Don't Want to Be Your Monster: Chapters 8–19

She never told us how much I would be able to smell them—not them, necessarily, but their blood.

The scent oozes out of them and wafts in the air and makes my brain a little dizzy.

Luis is a lot more tan and has a little cleft in his chin, with warm brown eyes that I can tell are looking at me suspiciously.

“How’d you run like that?” she asks, scooching next to me in my hiding spot.
“Like what?” I ask, hoping if I sound naive enough, she’ll forget that she inadvertently told me I’d failed at guessing where the line between mortal-speed and vampire-speed gets drawn.

“How’d you run like that?” she asks, scooching next to me in my hiding spot.
“Like what?” I ask, hoping if I sound naive enough, she’ll forget that she inadvertently told me I’d failed at guessing where the line between mortal-speed and vampire-speed gets drawn.

The door creaks open and I let out an aggravated sigh.
Alright. When I get a moment alone with Adam, I need to teach him how to not give off one-hundred-percent-guilty vibes, especially after specifically asking me to cover for him.

Mama bought it, which is a miracle in and of itself, but Sung narrows their eyes and shoots us both suspicious glares.

Mama is really good—and I mean like, really good even for a vampire—at noticing the smallest details. That’s why she works with the astronomy department at the local university; she can catch the tiniest anomaly. A speck of a light that wasn’t in the sky the night before.

Mom and Mama might be trying to make us feel like we’re a real family, but in the end, it’s all a ruse.

Mom and Mama might be trying to make us feel like we’re a real family, but in the end, it’s all a ruse. One that no amount of wholesome puzzle nights can disguise.

“Like we’re one person, in one body,” Sung grins. “Completely synchronized with each other.”

“Well, come on!” Victor calls after me, and we are off again. Jumping over the road, running alongside the asphalt, laughing as the sound of wheels screeching echoes deep into the chambers of our lungs, the reverberation in my chest pumping my heart faster as we vanish once more into the night.

The trees standing in our way become sparse. We are chasing each other over buildings now, the concrete jungle, neon lights reflecting in our eyes.

No. I won’t outrace the sun. I’ll withstand the sun. I’ll stay up…I’ll climb to the highest branches of the tallest fir tree. I’ll watch the sun come over the horizon.

“Easy now, you’re not as invincible as you think,” Mom’s voice shakes me out of my thoughts.

“Okay, so, maybe after the first few broke, I might have seen if I could juggle,” I admit with an innocent shrug. “The important thing is none of them went through the window.”
“I’m sure Mom will appreciate that,” Sung deadpans.

“I feel enlightened with this knowledge,” I say with a fake- snooty tone to my voice, which I drop to add, “but not happy. I’m just saying it would be nice to stop feeling hungry for once.”

“My parents were vampire hunters.”
Adam balks.

It’s not what everyone’s parents do for work. But you know in some countries they still offer bounties on vampire heads so…that was their job.

She waves her hand like she could make her bad joke dissipate in the air.

“We raise a ghost who could find the ghosts of all the murder victims. They schmooze, our ghost reports back, and bam! We know who the murderer is!”

What did rain have to do with getting murdered? I don’t bring it up. What if that’s, like, common mortal knowledge? No murders can happen during precipitation…or something.

Could I compel the details of the murder case out of Officer Espinosa?

“And after all the werewolves and the vampires were killed or driven into hiding, then what happened? Then they started to worry about the humans that weren’t the right kind, didn’t they? It was easy to get everyone on board with driving out difference when you started with something like vampires. Easy to dehumanize them, right? That’s the stuff I grew up being taught—that it doesn’t matter who it starts with, hate is hungry, and if you don’t do something to stop it, it eats everyone.”

My ears pick up the sogging smush of footsteps sinking into the wet, leafy forest floor and the snap of holly branches snagging on cloth. I could recognize that awkward stumbling gait anywhere.

I take a step back and splay my fingers wide, as if trying to zap bat-like thoughts into his head.

But I can rectify this. With charisma!

“Seems so unlike a vampire,” Alejandra says. “To not care that he’s being hunted.”
“Why should I?” I say, mustering as much bravado as I can.

The blood smell absolutely saturates the air.

The branches are part of house decoy duty.
At least once a week, before we go to sleep, we have to go out and make sure mortals don’t think to come investigate our house.

I start pulling books off the shelves—not the normal books with words on the spines, filled with stories, but the big leather-bound tomes, hopefully filled with how-to-stop-a-murderer information.

Luis has a pencil tucked behind his ear too. I point to it first.
“Let me guess…wooden stake?” I ask.
“Going for subtle. Don’t want to tip the vampires off, you know.”

“Can you stop thinking about everything so much?” Luis asks. “You’re seriously ruining my entire ensemble.”

Well, we have twenty-six municipal parks to pick from.

“What do we need to do?” I ask.
Luis and Shoshana glance at me, probably confused over where my sudden resolve came from.

Luis glowers at her. “Whatever. If you don’t want to help anymore, just say you don’t want to help.”

There’s a lot of landscaping with nice plants and stuff, but we walk right through them. Luis is very set on the idea of going exactly straight east from the murder scene. No deviations.

I jump down from the tree, not so much as making the leaves rustle as I hit the ground.

The line cinches around my ankle and the bandage gets yanked out of my hand. Before I know it, I’m hanging upside down, twenty feet in the air, dangling by my foot.

There are only so many ways someone can catch a vampire, and you know, I didn’t think a snare trap was going to work.