This chapter contains mature and violent content, and references to animal harm.

Isla, Underdressed and Under Duress

You know what, before meeting the murderous ghost of a vampire's ex-lover in possession of a reanimated barista's body who seems to be holding my not-boyfriend hostage for a presumably WrestleMania style grudge match, I probably should've changed.

Then maybe my nips wouldn't already feel like they were about to fall off just walking up Dmitri and Sloane's front lawn. They were hard enough to poke a hole through Greg's t-shirt. Hugging my silken robe tighter around myself did nothing to cut the windchill. It had begun to snow. The cold weather finally broke into the first blizzard of the new year. With every step I dragged my hem through the accumulating slush. My fuzzy slippers were already soaked through. Two pairs of footwear down in a single weak. Damn it.

Also my Uber driver probably would've given me more than a single star rating.

Grumpkin mewed and wove between my ankles.

Okay, well, I probably got some stars deducted for bringing a cat along too, but Grumps was my backup!

As I ran from the café and killed my phone battery summoning a car, any car (I didn't have time to walk back to the vamp house) I reached my will out onto the third floor of the building and not so quietly shouted: "Come here, Grumpkin!" up the fire escape. My clever kitten nudged the bathroom window open and wiggled his way out, didn't bother with the fire escape, and just tossed himself out the window onto the pavement below.

Shattered one of his legs and bent his tail into a perfectly 90-degree angle, but whatevs, he was still limping along fine. Keeping my ankles warm, at least.

Hey, he managed to scare some spookies, Rosemond included, off once before. Cats were excellent guardians of the underworld. Naturally gifted with second sight. Liquid at room temperature. Knives in their feet. Perfect combo.

The front door was open. Not, like, ajar. But it was unlocked. Just like the gate. I let myself, and Grumpkin, in.

"Greg?" I called. "Hello? Rosemond?"

My voice echoed through the empty halls. Despite the time approaching mid-morning, the house was dark. But all the blackout curtains and newspapers plastered over the windows were meant to keep the sunlight out, weren't they?

"Hello!"

For emphasis, Grumpkin meowed quite loudly along with me that time.

No answer.

Whatever blood donors remained post Sloane's staking and Caleb's death weren't home, I guess. Or, worse. They didn't remain at all.

No sign of Greg either. Not that I should have been expecting Greg's rich voice to call back. It was daylight. He was dead. But where was he slumbering? With each slide of my slippers down the hall, my ribs seemed to tighten around my lungs. Where was Greg?

The house was cold. Draftier than I remembered. As I ventured deeper inside, the biting chill's teeth grew sharper. A breeze tore through my pajama bottoms. Twigs and ice skittered inside from the open doors of the sunroom. In from the graveyard out back, I should say.

My anklet was ice cold against my skin.

"Well, Grumpkin, you ready to do something stupid?"

He bopped my shin with his soft head. Mewed. And pranced out into the yard.

Yeah. That's where I was heading too.

Fuck. Shit. Troll balls.

Rosemond's mausoleum was open. The naked rose bushes surrounding it shuddered under the weight of the drifting snow, undulating as if in worship to the gruesome scene displayed within. The bones, always those freaking bones, were arranged on the slab that formerly held her coffin much in the same way I'd seen them at the Cabroni house (the coffin was in pieces on the floor). Her skull seemed to sneer at me, even with the bottom half of her jar unattached.

I palmed the finger bone in my sleeve.

"Mmmmm!"

Oh, yeah, and there was a woman, a live woman, bound and gagged beside the decaying skeleton. See? Just like the Cabroni house. Except she wasn't dead. She was straining against the ropes binding her to the mausoleum's second pedestal (reserved for Dmitri's eventual casket, perhaps? Seat saved for him?).

The woman wriggled and kicked. Even at a distance I could see the red welts the ropes dug into her exposed wrists and ankles. She wore only a velour tracksuit in a bronze color that really complimented her skin tone. Her long, dark hair cascaded in tangles over the edge of the platform. She was chubby and gorgeous, even with the streaks of mascara running with the tears all the way to her chin.

