I made breakfast every evening around seven p.m. Wilson almost always hung around long enough to scarf food down. Then we would get into the usual where-are-you-going argument and he'd stomp out of the trailer, and I'd go to work.

We sat at the foldout table in the kitchen. Wil shoveled eggs into his mouth while I mentally lamented my inability to suck down a pot of coffee like I used to when I was human.

"Who's Gabriel?" he asked.

Startled, I looked at him and felt myself blush - which wasn't easy for a vampire to do. "I don't know what you're talking about."

He smirked at me. "I heard you last night, all the way from the kitchen. 'Oh, Gabriel,' " he said in a high-pitched, girly voice. " 'Oh! Oh!'"

"Stop it!"

"I know about sex, Mom." He shoved a deviled egg into his mouth and glared at me while he chewed it. "When are you going to introduce me to your boyfriend?"

"He's not my boyfriend. He's just - " A hot shape-shifting, bad-ass, yummilicious man. I'd be damned if I admitted that I'd dreamed about a man I'd met for all of two seconds.

"Jessica wants me to go to the parent-teacher meeting tonight," I said, switching to a subject neither one of us much liked. "Why don't you go with me? Maybe you can talk to Eva about getting caught up on your studies - "

"Not this again!" He slammed his fork against the table. Egg bits went flying. "I don't want to go to school, okay? It's lame and I'm no good at it."

"You're smart. You could do well if you wanted."

"Yeah, if I wanted." He scooted out from the table. "I'm old enough to make my own decisions. Why don't you just leave me the hell alone?"

He stomped into the living room and threw on his coat. Without another word to me, he left the trailer, slamming the door behind him. Despair clawed at me and I put my head in my hands.

Breakfast. Fight. Cleanup. The Donahue clan's morning events were right on schedule.

The phone rang.

I relished the idea of a telemarketer. I could rip the poor bastard a new asshole and not feel a whit of guilt about it. I left the kitchen and picked up the mobile sitting on the coffee table.

I plopped onto the couch. "Hello?"

"Hi, Patsy," said my only and much younger sister, Millie. "Guess what?"

She didn't wait for me to guess. Instead, she shrieked, "I'm getting married!"

"What the fuck for?" I blurted.

Her pause was too damned long and I knew I had gut-punched her. Our parents had died when Millie was sixteen and I was thirty-four. We were eighteen years apart, which meant my mother raised two only children. Millie lived with me until she turned legal. Her college fund kicked in and off she went to Texas for an education.

We had a hate/hate relationship. As her older sister, I was already bossy. When I took over parenting duties, she resented the hell out of me. In May, I went to her college graduation, wished her luck, and other than a birthday card when I hit four-oh in June, I hadn't heard from the ungrateful whelp.

"I'm in love," she said finally, her excitement gone. "Not every marriage is crummy."

"Keep telling yourself that."

She sucked in a breath, then said, "Hang on a minute. I have another call."

I heard the click of call waiting. Damn. Now I had time to think about how mean I was acting. Millie gettin' married. Gawd.

I heard another click. Then Millie said, "I knew you were going to act like this! Damn it, Patsy! You're my only family. I want you to be happy for me."

I wanted to be happy for her, too. But I just couldn't work up the appropriate emotion. "What's his name?"

"Ronald Meyers. He's a doctor." Her voice went dreamy all over again. "We met in the emergency room."

"What? Why? What happened?" My sisterly-motherly impulses kicked into overdrive.

"This is why I don't like telling you anything. You always overreact. I've been dating him for a year, but I didn't tell you because ... well, because. "

No wonder she hurried me off after the graduation ceremony in May. She didn't want me to meet Mr. Right and give him the once-over. I had a habit of scaring off her boyfriends.

"So when's the Big Day?" I asked.

"The first week of December."

"Next year?"

"No. This December."

My sister was all about the dream wedding. Unless she'd been planning it for the whole time she'd been dating this Robert Meyers, then something was up.

"Either he's terminally ill or you're ..." I nearly swallowed my tongue. Oh, dear Lord. "Millie, are you pregnant?"

"I think they can hear you in Canada." Millie let out a huge sigh. "Yes, damn it! I'm pregnant."

I couldn't form any words. My little sister was getting married. She was preggers. Well, maybe my weird dream had been a portent of my sister's news. Given my lack of womb, not to mention my undeadness, I'd never have another kid.

I leaned my head against the back of the couch and closed my eyes. I needed a cigarette. A whole pack. No, no. A carton of Marlboros.

"I knew you were going to do this," said Millie. "I told Robbie that you would be pissed off. And he wanted to have the ceremony in Broken Heart!"

Jesus God! This situation kept getting worse and worse. "You can't get married here."

How the hell would I explain the vampires, the wolfies, and the Consortium? The blood-sucker mafia wouldn't let my sister, her fiance, and mortals from Dallas into the town for a wedding. It didn't matter that Millie was born and raised here. Broken Heart no longer belonged to the humans.

Millie burst into tears. "You can't tell me where to have my wedding! It's the closest I'll get to having Mom and Dad there."

