Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The thing that changes Taissa Turner isn’t the sleepwalking. She’s sure it will be, for a while. Sure the very act of leaving her body for hours each night will unmap her, rewrite the girl she understands into something else. She’s sure she’ll have to explain it, when she goes home (if she goes home), and won’t have the words. It bothers her. It bothers her, but it makes an awful kind of sense. Of course this would change her. Of course.

But, in the end, it isn’t the sleepwalking that changes her. In the end, the sleepwalking isn’t the root of it.

It’s just the door.

And when that door cracks open, when something Other walks through?

Taissa Turner will never be able to explain that at all.

1996

She wakes in the woods. It’s happening a lot, waking in the woods, no memory whatsoever of what brought her here. More and more with each passing week, even. She considers telling the others—Shauna or Van, at least—and dismisses the thought each morning. She’s supposed to be strong. She’s supposed to be steady. She isn’t supposed to be the kind of person who sleepwalks into the trees, waking with mud crusted under her nails and a sour tang in her mouth.

The idea of them finding out bothers her almost more than the event itself. Shauna, who’s been trying to hide a pregnancy none of them are equipped to deal with. The last thing she needs is to find out Taissa isn’t standing on sturdy ground, especially after the abortion fiasco. She can’t tell Shauna.

And then there’s Van. Van, her best friend in the world. Van, who looks at her with bright eyes, a teasing grin. Van, who makes Tai’s stomach do backflips just by standing too close, and she knows that feeling. Knows it, and does not welcome it. Being gay back home was hard enough. Crushing on a teammate back home was hard enough. Here? In the woods? When all she wants is to grab Van by the shoulders, shake her, cry, Can’t you see it all over me? Aren’t we the same?

No way is she telling Van. Nor Lottie, who keeps staring sightlessly off into nothing, or Nat, who is all taut fists and flawless aim. None of them can find out she, of all people, might be their weakest link.

She doesn’t quite know why, but the idea of being the weak link in this team feels like something bigger than shame. It feels like a death sentence.

So now she’s here. The watch around her wrist is long-dead, a pointless accessory. The jitter of wind filtering through the pine boughs tells her exactly jack-all about what time it is. Late. Early. Dark, either way, and Taissa Turner isn’t afraid of the dark. She isn’t.

She isn’t.

Her muscles jump at every snapping twig, her head on a swivel. It’s her imagination, she understands, twisting nature into monstrous shapes. Her imagination, fed on fake seances and the corpses of dead men laid to rest. Her imagination, nothing more, and she is smarter than this, goddamn it.

“Fuck this,” she says loudly. “Fuck all of this.”

Van’s voice is in her head in the next heartbeat: The skeptic always dies first in horror movies. Duh. You never test the bounds of the dark while alone.

But Tai isn’t dying tonight, because this isn’t a horror movie. A horrorshow, maybe. A nightmare where JV players don’t make it to senior year, where pregnant girls start weighing the odds of surviving childbirth in the middle of fucking nowhere. A nightmare where a girl Tai’s always thought of as reasonably sane starts spouting bullshit, and a girl she’s had a secret crush on for longer than she wants to think about is sleeping one bedroll over. It’s a nightmare, but it’s not a movie, and she is going to be just—

Something cracks behind her. Something big. The echo of it radiates outward like a bomb blast, and Tai realizes she is instinctively hunching low, arms over her head, wild-eyed.

Don’t be stupid, she tells herself. It’s a— But she can’t finish the sentence, can’t fathom what might have made that noise that wouldn’t also grind her bones to powder. There’s no such thing as monsters, but there are animals. Big ones. Beasts with teeth and claws and way better night vision than an eighteen-year-old soccer player whose heartbeat clamors in her ears.

She needs to get back. No one ever needs to know she left the cabin at all. If she can just work out which direction she came from, all she has to do is retrace her steps. Easy. A moron could do it.

She takes a step. The world is so dark, she can’t even make out the detail of shadows. She might as well have her eyes clamped shut, for all the good they’re doing her. Her heart hammers wild, her blood rushing in her ears, and she feels herself sway. Feels herself briefly lose contact with the ground, with any sense of direction. Her hand swings out, searching for a tree trunk, for the grounding nature of anything at all.

Her fingers collide with something cold. Not bark. Not familiar in the least. Something cold and slim and breathless, as dry as an autumn leaf pressed between the pages of a book.

Not real, her rational mind insists even as the darker part, the desperate animal part that exists beneath the logic of every breathing organism, hisses, Death. You’re holding Death.

She twists her head around, squinting through the black, but it’s no use. There is no starlight out here, no moonglow, nothing to penetrate the wall between seeing and blindness. She moves to recapture her hand, to drag it back to her own chest and the comfort of her heartbeat, and something like a branch closes around her wrist.

She nearly screams, then. Nearly. Her heart is in her throat, butting up against the need to breathe, choking the voice from her before she can cry out. Don’t, she tells herself, don’t scream, because screaming just lets predators know where you are. Screaming just inflames that bloodlust, doesn’t it?

You’d be better off, that desperate animal part of her mutters, with a bear, a wolf, anything but this.

The thing around her wrist is too strong to be a hand, and yet, she can feel the fingertips. They press, ice-bright and insistent, into her skin, and she knows she will look in the morning and find burns. If she makes it to morning. If she can get away—

She wrenches with all her strength, turning to bolt into the dark, and another hand closes around the back of her neck. She cries out this time, shrieks with all the power of a girl who has been taught time and again that screaming will lead someone to the rescue. Scream if you’re being attacked, scream if someone is trying to lead you where you do not want to go, scream and scream and scream, Taissa.

No one is coming, that deep, too-certain part of her murmurs. No one is coming, because no one knows you’re even here.

The hands—that is what they are, unequivocally, despite the frigid scrape against her skin—haul her backward. Twist her around. She is facing it, the thing in the dark, and she cannot see, cannot make out even the outline, cannot reassure herself that this is even happening.

A caress. Spindle-long fingers tipped with vicious talons, tracing her cheek. She flinches away. The fingers travel lower, closing around her throat, squeezing until her head reflexively tips back and away.

It is leaning in. She can hear it: no breath, but the creak of a gnarled old tree bowing in a windstorm. She can feel it, the way you know someone is waiting in the dark to leap out. She wants it to be a trick, a prank, a bad joke. She wants it to be Van, that teasing grin on her lips, fooling around.

She wants it to be Van, hand gentle around her neck, breath on her skin, and she aches for never having said it aloud. Never having told Van. Never having tried—

It is leaning in, and Taissa is no longer screaming. Her throat is stopped up with terror, a clogged drain. She draws a wheezing breath, hearing it whistle like an asthma attack as those fingers—which cannot be fingers, which cannot be twigs, which are something awful and in-between—close tighter.

It leans, and the world is boundless black, no edges, no frame at all. It presses her close as a lover, the first thing ever to touch her this way, and it strikes her with violent force: this is wrong. This isn’t how it’s supposed to feel. Her first embrace, the first lips to caress her jaw, should not be a thing in the dark. It should be a girl, soft and sweet and clumsy. It should be a girl with copper hair and blue eyes, a smile that lights up the whole world. It should be light and shadow, care and laughter, a kiss she can come back to like a favorite song—

Something bites. Something bites. Something bites in, and Tai is fighting with everything in her, because she cannot accept the wrongness. She cannot accept that this is even happening at all, that the thing with teeth—knives—thorns—is the closest she’s come to a first kiss. She heaves against it, fists rebelling, whole body driving to escape.

Taissa Turner, who has never taken a thing lying down in her entire life, fights for her life, and the thing only bites harder. She can feel it sucking at her, a horrible sensation of emptying dropping over her like a cloth. She rages against the dizzy drop, the world skidding away like a car in the rain, and it is emptying her, emptying her, emptying her—

“Tai? Tai!”

A voice. A voice like a bell, like a flashlight switched on full blast. She blinks rapidly, struggling to orient herself.

“What the fuck is she doing out here?”

“Grab her arms—”

“Shit, is that blood?”

Her head rolls, ragdoll-limp as hands coil around her arms. Flashes of red hair, blonde hair, brown hair. A pair of uneasy brown eyes. A voice out of a dream, right beside her ear.

“Shit, shit, she’s bleeding so much, I—give me something—”

“What?”

“Shauna, your fucking shirt, give me your fucking shirt—”

Bleeding, thinks Tai from a universe away, yeah, that’s what that is. The hands, wrapped around her like steel. The teeth, sinking into her neck. The sticky-hot gush, sheeting down her shirt, so much less on her skin than there should have been for the sensation of draining…

A taste in her mouth like metal. Something sap-sticky spread across her lips, viscous as it coats her throat until she gags.

She hisses as something knots around her throat, pressing into the ragged wound with violent force. A hand cradles her chin, fingers splayed, turning her head back and forth in search of further injury.

“Sorry,” Van’s voice says, “sorry, we need to stop the blood—Nat, Shauna, get her arms. Akilah, help me—”

She’s gone, then, some distant part of her aware that Van’s arm is around her ribs, that Akilah is mumbling something from her other side, that the fabric around her neck is the long sleeve of a flannel shirt. She’s gone, and when she next comes to, she is in a bed.

In a bed, and her skin is smoking.

She heaves herself away from the window on instinct, hitting the floor painfully hard. Her arm, where it had been laying atop the blanket, smolders. She stares at it with uncomprehending eyes.

