Victoria “V. E.” Schwab

I

[Friday]

Calliope Burns has a cloud of curls.

That’s the first thing Juliette sees.

There are so many other things, of course. There’s Calliope’s skin, which is a smooth, flawless brown, and the silver studs that trace her ears, and the mellow rumble of her laugh—a laugh that should belong to someone twice her size—and the way she rubs her left fingertip back and forth across her right forearm whenever she’s thinking.

Jules notices those, too, of course, but the first thing she sees every day in English, when she takes her seat two rows behind the other girl, are those curls. She’s spent the last month staring at them, trying to steal the occasional glimpse of the cheek, chin, smile beyond.

It started with a kind of idle curiosity.

Stewart High is a massive school, one of those places where it’s easy for change to go unnoticed. There are nearly three hundred people in their junior class, but this year, only four of them were new, introduced at the first-day assembly. Three of the transfers were boring and bland, two square-jawed jocks and a mousy boy who’s never looked up from his phone.

And then there was Calliope.

Calliope, who looked straight out at the assembled school, as if rising to some unspoken challenge. Calliope, who moves through the halls with all the steady ease of someone at home in their skin.

Juliette has never felt at home in her skin, or in any other part of herself, for that matter.

Two rows up, the dark cloud of curls shifts as the girl rolls her neck.

“Ms. Fairmont.” The teacher’s voice cuts through the room. “Eyes on your test.”

The class snickers, and Jules drops her gaze back to the paper, sluggish blood rising to her pale cheeks. But it’s hard to focus. The air in the room is stale. Her throat is dry. Someone is wearing way too much perfume, and someone else is tapping their pencil, a rhythmic metronome that grates on her nerves. Three people are chewing gum, and six are shifting in their chairs, and she can hear the shuffle of cotton against skin, the soft whoosh of breaths, the sounds of thirty students simply living.

Her stomach twists, even though she ate breakfast.

It used to be enough to get her through the day, that meal. It used to—but now her head is beginning to pound and her throat feels like it’s full of sand.

The bell finally rings, and the room plunges into a predictable chaos as everyone rushes to lunch. But Calliope takes her time. And when she gets to the door, she looks back, the gesture so casual, as if checking over her shoulder, but her gaze lands squarely on Juliette, and she feels her pulse turn over like a stubborn engine. The other girl doesn’t smile, not exactly, but the edge of her mouth almost quirks up, and Jules breaks into a full-blown grin, and then Calliope walks out and Jules wishes she could crawl under the floor and die.

She counts to ten before following her out.

The hall is a tide of bodies.

Up ahead, Calliope’s dark hair bobs away from her, and Juliette follows in her wake, swears she can smell the subtle honey of the other girl’s lotion, the vanilla of her ChapStick. Her steps are long and slow, and Juliette’s are quick, the distance between them closing a little with every stride, and Jules is trying to think of something to say, something witty or clever, something to earn one of those rare, low laughs, when her shoe scuffs something on the ground.

A bracelet, lost, abandoned. Something fancy, fragile, and Jules reaches down without thinking, fingers curling around the band. Pain, sudden and hot, slices across her skin. She stifles a gasp and drops the bracelet, a red welt already rising on her skin.

Silver.

She hisses, shaking the heat from her fingers as she cuts through the tide of traffic in the hall and ducks into the nearest bathroom. Her hand is throbbing as she shoves it under the tap.

It helps. A little.

She rifles through her bag, finds the bottle of aspirin that isn’t aspirin, and dumps two capsules out into her palm, tips them into her mouth. They break open, a moment’s warmth, an instant of relief.

It helps in the way a single breath helps a drowning man, which is to say not much.

The thirst eases a little, the pain recedes, and the welt on her skin begins to fade.

She glances up at the mirror, tucking wisps of sandy blond hair behind her ears. She is a watery version of her sister, Elinor.

Less striking. Less charming. Less beautiful.

Just … less.

She leans closer, studying the flecks of green and brown in her blue eyes, the scattered dots across her cheeks.

What kind of vampire has freckles?

But there they are, flecked like paint against pale skin, even though she’s careful to avoid the sun. When she was young, she could spend a good hour outside, playing soccer or just reading in the dappled shade of their family’s oak. Now, her skin starts to prickle in minutes.

Add it to the growing list of things that suck (ha ha).

Her eyes drop to her mouth. Not to her teeth, polished as they are, fangs tucked up behind her canines, but to her lips. The boldest thing about her. The only bold thing, really.

Her sister told her that good lipstick is like armor. A shield against the world.

She digs through her bag, draws out a blackberry shade called Dusk.

Jules leans into the mirror, pretending she is Elinor as she reapplies the lipstick, carefully tracing the shade along the lines of her mouth. When she’s done, she feels a little bolder, a little brighter, a little more.

And soon, she will be more.

Soon—

The bathroom door crashes open, the room filling with raucous laughter as a handful of seniors barge in.

One of them glances her way.

“Nice color,” she says, a note of genuine appreciation in her voice. Jules smiles, showing the barest hint of teeth.

Outside, the hall is empty, the bracelet gone, rescued by someone else. The tide of students has thinned to a stream, the current heading one direction—the cafeteria—and Jules is thinking of skipping lunch, or rather the performance of it, and curling up in a corner of the library with a good book, when Ben Wheeler comes crashing into her.

