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

pretending that everything was fine and dandy - that the weirdness of the outside world would just pass them by.
    Three months had passed since Christy had teleported me here. At the time, one could have almost pretended that everything I’d seen in New York had just been my imagination. This city had seemed so normal at first, relatively speaking, of course. Now, those times were over and it was starting to look like a set piece from a Mad Max movie.
    Those were thoughts for another time, though. The condition of the world as a whole wasn’t my main concern right at that moment.
    I landed hard on the formerly mirror-polished stage - now marred by scratches, scrapes, and a body-sized crater that marked the landing place of most who dared test Sally’s wrath.
    Oh well, at least the ballistic glass that once covered the window looking down upon the club hadn’t been replaced. That shit kinda hurt to be flung through. Thankfully, custom, bulletproof, one-way mirrors were in short supply these days.
    “You know she doesn’t like to be called that.”
    I pulled myself to a sitting position and turned to find Kara’s grinning face staring back at me. Tom’s younger sister was cute in all the ways her brother wasn’t. Unfortunately for her, he made up for that by still living in all the ways she was no longer capable of. She’d been turned into one of the undead at some point in the recent past, under circumstances that I still wasn’t entirely clear on. Regardless, I sure as shit wasn’t going to be the one to break it to my oldest friend that his sibling was now Sally’s bloodsucking sorority sister.
    I stretched and felt my vertebrae snap back into place - ouch. “I think you’ll find that I have no problem calling our illustrious leader whatever the hell I please.”
    “Your funeral.”
    “Smart girl,” Sally’s voice carried down to us from the now open portal above. “Now get the fuck back to work.”
    Kara muttered something under her breath before scampering away. It was probably a petulant dig at being ordered about. She tended to do that a lot, but Sally mostly pretended not to hear her, oddly displaying an extra dollop of tolerance for her antics. Of course, maybe that was just relative to what she afforded me.
    “Care to rephrase your earlier statement?” Sally grinned as she peered down from above. Oddly enough, clocking me usually seemed to help improve her mood. Go figure.
    A momentary temptation to nod respectfully passed through my mind, but fuck that shit. Our roles might’ve been reversed from back in our Village Coven days, but all that meant to me was I could give her a dose of her own medicine - something that always improved my mood. “Yeah, I was thinking maybe we should just quit with the foreplay and move right on to the sex. Sound like a plan, Lu ?”
    Her eyes flashed black with annoyance. “How’s this for an answer?” She ducked back in, and I heard the sound of wood scraping against wood. By the time I put two and two together, her desk was already crashing through the remainder of the plywood and headed my way.
    I rolled to the right and fell off the stage just as it landed where I’d been sitting a moment earlier, shattering into pieces and greatly widening the crater in the middle.
    Some people just had no sense of humor.
    * * *
    I was still dusting myself off when Sally came downstairs. While there was little doubt she’d put on a show for all the eyeballs present, I could also tell whatever real annoyance she’d felt had already burned itself out. Had she been serious about chewing me a new asshole, she’d have taken the express route from above - probably landing far more gracefully than I had. Instead, minutes had passed and I saw that she was taking the time to acknowledge some of the refugees as she walked by them.
    As much as I wanted to make a douchey comment about that, I couldn’t. Despite her iron-bitch exterior, she’d continually surprised me by showing