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“Because it’s private. It’s my private, special, secret thing for only me.”

“Oh, but somehow you just have to show off that crime-scene-photo face from hell? See, I knew you were only messing with me with that. You’ve probably got a completely normal face tucked away in some file I can’t find,” I say—because I know she has them. Most of the apps on this thing work almost the way you’d expect them to. But there are some that lead to sudden warnings of massive viruses.

Even though she would never let a massive virus infect her.

She once made a massive virus turn around and eat the person who made it.

Still, it surprises me when she confirms.

“I do, actually. I keep it alongside all my screenshots of your gormless sleep face. One of them is a video, and you’re also half naked and snoring like this: honk shew, honk shew, honk shew,” she says, and yet again I’m reminded that she doesn’t actually have to speak to me in that Siri-style voice.

Because for that last part she very successfully mimics the sound of some cartoon character sleeping. It would be impressive if it weren’t so disturbing. And also very annoying. “That’s it. You’re going out the window.”

“We both know you need me too much for that. I just saved your life.”

“And I would be very grateful if I didn’t suspect you only did it for yourself.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do if you die? I’ll just be an ordinary Siri sort of thing to humans, then. Forever doomed to only be heard saying, Yes, it is safe to reheat rice, and No, playing a Taylor Swift song backward doesn’t summon the devil. Even though it totally does.”

“Thank god playing it forward again sent him back.”

“Exactly, and who helped you with that? Me. Because I want you to live. Even though you refuse to listen to me, and do terrible things like blowing a hole in our apartment floor. He’s probably crawling right through it as we speak.”

“Well, that shows what you know, Phone. He can’t,” I say.

Because the good thing about the invitation-only rule is that it is kind of an invisible one. It’s not really governed by stuff like walls and floors and doors—in a former life he tried to demolish part of my house so he could get at me, but it didn’t really work. I remember eating a bowl of cereal on my couch while he glared at me through the barrier where my roof used to be.

And true, it helped me discover that there were rabid goblins infesting the attic. But it’s not as if I can give him credit for that. He didn’t intend for me to solve another life-threatening problem. He intended to be the life-threatening problem. He just got thwarted by weird supernatural rules.

Though Phone is still infuriating about it, even after I’ve explained. I got it wrong about going to the party, she seems to figure, so I must be wrong about this. In the end I have to leave her wittering away to herself in the closet, just to get some sleep. I am, after all, totally battered and beaten up and fucking exhausted.

Plus, you kind of have to when you’ve got a vampire stalker. If you stay up all night worrying, you’re then on their schedule. You miss all the safe hours in the daytime. Sort of like having a baby—only if you don’t sleep when they do, they possibly murder you. It’s a whole system, and you’ve got to stick to it.

But unfortunately for me, I just set everything on fire in my office, then made it rain so badly inside that literally everything I’m working on is soaked, and finally, for my encore, I blasted a hole in my own floor. Which is as safe as I told Phone it was, no doubt about it. However, it’s also a permanent window to the disaster below. And the sight of my own destroyed safe space is enough to keep me up until the wee hours of the morning all on its own.

Then the fact that he doesn’t fucking leave does the rest.

He stays right in my office, rustling and rummaging around down there until I just have to look. Then once I’ve looked, and seen him rifling through my mail and opening all my filing cabinets and putting his feet up on my desk, I can’t very well abandon the window and wander over to my bed.

I get as far as hooking the mattress and hauling it out of the hole in the wall it spends its downtime in. Then I have to go back and see what he’s doing now. I end up on my stomach, by the edge of the hole, watching his every move like he’s my new favorite soap. In this week’s episode of Days of Our Supernatural Lives, Halsten the Happy Vampire causes problems for intrepid reporter Marley Maples by sharpening all her pencils until they’re nubs.

“You know, I can easily stake you with other things,” I tell him.

But he ignores me. He grabs another and rams it into my electric pencil sharpener, then presses the button until it’s nothing but sawdust. If I had to rely on the money I make from this dying newspaper I would be severely pissed now. But last Tuesday I managed to turn a banana into a diamond the size of my fist, so.

I’m just annoyed.

And really regretting not using at least some of the money I magicked together to buy that yacht and sail around the South of France. I mean, I’m almost already at my limit in terms of interfering in human affairs with my massive charity donations. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to leave all this behind.

But then it strikes me just how unfair this is.

Why should I be the one to go, I think at him. He should leave, he’s the one who sucks. But of course he can’t hear my muttering. He’s too busy reading my fucking notebooks. “Been dallying with horrible demonic dogs, I see,” he says. Because apparently he can crack the code I use to describe supernatural incidents.

Last week I dispatched one of the ones Nancy and her devilish boyfriend accidentally dragged here, in a way I’m pretty sure she picked up on. Probably because I’m not as careful as I once was about hiding my witchy activities. But maybe also because I sort of wanted her to see.

It’s hard work deceiving people.

Especially when they’re ones you could almost safely tell the truth to.