“I snuck a look to see how Eric was taking this, and he was staring at me the same way the Monroe vampires had. Thoughtful. Hungry."That's interesting," he said. "I had a psychic once. It was incredible.""Did the psychic think so?”

“I think I just became psychic," he said. "Holy crap.”

“You're not," Jonas said, "a freak.""Says the psychic and the vampire," Sera said. "Forgive me if I don't take your word for it. You two are not exactly the experts on normal.”

“I'm psychic," she said, and looked at me looking nervously at the lock. "Psychic. Not pshycho. I'm Jazz Parker.”

“Though I was having a blissful moment of being happy and content, I had one of those stray ideas you get at odd moments. I thought,How nice it would be if Eric were here with me in the car. He'd look so good with the wind blowing his hair, and he'd enjoy the moment . Well, yeah, before he burned to a crisp.But I realized I'd thought of Eric because it was the kind of day you wanted to share with the person you cared about, the person whose company you enjoyed the most. And that would be Eric as he'd been while he was cursed by a witch: the Eric who hadn't been hardened by centuries of vampire politics, the Eric who had no contempt for humans and their affairs, the Eric who was not in charge of many financial enterprises and responsible for the lives and incomes of quite a few humans and vampires. In other words, Eric as he would never be again.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.” But he did not see, exactly, though he believed that he could have been wrong and that she was right. And so a year later she talked to him suddenly of marriage and escape in the same words, he was not surprised, not hurt. He just thought quietly, ‘So this is love. I see. I was wrong about it too’, thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.”