“Agnes, what in the world are you doing?” Flo’s brows lifted in surprise as she watched her friend perform a feat of incomprehensible weirdness.

Agnes turned to Flo with cheeks bulging like a squirrel’s, her eyes wide and sweat running down her temples. “Mumphing.” A pastry projectile shot away from Agnes’s lips and plastered itself to the toe of Flo’s sneaker. Agnes shoved her hand behind her back and swallowed, grimacing as if the swallow hurt. 

“Are you really jogging in place while eating a donut?” 

Agnes frowned, giving up on hiding the glazed pastry with a sigh. She flung it toward the trash can and missed, whereupon her rotund feline, Tolstoy, sprang at the remains as if it were a particularly plump mouse wrapped in bacon. The orange cat darted out of Agnes’s kitchen with the donut clutched between his determined jaws and disappeared into his owner’s bedroom.

Agnes deflated, dropping into a kitchen chair and resting her head in her hands. Her gray-brown pageboy fell into her face, except where it stuck to her sweaty skin. “You don’t understand. Hertz’s mom is trying to talk him out of marrying me. She’s pushing an old girlfriend at him. If this wedding doesn’t happen on schedule and go off without a hitch, I’m really afraid that I’m doomed. He’s going to wise up and marry Petunia Marigold instead of me.”

Flo blinked her hazel eyes. “That’s a joke, right? Or a stage name?”

Agnes lifted her head, fixing sad gray eyes on Flo. “It’s not a joke. And she must have a lot of money to be able to pull off that stupid name.” She sighed, her entire six-foot-tall form deflating with the expulsion of air. “I really wish my mom was here. She’d know what to do about Hertz’s mom. I miss her like crazy.” Agnes had no living family. A fact that made Flo sad. But it also made her glad Agnes had found Silver Hills. The residents there were like family. Actually, some of them were better than family. And some were worse. 

Flo dropped into a chair across from her friend, fixing her with a concerned look. “Has something else gone wrong, hun?”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question, given everything that had been going on. It was the usual way of things for Agnes to stand at the center of a veritable tornado of problems and concerns. But Flo had—perhaps unreasonably—hoped the wedding would be a normal enough event to overcome Agnes’s built-in pandemonium setting.

Unfortunately, things had not been going to plan. The wedding venue had changed several times, only two of those times due to Agnes’s chaos quotient. The caterer for the reception had come down with an extremely rare disease Flo couldn’t even pronounce, and the baker had called to tell Agnes her cake had fallen and couldn’t get up. With less than two days until the wedding, that was a problem with a capital “P.”

Through it all, Agnes had been a wreck.

Right on cue, the bride-to-be burst into desperate sobs, sounding as if she had nine out of ten toes dangling over the edge of a steep emotional cliff.

Flo reached over and patted her friend's muscular forearm, trying to make soothing noises. “There, there,” she said, feeling like an idiot. “If you want to eat a donut, you can eat a donut. I wasn’t judging you. I was only curious as to why you were eating while jogging in place.”

Flo thought that was a reasonable question.

“I needed a donut.” Agnes said, sounding desperate. “But I can’t afford to gain another pound. My dress isn’t going to fit.”

Poor Agnes was a stress eater. And she fed her bouts of stress with all of the things that weren’t conducive to losing weight.

“Maybe you’re just hungry. You could eat a bowl of soup instead.”

Agnes sniffed, scraping the heels of her hands over her soggy cheeks. “I already ate an entire pot of chicken noodle soup.”

“And you’re still hungry?” Flo couldn’t quash a disbelieving tone.

“No,” Agnes admitted. “But I have a sweet tooth.” 

She burst into tears again and, out of sheer desperation, Flo went back to patting and there-thereing. Her phone rang and she lunged for it. “Thank the good Lord,” she mumbled to herself. It was Celia Angonetti, Flo’s other best friend. “Hello? Ce?” Flo nervously patted the perfectly sculpted bouff on her head, which was currently tinted red in honor of the upcoming holidays. “Do you need me to come help you with something? I could dig grunge out of your sink traps. Scrub toilets? I’m really busy with Agnes right now, but I’ll do anything…anything at all to...er...help.”

Flo left the kitchen, heading into Agnes’s living room. She lowered her voice. “Ce, the bride’s a mess. We need to drug her until Saturday and band-aid patch this wedding into next week. Anything to get those two danged lovebirds out of here and on their honeymoon.”

Flo expected Ce to chuckle, but she didn’t. Only taut silence filled the line. Flo collapsed onto the couch and sighed. “Give it to me fast.”

“The plumbing burst at the reception hall and the entire place is under three inches of water. The manager said he doesn’t think they’ll be back in business for a month.”

Flo made a noise like a wounded duck. Scrubbing her hands over her face, she dropped her voice to a harsh whisper. “I can’t tell her that, Ce. You don’t know how close to flinging herself into a ball pit brimming with jelly-filled donuts she is. This will take her over the top. She’ll strip Gioppino’s of all its pastries. And forget the local bakery. Cathy’s Cakes closes up and locks the doors when they see her coming. She’ll be like a pastry-eating locust working her way across the country, eating everything sweet in her path. We only need to get her through two more days, Ce. Just two more days.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Flo. The Marriot ballroom is out of action for the foreseeable future.”

“What about the restaurant?” Celia and her part-time thug husband Massimo Angonetti owned Gioppino’s Italian Restaurant in downtown Silver City. It would be the logical place to have Agnes’s wedding reception except that the space would be tight.

