My ass felt like a slab of dead flesh, too nerveless to even quiver as the butcher slaps it onto his cutting table. Twelve hours of flying from Manila to Sydney with another sixty minute’s hop after that is hell on the hindquarters, even when they’ve been cushioned by the most expensive seats available.

I stifled the urge to massage my butt cheeks as I descended the stairs of Vayl’s chartered jet onto the tarmac of Canberra International Airport, its serviceable hangars and practical block terminal hardly preparing visitors for Australia’s capital, which from the air had reminded me of a set from Shrek III. Tall white buildings sprouting from masses of evergreens set in a precise plan; fairy tale perfection from a distance but up close slanting just left of happily ever after.

Shrek was always having issues with his butt, I recalled, wondering if anyone would notice if I paused to rub mine against the stair railing. Nope, bad plan. I hadn’t seen Bergman and Cassandra in over two months, and I didn’t want my crew’s first look at me to remind them we’d begun a shithole of an assignment that, if botched, could severely cripple the US space program, not to mention vital parts of our anatomies. Plus, with Cole as my third greeter, I figured our hey-how-are-yous probably shouldn’t start with a lot of ass-grabbing.

I didn’t sense that Cole itched to get his hands on me as he stood at the bottom of the stairs. But his ear-to-ear grin, framed by the usual mop of sun-bleached hair, warned me that flexibility might be required. Because Something was Cooking. I eyed my former recruit, trying to get a sense of how bad it might be by the size of the gum wad rolling around his tongue. Then the music began.

“What have you done now?” I asked as my foot hit the fourth step and I realized he’d rented himself a black tuxedo, though he’d traded the bridal shop’s shoes for his red hightops. “And should I be better dressed?”

I frowned at my Jaded Unicorns T-Shirt, which showed my fave new band galloping across a meadow wearing fake horns on their foreheads. At least I’d worn black jeans.

Cole’s answer drowned in a sudden wail of funereal blues. Which made me doublecheck the landscape. Nope, not even close to New Orleans. In fact the airport, surrounded by the brownish green grasses of Australia’s autumn, reminded me a lot of the farmlands of Illinois. Except today was May 22, so back in the Midwest everything would be shooting out of the ground, green as a tree frog and bursting into bloom. Here, winter had crept to the country’s edge, and I could feel it sinking its claws into my neck along with the chill breeze that swept down the hills into Canberra’s valley.

I flipped up the collar of my new leather jacket, the mournful tone of the music reminding me of the bullet wound that had killed my last one. Below me, keeping time to my slow descent, two trumpeters, a trombonist and a sax-man wearing black suits and matching shades slow-marched from behind a baggage van, belting out a song fit for a head-of-state. If he’d just been assassinated.

I turned back and whistled. Jack had been cooped up so long I couldn’t believe he still stood at the cabin door, sniffing, as if he didn’t approve of this sudden change of season. He stared at me, his white face setting off deep brown eyes that looked somewhat mournful as his gray ears twitched as if to ask, Where did the tropics go? But we both knew he was really thinking, You put me on another fat metal bird when you know my paws belong on the ground. How could you?

“We’re here,” I told him.

He nodded (no, I’m not kidding; the dog is, like, one step away from hosting his own talk show) and bounded down the steps, racing toward the plane’s landing gear so he could make sure the pilot had settled it firmly into place. Satisfied, he lifted a leg. There. Now the gut-churning ear-popper belonged to him. And if it tried to lift him back into the clouds he’d show it who was the boss.

Cassandra laughed. She stood opposite Cole, her hand on the rail as if waiting to help me down. But I wouldn’t be touching her if I could help it. I preferred a little mystery in my future, and our psychic had a way of spoiling the fun.

Which wasn’t quite fair. The first time she’d touched me, in the studio above her health food store, she’d had a vision that saved my brother’s life. It was just, you know, now that the two of them were an item, I didn’t want her next conversation with Dave to include the words, “Oh, honey, your twin sister is such a freak in the bedroom! You’ll never guess what I picked up on her today!”

As our eyes met, she gave me her regal smile and flipped her heavy black braids over her shoulder, revealing a tangerine stole which she’d thrown over a navy blue turtleneck and white, rhinestone-studded jeans. An enormous bag made from the same orange furball as her wrap hung over one elbow, its mysterious bulges suggesting that it had been a marsupial on its home planet before Space Commandoes had trapped it, shaved it, and shipped the clippings to her favorite retail outlet. Only the former oracle of a North African god could’ve pulled off that ensemble.

I jerked my head toward the band and raised my eyebrows.

