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I smiled and squeezed her hands. “Apology accepted.”

“I’m thirty, and I’ve never been this happy with anyone. I’ll talk to Louie about giving me a little space and maybe finding a premarriage counselor.”

“Can I say I’m happy to hear that, without you accusing me of wanting you to marry him?”

She smiled and had the grace to look embarrassed. “Yeah, and sorry about that, too.”

“It’s alright, Ronnie, we all have our hangups.”

“Trust you to find a witch for a counselor, but if you can do therapy, I guess it’s not too late for the rest of us.”

“I was talking to Marianne for months before I realized what it was.”

“You’re saying that you went to therapy by accident.”

I shrugged, squeezed her hands, and got up. Please, God, let some of the coffee still be warm.

“So you went to therapy by accident. You became the lover of the Master of the City, kicking and screaming that you wouldn’t do it. Now you’ve fallen into one, or is it two ménage à trois, when your goal in life was monogamous marriage.”

The French press was cold, but the coffeemaker was not. Yeah. “That about sums it up,” I said.

“And my goal was to never tie myself down to any one person and never to marry. Now here we are, each getting what the other one thought she wanted.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I didn’t try. I’d never gotten the impression that God had a sadistic sense of irony, but someone sure did. Was there an angel in charge of relationships? If so, that particular winged messenger of diety had a lot to answer for. I got that tiny pulse in my head that I sometimes got when I prayed. It was more feeling than words. Be happy, just be happy. Easy to say, so very hard to do.

28

AT 3:00 THAT afternoon, I was at work, right on time. Neither sex, vampires, shapeshifters, nor metaphysical meltdowns will deter this animator from her appointed rounds. At least not today.

I was sitting in Bert Vaughn’s office. He’d been the boss at Animator’s Inc. once, but recently we’d had a sort of palace coup. He was still office and business manager, but he was more like our agent than our boss. It hadn’t lost him any money, so he was happy, but it had meant that most of the animators here were like partners in a law firm. Once you made partner, you almost had to kill someone to lose your job, well, kill someone and get caught. So Bert wasn’t the boss anymore. Which meant he didn’t get to treat us like the hired help. He hadn’t liked that part, but it was either agree to our terms, or we all walked, and since he can’t raise the dead, that would pretty much put him out of business. Especially if we opened another firm in direct competition with him. So we had a new power structure, and we hadn’t worked all the kinks out of it yet.

Bert’s office was now a warm yellow with orange undertones. It was cozier than the pale blue cubicle it had once been, but not by much. The entire office had gotten a face-lift, along with buying out the offices next door, so that most of the animators at Animator’s Inc. no longer had to share their office space. Since most of our time was spent out in the field, or cemetery as it were, I thought the new offices were a waste of money, but I’d been outvoted. Charles, Jamison, and Manny had wanted bigger offices. Larry and I had been fine sharing, but Bert voted with the other three, so they’d taken out a wall and voilà, we were suddenly twice as big. The reason that most of the offices had gone to warmer tones, earth tones, comforting tones of yellows, browns, tans, ecru, was that Bert was dating an interior designer. Her name was Lana, and, though I thought she was far too good for him, she irritated me. She constantly went around talking about the science of color and how with a business like ours we needed to make people feel loved and cared for.

I’d told her that it wasn’t my job to love my clients. That I wasn’t in that business. She’d taken it wrong and hadn’t really liked me since. That was fine, as long as she stayed the hell away from my office.

Mary, our daytime secretary, had asked me to wait in Mr. Vaughn