Marry the devil or die within a year by the hand of some mysterious...thing. That was hardly a fair choice, and I was sick to death of being boxed into a corner to make choices I didn’t want to.

During my nightly patrol, I went through the motions with two vamps, easily staking them through the hearts with minimal splatter, and they disappeared to wherever they went when death caught up with them a second time. In the back of my head, though, it felt strange taking the cemetery vamps out when I wouldn’t dream of doing that to those next door. It didn’t seem fair.

What separated one group from the other? The fact that I’d allowed one of those vamps between my legs and probably could have easily had another? That they had brains and brawn and didn’t always snap their jaws in my face? Well...yes, but it was more than that. They made me feel special, and not just because I was the slayer. Everything I was, the sum of all my parts, seemed important to them.

I wasn’t sure what to do with this line of thinking, so I stashed it away for later. Good timing, too, because an uneasy feeling skated up my neck. Someone was watching me. I faked like I hadn’t noticed, continuing up the paths of the cemetery on light feet, as my senses burned.

It was probably just a vampire. If it was another demon sent to drag me to hell with a wedding veil on my head, I would revolt on the grounds of lack of creativity. Then I would stab the demon in the throat with my stake. The threat of a forced marriage tended to make me stabbier than usual, but this didn’t feel like a prelude to an ‘I don’t.’ For one, I didn’t smell any brimstone, no matter how hard I sniffed. I didn’t sense any vampires nearby, either, so this strange feeling I had hinted at something...other.

My heart knocked against my ribs and my palms grew clammy. I didn’t want other. Not when it could sink dread into my stomach with thousand-pound barbs. And not when it could kill me like it had every other slayer before my twenty-first birthday.

When I followed the curve of the path around a tall, wide headstone, a man appeared, not there and then there in a blink. I stopped about six feet away from him, both of us instantly assessing. His eyes, neither vampire nor demon but a watery blue, sized me up from head to toe. Long straggly blond hair swept the shoulders of a tan bowling shirt with striped sleeves and Paul stitched across the front. No way did this guy bowl, though. Sometimes you can just tell, the same way you can tell someone’s going to be a dick customer at The Bean Dream before they even opened their mouth.

“Fancy meeting you here.” His voice sounded rusty, unused.

“Sure.” I nodded, willing myself not to back away. “Whatever you say, Paul. What did you do with the guy you stole the shirt from?”

He chuckled, an unpleasant sound that rolled a shiver up my back. “Fancy meeting you here.”

I blinked and rewound the mental tape of the last minute. Yeah. He’d said that already. What kind of game was he playing?

“Okay, well...” I swallowed. “You’re here for nefarious purposes, I’m guessing, so I’m going to start killing you now.”

He drifted forward, making every muscle in my body cringe backward, except he hadn’t moved from his spot. He did it again, pressing toward me and yet staying put. The static noise vibrated out of him as he held my gaze with his.

“Lovely...night...”

The words pounded against my ears even though he hadn’t moved his mouth to speak them.

His presence crushed the air from my lungs until they held nothing but panic. Plenty enough to consume me.

“Lovely night...for a stroll...isn’t it?”

My body had seized up, as if locked in whatever weird spell he’d put me under. I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink. Paul’s face swam behind a haze of tears, automatically triggered by my horror and my inability to close my eyes against it. His whole face warped into some kind of nightmare blob, his image fritzing from six feet away to within inches of my nose and back again. What the hell was happening?

“Lovely night for a stroll, isn’t it?”

A gasp rang in my ears, loud and sharp, followed closely by an awful pain in my chest.

“Lovely night...”

“Ms. Harrison?” a voice asked, male, familiar.

“...for a stroll, isn’t it?” I whispered. Those words had come out of me, but...

Paul was gone. The static noise gone.

I blinked down at the pain, sudden and bright and excruciating. Icy dread tumbled down into my gut for a crash-landing. My stake punctured Papa Smurf on my T-shirt through his eye, and his head and most of his body had bloomed purple with the spread of blood. My blood. I’d stabbed myself with my own stake. Not through my heart, but much too close for comfort. I swallowed hard at the sight, disbelief making a strangled sound at the back of my throat.

“Ms. Harrison, you all right?”

With my mouth pushed tight against a scream, I yanked out the stake. Blood rushed from the wound in dizzying waves, so I held one hand to it to staunch the flow and used the other to cover everything with my leather jacket. Taking a steadying breath, I glanced as nonchalantly as I could over my shoulder.

Tim, the cemetery groundskeeper, stood behind me, a deep crease between his salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

“Fine,” I lied without turning around. “How are you?”

“I forgot my thermos.” He pointed in the direction of his work shed near the back of the cemetery. “Was just on my way to get it. Without my coffee in the morning, I’m a real bear, even to dead folks.”

“You and me both,” I said, but I could hardly hear myself over the pain, over my mind whirring, over my erratic pulse. “If you want to lock up behind you, feel free. I think I’ll go now.”

Before I bled to death. Would I even make it to the vamps’ place? I was starting to feel all swimmy and disconnected from reality because I didn’t typically go around stabbing myself. I had staked myself. Panic rose up within me and threatened to swallow me whole.

“You sure you all right?”

I nodded and swallowed again, my mouth tasting like copper. “Did you see anyone else when you got here?”

He grunted. “Just you, talking to yourself.”

Not all that surprising since humans forgot about vampires as soon as they looked away from them. It had to be the same for...Paul, even though he definitely wasn’t a vampire.

I turned to leave, holding my jacket closed over the hole in my chest. “Well, have a lovely night.”

The static noise blared loud enough to shiver my brain and make my eyes wobble. I stumbled off toward the gate, my head hammering. The world began to sag at the edges the closer I drew to the gate, tunneling my vision through black voids on either side. The wing of an angel statue caught me as I tripped, and when I blinked upward, her stone face was melting. The statue’s eyes stared as they dripped down her cheeks. Fangs stretched between her drooping lips, and somehow the statue reminded me of Paul. Like an angel of death sent to take me out before my twenty-first—before my twentieth—birthday.

“Lovely night...”

No. Stop. Why were those words coming out of my mouth?

Terror chased up my back, threatening to consume me if unconsciousness didn’t. I didn’t know what Paul was smoking, but it most definitely was the opposite of a lovely fucking night.

I hauled myself forward and through the gate, clinging to the cold iron bars toward the only place that had felt like home in a long time, a pinpoint in the growing night. The distance stretched farther as if taunting me. I didn’t know if I could make it. A cry for help tipped my tongue, something I never did, never asked for, but I had no doubt that it would come.

“Help me,” I whispered.

The bite between my thighs tingled. The door flew open. A dark blur barreled out. Moonlight glinted in a pair of black glasses half hidden underneath a mop of blond hair. Strong arms enveloped me, and suddenly I was floating, adrift into safety, far away from that stroll through a not-so-lovely night.