Thank you to our fabulous agent, Meredith Bernstein, who had the idea for the vampyre finishing school.

A huge thanks to our St. Martin's team: Jennifer Weis, Stefanie Lindskog, Katy Hershberger, Carly Wilkins, and the excellent marketing and cover design geniuses.

From P.C.: Thank you to all my students who are always begging me to put them in these books and kill them off. Y'all are great comedic fodder.

"Yep, I have a seriously sucky birthday," I told my cat, Nala.

(Okay, truthfully she's not so much my cat as I'm her person. You know how it is with cats: They don't really have owners, they have staff. A fact I mostly try to ignore.)

Anyway, I kept talking to the cat as if she hung on my every word, which is soooo not the case. "It's been seventeen years of sucky December twenty-fourth birthdays. I'm totally used to it by now. No big deal." I knew I was saying the words just to convince myself. Nala "mee-uf-owed" at me in her grumpy-old-lady cat voice and then settled down to lick her privates, clearly showing that she understood I was full of b.s.

"Here's the deal," I continued as I finished smudging a little liner on my eyes. (And I mean a little—the line-your-eyes-till-you-look-like-a-scary-raccoon is definitely not the look for me. Actually, it's not the look for anyone.) "I'm gonna get a bunch of well-meaning presents that aren't really birthday presents— they're stuff that's Christmas themed because people always try to mush my birthday with Christmas, and that seriously doesn't work." I met Nala's big green eyes in the mirror. "But we're going to smile and pretend we're fine with the dorky birthmas gifts because people do not get that they can't mush a birthday into Christmas. At least not successfully."