“What was her condition?”
It wasn’t something I wanted to reminisce about for too long, so I just said, “She was in one piece, but she was bitten and clawed up.” It was a visual that stayed with me for a long time. My ex-fling in a frilly purple dress that was soaked in her own blood, stuffed and bent like a pretzel into the trunk of a car. It’s not how I envisioned our relationship coming to an end. If that were even the end anymore.
“Is it possible that there were vampires in your town and they fed on the bodies afterward?”
“You think I wouldn’t notice vampire neighbors?” Priscilla said, rhetorically.
“Well, in fairness, how long until you noticed the werewolves?”
“You know what, Daggett? You talk too much.”
The two chewed each other out for a couple of minutes, and with each second that passed, I felt myself slipping out of the conversation and into a state of numbness. If vampires were real, and they were here, that meant Cora was somewhere lost with them on her tail. I had no idea what level of strength they possessed, how fast they were, how brutal they could be. Deep down, I don’t think I wanted to know, because no matter how deadly they were, a human like Cora would never be a match for them.
The body in the gas station bathroom was most likely their doing, and so was Dana’s forced shift. If they could make Dana do something of that magnitude, what kind of fight could Cora put up? What defense would she even have?
My legs were bouncing up and down without me realizing it, and I knew I had to take a walk before I lost my mind. “I’ll be back,” I mumbled to them and then took off out of there. I couldn’t handle it anymore, the jabs, the jokes, the dozens of theories they were running through. It all felt like a waste of time. I needed to get straight answers.
I stood by the outside of my car and searched for a signal on my cell. It took me a couple of minutes, but I managed to get a weak one. So I called Brinly.
“You don’t sound good,” was the first thing out of her mouth. I had barely even greeted her outside of saying her name. She just knew.
“Tell me the truth,” I began. “What other supernatural beings are out there other than us?”
She didn’t answer, and simply said, “What happened?”
“It’s Dana.”
“Oh, God, is she all right?”
“She’s fine now. She claims she ran into a group of girls that had the ability to force her to turn into a werewolf. The girls she’s talking about are ones I watched die in Rookridge a couple of years back.”
There was a long pause on her end. “That’s a lot of info to take in, Max.”
“Just tell me. Are vampires real?”
“Vampires? You mean, actual blood-sucking vampires in the traditional sense?”
“Yes.”
Brinly stammered for a minute and then grew very quiet. “Papa used to tell me stories, but I thought he was trying to scare us.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Horror stories of the victims of werewolves rising from the grave and killing them as an act of revenge. He told tales like this all the time, but we thought they were just that. Tales.”
“He never said anything to make you believe he was telling the truth?”
“You remember Papa. He was big on stories. It was hard to know what was and wasn’t the truth.”
I groaned. Somehow I felt even more confused.
“What’s going on down there?” she asked. “Have you found Cora?”
I exhaled slowly. “Not yet.”
“You will, Max. You will.”
I didn’t have the strength to lie to her and tell her I was confident in that. No part of me was prepared for this new nightmare that was forming. I wanted to keep Brinly on the phone longer, but lost the signal and couldn’t get it back. There wasn’t much more we could say to each other anyway.
Eventually, I sat down inside my car and simmered in the silence. I needed to think.
Chapter Fifteen
PRISCILLA
Dana looked like something I sneezed out during the flu. Daggett tended to her like she was nine years old, forcing her to sip water through a straw and dabbing a napkin on her forehead to remove the sweat that was forming. I did my best to finish my cheeseburger, figuring that if any of the shit Dana was spewing about Molly was true, then I needed to make this last meal count.
Fucking Molly.
I still didn’t believe Dana had experienced anything other than some stroke-induced hallucination, but if anybody was gonna crawl their ass out of a grave to try to kill me it’d be Molly. Goddamn, I miss the days when people who died just stayed fucking dead.
I checked the clock on the wall and realized that Max had been missing for twenty minutes. Going outside sounded like a dipshit move, and something someone like Cora would do, but Max had the car and him taking off meant I’d be completely abandoned. Abandoned with a guy trying to get in my pants and a girl who could wolf out at any second.
It didn’t take much searching, as I just sort of poked my head out the door and saw Max sitting in his car. It made me wonder if he was toking one up, and if he was it was rude as hell he wasn’t sharing. I popped open the passenger seat and sat down beside him, and immediately shards of glass underneath me poked into my ass. The car was also freezing because of the punched hole in the window.
“If you’re out here because you’re trying to
