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with the nagging, because artless beauty must be punished. “It’s just me-me-me with you these days. Meanwhile my best friend might have gone insane, or she’s being blackmailed or hypnotized or audited, or some awful combination, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it. Because that’s what a good friend does: she pushes her troubles—nay, her responsibilities!—aside and helps. No matter what the cost.” I swept toward the door and pointed toward the foyer. “Good day, madam!”
    “Oh, Jesus jumped-up Christ on a crutch,” she muttered, which, for her, was about the most shocking epithet ever uttered. This was a woman who considered shoot over the line, swearwise. “Fine. Let the record show I tried.” She followed my pointy finger and exited with a huff and a glare. I vowed to make it up to her. Just as soon as I broke my other vow and figured out what was wrong with Jessica.
    “Okay, great!” I practically cheered. “Let’s get to the bottom of this! Hoo—”
    “Don’t cheer; you can be really obnoxious in victory,” DadDick warned.
    “I was going to say ‘whoever did this to her will be sorry,’” I managed with hardly any dignity. I managed to keep myself from jumping up and down in sheer glee. Something was wrong with my best friend and she obviously needed my help! Thank God something was wrong with my best friend and she obviously needed my help!
    Like I said: bad person. That’s me all over.

 CHAPTER 
    TWO
    “Hey, Jess! Wait up!” Before I could track down wherever she’d wandered to (wandering was also new behavior; Jess did not wander , she favored a “help me or move” stride), I nearly fell over Tina exiting the kitchen. I checked my watch—three o’clock in the afternoon. Sunset was still two hours away (winter, blech), so she was stuck in the mansion for a bit unless she stowed away in Marc’s trunk. But that was a whole other thing, and they only put Operation VampTrunk into action when it was important.
    Of course, important—like everything around here—was relative. Important could mean Tina had a five p.m. craving for sorbet-flavored vodka. (Don’t get me started on the vodka. She had her own freezer for the vodka. She didn’t care to share the vodka. I didn’t even like vodka but knowing I couldn’t have it made me crave it like a diabetic craves insulin.) And Marc loved the whole trunk setup; said it made him feel like he was in an action movie. I managed not to point out that, as a zombie, he was definitely in a movie, just not the genre he thought.
    So when he got twitchy or cabin-fever-ey, he’d occasionally pretend an errand was more urgent than it was (“We’re down to a half-pint of raspberries, Tina; get in my trunk stat!”—this from a guy who wouldn’t say stat if everyone around him was going into cardiac arrest) so she would climb into the blanket nest he always had ready, then they’d chat or text on their phones while tooling around town doing whatever it was they did . . . and why was I only now realizing that I kind of wanted them to do a buddy movie?
    “Majesty,” was how Tina greeted me, which was typical. We’d lived together for years and had saved each other’s lives more than once, and she loved me not for my (symbolic . . . if the queen gig had come with an actual crown I might have been more amenable) crown but for what I had done for Sinclair, the other person she loved more than life (death? undeath?) itself. I know my husband would have been lost without her, not just on a weekly basis but decades before I was born, and I was starting to suspect I’d be lost, too. I’d gone from not knowing what a majordomo was (I’d assumed it had something to do with the military) to wondering how I’d ever gotten along without one.
    All that love and devotion and it was still “Majesty” and “My queen” and “O dread majesty” and “Dearest sovereign, if I catch you in my vodka stash just once more, I shall set you on