“Tai?” The door, banging open. Van in the doorway, cargo shorts and silly t-shirt, her face shining with fear. Tai curls in on herself, trying to press the damaged arm out of sight.

“Fine,” she tries to say. It comes out croaky, nearly inaudible. Van steps the rest of the way into the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

“Uh uh, lady, we’re not doing that. Found you half-dead in the woods last night. You wanna explain?”

Tai is struck with the urge to say it was no big deal, nothing really, just a misunderstanding. Tripped and fell. She’s fine, she wants to say, really, you can go.

But Van’s clever eyes are flitting from her face to her throat to the arm she’s trying to hide, and the pieces are already falling into place. She never could hide much from Van. She’s put too much energy into hiding the big thing, the biggest thing, to cover any other base.

“Jesus,” Van breathes. “No way.”

“What?” It comes out snappy. It hurts her throat, to put any power at all behind the word. Van doesn’t so much as flinch.

“Let me see your arm.”

Tai tries to twist away, but Van is faster. Her hand is gentle, guiding the damaged arm up, her fingers carefully avoiding the burn.

The burn. How the fuck has Tai been burned—not by the fingers etching themselves into her flesh last night, but by something so simple as—

“Sunlight,” Van says, softly confident. “Right? This was in the—” She bobs her head toward the bed, the beam of light coasting across the blankets. Tai can’t look at it, feels certain her eyes will scorch if she dares.

“This is crazy,” she mutters. “I’m dreaming.”

“Hell of a lot of blood, for a dream.” Van skims a finger around the charred flesh. It hurts, yes, but Tai barely feels it compared to the shiver drawing up her spine. She can’t remember the last time Van touched her like this, with prolonged interest. Van’s touch is usually swift and careless, a lean in practice, a brush of elbows on a shared desk in class.

Almost as if Van, too, is being pointedly cautious. Almost as if Van, too, has something to hide.

Van looks at her, waiting. Tai swallows, winces. Her throat is tight.

“Something was out there,” she says reluctantly. “An…animal, maybe.”

“And you?” Van presses. “What were you doing out there?”

Sleepwalking, Tai can’t say. She swallows again. Like being sick, catching a bug that rubs your throat raw, every swallow brings a split second of relief before the pain rushes back in. She doesn’t want to talk. She wants to stay bunched up in this patch of shadow, swallowing over and over until the ache finally recedes.

“Had to pee,” she says, when Van doesn’t look away. “Made a wrong turn.”

Van nods slowly. “I don’t think you should do that anymore. Go out alone. Wake me up, next time, I’ll go with you.”

Tai almost laughs. Almost says I’ve already found the worst thing out there. Van is still holding her arm, still gazing at her with knowing eyes.

“Okay,” Tai says. “Okay, I will.”

Van exhales. “Good. Can I…?”

She lets go of Tai’s arm, gesturing toward the shirt still knotted around her neck. Tai scoops her knees close to her chest, bobs her head in assent, tilting her chin up to grant access. She’s suddenly hyperaware of this room, small and confined, the door shut tight against the rest of the team. She’s suddenly hyperaware of Van’s skin, the smell of her: months of soapless living, months of bathing in lake water, and still, the undercurrent of something warm and sweet. Something Van’s always carried during games, during class, at parties when she drinks too much and has to angle her hip against Tai’s to stay upright.

She’s suddenly hyperaware of Van’s proximity, kneeling on the floor with one knee almost touching Tai’s thigh. Van’s hands, carefully unbinding the shirt. Van’s hands, carefully drawing fabric stained a crisp brown away from her skin.

Van whistles under her breath. “Fuck, dude. That’s gnarly.”

Tai wants to see. Wants to know. There are no mirrors in this room, in the cabin, but she suddenly needs to know what has been done to her. What has been stripped from her without even the barest modicum of her consent.

First kiss, she thinks with a horrible pang. From a fucking monster.

“Hey.” Van chucks her on the shoulder, her voice pointedly light. “Hey, you’re okay. I promise, it’s not that bad. Looks like it’s already healing.”

“Don’t,” says Tai. “Don’t lie to me.”

Van’s brow creases. “I’m not. I swear. It’s—I mean, it’s scary, but not like Coach-loses-a-leg scary. You’re okay.” This last, she repeats, her voice low. As if reassuring herself. “You’re okay, Tai.”

Tai hugs her knees more tightly. She doesn’t feel okay. She feels wrong. Feels like a plastic bag with all the items tipped out, like her skin is stretched flimsy over brittle bones. That thing. That thing emptied her. It bit, tore open her throat, and all the essential Taissa of her drained out onto its greedy tongue.

She shuts her eyes, shakes her head. Insane. This is insane. She was attacked in the middle of the night, her brain still snagged in that half-asleep mire. She was attacked by an animal, not a monster. It’s explainable. It’s all perfectly explainable.

“Rabies,” she says. Van frowns. “Is that possible? Could whatever it was—could it give me rabies?”

“Dunno,” Van says slowly. “We could ask Misty, I guess?”

“Rabies,” Tai repeats. A horrorshow of a disease, she knows, but at least something she can understand. “Would that—I mean—could that make…?”

She can’t say it. She lifts her arm, the scorched patch of skin reminiscent of Van’s face just after the crash. Except Van had been sitting too close to a raging fire, and Tai…

Tai just had her arm in a patch of sunlight.

She can see it all over Van’s face, the impulse to speak. The impulse to explain. Van, who has a head full of stories, an encyclopedic awareness of movies and monsters and magic. Van, who made her sit through Halloween marathons of all the classics, pretending all the while not to be scared.

Van, who is piecing it all together. Who pieced it together the second she stepped into the room, probably.

“Don’t,” Tai warns. “Van.”

Van raises her hands, head dipped in surrender. “Didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it,” Tai groans. “I can see you thinking it.”

“You have no idea what I’m thinking,” Van retorts, a half-smile touching her lips. A glint of something Tai can’t quite recognize flashes across her face. It makes her heart race.

“It was an animal,” Tai says firmly. “An animal, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” says Van. “Sure. Guess you got lucky.”

Luck. That’s what you call it, certainly, when you trudge off into the dark alone and meet a set of teeth. That’s what you call it when the world goes pitch-black, and there’s blood in your mouth, on your clothes, in your hair. That’s what they call it, when you somehow walk away from an ice-cold grasp and breathless lips.

Luck. She’s lucky.

She’s alive.

Van leaves her to rest, though Tai can see she doesn’t want to go. Van would rather sit right here with her, shoulders bumping, spreading out the map before them. Piecing together bite and blood and sunburn. Piecing together monster and next steps and story beat. Van would rather Tai just talk to her, but Tai doesn’t know how. She loves Van. She worries she really loves Van. She worries what that could mean, especially out here, even without the added burden of whatever got at her last night.

She loves Van, and she can’t tell Van any of it, because if she opens her mouth, she might say everything. And then what? This isn’t the place. This isn’t the time.

You almost died last night, that deep-down voice chastises. If this isn’t the time, what is?

Van leaves her to rest, and Tai tacks a blanket up over the window. If anyone asks, she reasons, it’s to keep out a migraine. Blood loss leads to wicked headaches. It makes sense.

She can make it make sense.

But first, she needs to sleep.

***

She’s hazily aware of the others dipping in and out as she dozes in the pleasantly-dark room. Coach, leaning in the doorway, watching with hooded concern. Lottie, with a mug of tea that will have gone long-cold by the time Tai tastes it. Nat, perched on a chair near the door. Misty, checking her bandages. Shauna, scribbling in her journal. Akilah, draping a damp cloth over her forehead.

Van, of course. Van, most of all. Cross-legged at the end of the bed, flipping through a book, folding laundry, eating soup. Van, who leans over when she thinks Tai is dead to the world, making sure the blanket is fixed over the windowpane without so much as a sliver of light gaping through.

Van, who lays the tips of her fingers to the pulsepoint of Tai’s throat, silent and studying.

Days pass. They try to feed her, try to make her drink, try to guide her out to use the bathroom. Tai rolls away from them, burrowing deeper into the lumpy mattress.

“She’s good,” she hears Van say when Shauna makes an aggravated sound on the second day.

“She hasn’t eaten.”

“She ate a little,” Van lies. “When I went in a few hours ago. She had some berries.”

Van isn’t much of a liar, has never been the kind of person who leans on fabrication to get by, and Tai thinks it’s obvious she’s doing it now. She can smell it on her, the heat radiating off Van’s skin, the rush of blood just under the surface. She can practically taste the spike of her heart, drifting through the crack in the door to linger against Tai’s palate.

But Shauna just grunts. “Whatever. Make sure she gets water, will you? Since she’ll only do it for you.”

It’s almost ironic. Tai’s spent so much of her life concealing this part of herself, this need to be close to other girls—to Van Palmer, especially—and now she’s in danger of the lid being blown clean off that secret. And all because Van, and only Van, understands there is something bigger at play here.

“You think I’m sick,” Tai says in an undertone. “Don’t you?”

Van talked her into going for a walk because, in her words, if you don’t at least pretend to take a shit, they’re going to set Misty on your ass. The sun has disappeared from the sky, Van waiting until dinner is well behind them to make the suggestion.

“I don’t think you’re sick,” Van says carefully. Tai pins her with a disbelieving glare.