Ben, fair skin tan from a summer of running in the park, brown hair sun-bleached a tawny gold.

She hears him coming. Or maybe she feels him coming. Senses him the second before he knocks his shoulder into hers.

“I’m wasting away!” he moans. “How is a growing body supposed to make it between breakfast and lunch? The hobbits had the right idea.”

She doesn’t point out that she saw him scarfing down a bag of animal crackers between first and second period, a granola bar between second and third. Doesn’t point out that he’s clutching a half-eaten candy bar in one hand even as they make their way to lunch. He’s a distance runner, all sinew and bone and wolfish hunger.

She leans against Ben as they walk.

He smells good. Not bitable but likable, pleasant, homey.

They’ve been friends for ages.

In seventh grade, they even tried being more, but that was right around the time Ben figured out he preferred guys and she realized she preferred girls, and now they joke about which one turned the other.

Gay, that is. Not vampiric. Obviously.

Nobody turned her, either way. She was born like this, the latest in the honorable line of Fairmonts. And as for the whole blood gift, or curse, Ben doesn’t know. She hates that he doesn’t know. Has thought a hundred thousand times about telling him. But the what-ifs are too big, too scary, the risks too great.

They reach the cafeteria, all scraping chairs and shouting voices and the nauseating scent of stale and overheated food. Jules takes a deep breath, as if diving underwater, and follows him in.

“Cal!” calls a girl, waving to Calliope across the room.

Cal. That’s what Calliope’s friends call her. But Cal is a rough word, a heavy hand on your shoulder, a gruff sound in your throat. Juliette prefers Calliope. Four syllables. A string of music.

“Here’s a wild thought,” says Ben. “Instead of silently pining, what if you just admit you have a crush on her?”

“It’s not a crush,” she murmurs.

Ben rolls his eyes. “What would you call it, then?”

“It’s…” Juliette looks at the other girl, and she is back in the kitchen that morning, trapped between her parents, wishing she could crawl out of her skin.

“We’re not trying to pressure you,” said her dad, one hand sliding through his hair.

“It’s just, one day you’re going to find someone,” added her mom. “And when you do—”

“You’re making it sound so important,” he cut in. “It doesn’t have to be.”

“But it should be,” Mom said, shooting him a warning look. “I mean, it’s better if it is…”

“Oh no, not the talk,” said Elinor.

Her sister drifted through the kitchen like a warm breeze, on her way in instead of out. Her porcelain cheeks were flushed, a sleepy glow on her skin that always seemed to follow her home. “Firsts are just firsts,” she said, reaching for the coffeepot. She poured herself a cup, the contents dark and thick. Juliette watched as she added a shot of espresso. A “corpse reviver,” she called it.

Juliette crinkled her nose. “How can you drink that?”

Elinor smiled, soft and silver as moonlight. “Says the girl living on capsules and cats.”

“I don’t drink cats!” she snapped, appalled. It was an old joke, gone sour with age.

Her sister reached out and ran a perfect nail along her cheek. “You’ll know when you find the right one.” Her hand dropped to the space over her heart. “You’ll know.”

“Hurry up and bite someone.”

Juliette blinks. “What?”

Ben nods at the lunch buffet. “I said, hurry up and buy something.” The line is getting restless behind them. She scans the selection of sandwiches, pizza, fries, doesn’t know why she bothers. But that’s not true. She bothers because it’s what a human girl would do.

She grabs a bag of chips and an apple and follows Ben to the end of an empty table at the edge of the room.

Ben eyes the mountain of food on his lunch tray like he can’t decide where to start.

Jules tears open the bag of chips and offers him one before dropping it on the table between them.

Her mouth hurts. The pain is a low ache running through her gums. Her throat is already dry again, and she is suddenly, desperately thirsty in a way no water fountain is going to fix. She tries to swallow, can’t, dumps two more capsules into her palm and tosses them back dry.

“You’re going to give yourself an ulcer,” says Ben as the capsules burst in her mouth, blossoming on her tongue. A moment of copper warmth, there and then gone.

The thirst eases, just enough for her to swallow, to think.

The pills used to really work, to buy her hours instead of minutes. But the last few months, it’s gotten worse, and she knows that soon the pills won’t be enough to quench the thirst.

Jules presses her palms against her eyes. Keeps them there until the spots come and then go, leaving only black. A merciful, obliterating dark.

“You okay?”

“Migraine,” she mumbles, dragging up her head. She lets her gaze drift two tables over and one down, is surprised to find Calliope looking straight back. Her pulse gives a little jerk.

“You could talk to her,” says Ben.

“I have,” she says, and it isn’t a lie.

There was a moment in English last week, when she told Calliope she’d dropped her pen. And that time in the hall when Calliope made a joke and Juliette laughed even though she wasn’t talking to her. And once, in the second week of school, when it was pouring outside and Jules offered her a ride home and she was just about to take it when her brothers pulled up in their truck and she said thanks anyway.

“Well, you’ll have your chance.”

Juliette’s attention snaps back. “What?”

“Alex’s party. Tomorrow night. Everyone’s going.”

