“You’re one of them,” Melanie said with a quick upturn of her nose. Could she smell that I was a werewolf?
“I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“I didn’t say that you would.” She wasn’t in the least bit scared of me. She was on edge, of course, but unafraid. “You’re that girl Cora was looking for over the summer. This is your place, too.”
“Cora talked about me?”
She nodded. “Annoyingly so.”
I drew in closer but still kept a good distance.
“You come to stare at the new shiny object too?” she asked.
“No. I came to see if you’re alright.”
“Did Cora send you in here to check on me?”
“I sent myself.”
Melanie’s face tightened. “Why?”
“Why?” I repeated, confused.
The space between her brow harshly wrinkled. “Yeah. It’s not like you know me. You’ve got no reason to care.”
“True,” I replied with a lifeless shrug. “We’re complete strangers, so I understand if you want me to leave you alone, it’s just that I feel like I know what you’re going through. A little.”
Melanie pulled her legs to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. “Nobody knows what I’m going through.”
“I’m not a…vampire, no, but I do know what it feels like to have the rug pulled out from underneath you, to be turned into something unnatural and terrifying against your will, and I know what it’s like to be completely confused by it.” My voice trembled as I added, “I also know what it’s like to hurt people you don’t want to.”
That grabbed Melanie’s attention, as her eyes suddenly darted toward mine. Her gaze was like ice. I couldn’t tell if it was a side effect of vampirism or if they were always that piercingly blue, but they almost blended in with the whites of her eyes.
“You’ve killed someone?” Melanie asked.
I didn’t want to, but I nodded. I wanted to be transparent for her sake. “I’m still trying to cope with it.”
The momentary relief that we had something in common faded, and her face tensed back up. “But it’s different for you. You can’t control what you do when you’re turned. I don’t have that excuse. I’m always me.”
“I imagine your cravings for blood are pretty strong.”
She couldn’t make eye contact with me as she nodded. She was ashamed.
“Your hunger for blood is probably no different than us turning under a full moon. We’re victims of these powerful urges that take over us and make it hard for us to fight. It’s not our fault.”
I couldn’t believe I was saying this. I had wanted to believe these words for the past year and a half, but never could. Somehow, telling them to Melanie felt different. It felt honest. I would never blame someone like her for what she had done, so why had I done it to myself for so long?
Everything I said wasn’t exactly hitting Melanie, though. She still looked so somber and alone. One day, I thought. One day she’ll hear me.
“Do you have any family?” she asked.
I was surprised by the question. “I do, yeah.”
“Do they know what you are?”
“No.”
“How do you make that work, being what you are?”
“I don’t. I haven’t seen any of my family in over a year. I’m afraid of what I’ll do to them if I live close. Keeping my distance, telling them I moved away for a job…it’s easier than the truth.”
“So you’re alone?”
A knot formed in my throat. “I have Brinly and the compound now.”
It was true, I was no longer living by myself. But in every other aspect of my life, I was completely and utterly alone. Melanie didn’t need my tears and sob story, though. She had enough on her plate.
But Melanie persisted anyway. “You’re just done with your family forever?”
“I don’t know about forever. Forever seems like such an inconceivable notion for someone like me.”
“But not for someone like me,” Melanie responded sadly. Her living forever was something that hadn’t crossed my mind until that moment. I had never seen someone with so much endless time in their future look so sad and hopeless about it. One look into her glossy blue eyes, and I knew she saw it as a curse.
What good is an eternity to someone who is all alone?
I didn’t want to dwell on the subject, so I continued with our previous conversation. “The life I had before, the person I was before, had to be completely snuffed out so I could rebuild. My family couldn’t be a part of that.”
“That’s depressing.”
“It might be, but I’d like to think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve gone through so much, but in a lot of ways, this is a do-over. A way to start from scratch.”
Melanie frowned and then looked out the window. “I’ve had to start my life over twice now. The first was when my husband left me for another woman.” She chuckled to herself, though she wasn’t smiling. “He probably didn’t even shed a tear when he found out about me. Probably no one did.”
“Cora did,” I said.
“Yeah, she’s about the only one.”
There was so much loneliness coming from her I could taste it. She was trying to hide it, though, even if I saw right through her.
Melanie looked at me and admitted, “Not many people care about me. I mean, really care about
