Page 116 of Fall into Place

“Me too.” Joni nodded, looking a little teary. Tess rubbed her arm.

“You okay?” Tess asked Joni as the queen made her way deeper into the crowd.

“Yeah. At least I have you back.” Joni looped an arm around Tess’s shoulders. “That matters way more than some extremely hot vampire, no matter how good she was in bed.”

“That’s the ticket.” Tess smiled, but her heart caught in her throat when she saw a man whose hair and silhouette looked strikingly like Callum’s—until he turned, and their faces were completely different. Her hand went automatically to the necklace Callum had given her before the ball, and she felt a wave of pain. She couldn’t believe how much she already missed him.

“If we pull this off…do you think they’ll come back?” Joni looked at Tess hopefully.

“Maybe,” Tess said quietly. She’d had the same thought—and she certainly hoped Callum would want to be with her in New York if Konstantin wasn’t an issue. He’d said as much, hadn’t he? More than once?

But that wasn’t why she was doing this. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life running from a killer. Her only choice was to step up and kill him first.

“I can’t believe we’re carrying around all these stakes,” Tess said. “I never thought I’d feel this much like Buffy.”

“We’re putting aside our emotions about being dumped by our vampire lovers to take on the big bad,” Joni reasoned. “It’s giving season two.”

“And season three!” Tess added.

Tess and Joni were both wearing long, hooded black capes, which worked great to conceal their messenger bags filled with sharp wooden stakes. (It turned out Flora’s portal magic came in extremely handy when you needed to rob a costume shop and a garden supply store in the middle of the night.) Tess felt pretty good about their plan—but she was incredibly worried that something would go wrong and someone in this crowd would get hurt.

“Oh my god, it took me forever to get to you,” Flora huffed as she pushed through the people around Tess and Joni. “Are you ready?”

“I think so.” Tess’s heart started pounding. She glanced at her phone—it was 4:27. “Where are they?”

“Just a couple of blocks away.” Flora held up her Find My Friends app, where a little dot labeled Fern was nearly upon them.

“And you’re sure they don’t know about…all this?” Joni gestured at the crowd, the costumes, the general rumpus.

“Doubt it,” Flora answered. “Fern thinks she’s too cool for social media, Felix and the other vamps probably don’t even have phones, and Konstantin is famously not online.”

“Even if they know, it doesn’t change the plan,” Tess said. “We keep our hoods up, move through the crowd, and stake them before they find us. Joni, are you good?”

Joni nodded, but she looked a bit green. Since she was by far the tallest of the three, it was her job to stake Konstantin.

“I’ll just get behind him,” she said, gripping a stake tightly. “He can’t kill me if he’s dead before he realizes I’m even there. And if it looks like he’s going to kill me, Flora can always send him through a portal to the Atlantic Ocean or something, right?”

“Not really.” Flora shook her head. “Since portals are about desire, it’s really hard to send someone through one involuntarily. If I can do it at all, I can probably only send them a couple of blocks away.”

“Oh! Cool, cool, that’s fine.” Joni was jittery—she couldn’t stop moving. “It’ll probably still be fine.”

“Joni, if you feel like you can’t kill Konstantin without getting killed yourself, then don’t fucking do it, okay?” Tess put her hands over Joni’s. “And remember, if things go sideways, just get to the pool deck.”

Joni and Flora nodded. They took out their phones and got on a three-way call so they could stay in communication—they each had one earbud in.

“I feel like I’m in a Mission: Impossible movie,” Joni joked.

“Yeah?” Tess laughed anxiously. “Which character are you?”

“Tom Cruise, obviously,” Joni said. “Because of my unparalleled derring-do and problematic opinions about women. You’re Ving Rhames because you’re a majestic loyal genius, Flora’s Simon Pegg because she’s lovable but ultimately useless.”

“You’d both be dead if it weren’t for me,” Flora said dryly.

“Okay, that’s your opinion,” Joni joked.

Flora rolled her eyes—but then her phone beeped, and her expression hardened. “They’re here.”

Tess and Joni looked up. There was Konstantin, tall enough that he was easily visible above the packed lobby.