Alex is a varsity football player, a “steel-jawed fox,” and Ben’s current crush, which is unfortunate, since by all accounts Alex is straight.

Ben waves his hand whenever she mentions that.

“People aren’t straight,” he says. “They just don’t know better. So, party?”

Jules is about to say she doesn’t do parties when she catches a warped reflection in Ben’s soda can, a blank canvas, a pair of blackberry-colored lips.

“What time?”

“Pick you up at nine,” says Ben. “And you better make your move. Calliope Burns won’t wait forever.”

II

[Saturday]

Juliette hovers outside her sister’s room.

She’s about to knock when the door swings open under her hand and Elinor appears, obviously on her way out. She looks Jules up and down, taking in the starry tights, the short black dress, the polish on her nails already smudged because she can never seem to wait for it to dry. “Going somewhere?”

“Party,” says Juliette. “Could you, I don’t know…” She gestures down at herself as if Elinor has some transformative magic instead of just good taste. “Help me?”

Elinor laughs, a soft, breathy sound, doesn’t check her watch. Reggie will wait. She motions toward her vanity. “Sit down.”

Jules lowers herself onto the cushioned stool in front of the well-lit mirror, examining the line of lipsticks balanced along the back edge as Elinor hovers behind her. They both show up, of course; she’s never understood the logic behind that myth. Juliette studies her sister in the reflection—they’re three years apart, and, side by side, the differences are glaring.

Elinor’s hair is silver-blond, her eyes the deep blue of summer nights, while Juliette’s hair is a dingier shade, more straw than moonlight, her eyes a muddy blue. But it’s more than that. Elinor has the kind of smile that makes you want to smile back and the kind of voice that makes you lean in to listen. She is everything Jules wants to be, everything she hopes to become. After.

She remembers Elinor before, of course; it’s only been a few years, and the truth is, she’s always been delicate; beautiful. But there’s no question that now she’s more. As if that first kill took who she was and turned up the volume, made everything sharper, stronger, more vibrant.

Juliette wonders what she’ll be like with the volume turned up, which parts of her will get loud. Hopefully not the voice in her head, doubting everything, or the nervous energy that seems to steal across her limbs. That would be her luck.

Elinor’s fingers slide through her hair, and she feels her shoulders loosen, her tension melt. She doesn’t know if this is a vampire power or just a sister one.

“El,” she says, chewing the inside of her cheek. “What was it like?”

“Hm?” her sister says in that soft, cooing way as she touches a curling iron, testing its heat.

“Your first kill.”

The moment doesn’t slam to a halt. The world doesn’t stiffen or still. Elinor doesn’t stop what she’s doing. She simply says, “Ah,” as if everything about Jules is suddenly clear.

“Is it really so important?”

Elinor considers, a slow shrug rippling through her. “It’s as important as you make it.” She twists Jules’s hair, pins a piece of it out of the way. “Some believe it’s just the doorway, that it doesn’t matter which one you pick, as long as you go through.” She works her magic, taming Jules’s hair into ribboning curls.

“Others think the door determines the place beyond. That it shapes you.”

“What do you think?”

Elinor sets the curling iron aside, turns Jules toward her, one finger lifting her chin.

“I think it’s better if it means something.”

A soft brush slides along her cheekbone.

“It didn’t mean anything to Dad,” says Jules, but Elinor clicks her tongue.

“Of course it did. He took his best friend.”

Her stomach turns. She didn’t know that. “But he said—”

“People say all kinds of things. Doesn’t make them true.” Elinor dips a small brush into a pot of liquid liner. “Close your eyes.” Jules does, feels the tickle of the line along her eyelid. “Mom went a different route,” continues Elinor. “She took a guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was the last word on his lips as he died.” She laughs a small, soft sound, as if telling a joke.

Juliette opens her eyes. “What about you?”

Elinor smiles, her perfect red lips parting a little. “Malcolm,” she says in a dreamy way. “He was beautiful, and sad.” She looks past Jules in the mirror. “He didn’t struggle, even toward the end, and he looked so peaceful when it was over. Like a sleeping prince. Some people want to die young.” She blinks, returning to herself. “Others put up a fight. The most important thing is never to let them get away.”

Jules looks down at the array of lipsticks on the vanity, starts to reach for a coral, but Elinor shifts her fingers two tubes right, to a deep shade, neither red nor blue nor purple. She turns over the tube, reads the label on the bottom.

HEART-STOPPER.

Elinor takes the lipstick and applies with it an expert hand. When she’s done, she pulls back, head tilted like a marble sculpture. “There.”

Juliette studies her reflection.

The girl in the mirror is striking.

Hair falling in pale waves. Blue eyes ringed black, the sharp cut of the outer edge making her look feline. The dark lip, something more feral.

“How do I look?” she asks.

Her sister’s smile is all teeth.

“Ready.”

There’s a sign on the door that says COME ON IN, but Ben still has to pull her over the threshold.

Parties are everything Juliette hates.

They are loud music and crowded rooms, food she can’t eat and booze she can’t drink, and all the trappings of the normal life she’ll never have. But she drank a full cup from the coffeepot before leaving, and at least the sun’s gone down and taken the worst of her headache with it. The world is softer in the dark, easier to move through.

