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banshees her mother had always told her about back in Ireland when she was a little girl.
    After she cleaned up her purse mess, she should probably apologize. Or at least buy him a drink. Grappling around, she found her wallet, her keys, her compact. It was a bitch to apply makeup as a vampire because her skin was so pale, but she’d perfected the art of touch-and-go. Light powder, a swipe of nude lipstick. That was everything except her phone. Looking around, she didn’t see it. Fabulous. Her cell was gone.
    Then she saw it had rolled along the deck, fallen off the edge, and down onto a dirty corner of the lower deck, which was closed off for their event. Stella sighed. Just what she needed. She knew she couldn’t reach it. Her options were to find a staff member and see if they would let her down onto the lower level. Or she could morph into bat form and snag it.
    If she hadn’t consumed a large quantity of alcohol she might have reasoned out that option two wasn’t really much of an option as bats are generally not equipped to hold cell phones. She realized this a minute later and did what any drunk vampire would do—she tried to morph back on the tiny landing, promptly fell, and wound up face-first in the Mississippi before she was even sure what had happened.
    It was cold. Wet. Dirty. And smelled like rotting fish and grease. Without hesitation, she went back into bat form, terrified she might swallow some of that seriously unhygienic river water. Granted, it wasn’t Dublin at the turn of the century, which had been a complete cesspool, but she was convinced there was a fair amount of funky in the Mississippi. As a vampire, she wasn’t going to catch a skin disease, but that didn’t make it any less gross.
    Being in bat form wasn’t necessarily her favorite thing. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d done it. Probably in the ’80s right along with her last sexual activity. She’d been in a phase then involving teased hair and a love of spandex. Sometimes it had been nice to escape high-maintenance fashion and fly around.
    Now she just wanted back to herself.
    Only when she tried to morph back on the deck, she couldn’t.
    What the hell.
    She tried again.
    Nothing.
    It would seem she was drunker than she had realized.
    Fabulous. She got to fly around until she sobered up. Just what she always wanted to do. Maybe she could lick some coffee to speed up the process.
    When Wyatt reappeared on the deck a minute later, calling her name, she hid, suddenly embarrassed. She didn’t want him to see her like that. Which was stupid, but she was stupid. That’s what had been established in the last twenty-four hours. She was a big old idiot.
    Besides, he would wonder why she didn’t change back and as a bat she couldn’t exactly tell him.
    “Stella?” He stopped on the deck and looked around. When he spotted her purse, he swore.
    He picked it up.
    And that was the last thing Stella remembered that night.
    Wyatt put Stella’s bag over his shoulder, calling her name again. He was worried. She never went anywhere without that purse. And there was nowhere to go on the deck but in the water. Leaning over, he scanned the river. No sign of her. But her phone was a few feet down on a ledge, and he reached for it, snagging it with one hand.
    Leaning over made his head spin. Damn, he felt weird. Drunk, but a strange kind of drunk.
    Woozy.
    Climbing up onto the railing, because it seemed like the thing to do, Wyatt yelled, “Stella!” at the top of his lungs, suddenly feeling like he might have lost her forever.
“Stella!”
    And that was the last thing Wyatt remembered that night.

Chapter Three
    A PARROT, A PRIEST, AND THE SLIGHT PROBLEM OF AN EXTRA VAMPIRE
    R EALLY? Damned sirens again?
    Cort groaned, determinedly hauling the covers over his head.
    Couldn’t these damned humans make it through one day of partying without the medics coming to deal with some idiot who drank seventeen hand grenades and now had