"So, you're getting hitched in the graveyard?"

"You're heartless," she screeched. Then she slammed the phone down.

I listened to the dial tone for a long moment before opening my eyes. I turned off the phone receiver and tossed it onto the coffee table.

"Y'know, you never could cook worth a damn." Nonna floated near my left shoulder and watched me do the breakfast dishes.

I didn't respond to her comment because Nonna believed that a good cook made everything from scratch and I believed in using technological advances to make my life easier.

"Lay off, you old bat," said Dottie in a lazy voice. She sat on the kitchen table cross-legged and stared out the tiny window. "Who cares about runny eggs? She's got man problems."

Jerks. Despite their opinions about my kitchen skills, I knew how to put meals together. I turned around and pointed the soapy spatula at Dottie. "What do you mean 'man problems'? Are you talking about Wilson?"

"Naw. I was talking about your mystery man." She pulled out her Pall Malls and set about lighting up a cig. She puffed away, unconcerned about tormenting me.

"And?" I nearly ground my teeth into pulp waiting for her to respond.

Dottie shrugged, which jiggled her considerable cleavage. If I could get ghosts to do my bidding, I would've sent her to track down Gabriel. Nonna might've done it, but she gets distracted too easily.

I tried to shake off the dread snaking through me. Why had Gabriel pretended to be my guardian? Another terrifying thought occurred: What if he had killed Rick? I hoped it wasn't true. But why would he kill another lycan? And why would he lie about who he was? Did the demon show up before Gabriel could ... well, do whatever he'd planned?

Dottie blew a stream of smoke into the air. "Are you going to find ol' Gabe?"

"Why should I? Gabriel isn't my problem."

Her left eyebrow quirked. "If you say so."

Putting thoughts of Gabriel and his whereabouts out of my mind, I took a shower and got dressed.

Even though I was stuck with the same haircut for all eternity, my blond locks still took some wrangling. Today, I put it in a French braid.

I dressed in a T-shirt that proclaimed my love for the Dixie Chicks, my faded jeans, and my snakeskin boots.

I wondered where Wilson had gone and when he'd get back. He was darn near grown and I felt as though I'd failed him. An alcoholic father who'd abandoned him and a mother who was the walking dead ... jeez! Was it any wonder Wilson had a few issues? God, I missed him. I missed the way we used to be together.

When he was younger, he told me stories about ninjas hiding in the forest and secret spies who met in the school basement. He was quickwitted and smart, but I supposed living in a home where your parents fought all the time and your dad drank himself into a coma while watching CNN could suck the joy right out of your world.

When Wilson went to junior high, he just ... fell apart. He stopped studying, he got into trouble in his classes, and after a while, he started skipping school. Forget talking to me. No punishment worked. No reward. No nothing. How do you make someone care again? How do you break through someone else's walls, built by pain and loss?

We often stood in the same room, not talking to each other, and I would always feel like someone had punched me in the gut.

I lost my son.

And I didn't know how to get him back.

It wasn't fair, you know, to blame Sean for everything that went wrong. He didn't decide to be an alcoholic. But he'd sure decided he didn't want to be sober.

I was so lonely. Getting free of my marriage to Sean was like breaking the surface of the water after nearly drowning. I enjoyed that freedom. Still did. Sometimes, I found myself thinking about finding someone who could really share my life, all its sorrows, disappointments, joys, and thrills.

That was heady stuff, right there. Dangerous, too, especially when Gabriel came dancing into my thoughts. Not that I believed someone as heartbreakingly handsome as Gabriel could really be mine. Shoot. I would have bet my subscription to Cosmo that I was not Mr. Yummy's dream gal.

Oh, I didn't suffer from self-esteem issues, but I also knew my rank in the world. I lived in a trailer, I loved country music, I was a beautician, and to tie it all together, I was blond. Plus, I lived in a small town, I had no college education, and I could give a damn about politics, religion, or causes.

I wandered around the trailer, thinking I should open up the shop. Not that I had any appointments. I'd already done inventory umpteen times and I'd cleaned until there wasn't anything left to clean. I felt restless and bored. Being a beautician and running the family business had been my only dream for so long, I just couldn't fathom not doing it. I'd already given up on my marriage. I didn't want to give up my career, too. How many pieces of a person could be stripped away before there was nothing left?

I passed by the wall clock in the living room and groaned. Oh, man. Jessica expected me to attend the first meeting of the Paranormal Parent Teacher Association in an hour. There wasn't really a point to my attending the shindig. Even though the new night school opened in October, Wilson had never attended. Besides, the school was in the compound and we've established how much I hate that place.

Okay, forget the PPTA meeting. Plus, I was starving. I decided to put up the CLOSED sign in the shop, and then head over to my donor's house.

I put on my coat and stepped onto my tiny front porch.

"Patsy." The voice was not one I had heard before.

The tall, handsome man was caramel-skinned and shaved bald. His eyes were brown and he seemed, I dunno, wise. He was dressed in a very nice black suit and sported an electric blue tie.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I am Khenti. Your Master."