Something sharp and wet crunched over my shoulder. Grumpkin yowled. Loud and piercing and abruptly cut with another scrape of metal against rock. A snap. An awful and wet tearing.

I spun to my right, towards the sound.

"Good morrow, Madame," purred Lily—Rosemond—from amongst the headstones. "You're underdressed."

Rosie stood, elbow resting on the bloody spade of a shovel and one leg perched on a tombstone, at the head of an open grave. Snowflakes danced in time with her billowing, ill-fitted gown. It was red, possibly velvet, but had clearly been faded with age so that it more resembled a watered down, bloody pink. The gold, intricate stitching was threatening to tear around her hips and chest, and the hem of her skirt was way too long in the front. A golden belt rested like lover's hands over her hips, rubies encased within each swinging pendent that hung from it. Like my robe, her sleeves also trailed wetly in the snow. Looked like the whole getup had a few moth-eaten holes in it as well.

She stood proudly between the two severed halves of my freaking cat. So much being a guardian of the underworld. Grumpkin's head and front paws laid to one side of the gravestone. His back half on the opposite. All four paws still faintly twitched.

Rosemond noticed my gaze and shrugged. "Never like cats."

Melodramatic, evil, bitchfaced, slore.

"What the fuck, Rosemond? Where's Greg?" I sighed, an overwhelming exhaustion seeping into my own bones. I gestured to the bound woman. "And who the fuck is this?"

Rosemond inhaled deep and feigned a gasp. "My b-b-boyfriend's wife!" she squealed, in a truly, honest to deathly, absolutely horrific impression of Lily's softer cadence. Heinous. An offense to the creator of all that is good and even vaguely decent improv comedy groups. Yikes. How'd I not notice her shitty acting before?

Feeling dumb and not knowing what else to do, I waved at Mrs. Cabroni. "Yeah, hi, I'll get to you. Greg? Where is he?"

Mrs. Cabroni screamed into her gag. Ew. Hope that wasn't one of Dmitri's socks.

Rosemond sniggered. Her posture straightened, and she twirled the shovel like a baton. Reminded me of one of those roadside advertisements. A non-IP scarecrow with a pumpkin head twirling a cardboard Spirit of Halloween sign. "Come and see!"

Almost, almost, I stepped backwards. But I stopped myself. Straightened my spine. Rosemond was taunting me to venture deeper into the graveyard, but there's no way she could know about my anklet, right? Highly doubted she'd sacrifice herself like this to trap me. Which means, she didn't have a frigging clue that the moment I joined her I would trigger Magistrates to storm this place. Capture her. Save the lady wolf. Save Greg.

Damn myself.

Hey, maybe for once summoning my impending doom wouldn't be such a bad thing?

I marched forward. The snow was already deeper out here than on the sidewalks. Sunk right in up to my ankles. The Contraband Curse bound to my leg melted the slush as it warmed.

Not wanting to get that close to her and her sharp implement, I stopped at the foot of the grave. Smirking, Rosemond took her shovel and pointed the handle downwards. The wood of it was sharpened into a point—a stake.

I looked down.

Greg.

The tightness in my chest intensified into a crushing weight. My knees nearly buckled. Greg was down there. Just lying there. Posed in the same way as Rosemond's photo. He was six feet deep, propped up against the front wall of the grave, head lolled to one side, mouth slightly agape (was it wrong of me to think those fangs popping out under his lip were still cute, even like this?). Snow had gathered on his clothes. Buried the tips of his fingers. He was paler in daylight. Looked more tired and ragged and dead. Dark circles under sunken eyes. Limbs all limp and bent at odd angles. Neck dotted with old scars.

A wooden spear was lodged in his stomach.

"Was a bloody pain in the balls to get him in there," sighed Rosemond. "To be honest, I was never clear on the whole wooden stake rules. If you stab it on through their guts it pins a vampire to the ground in internal slumber, but if you nail it just right," she jabbed and twisted her sharpened shovel into an imaginary target, "right in the heart, they explode into dust, or some such? You are one lucky twat."

