Still, the only thing that makes her go inside—besides intractable, impossible Ben—is the idea, the fear, the hope that Calliope is somewhere in this house.

  But there’s no sign of her.

  “She’ll show up,” says Ben, and she wants to believe him, and she wants to go home, and she wants to be here, and she wants to be more, and she wants to take a shot from the bar, wants to do something, anything to calm her nervous heart.

  She purses her lips, tasting the dark red stain called Heart-Stopper, and agrees to stay. Maybe she will find someone else, maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe a first is just a first.

  Ten minutes later, a dozen of them have migrated to an upstairs room and Ben is leading a game of Truth or Dare, and she doesn’t know if he’s doing it for her or for himself, because he looks pretty sad when Alex picks truth, and then he picks dare, and now he’s drinking a beer while doing a handstand, an act that defies the laws of physics, and Jules is laughing and shaking her head when Calliope walks in.

  And when she sees Jules, she smiles. It’s not the bright smile of friends meeting in a crowd. It’s something sly and quiet, there and then gone, but it leaves her heart pounding.

  She stops a few feet away, so they’re on the same side of the room, side by side, and that’s better because Jules doesn’t have to look at her, doesn’t have to weather the force of the other girl looking back.

  Ben finishes and holds up his hands like a gymnast dismounting to a room full of applause.

  And then he looks at Jules and smiles.

  “Juliette,” he says, eyes dancing with power, and she knows what he’s going to say, knows the shape of it at least, and she wills him not to, even as her heart pounds.

  “I dare you to spend sixty seconds in the closet with Calliope.”

  The room whistles and whoops, and she’s about to protest, to make some quip about not being in the closet anymore, that if he wants them to kiss, they can kiss right here, in front of everyone, in the safety of the light. But there’s no time to say any of that, because Calliope’s hand is already closing around hers, pulling her forward out of the crowd.

  “Come on, Juliette.”

  And the sound of her name in the other girl’s mouth is so right, so perfect, she follows, lets Cal lead her into the closet. The door swings shut, plunging them both into the dark.

  Dark. It’s a relative thing.

  Light spills beneath the bottom of the door, and Juliette’s eyes steal the sliver, use it to paint the details of the crowded closet. The coats taking up 90 percent of the space, a pile of boxes around their feet, the hangers knocking into the back of her head, and Calliope—not the back of her head or some stolen sideways glance but right here, the slope of her cheek and the curve of her mouth and those steady brown eyes, somehow warm and sharp.

  “Hi,” she says, her voice low and sure.

  “Hi,” whispers Juliette, trying to sound like her sister, with her airy confidence, but it comes out all wrong, less like a breath and more like a whistle, a squeak.

  Calliope laughs, less at her, than at this. The crowded closet. The closeness of their bodies. And, for once, the other girl seems nervous, too. Tense, like she’s holding her breath.

  But she doesn’t pull away.

  Jules hesitates, thinks they should either be closer together or farther apart.

  Ben never said what they were supposed to do.

  Sixty seconds isn’t much time.

  Sixty seconds is forever.

  Calliope smells good, of course she does, but it’s not her lotion or her ChapStick.

  It’s her.

  Jules’s senses flare and narrow until all she can smell is the other girl’s skin, and her sweat, and her blood. Blood—and something else, something she can’t place, something that sends warning bells ringing dully through her head.

  But then Calliope kisses her.

  Her mouth is so soft, her lips parting between Jules’s own, and there are no fireworks. The world doesn’t stop. She doesn’t taste like magic or sunshine. She tastes like the grapefruit soda she was drinking, like fresh air, and sugar, and something simple and human, and people talk about the world falling away, but Juliette’s mind is racing, is here, aware of every second, of Calliope’s hand on her arm, of her mouth on her mouth, of the coat hanger digging into her neck, and she doesn’t understand how people simply kiss, how they live in the moment, but Jules is so painfully here.