Still, the only thing that makes her go inside—besides intractable, impossible Ben—is the idea, the fear, the hope that Calliope is somewhere in this house.

But there’s no sign of her.

“She’ll show up,” says Ben, and she wants to believe him, and she wants to go home, and she wants to be here, and she wants to be more, and she wants to take a shot from the bar, wants to do something, anything to calm her nervous heart.

She purses her lips, tasting the dark red stain called Heart-Stopper, and agrees to stay. Maybe she will find someone else, maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe a first is just a first.

Ten minutes later, a dozen of them have migrated to an upstairs room and Ben is leading a game of Truth or Dare, and she doesn’t know if he’s doing it for her or for himself, because he looks pretty sad when Alex picks truth, and then he picks dare, and now he’s drinking a beer while doing a handstand, an act that defies the laws of physics, and Jules is laughing and shaking her head when Calliope walks in.

And when she sees Jules, she smiles. It’s not the bright smile of friends meeting in a crowd. It’s something sly and quiet, there and then gone, but it leaves her heart pounding.

She stops a few feet away, so they’re on the same side of the room, side by side, and that’s better because Jules doesn’t have to look at her, doesn’t have to weather the force of the other girl looking back.

Ben finishes and holds up his hands like a gymnast dismounting to a room full of applause.

And then he looks at Jules and smiles.

“Juliette,” he says, eyes dancing with power, and she knows what he’s going to say, knows the shape of it at least, and she wills him not to, even as her heart pounds.

“I dare you to spend sixty seconds in the closet with Calliope.”

The room whistles and whoops, and she’s about to protest, to make some quip about not being in the closet anymore, that if he wants them to kiss, they can kiss right here, in front of everyone, in the safety of the light. But there’s no time to say any of that, because Calliope’s hand is already closing around hers, pulling her forward out of the crowd.

“Come on, Juliette.”

And the sound of her name in the other girl’s mouth is so right, so perfect, she follows, lets Cal lead her into the closet. The door swings shut, plunging them both into the dark.

Dark. It’s a relative thing.

Light spills beneath the bottom of the door, and Juliette’s eyes steal the sliver, use it to paint the details of the crowded closet. The coats taking up 90 percent of the space, a pile of boxes around their feet, the hangers knocking into the back of her head, and Calliope—not the back of her head or some stolen sideways glance but right here, the slope of her cheek and the curve of her mouth and those steady brown eyes, somehow warm and sharp.

“Hi,” she says, her voice low and sure.

“Hi,” whispers Juliette, trying to sound like her sister, with her airy confidence, but it comes out all wrong, less like a breath and more like a whistle, a squeak.

Calliope laughs, less at her, than at this. The crowded closet. The closeness of their bodies. And, for once, the other girl seems nervous, too. Tense, like she’s holding her breath.

But she doesn’t pull away.

Jules hesitates, thinks they should either be closer together or farther apart.

Ben never said what they were supposed to do.

Sixty seconds isn’t much time.

Sixty seconds is forever.

Calliope smells good, of course she does, but it’s not her lotion or her ChapStick.

It’s her.

Jules’s senses flare and narrow until all she can smell is the other girl’s skin, and her sweat, and her blood. Blood—and something else, something she can’t place, something that sends warning bells ringing dully through her head.

But then Calliope kisses her.

Her mouth is so soft, her lips parting between Jules’s own, and there are no fireworks. The world doesn’t stop. She doesn’t taste like magic or sunshine. She tastes like the grapefruit soda she was drinking, like fresh air, and sugar, and something simple and human, and people talk about the world falling away, but Juliette’s mind is racing, is here, aware of every second, of Calliope’s hand on her arm, of her mouth on her mouth, of the coat hanger digging into her neck, and she doesn’t understand how people simply kiss, how they live in the moment, but Jules is so painfully here.

There is the subtle ache in her mouth, the shallow longing of her teeth sliding out. And in that moment, between the fangs and the bite, she thinks of how she’d rather go to a movie, rather enjoy the scent of Calliope’s hair, the murmur of her laugh, rather stay in this closet and keep kissing her.

Just two human girls tangled up.

But she is so hungry, and her mouth hurts so much, and she is not human, and she wants to be more.

Juliette’s mouth drops to the other girl’s neck.

Her teeth find skin. It breaks so easily, and she tastes the first sweet drops of blood before she feels the tip of a wooden stake drive up between her ribs.

I

[Friday]

Juliette’s mouth is a work of art.

That’s the first thing Cal noticed.

Not the canvas, exactly—the way her bottom lip curves, the twin peaks of the top—but the way she paints it. Today at school, her mouth was the color of blackberry juice, not quite purple, not quite pink, not quite blue. Yesterday, it was coral. Last week, Cal counted burgundy, violet, and, once, even jade.

The colors stand out against the stark white of her skin.

Cal knows she shouldn’t spend so much time looking at the other girl’s mouth, or at least not at her lips, but—

A dinner roll hits her in the side of the head.

“What the hell!” she snarls.

“Dead,” announces Apollo.

Theo points his knife. “Just be glad it wasn’t buttered.”

Cal scowls at her older brothers as they go back to shoveling food. She’s never seen anyone eat the way they do. But then again, they’re built like the gods they’re named after. Built like heroes. Built like Dad.

