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Also, a special note for someone I left out of the dedication for Feast of Fools even though I promised to put her in:

Sarah Magilnick

Sarah, I’m very sorry for leaving you out. It was completely my fault.

1

“Happy birthday, honey!”

In the glow of the seventeen candles on Claire’s birthday cake, her mother looked feverishly happy, wearing the kind of forced smile that was way too com mon around the Danvers house these days.

It was way too common all over Morganville, Texas. People smiled because they had to, or else.

Now it was Claire’s turn to suck it up and fake it.

“Thanks, Mom,” she said, and stretched her lips into something that didn’t really feel like a smile at all. She rose from her chair at the kitchen table to blow out the candles. All seventeen of the flames guttered and went out at her first puff. I wish . . .

She didn’t dare wish for anything, and that, more than anything else, made frustration and anger and grief roll over her in a hot, sticky wave. This wasn’t the birthday she’d been planning for the past six months, since she’d arrived in Morganville. She’d been counting on a party at her home, with her friends. Michael would have played his guitar, and she could almost see that lost, wonderful smile he had when he was deep in the music. Eve, cheerfully and defiantly Goth, would have baked some outrageous and probably inedible cake in the shape of a bat, with licorice icing and black candles. And Shane . .

Shane would have . . .

Claire couldn’t think about Shane, because it made her breath lock up in her throat, made her eyes burn with tears. She missed him. No, that was wrong . . . missed him was too mild. She needed him. But Shane was locked up in a cage in the center of town, along with his father, the idiot vampire hunter.

She still couldn’t quite get her head around the fact that Morganville—a normal, dusty Texas town in the middle of nowhere—was run by vampires. But she could believe that more easily than the idea that Frank Collins was somehow going to make it all better.

After all, she’d met the man.

Bishop—the new master vampire of Morganville—was planning something splashy in the way of executions for Frank and Shane, which apparently was the old-school standard for getting rid of humans with ideas of grandeur. Nobody had bothered to fill her in on the details, and she guessed she should be grateful for that. It would certainly be medievally awful.

The worst thing about that, for Claire, was that there seemed to be nothing she could do to stop it. Nothing. What was the use of being a main evil minion if you couldn’t even enjoy it—or save your own friends?