Dead Is the New Black

One step, and everything's finished--the pain and the guilt and the cold, sickening fear washing over me, making my grip slick with sweat and turning my legs to rubber. With one step this nightmarish hunger ends, too. But I don't know if I have the nerve to take that step off this ledge into the darkness. Apparently I'm also a coward, among other things. Or maybe I'm still in denial. I can't help thinking that this isn't the way my life was supposed to turn out, even though I finally understand that whining about fair and unfair is useless. But still. I mean, I should have been Mrs. Dr. Todd by now, right? I should have had the triplet wedding thing with my sisters, Megan and Katherine: summer brides, the three of us, ready to say the vows that would have ensured us the same uneventful life Grammie Crosse has. We would have been on the Maplesburg Hospital committee. We'd have played tennis at the Maplesburg country club. Megan would have hosted parties with her investment-banker hubbie, Dean, Kat would have done the same for Lance as he climbed the ladder at his corporate law firm and I would have played the part of a cosmetic surgeon's wife to perfection. And if once in a while we lay awake in the middle of the night and asked ourselves if this was all there was to life...well, remembering the nightmares we had when we were kids would answer that question for us. But instead of getting married a few months ago we ended up having to stake our fiancÉs the night before Megan's wedding. It's a long story, and in my current position I'm not sure I'll have time to finish it. I'll just say that our fiancÉs were turned into vamps by a bitch called Zena, the QueenVampyrwho killed our father, David Crosse, and Angelica Dzarchertzyn, our mother--for those of you who don't know, our mother was a Daughter of Lilith, a hereditary vampire killer--when we were babies. Carrying out his vow to his dying daughter, Angelica's father, Anton, made sure his triplet granddaughters had a normal American childhood by placing us with Grammie and Popsie Crosse. So for the next twenty years Megan and Kat and I were adored, shop-till-we-dropped princesses in a small upstate New York town. Our closest encounter with a vamp was on a box of Count Chocula cereal and in barely remembered nightmares from our childhood. But then we turned twenty-one and Zena tracked us down to Maplesburg. Which is when our perfect world was torn apart, never to be put back together again. As I say, I don't want to dwell on the dreary details, mainly because I hate thinking about how dumb I was back then. When Anton Dzarchertzyn--Grandfather Darkheart, as he said we should call him--showed up on our doorstep the night we staked Lance and Todd and Dean, and told us the truth about how our mother had lived and died, I was convinced I would turn out to be the Crosse triplet who'd inherited Angelica's Daughter of Lilith destiny. I was equally convinced that Megan would fulfill Darkheart's other prediction. Our mother had died trying to save her babies from Zena. She'd failed. One of us bore the mark of the QueenVampyrand would turn vamp herself during her twenty-first year. My theory about Megan being the vamp and me being the Daughter was blown out of the water during our final battle with Zena, when Megan proved herself to be the true inheritor of Mom's title. So I fell back on theory number two: that Kat, the languidly sexy middle Crosse sister--born half an hour before me and twenty minutes after Kat--was the one Zena had marked when we were babies. Wrong again. When we went up against Master Vamp Cyrus Kane, Kat learned that her legacy didn't come from Mom or Zena, it came from our father, a Healer who'd been able to restore the souls of vamps and turn them back into the humans they'd once been. And after that revelation, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who among us was left to turn fang-girAllen, Harper is the author of 'Dead Is the New Black ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373514373 and ISBN 0373514379.