Tiffany wrapped her arms around her knees and began rocking back and forth. The glass crunched beneath her butt and feet as she swayed. “Shhh, Freddy. Shhh. They’ll hear you. They’ll hear you.”
“Who is this crazy bitch talking to?” I asked.
Tiffany picked up the shards of glass from the floor, laid them flat in her palms, and then began grinding them into her cheeks like she was exfoliating her skin with soap. Blood squirted out of her pores like a sprinkler, and instead of crying out in pain, she was laughing.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
Then the crazy bitch examined the bloody pieces of glass in her hands and popped them into her mouth like they were pills. “Hmm. Yummy,” she said while rubbing her stomach like a satisfied toddler.
Even if she weren’t trying to kill us, I’d want someone to put this bitch down. She had reached peak crazy bitch.
For a moment, she was just chowing down on the glass like she forgot we were even there, and then slowly, creepily, she raised her lasagna-looking face up and smiled. The next thing I knew, my face was stinging and I was flying into a wall. She had backhanded me like I weighed nothing. My cheek was on fire, and I was pretty damn sure the bottom row of my teeth had been knocked loose. The stupid bitch…I looked back just in time to see Cora literally thrown into the air. She fell straight onto the coffee table, and the glass surface was smashed to smithereens with her body. Cora went limp.
Oh, shit…
Not Cora.
Melanie growled like an animal and charged at Tiffany, grasping the base of her throat with her hand and then chokeslamming her to the ground. She lifted her back up using just one hand and then dashed across the room with her at lightning speed, slamming Tiffany into the wall and leaving an outline of her frame in the wood. Melanie exposed her fangs and went in for the kill.
“No!” Dana shrieked.
What? Why? Why? Why? Why was she stopping her?
Melanie’s red eyes bounced toward Dana, who was standing off to the side panting and on the verge of tears. “Please don’t,” she begged. “Please don’t kill her.”
“Have you lost your mind?!” I exclaimed. “She just tried to kill us!”
“I know! But it’s Tiffany.”
When Dana approached, Melanie had her forearm pressed into Tiffany’s throat to keep her pinned to the wall. I’d have choked from no air if she did that to me, but Tiffany only looked restrained and slightly uncomfortable. Her face was still oozing with blood from all the glass, but despite all that, she was giggling.
“Tiff,” Dana began softly, “I know you’re still in there. Please tell me there’s a part of you that remembers me, remembers us…remembers who you were. You can be more than this. Don’t let what you were forcefully turned into define you forever. There’s still time to take everything you’ve done back, to start over.”
Tiffany tilted her head as she listened to Dana.
Dana took a step closer to her. “Molly and Veronica don’t have to know. We can protect you, I swear. We’ll do for you what we’re doing for Melanie, but you have to stop this. You have to come to your senses. You can’t hurt people anymore.”
Blood dripped from Tiffany’s mouth as she opened it wide. “I’ve always wondered what werewolf meat tastes like,” she said with a giggle. This dumb bitch had one person in the room willing to help her, and she laughs about eating them.
I think this chick being a fucking mess clicked for Dana, because her face fell and she looked like she was going to cry. She took several steps back away from Tiffany, and with a despondent headshake said, “Just do it.”
Without hesitance, Melanie bit down on the base of Tiffany’s throat, and blood sprayed across the room. I turned away because my stomach couldn’t take it, but Jesus Christ, her screams were so high-pitched I thought the windows were going to shatter. When the sound faded and the ringing in my ears ended, I knew crazy-pants was dead.
She didn’t just bleed out a little, either, she slimed all over the damn place. Her blood flowed so quickly it reached the tip of my boots within a minute of her death.
“Goddamn…” I said under my breath. “Good luck getting this out of the carpet.”
Dana turned away and faced the wall. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t okay either. I had figured they weren’t all that close, but the longer I stared at Dana, the more obvious it became how wrong I was. Her and Tiffany were actually friends, and it was kind of sad that it went down like this.
Cora began groaning and stirring about behind me, and until that moment, I almost forgot about her. Her arms were covered in cuts and blood like some kind of junkie, and she could barely climb out of the hole that was the center of the coffee table. I sat down next to her and asked, “You all right?”
“I don’t know if I’m dazed or if I was knocked out for a second,” she admitted with a heavy breath. She rubbed her hand across the back of her neck and winced. There was a large chunk of glass stuck in her flesh and she shakily pulled it out. “Ow, ow, ow,” she whined.
“It probably hurts but, uh, I think you did better than old Tiff.”
At the same time, we turned and looked at Melanie. She stood over Tiffany’s brutalized corpse, staring at us with the bottom half of her face hidden beneath coats of blood and torn flesh. Melanie panted like a wild animal and her eyes were plainly right on Cora. Or, really, Cora’s wounds.
She was hungry.
“I’m…I