“I haven’t eaten a goddamn thing in three days. I haven’t had water. I haven’t pissed, Van.” There was a time this admission would have felt like the peak of humiliation. Tonight, stumping along through the fresh fall of leaves, Tai can’t tear her mind from the implications.

“How do you feel?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Feel?”

“Yeah.” Hands in her pockets, Van tilts a little half-shrug in her direction. Her hair flows loose, her skin better than it’s looked in weeks. The burn scars are barely visible, and Tai catches herself thinking if Van can walk away from this experience intact, everything else would have been worth it.

“I’m fine,” Tai says. It’s automatic. It rolls off her lips, easy as her next step. Van looks unimpressed.

“It’s me, Tai. Me and you, nobody else. Take a minute, run through it, and then tell me again how fine you are.”

She sounds almost annoyed. Van has never sounded like that with her. Barely has sounded like that with anyone, except Misty and Laura Lee and Jackie when she deserves it. Van is the good one of them, the kindness-and-light one, the jokes-and-laughter one. She makes you feel warm even when it’s you she’s making fun of.

She makes Tai feel warm no matter what, even when her neck’s torn open and her blood’s all sticky-red in the dirt, and so Tai shuts her eyes for a moment and takes honest stock.

How does she feel?

Empty.

“I can’t…feel myself,” she says slowly, not entirely understanding the words even as they worm out of her. “Like I’m here, but it’s just the shell of me? Like I’m not…totally awake.”

Like I’m sleepwalking, she thinks, but that isn’t right, either. She’s aware of herself. Of her every step, of Van’s nearness, of the ground beneath her sneakers. She’s aware of the dark, of the shape and weight of it, of the air tossing her curls and tickling her skin. She’s more aware than she’s been in her life of all the things that are not her. As if, in shutting off the switch that is Taissa, she’s flipped the world into brilliant focus.

A hand presses against the center of her chest, spread fingers and firm palm. She jumps, instinct driving her to flash out and snag that wrist. She can feel the bones of the beast in the dark, the icy ragged splay of that hand holding her hostage—but it’s only Van, of course. Only Van’s hand, pressed to the front of her shirt with grim determination.

Van’s cheeks flame in the dark, but her eyes are fixed on Tai’s face. For a long beat, neither of them dare to move. Van, pressed between her breasts, deadly-intimate. Tai, gripping her pale wrist in iron fingers, feeling the thunderclap of heartbeats pummeling her grasp.

“Do you feel that?” Van asks. Tai’s mouth swings open, her body rushing to fill in the gaps. Do you feel me? Do you want me? Is it you, too?

“What?” is all that comes out, hoarse and uncertain. Van’s palm presses harder. Her fingers curl, gripping Tai’s shirt, the pair of them hanging in a bizarre limbo between the trees.

“Your heart,” Van says. “It’s still.”

Tai starts to say that’s stupid, starts to say that’s impossible—with Van this close, she can feel every inch of her own body, feel herself stringing tight enough to snap—but Van pushes against her breastbone. Tai’s hand slides up the slim line of her wrist, up to cover that freckled hand. She wants to focus on the skin-on-skin, on the warm slide of her own fingers bracketing Van’s knuckles, on the way Van stands with feet pointed straight ahead, the toes of her sneakers jammed against Tai’s. She wants to focus on what matters—but she’s listening now. Listening, and feeling the first flutters of panic in her throat.

“Where is it?” she asks. She hates the flimsy note in her voice, the jitterbug of nerves. “Van. Where is my fucking heartbeat?”

Like it’s something you can up and lose. Like she set it down on a counter somewhere, and Van’s just going to jog back to retrieve it. She squeezes her hand over Van’s, holding her in place, waiting for her breath to skirt out of control into hyperventilation.

Except that isn’t happening, either. Van’s hand, rooted against her chest, isn’t moving.

She isn’t fucking breathing.

“Oh god,” Tai whimpers. Whimpers, like a little kid, and this isn’t her. There’s an explanation. There’s a simple explanation. All she has to do is find it.

“I think I know what attacked you.” Van’s voice is too level, too calm. “I know you don’t want to hear it—”

Forget not wanting to hear it. Tai can’t hear it. Tai can’t be here right now, standing in the middle of nowhere with the one person she wants to see the best of her about to say something insane. She can’t do this.

She takes a hefty step backward, her hand dropping. Van lets her go.

“Three days,” Van says. “I don’t know how much longer you can go.”

Tai takes another step. Van doesn’t move.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“No,” Tai says. Eating is the last thing she wants. The idea of food, for the first time in weeks, makes her want to hurl.

“Try again,” Van says. “Just me and you. Nobody else has to know. Tai: are you hungry?”

No, she wants to shout, no, I’m not fucking hungry. But Van is standing two feet away, and Tai is struck with the absurd belief that she can smell her. She can smell Van: the dirt in the treads of her sneakers, the lake clinging to her clothes, the sweat at the back of her neck, the innate undersmell that lurks beneath deodorant and shampoo. There’s life in Van, beating away in her wrists, in her throat, in the core of her. There’s life in Van, hot and sweet and tantalizing.

“Yes,” Tai whispers. She can smell Van. She can taste Van. The salt of her skin. The pulse just beneath. The fresh-bread earnestness of her, the health of her, the heat of her. She can taste it on the air between them, flickering toward her with every one of Van’s exhalations.

Van is two feet away, and suddenly, Tai needs her to be right here. Hand on Tai’s chest. Sneakers bumping Tai’s own. Breath coiling against her cool skin.

“God,” she says, swallowing hard. “What the fuck? What the fuck is this?”

“I’m gonna say a word,” Van says, “and I need you not to flip your shit. Okay? It’s just a word.”

“Van—”

“No heartbeat. No breath. You’re chilly for the first time since I’ve known you. Like, you’re not even this cool in the dead of winter, dude, but right now—and that thing, it came for your neck.” Van holds up a hand. Two fingers. She holds them apart, jabs them lightly against the column of her own throat. “Just like that. Two fangs.”

“Van—” She wants to cry. She wants to laugh. She wants to tell Van to quit fucking around, quit playing with her, just be serious, for once.

“I think you met a vampire in these woods.” Van clips the syllables neatly. She could be saying I think you met a celebrity in the grocery store. She could be saying I think you saw a math teacher in the wild.

“A vampire,” Tai repeats. She hates how the word fits into her mouth, like it belongs there. “A fucking vampire, Van. Really?”

“The sun,” Van says, like it’s obvious, “fried you crisp, and you think I’m out here talking out of my ass?”

Tai instinctively reaches for her arm, the burn still perfectly visible.

“Hate to say it, but that shit isn’t rabies. Which, thank fuck, right? I asked Misty about it, and turns out, rabies is fucked.”

“And being a vampire is better?” Tai shrills. Van shrugs.

“You’re still here, aren’t you?”

Tai sinks to the forest floor, a graceless collapse that leaves her puddled in the crisp leaves. Van hunches down to meet her, leaving that carefully-constructed space between them. It’s as though, between the intimacy of her hand and the intimacy of that word, she’s suddenly afraid of cutting Tai where it counts. Suddenly aware that they are friends, and teammates, and neither of those things grant her the right to write over Tai’s world with permanent marker.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do?” Tai asks. She’s talking to Van, and to herself, and to the forest most of all. To whatever it was that caught her last night, tore her open, invaded her most personal space and broke her. She raises her voice, half-hoping it will melt out of the ever-deepening shadows. “Huh? Tell me! What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

Nothing rises to meet her. No book drops into her lap, lined with instructions. No beast with flashing teeth to explain itself. It’s just her and Van and the dark.

“It’s going to be okay,” Van says. “I’m not gonna tell.”

She could be talking about anything. Fucking anything at all. She could be talking about Tai cheating on a bio test. About Tai coming up with that plan to ice out Allie. About the way Tai tries to keep her eyes pinned forward at all times, away from other girls, away from Van herself.

That used to feel like the sharpest sword dangling over Tai’s head. That secret. The one that could ruin her future, her parents’ assessment of her, the respect she’d earned on and off the team.

And now she’s out here without a heartbeat, and Van’s pledging to keep that secret. The one Tai can barely believe in the first place.

She can’t help it. She laughs.

“Hey.” Van’s hand, on her arm. Brief contact, a swipe of thumb across the skin just beneath her sleeve, and then gone again. “You’re okay, Tai.”

“Stop saying that,” Tai says through her mounting hysteria. “What about this is okay? Our fucking plane crashed, and a bunch of people fucking died, and we’re starting to run out of food. And, oops, now I guess we’ve got one less mouth to feed, because I don’t need to eat anymore. I don’t breathe. I can’t see the sun. I can’t—oh my god, I’m not going to college. How the fuck am I supposed to be a lawyer if I don’t go to college? How do I get a soccer scholarship, Van, soccer is played in the fucking sun, Van—”

Van’s hand darts out again, this time catching on her collar. She jerks once, and Tai tumbles into her, a tangle of limbs and words that just keep streaming out. Without the burn for oxygen in her chest, there’s absolutely nothing stemming the flow of her panic.

Nothing—except the warm loop of Van’s arms around her, holding her tight. She can’t remember the last time Van hugged her. Never, maybe—never when it’s just been the two of them, an invisible wall constructed in the air where they should connect. It’s one thing to leap around together at a party or after a victory on the field, but an embrace like this? Just Van’s hair in her face, Van’s breath on her shoulder, Van squeezing her in arms more strong than gentle?

