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I stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. His skin was warm. “You need to rest, Phillip. You’re tired.”

He nodded. “Tired,” he said.

I led him to the soft dirt. He lay down on it, then sat up, eyes wild, grabbing for me. “Aubrey! He . . .”

“Aubrey’s dead. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

“Dead?” He stared down the length of his body as if just seeing it. “Aubrey killed me.”

I nodded. “Yes, Phillip.”

“I’m scared.”

I held him, rubbing his back in smooth, useless circles. His arms hugged me like he would never let go.

“Anita!”

“Hush, hush. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

“You’re going to put me back, aren’t you?” He drew back so he could see my face.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t want to die.”

“You’re already dead.”

He stared down at his hands, flexing them. “Dead?” he whispered. “Dead?” He lay down on the fresh-turned earth. “Put me back,” he said.

And I did.

At the end his eyes closed and his face went slack, dead. He sank into the grave and was gone.

I dropped to my knees beside Phillip’s grave, and wept.

48

EDWARD HAD A dislocated shoulder and two broken bones in his arm, plus one vampire bite. I had fourteen stitches. We both healed. Phillip’s body was moved to a local cemetery. Every time I work in it, I have to go by and say hello. Even though I know Phillip is dead and doesn’t care. Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground. The dead don’t care about pretty flowers and carved marble statues.

Jean-Claude sent me a dozen pure white, long-stemmed roses. The card read, “If you have answered the question truthfully, come dancing with me.”

I wrote “No” on the back of the card and slipped it under the door at Guilty Pleasures, during daylight hours. I had been attracted to Jean-Claude. Maybe I still was. So what? He thought it changed things. It didn’t. All I had to do was visit Phillip’s grave to know that. Oh, hell, I didn’t even have to go that far. I know who and what I am. I am The Executioner, and I don’t date vampires. I kill them.

WHAT I REALLY MEANT TO SAY . . .

Laurell K. Hamilton

YOU ARE HOLDING the first hardcover edition of Guilty Pleasures. The book has been in print in paperback for almost ten years. When it first came out in 1993 it was one of hundreds of new novels thrown out to the reading public to sink or swim. Surprisingly, miraculously, Guilty Pleasures swam, and swam pretty well.

When I first agreed to write a little afterword for the hardcover edition I thought it would be easy, but so often in life, the things you think will be easiest turn out to be the most complicated. I’ve written and rewritten this little piece. I’m always much quicker when given hundreds of pages to fill than when asked to write just a few. Ask me for a few paragraphs on any topic and I run screaming for the hills. I’m one of those writers who apologizes for a letter being too long, because I didn’t have time to edit it.

My friend and assistant, Darla Cook, asked me what I wanted to say. What can I say here about Guilty Pleasures that you won’t have read in a dozen interviews? What isn’t already out there about it? What haven’t I said in public? Well, I finally thought of something, and here it is.

Guilty Pleasures was the third or fourth novel I ever wrote. I had sold my first novel, Nightseer, a very different book set in a fantasy world complete with elves, dwarves, and dragons. It is my firm belief that writing truly good elves, dwarves, and dragons is very hard to pull off well—I think because you have so little reality to use as your starting point. My other books are set in the here-and-now, with fantastic elements added to the mix. I can talk about Oreos and Nikes while we’re chasing vampires. It helps the illusion along. Nightseer was a success in some ways, and fell short in others, but in the most important way it was a true success: It got published. That really is the biggest hurdle for