Page 3

CHAPTER

THREE

Milly’s door flung open after one knock. Her long brown hair was frizzy in a way it only got when she got obsessed with something and forgot to shower, making her strange ozone scent stronger than ever.

“I got the translation wrong,” she said before Theo could open his mouth. “Well, not wrong—I got all the words right, I misunderstood the context. Rabbits could just be what vampires call humans. It might still have something to do with a particular hunting family, but they might have just adopted the nickname as a…”

She trailed off. Her eyes were wide, the white one somehow wider than the gray one as she stared at them, taking them in: their stiff shoulders, the panic in their faces.

“Oh,” she said. “Did something happen?”

Theo and Kade nodded in unison.

She held the door open. “Come in. ”

She led them into the living room. It was strewn with ripped out notebook paper, the black tome from her bookshop open in the middle of the room, full of water damage and old burns that made it mostly illegible.

“Sorry for the mess,” Milly said as she brought water for her and Kade and set the glasses down on coasters. “I get a little scatterbrained when I get too deep into it.”

“’S fine,” Kade said. He stepped around the balls of discarded paper as he paced, worrying at his thumbnail.

Theo watched him from the couch and thought back to Kade’s room, all that fabric and yarn cluttering up his shelves, designs pinned to the wall, fashion magazines piled so high they were falling over.

Milly sat on the couch opposite Theo, clutching her water.

“So,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

Theo did. Milly stayed quiet and stared intently into her glass. Kade kept pacing, thumbnail still in his mouth.

“It was him,” Theo finished. “My sire. I could just tell .”

“In your bones,” Milly murmured, stroking her spiky wrist tattoo.

Kade twitched. His fingers were in his mouth. Any more gnawing and he’d bite to the blood.

“Cut it out,” Theo told Kade, grabbing the sleeve of his leather jacket and tugging him down onto the couch with him.

Kade grumbled. Their legs bumped together as he settled beside him, and Theo fought two instinctive urges: one, to move away in case he burned him. And two, to move closer. That second urge was getting harder to resist the longer he knew Kade.

Milly’s finger squeaked against the wet rim of her glass, deep in thought. She was often deep in thought. The inside of her head seemed like an exhausting place to be.

After the Hawthorn incident, Theo and Kade had taken a risk: they’d gone over to Milly’s and explained everything. Well, almost everything—they didn’t mention killing Hawthorn. Not at first. Not until Milly had shared her own story, most of it revolving around the group of friends in most of the photographs around this room: all of them with some variation of the friendship bracelet that Milly wore, colorful thread with a small skull knotted in the middle.

We grew up somewhere full of rot and dark magic, Milly had told them, smiling down at her friendship bracelet and the spiky green tattoo under it. It tried to eat us. So we killed it.

Theo hoped that one day all of this could be summed up as quickly. Someone turned me into a vampire and tried to use me to open a door so a monster could raze my town to the ground. We stopped them. Everything’s fine now.

“Well,” Milly said. “It’s still in town. That’s good to know. It means you still have a chance to turn human again.”

“Wait,” Theo said. “ What ?”

“Those are the rules. If a vampire kills their sire, they turn human again. That’s how I knew it couldn’t be Hawthorn. Did I not tell you that?”

“ No ,” said Kade and Theo in unison.

“Ah,” Milly said, looking awkward. “Sorry about that. You said it was covered in blood, did it turn someone else?”

“It was a lot of blood.”

“So, it killed them.”

“Let’s hope not,” Kade said, drumming his fingers against his ripped jeans so fast Theo wanted to push his hand down to make them stop. He couldn’t, of course. Not without searing Kade’s hand.

Kade blew out a breath that smelled like smoke and meatloaf. “Why can these vampires turn into cool monsters and Theo can’t? How do we trigger that?”

“Why would we want to trigger that?” asked Theo, appalled. He didn’t want to turn into a seven-foot spindly monster with giant wings and claws, no matter how cool Kade thought it was.

Kade gave him an exasperated look. “So you don’t get your ass kicked so hard in your next fight, mate. Remember Hawthorn? You looked like hamburger helper.”

“I was fine,” Theo said. He touched his shirt, trying not to remember the deep gouges in his torso. When he looked up Kade was watching him, his expression unreadable.

Milly placed her glass of water on the table—no coaster—and leaned over the black tome, leafing carefully through the scarred pages. “We know Hawthorn wasn’t in charge. This sire of yours, he seems like the wisest bet for Cyth’s lover and second in command.”

Theo looked at Kade again. Kade looked equally lost.

“Second in command,” Theo repeated.