  There is the subtle ache in her mouth, the shallow longing of her teeth sliding out. And in that moment, between the fangs and the bite, she thinks of how she’d rather go to a movie, rather enjoy the scent of Calliope’s hair, the murmur of her laugh, rather stay in this closet and keep kissing her.

  Just two human girls tangled up.

  But she is so hungry, and her mouth hurts so much, and she is not human, and she wants to be more.

  Juliette’s mouth drops to the other girl’s neck.

  Her teeth find skin. It breaks so easily, and she tastes the first sweet drops of blood before she feels the tip of a wooden stake drive up between her ribs.

  I

  [Friday]

  Juliette’s mouth is a work of art.

  That’s the first thing Cal noticed.

  Not the canvas, exactly—the way her bottom lip curves, the twin peaks of the top—but the way she paints it. Today at school, her mouth was the color of blackberry juice, not quite purple, not quite pink, not quite blue. Yesterday, it was coral. Last week, Cal counted burgundy, violet, and, once, even jade.

  The colors stand out against the stark white of her skin.

  Cal knows she shouldn’t spend so much time looking at the other girl’s mouth, or at least not at her lips, but—

  A dinner roll hits her in the side of the head.

  “What the hell!” she snarls.

  “Dead,” announces Apollo.

  Theo points his knife. “Just be glad it wasn’t buttered.”

  Cal scowls at her older brothers as they go back to shoveling food. She’s never seen anyone eat the way they do. But then again, they’re built like the gods they’re named after. Built like heroes. Built like Dad.

  He’s on the road, on a long haul—that’s what they call a distance hunt. He’s a trucker, too. It’s good cover, but she misses him. His broad arms, his bear hugs. The way he can still pick her up, like he did when she was little. How safe she feels surrounded by his arms. Cal used to trace the black bands that wrapped his forearms, feeling the raised skin beneath her fingers. One for every kill. Used to draw lines on her own arms in Sharpie, imagine earning her first mark. First kill.

  She doesn’t like it when he’s gone this long. She knows there’s always a chance—

  This time she sees the roll coming, plucks it out of the air and winds up to throw it back, but Mom catches her wrist. Calliope looks at Mom’s right forearm, wrapped in delicate threads of ink.

  “Not at the table,” she says, plucking the roll out of Cal’s fingers. And Cal doesn’t bother pointing out one of her brothers threw it first, because she knows that doesn’t matter. Rule #3: Don’t get caught.

  Theo winks at her.

  “Where’s your head at?” asks Mom.

  “School,” says Cal, and it’s not a lie.

  “Settling in?” asks Mom, but Cal knows she means “blending in,” which is a totally different thing. She knows that moving around is part of the job; she’s been to a dozen schools in half as many years, and every time, the warnings are the same. Just blend in. But in high school, the two feel contradictory.

  Blending in, it’s standing out. It’s knowing yourself, and owning yourself, and Cal does, but thank god they’re too old for show-and-tell because she’s pretty sure the sharpened stick and the strands of silver in her bag wouldn’t go over well.

  “Cal’s got a crush,” says Apollo.

  “Do not,” she mutters. Jules isn’t a crush; She’s a target. And okay, maybe the first thing that caught her eye were those lips, the color of pomegranate seeds. Maybe there was, for a brief moment, the beginnings of a crush, but then she noticed the way the girl stuck to the shade, cringing away from the merest glimpse of sun between clouds. The way she picked at her food without eating. Last week, she found the bottle of capsules in the girl’s bag, cracked one open in the bathroom sink and watched the dark red substance ribbon into the drain. And today, in the hall, she dropped a silver bangle, waited around the corner and watched as the girl reached to grab it, then recoiled when the silver met her skin.

  And now she’s sure.

  Juliette Fairmont is a vampire.

  Theo rises to clear his plate. “Eat up, stick,” he says, kicking her chair.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “A ghost passing gas could knock you over.”

  Cal’s fingers tighten around her knife.

  “Theseus Burns,” warns Mom, but Apollo’s up now, too, and Cal can feel the shift in the room, the energy winding tight as wire. “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “Hunt,” answers Theo, the way someone might say drugstore or market or mall. As if it’s nothing. No big deal. Just another night.

