Nor had the fact that he’d missed decapitating Lucien Antonescu so nearly. If Holtzman ever found out about that, he’d never hear the end of it back in the office.

“Oh,” Jon said with a snort. “Us fighting? What about you two? You two sound like an old married couple when you start in with each other.”

Alaric opened one eye and eyed the younger man. “I have my sword with me, you know. I am perfectly willing to use it here at Shenanigans. I highly doubt anyone would notice, in fact.”

The brother closed his mouth and picked up the glossy cocktail menu that sat at the end of the table with the ketchup bottle and other condiments, clearly sulking. He was upset, Alaric knew, because he wanted to be a member of the Palatine, and the slightest hint of criticism from Alaric marred his dream of future employment.

Alaric knew that sooner or later he was going to have to tell the brother that his dream was never going to happen in this lifetime. Primarily because it took years of training to achieve, and Jon was too old to start that training.

But also because Alaric found Jon, like his sister, annoying.

But in entirely different ways, of course. Alaric was not, for instance, sexually attracted to the brother, as he was to the sister. A fact about which he kept berating himself. How could he be attracted to a woman who was sleeping with the master of eternal darkness? She wasn’t even that attractive! She kept her hair too short for his taste, and her front teeth were a little crooked.

Plus, she had an irritating habit of jiggling her foot. She was doing it now, under the table. He could feel her shoe brushing his leg. The contact was far too intimate, considering how she’d spent the evening-making love with Dracula’s son under his very nose.

Meena went on as if her brother had never interrupted. “He-Gerald, the boyfriend-took away her passport and was holding her captive, making her…” She looked down and coughed. “Service other men. Yalena got away somehow and called me because mine was the only number she had. She’s going to meet me here. Though what she’ll do when she sees you two, I don’t know.” Meena glared at both her brother and Alaric darkly. “She doesn’t exactly trust men right now.”

“Well, I don’t exactly trust you, either,” Alaric said, still rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Especially now.”

“Oh, right,” Meena replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Because it’s so likely this is all just a ruse so I can run off with my vampire lover. Or tip him off about where to find you. Like I couldn’t have done that last night, when you were watching movies in the room next door. We’ll see how much you still think that when she comes in here, all beat up, terrified and alone.”

Alaric dropped his hand and opened both eyes to stare at her. “You act like you’ve done this before.”

Meena shrugged. “It’s not totally uncommon. Unfortunately.”

“I don’t understand,” the brother burst out. “Is my sister a vampire now or not?”

Both Alaric and Meena turned to look at him in astonishment.

“Well,” Jon said, “it’s the elephant in the room. She got bit again. Is she or isn’t she? Do we have to stake her?”

“Oh, that’s very nice, Jon,” Meena said, still sarcastic. “Just talk about staking me in the middle of Shenanigans.”

“I already told you.” Alaric’s headache was not improving. “He has to bite her three times, and then she needs to drink his blood to become a vampire. This is only the second time he’s bitten her. Did you drink his blood, Meena?”

“No!” she cried, looking horrified. He felt her foot stop jiggling and come to rest against his leg. He didn’t think she knew his leg was his leg and not part of the table.

He ought, he knew, to move his leg away.

And yet, he didn’t. He didn’t know why he didn’t. This was the most disturbing thing of all.

All right. He did know why.

This was the most disturbing thing of all.

He ought to get out of this assignment as soon as possible. Possibly Holtzman was right, and he did need psychological counseling.

“And I’m not going to, either,” she insisted. “I happen to enjoy things like sunshine and dining at Shenanigans. Even if it is owned by Consumer Dynamics Inc., which means it’ll probably be showing up on an episode of Insatiable soon, considering the way things are going,” she added darkly. “And would I really be sitting here in broad daylight if I were a vampire?” She looked up at the ceiling. “I cannot believe I’m actually having this conversation. In a Shenanigans.”

The waitress appeared and slammed Alaric’s and Meena’s beverages down in front of them. For Jon she had a gracious smile.

“Your Taco Torpedoes and Spicy Potato Stax will be ready soon, sir,” she said.

“Thank you,” Jon said, smiling back at her.

At the table beside theirs, a man wearing a black leather jacket and a pair of pleated khaki pants chuckled as the cell phone at his belt suddenly squawked with static and a child’s voice was broadcast, loudly enough to be heard over the entire second floor of the restaurant: “Daddy? Are you there?”

Khaki Pants smirked and pressed a button on the side of the cell phone/walkie-talkie device and shouted, “I’m here, munchkin! I’m in Times Square!” while the woman across the table from him-who had a pair of extremely large fake breasts on prominent display in a too-small crocheted shirt beneath her mink jacket-slurped a frozen daiquiri and typed into her own cell phone with a set of long, French-tipped nails.

Alaric threw the man a warning look. Khaki Pants pretended not to notice it.

This would soon become his misfortune, Alaric decided.

“There she is,” Meena said, her foot going still again and her spine straightening like a pool cue.

Alaric turned in his seat to see a girl slinking into a chair at a table for two in one darkened corner of the restaurant, far from where the sunlight streamed through the plate-glass windows looking out over Times Square.

The girl wore a pair of enormous sunglasses, even though they were indoors, which might have been suspicious in and of itself…

If it weren’t for the ugly purple bruise he could see creeping out from beneath the lower frame of one side of the sunglasses, indicating she was suffering from a fresh, tender-looking black eye. She wore a gray hoodie pulled up over her head, with tufts of not very attractively cut blond hair sticking out from beneath it here and there.

The thing about her that struck Alaric most of all was the shoes she wore: white pumps with enormous plastic butterflies on the toes.

She glanced around furtively from beneath the sunglasses…until her gaze fell upon their table.

Then she looked away quickly and picked up one of the nine-page menus, behind which she hid her battered face.

“Good God,” Alaric said, appalled. The victims he normally encountered had suffered their abuse at the hands of the undead. It seemed hard to believe the person who’d done this, at least according to Meena, had actually possessed a beating heart.

“Stay here,” Meena said, and laid her napkin on the tabletop. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’m going with you,” Alaric said, rising. He made it clear with his tone that this wasn’t a request.

“Just stay where you are and let me handle this,” Meena snapped. “You’ll only scare her.”

And then she was gone.

Alaric, astonished by this outburst-really, how could such a small person lose so much blood every night and remain so…forceful?-watched as Meena scooted out from the booth and left the two men alone while she went to join Yalena, who looked up at her when she approached…and immediately burst into tears. Meena moved a chair over and slipped an arm around the younger girl’s shoulders, murmuring to her soothingly.

“My sister can be a real bundle of fun, can’t she?” her brother reflected as he poked the ice in his drink with his straw. “Hard to see what this prince guy sees in her.”