Page 107 of The Blood we Crave

“I wonder if they rock, paper, scissor, shoot for who has to wait on us.”

The entire staff and customers inside Tilly’s Diner do not hide their stares or concern for our presence. It wouldn’t shock me to find out the cook put rat poison inside the food my friends ordered.

Their visible fear and buried envy are no longer a surprise. When I was younger, I questioned why everyone always stared, why they walked on the opposite side of the street or whispered amongst themselves.

It did not take me much time to figure out that I was both everything they wished to be and lived to tear down. Even if my father’s reputation hadn’t flowed to me like a plague, I would still be everyone’s favorite topic.

We all would.

“Must have been her turn to pull the short straw,” Briar quips from across the booth, leaning further into Alistair’s arm that is slung protectively over her shoulder.

“Is getting dick from Ponderosa Springs’ most notorious asshat worth the shit service?” Rook mutters, reaching down from his place behind me to pluck a basket of fries into his hands.

He is sitting atop the booth, tucked against the wall behind Sage, who rolls her eyes at his vulgar question but does nothing to correct him.

Briar doesn’t miss a beat, only shrugs and replies, “Wouldn’t that mean I was screwing you?”

A loud cough erupts from Alistair’s mouth, his girlfriend’s rebuttal choking him on a mixture of shock and laughter. A smirk tugs at my lips. I may not like Briar, but I enjoy anyone calling Rook out for his stupidity.

Rook juts out his bottom lip in a fake pout, leaning down to bury his head in Sage’s strawberry blonde locks.

“Babe, you just gonna let her talk to me like that?”

“You asked for it,” she says, smiling as she runs a hand through his messy hair.

A bell rings, the door to Tilly’s swinging open. I remove my attention from the couples fest I’ve subjected myself to, to see a pair of muddy yellow rain boots.

I can hear the wet steps from our table, the face of our new guest hidden by a ratty, navy green coat. Except the curls bursting from the edges give her away.

Lyra glides through the aisle, her fingers wrapped around the strap of her crossbody bag. She makes no noise, brings zero attention to herself, and the patrons barely acknowledge her arrival.

They give her a quick glance before returning to their stale food and redundant conversations. She isn’t of interest to them.

But she is all I can see. All I am intrigued by in the neon-lit diner.

It’s starkly different from their reaction to me. They do not stop to gawk and whisper. She simply blends into her environment with little effort and goes undetected.

However, when a select few people notice my gaze is away from my already outcast group, she warrants recognition. They take a moment, a second glance, a third, until they are blatantly staring at the woman who has my attention.

I can see it in her shoulders, the way they tense. She knows they are watching her now. A feeling I’m sure she isn’t used to or comfortable with. Lyra shrinks into her hood, trying desperately to fade back into the shadows, but it’s too late.

All of them are asking the same vain question.

Who is she?

A violent thought enters my brain.

Would it be possible to make it around every table, plucking eyeballs and feeding them to the vultures with enough time to evade the police?

When she reaches the table, the girls greet her with warm remarks. She tugs the hood from her head, the split in her lip still visible, and there is an ugly bruise still decorating her cheek. Its edges have turned yellow, but the center still lingers purple.

“Hi,” she breathes, grabbing the back of a chair from an empty table. “Sorry, I was in the library and lost track of time. Did I—”

“You can’t use that chair.”

Silence so thick you could slice it settles around the restaurant. I remove my eyes from Lyra, cutting a cold glaze towards a server, different from the young female who had delivered our food but still reeking of distaste for our presence.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware it was reserved,” Lyra apologizes swiftly, her face red with embarrassment, visibly shrinking for a man wearing something off the rack.