She’s dreamt about this. Some part of her—the girl part, the part that shivers under the gravity of blue eyes in the dark—thrills.

Some part of her—the shattered part, the blood-and-teeth part—shudders. She shifts her face from Van’s shoulder, inhaling deeply against the line of her neck. It’s dangerous, both parts of her understand. It’s the most dangerous thing she could possibly do.

A shiver ripples through Van as she nuzzles into the space just above her t-shirt collar. Tai should back off. Tai should pretend she never even got this close.

Van’s arms flex around her. Her breathing is picking up, sharpening. In the absence of Taissa’s breath, Van’s is that much more obvious. In the absence of Taissa’s heat, the flare of fire beneath Van’s skin sings.

Her mouth waters. Her nose, pressed to Van’s throat, takes in every detail. She swallows, struggling to draw back.

“You should—you should get away from me.”

“For you or me?” Van asks. Her voice is scraped raw. Everything about her is pure intoxication, a campfire in the middle of a snowstorm. Tai grips her tighter.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

She thinks of the violence, those teeth in her throat. The horrible emptying sensation. The draining of her life out in great gushes. The thought of doing the same to Van is revolting. She shoves out with both hands, breaking the seal.

Instantly, her stomach clenches. Her body cries out as though she’d been granted access to a buffet and then whisked out the door before a single morsel could pass her starving lips.

“Tai?”

“You should get away,” Tai repeats. “Please. Just go.”

She isn’t going to be able to pull away a second time, she understands. She isn’t strong enough. Three days without sustenance, three days of a body forgetting all the rules of girlhood, replacing them with something monstrous. She can’t be expected to push Van’s warmth to safety again.

“Van,” she growls. “Go.”

Van doesn’t. Van looks at her, comprehension in blue eyes, nodding to herself.

“You need to eat,” she says. Tai shuts her eyes tight, closing out the empathy in that sweet face. It’s a mistake; with her eyes shut, the smell of Van strengthens. The heat of her. The taste of her breath, of her heartbeat, a thing that should have neither scent, nor flavor, and which is possessed of such richness, Tai almost can’t stand it.

“I don’t—this isn’t—” Happening. This isn’t happening. But she can’t stop the certainty flowing into her, the understanding that strikes in times of crisis. You can logic your way out of anything, Tai understands, until you are desperate. Until you are panicked. Until you are starving.

And then logic feeds nothing at all. Then logic is out the window, and all that is left is pure instinct.

Her mouth floods with saliva. Her teeth ache. Straight up the gums, straight up into the bones of her jaw, she can feel them thrumming. It’s worse than any cavity, worse than any headache. The drumbeat feels as though it could go on forever without losing steam.

Van edges closer. Her hand brushes Tai’s shoulder. “You have to eat,” she says. “Come on.”

Tai opens her eyes. Van is combing her own hair back, twisting it into a reckless knot behind her head. Her throat lays bare, pale and endless above the collar of her silly t-shirt. She’s tipping her head, giving Tai a look at skin that should just be neck and not feel straight-up obscene.

“You survived a fucking vampire,” Van says, like it’s obvious. “I’m not letting you die of starvation now.”

“I’m not going to—” She almost can’t say it. It’s so impossible, so insane. “I’m not going to fucking bite you, are you crazy?”

Van grins. “When have you ever chickened out of anything?”

“This isn’t chickening out,” Tai snaps, disbelieving. “It’s nuts. That thing almost killed me, and you want me to just pay it forward? What if I infect you?”

“Nah,” says Van, still grinning. Tai wants to shake her. Tai wants to pin her against the forest floor and hold her there forever. “There are rules, man. To all of this. Always are in the movies.”

“This isn’t a movie,” Tai groans. “I’m not gonna…”

Van scoots closer on her knees, head tilted to the side. Tai feels the words dissolve on her tongue, feels the ache in her teeth intensify until it radiates out in all directions, until her entire head is engulfed in throbbing agony. She swallows, claws dragging trenches down her gullet.

“Rule one,” Van says softly. “A vampire only becomes a vampire if they drink of the sire.”

“What the fuck,” Tai tries to say, but her teeth are crowding her mouth, scraping together. She shuts her lips over them, panic blooming in the absence of heartbeat within her ribcage.

“You get bitten,” Van says, “and then you drink of the one who bit you. That’s how you change. So if you don’t give me your blood, I’ll stay human.”

Human. She says it like the word no longer applies to Tai, like that’s just fine.

“Rule two,” Van goes on. “A vampire doesn’t have to kill. A person can live without—what—at least a pint. Isn’t that what they take when you donate?”

“No idea,” Tai says thinly. The words are garbled. Her mouth is nothing but teeth now, teeth and saliva pooling on her tongue. She can’t tear her eyes from Van’s throat. From the visible beat of her heart under the surface. From the life pumping away right there.

“Rule three,” Van says. “A vampire needs to feed. You don’t have blood flow, you don’t have anything keeping your body going in the traditional sense. If you don’t eat, it’ll all shut down—you’ll fade, or necrosis will set in, or you’ll just go straight-up feral and attack without conscience. The stories are all different, but the point is, you’re like any of us. You can’t not eat, Tai.”

She can’t see straight. She can’t see anything except Van’s offering on full display. Gray light fizzes around the edges of her vision, the shadows shouldering in on all sides.

“So.” Van is almost on top of her now. Her cheeks are bright, flushed with life, with nerves, with all that glorious blood. “Are you gonna do it, or what?”

“And if I can’t stop?” Tai demands. It hurts to talk. It hurts so goddamn much to think. She’s seeing it in her mind’s eye, over and over: grasping Van, burying her mouth in Van’s throat, drinking deep. Her stomach twists with some awful mixture of want and terror.

“You’ll stop.” Van sounds so confident. So fucking assured. Van sounds like she does on the pitch, when the play calls for Tai to take the ball all the way. You got this. You’ve never let us down before.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know how much is—how much is too much?”

“I’ll tap out.” Van raps a loose fist against Tai’s shoulder. “And you’ll let go, and we’ll go back to the cabin. Easy.”

“Why?” Tai breathes. “Why are you doing this?”

Van’s smile breaks her heart. Of all they’ve been through lately, of all the hellishness that has become their lives, Van’s smile is unchanged.

“’Cuz you’re Tai,” she says. “And you need me.”

There is so much trust in her face, so much trust in those two simple sentences. Tai blinks back a wave of tears.

She should tell her. She should open her mouth and let the secret spill out. How much she cares for Van, how desperately she needs Van now, more than ever. How that caring runs so much deeper and more intensely than she could have planned for. How she wishes she’d said it sooner, pressed her lips to Van’s in the locker room, let Van in before the world tore out from under them.

“Come on,” Van says. “Let’s do it.”

She braces a hand against Tai’s shoulder, like they’re out before a game working through quad stretches. Her free hand drifts around to the back of Tai’s head, hovering. Tai can hear the question, unasked: May I? She nods, feels Van’s fingers cup around her skull, feels Van apply careful pressure. In the back of her mind, she registers this is the first time Van has touched her hair, the first time those fingers have so much as brushed against her curls. Her skin feels too tight, the hollow space within her breast gaping open.

“It’s okay,” Van whispers, guiding her in. “You won’t hurt me.”

Tai can’t imagine how that could be true. She should say no, should tell Van it isn’t worth it—but Van’s skin is intoxicating, and Tai’s lips are suddenly flush against the side of her neck. She moans softly, unable to control herself, feeling the fingers in her hair flex. Van makes a sound under her breath—Tai thinks it might be fuck—and presses harder.

“It’s okay,” she says again. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s—ahhhhh—”

It’s not a sound of pain, exactly—more surprise, Tai thinks. Surprise, as Tai’s lips part around the pulse of her, as her tongue instinctively dips out and traces the spot where the beat is strongest. Surprise, as Tai licks the skin clean, like an alcohol pad just before a shot—and bites down. Bites in, bites through, and she is suddenly in Van. Inside Van, surrounded by Van, the entire world diminishing to nothing but Van’s scent, Van’s heart, Van’s voice groaning her name.

It doesn’t feel like violence. It feels like desire, years of secrecy culminating in surrender. It feels like the first gulp of water on the hottest day of July. She cradles Van’s jaw in one hand, pushing up, baring her throat, and she drinks. The normal part of her, the girl part of her, wants to recoil from the thick spurt of blood coating her lips and tongue and teeth. The normal part, which is so small, so easily shoved into a box and locked away, cries out.

The rest of her is too far gone to care. Van’s skin is pliant under her kiss, her lips pressed firm, her tongue laving the punctures where her teeth have driven in. She laps at the twin wounds, sucks at the flow of hot, heady life pouring forth. It doesn’t feel like violence at all; it’s a gift. It’s Van’s hand in her hair, sensual in its directness. It’s Van’s throat pumping away, straining to replenish what she’s taking, to offer her more. It’s Van’s soft voice making helpless sounds, repeating that mantra: It’s okay, you’re okay, Tai, you’re okay.

She can’t think. There is nothing but the blood, the flare of iron in her nose, painted across her tongue. There is nothing but Van, how much of her Tai can feel—not just her throat, not just her heart, but all of her. She can feel Van’s hands—in her hair, wrapped around her shirtsleeve—and Van’s hips angled against her own, and Van’s every breath hitching like a runner approaching the height of a sprint. Van’s heat blooms outward, engulfing her, sinking into her skin. Van. Van, clutching, giving, warming.

