My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding (28 page)

"Oh yeah, and we're supposed to bow and scrape for the little madam?" he said.

"You should get that stick out of your ass and behave more like Taffy. She doesn't act so snooty and superior. After all, what you got on us? We live longer than humans, and we're stronger than humans, and we can do all kinds of things that humans can't do."

"Excuse me," Dahlia said frigidly. "I am
so
not interested."

"I'll show you interested," the huge monster growled, reaching down as if he was actually going to pick Dahlia up and give her a shake. The next instant, he was looking up at her from the floor and his friends had leaped to their feet, their eyes glowing. Snarls issued from several male throats, and one or two female ones.

"No," called the man from the floor, just as Dahlia prepared to free her hands for fighting by tucking her tiny evening purse into the gartered top of her hose (a process that distracted the males for a few long seconds), "she's in the right, guys."

"What?" asked a blond man built like a fire hydrant. "You gonna let a vamp get away with putting you on the floor?"

"Yeah, Richie," said the man, getting up. "She did it fair and square after I provoked her."

The rest of the Weres seemed disconcerted, but they backed away a foot or two.

Dahlia felt a mixture of relief and regret. Her fangs had extended as she readied to fight, and she would have enjoyed relieving the tension by ripping off a few limbs.

"Come on, little highness," Brown Ponytail said. "I'll take you to Taffy."

She nodded curtly. He turned to lead the way, and she followed right behind him. The crowd parted along the way rather reluctantly.

"Coldblooded creep," said one Were woman. She was built like an Amazon, broad shouldered. Dahlia would have loved to flash out a hand and bury it in the Were's abdomen, but ladies didn't do such thingsnot if they wanted the truce to hold.

Dahlia was proud of herself when she didn't meet the woman's eyes in challenge.

Instead, Dahlia kept her gaze focused forward.
Which is no hardship,
she had to admit to herself, as she examined the curve of the butt moving in front of her. It certainly was a prime one, packed into the worn Levi's in a most attractive way Dahlia winced, realizing that she'd actually caught herself admiring a Were.

Her guide stepped aside, and Dahlia was relieved beyond measure to see Taffy sitting in a padded booth behind a round table with Don cuddling close to her right and another Were to her left. Dahlia barely kept her upper lip from drawing back in distaste. It was like seeing a racehorse cavorting with zebras.

"Dahlia!" shrieked Taffy. Her auburn curls were piled up on top of her head, and she was wearing a halter top and blue jeans, as far as Dahlia could tell. Oh,
really,
Dahlia thought, exasperated, remembering the care she'd taken to dress correctly.

Taffy looks like a real human.
Probably trying to blend in. As if she could.

"Taffy," Dahlia said, thrown seriously off track, "can we have a talk?" She didn't even want to acknowledge Don. He was as redheaded as Taffy, but his hair was short and rough looking, like the coat of a terrier.

"Hey, beautiful!" Don said expansively.

Dahlia gave Don a stiff nod of greeting. She was no barbarian.

Don had a beard, and bright filaments of red stuck out from the neck of his golf shirt. Dahlia shuddered. She was glad to look back at Taffy.

"You still got that cold bitch thing goin' on," Don observed. "Doesn't she, Todd?"

"She's got it down pat," agreed her guide. "Didn't even bother to introduce herself." Dahlia realized, with a pang, that the Were was correct. "She's a brave little thing, though," the Were went on. "Knocked me assbackward."

Don grinned approvingly. "People should do that more often, Todd. It seems to soften you up."

While Dahlia tried to estimate how long it would take her to kill them all, Taffy was extricating herself from the booth, which seemed to involve a lot of unnecessary brushing against Don, with wriggling and kisses strewn in for good measure. This was the source of many teasing comments and much laughter from the assembled Weres.

I
seem to be the only one who's in a had mood,
Dahlia thought, and then without meaning to, her eyes met the tall Were's again. Nope, Todd was less than happy, too. Dahlia wondered whether it was the engagement between Don and Taffy or her own intrusion that had triggered Todd's irritation.

"This is my friend Dahlia LynleyChivers," Taffy announced to the crowd of Weres. "She's my maid of honor."

