She was dancing with her eyes closed, her mouth open and showing off her crooked smirk with her head tilted up. Anyone who looked at her would think she had to have ingested something dubious if she was having as much fun as she looked like she was having as she thrashed to the metal beat in a club so popular it had to be at least 63 people past occupancy, despite the fact that RUBY CIRCUS practically reinvented the word seedy. And she was on something radical and completely illegal, just not quite what anyone would have expected.

Jeremy Pivons. Overdose. Died last week with the very same raptured smile on his face. It had taken Liv 3 hours and 16 minutes to dig him up and break into his coffin. She was getting better at it.

She was getting better at living the kind of lifestyle that had her up mornings, tending the patrons of Luella's diner and had her spending her nights alternately at the club or uprooting the graves of the freshly dead to steal and eat their brains. It sounds bad, but she found that the younger the dead, the better. It made the club scene more tolerable, more enjoyable, and that was where she spent all of her free time.

Apart from being across from the diner where she worked, Ruby Circus was next door to the apartment complex where she rented a tiny box to shower and change clothes. The set-up of a club next to an apartment building didn't make sense to her, but she didn't mind. It's not like she found sleep anymore, anyway.

Currently, she wasn't sure if she was having fun or if Jeremy's thoughts and feelings were having their last hurrah with her body. Olivia sidled up to a black-haired beauty and felt her heart skip as the girl gyrated against her. Perhaps it was one and the same, now.

The brunette's name was Amanda, and she'd had a thing with Jeremy, but that wasn't saying much, she'd had a thing with everyone. Liv had managed to avoid leaving with the other girl thus far, much to Amanda's befuddlement. Liv grinned and nibbled her ear very lightly. Her dizzy head and Jeremy's brain were messing with her judgment, making her less cautious. One sharp push from anyone in the overcrowded club and Liv's teeth might scrape the other girl's skin just enough. Liv fought through her haze just enough to switch to using her lips.

Because although Liv had turned her back on her friends, her family, her life, she wasn't about to make another zombie. She'd learned that the hard way. And now she was stuck pasty and washed-out. She was currently dying 'roots' into her hair so that anyone who saw her would just think she'd missed a bleach session. She couldn't bring herself to just dye her hair. It fit too well with her new life along with the heavy eye makeup and black couture.

Amanda's sweat was starting to dampen Liv through her thin black cotton tank top and she pulled away to let the hot air between them. Upon raising her eyes, she swore she saw a familiar blond head. She grasped Amanda's shoulders too tightly as she gasped. "That man," Liv panted. "Do you see him?" Olivia wanted to be sure he wasn't part of some paranoid hallucination on Jeremy's strung-out brain. It wouldn't have been the first time in the past two months. But this was different, Liv could tell.

Amanda jerked out of Liv's painful grip and turned away, not hearing anything she'd said over the thumping music. Say anything about Amanda, but she knew when to ditch someone on a bad trip. Smart. Liv strained to see his pale face again, but it was like he'd disappeared. Liv stumbled back into an almost faint, but the crowd closed in too tightly to actually let her fall.

She wasn't sure if it was her heart pounding in her chest or if the fast-paced thrum of the music was just hitting her deep. The lights blurred like shooting stars in her eyes as she let the crowd move her in the dark club. A wave of euphoria came over her and it was the best she'd felt since dying. Liv recognized that Jeremy's brain was taking over, trapped in a memory of his last high, but she was finding it so hard to care. Because the death didn't matter, not Jeremy's, and not her undead life or her mom or her friends and certainly not Major. She didn't need any of them. Not if she could feel this good without them.

Cool hands found her neck, then lips as they slid down her sides and wrapped close around her waist. Before she could begin to say 'no,' sharp teeth pierced her neck and she cried out.

"There, there," a familiar voice said.

Liv shuddered as she felt the cold lips smirk at her neck. She tried to think beyond the effects of Jeremy's brain. She wanted to push out of Blaine's arms, but the crowd pushed them so closely together she couldn't even pull back enough to see his face. She couldn't risk going full-on zombie in a crowd like this—and she wasn't sure she was even capable of it when her head felt like it was on a different level than her body.

"That wasn't very nice, what you did to me," Blaine murmured against her neck.

Liv squeezed her eyes shut as she started to feel sick. "If you miss it so much, why don't you get someone to change you back?" She wasn't sure the words came out right. She'd needed to concentrate on each one.

"Don't you think I've tried everything?" Liv felt his slimy tongue lap at something warm that had dripped down her neck. "You've really changed the game, Liv."

"I—" She couldn't see anything with her face buried in his chest, wasn't aware of the knee digging into her hip from behind or the elbow jabbing into her side from the right. All she felt was the breath at her neck where Blaine stood.

Her head began to swim so much that she couldn't even force out a cry of pain. She grasped his shoulders and fought to remain conscious and upright. The last thing she remembered feeling was the stinging of a needle in her arm and a vision flashed before her.

Fingers with chipped pin nail polish, slim and shaking, as they slowly pushed a needle into my—Jeremy's—arm and pressed the plunger.

Liv fell forward into a chest. It seemed even Zombies could overdose.