Van, tapping against her shoulder.

Van, pounding against her shoulder.

“Tai.” Her voice is a million miles away, drifting through a vacuum. “Tai. Enough. Tai. Fuck, Tai, fuck, Taissa, stop.”

Tai jerks back, a heap of bones and raging need. Her stomach is strung taut, her body burning. There is a powerful ache between her thighs, and she realizes with belated humiliation she is wet. Her face is sticky from nose to chin, and though she doesn’t want to, she can’t help darting her tongue out. Rubbing her fingers through the mess, pressing those fingers past her lips, sucking every morsel down.

She wants to cry. She wants to howl. She can’t look at Van, who is panting on her knees in the dirt. She doesn’t want to see the look on Van’s face, the charm of her smile washed away into horror.

Control, Taissa. Women like us, we need to be in control. Her mother said that once, when she was seven or eight. She’s never been able to forget. Women like us, they’re not going to want to see succeed. They want to think we’re weak. They want to think we’re angry. What are we, Taissa? In control.

She isn’t in control now. She wasn’t, sleepwalking, and she isn’t, with Van’s blood smeared across her lips, and she can never be again. She presses her hands over her eyes, shaking all over, huddled against a tree trunk.

A hand. Tentative, but strong, wrapped around her wrist. Van’s hand, trembling, but steady, pulling her hands from her face.

“I’m okay,” Van says shakily. “C’mere, Tai, it’s okay. You did great.”

She pulls Tai into her arms, Tai’s face pressing a bloody print against her t-shirt. They sit in the shadows for a long time, Van’s heart rampaging beneath her cheek, Van’s voice a soft reassurance in the dark.

***

“I hurt you,” Tai says later. When they’re back at the cabin, the pair of them sitting alone up in the attic. When Van is brushing absently at the twin punctures, no longer bleeding, no longer flowing life out for the taking. Van touches these marks—gentle, compared to the ripping of Tai’s flesh under the monster’s maw, barely more than love bites—and Tai’s stomach does something complicated. Something almost proud, watching Van rub the pad of her thumb over the bites.

“Nah,” Van says. It’s too easy, too forced. Van, who can’t keep in her joy, who can’t pretend to be something she’s not, is a shit liar.

“I did.” Tai hugs her knees. She can’t deny how good she feels. How the air seems to spark, how the dim light of the fire downstairs, the stars beyond the window, twist and twirl. Her stomach has never been empty. Her flesh is warmer than it has been in days. If she concentrates, she can draw breath and almost convince herself it’s normal. If she concentrates, she can almost feel her heart beat in time with Van’s.

Van’s heart, which she can hear even now. Which she can feel in her teeth, even from across the room. She can feel everything of Van: the fear, the hunger, the inexplicable draw toward Tai. The way some part of her wants to drift over, take Tai by the hair, position her mouth over those bites once more.

Tai can feel it. Tai can feel it all, and the excitement it spurs, the pride it sets alight, makes her almost nauseous.

“Okay,” Van admits, “it got a little hairy at the end there. But the rest of it was fine.” She hesitates. “It was…good. I know that’s fucked up, I’m so sorry, I—”

“Sorry?” Tai repeats blankly. “What for?”

Van isn’t quite making eye contact. She rubs that spot again with talismanic dedication. Tai’s eyes snag on the press-slide, press-slide of her thumb, and her whole body tenses with inappropriate longing.

“I, um.” Van clears her throat. “It felt…kinda hot?”

A shocked laugh unspools from Tai’s chest. Van ducks her head.

“See, this is what I mean! I’m sorry! I know you just needed to eat, and I’m over here making it fucking weird—”

“It’s not weird,” Tai interrupts. Van looks at her with open disbelief, and she winces. “It’s weird. It’s all weird. I’m a fucking—” She can’t say it. She won’t say it. “I need to drink blood. That’s fucking weird.”

Van can’t hide her grin. Tai can’t help but return it.

“But the part where it’s you,” she says. “That part isn’t weird at all.”

“No?” Van looks like someone just threw her a pizza party and a fully-rented movie theater all in one go. “For real?”

This can’t be how the story goes. This can’t be how Tai admits a crush.

“I’m really, really glad it’s you,” she says, feeling insanely shy for a person who just buried literal fangs in a girl’s throat. Van lights up, a firework of red hair and brilliant grin.

“Can I, uh—” She mimes crossing the room, pumping her arms back and forth, despite her seated position. Tai laughs.

“I think I can control myself.”

“Boring,” Van announces, and crawls to her with cheerful abandon. Tai catches her, feeling so much a girl and so little a monster when Van’s mouth crashes into her own. This is how a first kiss ought to feel. This, the privacy of it, Van’s hands on either side of her face. Van’s laughing mouth angling over hers.

Van breathing, “Finally,” against her like she’s been waiting for years.

They’ve gone about it all wrong, all upside-down and ass-backwards. Tai should have known this, first: the way Van’s mouth tastes, the way she breathes faster when a hand fists in her hair, the way her heartbeat thunders under her skin when Tai’s tongue drifts along her lower lip. Tai should have known this before the flush of Van’s blood in her mouth, before the bliss of using her life to fuel Tai’s own.

“I wanted to do that before,” she says when they break. “For the record.”

“Yeah? Bet I wanted to do it longer. Bet I had the idea way before you did.”

“Seriously?” Tai snorts. “This is not a competition.”

Van grins. “When the hell is it not, with you?”

Tai erupts into giggles, unable to stop herself. She feels, for the first time since the attack, like her old self. Like the girl with the full-ride ahead of her, the one who always scores. The one who hasn’t told anyone she’s gay, but who has been watching Van out of the corner of her eye since high school began, wanting to bridge that immeasurable gap.

“I wanted to tell you,” she says, “in ninth grade. Second day of tryouts. You made that save with your face, had a black eye for two weeks after, and I had this dream where you let me kiss you in goal.”

“In goal?” Van repeats with feigned dismay. “The depravity.”

Tai shoves her away. Van rolls onto her back, giggling.

“I still got you beat, by the way.”

“You fucking do not.” Tai arches up onto her elbow, skeptical. “No way did you know before ninth grade.”

“Excuse you. I knew when I was six. Supergirl came out and wrecked my shit.” Van shifts an arm behind her head, bites her lip. “Anyway, I saw you nail Randy Walsh with a perfect fastball in gym class. Right in the jewels. He hit the deck, you looked so proud of yourself, and I thought if I could invite you to the dance, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.”

“But…” Tai wracks her brain. “Dude, we were twelve.”

Van shrugs. “What can I say? I love a ballbreaker.”

Tai shoves her again, pleased when Van diverts the momentum to roll right back into a kiss. There’s a glorious softness to her, a sturdy strength Tai can’t get enough of. She wants to stay here all night, embroiled in the heady first-kiss glee she thought they’d never get, forgetting all the rest.

“I don’t ever want to hurt you,” she says, curling an arm around Van’s shoulders. Copper hair tickles her cheek, the underside of her jaw, and she turns her face into it. Inhales. Drinks in the scent of Van like a woman drowning.

“You won’t.”

“I already did.” She tents a hand over her eyes. Van eases up, kisses her cheek with all the soft repentance of one who has done nothing wrong.

“I swear, if it ever gets too much, I’ll tell you.”

The rest of the oath goes unsaid, but Tai can feel the pick-up-and-go of Van’s heart. Van means to keep going like this. Van and Tai, Tai and Van. Van feeding Tai of herself. No questions asked. No arguments accepted.

Van means to keep this up for as long as her body will allow, and Tai shudders to think what that might mean. Where that might go. The summer is fading fast, autumn donning steel-toed boots to kick in the door. Soon, there will be less food. So much less.

Soon, the body sustaining hers will be starving, and what then? What will happen when Van can’t replenish the blood Tai needs to steal?

“Stop jumping ahead, lady,” Van scolds. “I can hear your big brain working. We might still get rescued, you know. This is all temporary.”

“All of it?” Tai asks. Van threads their hands together, fingers interlacing, and presses both against her heart.

“Probably not all of it.”

***

Telling the others is a messy idea in so many ways. Tai tries to suggest keeping it to themselves—the way they’re inclined to keep the sweetness of the new space between crush and relationship to themselves—but Van looks at her with baffled uncertainty. How, she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t need to. Tai’s aversion to sunlight is impossible to miss, and the marks on Van’s throat stand stark the next morning.

Tai’s wounds, on the other hand, are nearly gone.

“This is impossible,” Akilah mutters, kneeling on the attic floor. “How do you feel?”

 “Um.” No heartbeat, no breath, getting a little chilly again, but I think I got the girl? “Fine?”

Akilah arches her brows. Van, a sweatshirt hood blotting her own bites almost from view, stuffs her hands in her pockets.

“Midnight walk does a body good?”

Now Akilah is looking at her like she’s crazy, and if they can’t even convince JV, Tai has no idea how they’re supposed to do this. She heaves a sigh.

“Just. Trust me? I feel good. Long as I stay in the dark, my head doesn’t feel like it’s going to explode.”

She refuses to say more, especially when they send Lottie up to interrogate her further. She doesn’t want to talk about it with anyone, especially Lottie. She’s been acting too fucking weird lately, too fucking nuts in her own special way, and Tai can’t see how that’s going to help. She knows. Van knows. No one else needs to be told right now.

“You won’t be able to hide it forever,” Van says in a low voice. “You have to know the sunlight-migraine story can only hold so long.”

