"You've destroyed my pride," he said.

"No, Jacob," I said, "you destroyed it when you put yourself on the wrong side of me and mine."

He looked at me then, his eyes so wide there was a flash of white to them. "I'm going to try to leave before your people get here. Oh, yeah," he said, "I feel them like something hot riding closer, so much power coming to your rescue, as if you need rescuing." He laughed, but not like it was funny.

"Go, Jacob," Nicky said.

Jacob looked at me. "If your name ever comes up in connection with another job, I'll turn it down."

"No matter how much money they offer you?" I asked.

He nodded. "There isn't a price big enough to get me to come near you again." He actually looked at the gun in his hand under Ellen's body. I watched him think about it. "I'll make you a deal, Anita Blake. You don't come near me, and I will leave you the fuck alone."

"Deal," I said.

Nicky hugged me. "I don't think I'm leaving, Jacob."

"I know that." He looked at me then, his eyes so wide there was a flash of white to them. "I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to leave. I'll gather everyone up, and we'll leave you and your men alone. I'd put a sign above St. Louis for all the hired thugs, if I could."

"What would it say?" I asked.

"Here is a bigger motherfucker than you are."

Jacob returned my weapons and trusted me not to shoot him in the back. He walked to the edge of the cemetery with Ellen in his arms and only when he was about to enter the trees did he turn and look at me. Maybe I should have shot him, but my lioness was content with beating his ass and letting him go. In the world of lions, he wouldn't be back. Here was hoping my lion knew what she was talking about.

The first hint of dawn showed above the trees, making them look even blacker against the growing light. I felt Jean-Claude's frustration. He could not come for me, but there were others who could. Others that daylight worked just dandy for, and as if I'd called them just by thinking of them, Micah and Nathaniel came out of the woods with guns, and other dark figures came with them. The cavalry had arrived.

They held me while the other guards made sure there were no more bad guys. They had Nicky at gunpoint, on his knees with his hands behind his head. He looked like he was familiar with the position. I was holding them, and crying, which I never did. "I thought they'd kill you."

"When you didn't come back from lunch, Bert called us to see if you'd gone home," Micah said.

Nathaniel put his forehead against mine. "Then we couldn't find you, and you missed the call from the other marshal about the vampire execution. We went back to the restaurant you had lunch in and Ahsan, the cute waiter, told us about two men and you getting into an SUV with them." He began to kiss his way down my face. "Then you were gone, all our connections to you were broken. I thought you'd died." He hugged me so tight I could hear the beating of his heart against my body.

I hugged him, and Micah kept my other hand. "Jean-Claude kept Nathaniel and Damian going with energy, but we knew you were hurt; that much we felt before it all went black." He came to us both and Nathaniel opened his arms, so we did a group hug.

Jason's voice came. "I almost die for you and I don't even get a hug?"

I pulled away enough to see him, and he joined the hug. "Sorry I missed the party but I had to be in charge of finding sunproof housing for the vampires."

"I felt his frustration that he couldn't get here before dawn."

"Frustrated is one word for it. Insanely angry is another," Jason said, and wiped at the tears on my face.

"What do we do with this one?" one of the guards asked.

I turned to look at Nicky, still kneeling at gunpoint. "He's with me," I said.

Everyone looked at me. "I needed help to heal from the injuries, and I needed enough power to raise the dead so they didn't kill you guys. I rolled him. The dead Rex said that he'd seen male vampires that could do what I do; Brides of Dracula."

"Brides of Anita?" Jason asked.

I shrugged.

"Are you sure you can trust him?" Micah asked, and the look he gave Nicky wasn't friendly.

"I don't know, but I do know that he protected me from his own pride, and almost took a bullet for me."

"Would you have survived without him?" Micah asked.

I thought about it, and then said, "No."

Micah went to Nicky and offered him a hand up. The guards didn't like it, but they knew not to argue with all of us. Micah stared up at the taller man, studying his face. "Thank you for taking care of her for us."

