Now that I was rid of the knife, I leaned forward and, with the hand I wasn't using to keep Maria's arm bent back against her spine, I seized a handful of those glossy black ringlets and jerked her head toward me.

"But you know what I said to her?" I asked Maria. "I said, it's not that the trigger to my rage mechanism is oversensitive. It's that people . . . just ... keep ... pissing ... me ... off."

To emphasize each of the last six syllables of that sentence, I rammed Maria de Silva's face into the roof tiles. When I dragged her head up after the sixth time, she was bleeding heavily from the nose and mouth. I observed this with great detachment, like it was someone else who had caused it and not me.

"Oh," I said. "Look at that. That is just so interfering and loathsome of me."

Then I smashed her face against the roof a few more times, saying, "This one is for jumping me while I was asleep and holding a knife to my throat. And this one is for making Dopey eat bugs, and this one is for making me have to clean up bug guts, and this one is for killing Clive, and oh yeah, this one is for Jesse - "

I won't say I was out of my mind with rage. I was mad. I was plenty mad. But I knew exactly what I was doing.

And it wasn't pretty. Hey, I'll be the first to admit that. I mean, violence is never the answer, right? Unless of course the person you're beating on is already dead.

But just because a hundred and fifty years ago this chick had had a good friend of mine offed, for no other reason than that he had very rightly wanted out of a marriage with her, she didn't deserve to have her face bashed in.

No way. What she deserved was to have every bone in her body broken.

Unfortunately, however, when I finally let go of Maria's hair and stood up to do just that, I noticed a sudden glow to my left.

Jesse, I thought, my heart doing another one of those speeding-up, skidding things.

But of course it wasn't Jesse. When I turned my head, what I saw materializing there was a very tall man in a dark mustache and goatee, dressed in clothes that were somewhat similar to Jesse's, only a lot fancier - like he was a costume party Zorro or something. His snug black trousers had this elaborate silver filigree pattern going down the side of each leg, and his white shirt had those puffy sleeves pirates always wear in movies. He had a lot of silver scrollwork on his holster, too, and all around the brim of his black cowboy hat.

And he didn't look very happy to see me.

"Okay," I said, putting my hands on my hips. "Wait, don't tell me. Diego, am I right?"

Under the pencil-thin mustache, his upper lip curled.

"I thought I told you," he said to Maria, who was sitting up and holding her sleeve to her bleeding nose, "to leave this one to me."

Maria was making a lot of very unattractive snuffling noises. You could tell she'd never had her nose broken before, because she wasn't tipping her head back to stop the bleeding.

Amateur.

"I thought she might be more amusing," Maria said in a voice laced with pain - and regret - "to play with."

Diego shook his head disgustedly. "No," he said. "With mediators we do not play. I thought that was made clear to you from the start. They are entirely too dangerous."

"I'm sorry, Diego." Maria's voice took on a whiny quality I had not heard before. I realized she was one of those girls who has a "guy" voice, one she uses only when men are around. "I should have done as you said."

It was my turn to be disgusted.

"Hello," I said to Maria. "This is the twenty-first century. Women are allowed to think for themselves now, you know."

Maria just glared at me over the sleeve she was holding to her bleeding nose.

"Kill her for me," she said in that whiny little-girl voice.

Diego took a step toward me, wearing an expression that told me he was only too happy to oblige his lady love.

"Oh, what?" I said. I wasn't even scared. I didn't care anymore. The numbness in my heart had pretty much taken over my whole body. "You always do what she tells you? You know, we have a word for that now. It's called being whipped."

Apparently he was either unacquainted with this expression, or he just didn't care, since he kept coming at me. Diego was wearing spurs, and they clanged ominously against the roof tiles as he approached.

"You know," I said, holding my ground. "I gotta tell you. The goatee thing? Yeah, way over. And you know a little jewelry really does go a long way. Just something you might want to consider. I'm actually glad you stopped by, because I have a couple things I've been meaning to say to you. Number one, about your wife? Yeah, she's a skank. And number two, you know that whole thing where you killed Jesse and then buried his remains out back there? Yeah, way un-cool. Because you see, now I have to - "

Only I never got a chance to tell Felix Diego what I was going to have to do him. That's because he interrupted me. He said, in this deep and surprisingly menacing voice, for a guy with a goatee, "It has long been my conviction that the only good mediator is a dead one."

