I’d never known that anyone could kiss in English, kiss in apologies.

More worryingly, my baby fangs were out, which usually happened only when I was perilously close to tipping over into Mr. Hyde territory. I quickly drew them back in. It didn’t help much. I still looked like Dracula’s daughter. Which was completely unfair, since he’d only been an uncle.

And then Mircea finally let me down, only to get his hands inside the coat and push me against the wall. "I'm dirty," I protested. He waggled his eyebrows. "Promise?" "Mircea!" I laughed in spite of myself.

If I'm not supposed to be awake, why are you here?" I mumbled. "To be the little spoon.

I couldn’t see Pritkin’s face very well, just a pale blur against the shadows, but he didn’t sound happy. Some people thought he had only one mode... pissed off. In reality, he had plenty of them. Over the past few weeks, I’d learned to tell the difference between real pissed off, impatient pissed off and scared pissed off. I suspected that this was the last kind. If so, that made two of us.

I stared at him, unable to believe this was happening. That he could just disappear, along with everything rich and strange he’d brought into my life. Vanished, like magic.

So maybe it was just as well that my companion was more like Mulder. A coked-out Mulder with a lot of weapons, who knew that the monsters under the bed were real and would gut you.