"I helped kidnap her, you know," Nicky said.

Micah nodded. "I know."

"Is he coming home with us?" Nathaniel asked.

"I hadn't actually thought that far ahead," I said.

Then Nicky looked at me, his eyes stricken. "Don't leave me, Anita. Please, don't leave me." His face seemed to struggle for an expression, but finally he collapsed to the ground and crawled toward me. He extended one hand. "Please, please, Anita, I don't understand everything, but the thought of you leaving me behind feels like dying."

I looked at the other men. Micah nodded. Nathaniel hugged me. Jason said, "I don't live with you guys, so I don't think I get a vote."

I hugged him with the arm that wasn't around Nathaniel. "They threatened to kill you; you get a vote."

He came to stand with us and looked down at the man with his hand still out. "Touch him and let us feel the power." That was Jason, so much smarter than he pretended he was.

I reached out and took Nicky's hand. The moment we touched, the power jumped between us, climbed over my skin in a warm, tingling rush that caressed Nathaniel's skin and crossed to Jason. Nathaniel made a small sound. Jason said, "Tasty."

Micah came to us, rubbing his hand up and down the goose bumps on his arm; the other hand still held the gun. "You mind-fucked him."

I nodded. "Yeah."

He kissed my cheek. "I'm sorry you had to do that." And in that moment I realized that he understood what it had cost me to take Nicky the way I did. I kissed him back and moved into the circle of his arms. I buried my face against the warm scent of his neck and let him hold me. The gun dug into my back a little.

Nathaniel and Jason were helping Nicky to his feet. The bigger man was crying, crying at the thought that I would cast him aside. Fuck.

I looked at Nicky watching me with frightened eyes while Jason tried to comfort him and Nathaniel came to join us, his gun peeking from the side of his jeans and ruining the line of his shirt.

I went to Nathaniel and kissed him, thoroughly and completely, so he melted in against me, our bodies, our hands, pressing against each other. He drew back laughing. "I love you, Anita."

"I love you, too."

"Let's go home."

I nodded. "Home sounds great."

We started walking toward the woods. Jason jogged to catch up with us. I realized that Nicky was still standing back by the grave. I looked at him, so tall, so muscular, and so lost.

"What do I do with him?"

"What do you do with any of us?" Micah asked.

"He's a stranger, and he tried to kill us all."

"He would do anything you told him to do, Anita," Jason said. "He seems to have even less free will than the rest of us do."

"I did it on purpose, Jason. I took everything from him on purpose."

"You did what you had to do, so you could come back to us," Micah said.

"I really wanted a puppy," Nathaniel said, "but I guess we could say he followed us home, too."

"I told you we'd think about a dog."

"In the meantime can we take the kitten home?"

"He's not a kitten," I said.

"He looks like one."

I looked at Nicky by the grave and knew what he meant. He looked so alone, but he made no move to follow us, as if he'd simply stand there by the grave until I told him to do something else. Had I told him to stay by the grave? I couldn't remember.

"We can't leave him like that," Micah said.

I sighed. "Nicky, come on."

His face lit up as if I'd told him tomorrow was Christmas, and he jogged toward us. We slept in the motel that Jason had settled Jean-Claude and the other vampires into so that dawn didn't find them and do something unfortunate. The four of us shared the king-size bed, and Nicky slept on the floor beside us. He'd started to shake at the thought that he couldn't stay in the same room with me. God help me.

But in the morning, I woke with Nathaniel's vanilla-scented hair across my face, and Micah's warmth pressed against my back. Jason's arm and leg were across Nathaniel's body, touching me even in his sleep. I heard movement on the floor and Nicky sat up, rubbing his face clear of sleep. He smiled at me, as if whatever he saw was the most beautiful thing in the world. I knew that was a lie, but with all my men around me in a warm puppy pile I couldn't be unhappy. I'd taken Nicky's free will; I'd eaten his life on purpose. He could never be free, never be his own person again.

