Definitely Dead

wedding.”
    “Yep. He was all dressed up that night.”
    “And that was the night of the wedding.”
    “Yeah, the night before Hadley died.”
    “Did you see them leave?”
    “No, I just . . . No. I heard the car pull up. I looked out my living room window and saw Jake coming in. I knew him already, kind of casually. I had a friend who used to date him. I went back to whatever I was doing, watching TV I think, and I heard the car leave after a while.”
    “So he may not have left at all.”
    She stared at me, her eyes wide. “Could be,” she said at last, sounding as if her mouth were dry.
    “Hadley was by herself when he came to pick her up . . . right?”
    “When I came down from her apartment, I left her there alone.”
    “All I came to do,” I said, mainly to my bare feet, “was clean out my cousin’s apartment. I didn’t much like her anyway. Now I’m stuck with a body. The last time I got rid of a body,” I told the witch, “I had a big strong helper, and we wrapped it in a shower curtain.”
    “You did?” Amelia said faintly. She didn’t look too happy to be the recipient of this information.
    “Yes.” I nodded. “We didn’t kill him. We just had to get rid of the body. We thought we’d be blamed for the death, and I’m sure we would have been.” I stared at my toenail polish some more. It had been a good job when it started out, a nice bright pink, but now I needed to refresh the paint job or remove it. I stopped trying to think about other things and resumed my gloomy contemplation of the body. He was lying in the closet, stretched out on the floor, pushed under the lowest shelf. He’d been covered with a sheet. Jake Purifoy had been a handsome man, I suspected. He’d had dark brown hair, and a muscular build. Lots of body hair. Though he’d been dressed for a formal wedding, and Amelia had said he looked very nice, now he was naked. A minor question: where were his clothes?
    “We could just call the queen,” Amelia said. “After all, the body’s been here, and Hadley either killed him or hid the body. No way could he have died the night she went out with Waldo to the cemetery.”
    “Why not?” I had a sudden, awful thought.
    “You got a cell phone?” I asked, rising to my feet as I spoke. Amelia nodded. “Call the queen’s place. Tell them to send someone over right now. ”
    “What?” Her eyes were confused, even as her fingers were punching in numbers.
    Looking into the closet, I could see the fingers of the corpse twitch.
    “He’s rising,” I said quietly.
    It only took a second for her to get it. “This is Amelia Broadway on Chloe Street! Send an older vampire over here right now ,” she yelled into the phone. “New vamp rising!” She was on her feet now, and we were running for the door.
    We didn’t make it.
    Jake Purifoy was after us, and he was hungry.
    Since Amelia was behind me (I’d had a head start) he dove to grab her ankle. She shrieked as she went down, and I spun around to help her. I didn’t think at all, because I would have kept on going out the door if I had. The new vamp’s fingers were wrapped around Amelia’s bare ankle like a shackle, and he was pulling her toward him across the smooth laminated-wood floor. She was clawing at the floor with her fingers, trying to find something to stop her progress toward his mouth, which was wide open with the fangs extended full length, oh God! I grabbed her wrists and began pulling. I hadn’t known Jake Purifoy in life, so I didn’t know what he’d been like. And I couldn’t find anything human left in his face, anything I could appeal to. “Jake!” I yelled. “Jake Purifoy! Wake up!” Of course, that didn’t do a damn bit of good. Jake had changed into something that was not a nightmare but a permanent otherness, and he could not be roused from it: he was it. He was making a kind of gnarr-gnarr-gnarr noise, the hungriest sound I’d ever heard, and then he bit down on the calf of Amelia’s leg, and she screamed.
    It was like a shark had hold of her. If I yanked at her any more, he might take out the bit his teeth had clamped on. He was sucking on the leg wound now, and I kicked him in the head with my heel, cursing my lack of shoes. I put everything I had behind it, and it didn’t faze the new vampire in the least. He made a noise of protest, but continued sucking, and the witch kept shrieking with pain and shock. There was a candlestick on the table behind one of the loveseats, a