“It wasn’t me,” she mouthed, her six pairs of earrings waving a double negative as she shook her head and rolled her eyes toward Bergman.

I felt a rush of affection as I glanced at my old roomie and current sci-guy. In some ways he hadn’t changed at all since college. He stood at her shoulder, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, looking so worried about the rip in the knee of his jeans you’d have thought he’d just been mugged and was trying to decide if his insurance would cover the replacement cost. His beige sweater hung limply from shoulders that were bowed under the weight of an army green backpack. Its bulk helped provide balance for his head, which seemed extra large today, maybe because he wore a brown ball cap fronting the Atlanta Braves logo. His lack of glasses encouraged the look too. I’d forgotten that he’d had lasig surgery and didn’t need them anymore.

Genius that he was, Bergman caught my gaze, flipped his own to Cassandra, and figured out in milliseconds what I was thinking. “Oh no!” he yelled over the dirge. “It was all his idea!” He pointed a bony finger in Cole’s direction.

Before I could snap his head off, Cole clasped his hands over his heart and sank to one knee. “We are all so sorry for your loss!” he cried. He threw a dramatic gesture toward the hold of the plane, where six frowning pallbearers were taking a casket from the hands of the jet’s flight crew. But it wasn’t just any old deathbox. Some company with a sense of style but zero restraint had built this sucker to resemble a golf bag. An umbrella, a black towel, and even a couple of irons had been tacked to the side, while the heads of the rest of the clubs jutted from the coffin’s end.

I glared down at Cole, so pissed I wouldn’t have been surprised if smoke had poofed from my nostrils.

Control your temper, Jaz, I told myself. You know what happens when you lose it.

I’d love to see you lose it. I frowned as I pushed the unwelcome voice to the back of my brain and said, “Cole, you shouldn’t have.”

He rose to his feet and dusted off his pants. The moment I reached his side he snaked an arm around my shoulders. “We all know how difficult this must be for you.” He put a hand to his chest. “As your former boyfriend—”

“We were never—!”

“—I realized it was on me to make sure your dead boyfriend arrived in Australia in the style to which he has—uh, had—become accustomed.”

Cole pulled me toward the casket with Bergman, Cassandra and the sad-band following as he crooked his finger at the hearse I’d asked him to order. Except I hadn’t told him to request a white Mercedes stretch with enough room for an NBA player and all his devastated relatives.

It pulled up beside us, its driver stepping out and promptly disappearing. At first I thought he’d fallen. Jack, also interested in his welfare, raced over to check him out. When the dog didn’t immediately surface, I leaned over to get a better view. Then I grabbed Cole’s arm and squeezed.

“If that’s a gnome whose crotch Jack is nosing, I’m going to tie your hair in a bun and sell you to the pirates who operate off this coast. I hear they’re always looking for fresh young girlfriends.”

Our boss, Pete, wanted to brief us personally on the details of this assignment, but we both already knew it involved gnomes attacking the Canberra Deep Space Complex, one of NASA’s three eyes to the cosmos. Not every gnome wanted to stomp Canberra’s eye to jelly. Just the Ufranites, a fanatical sect who’d transformed half their farmers to soldiers in less than a decade.

Cole sighed. “Would you chill? I know Ruvin’s got the long forehead and chin of a gnome, but look at him! He’s over three and a half feet tall, there’s no tail in sight, and if his nose was blue you’d have seen it from inside the plane. He’s a seinji.”

Okay, seinji I could deal with. They were distant relatives of gnomes. But nearly all of them had, like Vayl, found a way to live among humans. To blend. “Still—”

He leaned his chin on my shoulder. “I checked him out. He’s fine. Plus, and this is the part that’s going to make you add at least twenty bucks to my Christmas gift, Ruvin’s an independent contractor.”

“He doesn’t work for the funeral home full time?”

“Nope. Only when they have to double or triple up. Or when guys like me request him,” he paused for dramatic effect, “because his next pickup is the Odeam Digital Security team.”

“Really?” So Cole knew what Pete had told me and Vayl. That our target worked for the most trusted software security company in America.

He nodded. “I planted one of Bergman’s new bugs on Ruvin. If we’re lucky we’ll know our target’s name before the Odeam team has left the airport.” He beamed at me. Like I was supposed to forgive him for conning Vayl into traveling to Australia via golf bag.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You do understand the whole team is suspect, right? We may have to take them all out before this is over.”

Cole swallowed. Nodded.

I checked my watch. Three-thirty p.m. We might just have time. If we hurried.

“Let’s get him loaded,” I said.