He’s on the road, on a long haul—that’s what they call a distance hunt. He’s a trucker, too. It’s good cover, but she misses him. His broad arms, his bear hugs. The way he can still pick her up, like he did when she was little. How safe she feels surrounded by his arms. Cal used to trace the black bands that wrapped his forearms, feeling the raised skin beneath her fingers. One for every kill. Used to draw lines on her own arms in Sharpie, imagine earning her first mark. First kill.

She doesn’t like it when he’s gone this long. She knows there’s always a chance—

This time she sees the roll coming, plucks it out of the air and winds up to throw it back, but Mom catches her wrist. Calliope looks at Mom’s right forearm, wrapped in delicate threads of ink.

“Not at the table,” she says, plucking the roll out of Cal’s fingers. And Cal doesn’t bother pointing out one of her brothers threw it first, because she knows that doesn’t matter. Rule #3: Don’t get caught.

Theo winks at her.

“Where’s your head at?” asks Mom.

“School,” says Cal, and it’s not a lie.

“Settling in?” asks Mom, but Cal knows she means “blending in,” which is a totally different thing. She knows that moving around is part of the job; she’s been to a dozen schools in half as many years, and every time, the warnings are the same. Just blend in. But in high school, the two feel contradictory.

Blending in, it’s standing out. It’s knowing yourself, and owning yourself, and Cal does, but thank god they’re too old for show-and-tell because she’s pretty sure the sharpened stick and the strands of silver in her bag wouldn’t go over well.

“Cal’s got a crush,” says Apollo.

“Do not,” she mutters. Jules isn’t a crush; She’s a target. And okay, maybe the first thing that caught her eye were those lips, the color of pomegranate seeds. Maybe there was, for a brief moment, the beginnings of a crush, but then she noticed the way the girl stuck to the shade, cringing away from the merest glimpse of sun between clouds. The way she picked at her food without eating. Last week, she found the bottle of capsules in the girl’s bag, cracked one open in the bathroom sink and watched the dark red substance ribbon into the drain. And today, in the hall, she dropped a silver bangle, waited around the corner and watched as the girl reached to grab it, then recoiled when the silver met her skin.

And now she’s sure.

Juliette Fairmont is a vampire.

Theo rises to clear his plate. “Eat up, stick,” he says, kicking her chair.

“Don’t call me that.”

“A ghost passing gas could knock you over.”

Cal’s fingers tighten around her knife.

“Theseus Burns,” warns Mom, but Apollo’s up now, too, and Cal can feel the shift in the room, the energy winding tight as wire. “Where are you going?” she asks.

“Hunt,” answers Theo, the way someone might say drugstore or market or mall. As if it’s nothing. No big deal. Just another night.

Cal’s heart quickens. She knows better than to ask if she can come. A question begs an answer, and the answer is usually no. Better to stick with statements.

“I’m coming with you,” she says, already on her feet, fetching her boots from the hall. She’s learned to keep a set of gear downstairs. Last time she jogged up to her room to grab her stuff, they were already gone.

“You finish your homework?” asks Mom.

“It’s Friday.”

“Not what I asked.”

Cal doesn’t stop lacing her boots. Her brothers are walking out the door. “Math and physics, yes, English, no, but I’ll do it first thing in the morning.” Her mom wavers. The front door swings shut. Cal shifts from foot to foot.

At last, her mom sighs.

“Fine.” And she says something else, something about being careful, but Cal doesn’t catch more than a glimpse as she surges out the door. An engine revs, and she half expects to see the taillights on the pickup, two red eyes gleaming as the truck drives away.

But it’s there, idling, in the drive, and Cal beams, because they waited.

“Wipe that grin off your face,” says Theo. “And get in.”

Up front, Theo raps his fingers on the steering wheel, and from the safety of the back seat, Cal stares at the tattoos that wind around his right forearm, mirrored by the bands that circle Apollo’s bicep. Cal runs a fingertip along the inside of her elbow, counting down the weeks until she turns seventeen.

Apollo was fifteen when he made his first kill, took down a shape-shifter with a crossbow at thirty feet.

Theo was twelve. She’ll never forget the sight of him, smiling through a sheen of oily gore as he trailed Dad back to the campsite on a family trip. They’d gone off, just the two of them, to study marks on the trail and had come across a full-grown wendigo. He and Mom had a big fight about it after, but Theo just kept grinning as he held aloft a monstrous claw, a prize Dad made him toss into the fire. He has a strict rule about keeping things like that. The only trophies he approves of are the black tattoos, anonymous reminders of victories past.

Their bodies read like a map. A ledger.

And hers is still blank.

“Wake up, stick.”

Cal blinks as Theo cuts the engine, kills the lights. She squints into the dark and suppresses a low groan at the sight of the cemetery gates.

They’re parked outside a graveyard, which rules out the wilder monsters that show up in woods or bars, places with plenty of food. Not a nest of vamps, either—they’re more likely to hole up in mansions than mausoleums.

No, a graveyard means they’re hunting ghouls.

Cal hates ghouls.

She’s really not fond of dead things in general. Zombies, specters, wraiths—it’s the emptiness, the hollowness that unnerves her. Theo says they’re easiest to hunt because they don’t beg. Don’t plead. Don’t trick you into caring.

