“Awww, you know I’m your hero.”

Sinclair was overseeing our luggage (as an alternative to strangling Jessica), Detective Nick was still in the lobby, and Jessica and I were arguing in the hallway outside our hotel room. It was a nice hallway . . . crimson carpet, gold wallpaper, gorgeous wall fixtures, dim lighting. Too bad I was so pissed it was totally wasted on me.

“You’re not a tiny bit glad to see me?” Jessica was continuing.

I snapped my attention away from the wall fixtures. “Irrelevant! Now will you get lost already?”

“Don’t you want to go shopping at Macy’s with me?” Jessica had the nerve to sound wounded.

“We have one in the Mall of America,” I said coldly. Also a Bloomingdale’s and an Orange Julius. “And we’ve been a thousand times.”

“Listen, Betsy . . .” Jessica was trying to look earnest, but as usual, her black hair was skinned back so tightly her eyebrows couldn’t move. She could barely blink. Even in the low hallway lighting, her ebony skin shone, but not in a run-for-the-blotting-papers way. She was, as usual, ridiculously beautiful, although still far too thin from the cancer. “I had to come.”

“You had to crash my honeymoon?”

“You make it sound so mean.”

I put my hands behind my back, because they wanted to fly up and fasten around my best friend’s throat. “It is mean, you nimrod! I finally haul Sinclair’s protesting ass to the altar—after rescuing him from certain death, and attending a double funeral, and taking on responsibility for BabyJon, and curing your cancer—and now here I am in New York City for the first time ever, ready to enjoy my honeymoon and you two idiots show up! No offense.”

“Listen . . .” Wary of superior vampire hearing, Jessica tugged me by the elbow about ten feet further down the hallway. I didn’t bother telling her Sinclair could still hear her from inside the room if he put his mind to it. Ears. Whatever. “I know it seems like a rotten trick—”

“‘Oh, sure, Betsy, you guys can borrow my plane, but not until tomorrow . . .’ Giving you plenty of time to beat us here.” Now my hands wanted to fly into my hair and yank, hard. “And dumbass that I am, I actually left our contact information with you.”

“Well, yes, but there was a method to my madness. You see, Nick hates you and Sinclair.”

I blinked. “Yeah. So?”

“So?” Jessica threw her bony arms up in the air. “So? So I finally find a guy who doesn’t give a shit that I gave away more money last year than the Target Corporation. So I finally find a guy who isn’t so busy crushing on my best friend he doesn’t even notice me. So I—”

“Hey, hey!”

“Oh, shut up, you know it’s true. I finally find a guy who likes me for me, and it turns out he hates my best friend and her husband. Not ‘God, they’re boring, I hate going over there’ hate, or ‘I hate how all she talks about is shoes’ hate. Hate hate. ‘I hate war’ hate. ‘I hate plague’ hate.”

I blew out a breath, which wasn’t necessary, but I’d only been dead a couple of years, and old habits died hard. Jessica wasn’t lying, or even exaggerating. Her boyfriend did hate me, and it was a problem.

See, when I was a newborn vampire, out of my mind with the thirst, I’d feasted on Nick. And it . . . sort of drove him crazy. Crying, slobbering crazy. Sinclair had to step in and fix it by erasing Nick’s memory of all events leading from my death.

We’d assumed it worked.

It hadn’t.

It had actually worn off several months ago but, like all cops, Nick could lie like a sociopath. Instead he’d waited and watched. When Jessica had gotten sick, he’d explained in terrifying detail all the things he and his Sig Sauer would do to me if I didn’t cure her. But I’d had plenty of other things on my mind at the time, and as upsetting as it was to find out how he really felt, there hadn’t been much I could do about it.

Frankly, what with one thing and another (the aforementioned rescue, the wedding, Jessica’s miracle cancer cure) I’d managed to put Nick’s simmering hatred out of my mind.

“I can’t have the man I love hating my best friend.”

“So you figure we’ll hang out on my honeymoon and get to be friends again?”

Jessica opened her mouth to reply, but our hotel door popped open and a bellboy (bellman, actually) trotted down the hallway toward us, dressed in the crimson uniform of the hotel staff. He was a wide-eyed redhead with a goatee. Goatees irritated me. Either shave it all off, or grow a proper, Grizzly Adams beard, that was my motto. “Mrs. Sinclair, did you want your shoes kept in the tissue paper, or—”

“It’s not Sinclair and go away,” I snapped, a little too forcefully, as all the expression fell out of his eyes and he spun jerkily around, hit the Exit door, and disappeared.

“Great, he’s probably going to swan into the Hudson,” Jessica said disapprovingly.

“The least of my problems,” I snarled back, pretending I didn’t feel hugely guilty. “Are you saying Nick thought coming to New York was a fine plan?”

“Well . . .”

I got it. “Ah. ‘Hey, Nick, I’ve got a great idea for a way to mess with your archenemies . . . how about we beat them to their hotel and tag along on their honeymoon?’”

Jessica spread her hands and grinned the grin I could never resist. I ground my teeth in a vain attempt to resist. “He did smile. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile when you or Sinclair’s names have come up. What could I do?”

The door opened again and Sinclair’s head popped out, which was as startling as it sounds. “Where did the bellboy go?”

“Bellman,” I said helpfully.

“I’ve got twenty pairs of shoes in here and I don’t know what you”—his eyes narrowed as he took in Jessica’s grin—“I know that look. You’re giving in, aren’t you?”

“It’s not like they’re going to be sharing the room,” I began, but my husband cut me off by shutting our door.

Great.

Jessica coughed. “Sorry,” she almost whispered.