This was an important missing scene between books, and for some reason, I ended up selling it as a short story to an anthology: Eternal, the follow-up to Immortal, also edited by P. C. Cast. I love writing in Eve’s point of view, particularly when she’s snarky, and there is a lot of that on display here. There are also fancy gowns, jealousy, dancing, Michael in distress, DANCING OLIVER (I cannot stress this enough, because I always wanted to write that scene), and, most of all, a spontaneous proposal. So if you haven’t read it, here’s your chance to see the tale of Michael, Eve, Gloriana, and the last dance of the drama queen.
My name is Eve, and I am a drama queen.
I don’t mean like any old garden-variety teen throwing a tantrum, oh no. I am a Drama Queen, with big initial capital letters and curlicues on top. I work hard at it, and I resent anybody lumping me in with a bunch of wannabe poseurs who haven’t even qualified in Beginning Pouting, much less Champion Fit Throwing.
So when I had a golden opportunity for launching a big, fat, drama-filled scene, and ended up acting like an actual adult, perhaps you’ll appreciate just how important this was to me. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, let me explain the drama that is my life—and this is just the background, broad strokes, you know, for I am epic, I tell you. I am a Goth, but mainly for the fashion, not the ’tude. I had an emotionally abusive father and a checked-out mom. My little brother turned out to be one step short of either the asylum or federal prison.
Oh, and my boyfriend is a sweet boy, a gifted rock guitarist, and he just happens to have an allergy to sunlight and crave plasma on a regular basis. However, in our hometown of Morganville, this is not really all that unusual, since about a third of the citizens are vamps. Yes, vampires. Really. So you see why my life was generally a nightmare from an early age—the monsters under the bed really existed, and the pressure on all of us growing up was to give in. Be a good Morganville conformist.
Give up our blood for the cause.
Not me. I had a pact with all my other rebel friends. We’d never, ever be part of that scene.
And I mentioned my boyfriend is a vampire, right? Yeah. There’s that.
Given all that, when I say that today was a crisis . . . well. Maybe you get the legendary scale of which I am speaking.
The saga started out a normal day—don’t they all? I mean, surely one morning back there in prehistoric times a dinosaur woke up, yawned, chewed some coffee beans, and thought his day was going to be dead boring, just before a comet slammed into his neighborhood. “Normal day” in my life means that I woke up late, yelled at my housemate Shane to get the hell out of my way as I dashed to the bathroom in my vintage dragon-embroidered silk robe, and spent forty-five minutes doing shampoo, body wash, conditioner, blow-dry, straightening, makeup, clothes, and listening to Shane bang on the door and complain about how he was going to go pee all over my bedroom floor if I insisted on living in the bathroom.
I blew him a mocking black-lipsticked kiss on the way out, checked the time, and winced. I was late for my job at Common Grounds, the best local coffee shop of the two in town. (I also worked at the second best, but on alternate days.) I didn’t mind dragging my ass in late to the University Center java store, but at Common Grounds, the boss was a little more of a leg-breaker—probably because he’d been making people show up on time since before the invention of the pocket watch.
I tried sneaking in the back door of Common Grounds, which seemed to work all right; I ditched my coffin purse in my locker, grabbed my long black apron, and tied it on before I went to grab a clipboard from the back. I took a hasty, not very thorough inventory, and toddled out to the front. . . .