Definitely Dead

disasters, and sometimes I can prevent them.”
    “Things would be worse without you around?”
    She nodded vigorously.
    “I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “How come I rated a fairy godmother?”
    “I’m not allowed to say,” Claudine said, and Amelia rolled her eyes.
    “We’re not learning a lot, here,” she said. “And in view of the problems we had last night, maybe you’re not the most competent fairy godmother, huh?”
    “Oh, right, Miss I-Sealed-Up-The-Apartment-So-It-Would-Be-All-Fresh,” I responded, irrationally indignant at this assault on my godmother’s competence.
    Amelia scrambled out of her chair, her skin flushed with anger. “Well, I did seal it up! He would have risen like that no matter when he rose! I just delayed it some!”
    “It would have helped if we had known he was in there!”
    “It would have helped if your ho of a cousin hadn’t killed him in the first place!”
    We both screeched to a halt in our dialogue. “Are you sure that’s what happened?” I asked. “Claudine?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, her voice placid. “I’m not omnipotent or omniscient. I just pop in to intervene when I can. You remember that time you fell asleep at the wheel and I got there in time to save you?”
    And she’d nearly given me a heart attack in the process, appearing in the front seat of the car in the blink of an eye. “Yes,” I said, trying to sound grateful and humble. “I remember.”
    “It’s really, really hard to get somewhere that fast,” she said. “I can only do that in a real emergency. I mean, a life-or-death emergency. Fortunately, I had a bit more time when your house was on fire. . . .”
    Claudine was not going to give us any rules, or even explain the nature of the rule maker. I’d just have to muddle through on my belief system, which had helped me out all my life. Come to think of it, if I was completely wrong, I didn’t want to know.
    “Interesting,” said Amelia. “But we have a few more things to talk about.”
    Maybe she was being so hoity-toity because she didn’t have her own fairy godmother.
    “What do you want to talk about first?” I asked.
    “Why’d you leave the hospital last night?” Her face was tight with resentment. “You should have told me. I hauled myself up these stairs last night to look for you, and there you were. And you’d barricaded the door. So I had to go back down the damn stairs again to get my keys, and let myself in the French windows, and hurry— on this leg —to the alarm system to turn it off. And then this doofus was sitting by your bed, and she could have done all of that.”
    “You couldn’t open the windows with magic?” I asked.
    “I was too tired,” she said with dignity. “I had to recharge my magical batteries, so to speak.”
    “So to speak,” I said, my voice dry. “Well, last night, I found out . . .” and I stopped dead. I simply couldn’t speak of it.
    “Found out what?” Amelia was exasperated, and I couldn’t say as I blamed her.
    “Bill, her first lover, was planted in Bon Temps to seduce her and gain her trust,” Claudine said. “Last night, he admitted that to her face, and in front of her only other lover, another vampire.”
    As a synopsis, it was flawless.
    “Well . . . that sucks,” Amelia said faintly.
    “Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
    “Ouch.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I can’t kill him for you,” Claudine said. “I’d have to take too many steps backward.”
    “That’s okay,” I told her. “He’s not worth your losing any brownie points.”
    “Oh, I’m not a brownie,” Claudine explained kindly. “I thought you understood. I’m a full-blooded fairy.”
    Amelia was trying not to laugh, and I glared at her. “Just let it go, witch,” I said.
    “Yes, telepath.”
    “So what next?” I asked, in general. I would not talk any more about my broken heart and my demolished self-worth.
    “We figure out what happened,” the witch said.
    “How? Call CSI?”
    Claudine looked confused, so I guessed fairies didn’t watch television.
    “No,” Amelia said, with elaborate patience. “We do an ectoplasmic reconstruction.”
    I was sure that my expression matched Claudine’s, now.
    “Okay, let me explain,” Amelia said, grinning all over. “This is what we do.”
    Amelia, in seventh heaven at this exhibition of her wonderful witch powers, told Claudine and me at length about the procedure. It was time- and energy-consuming, she said, which was