Micah moved against my back and laid a kiss on my shoulder. "Good morning," he whispered, and that was enough. Did I regret what I'd done to Nicky? Yes, I did, but as Nathaniel blinked those lavender eyes up at me through a veil of his own hair, Jason mumbled, "It's too early to be up," his hand rubbing along my shoulder. I could live with it.

123

Afterword

Where do I get my ideas? How do I know if an idea is strong enough to support a whole book? How do I write a whole book? How do I write day to day? What helps me get into the mind-set to pull words out of thin air and write books?

These are some of the questions I get most often from would-be writers or just people who think being a writer must be interesting, or hard, or easy, or just weird. All of that is true, often at the same moment. I love my job. It's all I've ever wanted to do since I was fourteen-well, except for being a wildlife biologist, but that was a fling; my heart has and always will belong to the muse. She hooked me at about age twelve, but she set the hook in hard at fourteen when I read Robert E. Howard's short story collection Pigeons from Hell. That was my moment of decision that I not only wanted to be a writer but I also wanted to write horror, dark fantasy, heroic fantasy, to make up worlds that never existed, and write about our world with just a few scary changes. That was my epiphany and I never really looked back.

Flirt is my twenty-ninth novel in about fifteen years of time and space. I know something about writing and about how to treat it like a career. It takes a lot of hard work and a very thick skin so all those early rejections don't crush you. But first you need an idea.

I'll state up front that I don't understand the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" I had a woman who was raised just across the alley from me ask me after I had several books out, "How do you come up with ideas like that, when you were raised here?" The implication was that small-town middle of farm country wasn't the most likely place to find a writer of paranormal thrillers. I asked her the question I really wanted to ask, "How do you not come up with ideas like that, when you were raised here?"

I can't remember a time when I wasn't telling myself stories, at least in my own head. I would often tell a true story with just a little embellishment, which is one reason I did not pursue journalism. But most often my ideas were about fairies, monsters, vampires, werewolves-scary but beautiful, or scary but emotionally poignant were always the things that attracted me as a child. I guess I've never really outgrown the idea that if it can drink my blood, eat my flesh, and be attractive at the same time, then I am all over it. By fourteen, I wrote my first complete short story. It was a real bloodbath where only the baby survived to crawl away into the woods. The implication was that she would starve to death or be eaten by wild animals. I was always such a cheerful child.

I have no idea where that first story came from and it wasn't a great idea, but it was the first complete idea and that makes it valuable. But how do I come up with ideas that are book length and good enough to be book length? Funny you should ask that. Because that is exactly what I'm about to try to explain.

I am going to tell you where the idea for Flirt first came from. I'm going to tell you the first scene that came into my head, because most books start with a scene for me. I have a little mini-movie in my head or freeze-frame of a visual and that is the peg on which the entire book begins to revolve. That first moment is when I see something or experience something, and I feel that little catch in my stomach, or prickling along my skin. Book ideas are a little bit like falling in love. You're on a date with someone and they do something, or say something, and you get that little uplift where you think, Yeah, I like this one. Ideas are like that. I'll tell you the first idea, and I'll even tell you the fertile ground that that idea found to land on, which happened nearly a year before. Because an idea is like a seed; it needs good soil to grow into a nice big book.

I'm going to tell you the schedule I kept, the pages I wrote per day, the music I listened to, and the books that I read for extra research while writing the book. I am going to lay my process bare before you. I'll let you see it from inception to completion. Will this help you do the same? I'm not sure. Will it answer the question of where I got this idea and how I knew it was a book? Oh, yes.

First, what do I mean by fertile ground? I mean a set of circumstances or a mind-set that puts me in a headspace to appreciate the idea and to see almost instantly the possibilities of it. This mind-set has allowed me to write short stories in one glorious muse-driven rush, and this once allowed me to get an idea for a book and weeks later have that book be complete.