There was a smattering of polite response. Dahlia inclined her head civilly. She couldn't force a smile.

"Snottynose bitch," muttered the other Were sitting in the booth. He had dark curly hair and a pugnacious attitude. "Having one in the bar at a time is enough."

Dahlia's tiny hand darted out and dug into the Were's throat.

He gagged, his eyes going wide with shock and fear, and the atmosphere of the bar went into high gear.

"Dahlia!" said Taffy. "He didn't know what he was saying, Dahlia. Please, for me."

Dahlia released the darkhaired Were, and he collapsed against the wood of the booth, breathing heavily. There was an uneasy stirring among the denizens of the crowded bar.

"Thanks, honey," Taffy murmured. "Let's take this out on the sidewalk, okay?"

Her back as straight and her head as high as ever, Dahlia followed Taffy out of the bar, looking neither to the right nor to the left, ignoring the growing chorus of growls that surged in her wake.

"Smooth move, Dahlia," Taffy said, the words bursting out as soon as they were on the sidewalk.

"You were the one who invited me! If you weren't the one engaged to that. . .

that dog man . . . do you think I'd go inside such a place?"

"Where are the others?" Taffy lost her anger and looked a bit lost. Maybe she hadn't been quite as comfortable as she'd seemed, being the only vamp in a crowd of Weres.

"Ah, they couldn't make it." Dahlia couldn't think of any way to cushion the rudeness of Taffy's other bridesmaids and her sheriff, Cedric.

Taffy sighed. "I didn't think it was too much to ask, coming to a party in our honor to wish me well." Dahlia's cheeks would have flushed if they could have;

she was embarrassed at the poor manners of her sisters. "I guess it's a measure of our friendship that you came inside to see me," Taffy admitted. "I know we're buddies. Please, help me get through this wedding with peace between our people.

I want you there on my wedding day, and I want my other friends there, too, and the last thing I want is a bloodbath between the two tribes, us and the Weres, right there in Cedric's garden."

Cedric had offered the garden of his mansion as the locale for the wedding, to everyone's surprise. Cedric had told Dahlia, in his languid way, that he had been sure Taffy would cry off before the day actually arrived. Now that the wedding was fast approaching and still a reality, the notably lazy Cedric was scrambling to get the grounds ready and also calling in markers in an effort to assemble some of the more levelheaded vamps to act as security for the big night, which was shaping up to be
the
scandalous social event of the season in the supernatural world.

Ignoring the Weres who were peering out of the bar, Dahlia and Taffy began to stroll down the street, arm in arm, an oldfashioned habit that drew a few stares.

"Taffy, I'm worried."

"What about, Dahlia?" Taffy asked gently.

"You know that Cedric's mansion is in a turmoil of preparation," Dahlia began, trying to think of the best way to voice her concerns without sounding like a complete alarmist.

"I heard." Taffy laughed, her throat tilted back. "That old bastard! Serves Cedric right for making a promise he had no intention of keeping."

"Taffy, you've been with the Weres too much. Don't disrespect the sheriff so boldly."

"You're right," Taffy said, sobering quickly enough to satisfy even the worried Dahlia. "So, Cedric's in an uproar. What of it?"

"The Weres and the vampires aren't the only ones who may have heard of this wedding," Dahlia said. She was voicing something she'd not told anyone else, and her voice wasn't completely steady. "Since the Weres haven't come out yet, to the world it must look as though you're illegally marrying a human."

Vampires didn't have the legal right to marry in the United States, not yet anyway. Dahlia couldn't have cared less about her legal rights, since she knew how transitory governments were, but there was no denying it was sweet to be able to walk the streets openly, admitting her true nature, and to know that if she was killed, her death would be stateavenged.

Well, maybe, under certain circumstances.

The point was, society was moving in the right direction, and the backlash from this affair might knock all of them sideways.

"Who in the mundane world knows?"

"It won't make a difference if humans know it afterward; we can explain it wasn't a true wedding at all. Cedric can get reporters to believe anything. But if it becomes common knowledge beforehand, there'll be human reporters all over the place, and protesters, and who knows what else."

"Cedric's gardeners are human," Taffy said slowly. "The florist is human." Her face was utterly serious now, and she looked like a true vampire. They turned back to return to the bar.

