will happen if someone sees this? They’ll think you’ve lost it.”

“I have lost it, baby.” He fell into his uptown cool routine. “So have you. Just two little productive members of society, aren’t we? Keeping the population down. You know, I’ve been thinking we might move to China. They could certainly use us there.”

“Stop it. You’re scaring me.”

“Really? We can’t have that, now can we?”

My kind has no doctors or lawyers or psychologists to help us. We don’t have group therapy for undeads who slip out of reality. I remember feeling angry at myself because I didn’t know what to do. How bad off was he? Would he get better?

I handed back his grocery bag and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Don’t take this out on me. Let’s just clean up this mess and go hunting. We haven’t been hunting together since that New Year’s Eve party at the Red Lion in ’seventy-eight.”

That was a great party. Edward always looked hot in a black tux.

“Can’t,” he whispered.

“What do you mean, you can’t? You have to feed.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to.”

“Okay, then come and stay with me and William for a few months. Maybe you’re spending too much time alone.”

William is an old man who lives with me. I’ll talk more about him later.

“And then what?” He dropped the bag and looked straight at me through his cold, green, bloodshot eyes. “A few months? Hardly worth noticing to someone like you, is it? Nothing would change in the world around us besides the skirt length in Paris and Tom Cruise finding his next wife. What happens in ten years? Twenty? I see the same face every day when I look in the mirror. It never changes.”

“I know. You just have to deal with it.”

“Don’t you get tired of seeing the same face every day?”

“Sometimes.”

He smiled again and picked up a butcher knife lying by the dead cats. “I could change it for you. But that wouldn’t matter either, would it? You’d look the same in a week, so it wouldn’t do you any good, unless I cut your head off.”

I backed up. “Do you want me to leave?”

“I don’t care what you do.”

“Fine. You stay here in this pig pit and talk to yourself. But you’d better get it together and clean this mess up by morning, or it’s going to stink and get some nosy neighbor poking around in your stuff.”

“By morning it won’t matter,” he whispered.

I turned back to him in frustration. “Edward, what’s wrong? Let’s just get out of here. Let’s go to my place.”

“No, it’s too late . . . I’m sick of it all, Lady Leisha.”

He hadn’t called me that in over a hundred years. It was a nickname he’d picked for me when I first stepped off the boat from Wales in 1839, looking like a frightened, half-drowned mouse. He’d been so nice to me back then.

Softly grasping his wrist, I pulled him down to a crouched position on the floor. “Talk to me.”

“Do you remember church? I don’t mean the religion itself, but how we used to wonder about death?”

“I remember, but I don’t think about it very often. Should we?” He pushed me back against the bloody kitchen wall, and then he lay down on the floor with his head in my lap. I wrapped my arms around him, and his butcher knife clattered harmlessly onto the checkerboard linoleum.

“You’re going to kill yourself, aren’t you?”

“I’m tired,” he whispered.

“Don’t do it.”

He didn’t answer, and we just sat there like that, not saying anything until five thirty, when I saw streaks of light peeping through the eastern sky.

I tried lifting him. “We’ve got to get underground.”

He crawled to his feet but didn’t head toward the cellar door. Instead he walked into the living room and restarted the Tchaikovsky album at max volume. Francesca da Rimini screamed out the front windows.

I panicked.

“Stop it! Turn it off. We’ve got to get below.”

Looking back now, I think he wanted the neighbors to complain. He wanted someone to find what he’d been doing in the house. He wanted the police to show up, and I never did understand why.

But my stomach lurched when the blue and red flashing lights pulled up in front of his house.

Grabbing his shoulder, I tried pulling him for the cellar door. He threw me off easily and looked at me with something close to contempt. “We don’t really live forever, baby. We just cheat for a while.”

Rays from the morning sun