It all began with a party at my friends Wendi and Daven's house, which is states away, and that is important to this tale, because it meant Jonathon, my husband, and I had to fly in and stay at a hotel and were there visiting for several days. Among their other lovely and charming guests was Jennie Breeden, who does the web comic "The Devil's Panties," which has nothing to do with satanic underwear, but more to do with the semiautobiographical life of Jennie, but funnier. Jonathon and I were fans of her web comic, and we'd met her for the first time at Comic-Con 2007. She turned out to be a fan of my books, so it was a mutual squee-fest. Which was very cool. We met and visited with all of them more at DragonCon the following year, but coming to visit Wendi and Daven was the first chance for me to spend some quality time with Jennie.

I have a lot of friends who are writers. I have friends who are artists from sculpture to woodworking to graphic art and comic books. It's always fun to be with other artsy types. It can help spark ideas and just give you a new perspective, but Jennie's comic is funny. She records, or writes down, funny things that people say around her for later comics. She's doing a daily strip and that takes a lot of funny. I could not possibly do a daily strip. I certainly couldn't be funny every day.

Jennie and I would hear the same thing, or see the same event, but she would then speak into her phone/recorder and it would be funny, even funnier than what happened. I began to help her collect funny bits, but all my ideas sparked by similar things were dark. It was as if we walked through a slightly altered version of the same world. Her's was brighter, happier, even funnier, and there was a lot of genuine funny that trip. My version was darker, more overtly sexual, even aberrant, violent, sometimes violently sexy, and an innocent moment turned into a potential for murder and horror in my head. In Jennie's head, there was a laugh track, and even when the jokes had a sexual flavor to them, they were still charming, and never crossing that line of deviancy that my ideas always seemed to be on the other side of, waving happily at the less debauched across the line. If she had not been speaking out loud into the recorder, or asking us to repeat phrases, I wouldn't have realized how much funnier her version of events were than mine. She also would tweak the reality and it would begin to build into something much funnier.

Later, she contacted me and Jonathon and ran some of the cartoons by us because she didn't want to make us uncomfortable. She takes reality and pushes it to that next absurd level, so that it's not exactly what actually-actually happened, but it's almost what happened. But it was always fun, and funnier for having gone through Jennie's mind and onto the paper.

I realized that here were two artists experiencing the same weekend, but taking entirely different things away from it. It was eye-opening, refreshing, and made me look at things anew. The experience, like much of this last year, helped me lighten up somewhat, but it also confirmed that I would never be truly light and fluffy. It's just not my speed, and at the end of the year I was content with that, happy even with my lighter shade of dark.

Skip ahead a few months, from winter to summer, and Jonathon and I were back visiting Wendi and Daven. It was at the end of the visit and we were catching a late lunch or an early supper (aka "lup per"), before they drove us to the airport. We were all sitting in a U-shaped booth at a restaurant where we'd gone before with them. It was nice, comfy.

The waiter came to take our orders. He had his little notepad out, pen poised. He asked what we wanted for drinks. I think Jonathon and I ordered first, and then it was Daven's turn; Wendi was on the other side of him. Daven had been studying his menu and only then looked up. I swear, he only looked up and gave the waiter his full face, nothing more. The waiter went from reasonably intelligent, competent, human being to stuttering idiot.

Have I mentioned yet that Daven is six foot three with long, thick hair down to his waist? It's brown, but it's that kind of brown that has natural gold highlights all through it. He has these great big hazel eyes that are truly brown and gray and a little green all at the same time, depending on his mood. He has a Vandyke beard and mustache that he grew so he'd look old enough to date his age group and stop getting hit on by so many men, when all he wanted was to date women. All this is to say that Daven is pretty, very pretty. Oh, and just to add to the treat of it all, his wife, Wendi, is six foot one, blond with huge, soft, blue eyes, and enough curves to make straight men weep and gay women beg. If you are at all insecure about yourself these are not the two people you want to be standing next to.

