sounds followed. Initially, I’d thought that Beverley had run off and slammed a door behind her, but now I realized Vivian had left Beverley and was fighting to keep the door shut to separate herself from the little girl who was repeating, “I want my mom” in a desperate chant.

It made my heart ache. My prepared speech faded away. “Do you need some help?” I asked.

“I can’t hear you, Miss Alcmedi, but don’t worry, your money will be ready at four.” She hung up.

The phone was still in my hand when Nana ambled into my sunny room.

“Aren’t you fixing breakfast?” I heard the lighter click as she lit a cigarette.

Numbly, I said, “No.” I couldn’t tear my eyes from the blank digital display of the phone. The words still seemed to echo dully: “I want my mom, I want my mom…”

I remembered feeling that wretched and misplaced. I remembered running through a cornfield, blasting through stalks and spiderwebs and crying so hard I couldn’t see. I’d collapsed when I had fallen into a muddy ditch between fields and sobbed myself to sleep. My first real experience with the Goddess had been in that cornfield.

“Persephone?” Nana prompted.

“There’s cornflakes. Or toaster waffles.”

Poopsie bounded in and pulled up short, somehow managing to skid despite the carpet. He thumped down on his backside. Everything in the upstairs of my house shook. The crystal frame beside my bed clunked down on its back, the loose hinge having given way despite the doily.

I twisted to right it and paused, looking again at my father, at his Anubis amulet. I studied the sport coat he wore, searching for telltale signs of a pistol underneath. I tried to, but couldn’t, detect where a shoulder holster might be hidden.

“Fine.” Nana walked away. “Hope you don’t expect me to eat boxed food every morning. Even the nursing home fixed real food.”

Poopsie sat where he’d landed, panting. “You have to be more careful if you’re going to stay here,” I said. He gave a little bark and was up bounding after Nana and, from the sound of it, crowding past her on the stairs.

I grabbed last year’s phone book from the low drawer on the bedside table; I kept the newer book on my desk downstairs by the kitchen phone. Flipping through the yellow pages’ “Churches & Places of Worship” section, I found what I was looking for in a sizeable, poorly designed ad: The Church of God Almighty, Reverend Samson D. Kline, Pastor.

That poor little girl deserved justice. “For Beverley,” I whispered as I dialed.

“They wanted it and they got it. Damn them all!”

In a Hooters booth, sitting across from Samson D. Kline, I couldn’t help staring at him. The fundamentalist preacher and local televangelist wore a light blue polyester suit with a white shirt. A Donald Trump comb-over sat like a thin gray dollop atop his head. Drooping jowls wiggled on either side of a bulging double chin from which his boring black tie descended. His piggish dark eyes gave him the look of someone constantly attempting to cry, but never succeeding.