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hopes that you’d startle me into spilling blood at court, Darth Barbie? You tried to murder me just now, Maeve, and you think a little psychic porn is going to make me forget it? I can’t decide if you’re insane or just that stupid.”
    Maeve stared at me with her mouth dropping wide open.
    “Now hear this,” I said. “You’re cute, doll. You’re gorgeous. You inspire supernatural levels of wood. And so what ? You’re damaged goods. So turn around and move your naked little ass away from me—before I do it for you.”
    For a long moment, there was dead silence.
    And then Maeve’s face twisted up in fury. The seductive beauty of her features vanished, replaced by an animal’s rage. Her eyes blazed, and the temperature in the air dropped suddenly, painfully, enough to cause icy frost crystals to start forming on the ice . The freaking ice iced over.
    Maeve glared at me with naked hatred in her too-big eyes and then gave me a small bow of her head and a little smile. “It would appear we yet have a life to celebrate,” she hissed. “Music.”
    From somewhere in the room, the symphony began playing again. The silent gang-circle ring of bedtime-story villainy broke up with fluid grace, and seconds later you would have thought you were at any kind of extremely wild, extremely posh costume party.
    Maeve’s eyes glittered and she spun once, displaying herself to me with a mocking little flick of her hair, and then vanished into the crowd.
    I turned to Sarissa and found her staring at me with wide eyes. “You turned her down.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “No one does that. Not here.”
    “Whatever,” I said.
    “You don’t understand. The insult you’ve just given her is . . . is . . .” Sarissa shook her head and said, with masterful understatement, “You just earned a little payback, in her mind.”
    “That was going to happen sooner or later,” I said. “What bugs me is her response.”
    “Music?” Sarissa asked.
    “Yeah,” I said. “And in a minute there might be dancing. Can’t be good.”
    “It could be worse,” she said. She took a deep breath and settled her arm in mine again. “You won the first round.”
    “I only survived it.”
    “Here, that is winning.”
    “So if we win the rest of the night, we’ll be making a good start.” I looked around us and said, “Come on.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Somewhere that isn’t the middle of the floor,” I said. “Somewhere I can put my back to a wall. And hopefully somewhere with snacks. I’m starving.”

   Chapter   
Five
    I ’m never really comfortable at parties. Maybe I’m just not the partying type.
    Even when they aren’t full of lunatic elves, hulking monsters, and psychotic faerie queens, parties are kind of tough for me. I think it’s because I’m never sure of what to do with myself.
    I mean, there’re drinks, but I don’t like being drunk, and I’m pretty sure I don’t get any more charming when I do get that way. More amusing, tops, and that isn’t always in a good way. There’s music, but I never really learned to dance to anything that involved an electric guitar. There are people to talk to and maybe girls to flirt with, but once you put all the stupid things I do aside, I’m really not all that interesting. I like reading, staying home, going on walks with my dog—it’s like I’m already a retiree. Who wants to hear about that? Especially when I would have to scream it over the music to which no one dances.
    So I’m there but not drinking, listening to music but not dancing, and trying to have conversations with near-strangers about anything other than my own stupid life, and they generally seem to have the same goals I do. Leads to a lot of awkward pauses. And then I start wondering why I showed up in the first place.
    Hell’s bells, the kind of party with monsters is actually easier for me. I mean, at least I have a pretty good idea of what to do when I’m at one of those.
    The food table was set