Page 37

I’m trapped staring at the image on the screen.

Darkness clouds the edges of my vision, but not in a way that makes me feel powerful; I feel nauseous, woozy, like the shadows are pressing down on me and preventing my breath from properly filling my lungs.

I move around the chair and grab the tablet from him, pinching the screen to zoom in with shaking hands.

“Luna?” Kim is at my side but his voice sounds a million miles away.

A large, bulky silhouette is moving across the lawn, drawing closer to the house. It travels in jerky half-running, half-skulking movements, dipping in and out of the shadows, which seem to quiver at its presence.

Even though its shape is different from before, I know immediately who and what it is.

I don’t know how it is.

But I know what it is.

Kim says my name again. This time, he touches my arm. As his skin brushes mine, a vine-like swirl of shadow curls down my arm and binds him to me.

I’m still staring at the screen, and the shadows are swirling around it now, too.

They squeeze tighter.

“Luna, my arm.” Kim tries to pull away but he can’t and neither can I.

I’m transfixed by the screen.

At the exact moment Steven reaches the mansion’s steps and stares up into the camera, the screen on the tablet shatters, squeezed too tightly by the shadows I’m struggling to control.

Steven tilts his head then opens his mouth and makes a loud, gurgling, growling noise that sounds the way I’d always imagined death would sound if it was a person.

“He can’t speak. Lucien took his tongue.” I turn to look at Kim. The tablet splits in half and its pieces fall to the floor. I stumble backward and Kim catches me as the shadow-vines disappear from around our arms.

“Steven?” Kim looks at the broken pieces of tablet on the floor.

I nod. My skin is cold and clammy, my mouth dry, my heart hammering in my chest.

“You’re sure?” Kim asks.

Before I can speak, there is a hammering at the door, too.

“He can’t get in.” Kim stares at me. “He can’t get in, Luna.”

There is the sound of loud, vicious barking. The dogs coming for him. But then there is squealing, whimpering, and silence.

I’m shaking, but something is happening beneath the fear. A sensation deep in the pit of my stomach like a hot spring or a volcano before it erupts.

“We can’t leave him out there.”

At first, Kim thinks I’m feeling sorry for Steven. When he realises I mean I do not want to allow him to be there – terrorising my mind with the threat of what he might do one day even if it’s not today – he clenches and unclenches his fists.

“Lucien didn’t turn him into a vampire. He wouldn’t have done that.” There’s a note of vulnerability in my voice, as if part of me is scared that— after all the other times Lucien has surprised me — there’s a chance he might have done this.

“No, he wouldn’t.” Kim is adamant. “He would never, Luna. Someone else did this. And I think it’s too much of a coincidence to tell ourselves it was a random, unrelated event. Don’t you?”

It takes me a moment to understand what Kim’s insinuating. But then it clicks. “You think Nix…?”

Kim nods gravely, already taking out his phone. Holding it to his lips, he voicenotes Lucien. “Pretty sure whatever’s going on at the campsite is a distraction. Because Luna’s ex-boyfriend just turned up at your door and he’s decidedly undead. Get back here. Now.”

The shutters on every window are closed, but it’s like I can feel Steven’s presence behind them. Moving along the outside of the building.