Cole squeezed my shoulder. “But then you’ll miss the best part.”

I wrapped my arm around his waist so I could jerk him close enough to whisper in his ear. “You’re about to lose your best part.”

“Hey, this event is costing somebody a lot of money. You might as well enjoy it.” He grinned down at me, his bright blue eyes daring me to loosen up and have some fun.

“This is not necessary.”

Cole popped a huge green bubble in my face. “Picking up a casket-rider and the woman you’re about to fall out of love with is boring. Arranging a funeral procession with a displaced band from the French Quarter and a quartet of professional mourners is one for the diary. You do keep a diary, don’t you Jaz?”

“No! And don’t call me that. I’m here as Lucille Robinson, remember?”

Cole frowned. “But if you’re Lucille, who am I?”
“Hell if I know. As I recall, your last text said you didn’t like the name they’d picked for you and had demanded a new one.”

“Damn straight! The CIA has no imagination you know.”

I’d have told him to pipe down, but between the band’s latest number and the wails of the four women who’d emerged from the back seat of the hearse to drape themselves and a blanket of flowers over the casket’s tee-time accessories, I could barely hear his whispers.

“Sure,” I agreed, mainly because I thought I’d seen the coffin wobble. Had one of the pallbearers stumbled, or . . . I checked my watch again. Holy crap, we were cutting this close!

“Do you want to know my new name?” Cole asked as we led Cassandra and Bergman toward the country club casket. Would Tiger Woods be caught dead in one of those? I thought not.

I sighed and said, “Since we’re going to be working together for the next few days, a clue to your fake ID might help.”

“Thor Longfellow.”

I stopped and stared, not even turning when I heard Cassandra stumble to a halt behind me. “No.”

His hair bounced cheerfully as he nodded. I asked, “How did you get away with that?”

He shrugged. “The girl who assigns identities really likes Thai food, and I know this place on the East side—”

“Say no more.” I should’ve guessed he’d charmed that ridiculous cover out of a woman. I got moving again, picking up the pace when I realized the pallbearers had begun to look at the coffin, and each other, curiously.

“Oh, please, could you just put him in the car now?” I asked, attempting to make my voice quiver. Instead I sounded like I’d tried to squeeze myself into my old training bra. At least it got Jack’s attention. He trotted over to inspect me for injuries, which gave me a chance to grab his leash.

Ruvin, duded up in a white uniform to match the hearse with green buttons that complimented its future load, opened the back door. The pallbearers had just begun to slide the casket in when the ruby-luscious ring on my left hand shot a stream of warmth up my arm.

Oh, shit, he’s awake!

Most vampires would’ve slept through the whole transfer. But Vayl had powers, baby, and one of those was the ability to draw in another vamp’s cantrantia, his or her essential skill, and make it his own. Which meant the one time he’d been forced to stay awake through the entire day, he hadn’t just slept it off at the next sunrise. He’d seen the dawn and another two hours of light before going down. Same deal, only reversed, that evening. And every day since. Nice for him—and me—until now.

I handed Jack off to Cassandra, flung my arms into the air and began to wail. “I can’t stand it! This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me! Life will never be the same again! He was so young! We never even had kids!” On and on I ranted, barely pausing to breathe between screeches.

“Oh, you’re good!” Cole scrubbed at his day-old stubble to hide his smile, which quickly transformed into a jaw-dropper when a fist punched through the golf bag’s lid. Luckily only the two of us noticed. The rest were distracted by the youngest mourner who’d ripped her dress, maybe thinking she had to one-up me if she wanted a decent tip.

“Oh, God, why did this happen to me!” I flung myself across the hand, which began to work its way up my ribs like they were a ladder to the Promised Land. But I could feel Vayl’s mood through Cirilai, the ring that bound us closer than a promise, and fun was the last thing on his mind. I sent him soothing thoughts, yanked a hand full of roses from the bouquet decorating the lid, and shoved them into his fist.

The mourners, inspired by their colleague’s wardrobe malfunction and my overacting, kicked it into high gear. Their screams bounced off the hearse and sank into the coffin, sending Vayl into a frenzy. Despite the tradition followed by most of his kind, he’d never spent his days in the spelunker’s paradise he presently inhabited. Only Pete’s promise of a hefty bonus and the help of a sedative known to work on vampires had convinced him to travel this way at all.

His other hand crashed through the lid, wrapped around my jacket and forced me down, holding me so tight that I rode the casket into the hearse as Cole, Bergman, and Cassandra helped the pallbearers shove it the rest of the way home. Somebody slammed the door shut and, since the back of the car had no windows, I began to open the latches.