But they also don’t stop.

They are voids, insatiable, relentlessness. They don’t feel pain, or fear. They don’t get tired. They come, and they keep coming.

Cal wishes they were going after werewolves, or changelings—hell, she’d rather go up against a demon than a dead thing, but it’s not like picking a college major.

Hunters don’t specialize.

They hunt what needs hunting.

What, not who, her dad’s voice booms in her head. Never think of them as who. Never think of them as them, only it, only the target, only the danger in the dark.

They climb out, and Theo tosses her a flak jacket and a pair of elbow pads, the hunting equivalent of wearing kid floaties in a pool. Then it’s time for gear.

Shovels, timber, steel spikes—those can be stored in the bed of the truck, passed off as ordinary farm gear.

The rest of the tools they keep in a hidden compartment under the bench.

The seat comes away like a coffin lid, revealing silver crosses and iron chains, a steel garrote and an assortment of daggers, things you can’t exactly pass off as yard equipment. She balances on the footboard, staring down at the cache.

Cal’s been building her own kit, stashed in the hatchback of her beat-up five-door, an old tool chest hidden under a pile of reusable shopping bags, because if Dad taught her one thing, it was to always be prepared. Hunters carry a whiff of the work on them, a spectral signature that some monsters can scent.

The more you hunt, the more the things you’re hunting start to notice you.

Which is fine, if you’re using yourself as bait in a trap, but it’s less ideal if you’re not on a job.

They each take a walkie-talkie. Theo chooses a samurai sword, while Apollo goes for an ax that looks massive, even in his grip, then tosses Cal a tire iron.

It hits her palm hard enough to bruise, but she doesn’t wince.

“The last time I checked,” she says, “the only way to kill a ghoul is a head shot.”

“Right.”

“Yeah, well, a tire iron isn’t exactly designed for decapitation.”

“Sure it is,” says Apollo. “If you swing hard enough.”

“The iron’s just a precaution,” says Theo, handing her a pair of binoculars. “You’re on watch.”

Watch. The hunter equivalent of stay in the car.

“Come on, Theo.”

“Not tonight, Cal.”

Apollo grins. “Hey, if you’re good, we’ll let you do a dead check.”

“Gee, thanks,” she says dryly, because who doesn’t love pulping skulls with a steel bar. She grabs a dagger from the kit, slips it into her back pocket, and trails after them, feeling like a puppy biting at heels as they head for the entrance. Apollo picks the lock in seconds, and the iron gate swings open with a faint groan.

Cal’s mind does this thing where it pulls away from her body, zooms out until she can see the whole scene from a distance, and she knows it doesn’t look good: three black teenagers clad in makeshift armor, marching into a graveyard with spikes and swords.

No, officer, everything’s fine. We’re just out here hunting monsters.

Dad has a contact at the sheriff’s department, a family friend he saved on a camping trip when they were kids. But memory’s a weak bond in the face of trouble, and no one wants to test the current strength of that old thread.

“Cal,” snaps Theo, who can always tell when her mind’s wandering. “Get some height.”

She hoists herself up onto a grave marker, one of those massive angels people get when they want to stand out from the shallow tide of tombstones.

Like climbing a tree, she thinks, hooking her leg over the wing. She straddles the old stone sculpture as her brothers fan out and wait for her to scan the dark. It’s a windless night, and the cemetery stretches out, gray and still, and it’s only a few seconds before she catches sight of motion to her left.

A grisly shape sits on the edge of an open grave, gnawing on a human calf, the leg still wrapped in suit cloth.

Cal wishes she’d skipped dinner.

A second ghoul comes into sight, shuffling between the graves. It looks human, or at least it looks like something that used to be human, but it moves with the staggered stride of a puppet on uneven strings. The ghouls look like corpses, tattered clothes clinging to withered forms—but of course they aren’t wearing clothes, just strips of skin, flesh and muscle ribboning off old bones.

Call whispers into the walkie-talkie. “I see them.”

Theo’s voice crackles. “How many?”

She swallows. “Two.”

She guides them forward, each to his target. One row over, two graves down, like a game of battleship, holds her breath as her brothers close in. They get close, but ghouls are sharper than they seem. The one feasting twitches upright. The one searching turns, the motion jerky but impossibly fast, and the fight begins.

Theo swings his sword, but the ghoul twists out of its path and surges forward, gnarled hands and snapping teeth. Several rows over, Apollo slashes out with his ax, but he’s off-balance, and the blow is low. It passes through the ghoul’s stomach, lodges somewhere around his spine. No—the tombstone behind it. He twists the blade free, falls back with the force of the motion, and rolls up into a crouch.

She watches her brothers, marveling at Theo’s grace, so at odds with his size; at Apollo, a blur of speed and force. But then a flash of movement catches her eye. Not from her brothers or from the ghouls they’re fighting. The motion comes from the graves to her right.

A ragged shape moving too quick through the dark.

And Cal realizes she was wrong. There aren’t two ghouls in the graveyard.

There are three.

The third is twice the size of the others, a rotting mess of limbs and teeth.

And it’s heading for Theo.

