Even Vampires Get the Blues - By Katie MacAlister Page 0,8

upon them with damp little slippers. Don't you think that's lovely? I thought that up all by myself."

"Very, um..." Clare blinked silver-tipped lashes at me. I relented under her hopeful expression. "Very poetic. But not terribly accurate, is it?"

She blinked again, her large blue eyes clouded with confusion. "What do you mean?"

"Well... just look at you." I waved a hand toward her torso. "You're the opposite of short, sturdy, dark-haired me - you're tall, lovely, elegant, and have that silver blond hair that everyone seems to rave about, but you're hardly in a dancing-on-the-dew-kissed-flowers sort of form, are you? You'd squash the little buggers flat were you to try it in your human form."

She rolled her expressive eyes and bopped me on the arm with her tulip. Clare always had flowers with her - she couldn't help it any more than my mother could. It was just part of their genetic makeup. "You're going to start that silly business again, and I won't listen to it, I simply won't listen to it."

I took her by both arms and shook her gently. "You're a faery, Clare. It's time you face up to that fact. You're a faery, your real name is Glimmerharp, and you were left with my aunt and uncle because your faery parents wanted you to have a better life than running around in wet shoes, stamping dew onto flowers. I doubt if they would have done so had they known that your idea of a better life is to parade up and down in scanty lingerie in front of strangers with cameras, but that's neither here nor there. You are a faery, and the sooner you admit that, the happier everyone around you will be."

"I am not a faery; I am an underwear model."

"You're both."

"Oh!" She plucked a piece of the smooth red tulip's flower and popped it in her mouth. "You take that back!"

"I won't," I said calmly, releasing her to hook the printer up to the laptop that sat on the scarred and battered oak desk I'd claimed as my own. "It's the truth, and you know it, even if you are in denial."

"You're a fine one to talk about denial!" she said, marching over to her desk, a trail of tulip petals gently drifting to the floor behind her. "You deny your heritage every chance you get."

I laughed. I couldn't help it - the mere thought of me being able to ignore who I was, was beyond ridiculous. "There's no way I could deny my parentage - not after growing up the only kid in my neighborhood whose mother is a bona fida poetry-spouting, pointy-eared, gonna-live-forever elf. Years of Keebler jokes made sure I knew just how different I was, and we won't even go into what a mention of Lord of the Rings does to me. What I've never understood is how you can accept the fact that my mother is an elf, and yet insist that there are no such things as faeries."

"I refuse to talk to you when you get in that mood," Clare said, and picked up an empty milk jug she'd brought to serve as a vase. "I won't let you ruin the excitement of the day with all that nonsense."

"Excitement?" I looked around the small office as Clare left to fill the vase with water. The painter had toddled off, leaving the faint odor of acrylic paints behind her. Through the open door I could see a dark, dingy hallway that led to a couple of flats and a shared bathroom.

"That's not quite the word that comes to mind," I said loud enough that Clare could hear me down the hall. "But never fear! A little elbow grease and some creative decorating courtesy of that thrift store you saw on the way in should do much to wipe out the years of neglect. I just wish Mila would come and get her boxes of sex toys."

Clare's muffled voice drifted into the room as I crawled under the desk to plug in the computer equipment. "You shouldn't have told her she could keep her stock here."

"I had a hard enough time persuading her to rent this office to me - ow!" I rubbed the back of my head where I cracked it on the underside of the desk. "Evidently her sex store is doing a tremendous amount of business and she needs all the storage space she can get. Besides, she knocked a hundred pounds off the rent just for