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Seth mutters, “Jesus Christ.”

All we’re missing is the fucking raccoon and the damn dog.

And even then I think it’s just because they’re currently fighting over a piece of pizza. Probably they, too, would join this ridiculous Halsten is the most handsome man alive party, if they stopped to gawk at his not even that attractive face. Because it isn’t that attractive, I swear it isn’t. His mouth is too small, his nose is too big, he has that stupid dimple in his chin.

They’re all buffoons.

“Okay, while you’re all standing around drooling, I’m going to do a test to see if the spell even worked. Because if it has, we need to grab him and dump him somewhere before he sees us all and decides that these strangers are going to fill the mortal-enemy hole my removal from his memory left behind,” I say, intending to sound practical and sensible, and somehow getting increasingly speedy and forceful as each sentence rolls on. By the end I’m red in the face. My magic is crackling.

I see Seth’s eyes widen as it hisses and spits along my arms.

But hey—they’re all the ones who groaned over this hideous man. I’m fine, I’m doing fine, I’m normal, I think as I take the bull by the horns and ping him with a little bit of curse finder. If we crammed one into him, it’ll ping back to me and tell me exactly what it is and we’ll all be set.

It’s really simple.

I don’t know what goes wrong.

I think maybe I do it too hard. Or maybe too angrily. I’m not sure, but it seems to explode through him the moment it makes contact. Like there’s loads of stuff in there, instead of just our straightforward, pretty singular spell. The sound it makes isn’t just the usual little bell ring, it’s almost a boom.

And worse:

He immediately sits up.

He practically jumps to his feet. Everybody automatically moves—Jack trying to get in front of Nancy, and Nancy trying to get in front of Jack, and Seth trying to get in front of Cassie, and Cassie trying to get in front of Seth, and then for fuck’s sake even the animals try to save each other. The goddamn microwave lurches out of its cubby between the many happy couples and the crazed vampire.

It’s sickening, honestly.

If I wasn’t about to be murdered, I’d be fake vomiting.

But as I am, I’ve got to do something about this. He’s already raging and looking ready to pounce. Plus he can see us all—so first things first, I try to mitigate his front-row view of everything. Softball blindfold, I think, and then draw my arm back to pitch, hand miming a rough rectangle, the other hand adding something to stick it in place. Then I just lob what I’ve got, knowing it’s not quite perfect, but putting my faith in it anyway.

You’ve got to when you’re in the middle of sudden and brutal vampire fights.

There’s no time to pause—he’s fast as lightning. Though weirdly, he doesn’t seem to react like he is. The rectangle of metal hits over his eyes, dead on, instead of offset and skewed the way I expected. He doesn’t even swipe it away before the screws go in and secure it to his face.

And he rocks back, too.

He flails.

It was such an easy ball, and he’s crashing into the kitchen table behind him and pawing at his face ineffectively, and strangest of all: he’s kind of babbling. His words are coming out all garbled and frantic, like he’s half forgotten how to speak. What the fuck, I want to say, but Cassie gets there first.

“Oh my god,” she says. “We scrambled his brains.”

But before I can fully process this, or do anything about it, he suddenly stops dead. He makes a sound like a howl. And then he fully flings himself into the air, so hard and fast the floorboards beneath him crack. A boom goes through the house, rattling windowpanes and doors and setting off an alarm somewhere upstairs.

We’re left with nothing more than a second hole in the roof.

And the sure and certain knowledge that we just let a vampire with soup for brains escape into the night, to do god only knows what.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The first thing I do is tell them all the wrong places to look for him. He hates making a lair in the woods, or near running water, or basically anything that is outside or outside adjacent. So I tell them not to look anywhere indoors, and watch them run off into the night.

Then I start searching all the fanciest hotels in the surrounding area.

Starting with the ones that have a good mall close by. The only thing my immortal enemy loves more than trying to murder me is making himself look good. The last time he was in one of my lives, we had a truly epic battle in the menswear department of Macy’s. He lobbed a mannequin at me like a spear.

While wearing a velour jacket that he’d been trying on.