Page 104 of Fang Fatale

I snort. “Too late. My ego has entered the stratosphere.”

She rolls over, snuggling her cheek against my chest. “Just so you know, if you ghost me after this, I will egg your car.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“Then I’ll egg your crypt.”

It’s so ridiculous I snort-laugh. “Deal.”

We fall asleep tangled together, her heartbeat doing most of the work. Somewhere between one breath and the next, I stop keeping track of the centuries. The monster, for once, has nothing to say. It’s been thoroughly outcharmed.

EPILOGUE: ONE YEAR LATER

ALARIC

It’s been a year, give or take a few leap days, since I married Birdie Longfellow in the graveyard at the edge of Blackthorn Bay under the least-sinister willow I could find. The willow had a reputation for whimpering whenever the wind picked up, but that night it went silent, either out of respect or horror at being forced to witness yet another act of matrimonial self-immolation. Birdie walked down the mossy aisle with Barnaby on a leash made of braided hair ribbons. Daisy officiated, her demon partner, Enoch, standing behind her with a look that said I’m only here for the cake. All of Blackthorn’s best monsters turned out, plus a few humans brave enough to pass through the boundary spells, and for one putridly humid March evening, the living and the dead called a truce and got hammered on Clover’s home-fermented cherry wine.

I have not, in the thousand and one years of my extended afterlife, ever felt so disarmed. It’s alarming, this absence of lurking dread, like a guilty habit you can’t remember why you started in the first place. Sometimes I’ll catch Birdie in the middle of pulling weeds from our garden, face smudged with dirt, mouth set in that firm, mutinous line, and think, Oh, so this is what being alive feels like. The rest of the time, I think about sex, because even husbands are allowed hobbies.

If you’d told my maker—the original, the one who mistook me for a worthy successor—that I’d end up here, wearing a sad dad hat and human sunscreen to prune tomatoes at dusk, he’d have laughed himself straight out of his own spine. A millennium’s worth of intrigue, blood feuds, and diplomatic backstabbing, and the final boss fight is dandelions in the east plot. It’s tragic, honestly.

I love every goddamn minute.

Birdie insists on doing all our gardening together, “to keep you honest.” Our division of labor usually means I carry the heavy shit, and she picks fights with squirrels and muskrats. Today, the air is thick with the kind of mist that ruins both hair and morale, but Birdie’s out here anyway in a pair of cutoffs and her BLOOD DRIVE: DONOR OR DIE T-shirt, humming under her breath as she shoves a trowel into the mud. She looks up at me with no warning, eyes gone full clinical.

“You’re burning,” she says, in that deadpan way that is both accusation and endearment.

“I am not,” I protest, even as I can feel my ears crisping at the edges. “I put on the SPF 300 you left in the skull planter.”

I still have no idea why she keeps buying progressively larger numbers, as though one day she’ll discover SPF Immortal.

Birdie wipes her hands on her legs. “That’s SPF Zero in vampire math, you coward. You want to go up in flames and ruin my raised beds?” She pulls out a squat pink bottle and lobs it straight at my head. “Put this on, or I’ll do it for you.”

“Your threats are getting lazy,” I tell her, but I open the bottle and squirt a glob onto my arm, rubbing it in with professional disgust. “You know this stuff just sloughs off, right? My skin repels it like holy water.”

Birdie squints and marches over, stealing the bottle from my hand and massaging a quarter cup into my neck and ears with deliberate, unsexy roughness. “You die of heatstroke, I’m not getting remarried. I’ll just turn the cottage into a donut shop and let Barnaby terrorize the neighborhood.”

“He terrorizes the neighborhood now,” I say, but I lean into her touch anyway. “And besides, who would marry you? You’re mean as hell, and still have a criminal record for disturbing the peace. I told you not to antagonize the trolls—even if they were jaywalking.”

Birdie grins, then wrinkles her nose as if considering the short list of mortals and monsters who could withstand her. “Could be fun to find out.”

She pulls away just as I’m about to suggest what else we could do with all this lotion and starts pulling weeds again. Barnaby, in the shade beneath the porch, makes a noise halfway between a bark and a yawn, then resumes his nap, blissfully unaware that half the supernatural entities in Blackthorn are still posting bounties for his arrest.

After a few minutes of companionable silence, Birdie says, “Daisy invited us to the lighthouse for dinner. She’s doing her full moon party and wants us to bring dessert. I told her we’d make those blood orange tarts, but, heads up, you’re on slicing duty.”

She says this like she hasn’t seen me stare at a paring knife with the same suspicion most people reserve for tax auditors or tarantulas.

“I’ll take it under consideration,” I say. “What’s the theme this time? Liminal Spaces and Charcuterie Boards?”

I can never keep up with Daisy’s event branding. In the past year she’s thrown a Haunted Cheese Soirée, a Mothman Appreciation Potluck, and even a Poltergeist Punch Party that ended with her making out with Enoch’s cousin in the pantry. The themes are less about the food and more about Daisy’s personal quest to invent new reasons to make people act weird on camera.

“This one’s less subtle,” Birdie says, deepening her voice to imitate Daisy. “It is for all the lonely monsters who want a safe place to play Twister without biting anyone, and also for people who enjoy chili dogs.”

She grins at me, eyes sparkling.

“I’m obligated to go for both reasons. And you should come too.”

“I’m only going if you promise to wear my bite marks in public,” I say. “Otherwise, Daisy will never let me live down the time I lost Spin the Bottle to a two-headed banshee.”