Then, before I could so much as twitch, he threw his arms around me. I thought he was trying to give me a hug or something, which would have been pretty weird.

But that wasn't what he was doing at all. No, what he was doing, actually, was throwing me off the porch roof.

Oh, yes. He threw me right into the hole where the hot tub was supposed to go. Right where they'd uncovered Jesse's remains, just that afternoon....

Which I thought was kind of ironic, actually. At least, while I was still capable of thought.

Which wasn't for long, since I lost consciousness shortly after slamming into the ground.

CHAPTER 10

Here's the thing about mediators:

We're hard to kill.

I'm serious. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've been knocked down, dragged, stomped on, punched, kicked, bitten, clawed, whacked on the head, held underwater, shot at, and, oh, yeah, thrown off roofs.

But have I ever died? Have I ever sustained a life-threatening injury?

No. I've broken bones - plenty of them. I've got scars galore.

But the fact is, whoever - or whatever - created us mediators did give us one natural weapon, at least, in our fight against the undead. No, not superhuman strength, though that would have been handy. No, what we've got, Father Dom and I - and Jack, too, probably, although I doubt he's had an opportunity to test it out yet - is a hide tough enough to take all the abuse that gets heaped on us and then some.

Which was why even though by rights a fall like the one I took should have killed me, it didn't. Not even close.

Not, of course, that Maria de Silva and her paramour didn't think they'd been successful. They must have, or they'd have stuck around to finish the job. But when I woke up hours later, groggy and with a headache you would not believe, they were nowhere to be seen.

Clearly, I had won the first round. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway. I mean, I wasn't dead, and that, in my book, is always a plus.

What I was, was concussed. I knew right away because I get them all the time. Concussions, I mean.

Well, all right, twice.

Anyway, it's not so pleasant, being concussed. Basically, you feel pukey and sore all over, but, not surprisingly, your head really hurts more than anything. In my case, it was even worse in that I'd been lying at the bottom of that hole for so long, the dew had had a chance to fall. It had collected on my clothes and soaked them through and made them feel very heavy. So dragging myself out of that pit Andy and Dopey had dug became a real chore.

In fact, it was dawn before I finally managed to let myself back into the house - thank God Sleepy had left the front door unlocked when he'd come in from his big date. Still, I had to climb all those stairs. It was pretty slow going. At least when I got to my room and was finally able to peel off all of my sodden, muddy clothes, I didn't have to worry, for once, about Jesse seeing me in my altogether.

Because of course Jesse was gone.

I tried not to think about that as I crawled into bed and shut my eyes. This strategy - the not-thinking-about-Jesse-being-gone strategy - seemed to work pretty well. I was asleep, I think, before that thought had really had a chance to sink in again.

I didn't wake up until well past eight. Apparently Sleepy had tried to get me up for work, but I was too far gone. They let me sleep in, I guess, because they all assumed I was still upset about what had happened the day before, about the skeleton they'd found in the backyard.

I only wish that was all I had to be upset about.

When the phone rang a little after nine and Andy called up the stairs that it was for me, I was already up, standing in my bathroom in my sweats, examining the enormous bruise that had developed beneath my bangs. I looked like an alien. I'm not kidding. It was a wonder, really, I hadn't broken my neck. I was convinced that Maria and her boyfriend thought that's exactly what I'd done. It was the only reason I was still alive. The two of them were so cocky, they hadn't stuck around to make sure I was well and truly dead.

They'd obviously never met a mediator before. It takes a lot more than a fall off a roof to kill one of us.

"Susannah." Father Dominic's voice, when I picked up the phone, was filled with concern. "Thank God you're all right. I was so worried . . . But you didn't, did you? Go to the cemetery last night?"

"No," I said. There hadn't been any reason to go there, in the end. The cemetery had come to me.