“They’ve got bigger problems,” Tai insists. They’ve snuck out again, are sitting lakeside with their toes in the sand. Van’s leaning back on her hands, neck arching tantalizingly from the collar of her shirt. It’s making conversation incredibly difficult to focus on, especially when Van’s fingers toy absently with her own.

“Bigger problems than our star mid-fielder contracting the vamp?”

“The vamp?” Tai repeats. Van offers a charming smile.

“Catchy, right?”

“You are so lucky you’re cute.” She heaves a sigh. She’s been working hard at it, teaching her body to breathe. It isn’t easy. It’s especially difficult the hungrier she gets, like the borrowed blood in her system draining out takes with it all the simple humanity. Her skin cools the further away from a feeding she gets. Her lungs refuse to contract. She is—

“—starving,” Van is saying. Tai gives herself a sharp shake, tuning back in.

“What?”

“We’re going to be starving,” Van repeats. “Sooner rather than later.”

“Nat—”

“Is doing her best, but everything’s starting to disappear. The berries, the mushrooms—which we’re not even supposed to touch, apparently—everything. You saw that fucked-up deer they brought back. It’s getting bad. Laura Lee keeps talking about taking that plane.”

“Laura Lee?” Tai repeats. “No fucking way is she flying that thing.”

Van makes a face. “I know, but she says if her grandpa could do it, anyone could. I think Lottie believes her.”

Lottie. Tai grits her teeth against a wave of something fierce, something that drags her sharpened teeth down from their sheath. Jealousy? Is this jealousy, this keen feeling pressing in from all sides?

“We have to find another way,” she hears herself say. “We need to go looking.”

“Looking?” Van frowns. “What, like—leave camp?”

“Yeah.” She pushes herself to her feet, a burst of eager adrenaline detonating in her chest. “Yeah! I’ll go. I’ll take the compass, I’ll head out—I mean, we’re not on a fucking island, right? There has to be something if I can just get far enough—”

“If,” Van says woodenly. She doesn’t look half as excited as Tai feels. “The world’s biggest fucking if, Tai. And what do you mean, you’ll head out? You can’t move in sunlight!”

“I can climb a tree,” Tai tells her. “Or dig a hole and wait out the sun. That’s a thing, right? In your movies?”

“Yeah, for Count fucking Dracula. You’ve been at this for like two weeks, and you’re already trying to outwit the sun?” Van doesn’t sound impressed. Van sounds dumbstruck by Tai’s confidence in herself. “What happens if you get out there, and the three days pass? You’ll weaken.”

“We don’t know that three days is the hard line,” Tai argues. “And, hey, vampires are strong, right? Fast? Resilient?”

“You’re literally just saying whatever now.” Van bounces to her feet, frustration drawing fresh lines between her brows. “Tai, you can’t be serious about this. You get attacked by a monster, and a few days later you just want to waltz off into the trees? No. No way.”

Irritation rises in Tai, followed by a pang of vicious hunger. Van’s skin glows with heat, every angle of her body primed for a fight. The situation is a whetstone, and Tai can’t seem to lean away from it.

“You can’t stop me,” she says coldly. “I could wait to leave. You have to sleep sometime, right?”

It’s a low blow, and she knows it. Van hasn’t been sleeping well. Van’s rewritten her entire schedule to keep up with Tai’s new nocturnal habits, while trying at the same time to function during the day with the others. Van’s already exhausted.

And Tai needs her to be okay. Tai needs to keep her safe.

“Look.” She smooths out her voice, injects as much calm as she can into her tone. Her hands close around Van’s upper arms, thumbs rubbing slow circles. “You said it yourself. We’re in danger of running out of food. And it’s getting colder. The bad kind of cold. Dying feels like falling asleep kind of cold. And you, most of all, are taking on too much.”

For me, she doesn’t add. Van’s eyes drop, guilt flaring in the flush of her cheeks.

“I can do this,” Tai says. “I swear I can. I’ll go, I’ll look. I’ll be safe.”

Van gnaws the inside of her cheek. Tai wants to kiss her, wants to press her back against the shoreline and bury her face in that pale neck.

“I can’t lose you,” she says, cupping Van’s cheek. She forces a smile, desperate to be believed. “We’re just figuring this shit out.”

It’s probably wrong, to distract Van with a kiss. Probably wrong, to part her lips against Van’s, press her body close, slip cool fingers up under the hem of Van’s shirt. It’s probably wrong, to pretend like this is all going to be okay when it very certainly will not.

But Van lets her. Van, so warm, so brilliantly warm, whose heart seems to sing. Van, who guides her face down to the line of her neck, who whispers, “All right. But you gotta eat.”

Tai grips her with too-eager hands, shivering all over. The anticipation is the best part, she’s learning—the moment just before she bites in. The moment when it’s just Van’s fingers in her hair, Van’s chin tipped up, Van’s breath coiling from her in spirals. Van’s hips an inch from her own, body taut with a longing that almost, almost matches Tai’s own.

This will be the third time. Just three, each bite carefully layered over the last, and it should not already feel so comfortable. Tai should be rebelling against it, refusing to accept that this is her life now. She should be holding out as long as she can, going weeks without sinking her teeth into Van’s smooth skin.

Van’s pulse quickens under her lips. Tai bites back a groan. It’s just food, she tries to tell herself. It’s just food, and if she’s weak enough to need it, that’s one thing. It doesn’t have to be such a production each and every time.

She hears Van chuckle low in her throat. “You just gonna tease all night?”

It’s just food, Tai tries to think, but Van’s palm is hot against the base of her skull. Van’s chest is inflating against her own, receding again. Van’s whole body is white-hot, and when Tai traces the scabbed bite marks with the tip of her tongue, Van bucks once. Sharp. Needy. Her fingers flex around the back of Tai’s neck, and Tai can’t hold herself at bay any longer.

It isn’t just food, isn’t just eating. This isn’t a fucking granola bar she’s sinking into. She’s wrapping Van around her every sense, plunging past the slim barrier of flesh into the intrinsic life of her. The blood that floods her mouth is hot, sweet, rushing in on her like a shot. Van gasps, as she always does on the bite—on penetration, some part of Tai can’t help but think, and her own hips drive against Van’s with embarrassing force. They’re locked together on this beach, the waves dancing around their ankles, an embrace no one else could ever understand.

“Easy,” Van murmurs, though one of her arms is around Tai’s shoulders, gripping her close. “Remember—to—slow down—”

It’s better slow, they’re learning. Tai went too hard too fast the first time, nearly lost control of herself. Nearly did irreparable damage. The second time, she forced herself to hang on. To lick in slow, gentle arcs. To draw the blood into her mouth and hold it, really tasting each mouthful. She forced herself to suck carefully, making it last, making herself last. Van’s voice, meditative, helped. Van’s fingers stroking her hair helped.

Van’s heart, slamming away, pumping faster with every moment of contact between them—that does not help, but Tai wouldn’t trade it for anything. Van can hide a lot, if she works at it; she hid her crush well enough for years. She hides her home, her family, her secrets. But she can’t hide what Tai is doing to her. Can’t hide what Tai’s mouth on her skin is drawing to the surface, what Tai’s arms around her is making her feel. She can’t hide the hunger in her own belly, the way her body arches and angles, the way her heart races when Tai grips her hips.

She wants to go faster. Wants to drink until there is no space left between them, until they are one person. Until the sense she’s got of Van’s heartbeat—even when they’re apart, stretching a little further after each taste—goes on forever. She wants to have Van, body and soul, blood and life.

She forces herself away, fingers already rising to catch the last drops. She traces the open wounds, relishing the low hiss of Van’s breath when she comes away sticky and pops her fingers into her mouth. The grease at the end of the burger. The last trace of chocolate in an ice cream sundae.

Food. It’s just food. It’s normal, it’s tolerable, it’s permissive.

The thrum between her legs, the desperate ache in her belly, the absolutely feral need to tear the clothes from Van’s body and devour her in a different way—none of that has a place. Not here. Not now. They’re too new. They’re too delicate, a fragile wisp of happiness she’s terrified to breathe on lest it blow away. She can’t be that, not yet.

Not even with Van staring up at her with blue eyes gone nearly black, with lips parted as she watches Tai lap up the final remnant of scarlet from her own fingertip.

“Okay,” Van says. “You’re going to go.”

“Thank you,” Tai starts, because she never needed permission for that, but it seems the courteous response anyway. Van raises a hand.

“And I’m going with you.”

Tai opens her mouth. Van grins.

“I wasn’t asking.”

And with that, she’s flouncing away. Flouncing. Like a fucking asshole.

Tai might be a little bit in love with her.

***

“What do you mean you’re going to look for a way out?” Nat demands the next day. Van has collected everyone together, leading them to the attic where Tai is waiting. It feels a little like an ambush, a little like plain old-fashioned stupidity, but they couldn’t think of a better way.

“I’m going,” Tai says.

“We’re going,” Van corrects. Nat’s face shutters.

“You got attacked by something out there, and now you want to go find it again?”

“Nat’s right,” Lottie says, which makes everyone convulse. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

Van looks at her, big blue eyes uncertain. Tai feels that strumming sensation again, a knife’s edge upon which she can’t hold her balance for long.   

“We’re going,” she says, raising her voice to shut out protests. “Anyone who wants to come is—” She hesitates. Wants to keep it to her and Van, to safety and secrecy, but it doesn’t feel fair. “Anyone who wants to come is welcome, but you have until sundown to decide.”

