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the clouds, and I felt a raindrop splatter on my cheek. I needed to get out of here, and fast.
     
    I could hardly bend my left leg, but I managed to get on the scooter from the right side, keeping my right foot on the ground and easing my left foot onto the platform. I twisted the throttle and took off, pulling my right leg up as the scooter moved forward.
     
    Behind me, I heard a snarl, and I glanced over my shoulder, unsurprised to see the starving vampire staggering from inside the store. His skin was smoking, even with the sun covered by the clouds, but he was so hungry that I doubted he felt any pain. When I turned onto the street, I looked back one more time and saw that he was feeding on the man I’d shot.
     
    I felt sick to my stomach at the sight, but there was nothing I could do about it now.
     
    I tried to tell myself that the man I’d killed had tried to kill me first. I’d had good reason to defend myself.
     
    Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I recalled that he’d stopped me from getting Vienna sausages- one of my favorite snacks and almost the only food item that I got excited about these days- that my guilt eased somewhat. What a jerk. There was no telling if I’d ever see another Vienna sausage in my life. This might have been my last chance.
     
    I glowered as the rain picked up, spattering me ungraciously. It just figured. I was already in pain, possibly suffering torn ligaments in my knee, with my forearms scraped all to hell, and now it was raining.
     
    And I had no Vienna sausages.
     
    “The next vamp to attack me had better be prepared to be shot full of bullets and bolts,” I muttered. The wind snatched the words from my lips and carried them away to some far-off place.
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    The first time I caught Cole with one of his female friends, it had been completely inadvertent, a freak accident on my part. Looking back, I probably should have seen the signs- after almost three years of what I’d thought was a reasonably happy marriage, he’d started experiencing some kind of belated quarter-life crisis. He started going out to bars, leaving me at home to watch his daughters. He bought a motorcycle. And suddenly, despite eschewing anything to do with smartphones for years, he’d decided he needed the latest iPhone.
     
    The iPhone wasn’t that big a deal to me. Even the motorcycle wasn’t a huge point of conflict. But considering we’d fought so hard to get a court-ordered visitation schedule with his kids, it ticked me off that he was thumbing his nose at quality time with the girls in favor of going clubbing with his friends.
     
    I didn’t want to tie him down. I’d been quite the barfly myself before our marriage, but the girls were with us less than half the time. In my opinion at least, Cole had plenty of time to go out with friends when his kids were with their mom.
     
    Still, I kept my mouth shut and let him do what he wanted, telling myself that I was being unreasonable. But one night when he was out at the bar, I put the girls to bed and logged onto our account on our cell phone provider’s website, looking to see if they had retained a copy of a photo I’d accidentally deleted.
     
    They’d retained all our photos, all right. Every one that either of us had sent or received. And it appeared that Cole had, at one point, received a photo of another woman’s butt. She was wearing jeans in the picture, however, which put me in an awkward position. On one hand, I didn’t like that he was receiving pictures of another woman’s rear end. On the other hand, if he’d been sexting, wouldn’t she have been naked?
     
    I told myself I was overreacting.
     
    I’d asked him about it, searching for an explanation to quiet my fears, and he’d promptly turned it around on me, somehow making it my fault for invading his privacy and, of course, viewing the photo in the worst possible light.
     
    It was a joke, he’d said, and had rolled his eyes, as though my immense