“I’m getting you out!” I called. I popped the last closure and Vayl shoved back the lid, rolling me into the narrow space between the coffin and the hearse’s inner wall, raining roses on me like I was a parade float. Now it was my turn to grit my teeth and wriggle.

“I’m stuck!” I yelled.

The lid slammed and Vayl, moving so fast all my eyes caught was a blur of black leather and blood red cashmere, grabbed my arms and pulled me into the back seat. We landed on our sides, tangled like teenagers, our mouths so close I could feel the steam of his heavy breaths washing over my cheeks.

I pulled my head back, inspecting him for damage. His short, dark curls practically stood on end. His winged eyebrows looked like they wanted to fly off his forehead, but his eyes, the orange of a tiger lily, were already fading to brown. “That was . . . unpleasant,” he said, his expression still taut enough to show the bulge of his fangs under his upper lip.

“But this is nice,” I said as I slipped my hand inside his coat. I made my next move quick, because company was coming and the CIA frowns on fraternization. Not that my crew would’ve gossiped about me grabbing my boss’s rear. They knew how to keep their mouths shut. So did we, for that matter. But people who risk death with you on a regular basis just seem to figure things out. And if the Oversight Committee questioned them I didn’t want them to have to lie any more than necessary.

“Jasmine!” Vayl’s breath caught. “You pick the worst moments!” Which was true, because people had begun to pile into the hearse. I could hear the delight in his voice though. Damn near three hundred years old and he still loved to be groped.

“I think my necklace is tangled in your sweater,” I said. Since the line my shark’s tooth, shells, and beads were strung on had been tested to six hundred pounds, one guess which would give first.

“I do not care what is wound where as long as I am rid of that box.”

“That bag was lined with real silk!” Cole announced as he bounced into the seat beside Ruvin.

I covered Vayl’s mouth before he could reply, because absolutely nothing he said could’ve helped. I gasped when he licked my palm. “What’re you doing?”

“Your hand is bleeding,” he whispered.

Oh, great, the roses. I hadn’t even felt their thorns dig in when I’d ripped them out of the bunch. But now that I knew, my wounds began to throb, along with a vein in my temple as Bergman and Cassandra got comfy in the seat opposite us. Jack, bummed to be stuck in yet another enclosed space, hopped up on the seat beside us and stuck his nose against the window.

“Somebody needs to pay the mourners,” Bergman said to Vayl. “They say they won’t cry another tear until—”

“What mourners?” he growled.

I dropped my fist to his chest, thought better of patting it. Hell, his sweater probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. “It’s a long story. One you probably shouldn’t hear until you’ve had some nourishment, and Cole’s a couple of miles away. Hang on.”

I freed my necklace and, taking Jack with me, slipped out the door, making sure the light didn’t hit Vayl’s position. Though he’d applied Bergman’s skin lotion and brought his fedora and sunglasses, the UV still hurt when it struck him. It just didn’t make him burst into flame anymore.

Pulling a wad of bills from an inner pocket of my jacket, I headed toward the oldest, and loudest, mourner. “How much?” I asked.

She named a number that made me bite my tongue. I nearly bartered, but realized as a widow wallowing in grief, I probably wouldn’t have the emotional stability to go there. Which made me wonder how many bereaved families got screwed the world over.

I gave her the dough and passed an even larger amount to the band. They, at least, made a pretty noise for their pay. I headed back to the hearse.

Stop.

Like competitors in a game of Simon Says, my feet obeyed. That the order came from a voice inside my head shouldn’t have been disturbing. I talk to myself all the time, and my imaginary people come in all shapes and sizes. Except this one had risen recently, without welcome or permission, or a face to make it familiar.

Don’t go back in that car, it snarled. What do you want with a seinji, a shallow playboy, a neurotic inventor and a See-it-all anyway? You’re better off on your own, like it was before you met that cowardly vampire.

I closed my eyes. Like all my mental voices, this one felt like an extension of me. But I didn’t have the ability to silence it like I could the others. Near as I could remember, it had begun quietly near the end of our last mission and grown like a tumor ever since. The only time it voluntarily muted was when Vayl showed.

I scratched at an itch that threaded from wrist to elbow. Hell, maybe I’d still be standing there today, sinking nails into skin, if not for Jack, who let out a series of his rare, throaty woofs. They snapped the hold that voice had woven over me. As I forced my feet to carry me back to the hearse, it suddenly felt like I was attending my own funeral. Because I knew it was time to face the facts. Either I really despised everybody in that car. Or my psyche had picked up a passenger.

(c) 2009 Jennifer Rardin