Definitely Dead

listening.”
    “Something very bad is going to happen here in the next hour or so. It’s going to be so bad that it might get a lot of people killed. Now you can stay and have a good time until it happens, and then you’ll wonder why you didn’t listen to me, or you can leave now after acting like you’ve been taken ill, and you can save yourself a lot of unhappiness.”
    Her gaze was intent. I could hear her wondering whether to take me seriously. I didn’t seem like a weirdo or a crazy person. I seemed like a normal, attractive, young woman with a heck of a handsome date.
    “Are you threatening me?” she asked.
    “No, ma’am. I’m trying to save your ass.”
    “We’ll get one dance in first,” Genevieve Thrash said, making up her mind. “David, honey, let’s take a spin around the dance floor and then make our excuses. I’ve got the worst headache you ever felt.” David obligingly broke off his conversation with Quinn to take his wife to the clear space and begin waltzing along with the royal vampire couple, who looked relieved to have company.
    I was beginning to relax my posture again, but a glance from Quinn reminded me to stand very straight. “I love the dress,” he said. “Shall we dance?”
    “You can waltz?” I hoped my jaw hadn’t dropped too far.
    “Yep,” he said. He didn’t ask if I could, though as a matter of fact I’d been watching the queen’s steps intently. I can dance—can’t sing, but I love a dance floor. I’d never waltzed, but I figured I could do it.
    It was wonderful to have Quinn’s arm around me, to be moving so gracefully around the floor. For a moment, I just forgot everything and enjoyed looking up at him, feeling the way a girl feels when she’s dancing with a guy she expects she’ll make love with, sooner or later. Quinn’s fingers touching my bare back just made me tingle.
    “Sooner or later,” he said, “we’re gonna be in a room with a bed, no phones, and a door that will lock.”
    I smiled up at him and spied the Thrashes easing out of the door. I hoped their car had been brought around. And that was the last normal thought I had for some time.
    A head flew past Quinn’s shoulder. It was moving too fast for me to pin down whose head it was, but it looked familiar. A spray of blood created a ruddy cloud in the head’s wake.
    I made a sound. It wasn’t a scream or a gasp; more like “Eeeeep.”
    Quinn stopped dead, though the music didn’t for a long moment. He looked in all directions, trying to analyze what was happening and how we could survive it. I’d thought one dance would be okay, but we should have gone with the Were couple. Quinn began pulling me over to the side of the ballroom, and he said, “Backs against the wall.” We’d know from which direction the danger was coming: good thinking. But someone cannoned into us and Quinn’s hold on my hand was broken.
    There was a lot of screaming and a lot of movement. The screaming was all from the Weres and other supes who’d been invited to the party, and the movement was mostly from the vampires, who were looking for their allies amid the chaos. This was where the horrible outfits worn by the king’s followers came into their own. It was instantly easy to see who belonged to the king. Of course, that made them an easy target, too, if you didn’t happen to like the king and his minions.
    A thin black vampire with dreadlocks had whipped a sword with a curved blade out of nowhere, apparently. The blade was bloody, and I thought Dreadlocks was the head lopper. He was wearing the awful suit, so he was someone I wanted to dodge. If I had any allies here, it wasn’t anyone working for Peter Threadgill. I’d gotten behind one of the pillars holding up the ceiling of the west end of the refectory, and I was trying to figure out the safest way from the room when my foot bumped something that shifted. I looked down to see the head. It belonged to Wybert. I wondered for a fraction of a second if it would move or speak, but decapitation is pretty final, no matter what species you are.
    “Oh,” I moaned, and decided I’d better get a good hold on myself, or I was gonna look just like Wybert, at least in one important respect.
    Fighting had broken out throughout the room. I hadn’t seen the precipitating incident, but on some pretext the black vampire had attacked Wybert and cut off his head. Since Wybert was one of the queen’s bodyguards and Dreadlocks was one of Peter’s