I was covered in scrapes, bruises, blood, and dirt when I looked up to see a sign reading CHLOE STREET. That was where Hadley's apartment was, I realized slowly. I turned right, and began to walk again.

The house was dark, up and down. Maybe Amelia was still at the hospital. I had no idea what time it was or how long I had walked.

Hadley's apartment was locked. I went downstairs and picked up one of the flowerpots Amelia had put around her door. I carried it up the stairs and smashed in a glass pane on the door. I reached inside, unlocked the door, and stepped in. No alarm shrieked. I'd been pretty sure the police wouldn't have known the code to activate it when they'd left after doing whatever it was they'd done.

I walked through the apartment, which was still turned upside down by our fight with Jake Purifoy. I had some more cleaning to do in the morning, or whenever… whenever my life resumed. I went into the bathroom and stripped off the clothes I'd been wearing. I held them and looked at them for a minute, at the state they were in. Then I stepped across the hall, unlocked the closest French window, and threw the clothes over the railing of the gallery. I wished all problems were that easily disposed of, but at the same time my real personality was waking up enough to trigger a thread of guilt that I was leaving a mess that someone else would have to clean up. That wasn't the Stackhouse way. That thread wasn't strong enough to make me go back down the stairs to retrieve the filthy garments. Not then.

After I'd wedged a chair under the door I'd broken, and after I'd set the alarm system with the numbers Amelia had taught me, I got into the shower. The water stung my many scrapes and cuts, and the deep bite in my arm began bleeding again. Well, shit. My cousin the vampire hadn't needed any first aid supplies, of course. I finally found some circular cotton pads she'd probably used for removing makeup, and I rummaged through one of the bags of clothes until I found a ludicrously cheerful leopard-patterned scarf. Awkwardly, I bound the pads to the bite and got the scarf tight enough.

At least the vile sheets were the least of my worries. I climbed painfully into my nightgown and lay on the bed, praying for oblivion.

I woke up unrefreshed, with that awful feeling that in a moment I would remember bad things.

The feeling was right on the money.

But the bad things had to take a backseat, because I had a surprise to start the day with. Claudine was lying beside me on the bed, propped up on one elbow looking down at me compassionately. And Amelia was at the end of the bed in an easy chair, her bandaged leg propped up on an ottoman. She was reading.

"How come you're here?" I asked Claudine. After seeing Eric and Bill last night, I wondered if everyone I knew followed me around. Maybe Sam would come in the door in a minute.

"I told you, I'm your fairy godmother," Claudine said. Claudine was usually the happiest fairy I knew. Claudine was just as lovely for a woman as her twin Claude was for a man; maybe lovelier, because her more agreeable personality shone through her eyes. Her coloring was the same as his; black hair, white skin. Today she was wearing pale blue capris and a coordinating black-and-blue tunic. She looked ethereally lovely, or at least as ethereal as you can look in capris.

"You can explain that to me right after I go to the bathroom," I said, remembering all the water I'd chugged down when I'd gotten to the sink the night before. All my wanderings had made me thirsty. Claudine swung gracefully from the bed, and I followed her awkwardly.

"Careful," Amelia advised, when I tried to stand up too quickly.

"How's your leg?" I asked her, when the world had righted itself. Claudine kept a grip on my arm, just in case. It felt good to see Claudine, and I was surprisingly glad to see Amelia, even limping.

"Very sore," she said. "But unlike you, I stayed at the hospital and had the wound treated properly." She closed her book and put it on the little table by the chair. She looked a little better than I suspected I did, but she was not the radiant and happy witch she'd been the day before.

"Had a learning experience, didn't we?" I said, and then my breath caught when I remembered just how much I'd learned.

Claudine helped me into the bathroom, and when I assured her I could manage, she left me alone. I did the necessary things and came out feeling better, almost human. Claudine had gotten some clothes out of my sports bag, and there was a mug on the bedside table with steam rising from it. I carefully sat against the headboard, my legs crossed in front of me, and held the mug to my face so I could breathe in the smell.

"Explain the fairy godmother thing," I said. I didn't want to talk about anything more urgent, not just yet.

"Fairies are your basic supernatural being," Claudine said. "From us come elves and brownies and angels and demons. Water sprites, green men, all the natural spirits… all are some form of fairy."

"So you're what?" Amelia asked. It hadn't occurred to Amelia to leave, and that seemed to be okay with Claudine, too.

"I'm trying to become an angel," Claudine said softly. Her huge brown eyes looked luminous. "After years of being… well, a good citizen, I guess you'd call it, I got a person to guard. The Sook, here. And she's really kept me busy." Claudine looked proud and happy.

"You're not supposed to prevent pain?" I asked. If so, Claudine was doing a lousy job.

"No, I wish I could." The expression on Claudine's oval face was downcast. "But I can help you recover from disasters, and sometimes I can prevent them."

"Things would be worse without you around?"

She nodded vigorously.

"I'll take your word for it," I said. "How come I rated a fairy godmother?"

"I'm not allowed to say," Claudine said, and Amelia rolled her eyes.

"We're not learning a lot, here," she said. "And in view of the problems we had last night, maybe you're not the most competent fairy godmother, huh?"

"Oh, right, Miss I-Sealed-Up-The-Apartment-So-It-Would-Be-All-Fresh," I responded, irrationally indignant at this assault on my godmother's competence.

Amelia scrambled out of her chair, her skin flushed with anger. "Well, I did seal it up! He would have risen like that no matter when he rose! I just delayed it some!"

"It would have helped if we had known he was in there!"

"It would have helped if your ho of a cousin hadn't killed him in the first place!"

We both screeched to a halt in our dialogue. "Are you sure that's what happened?" I asked. "Claudine?"

"I don't know," she said, her voice placid. "I'm not omnipotent or omniscient. I just pop in to intervene when I can. You remember that time you fell asleep at the wheel and I got there in time to save you?"

And she'd nearly given me a heart attack in the process, appearing in the front seat of the car in the blink of an eye. "Yes," I said, trying to sound grateful and humble. "I remember."

"It's really, really hard to get somewhere that fast," she said. "I can only do that in a real emergency. I mean, a life-or-death emergency. Fortunately, I had a bit more time when your house was on fire…"

Claudine was not going to give us any rules, or even explain the nature of the rule maker. I'd just have to muddle through on my belief system, which had helped me out all my life. Come to think of it, if I was completely wrong, I didn't want to know.

"Interesting," said Amelia. "But we have a few more things to talk about."

Maybe she was being so hoity-toity because she didn't have her own fairy godmother.

"What do you want to talk about first?" I asked.

"Why'd you leave the hospital last night?" Her face was tight with resentment. "You should have told me. I hauled myself up these stairs last night to look for you, and there you were. And you'd barricaded the door. So I had to go back down the damn stairs again to get my keys, and let myself in the French windows, and hurry—on this leg—to the alarm system to turn it off. And then this dooms was sitting by your bed, and she could have done all of that."