The Tome of Bill (Book 6): Half A Prayer by Rick Gualtieri

capitulation against a superior foe. However, it was a means to an end lest we wind up standing there all night looking like two star-crossed lovers refusing to say goodbye.
    Oddly enough, that thought lingered in my head for longer than it should have. Oh well, it was probably a side effect of my heart being crushed like a paper cup. I quickly pushed it aside as I told her a greatly abbreviated version of my story, mostly sticking to Sheila’s reasons for not wanting to join us. Unlike Christy, Sally didn’t seem overly pleased at Sheila’s logic. A look of annoyance showed on her face when I was finished.
    “Fuck,” she spat softly. “I was afraid she might do that. Doesn’t help that she’s probably still squirrely from our last little adventure.”
    “Yeah, I got a bit of a sense of that.”
    “Any trouble?”
    “None at all.”
    “Good, then you still have that vial I gave you?”
    “Uh...not exactly.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, there was a little bit of trouble.”
    “A little bit?” she asked dubiously.
    “Yeah, she had a...” I mumbled the rest.
    Her face stretched into a wide, shit-eating grin - enough so that I would have gladly staked her for that alone had I a weapon in hand. “She has a boyfriend?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Her own personal pipe-layer.”
    “Listen...”
    “A man willing to deliver the sausage whenever she gets a midnight craving.”
    “Okay, I get the point.”
    “So did you kill him?”
    “What?!” I stopped and looked around. Thankfully, my little outburst hadn’t attracted any attention. I lowered my voice. “No, I didn’t kill him.”
    “Then what?”
    “I might’ve...compelled him.”
    “That blood was only supposed to be for an emergency, Bill.”
    “What? Protecting the Icon’s virtue sounded like a pretty big emergency to me.”
    * * *
    She got a pretty good laugh out of it in the end. “There’s hope for you yet.”
    “Maybe,” I groused. “Just probably not with her.”
    “Her loss.”
    “Really?”
    “No.” Bitch! “It’s probably for the best, though. If she’d said yes, we’d have been in a bit of a pickle.”
    “How so?”
    Sally made it a point to weave into the densest part of the crowd as she spoke. It was all I could do to use my enhanced hearing to concentrate on weeding her voice out of the many others around us. “Orders from on high. They came in right after you left.”
    “On high?”
    “The very top - the Draculas.”
    Oh, crap. “Who called?”
    “Colin; who else?”
    “Were these new orders from James?” We hadn’t heard anything from him since he’d left my apartment, still nursing his wounds following the fall of the Boston complex. Mind you, that wasn’t too surprising for me. I was lucky if I heard from him every other month. Sally, though, seemed to be able to reach him whenever she needed to. Go figure - when a perky blonde calls, guys answer.
    “Nope.” She stepped to the left to avoid a couple that was paying more attention to their squabbling kids than where they were going. “Colin made it a very specific point to let me know that this came from the First Coven as a whole.”
    “I bet he enjoyed that.”
    She glowered at me, her sour look saying it all. Colin was a grade-A dick. Even with the world crumbling around us, he was still more than willing to grease it up and stick it in whenever he could.
    “I assume that has something to do with why I’m two thousand miles further west than I thought I’d be.”
    “They knew what we were planning to do.”
    “What? How?”
    “Relax. Just us; nothing to do with who you were going to see. They assumed that we’d be working on a half-assed plan to head back north and put a shank in that asshole.”
    “Rightfully so,” I pointed out.
    “Yeah, I guess we’re getting easy to read. Anyway, they were very specific. We were not to do anything of the sort.”
    “How specific?”
    “Of the ‘we’re watching you and there will be consequences if you