Deaths Excellent Vacation

have rights, too, you know!”
    “Titania, huh? What do your friends call you for short? Titty?” I snickered to myself.
    She straightened up and gave me a look that would have melted my guts if I weren’t a demon. “They call me Titania!”
    “Gotcha. Wait a sec . . . Oberon? Titania?” I kicked my brain into high and dug through some old memories. “ Midsummer’s Night Dream ?”
    “Pfft.” She examined a rose-tipped fingernail. “That Will Shakespeare got it all wrong. He said I was a faery. As if! He totally dissed us nymphs, and let me tell you, the nymphood was not happy about that.”
    “Yeah, I heard you guys can be kind of . . . eh . . . militant,” I said, wondering if she wanted to use those long nails to hit all my scritchy spots. Then I remembered I didn’t have scritchy spots. At least, not in this repulsive form. I glared at my package.
    “What on earth are you doing?” she asked.
    “Glaring at my crotch. A Guardian did this to me,” I said, mourning the loss of my fabulous doggy form.
    She, too, stared at my groin. “She has a lot to answer for.”
    “You said it. I wish I could do something to pay her back. Hey! Nymphs! You guys are all militant and badass, right? I could have some of your buddies beat up the Guardian who screwed me over.”
    “We prefer the term proactive to militant .” Titania pulled out a nail file and tended to a fingernail. “And if you had spent your life as underestimated and overlooked as we have been, you’d be proactive about making sure people got their facts right, too.”
    “I’m a demon,” I answered, carefully sitting down and examining my abused foot. “I am all over underestimated.”
    “Anyway, Shakespeare got it all wrong,” she continued. “Oberon isn’t king of the faeries at all. He’s just an advocate for the Court of Divine Blood.”
    “Advocate? Like a lawyer?”
    “An obscenely vile one, yes.”
    “Yeah? So what did you do that you got tossed in here?” I asked.
    “Oberon, my former lover and disgusting lint in the underbelly of the worst sort of beings, decided to dump me, a priestess in the house of Artemis, for a naiad. Can you believe it? He dumped me for a water trollop!” Her expression went from outraged to calculating in a split second. “But he’d just better watch out, because the minute I’m out of here, I’m going to get my pound of flesh.”
    “Ew,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Wait—a human pound of flesh or meat from, oh, say, the rump of a corn-fed Black Angus cow? Because the latter sounds really good right about now. Especially with a whisky barbecue sauce.”
    “If I could just find a way out, I could rally the sisters and we’d have our revenge!”
    “On who, Shakespeare? Got news for you, babe. He’s dead.”
    “No, not him. Oberon.”
    I thought. I always think better sitting down. “Not that I want to rush you, since I’ve got at least ten days before Aisling comes back from her cruise and finds out that witch on two legs drugged her boss just so she could banish me, but I’m a bit confused. I get that boy toy dumped you in here when he was hooking up with a naiad, but how does that translate to you nymphs going to war against him?”
    “He’s Oberon,” she said, just like that made sense. When I scrunched up my face in an attempt to figure that out, she added, “He didn’t just have me banished to the Akasha—he had all nymphs banished from the Court in order to curry favor for his own kind.”
    “Oh, yeah,” I said, dredging up a memory. “I think I remember reading something about that. You guys got run out of town because you were causing all sorts of trouble.”
    “We did nothing of the sort. Oberon just made it look like we did,” she said, leaping to her feet and shaking her fist at the air. “He will pay for that! He will pay for—” Her words suddenly stopped.
    I lifted an eyebrow in a move just as smooth as the one Drake makes whenever Aisling says something outrageous.
    “You’re a demon,” she said.
    “You got that right, baby cakes. Sixth class,” I said, winking. “But if you are interested in hooking up with me, I gotta tell you that I’m in a relationship right now with a Welsh Corgi named Cecile. She has the cutest little fuzzy butt you ever did see.”
    She stared at me just like I said something weird.
    “You’re a demon,” she repeated. “Thus, you can get me out of here.”
    “If I could get anyone out of here, it would be me,