Dahlia nodded, silently, knowing her point had been taken. She was thrilled to see Taffy looking like her former self, until she realized that though the familiar calculation had returned to Taffy's face, something had been taken away: the lighthearted joy that made the ancient vampire look so renewed.

"So, you're saying that we might need more security than Cedric's thinking of providing," Taffy continued.

Dahlia cursed inside. Her point had been that Taffy should call off this insane ceremony. But Taffy had simply not considered it for a moment. "Sister," Dahlia said, calling on the bond of the nestmate. "You must not go through with this wedding. It will bring trouble on the nest, and . . . and . . ." Dahlia had a flash of inspiration. "It may bring the Weres out into the open before they are ready to be known," Dahlia said, confident she was playing a trump card.

"This is a big secret," Taffy whispered, and not even a gnat could have heard her whisper, "but in the next month, the Weres are voting at their council about that very issue."

It had taken years of worldwide secret negotiations to pick the moment for the vampires: months of coordination, selection, and a carefully composed text that had been translated into a myriad of languages. The Weres would probably slouch in front of the television cameras with beers in their paws and dare the world to deny them citizenship.

"Then delay the wedding until then," Dahlia urged, trying to ignore all these side issues and stick to the main point.

"Sorry, no can do," Taffy said.

It took Dahlia a minute to grasp the meaning of Taffy's words. "Why not?" she asked. She made her lips manufacture a smile. "I know you're not pregnant." Dead bodies, however animated they looked, could not produce live children.

"No, but Don's ex is." Taffy's face was grim as she looked down at Dahlia's stunned face. "We have to get hitched before she has the baby, or she can appear before the Were council and demand they reinstate her marriage. Don hasn't had a child with anyone else, and you know how the Weres are about the purebloods reproducing with each other."

Dahlia could not do something so gauche as gape, but she came close. "I've never heard of such a thing," she said weakly.

"None of us knows much about the Were culture," Taffy said. "Our arrogance keeps us ignorant." The two stepped off the curb to cross the mouth of the alley.

The bright lights of the bar were only half a block away.

Dahlia brightened. "I'll kill her," she said. There, she'd solved the problem.

"Then you can hold off on your marriage, or cancel it altogether. No need to get married, right? What does this bitch look like?"

"Like this," said a sweet voice from the shadows, and a young woman leaped out, the knife in her hand glinting in the streetlight. But as fast as the Were stabbed at Taffy, Dahlia jumped to intercept it. She deflected it with her bare hands, but not quickly enough. It lodged between Dahlia's ribs, and the strong Were woman began to twist the blade. Just in time, Dahlia gripped the Were's wrist, and neatly broke it before the gesture could be completed.

The woman's screams drew an outrush of Weres from the bar. They circled Dahlia, growling and snapping, sure that the vampire had attacked first. Dahlia herself was standing very still, trying to keep from shrieking. That would have been unseemly, in Dahlia's opinion, and she was a vampire who lived by a code.

Taffy was so shocked that she didn't react with the speed one expected of a vampire. Between trying to explain to her fiance what had happened and positioning herself to slap away the hands that would have struck Dahlia, Taffy was too occupied to evaluate Dahlia's plight. Oddly enough, it was Todd who calmed things down by silencing the crowd with a yell that was perilously close to a howl.

Into the hush he said, "Keep all humans away, first of all." There was a flurry of activity as the few humans who'd been drawn by the ruckus were hustled off, diverted with some story that would hardly make sense when it was reconsidered.

"What happened?" Don asked Taffy. Several female Weres were kneeling on the ground around the moaning exwife. The Amazonian Were called, "The vamp bitch attacked Amber and broke her arm!" A chorus of growls swelled the throats of the werewolves.

Dahlia concentrated on her breathing. Though vamps healed with amazing speed, the initial injury hurt just as much as it would any other being. The blood dripped from her hands, but it was slowing. She held them out in the light, and the crowd murmured. Taffy exclaimed, "She did this for me!" and then became quite still. Her voice shaking with a very unvamplike quiver, Taffy said, "Dahlia pro

tected me with her life. Not exactly in the bridesmaid description."