Page 2 of Dark

After an hour spent curled up shivering in my front seat, I’d somehow driven home, where my aunts were already asleep. Shaking like a junkie forced into zombie withdrawal after binge-watching an entire season of The Walking Dead, I frantically scrubbed the message from my skin with alcohol wipes, stripped naked and checked myself over in the harsh flickering light of the bathroom mirror.

No marks. No scrapes from where I'd face-planted on the asphalt. No bumps or bruises. But there was something wrong with my eyes, the light over the sink suddenly so painful I had to switch it off and fumble for my toothbrush in the dark. Over the next hour, my vision alternated between blurring so much I thought I might faint and sharpening to the point I could count every fiber on Piper’s handwoven Moroccan bathmat. A concussion. It had to be.

But as I sat on the floor of the shower, barely noticing as the scalding water slowly ran cold, a thought nagged at me. If it was a mugging, why hadn’t they taken anything?

“There’s something off about that town,” Ellie said after a moment. “You know I wouldn’t even go back twice a month if it weren’t for my internship at the after-hours clinic.”

So, the 4-1-1 on our hometown.

In the three years since vampires were outed to the human world, there has never been a confirmed supernatural sighting in Blood Moon. But no one has forgotten that it was less than ten miles from here where the first vamp ever to be caught on dashcam footage panicked when officers started to snap cuffs on his wrists, sank fangs into the neck of the closest deputy and vanished into thin air.

The internet, predictably, flipped its shit. Rumors ran rampant. The deputy was later found unharmed half a mile away in an empty cornfield. Even under hypnosis by a world-renowned psychiatrist, the officer was unable to recall anything that had transpired that day from the moment he’d gone downstairs to turn on the coffee pot, leading to speculation vamps could perform some sort of mind control. Because he took the risk of flashing out as dawn approached, rumors swirled prickheads couldn’t be exposed to the sun.

Grave shift workers were dragged in for questioning. The price of silver and garlic supplements skyrocketed on Amazon. New laws had to be established about the carrying of wooden stakes after a man went full-on Buffy on a crowded subway in New York. The next few months fell into a pattern of unexplained disappearances, public panic, mass raids and protests. And as far as anyone knew, no arrests. The vamps, for their part, had gone completely dark.

Then last year, someone posted a video on YouTube of a group of hipsters partying naked at a campsite out in Oregon. Because, you know, Oregon. It was your typical drum-circle, one dude with skill for every three with weed, up until the end where two of the men appeared to shift into giant wolves. The video was quickly taken down and announced to be a hoax, but that didn’t stop the rumors.

Some, Blood Moon, Texas among them, decided to capitalize on the paranormal craze, turning our small economically-depressed Hill Country town on the shores of Lake Buchanan into a tourist destination for all the closeted Potter-heads (cough, Ellie) and romance readers hoping to eat mushroom ravioli with their very own Edward Cullen. Which, whatever. #TeamJacob all the way. The school board even renamed the high school mascot the Howlers.

I’d always dismissed the talks of government raids and supernaturals coming to kill us all in the night as mostly for the tinfoil-hat wearing crowd. The kind of thing you had time to worry about when you weren’t having to serve up mojitos until 2 a.m. in addition to picking up substitute gigs as a teacher’s aide when things got tight to make sure your sister could stay on her medication and didn’t have to drop out of school.

Until the note on my arm. Until the memory that jerked me awake night after night of the dark figure looming over me in the alley. Until two days after I woke up alone behind a dumpster, when the fever struck.

I twisted my hair around one hand, the muggy September air clinging to my skin. “I just need to see him. I’m sorry. I can’t give you a reason. I can’t even explain it to myself.”

“That’s why I’m worried. You’ve been acting off since the attack. My therapist says sometimes certain behaviors can follow in the wake of a traumatic event—”

“We’re. Not. Going. To. Hook. Up.”

“You did before.”

“I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but I swear on my new set of strings I couldn’t pick his dick out of a line-up.”

The phone exploded with the sound of barking. I let my head flop back against the seat, hoping my sister wasn’t being eaten by someone’s Great Dane. All minimum-wage jobs were a suck-fest. But did Ellie really have to pick one where she flung cookies at hundred-pound dogs while trying to convince them to let her give them a mani-pedi?

“—saw the texts you used to send.” A door closed and the barking faded into the background. “You can’t tell me nothing ever happened between you two.”

Suddenly it was as if all the air had been squeezed from my chest. I drew up my sleeve, fingers tracing the intricate swirls of the daisy inked on my forearm. “We hooked up once. Happy, Nancy Drew? And before you ask, I was nineteen.”

For a long moment, Ellie was silent.

“Hayden, you know I’ll always stand by you, right? If you’ve gotten into something bad—”

HOSPITALS NOT SAFE

I closed my eyes, fingers twitching through the opening chords to Killer Queen. I thought back through every misdirection I’d already tried. Drugs. Owing someone money. That I’d gotten hooked up with a gang. Going to the hospital wasn’t an option. But I couldn’t tell Ellie the real reason why. I couldn’t lose her, too.

With our dad gone, it was just the two of us. And our aunts, although I was never sure how much to count on Piper in emergencies that didn’t involve split ends or midnight runs to the Walmart for Rocky Road. If Ellie had been wise beyond her years from the time she won the school science fair in freaking second grade (because, let’s get real, Zane Crowe was the one parent in town no one would accuse of doing the project for her), Piper was like the crazy older sister who would show up sporadically to take us on wild adventures.

Think shopping trips to vintage clothing stores. Spa days at the nail salon. Outings for ear piercing and sushi. And one time when Ellie begged, a trip to the local animal rescue for a pet rabbit named Marigold (sidebar: he was so a Bunnicula) that looked like a furry cheese puff with ears. And of course, Piper would also have been the one who, when the radio fizzled out spectacularly one steamy July day on the way home from the pool while the three of us were screaming Katy Perry at the top of our lungs, turned her attention to slapping the dashboard instead of watching the road.

Three guesses as to what happened next. Ellie and I were okay. The pecan tree was okay. Except for a bumper and a headlight, even Axel was okay, although to this day, you could still see the stain in the backseat from my cherry-mango snow cone. Those Swedes knew how to put together a car.

The phone has gone silent. I tensed, waiting for what I knew was coming. Ellie blew out a breath.

“Look. I know you haven’t been going to gigs when you leave at night. I checked your schedule.”

I stared out at the rain-soaked street, tears burning the backs of my eyes. Since our dad bailed on us four years ago, Ellie and I texted every day. She laughed off my overprotectiveness. But we both knew she was full of it. That was the thing about scars. We guarded them fiercely. Denied them until our last breath. But hard as we fought, they never really went away.