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banging against my hip with each step.
    All those roses made the elevator smell like a florist’s shop. I almost started sneezing, myself. I was glad when the doors opened to my floor.
    Outside my apartment, I raised a knee to balance the vase against the wall as I fished in my pocket for my keys. Even through the closed door, I could hear Juliet’s massive TV blaring, but I didn’t bother to ring the bell. She wouldn’t be home at this hour, not with so many necks out there waiting to be bitten. And she had a bad habit of turning on the TV—loud—then losing interest and wandering away.
    I pulled out my key ring and sorted through it one-handed. Inside, the phone rang. I found the key, turned it in the lock, got the door open, and flew into the living room. I dropped the flowers on the coffee table, ducked out of the duffel bag strap, scooped up the remote, and powered off the TV, all while diving for the phone on the far side of the sofa. Don’t try this at home, kids, I thought, as I belly-flopped onto the cushions and hit the Talk button. I’m a trained professional.
    “H-hello?” A trained professional who panted like she’d run a marathon after making it all the way from the front door to the sofa.
    “Vicky.” Kane’s voice flowed warmly over the phone. “Did you get the flowers I sent?”
    “Those are from you?”
    In the long pause that followed, I reflected that maybe I’d sounded a little too surprised.
    “You thought they were from someone else?” A new note strained his voice.
    “No, no. I just got home. I didn’t have a chance to read the card.” I searched my memory for an anniversary or other occasion I’d forgotten, but came up blank. “Sorry. I guess I didn’t have you pegged as a champagne-and-roses kind of werewolf.” Champagne, maybe. Kane liked expensive wines.
    His chuckle brought the warmth back into his voice. “Okay, I get the hint. Next time, I’ll include champagne.”
    “Make it a box of chocolates instead and you’ve got a deal.”
    “Done.” I could almost see his smile over the phone. Kane had a smile that could break hearts across three states. He’d be sitting back, grinning, his gray eyes alight with amusement, his silver hair gleaming. Because it was outside norm working hours, he’d have draped his suit jacket over the back of his chair, maybe even loosened his Italian silk tie. “How’d the job go tonight?” he asked.
    I rolled over onto my back and shimmied up against an armrest, getting comfortable. “I got the Glitch, but I may have damaged one or two processors in that fancy supercomputer.” I told him about the night’s events. He growled when I got to the part where the security guard stuck a gun in my face, but Kane knew better than to lecture me that my job was too dangerous. We’d argued about it too many times for even Mr. Successful Trial Lawyer to have a prayer of winning.
    “You’re up late,” I observed, to change the subject.
    “Late, early—I’m not sure I can tell the difference anymore. I’ve been reading more of Justice Frederickson’s opinions. She has me worried, Vicky. She’s consistently interpreted citizenship and civil rights in the narrowest way possible.”
    Chief Justice Carol Frederickson, who’d been on the Court for a couple of decades, was its most influential member. That didn’t mean she always swayed the other justices’ opinions, but nobody knew how she might affect a close vote.
    “And yesterday,” he continued, “someone told me about an informal conversation where she insisted that civil rights are human rights and as such apply only to those who meet the genetic definition of human.”
    “So those of us with the wrong genome have to obey their laws, pay taxes to them, and live as second-class citizens.”
    “Not citizens at all. Not even second-class.”
    “Where does that leave zombies? They’re genetically human, right? They just died and came back to life.”
    “Yes, and that’s