“Hmm?” Milly barely glanced up from the tome. “Oh. Yes. That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. It’s slow going, but I think I’m finally piecing together a narrative. Your counterparts—that is, the vampire and the human who were forced to become the key and the lock, the sacrifice and the sacrificer?—”

“Lamb and the knife,” Kade muttered.

Milly continued, undeterred. “They found a way to stop the ritual. It had something to do with Cyth’s second in command. Her lover.”

Kade made an excited noise in his throat. His fingers were drumming again, but this time with excitement. He always got like this when Milly made a breakthrough, treating it like it was some fun story and not a nightmare they were trapped in that could end up with both of them dead.

Theo sighed. “Milly. Next time, can you lead with that?”

“Of course,” Milly said distractedly, still flipping through the book’s worn pages. She was almost at the end. Right before the pages went blank, she stopped, gingerly pressing the pages flat. “Okay. There is something here about the fire…failing? I can’t read a lot of this yet. My point is, if they can stop it, then you can, too. I think.”

“You think,” Theo and Kade repeated in one.

Milly looked up at them. “Have you ever translated a dead language from centuries-old fragments written by someone with terrible handwriting?”

The boys looked down guiltily.

“No,” Kade muttered.

“Thank you, Milly,” said Theo, bringing out his extra-special polite voice he used with adults he needed approval from. “You’ve been such a great help.”

You’ve been such a great help , Kade mouthed. He thought Theo’s extra-special polite voice was hilarious.

Theo kicked him under the coffee table. Kade made a wounded noise, and Theo looked over in panic—he hadn’t meant to kick that hard. He was met with Kade grinning, sticking his tongue between his teeth.

“One day I’m going to actually hurt you,” Theo told him. “And you’ll scream, and I’ll think it’s just a big joke and leave you abandoned in the forest or something.”

“Can’t wait.” Kade batted his eyelashes, leaning in.

Theo shoved him. They were getting better at this whole no-skin-contact-but-still-touching thing, mainly because they both wore so many clothes. Pants down to the ankles, sleeves down to their wrists. Theo’s parents had asked how he was surviving with all those layers, and Theo had said something about not feeling the warmth. Which was true. He didn’t know how Kade did it, all those leather jackets and jeans in the July heat. He smelled like sweat the whole month, and yet he rarely took off that jacket.

“I do what I can,” Milly said. Then she adopted that stiff semi-sweet tone that suggested that although she wasn’t an open person, she would like to be one day. “Can I get you something to eat?”

Kade thought about it. “Do you have any of those strawberry bickies?”

Milly blinked.

“He means biscuits,” Theo explained. “In British.”

“Oh. Right. I do!” Milly got up and stepped cautiously around the paper as she made her way to the kitchen. The dark tome lay on the coffee table, filled with unintelligible scrawl Theo couldn’t read even if he wasn’t looking at it upside down.

He leaned across the table to flip the book closed. If he stretched a little further he could touch the golden sun embossed on the cover, flecked and decaying with age. They had until this spring before the ritual could be attempted again. The coming months felt impossibly long and full of terrors. Theo had tried to forget over the summer, busying himself playing effortless basketball with Aaron and choking down food at Fletcher dinners; gardening in secret with Russel when his parents were out; mushroom foraging; hanging out with Kade and calling it research even if they spent five hours arguing over whether a TV show from the nineties was good or not; trying to goad Felicity into answering his damn texts— but something terrible was waiting for them, and it was getting closer.

Kade slung his feet up on the table. “What were you gonna give me, back in the woods?”

Theo paused mid-glare at Kade’s dirty boots on Milly’s clean coffee table.

“Uh,” he said. He tilted his head, listening to Milly opening cupboards in the kitchen. It wouldn’t take her that long to find the biscuits. “Uhhhh. Nothing.”

Kade snorted, nudging Theo’s knee with his boot. “Come on! You can’t leave me hanging. You said it wasn’t mushrooms, what was it? Edible moss?”

“No,” Theo said. He dug his phone out of his pocket, hoping for a distraction.

Six missed calls from Carol.

“Oh,” Theo said, stomach plummeting. He went over a mental list of everything he’d done wrong in the last week. Nothing that warranted six phone calls. Maybe his dad’s speech this morning was a smokescreen and they had decided to follow through on a punishment after all.

Kade was still nudging him. Theo batted his boot away and scooted further down the couch.

“Cut it out! I need to focus.” Something yanked behind his sternum. He jerked his head up. “Sparky’s here. ”

Kade lowered his foot. “Huh?”

Something slammed against the front door with a yelp. Then the scratching started.

Theo leapt up. “Sparky! Bad girl! Don’t hurt the door!”

He raced down the hall. Sometimes he got a second sense of where Sparky was, the same way he tuned into where Kade was when Hawthorn had him. Both were connected to Theo on some invisible wavelength, he just needed to tune into it.