  Cal’s heart quickens. She knows better than to ask if she can come. A question begs an answer, and the answer is usually no. Better to stick with statements.

  “I’m coming with you,” she says, already on her feet, fetching her boots from the hall. She’s learned to keep a set of gear downstairs. Last time she jogged up to her room to grab her stuff, they were already gone.

  “You finish your homework?” asks Mom.

  “It’s Friday.”

  “Not what I asked.”

  Cal doesn’t stop lacing her boots. Her brothers are walking out the door. “Math and physics, yes, English, no, but I’ll do it first thing in the morning.” Her mom wavers. The front door swings shut. Cal shifts from foot to foot.

  At last, her mom sighs.

  “Fine.” And she says something else, something about being careful, but Cal doesn’t catch more than a glimpse as she surges out the door. An engine revs, and she half expects to see the taillights on the pickup, two red eyes gleaming as the truck drives away.

  But it’s there, idling, in the drive, and Cal beams, because they waited.

  “Wipe that grin off your face,” says Theo. “And get in.”

  * * *

  Up front, Theo raps his fingers on the steering wheel, and from the safety of the back seat, Cal stares at the tattoos that wind around his right forearm, mirrored by the bands that circle Apollo’s bicep. Cal runs a fingertip along the inside of her elbow, counting down the weeks until she turns seventeen.

  Apollo was fifteen when he made his first kill, took down a shape-shifter with a crossbow at thirty feet.

  Theo was twelve. She’ll never forget the sight of him, smiling through a sheen of oily gore as he trailed Dad back to the campsite on a family trip. They’d gone off, just the two of them, to study marks on the trail and had come across a full-grown wendigo. He and Mom had a big fight about it after, but Theo just kept grinning as he held aloft a monstrous claw, a prize Dad made him toss into the fire. He has a strict rule about keeping things like that. The only trophies he approves of are the black tattoos, anonymous reminders of victories past.

  Their bodies read like a map. A ledger.

  And hers is still blank.

  “Wake up, stick.”

  Cal blinks as Theo cuts the engine, kills the lights. She squints into the dark and suppresses a low groan at the sight of the cemetery gates.

  They’re parked outside a graveyard, which rules out the wilder monsters that show up in woods or bars, places with plenty of food. Not a nest of vamps, either—they’re more likely to hole up in mansions than mausoleums.

  No, a graveyard means they’re hunting ghouls.

  Cal hates ghouls.

  She’s really not fond of dead things in general. Zombies, specters, wraiths—it’s the emptiness, the hollowness that unnerves her. Theo says they’re easiest to hunt because they don’t beg. Don’t plead. Don’t trick you into caring.

  But they also don’t stop.

  They are voids, insatiable, relentlessness. They don’t feel pain, or fear. They don’t get tired. They come, and they keep coming.

  Cal wishes they were going after werewolves, or changelings—hell, she’d rather go up against a demon than a dead thing, but it’s not like picking a college major.

  Hunters don’t specialize.

  They hunt what needs hunting.

  What, not who, her dad’s voice booms in her head. Never think of them as who. Never think of them as them, only it, only the target, only the danger in the dark.

  They climb out, and Theo tosses her a flak jacket and a pair of elbow pads, the hunting equivalent of wearing kid floaties in a pool. Then it’s time for gear.

  Shovels, timber, steel spikes—those can be stored in the bed of the truck, passed off as ordinary farm gear.

  The rest of the tools they keep in a hidden compartment under the bench.

  The seat comes away like a coffin lid, revealing silver crosses and iron chains, a steel garrote and an assortment of daggers, things you can’t exactly pass off as yard equipment. She balances on the footboard, staring down at the cache.

  Cal’s been building her own kit, stashed in the hatchback of her beat-up five-door, an old tool chest hidden under a pile of reusable shopping bags, because if Dad taught her one thing, it was to always be prepared. Hunters carry a whiff of the work on them, a spectral signature that some monsters can scent.

