From Dead to Worse

extraordinary.
    I was still mulling over the strange little episode when I turned off Hummingbird Road and onto the long driveway through the woods that led back to my old house. The core of the house had been built more than a hundred and sixty years before, but of course very little of the original structure remained. It had been added to, remodeled, and reroofed a score of times over the course of the decades. A two-room farmhouse to begin with, it was now much larger, but it remained a very ordinary home.
    Tonight the house looked peaceful in the glow of the outside security light that Amelia Broadway, my housemate, had left on for me. Amelia’s car was parked in back, and I pulled alongside it. I kept my keys out in case she’d gone upstairs for the night. She’d left the screen door unlatched, and I latched it behind me. I unlocked the back door and relocked it. We were hell on security, Amelia and I, especially at night.
    A little to my surprise, Amelia was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me. We’d developed a routine after weeks of living together, and generally Amelia would have retired upstairs by this time. She had her own TV, her cell phone, and her laptop up there, and she’d gotten a library card, so she had plenty to read. Plus, she had her spell work, which I didn’t ask questions about. Ever. Amelia is a witch.
    “How’d it go?” she asked, stirring her tea as if she had to create a tiny whirlpool.
    “Well, they got married. No one pulled a Jane Eyre. Glen’s vampire customers behaved themselves, and Miss Caroline was gracious all over the place. But I had to stand in for one of the bridesmaids.”
    “Oh, wow! Tell me.”
    So I did, and we shared a few laughs. I thought of telling Amelia about the beautiful man, but I didn’t. What could I say? “He looked at me”? I did tell her about Jonathan from Nevada.
    “What do you think he really wanted?” Amelia said.
    “I can’t imagine.” I shrugged.
    “You need to find out. Especially since you’d never heard of the guy whose guest he said he was.”
    “I’m going to call Eric—if not tonight, then tomorrow night.”
    “Too bad you didn’t buy a copy of that database Bill is peddling. I saw an ad for it on the Internet yesterday, on a vampire site.” This might seem like a sudden change of subject, but Bill’s database contained pictures and/or biographies of all the vampires he’d been able to locate all over the world, and a few he’d just heard about. Bill’s little CD was making more money for his boss, the queen, than I could ever have imagined. But you had to be a vampire to purchase a copy, and they had ways of checking.
    “Well, since Bill is charging five hundred dollars a pop, and impersonating a vampire is a dangerous risk...” I said.
    Amelia waved her hand. “It’d be worth it,” she said.
    Amelia is a lot more sophisticated than I am . . . at least in some ways. She grew up in New Orleans, and she’d lived there most of her life. Now she was living with me because she’d made a giant mistake. She’d needed to leave New Orleans after her inexperience had caused a magical catastrophe. It was lucky she’d departed when she had, because Katrina followed soon after. Since the hurricane, her tenant was living in the top-floor apartment of Amelia’s house. Amelia’s own apartment on the bottom floor had sustained some damage. She wasn’t charging the tenant rent because he was overseeing the repair of the house.
    And here came the reason Amelia wasn’t moving back to New Orleans any time soon. Bob padded into the kitchen to say hello, rubbing himself affectionately against my legs.
    “Hey, my little honey bunny,” I said, picking up the long-haired black-and-white cat. “How’s my precious? I wuv him!”
    “I’m gonna barf,” Amelia said. But I knew that she talked just as disgustingly to Bob when I wasn’t around.
    “Any progress?” I said, raising my head from Bob’s fur. He’d had a bath this afternoon—I could tell from his fluffy factor.
    “No,” she said, her voice flat with discouragement. “I worked on him for an hour today, and I only gave him a lizard tail. Took everything I had to get it changed back.”
    Bob was really a guy, that is, a man. A sort of nerdy-looking man with dark hair and glasses, though Amelia had confided he had some outstanding attributes that weren’t apparent when he was dressed for the street. Amelia wasn’t supposed to be practicing