Page 37 of Fangs

I lie on the cold slate, staring at the space where Thomas was, chest heaving, blood pooling beneath me. My hand presses against my throat, trying to stem the flow. My fingers come away red. The wound is deep—I can feel it in the way my pulse flutters, weak and irregular.

I’m alone on the rooftop.

The shadows are gone. The cemetery below is still. The trees cast their familiar shadows across the graves, unmoving.

Vampires

“Lucille.”

Blake’s voice slices through the fog in my skull. Not spoken aloud. It materializes inside my head, a whisper that echoes through the hollow chambers of my mind.

“For you I rose from the grave. But I went beyond my power. I cannot hold the other three much longer. Neither have I any power left to kill them. Hide, Lucille. Hide.”

The voice fades, leaving behind only the thunder of my pulse and the wet rasp of my own breathing.

I push myself upright, the movement sending the world spinning violently. My hand flies to my throat, pressing against the torn flesh. Blood oozes between my fingers—slower now, but still flowing. The wound aches with a deep, thrumming poison. Thomas’s bite burns different than Blake’s. Where Blake’s brought pleasure, Thomas’s brought agony. A searing, festering fire that crawls through my veins like liquid death.

I look down at the smear of ash on the slate, the charred remains of Thomas’s clothes, and the horror crashes over me in a wave so cold it steals my breath.

Thomas was a vampire.

A creature of nightmare and legend, and he bit me. He drank from me. If the shadows had not—

My stomach lurches. I double over, retching, but nothing comes. My body shakes with violent tremors.

Vampires. The masters. All of them. They are all vampires.

The word echoes through my mind, impossible. Vampires. Real. Living—no, not living. Existing. Hunters. Predators. Monsters who drink blood and live forever and—

I press my fingers to the wounds on my neck. The pain is real.

The shadows. The dreams. The man with the silver hair and the violet-blue eyes.

Blake.

He is a vampire too. He rose from the grave for me. He killed Thomas for me. He spoke inside my mind.

I sway on my feet, my vision swimming. This cannot be happening. This is not real. This is another nightmare, another twisted hallucination born from stress and exhaustion and the horrors of this house.

I will wake up. I am going to wake up, drenched in sweat, safe in my bed, and all of this will dissolve like morning mist.

That is what I tell myself. That is what I cling to as I take a shaky step toward the edge of the roof.

“I am dreaming,” I whisper to the wind. “This is just a dream. A horrible, impossible dream.”

Another step. The edge looms closer. The cemetery sprawls below, the tombstones like crooked teeth, the ground too far and too close all at once.

“In dreams, you fall,” I continue, my voice trembling. “I have had those dreams before. The ones where you fall and fall and wake up gasping.” I swallow hard. “I just need to wake up.”

I take a breath. Then another.

And I step off the edge.

The wind roars in my ears. My body plummets, weightless and falling, the ground rushing up to meet me. The air whips my hair across my face, tears streaming from my eyes. The world blurs into streaks of grey and green and stone.

It is a dream. It is a dream. It is a—

A wave of darkness engulfs me.