I knew intellectually that they were pretty, and I knew that Daven flirted at a black-belt level, but I hadn't until that moment understood the impact he could have simply by looking up. But once Daven realized the reaction, he smiled at the waiter. And the waiter just fell to pieces. I almost felt sorry for him-almost.

The waiter said, "Um, ah, wh... what, I..." Out of desperation he sputtered, "Drinks, I can bring you drinks."

All four of us nodded in unison, and said, "Yes, bring us drinks."

The waiter fled.

Daven turned to Wendi and practically bounced in his seat, almost clapping his hands together in excitement. "Can I play with him, please?"

"No," said Wendi.

Pouting, Daven said, "Why not?" I'm not sure I can explain to you how a man that tall, that broad-shouldered, can bounce in his seat and pout and have it work for him, but he does, and it does.

"Because we'll either get great service, or we'll never get our food," Wendi said.

The waiter returned with water for all of us, which was great since we all wanted water. He then asked for our food orders. But he took our orders while staring at Daven, as if the rest of us didn't exist. Daven just looked up at him with that beatific smile on his face.

I don't remember why the waiter kept coming back to the table. All I know is we never had to ask for our drinks to be refilled, they just were, and bread never ran out, and, well, the waiter kept coming back and he never looked at anyone except Daven.

Now, I have no problem with both my friends being gorgeous. I usually just enjoy the world's reaction to them, especially to Daven, who just has an aura of charisma that's hard to explain. But I was sitting within inches of Daven. Jonathon and Wendi were at the edges of the U, but I was right there, and the waiter stared at Daven's smiling face. Did I mention yet that I'd asked Daven how he did his charming thing earlier on this trip? I had, and he had explained it to me. It was a technique I would later use to good effect on camera for the commercial and interview for my book Skin Trade, but this day, at that moment, I trotted it out for something nearer and more immediate.

I lifted my face up, and because I'm a petite woman, I did the slight head tilt and smiled. The waiter just kept staring at Daven, and I admit that I moved a touch closer to Daven and made certain that the waiter couldn't ignore the fact that I have curves of my own. The only question was, did he only like boys, or did breasts hold some appeal? I waited to see. He did that little eye flick, and then he was dividing his attention between the two of us. I honestly don't think it was that I was flirting that well, but that the waiter had actually realized he hadn't made eye contact with anyone else at the table. He could look at me and still see Daven, because we were beside each other. He couldn't look at either Wendi or Jonathon and still see Daven. My husband is his own share of pretty (shoulder-length waves of strawberry-blond hair), and he grew his own Vandyke beard and mustache that is true orange-red for much the same reason Daven grew his, because he looked twelve and wanted to date his own age group and was tired of fending off more offers from men than women. Cap it with almond-shaped blue eyes like an exotic Viking, and his much cozier size for me (five-eight), and, well, any more description would be oversharing... The most important thing I learned about flirting is that it's not just the equipment you have, but how you use it. Daven and I were willing to use what we had on the waiter; our spouses were not willing to stoop to those levels. One must simply tip a hat to the strength of their character, and go back to tormenting the waiter.

We finally got our bill, paid, tipped, and left. The waiter was sooooo giving Daven the invitation to leave a number, to call back, to please, don't go. Daven did one more grin and off we went. I believe it was as we were leaving the restaurant that I turned to them all and said the fateful words, "If Jennie were here she'd turn this into a funny, charming comic strip, but if I ever used it as an idea, it would all go horribly wrong. There would be violence, or violent sex, or both, and a high body count."

We all laughed, they drove us to the airport, we went home.

But that was the idea, right there.

Fast-forward a couple of weeks and I was deep into the writing of the latest book of my other series, Meredith Gentry, fairie princess and private detective. The book was Divine Misdemeanors, and it was kicking my ass. Something was really blocking the inspiration pipeline. Usually that means there's another idea trying to get out. If I can just figure out the idea and write it down then I can go back to the book that's due, and let the idea simmer on the back burner, as it were.

