I'd brooded myself through twenty minutes of droning stories and screaming ads, so Sheena Coleman was already doing her nightly bump-and-grind against the studio blue screen. Of course she had to compete with the weather maps the viewers really wanted to see.

Sheena was a weather witch. That meant she could control meteorological conditions to some degree, as well as report them. Actually, I found it admirable that she had a regular job. A lot of weather witches went into blackmail. You know, pay me or I drop a firestorm of hail on your harvest-ready crop. It was a crime to use weather witching for personal gain, but there were only so many government and corporate positions around for them. Sheena was tall, blond, and anorexic. She liked the limelight the way bolt lightning likes trees and power lines.

"There's a storm front moving across rural Sedgwick County," she explained, taloned fingers pointing to an orange crescent on the lurid green background. (I may be Irish but I don't like green; clashes with my baby blues.) "But it will take a quick swing north and miss the wheat fields." She gave her right hip a little bump and the crescent obediently moved over the blue of a water treatment plant.

Weather witches weren't all equally adept. It sucked a lot of their energy to produce major weather changes, so Sheena's little quasi-news/entertainment position was tailor-made.

"Guess it won't rain on Ted and me when we go out to dinner," I told Achilles, whose perky ears immediately took a dive.

Achilles didn't like Ted. I wasn’t sure I did either, but every once in a while I had to take a stab at a social life.

So, I bustled around the dollhouse rooms of my small rented house. No apartments for me. I craved roots. I wanted a front door that opened on fresh air. A back stoop. A too-tiny kitchen with no garbage disposal. Achilles trailed me, a canine dust mop, sensing my excitement. Company coming.

Maybe it was time to give up the ghost. I'd always attracted a certain type of man. Well, not man. Ted had a great job for a vamp in the heartland. He was a pioneer for his, um, race. He was attractive, well educated, apparently long ago. He loved my looks, which was more than I did.

What was not to like?

Well, maybe that Vampire Lunge, for one thing. Vamps always made me feel like the smorgasbord at the local pancake house on Sunday morning.

I rushed into my bedroom to survey the clothes in the square old-fashioned closet. I'd been dithering about what to wear all evening; seeing myself totally unclothed on national TV hadn't helped.

I pulled out a seventies miniskirt dress. Weird era. The skirt barely covered my rear but the sleeves were choirgirl wrist-length and the top had a prim little mandarin collar that would convince any vamp to hold off on his neck lunge until the after-dinner mints. Of course tights were the required legwear for this truncated dress, and I had several pair as well as flat-heeled baby-doll shoes. All vintage. Born long before I had been. I loved that sense of connection to times past.

But I also felt like an overage baby doll. Not ready for prime time. As a dedicated reporter, yeah, I was ready for a jump to a major market. As vamp bait, I hoped I'd only get a wee midnight nibble. I needed…I don't know what I needed, except a little patience and a lot of love. Or maybe the opposite.

If I were cinderella I'd have lost a slipper by the time Ted finally showed up. He should have been here by 11:30, not after midnight.

I saw why he was late the minute I answered the door.

"You've been drinking."

"Just a mellow-outer after the show." He flashed the glass hip flask in his back pocket. Sterling silver was a no-no for vamps and werewolves, almost as bad as a sunburn. I doubted the "quick one" he'd stopped for had been alcohol. He knew I was not an easy bite.

He also pulled a bouquet from behind his back, white roses and gardenias bursting with heady scent. The gesture did sweep away my inbred suspicion. Growing up in an orphanage, even if it was called a "temporary group housing facility" for social services, will do that.

"Ted, these are gorgeous. Thank you."

"Gonna ask me in?"

"I forgot. Sure."

He couldn't cross thresholds without an okay. His eyes were only a little bloodshot. Could be the hot studio lights. Sure.

"I'll put these in water and then we can go."

This was starting to feel almost old-fashioned. Maybe Ted really was willing to put some effort into me, instead of offering the usual mesmerizing gaze and knee-jerk snap for the carotid artery.

I found a frosted crystal Victorian celery jar in the cupboard that made a perfect vase. No family heirlooms? Buy 'em at estate sales. Plus, since I'd earned full tuition to college but not a cent of spending money, I'd had to buy recycled to save every penny for so long that I came to love having…saving…the odds and ends of other people's family lives. These objects with their aura of someone else's history were adoptees, as I had never been.

I could visualize some Barbie-waisted corseted Victorian miss plunging this glorious bouquet of pure white dazzle and scent into this very celery jar as a makeshift vase…

"Ouch!"

Rose stems have thorns and one had torn a jagged slash on my forefinger. I automatically lifted it to my mouth. But Ted seized my finger with its Sleeping Beauty drop of welling blood and sucked like a leech. While I was trying to decide if this was deeply erotic, as the vamp tramps claimed, or just plain rude, the bouquet dropped to the carpet. Achilles came barking and running around our feet.

"Excuse me." I extracted my finger, which had painted Ted's lips a glossy girly red that was a bit of a turn-off, and bent to retrieve the flowers.

The enveloping tissue had fallen away. Something sharp and silver glittered among the green rose stems. I stood, bringing the phenomenon into the light. Not silver. Steel.

"You bastard."

Ted was too busy licking his lips to notice what I'd found. "What is it, Delilah? Don't tell me a little love-nip on the finger is too much? You must be frigid."

Achilles' barks and growls had turned into worrying Ted's ankles just in time. Ted did a two-step away from my dog, and me.

"X-acto knife razor blades," I said. "Duct-taped to the rose stems? You couldn't wait for a tender moment before fanging me? You couldn't so much as feed me dinner before tapping my veins? Frigid! I'll show you hot!"

I picked up the bouquet in its tissue paper and thrust the angle-cut rose stems at his chest. He shrieked and backed away. Rose stems are "woody," you know. And, by the way, never date a man who shrieks. Meanwhile, Achilles took a good Tibetan-staple-gun chomp out of his right ankle.

I backed off, laughing. "Not a man-bites-dog story, but a dog-bites-vamp story! I'm gonna call this in to the rival station, Ted. Oughta get a few chuckles."

"You are everything I've heard! Uppity. Frigid. Bitchy. I should have never given you a chance. If it weren't for your damn white skin, I wouldn’t have."

"Date a Royal Dalton porcelain figurine next time, Ted! Probably lively enough for you," I yelled as he retreated through the door.

Damn white skin. That's the way I felt about it too.

Especially now that I'd seen a lancet pierce that skin on TV. Skin that had parted cleanly, bloodlessly. So my double was dead. Or had been filmed to look that way, more likely. People would kill to land the bit part of corpse on any CSI show in the country but I didn't think they'd literally die for it.

I locked the door behind Ted. My house was on the outskirts of town, a nineteen-twenties wood-frame bungalow. It felt like a phantom family home where an aproned grandma lurked just out of sight around the corner, baking blueberry muffins. Some days I could almost smell them.