Milly came out of the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”

Theo jumped aside to avoid barreling into her. “Not sure yet! One second!”

He flung the front door open. Sparky jumped up at him and nipped at his jaw. Her eyes burned an even more intense orange than usual, too bright for Theo to pass them off as a birth defect like he’d been telling everyone.

Theo knelt, catching her head in his hands. “Hey! What’s wrong? I told you to stay behind the fence!”

Sparky whined, licking his face anxiously and shivering. Her ears were plastered to her head, her tail between her legs.

“It’s alright,” Theo soothed. He twisted to check over his shoulder. Kade stood in the hallway with Milly, their faces grave.

Theo’s stomach sank .

“It’s probably nothing,” Kade insisted as they drove toward the cliffs where Theo lived. “We had a dog once, this weird little Pomeranian, she got spooked when she got tape stuck to her leg.”

“This is a little more serious than tape,” Theo snapped.

Kade fell silent. He scratched Sparky, who was curled up in his lap. Other than Theo, Kade was the only person she let pet her. Everyone else got a warning snarl.

Theo glanced over at his phone, which was sitting on the dashboard. “Anything?”

Kade checked it. “Nope.”

Theo swore. He couldn’t stop thinking about the blood dripping off the creature’s bony chin, the flesh wedged between its fangs. The red splatters up his chest and arms. Whatever that thing had ripped apart, it had died painfully.

They turned the last corner before Theo’s house. Theo pulled off the road, parking his Lexus near the tree line. It felt stupid, not wanting his parents to see him roll up with Kade. But even with all this panic in his stomach, even with something unnameable on the horizon—Theo didn’t want to disappoint his parents.

“Stay in the car,” he told Kade, who immediately opened his mouth to protest. “No, I mean it.”

He turned to Sparky. Her tail thumped hopefully.

“You stay too,” he said. “If anything comes after you, protect each other. ”

Kade sighed. “Theo?—”

“Stay,” Theo repeated, and slammed the Lexus door.

He ran as fast as he dared. He slowed as he turned the corner, the dread in his stomach flooding his system, making him lightheaded.

There was a cop car at the end of the driveway. An ambulance sat further up, the back doors firmly closed. The car’s lights were off and a paramedic spoke in low tones to a cop who had taken his hat off, looking nauseous.

The front door was open.

Theo ignored anyone who tried to speak to him as he headed down the driveway, his ears full of static. He kept his gaze firmly on the open front door, which hadn’t even been propped open with a shiny rock like it was on hot summer days. He could hear his mother’s voice, thick and strange, from the living room.

Before he could reach the front door, Russel the gardener walked out of it. He was in his usual clothing, dirty jeans and rubber boots and a frayed T-shirt. He looked incredibly tired, and he only looked worse when he saw Theo.

“Oh,” Russel said. “God. Theo. Hi.”

“Hi,” Theo said, too fast. He scratched his dry cheek. He couldn’t cry. He couldn’t , or everyone would see his black tears. And he didn’t know what had happened yet. It could be nothing. It could be a misunderstanding. Maybe his parents had a crash and his mom was really upset about the new car. Maybe someone broke into the house and stole her family heirlooms. A thousand possibilities raced through his head, all of them hovering around the obvious one he didn’t let himself think about.

Russel sucked in a bracing breath. “You should go talk to your mom. And I’m…I’m here. If you ever want to talk. If you want to call later, or…or get coffee. Or just work in the garden, I’m always here.”

“Okay,” Theo said, trying to force down the deep panic threatening to explode inside him. “Russel, what happened? Why are all those cars outside?”

Russel shook his head. His eyes were red-rimmed.

“You should go see your mom,” he said hoarsely.

Theo shoved past him. Through the front hall, past the kitchen and into the living room, where his mom was talking to a cop in soft, stilted tones.

“Theo,” she said faintly. “You’re home.”

That's when Theo knew. He didn’t let himself believe it, but he knew. She looked the same as when he left her that morning: same pristine clothes, same blond hair she coiffed into curls that came so naturally to her husband and son. But her lipstick was gone, her eyeliner smudged. She only had one high heel on. The other was in her limp hands, like an injured bird.

“Mom,” Theo asked, his mind full of that creature dripping with blood, staring at them with those endless black eyes. “Why are there cops outside? What happened?”

She blinked, dazed. A tear curved down her pale cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said to no one in particular. “This is so inappropriate.”

The cop shifted uncomfortably. “That’s perfectly fine, ma’am. Do you want me to tell him?”

“No, no. I’ll…do it.” She sniffed, and Theo wanted to run out the door, into the woods, hide in the car with Kade. But he stood there, rooted to the spot, as she said the words he was powerless to stop:

“Your father is dead.”