Theo, who’s too busy trying to carve up his own monster to notice.

Cal doesn’t think.

She jumps from the angel’s wing, hits the ground hard, pain lancing up her ankles as she runs.

“Hey!” she shouts, and the ghoul turns just as she swings the tire iron at its head. It lands with a crack, the creature’s face jerking a little as the bar glances off its skull. And for a second—just a second—Cal’s blood races in the best of ways, and she feels like a hunter.

But then the ghoul smiles, a horrible, open-jawed grin.

Cal dances back, away, out of its grip, and remembers the dagger. She pulls it from her pocket, rips the sheath off with her teeth as the ghoul shuffles toward her.

She drives the blade into the creature’s neck, but the dagger is barely long enough to cut its throat. It gets stuck somewhere around its collarbone, tearing out of her grip as the ghoul’s fingers scrape her skin.

She scrambles backward, but her boot catches on a broken grave and she goes down and the ghoul is on top of her. Up close, it reeks of rot, sickly sweet, and the fear is sudden, wrenching. It slams into her like a wave and she has to fight the urge to scream.

It gnashes, making a terrible chattering sound as it snaps its jaw. She drives the iron bar up between its teeth, forcing its head back and away as its bony fingers claw at her, leaving trails of its latest meal. She kicks out, trying to drive it back, but it’s strong, impossibly strong for something made of sinew and bone, and the fear is a high whistle in her head, a fever in her blood, and her hands slip on the bar and she is going to die, she is going to die, she is going to—

Theo’s sword slices through the monster’s neck, the blade so close Cal feels the breeze on her face.

The ghoul’s head rolls into the weedy grass.

The rest of the ghoul collapses into a heap of sinew and bone, and then her brothers are there, kneeling before her, walls blocking out the horror of the world beyond. Cal grips the bar hard to stop her hands shaking.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Theo’s saying, low and rhythmic.

Apollo rises, hefting his ax, and ambles over to the ghoul’s severed head.

Cal swallows.

“Of course I’m okay,” she says, as Apollo drives the ax down into the monster’s skull. It bursts like a rotting pumpkin under the blade.

Cal doesn’t puke. It feels like a victory.

It feels like a failure.

Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

Apollo kneels to collect Cal’s dagger from what’s left of the ghoul’s throat.

“Should have given me a sword,” she mutters as Theo hauls her to her feet.

Her brothers buzz all the way home.

They’re wound up, riding high in the aftermath of the hunt, and Cal is buzzing, too, but for all the wrong reasons. For missing the third ghoul in the tally, for taking on a dead thing with a five-inch knife and an iron bar, for tripping, for scrambling, for getting twisted up in fear.

Apollo doesn’t give her shit. Theo doesn’t lecture. They don’t chew her out. They don’t say anything about it, and maybe they’re trying to make her feel better, but they don’t. It makes her feel like a kid thrown into time-out, and she spends the whole ride wondering, just like a kid, if they’re going to tell Mom.

She’s waiting for them in the living room. “How did it go?”

And Cal waits for them to rat her out, to say it was fine until they had to save her sorry ass, but Theo just nods, and Apollo grins and says, “Ghouls old fun,” because he can’t resist a shitty pun, and then Mom looks right at Cal, as if she can read the truth in her face, but Cal’s learned that truth is something you don’t just go around showing.

“All good,” she says, the words like a stone in her stomach.

And Mom smiles and goes back to watching her show, and Cal heads for the stairs, her brothers on her heels. She’s at the top when Theo catches her elbow. “You okay?”

It’s all he’s said. It’s all he’ll say.

“Of course,” she says, trying to sound bored as she pulls free, slips into her room.

A few moments later, she can hear the buzz of the tattoo gun down the hall, the laughter her brother uses to cover up pain.

She frees the straps and clasps of the makeshift armor, grimaces when she sees the tear in her favorite jeans. It’s her fault, she should have changed, should have worn something she didn’t care about losing. Cal strips, searching for broken skin, signs of injury, but there’s nothing but a few scrapes, the beginning of a bruise.

Lucky, she thinks.

Fool, she answers, staring down at her hands, the grave dirt lodged deep under her nails. She goes into the bathroom, tries to scrub the cemetery from her skin. The water runs, and in the white noise she replays it all again, scrambling backward over the weedy ground, heart pounding, the fear, the panic, the shock of shoulders hitching up against stone and the urge to throw up her hands, not to fight but to hide, to get away.

Her stomach turns, bile rising in her throat.

The Burns are hunters, and hunters don’t run.

They fight.

Cal’s hands are raw by the time she shuts off the tap.

Her dagger lies discarded on the comforter, and she knows her mother would give her hell for leaving weapons out, so she picks it up, sinks to her knees beside the bed, and draws out the leather chest she keeps beneath. She drops the dagger in among the silver crosses, the needle-thin blades, the collection of wooden stakes.

Cal runs her hand over these, pausing at one on the end, a drum stick sharpened to a wicked point. She lifts it, brushing her thumb over the initials she carved into the wood.

JF.

Juliette Fairmont.

Down the hall, the tattoo gun stops buzzing. The laughter dies away with it, and Calliope spins the wooden stake between her fingers and decides she’s ready to earn her first mark.

