I was getting a migraine. “I wish I could make sense of it,” I said with a heavy breath.
“What about the body?” Priscilla asked.
“What about it?”
“Uh, gee, I don’t know, maybe about the fact that it’s fucking rotting in a public restroom right now.”
“We’ll deal with that later.”
“Later? Our DNA is probably all over that place. Won’t it look bad if we don’t call someone? Won’t we look like we’re the ones that did it?”
“I can’t deal with that right now.”
“Sounds like a pretty solid alibi for court,” she said sarcastically.
“Look, his problems are over, all right? We can’t do anything for him right now, but we can for Cora. We can be upstanding citizens later.”
Our bickering must have gotten too loud, because suddenly Dana was rustling in her seat. Her head swayed back and forth, and then very, very slowly, her eyes peeled open. She was awake, and she looked confused as hell.
“Morning, sunshine,” Priscilla said as she drank from her cup.
Her voice was hoarse as she asked, “Where am I?”
“We stopped at a diner,” Daggett told her. “You’re recovering.”
Dana straightened herself out, and even though she was weakened, she began manically looking around at our surroundings as she panted. “Where are they?! Are they here? Did they follow us?”
I furrowed my brow and asked, “Who?”
“Molly!”
Priscilla scoffed. “How far back did that little tiff of yours send you? Molly’s dead and buried, in case you forgot.”
“Not anymore,” she trembled.
“What?” I said, almost laughing. I didn’t find it funny, but really out there.
She swallowed and licked her lips, before steadying her voice. “Molly, Tiffany, and Veronica. They were out there in the forest. I thought I was hallucinating or dreaming, but they were real. Only they weren’t really alive.”
“Hold up.” I was trying to wrap my mind around what she was saying. “Are you serious right now?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean not alive?” Daggett asked.
Dana took a slow breath inward. “I didn’t sense that they were coming until they were standing a few feet in front of me. It’s only then that they made a sound or created a scent. Everybody has a smell, and theirs reeked of death.”
“No way,” Priscilla groaned. “No fucking way. People don’t come back from the dead.”
Daggett shook his head. “Is it really out of the realm of possibility considering what the three of us are? A few years ago, would you even entertain the idea of someone turning into a beast?”
Her mouth hung ajar for a second and then she slumped into her seat. That stumped her. “But back from the dead? I mean…”
I leaned forward with my arms sprawled across the table, desperate for more information. “What happened after you saw them?”
“They circled me,” she answered. “They wanted to know if I was alone. They wanted to find you.”
I knew it.
Dana was nearly hyperventilating at this point, with tears streaming down her red cheeks. “She made me do it,” she cried. “I don’t know how she did it, but I was normal one second and then I was changing the next.”
“Molly forced you to turn?”
She nodded. “She told me to and I just…I just did it. I had no control. It was like she was brainwashing me or something.”
It was a completely unbelievable story, but I knew Dana wasn’t a liar, nor was she a drama queen. She was loyal and honest to a fault, and if she said a resurrected Molly came after her then I sort of had to believe it. Even if it did sound batshit insane.
“Have you heard anything like this before, Daggett?” He had been with Brinly’s compound longer than I had, and he knew more about their world than I ever could.
But he shrugged and said, “Dead people who can manipulate you into doing things? No, man…never.”
“Sounds like vampires,” Priscilla said.
We all sort of stopped everything we were doing and went silent. Priscilla was being sarcastic, but one look at Dana’s petrified expression and we realized Priscilla probably wasn’t off.
Vampires? No. I would have heard about this at some point. Right?
But shit, I didn’t listen to Cora about werewolves right away and look where that got me; bitten and cursed. Maybe these Rookridge girls were onto something.
Very softly, Dana said, “They had fangs—bloody, protruding fangs—like they had been eating something. Or someone. It was all over their dresses too.”
“Why were they in dresses?” Daggett asked.
Priscilla scoffed. “A bunch of crazy bitches with fangs are back from the dead and you want details on what they were wearing?”
Daggett rolled his eyes. “It may have been significant. If they weren’t wearing coats they could be immune to the freezing temperature. It’d help us figure out what they are.”
“There were no coats,” Dana told him. “Their skin wasn’t even flushed. They were just pure white, and they were wearing the exact same dresses from the night of the date auction. What they died in.”
“Okay, this is nuts,” Priscilla said with her hands flailing about. “You guys woofing under a moon is one thing, but this is pure lunacy. Besides, if we’re gonna pretend vampires are real, then this makes even less sense, because vampires are made from bites from other vampires. Molly and the blonde brigade were killed by Owen.”
“Are you sure they were?” Daggett asked. “Did you actually see them die?”
“I saw Tiffany and Veronica. Tiffany was dragged around the dance hall and Veronica was attacked in the parking lot.”
“What about the other one?”