“We can’t seat three hundred people,” Ce told her. “We’ve talked about this, Flo.”

“What if you open up the patio?”

“That will give us fifty more people if we really crunch. But the band would need to go somewhere. And there are just too many guests.”

“Maybe the band would like to stand on the bar while they play. Women could sit at the bar and stuff dollar bills into their pants. You know how these musicians are. They crave attention. They’ll love it. And they could probably use the cash.” 

Ce snorted. “And how exactly would the bartender serve drinks?”

“Through their legs?”

“Sorry, Flo. I’d help if I could. Believe me.”

“What if I can get half the people disinvited?”

“How are you going to do that without telling Agnes?”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to get it done if I have to personally insult every last one of them to get them to back out.” 

Flo disconnected with only a mild sense of guilt over what she intended to do. She told herself that the most important thing was getting her friends married. 

Flo called out to Agnes, telling her that she had to run an errand. She headed out of the apartment. Glancing down the hallway as she waited for the elevator to come, Flo found herself wishing that Hertz was still in residence at Silver Hills Senior and Singles Apartments. He’d taken over his father’s apartment there for a few months, with the idea of sticking it out until the lease was up. But then he’d met Agnes and, for a while, it had looked like he might stay. The lovebirds had enjoyed having apartments just a few steps away from each other. 

But when they’d gotten engaged, Hertz had announced that they needed their own place to live. They needed privacy, he’d proclaimed. As if he thought people would be pounding on their door day and night at Silver Hills. 

She scowled at the thought, punching the elevator button again and then succumbing to the realization that the elderly lift wasn’t coming. She’d been nagging the manager team at Silver Hills for over a month that the elevator needed to be serviced. 

But apparently nothing had been done about it. 

She started down the central lobby stairs, and headed for the main entrance. On her right as she descended, the dining room held only a few people, mostly sitting together and chatting, some of them over glasses of wine or beer from the small bar that was tucked into the back corner. 

She eyed the group, looking for Celia Angonetti or Tricia Colombo, hoping that one of her friends could come with her to speak to Hertz about the guest problem. 

Dutch, the bartender caught her eye and smiled, the expression turning his craggy face almost handsome. 

Flo waved back and then ducked her head as a tall, bird-like woman leaped from her chair and bobbed toward Flo, calling her name in a hawklike screech. “Florence Bee, just the woman I needed to see.”

Picking up the pace, Flo had hopes of making it to the front door before Elisa Kemp, the resident’s unofficial rumor queen caught up with her. 

High above her head, the music skipped and stalled for a beat as the office door opened and one of the two resident vampires slithered through it and floated her way. 

Flo fought the urge to make the sign of the cross, even as she wondered whether facing Elisa wouldn’t be a better option than the approaching demonic assault. 

But she lost her chance.

Apparently seeing the proverbial blood on the wall, the rumor queen did an abrupt about-face, leaving Flo to face the devil all by herself. 

“Mrs. Bee,” hissed Vladwicke Newsome in his oily, prince-of-darkness voice. “I need to speak to you about the upcoming holidays. I understand that you’re to be the chair-person of the planning committee again.”

The darker half of a duo of night managers, which wasn’t saying much because his wife was only slightly less dark than a slasher movie, Vlad floated to a spot in front of Flo and lifted a jagged, ebony eyebrow. “I thought it prudent to let you know that, per usual, I’ll be circulating a petition against having holiday parties and the associated frou frou.” 

Flo crossed her arms over her chest and gave him the evil eye. “Why? Not enough human sacrifices and demon worship for your taste? Or, maybe you were hoping the snacks would come directly from the vein rather than from Cathy’s Cakes or Gioppino’s?”

Vlad lifted the other eyebrow. “I see somebody’s been taking her mushroom supplements to sharpen her wit.”

Flo eyed the man facing her. As usual, his black hair was slicked back to highlight a widow’s peak—or, in his case a devil’s peak—and his black eyes shone with evil glee. Skinny and of average height for a man, Vlad Newsome was as mean as a snake and twice as slimy. He also had a particular hatred of holiday parties, no doubt worried about suffering seizures from witnessing people having fun and embracing kindness. She shook her head. “Go ahead and distribute your petition. I’m sure that, as usual, you’ll get maybe ten names on it. Believe it or not, Vlad, people enjoy celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving.”

The black eyes took on an extra level of shine, even crinkling a little in the corners. “I fear you’re going to be disappointed in that assumption, odious woman. You’re forgetting about my Satanic Bliss club. I’ve tripled the members since last year. You and your holiday parties are going down.”

Flo’s eyes went wide. “Ah, yes. The devil’s useful idiots. I did forget about them.” Though Flo was surprised she had, since they’d been especially annoying during the Halloween season, doing such fun things as replacing the canned music with satanic chants and ritual services, and burning black candles around the public areas of Silver Hills. Some particularly ambitious idiot even painted a “pentagram” symbol in the center of the lobby, apparently not realizing the well-known symbol had five points rather than six. “They are very forgettable,” she assured Vlad.

Vlad’s smile widened and Flo was sure, for just a blink, that his canine teeth seemed longer than they should be. 

Nah. She was imagining things. 

The lights flickered and the music stuttered, and then Vlad was floating back toward the office, where the demon goddess of ill will and empty veins awaited his return with grave-scented breath.

Flo was out the door and heading uptown before the office door managed to close.