I froze.
Slowly, I turned my head.
The children stood in the wide opening between the foyer and the kitchen. All three of them with their backpacks slung over their shoulders. They’d just returned from school.
CJ was in front, one arm stretched slightly in front of his sisters as though his eleven-year-old body could stop anything terrible from reaching them. Beside him, Bianca was pale and rigid, eyes moving rapidly over the scene, cataloging every detail with terrifying precision, including my exposed fangs. Billie clutched a stuffed bear against her chest, her curls wild around her face, her mouth slightly open.
They stared at me.
At the unconscious men.
At the smoke rising from my skin.
At my fangs.
My heart, traitorous and undead and useless, lurched. “I can explain,” I blurted.
It was perhaps the stupidest sentence I had ever spoken, and I had once told a customs officer that the bag of blood in my luggage was for amateur theater.
The children didn’t move.
Billie blinked. “Cool.”
The word landed so perfectly, so absurdly, so exactly like the day we met, that I almost laughed. Almost. Instead, I pressed my lips together and forced my fangs back as much as instinct allowed.
“Children,” I said carefully, “there was a break-in.”
“We noticed,” Bianca said faintly.
Billie took one small step forward. “Are they dead?”
“No.”
“Areyoudead?”
That question, unfortunately, had a far more complicated answer.
“No,” I said. “Not in the way you mean.”
Bianca’s gaze sharpened.
CJ turned toward her. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Bianca said slowly, still staring at me, “she’s a vampire.”
Silence held the kitchen for half a beat. Then Billie gasped, not in fear but delight. “I knew it!”
“You did not,” Bianca said automatically.
“I knew she wassomething.”
CJ looked from Bianca to me, then back to Bianca. “Wait. Seriously?”
I rubbed one aching hand across my forehead, then immediately regretted it because my skin was too tender. “Yes,” I said. “Seriously.”
Billie’s eyes became enormous. “You’re arealvampire?”
“Yes.”