“Sundown?” Shauna repeats. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“Why the fuck would you wait for the sun to go down?” Nat adds, a desperate lilt to her voice. “There’s no way you’ll survive. The nights are getting colder, and it’s so fucking dark out there. You’ll get lost in hours.”

Van’s eyes swing from Lottie to Tai. The urge to tell is written all over her. Before they’d returned to camp last night, she’d said, “You really should tell them, you know. I’m not gonna out you or whatever, you know I wouldn’t, but—don’t they deserve to know?”

Tai had pretended not to hear. She’d told herself it was for the best, that secrets are the definition of safety. When you’re different, when you just keep getting more different, secrets are all you’ve got.

She draws a breath. Big enough to call attention to the act. Big enough for at least the more observant among them—Akilah, Shauna, Misty, Nat—to realize it’s the first her chest has moved in this entire conversation.

“That thing,” she says, forcing calm, “did something to me. Van’s been…helping me figure it out.”

“Did what to you?” Jackie asks. She, of all of them, is standing the furthest back. Watching with arms folded over her chest. She, their captain, is assessing from a distance, and Tai wonders if she’s still been dragging her feet out there. Refusing to pitch in. If she’s been blaming Tai for doing the same, making excuses, as if Tai would ever.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “It messed me up. I can’t…go outside when the sun’s out. It hurts. But my vision’s better in the dark, like—a lot better. And I know I can do this.”

I don’t need to eat like you guys do. I don’t need to stop for bathroom breaks, I don’t need to sleep the same way, I don’t fear the wild like you.

Too much. Too much to give up. She can’t surrender it, not with Jackie frowning and Lottie wringing her hands, not with Laura Lee fiddling with the cross around her neck. Not with Coach downstairs, waiting, uncertain as to what kind of meeting his team is deliberately shutting him out of.

“It’s me and Van at sundown,” she repeats. “Anyone else who wants to can come, but we’re going. We’re getting out of this hellhole.”

They disperse, muttering to one another, forming little factions. Shauna stays behind, lightly brushing Tai’s arm.

“You really believe you can do it?”

Not what the hell actually happened to you? Not are you sick? Just: can you do it? Tai feels a rush of affection for her, wants to yank her close and beg her not to do anything stupid while she’s gone.

“Yeah,” she says. “I really do.”

Shauna doesn’t volunteer to come along, for which Tai is grateful. A pregnant girl is the last person who ought to even try it.

No one else volunteers, either. That, Tai is also grateful for, though that gratitude is chased by a wave of guilt. She should want them to come. She should want them to trust her enough to follow her into the dark.

She should, but she doesn’t, because she wouldn’t trust her, in their shoes. She wouldn’t set off at sundown to search for civilization. That would be insane.

Her life is insane.

It’s okay, she tells herself. It’s good. Humans are slow. Humans are tired. These humans, especially, are starving. It’s good, that it’s just Tai—just Tai, and the one human she can’t bring herself to leave without, because she, too, has a weakness.

It’s just her and Van. Two backpacks of supplies: blankets, extra clothes, water bottles, a flare gun, an axe. The food they bring is sparse, but Tai doesn’t mind. It’s all destined for Van’s stomach, anyway. She’ll feed Van her share, and Van will feed her in turn, and they’ll be all right. They’ll be fine.

“Wait!” Lottie sprints after them, a strange white shape clutched in one hand. She slaps it into Van’s upturned palm. “Take this. I think it’ll keep you safe.”

Van’s somber expression bunches in confusion, levels out again with a measure of softness that makes her look much younger. “Thanks, Lot.”

Lottie’s lips twitch in a half-smile, but her eyes are sliding to Tai. Her eyes, dark and soulful and definitively uncertain, clinging to Tai’s face like she’s trying to unzip her.

“Be careful,” she says. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Noted.” Tai can’t keep the edge from her voice. Can’t keep the roil of that nasty jealousy from grabbing the wheel. The way Van looks at Lottie sometimes, the trust in her gaze, makes Tai feel as though she’s taken a wrong step and plummeted down a flight of stairs.

Trust me, she wants to beg—Van, and all of them. Trust me, not her. But what can she really say? How could she really convince them, especially now that she’s pointedly not telling them the truth?

By finding a way out of this hell. By leading rescue back. By proving she’s capable, even changed, of taking care of them all.

Van hangs the strange bone around her neck, and when Tai scoffs, rolls her eyes. “You’re a fucking vampire, and you’re going to give me sass about superstition?”

No, Tai supposes that wouldn’t help. Tai wants them to succeed, wants Van to feel good about the choice to head out into the dark with only Tai’s eyes to guide them. If some stupid talisman of Lottie’s helps in any way, fuck it—who is she to judge?

“We’re going to do this,” she says, injecting all the confidence she needs to feel into the words. “We’re going to save us.”

She tries to believe it. She needs to believe it. She’s different now, some part of her damaged beyond repair, and it has to help somehow. It has to lead them out of the shadows, somehow.

It takes less than twelve hours for her to realize this isn’t going to run as smoothly as she’d hoped. It takes more time than she’d like to dig a hole before sunrise. More time than she’d like to curl up beneath a layer of loose soil and dry leaves, Van spreading the thickest blanket they could take over her once she’s in. It’s worse than she could have imagined, tucked into an earthen bed, dirt in her mouth and eyes and hair.

It's awful, even with Van settled just above her, keeping guard. The monster in her is so newly formed, so deep in its infancy, that the only instincts she truly possesses revolve around blood. Finding safe places to hide from the sun is harder than it had seemed back in the comfort of the attic. Digging daily graves, laying herself to rest each dawn, choking down the panic that comes from handfuls of dirt pinning her to the earth—it’s almost too much to stand.

By the end of the first full day, she’s shaking all over.

By the end of the second, her sanity is threatening to crack.

By the third, Van is looking at her with barely-restrained concern, a hand resting on Tai’s trembling arm.

“We don’t have to keep doing this,” she says. “We can go back. The odds were never—”

Tai shrugs her off. She has to do this. She has to find a purpose in this thing that has happened, this thing so beyond her control, she can’t wrap her mind around it. She has to find some reason the universe would conspire to steal from her the sun, the normalcy she craves, her whole fucking life.

“We’re going,” she growls, “to find help. We have to.”

Van studies her, nodding slowly. “Yeah. Okay. You should eat, though. It might be better on a full stomach.”

It strikes Tai, then, that neither of them have the first clue what they’re talking about. Neither of them know anything. They have no map, no true survival skills, and Van’s pulling from a wealth of fiction to even begin dealing with Tai’s new problem. They know absolutely nothing.

And still, Van looks at her with hope in her eyes. Van, who wants to go back to New York City, who wants to take Tai with her. Van, who doesn’t care that theirs would be a midnight carriage ride through the park, who doesn’t mind a trip to the theater well after sunset. Van just wants her. Whatever that looks like, whatever it means, Van believes they deserve the chance to find out.

Tai sinks into her, teeth punching deep. She’s too tired to lean into the usual rush of endorphins, the overwhelming urge to take all Van will give and then some. Her head aches. She imagines digging a fresh grave for herself when she’s done feeding, and nearly bursts into hysterical sobs.

“Shh,” Van murmurs, coaxing fingers against the back of her neck. She’s leaning back against an enormous tree, legs tented comfortably, an arm around Tai’s shoulders. “Stay with me, Tai.”

Tai whimpers. She hates anyone seeing her this way, least of all Van, but she can’t help herself. It could be days like this. Weeks. How long can she keep doing this: laying awake under the fetid dirt, all the endless animal smells pressing in like bricks from all sides? How long can she feel like the time they read The Cask of Amontillado in class, and she dreamed for a week about the horror of being walled into a tiny space?

“Stay with me,” Van repeats. Her throat bobs around the catch of Tai’s fangs, her breath coming fast. She slides her hand into Tai’s hair, which she’d chopped short just before they left. The heat of her palm is closer than ever, burning bright, reminding Tai of how badly she needs to be warm.

She focuses her attention on the moment. On the scent of Van’s hunger, her hard-fought calm, the rapid-fire pace of her heartbeat. She focuses on the blood pooling under the skin, the vein open to her lips, the slide of sweet nectar down her throat. She sucks gently, narrowing her focus to the point where her lips meet Van’s neck, to the caress of Van’s hand at her nape. There is no grave. There is no dirt in her teeth. There is just Van, sitting against this tree, holding her close. Just Van, sighing soft beneath her, arching slightly when Tai’s hand slips under her shirt and lays flat against her stomach.

“Good,” Van murmurs. “That’s good. We’re okay, Tai.”

She says it, and Tai knows she wants to believe. Maybe that explains the bone around her neck, bumping against her chest even as Tai drinks. She wants to believe, like Tai needs to believe she can do this. She wants that old good cheer to be enough.

Tai drinks of her, letting the warmth of her skin, of her voice, of her belief wrap around her. She drinks, and she doesn’t think about what comes next. She’ll stay sane. She has to stay sane. Van gives up so much for her, gives up the basic right to keep her own blood inside her body for her, and that cannot be in vain.

“I’ll be right here,” Van assures her, like she always does, when the hole is dug. “Right here, Tai. Maybe tonight is the night.”

