Definitely Dead

particularly,” I said, and closed my eyes again. “I guess they’re dead?”
    “I’m sure they wish they were,” Eric said. “What did you do to the little man on the floor?”
    “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said.
    “Try me.”
    “I scared him so bad he spilled hot coffee on himself. Then I hit him with a stun gun that I got out of the van.”
    “Oh.” There was a kind of breathy sound, and I opened my eyes to see that Eric was laughing silently.
    “The Pelts?” I asked.
    “Rasul has them covered,” Eric said. “You have another fan, it seems.”
    “Oh, it’s because of the fairy blood,” I said irritably. “You know, it’s not fair. Human guys don’t like me. I know about two hundred of ’em who wouldn’t want to date me if I came with a Chevy truck. But because supes are attracted to the fairy smell, I get accused of being a guy magnet. How wrong is that?”
    “You have fairy blood,” Eric said, as if his own lightbulb had just lit up. “That explains a lot.”
    That hurt my feelings. “Oh no, you couldn’t just like me,” I said, tired and hurting beyond coherence. “Oh no, gosh, there has to be a reason. And it’s not gonna be my sparkling personality, oh no! It’s gonna be my blood, because it’s special. Not me, I’m not special . . .”
    And I would have gone on and on, if Quinn hadn’t said, “I don’t give a damn about fairies, myself.” Any available room left in the kitchen vanished.
    I scrambled to my feet. “You okay?” I asked in a wobbly voice.
    “Yes,” he said, in his deepest rumble. He was altogether human again, and altogether naked. I would’ve hugged him, but I felt a little embarrassed about embracing him in the altogether, in front of Eric.
    “I left your clothes out there in the woods,” I said. “I’ll go get ’em.”
    “I can.”
    “No, I know where they are, and I couldn’t get any wet ter.” Besides, I’m not sophisticated enough to be comfortable in a room with a naked guy, an unconscious guy, a real horrible girl, and another guy who’s been my lover.
    “Fuck you, bitch,” the charming Sandra called after me, and shrieked again, as Eric made it clear he didn’t care for name calling.
    “Right back at you,” I muttered, and trudged out into the rain.
    Oh, yes, it was still raining.
    I was still brooding over the fairy-blood thing as I scooped up the bundle of Quinn’s sodden clothes. It would be easy to slide into a depressed trough if I thought the only reason anybody ever liked me was because I had fairy blood. Of course, there was always the odd vampire who had been ordered to seduce me . . . I was sure the fairy blood had just been a bonus, in that case . . . no, no, no, wasn’t going there.
    If I looked at it in a reasonable way, the blood was just as much a part of me as my eye color or the thickness of my hair. It hadn’t done a thing for my half-fairy grandmother, assuming the gene had come to me through her and not one of my other grandparents. She’d married a human man who hadn’t treated her any differently than he would have if her blood had been plain old grade A human. And she’d been killed by a human who hadn’t known anything about her blood other than the color of it. Following the same assumption, fairy blood hadn’t made a bit of difference to my father. He’d never in his life encountered a vampire who might be interested in him because of it—or if he had, he’d kept it mighty close. That didn’t seem likely. And the fairy blood hadn’t saved my father from the flash flood that had washed my parents’ truck off the bridge and into the swollen stream. If the blood had come to me through my mother, well, she’d died in the truck, too. And Linda, my mother’s sister, had died of cancer in her midforties, no matter what kind of heritage she had.
    I didn’t believe this wonderful fairy blood had done all that much for me, either. Maybe a few vampires had been a little more interested in me and friendly to me than they would have been otherwise, but I couldn’t say that had been much of an advantage.
    In fact, many people would say the vampire attention had been a big negative factor in my life. I might be one of those people. Especially since I was standing out here in the pouring rain holding someone else’s wet clothes and wondering what the hell to do with them.
    Having come full circle, I slogged back to the house. I could hear a lot of moaning coming from the front