Micah came to us, rubbing his hand up and down the goose bumps on his arm; the other hand still held the gun. “You mind-fucked him.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

He kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry you had to do that.” And in that moment I realized that he understood what it had cost me to take Nicky the way I did. I kissed him back and moved into the circle of his arms. I buried my face against the warm scent of his neck and let him hold me. The gun dug into my back a little.

Nathaniel and Jason were helping Nicky to his feet. The bigger man was crying, crying at the thought that I would cast him aside. Fuck.

I looked at Nicky watching me with frightened eyes while Jason tried to comfort him and Nathaniel came to join us, his gun peeking from the side of his jeans and ruining the line of his shirt.

I went to Nathaniel and kissed him, thoroughly and completely, so he melted in against me, our bodies, our hands, pressing against each other. He drew back laughing. “I love you, Anita.”

“I love you, too.”

“Let’s go home.”

I nodded. “Home sounds great.”

We started walking toward the woods. Jason jogged to catch up with us. I realized that Nicky was still standing back by the grave. I looked at him, so tall, so muscular, and so lost.

“What do I do with him?”

“What do you do with any of us?” Micah asked.

“He’s a stranger, and he tried to kill us all.”

“He would do anything you told him to do, Anita,” Jason said. “He seems to have even less free will than the rest of us do.”

“I did it on purpose, Jason. I took everything from him on purpose.”

“You did what you had to do, so you could come back to us,” Micah said.

“I really wanted a puppy,” Nathaniel said, “but I guess we could say he followed us home, too.”

“I told you we’d think about a dog.”

“In the meantime can we take the kitten home?”

“He’s not a kitten,” I said.

“He looks like one.”

I looked at Nicky by the grave and knew what he meant. He looked so alone, but he made no move to follow us, as if he’d simply stand there by the grave until I told him to do something else. Had I told him to stay by the grave? I couldn’t remember.

“We can’t leave him like that,” Micah said.

I sighed. “Nicky, come on.”

His face lit up as if I’d told him tomorrow was Christmas, and he jogged toward us. We slept in the motel that Jason had settled Jean-Claude and the other vampires into so that dawn didn’t find them and do something unfortunate. The four of us shared the king-size bed, and Nicky slept on the floor beside us. He’d started to shake at the thought that he couldn’t stay in the same room with me. God help me.

But in the morning, I woke with Nathaniel’s vanilla-scented hair across my face, and Micah’s warmth pressed against my back. Jason’s arm and leg were across Nathaniel’s body, touching me even in his sleep. I heard movement on the floor and Nicky sat up, rubbing his face clear of sleep. He smiled at me, as if whatever he saw was the most beautiful thing in the world. I knew that was a lie, but with all my men around me in a warm puppy pile I couldn’t be unhappy. I’d taken Nicky’s free will; I’d eaten his life on purpose. He could never be free, never be his own person again.

Micah moved against my back and laid a kiss on my shoulder. “Good morning,” he whispered, and that was enough. Did I regret what I’d done to Nicky? Yes, I did, but as Nathaniel blinked those lavender eyes up at me through a veil of his own hair, Jason mumbled, “It’s too early to be up,” his hand rubbing along my shoulder. I could live with it.

123

Afterword

Where do I get my ideas? How do I know if an idea is strong enough to support a whole book? How do I write a whole book? How do I write day to day? What helps me get into the mind-set to pull words out of thin air and write books?

These are some of the questions I get most often from would-be writers or just people who think being a writer must be interesting, or hard, or easy, or just weird. All of that is true, often at the same moment. I love my job. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was fourteen-well, except for being a wildlife biologist, but that was a fling; my heart has and always will belong to the muse. She hooked me at about age twelve, but she set the hook in hard at fourteen when I read Robert E. Howard’s short story collection Pigeons from Hell. That was my moment of decision that I not only wanted to be a writer but I also wanted to write horror, dark fantasy, heroic fantasy, to make up worlds that never existed, and write about our world with just a few scary changes. That was my epiphany and I never really looked back.

Flirt is my twenty-ninth novel in about fifteen years of time and space. I know something about writing and about how to treat it like a career. It takes a lot of hard work and a very thick skin so all those early rejections don’t crush you. But first you need an idea.

I’ll state up front that I don’t understand the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” I had a woman who was raised just across the alley from me ask me after I had several books out, “How do you come up with ideas like that, when you were raised here?” The implication was that small-town middle of farm country wasn’t the most likely place to find a writer of paranormal thrillers. I asked her the question I really wanted to ask, “How do you not come up with ideas like that, when you were raised here?”

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t telling myself stories, at least in my own head. I would often tell a true story with just a little embellishment, which is one reason I did not pursue journalism. But most often my ideas were about fairies, monsters, vampires, werewolves-scary but beautiful, or scary but emotionally poignant were always the things that attracted me as a child. I guess I’ve never really outgrown the idea that if it can drink my blood, eat my flesh, and be attractive at the same time, then I am all over it. By fourteen, I wrote my first complete short story. It was a real bloodbath where only the baby survived to crawl away into the woods. The implication was that she would starve to death or be eaten by wild animals. I was always such a cheerful child.

I have no idea where that first story came from and it wasn’t a great idea, but it was the first complete idea and that makes it valuable. But how do I come up with ideas that are book length and good enough to be book length? Funny you should ask that. Because that is exactly what I’m about to try to explain.

I am going to tell you where the idea for Flirt first came from. I’m going to tell you the first scene that came into my head, because most books start with a scene for me. I have a little mini-movie in my head or freeze-frame of a visual and that is the peg on which the entire book begins to revolve. That first moment is when I see something or experience something, and I feel that little catch in my stomach, or prickling along my skin. Book ideas are a little bit like falling in love. You’re on a date with someone and they do something, or say something, and you get that little uplift where you think, Yeah, I like this one. Ideas are like that. I’ll tell you the first idea, and I’ll even tell you the fertile ground that that idea found to land on, which happened nearly a year before. Because an idea is like a seed; it needs good soil to grow into a nice big book.

I’m going to tell you the schedule I kept, the pages I wrote per day, the music I listened to, and the books that I read for extra research while writing the book. I am going to lay my process bare before you. I’ll let you see it from inception to completion. Will this help you do the same? I’m not sure. Will it answer the question of where I got this idea and how I knew it was a book? Oh, yes.