Eric followed Vlad Tepes’s stubby finger, identifying me as the future Happy Meal. Then he stared at Dracula, looking up from his kneeling position. I couldn’t read his face at all, and I felt a stirring of fear. What would Charlie Brown have done if the Great Pumpkin wanted to eat the little red-haired girl?

Oh. No wonder I'd been sick. I hadn't eaten anything since then. I'm a girl who likes her meals, so it hadn't been a weight-loss tactic. I'd just been too busy bumping from crisis to crisis. Go on the Sookie Stackhouse Narrow Avoidance of Death Diet! Run for your life, and miss meals, too! Exercise plus starvation.

It was like being around a particularly irritating two-year-old.

Who wants a bag of bones?” he said, with absolute sincerity. “I don’t want to hurt myself on the sharp edges of the woman I’m bedding.

There's not much I dislike more than being addressed as "Hey you" and being poked with a finger.

What are you, Zen Master Fang?

If this was The Lord of the Rings and I had a smart British voice like Cate Blanchett, I could tell you the background of the events of that fall in a really suspenseful way. And you’d be straining to hear the rest.