"I'm human," Josh said, "And I'm hiring vampires, I need to know these things. It's important."

I glanced at Heather, but she looked completely fixated on Josh and not in the least bit frazzled by his vampire-related interview. I brushed away my sense of weirdness about the situation and took a sip of my now too-sweet coffee. "Okay, if you say so."

"So…" Josh continued. "There's a rumor that you've drunk the blood of not one, but two master vampires. Is that true?"

I grimaced. Another rumor. Just what I needed.

Well, there was Thierry, of course. He'd saved me when my original sire was slain by vampire hunters before I'd had the proper fledgling nutrition to keep me breathing. I got to ingest some of his supercharged vampire blood—apparently the older the vamp the more potent his blood was. Since master vampires rarely, if ever, shared blood or sired fledglings, this caused my vampire side-effects—namely losing my reflection and developing my fangs—to happen months if not years before they normally would have.

Becoming a full vampire apparently took time.

And I guess Nicolai was a master vampire, too. Or was, anyhow, until he'd ended up on the wrong side of a wooden stake. As one of the elder vampires in the Ring—the international vampire council—he'd stopped by Toronto three weeks ago to investigate my

Slayer of Slayers reputation. Unfortunately there was some major bad blood—no pun intended—between him and Thierry. When he found out Thierry and I were involved, the insane vamp tried to kill me to seek his revenge. Before I'd learned about his ulterior motives, I'd had some of his blood by way of his wrist stuck in my mouth when I was near death. A girl can't be too choosy in situations like that.

"Sure, two master vamps," I said after a few moments of silence. "I guess I'm popular.