Giving a grim nod, Tai curls up in the makeshift grave. She keeps her eyes on Van as long as she can, until there’s too much dirt and she’s forced to shut down. Even with eyes firmly closed, she fixates on the pulse of Van above, the bright thread of her heartbeat. If Tai tries hard enough, she can feel that pulse in her own chest. They can share.

It'll keep her sane, she thinks. It’ll keep her—

She jolts awake to a scream like the tearing of the world. She feels as though the heart is being ripped from her chest, as though the air is being sucked from her lungs. It takes too long to remember where she is: beneath the soil. With no need for air. With a heart that simply refuses to beat.

The scream, though. The scream is very, very real, and she realizes it’s Van screaming. Van’s heart, being torn straight out of Tai’s ribcage.

She thrashes, straining to dig free. Some distant part of her recognizes she has no sense of time, no idea where the sun might be in the sky—but the rest of her doesn’t care. She’ll burn if it means stopping whatever’s come for Van.

It’s dark, when she shoves aside the last of the soil. Pitch-dark. They should have gotten up by now, should have gotten moving. Why didn’t Van wake her?

Because, the dark little voice in Tai’s head murmurs, something got to her first.

She thinks of that beast in the woods, the thing which tore her life out from under her. The idea of its teeth in Van makes her feel closer to madness than three days of sleeping in a grave ever could. She whirls, listening for the pulse that leads to Van, the thread that stretches out from Van’s blood, cinched around her unbeating heart.

There: off to the left, through the thicket of trees. She doesn’t think. She sprints, catching up the axe they have thus far used as a makeshift shovel on the way.

Shadows raise up before her, three of them: wolves. Just normal, average wolves. Wolves, which have had how much time with Van while Tai was fucking asleep? While Tai was shut down, her conscious mind utterly vacant to prevent losing ties to it altogether?

Three wolves, snarling over the huddled form of a small body. Snarling, ripping, tearing at her.

Tai makes a noise like Death come home to roost, and dives for them. She’d been half-kidding about the added strength and speed, but now—high on a melding of terror for Van and the still-fresh heat of a recent feeding—she finds it’s true. When she runs, it’s three times faster than her best day as a normal girl, with none of the exhaustion. When she leaps, gravity has barely any hold at all.

When she brings down the axe, it cleaves a wolf in two. She barely registers its corpse, rounding on the next.

I’ll be right here, Van kept saying, standing guard, but it should have been Tai guarding her. Tai, who’s been useless under the earth for hours each day. Tai, who Van probably has been giving more and more time, terrified of waking her too early, of burning her to cinders.

She’d been so concerned about humans—tired and frail, half-starved, weak humans—handicapping the trip, Tai didn’t even think about what obstacles she brings to the table. And now…

She leans over Van, desperately pulling at her shoulder to coax the girl out of her fetal position. Van rolls, gagging, and the human instincts in Tai rise up like a punch to the stomach. Van’s face. Van’s wonderful, beautiful face, half-mangled. Dirty. Bloody. Her jaw hanging on display.

“Jesus,” Tai moans, “Van—Van, fuck, don’t be dead, don’t be dead—”

Van gurgles something unintelligible. Tai leans down, ear to her mouth, ignoring as best she can the scent of all that blood. Her teeth crowd toward her tongue, her mouth full of sudden watering hunger. She grinds it away, says, “Van, what? Hey—hey, please—”

“Okay,” Van gurgles again. She isn’t opening her eyes. She looks half-dead, more than half, but her heartbeat carries stubbornly on. “Won’t—be—dead—”

She passes out, then, and Tai screams. It’s not productive, not in the least, but she has to let it out. Has to release this mingled relief and horror, this overwhelming guilt—she’s out here because of me, she was alone because of me—before it eats her up.

Van remains unconscious for a while. Long enough for Tai to pull her shit together. Long enough for Tai to tear fabric into bandages, tying tight around Van’s mangled jaw, her cheekbone, her left eye. She can smell the raw meat of Van, the devastation already setting in. Too long without being properly cleaned and stitched, and that meat smell will grow rotten. Too long, and it won’t matter that the wolves didn’t finish the job.

It's dark. Thank fuck it’s dark. Thank fuck Tai is, as it turns out, fast.

Three days, it’s taken to reach this point. With Van in her arms, all but a single pack of supplies left in the dirt, Tai will make it back to the cabin in one.

She stumbles to a stop with the sun edging over the horizon, unable to take so much as another step. She feels like she’s been flying. She feels like Icarus, the smoke rising off her back, her skin melting like wax where the first rays kiss her flesh. Van, groaning in her arms, turns her head and vomits.

“What—what the fuck?” Natalie, armed and bewildered. Natalie, diving to catch them as two girls fall forward, Tai struggling to position herself under Van before she can strike the earth.

“Wolf,” Tai wheezes. Her skin is white-hot. She can smell herself beginning to cook, can smell the horrorshow heat of it. She thinks of the blanket in her pack, unable to move so much as a hand toward it, uncertain if it would help anyway.

She says the important part instead. “Get her inside. Help her. Do not—let her—die—”

***

Tai comes to in the back bedroom. The same bed, she registers—but the window is blocked off with a blanket, the room draped in shadow. The door is partially open, Lottie sitting in a chair near her bedside.

“Van.” It’s all Tai can think to say. She isn’t full of that burning-hair smell anymore, can’t feel her skin charring. When she shifts awkwardly, raising a hand to her cheek, the skin is smooth.

Lottie looks at her with understanding. No, not understanding. Comprehension. It’s a very, very different thing.

Tai never quite realized how different, until this moment.

“Van,” she repeats when those dark eyes don’t twitch. “Where is she?”

“Resting,” Lottie says. “Akilah stitched her up. We think she’ll be all right.”

Tai collapses back against the pillow, every muscle aching. She remembers how it felt to run with Van’s blood singing under her skin. How limitless she’d felt, bounding through the trees with a limp body in her arms.

She feels now as though she’s struck a brick wall and tried to keep going. Everything hurts. Things she hadn’t realized still worked hurt.

And, under that hurt, she can feel it. The tether. The thrum of life, obstinate despite everything, emanating from Van Palmer in the next room. Some of the tension eases, and she realizes her face is wet.

The tears smell of pennies gone cold in a January parking lot. Tai doesn’t bother reaching to smear the red off her cheeks.

“So it’s really true,” Lottie says. “You really aren’t…what you were.”

If she had been, Tai recognizes, Van would be dead. For the first time, she raises her chin and feels a stab of something like pride.

“No,” she says. “I’m not.”

They stare at each other. A stab of dread touches Tai’s unbeating heart. She’s weak. Whatever strength she had from a fresh feed, it’s long gone. She feels like she hasn’t eaten or rested in weeks. She’s fragile.

She’s prey.

And, if she wanted to, Lottie could do something with that. Lottie, whom they all follow. Lottie, whom even Van trusts. Lottie, with her blood and her bones and her dreams.

“You saved her life,” Lottie says. It isn’t a question. She reaches out, clasps Tai’s hand, and Tai understands that this is still Lottie Matthews. Still the girl she used to party with. The girl who laughed with her at Van’s jokes. The girl who swore over calculus homework and always shared her smokes.

It’s still Lottie, and she’s still Tai, and even if that doesn’t make a lick of sense these days—Lottie won’t hurt her.

She can’t explain the relief that powers through her, realizing as much.

“Can I get you anything?” Lottie asks. “Not food, I’m guessing.”

Tai shakes her head slowly. She thinks of the blood on her shirt. Of Van’s blood. She’s overcome with the impulse to raise the fabric to her lips, to suck at the dry stain. It disgusts her.

“I’m okay,” she lies. “I’m good. Can I see her?”

She’s relieved when Lottie just pushes the door open and waits. It hurts, getting out of bed. Hurts, limping out to where Van is wrapped in blankets upon a table. Hurts most of all, seeing the way the others look at her, glances sliding off with varying degrees of fear.

None of it matches the clutch of her unmoving chest when she sees Van. Bandaged, breathing shallowly, laid out like she’s at her own wake. Her eyes remain closed, but when Tai perches beside her and takes a hand between her own, she feels Van’s heartbeat quicken.

No one ventures near. No one says a word. Even Shauna is looking at her with uncertainty, though when Tai meets her gaze, she almost smiles. Tai can’t bring herself to smile back.

She moves Van to the bedroom herself. She changes Van’s bandages, brings Van food. She sits on the floor, one hand always tangled in Van’s, and tries not to think about what they didn’t see. Any sign of human life. Any sign of civilization. No litter. No campfires. No signposts.

She could go again. Go further. She could go by herself, right now, while Van’s recuperating. Maybe she could make it.

Except she’s out of blood, and she refuses to steal anything from Van now. She’s out of blood, and she’s exhausted, and some part of her knows she should not have been able to run that distance. Not even as she is now. Some part of her knows that was like a mother hoisting a minivan off her children in a fit of miracle strength.

If she tries again, it might well kill her.

If she goes out again, she might not make it back.

And maybe that would be best. Maybe it is her purpose. Maybe.

But if Van wakes up, and Tai’s gone, it won’t matter who’s a vampire and who’s a human girl. All that will matter is, Van will never look at her the same again. It’s the one thing Taissa can’t stand.

“I guess,” she says softly to the sleeping Van, whose hand squeezes her own as if in a dream, “we’re just doing this. You and me, Van. Stay with me.”

Van, still asleep, murmurs something that sounds too much like Tai’s name.