  The more you hunt, the more the things you’re hunting start to notice you.

  Which is fine, if you’re using yourself as bait in a trap, but it’s less ideal if you’re not on a job.

  They each take a walkie-talkie. Theo chooses a samurai sword, while Apollo goes for an ax that looks massive, even in his grip, then tosses Cal a tire iron.

  It hits her palm hard enough to bruise, but she doesn’t wince.

  “The last time I checked,” she says, “the only way to kill a ghoul is a head shot.”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah, well, a tire iron isn’t exactly designed for decapitation.”

  “Sure it is,” says Apollo. “If you swing hard enough.”

  “The iron’s just a precaution,” says Theo, handing her a pair of binoculars. “You’re on watch.”

  Watch. The hunter equivalent of stay in the car.

  “Come on, Theo.”

  “Not tonight, Cal.”

  Apollo grins. “Hey, if you’re good, we’ll let you do a dead check.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she says dryly, because who doesn’t love pulping skulls with a steel bar. She grabs a dagger from the kit, slips it into her back pocket, and trails after them, feeling like a puppy biting at heels as they head for the entrance. Apollo picks the lock in seconds, and the iron gate swings open with a faint groan.

  Cal’s mind does this thing where it pulls away from her body, zooms out until she can see the whole scene from a distance, and she knows it doesn’t look good: three black teenagers clad in makeshift armor, marching into a graveyard with spikes and swords.

  No, officer, everything’s fine. We’re just out here hunting monsters.

  Dad has a contact at the sheriff’s department, a family friend he saved on a camping trip when they were kids. But memory’s a weak bond in the face of trouble, and no one wants to test the current strength of that old thread.

  “Cal,” snaps Theo, who can always tell when her mind’s wandering. “Get some height.”

  She hoists herself up onto a grave marker, one of those massive angels people get when they want to stand out from the shallow tide of tombstones.

  Like climbing a tree, she thinks, hooking her leg over the wing. She straddles the old stone sculpture as her brothers fan out and wait for her to scan the dark. It’s a windless night, and the cemetery stretches out, gray and still, and it’s only a few seconds before she catches sight of motion to her left.

  A grisly shape sits on the edge of an open grave, gnawing on a human calf, the leg still wrapped in suit cloth.

  Cal wishes she’d skipped dinner.

  A second ghoul comes into sight, shuffling between the graves. It looks human, or at least it looks like something that used to be human, but it moves with the staggered stride of a puppet on uneven strings. The ghouls look like corpses, tattered clothes clinging to withered forms—but of course they aren’t wearing clothes, just strips of skin, flesh and muscle ribboning off old bones.

  Call whispers into the walkie-talkie. “I see them.”

  Theo’s voice crackles. “How many?”

  She swallows. “Two.”

  She guides them forward, each to his target. One row over, two graves down, like a game of battleship, holds her breath as her brothers close in. They get close, but ghouls are sharper than they seem. The one feasting twitches upright. The one searching turns, the motion jerky but impossibly fast, and the fight begins.

  Theo swings his sword, but the ghoul twists out of its path and surges forward, gnarled hands and snapping teeth. Several rows over, Apollo slashes out with his ax, but he’s off-balance, and the blow is low. It passes through the ghoul’s stomach, lodges somewhere around his spine. No—the tombstone behind it. He twists the blade free, falls back with the force of the motion, and rolls up into a crouch.

  She watches her brothers, marveling at Theo’s grace, so at odds with his size; at Apollo, a blur of speed and force. But then a flash of movement catches her eye. Not from her brothers or from the ghouls they’re fighting. The motion comes from the graves to her right.

  A ragged shape moving too quick through the dark.

  And Cal realizes she was wrong. There aren’t two ghouls in the graveyard.

  There are three.

  The third is twice the size of the others, a rotting mess of limbs and teeth.

  And it’s heading for Theo.

  Theo, who’s too busy trying to carve up his own monster to notice.

  Cal doesn’t think.

 

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