II

[Saturday]

There are monsters you can kill from a distance, and there are ones you have to face up close.

Cal tells herself that’s why they’re here, in the closet. Tells herself that’s why she’s tangled up in the other girl’s arms. Why she’s kissing Juliette Fairmont.

Juliette, who is not a girl at all, who is a monster, a target, a danger in the dark.

Jules, who tastes like summer nights and thunderstorms. The crackle of ozone and the promise of rain. It is one of Cal’s favorite things. That’s the idea, she’s sure, the trick. Because it isn’t real; it’s just another way to catch prey.

Which is how Juliette sees her.

Prey.

Remember that, Theo warns.

This is a hunt, adds Apollo.

And she really doesn’t need her brothers’ voices in her head right now, not when Juliette is pressed against her, as warm as any living thing. Her heart pounds, and she tells herself it’s just the high before the kill and not the warmth of the other girl’s mouth or the fact she has dreamed of both these things.

Of killing Juliette.

Of kissing Jules.

And even as her fingers curl around the stake, she wonders what would happen if they stopped here, if they left this closet hand in hand. If they went back to the party. If, if, if. She doesn’t have to do this. It’s not a sanctioned hunt.

Her family will never know.

They can just—what? What is she supposed to do? Take Juliette home for dinner? Introduce her to her family?

No. There is no future here. Not for them.

But there is one for her. One where she gets her first tattoo. Where she earns her place between her brothers. Where her father comes home from his hunt and sees the thin black band below her elbow and knows he doesn’t have to worry anymore.

And then the other girl’s mouth drops to her throat, and there it is, the subtle press of teeth, the bright flash of pain, and Cal’s bones know what to do. She draws the stake and drives the tip between the vampire’s ribs.

She hears the soft, audible gasp of Juliette’s breath catching, and Cal falters. Just for a second, but it’s enough time for the vampire’s hand to fly up, for her fingers to catch the wooden stake.

Juliette pulls back, her mouth open in surprise, and even in the dark, Cal can see teeth.

“Time’s up!” calls a voice, and the door flies open.

They pull apart, a slash of space carved between them by the sudden light, and Juliette’s fangs are gone, and Cal presses the wooden stake back against her forearm, and she does the only thing she can.

She runs.

The room is filled with whoops and cheers as Cal surges out of the closet, past the crowd and into the hall, her pulse pounding in her ears.

Shit, shit, shit.

The first rule of hunting, the one that matters most, is finish what you start. And she didn’t. The one thing she had was the upper hand, the advantage of surprise.

But now Juliette knows.

She knows.

Jules doesn’t know what just happened.

She squints in the sudden light, but by the time she can see again, Calliope is gone.

Calliope, who just tried to kill her.

She can still feel the wooden tip of the stake between her ribs, the sharpness of it like a rock through the smooth glass of their kiss. The kiss. And just a taste of blood.

And now Cal’s gone, and her sister’s voice drifts through her head.

Never let them get away.

Shit.

Jules strides out of the closet, one hand pressed to her front to hide the tear in her shirt, the other hovering over her mouth even though her fangs have already retreated. The room is filled with whistles and laughs, and beneath the raucous sound, she can hear blood. Blood, pulsing inside them. Blood, pounding like a drum inside her head. Cal’s blood, rushing beneath the surface of her warm skin, so close Jules could taste it, could taste her—

And now she’s getting away.

And she knows Juliette’s secret.

She knows.

“I have to go,” she says, pushing through the group.

“But it’s your turn!” calls Ben.

But Jules doesn’t stop, can’t stop. She’s out the door and in the hall, on the landing, looking down at the wave of students on the first floor, she’s scanning the clustered heads, searching for that cloud of curls, and—

There.

There she is, heading for the front door. She’s got her hand on the knob, one foot across the threshold when she stops and looks back into the house. Juliette grips the wooden rail as the girl’s gaze rises up the stairs and finds hers.

And holds.

And for a moment, the sound of the party drops away, and all she hears is blood. Hers, slow and stubborn, and Cal’s, thundering and quick. For a moment, they are back in the closet, a tangle of lips and limbs, before the whole thing tipped, before kiss became kill.

Cal stares up at her across the gulf of space. Jules stares back, holding her breath, and she knows the other girl is holding hers, too, knows they are both waiting to see who will break, who will move, who will run, who will chase.

Calliope’s mouth pulls into a crooked grin.

And Jules stares back, smiles back, and thinks—

Let the hunt begin.

While not all vampires can claim to be charming (take, for example, the decaying form of the Nosferatu), the romantic allure of vampires is a tale as old as time. They are powerful, dark, dangerous, and while their bite can kill, it can also entrance. They might just be the original bad boys. It’s kind of difficult to imagine building a romantic life with someone who might never age or who might, totally by accident, drink your mom or something like that. Still, romance with vamps is a popular part of the mythology. But as often as we see a romance played out between a vampire and a human, or a vampire and a slayer, it is super rare to find one with a happily ever after. Slayers, like humans, usually come to the relationship with too little power, but here, Victoria is complicating the idea that the vampire is the natural villain by introducing a slayer with a strong family tradition, putting them on equal—and deadly—footing.

What do you think? Who is the real villain: the slayer or the vampire?