"Don't feel like such a lucky penny right now," I said, voice weak, eyes pinned to Greg. Could I yank a whole spear out of his chest, like I pulled the stake from Sloane? Thing was like three feet long. And that was just the part sticking out of him.

Rosemond pointed skyward with her shovel/stake. "If it wasn't for this weather, he'd be spit-roasted like a pig. How long you think it holds out?"

I rubbed my one hot ankle against the other, hands curling into fists. "What do you want?"

"I wanted to have a moment, alone, with you for ages now, ever since I realized what you," she emphasized the word with a snort of disgust, "of all bloody people were capable of."

"Oh, my, fucking—" I rubbed my temples. Think I was starting to come down hard off my cheap wine buzz. "Just shoot straight with me, bitch. I fast forward through the part of the movie where the villain monologues."

She cocked a brow. "I need your help."

Silence. Eerie and still and snow covered. Rosemond nodded her head at Mrs. Cabroni – whose screams had diminished to mere whimpers – with a tight smile and wide eyes.

I didn't follow and raised my hands to express as much.

Undead bitch grunted. "Ugh, the Restoration spell. Do it. To me," she swiveled her shovel at the bones. "Bring my body to tip-top shape and put me back in it. I want to surprise Dmitri when he wakes from his little nap. Look! Even got you a sacrifice. Cow ought of to have more than enough meat there to fill out my bones, yeah?"

I reared back, nearly tripping on weather worn gravestone as I did. "No."

Rosemond's glare darkened. She pointed that staked end of the shovel down at Greg's chest.

"I'll stake him. Through the heart this time."

"It'll kill her."

"Yeah, okay, so? Kind of the point," she waggled the stake, "of a sacrifice."

A slimy sensation snaked through my gut. A part of me, the part more connected to the shadows and the veil and the Netherworld than I usually liked to admit, just gave a mental shrug and said why not? You want to keep Greg, don't you? This is how. You're about to be pinched for the last time anyway. Might as well save the boy you're pretending not to be crazy about in a blaze of necrotic glory before you're doomed for good. It's not like you haven't done worse before, girlfriend. Much, much, much worse than sacrificing one woman to revive another. Just ask your prom date.

And this was noble, wasn't it? To reunite true love?

I glanced down at Greg. Reunite whose true love?

Oh. Oh heck, ew, weird, that was a dumbass thought. Yeah, no, too soon, girlfriend. Way too soon for that kind of lovey dovey talk. Get ahold of yourself.

I imagined Greg's eyes rolling behind those unmoving lids.

"No," shook my head, "I'm sorry, Rosemond, I know you're doing this for love—"

Rosemond burst into a fit of cackles to rival the Wicked Witch of the West. And East. Combined. Her whole body shook with the force it. As the maniacal laughter subsided (see, now, that's villain worthy machismo), she shook snowflakes from her frizzed out hair.

"Love?" she croaked, wiping a globby, pus like tear from her cheek. "That's the daftest thing I've ever heard! I don't want true love. I want to be me. In my own body. Forever. I want immortality! I want to be young and beautiful and me for all eternity! And no one will bloody give it to me!"

She swung her shovel like a blade. It lopped off the head of an unfortunate shrubbery. A big cloud of snow and frost erupted from the plant, dusting Greg, flakes of it landing on his precious face. He didn't flinch. The snow didn't melt.

"Self-love is a form of a love," I mused, hoping to draw her attention, and weapon, away from the vicinity of the unconscious vampire. "Nothing wrong with putting your own needs first."

Ugh, why did my own words make me wince?

"Dmitri, my truest love," Rosemond continued, screaming, "wouldn't even turn me after I begged him. You'd think slicing your own wrists would get that fanger's attention to what lady really wants, but nooooooo, the piss bucket let me die! For what? Some idiotic, altruistic purity culture rubbish."

You know what, after meeting Sloane and his other exes, I get what Dmitri saw in this lady. I did. She was definitely his type.

No clue how Lily managed to pull it off.