But when I sat down to write this idea out, it didn't stop. I wrote the first few pages and made myself go back to Divine Misdemeanors, but that book slowed to a crawl. I remembered the last time this happened was in the middle of Danse Macabre, and the book that came out of that interruption was Micah. So I let myself divide my day, working on the book that was due and allowing myself a second writing session on the idea that would not die, and that would eventually become Flirt.

How do I divide my attention and my muse between two projects at the same time? Music. I use different music for the different projects so that when I sit down I know by the soundtrack what project I'm into. I find that music can be so intensely paired with a character or a book that I will sometimes have to put that song, or album, or even band, away for a while before I can listen to it again without being thrown back into the book it's so closely associated with. The music for Flirt was The Fray, Flaw, and Tori Amos's album Abnormally Attracted to Sin. That was the music to sink me into Anita's world and this idea. Over and over for hours, for days, for weeks, this was the music that let my imagination know what we were doing. I find that the right music is like a magic switch in my head and even months later a certain song will make me think of a character, or a scene in my books. I tend to associate real people with songs, too, so I guess the fact that my imaginary friends have their music isn't that surprising, but I find that once I land on the right music, the book, whatever book, writes much better and much smoother. There would come a point where I simply had to give myself over to Flirt and let it eat my world for a little bit. Just checked the calendar on my office wall and I actually only let the book have its way with me exclusively for two weeks; the other three months that it lived in my head it had to share its time with Merry and Divine Misdemeanors. I averaged eight pages a day, the highest being twenty-five on the last day. It wrote as fast as Micah except it took longer for me to be willing to give the book its own time in my schedule. Sometimes working with two different publishers on two different bestselling series is like trying to date two men at the same time. You can do it, but there are moments when each man wants all the attention and there doesn't seem to be enough of this writer to go around. Once Flirt was done, I was able to write Divine Misdemeanors with a fresh eye, a fresh attitude, and renewed enthusiasm. The same had happened with Danse Macabre after Micah.

There is a scene in Flirt that is based on what happened in the restaurant with Daven and Wendi. I've given most of Daven's part of the event to one of the other men in Anita's life. I gave Micah and Anita Wendi's part. I let Anita do some of my part. I did with that real-life event what Jennie does, except the charming incident would inevitably lead to something going horribly wrong, and there would be sex and violence, and a high body count, just as I'd predicted.

I let Daven and Wendi read the novel early so they could see that I'd done exactly what I said I would do. It amused us all, and I suddenly had a surprise Anita Blake novel for the year. Nifty!

So that was the idea, and that was what it became, and how I wrote it. But to prove to you that it doesn't matter what the idea is, that it matters who the artist is and what they do with the idea, I asked Jennie to create comic strips of the idea. I told her the story of what happened in the restaurant and she did it as a comic. They're funny and charming and no one dies. I managed for the same scene to be funnyish and charming and tender and a little sad, but it would set in motion a series of horrible events, because that's just the way my mind works. And to see how Jennie Breeden's mind works, turn to the comics that follow, and then you will have it all.

Now, how I took the charming restaurant scene and got to a man who wanted his wife raised from the dead at any cost-even the death's of those Anita held most dear-well, I don't know. Years ago when I had one or two books out, people would guess that I wrote romance or children's books. As a petite woman, I guess they went for the packaging, but as my good friend who is a policeman says, "Packaging is not indicative of content." Boy, that's the truth.

I'd tell the people who thought I wrote children's stories, as in picture books, "No, I write science fiction, fantasy, and horror."

It was always that last part that got them. I had several people say, "But you look so nice," as if you can't be nice and write horror. If asked now, I say, "I write paranormal thrillers." That seems to make people happier, and it's more accurate for what I do, since I was mixing vampires and zombies with mystery and romance long before it was a genre of its own. But I still get asked, "Why do you write about sex and monsters?"

The only honest reply is, "You say that like I have a choice. These are the ideas that come to me. These are the ideas that have always come to me. If it can bleed me, eat me, or fuck me, I want to write about it." Every girl needs a hobby.