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“No, I mean it, Ryker. Tonight. I’m going to kill her tonight.”

Ryker’s hands settled on her shoulders, and he brought his face in close to hers. The wild blaze in his eyes had banked and left them their usual, beautiful blue. The silver sparks weren’t a wildfire anymore. “Okay, my turn. Take a breath, Leslie.”

She couldn’t if she wanted to. Her chest was a lead block. “I don’t want to take a breath! I want to kill that vampire!”

His arms wrapped around her. She pushed against his chest, but he held her close. He was breathing like a human, slow regular breaths. Leslie pressed her mouth to his shirt and screamed. He held onto her until slowly, slowly, her body began to relax. The deep-freeze fury began to thaw. She began to think again. She clung to him. He wasn’t shot or dead. Jacqueline’s scheme had failed. Leslie matched her breaths to Ryker’s, and slowly, slowly her chest opened.

“You okay?” he said after another half-minute, during which time Billy remained curled up and whimpering in the corner and none of the other assailants stirred from the floor.

“Yeah,” she said. “Time to call the police?”

“Definitely.”

The next hour was a blur of giving her statement, watching and listening from a distance while Ryker gave his. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so relieved as when the perpetrators had all been placed under arrest, carted off in various squad cars, and the whirling blue and red lights droveaway. Those lights had been too much for the last hour, not to mention the frequent squawking from police radios.

When the final officer finished verifying their contact information, looking over their statements, and bidding them good night, the time was close to five in the morning, and the birds had begun waking up. Gray light had appeared on the eastern horizon. Leslie and Ryker sat on his front porch stoop and watched the sunrise.

“I’ll call Kim in the morning,” Ryker said. “I mean, later in the morning.”

She had called and spoken briefly to Mom and Dad, then texted Hannah, who wouldn’t be awake to see her text for another hour or two. None of them would accidentally find out about last night’s events from some news site. The headlines wrote themselves.Senator’s Son and Girlfriend Victims of Attempted Murder.Frederick Angstrom Targets Vampire Accountant Who Will Testify Against Him. But Leslie couldn’t think about Detective Kim or Frederick Angstrom or Billy Ellis anymore.

Eyes on the sky, she blurted, “She tried to have you killed.”

“I don’t think so.”

Wait, what? “It’s pretty obvious, Ryker.”

“She didn’t expect them to succeed.”

“Are you freaking serious right now?”

“I know her, Leslie. She wanted to complicate our lives, make us miserable, edgy…keep us from enjoying our time together. That’s all this is to her. A game of petty revenge.”

“Do you still need to hear me say she’s abusive?”

He didn’t immediately answer, but when he did, the confidence in his voice was absolute. “No. I know she is.”

“And not a single thing she ever said against you was reliable.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” He draped his arm over her shoulders, and she leaned into his side. His wound had stopped bleeding almost immediately, would scar over in a day. Leslie tried not to hate the stain that marred his shirt. “I’m free now, Leslie. Free for good.”

“Maybe this was worth it then.” Maybe. Probably not.

“What about you? Are you okay?” he said.

She snuggled into him, pressed her palm to his chest, and waited to feel a beat from his heart before she answered. “I’ve never been so angry in my life. It was…too much for a minute. If she’d been standing in front of me, I might have tried to kill her, Ryker.”

“Well, in case you didn’t know this…” The smirk in his voice was audible for a moment, but then he sobered. “Vampire rage is deadly. If you can actually get one of us mad enough, we’re…kind of unhinged for a little while.”

“I felt unhinged.” She shuddered.

“I think that’s why it’s so hard to anger us. If we had short fuses like some humans I’ve met, we’d betoodeadly to the world around us.”

“Are they going to arrest her for conspiracy?”