"And the wolf! My word. Spot of luck in him picking me up after I left your quaint parlor, but lord, I don't know what she," Rosemond waved a hand over her borrowed face, "saw in that dolt! But he 'loved' her alright. Enough to believe me when I said she'd come back, right as rain, so long as he helped me return to my own body," another snorting fit of laughter overtook her, "I can't fathom how you believed that was the mutt's bloody idea. Nearly fainted from holding in my laughter with how easily you twits swallowed that pill!"

"A credit to your ability as a performer," I droned. "Is this tangent going anywhere, or..."

"But even that ponce made me wait!"

The undead woman attacked the branches of the shrub viciously. "Mummy's boy loved her so much, that if I just had to use her shriveled husk as a sacrifice, I at least had to wait till she died naturally. At peace. What sort of twisted logic s'that? Love is stupid! And look where it got the beast! You two shot him in the face!"

I turned to Mrs. Cabroni – just as a fresh wave of tears washed her cheeks. I shook my head. "It wasn't in the face. But also, yeah, he's dead. Uh, sorry."

"Well, I waited," with another giggle, Rosemond mimed a smothering motion over Greg's grave. "Waited till he wouldn't notice her kick it, that's how long I waited."

"Why though?" I blurted. Damn it. I swore I wouldn't be taken in by a stupid monologue. "Why wait? Why sneak around? Why not just come straight here and tell Dmitri who you are? You'd have saved us all a lot of headaches, babe."

"And willingly bloody validate that wanker? I've watched him pull these stunts for centuries. You think just showing up in his latest whore's body like, 'oi, really me this time, love' would magically make it all better? Piss off."

I shrugged. Yeah, okay, I guess she had a point there.

"Besides, where would the drama be in that? I'm only here now because you horny buggers," she gestured to Greg with that shovel again, "kept ruining things! Ran me out of bloody options."

Rosemond speared the roots of one of those rose bushes with her shovel.

Yikes.

As she continued with her tantrum, I shuffled to the long side of the grave, inching my back to the mausoleum. Slowly. Quietly. Toward where Mrs. Cabroni was bound. Which was difficult, especially gauging the distance since I couldn't feel my feet. I was so cold my fingers were numb, and I couldn't stop trembling, but maybe I could undo the werewolf's binds and she could, I don't know, use some talons to help me put another hole in the other side of Lily's body before the wench driving it put another hole through Greg's chest.

Don't care if the days after the full moon were when werewolves were their most human, and vulnerable. Never tell me the odds! This was a plan wasn't it? Of some sort.

Rosemond moved too, continuing her attack on the landscaping. She'd shifted to the opposite side of the open grave as well. I stiffened. The distance between us was suddenly way, way too small.

"Yeah, no, true love is horseshit! If Dmitri loved me, he wouldn't pretend to see me in every twat that gets his cock hard! He wouldn't offer to turn every harlot he ever sucked on and sucked him off immortality. Not when he wouldn't. Give it. To. Me!" Rosemond punctuated each sentence with a hack at the earth. Pigeons fluttered off the back wall. Snow fluttered from their wings. "Look at this?" she gestured to herself in Lily's body. "She looks nothing like me! It's insulting."

I nodded. Yeah, kind of hard to argue with that. I'd be pissed if my ex-husband used my soul as an excuse to bone any woman he got a chub for too.

Think I even heard Mrs. Cabroni offering an agreeing mmmmm behind us.

"Hey, boys are dumb. Real dumb. I get it," I said, hands up in surrender. "I mean, yeah, I get it. You know them for, like, a week, and suddenly they're professing their love for you, but in the same breath, insulting you. What's up with that?"

Rosemond huffed, her shoulders relaxing a touch. "Well, who's more stupid? The boy who thinks he's in love or the girl at his beck and call?"

"Uhhh." Okay, well, that burned a little.

"Doesn't matter. What were we discussing? Right! Killing this woman and using her life force to restore me to my former glory. Changed your mind on that yet?"

I inched another step back toward Mrs. Cabroni. "Yeah, that's going to be a no from me, dawg."

"Pity. But, you know what they say. Want something done right," she twirled her shovel, "You have to do it your-bloody-self."

That's when slugger over here wound up and smashed her shovel right into my face.

Ouch.