Ellie took a step closer to Wood and patted him on the shoulder. Then she looked down at the spot where the corpse had been, pulled out a rather large bottle of bleach from her inventory, uncapped it and then started drowning the area with the rancid liquid.

“They use this to destroy physical evidence in murder cases,” Ellie said as she doused the area. “So, it should destroy what's left of his scent, or any other biologicals on the ground.”

I forgot that Ellie was such a big fan of forensic crime scene investigation shows: CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds. She knew more about getting rid of bodies than any one of us. Maybe one day she would have been a really good forensic investigator… or maybe a defense lawyer.

She reached down and picked up the gem Travis’ corpse had left behind and handed it to Wood. “Put it in your inventory, just in case it carries his scent.”

***

I felt strange. There was a dead body. We all knew who it was, and he’d tried really hard to kill us all, as evidenced by the gaping hole it tore in the roof of the Pizzeria. But now it just wasn't here. The body had gone poof. We knew where it was. Wood definitely knew where it was. But, if it wasn't for the spot of ground with Clorox all over it, you’d never know there was ever a dead human body here.

The fact that this was where my friends had dumped all the monsters they killed was kind of creepy too. I get it. The monsters’ bodies turned to dust by morning. There was no reason to go out of their way the dump bodies further away. But still… that shit was creepy.

But I had to admit, if they hadn't been dumping their bodies so close, then we would have never known that we had killed an actual person. Well, that Oz had killed an actual person. But, truthfully, if we had been able to, we would have killed the werewolf as soon as it showed up. And we definitely would have killed the werewolf if we could have, before tore its way through our roof. Oz had just beat us to it. And he did it with extreme of a plume.

The pale, perfect skinned bastard…

The whole scenario of the wolf tearing through our roof was more than a little Three Little Pigs.

Silently I wondered if somewhere inside Oz—especially now that he was a creature of the night with enhanced senses—had part of him known that the beast was Travis Deverell?

If so, had he felt an extra sense of satisfaction when he’d snapped his neck?

We'd all gone back to the pizzeria, and though none of us really felt like doing anything right then–the fact that a human being had been killed, and we'd been in on it–made the thought of going out and grinding seem really unappealing.

But we now all knew how much we needed to level up, how much we needed to grind. After all, Travis may have killed us all in the pizzeria last night. And that was just one monster. We needed to become more powerful, and had a lot of work to do.

While we were getting ready to go out and start grinding again, mentally I went over what I remembered about The Travai.

One of them graduated the year before, and the other two had barely graduated with us. Travis Deverell should have graduated the year before us, but hadn't. Sure, the education system liked to profess No Child Left Behind, but in Travis's case they found a reason. That reason may have been that he'd seduced the principal's daughter, taking her virginity and then telling everybody in the school about it. Their relationship had not lasted after that. I wasn't sure Travis had wanted it to. He had seen something he wanted, and then he took it. The fact that it was something that would stick it to the principal of the school, Mr. Hurley, was just an added bonus.

Probably.

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This is all conjecture on my part. I didn't know the ins and outs of Travis Deverell’s mind. I never would.

He also might have gotten left behind because he and his two compatriots had broken into the high school and left it in a shambles, multiple times. Be it covering the floor of the Home Economics classroom in hey and cow dung, decorating the Chemistry lab with shaving cream, toilet paper and glitter, or somehow filling the Band room with over three dozen rats—and trashing principal’s office on three separate occasions—The Travai had become infamous.

The fact that Travis Deverell had been a straight D student, who had literally strong-armed smarter students into doing his homework for him, may have been another deciding factor in leaving him behind with us.

Whatever it was, he had been held back and had graduated with us.

All three had been arrested during their time at Mars High. All three had very low GPAs and long, detailed permanent files. And all three had parents that really didn't care. If anything, the three boys’ parents seemed by all accounts to enjoy the fact that their kids were monsters.

Heck, if they were still alive, they probably would have thought it was a hoot that their boys were now werewolves.

Teddy came back from his reconnaissance, and after we filled him in on the Travai corpse situation, we all went out on the town, our weapons drawn and ready for whatever would attack us. Like the day before, it took us a while before we ran into anything monstrous. But the thing we ran into was not something we were going to try and fight. I’d never seen anything like it, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. But as soon as Ellie saw it, she’d grabbed hold of both me and Wood and pulled us down behind a smashed car.

“What is it?” I asked.

Ellie had brought her finger up to her mouth and hushed me. Sneakily, she poked her head up and out so that she could keep an eye on whatever it was. I leaned in and looked around her head. What I saw was fucking strange as hell. It looked like a car sized square of Styrofoam, with lateral lines either drawn or cut through it, and it was kind of… well, it was as if it was see-through. Ghostly.

It hovered over the ground, slowly moving over the terrain. Ellie grabbed hold of me and pulled me back, her finger again over her lips, telling me to keep it quiet. It took a few minutes, but whatever it was eventually moved away from where we were. When it seemed safe, Ellie led us off in the opposite direction.

“What the fuck was that thing?” I whispered to Ellie when we were far enough away.

Teddy was the one that answered. “The stats box says that it's a Sleep Eater. We've seen it eating things while they were asleep. Once it starts, it's victims never wake up and it just keeps eating them. Mostly we’ve only seen it get a hold of animals, but the stats box says that it will eat any living creature that it comes across that is asleep.

“That's… fucking horrible,” I said.

“You should see it in action,” Wood chimed in. “It starts to change color as it dissolves whatever it's devouring. Chunks will float through it. It's really disgusting.”

“The worst part,” Ellie said, “is that it can change itself into looking just like whatever it just ate. It doesn't last long, but it's really fucking creepy.”

Fucking Creepy should be the name of whatever this game is. No, the game should be called Sadistic Assholes Torturing Us.

“And,” Teddy said, “if it touches you while your awake, it marks you as its next meal, and will track you down to eat you while you sleep.”

Okay, that was way worse than it turning into you for a while. But not as bad as the dissolving you bit.

We were passing by the police station on the edge of town when we heard something skitter to our right. There was a really big pile of road salt nestled under the protection of one of those metal garages. We saw something slip away out of the shadows and then move up the hill, through the trees and up the hillside.

“I think it’s a cat,” Teddy said.

As I watched the cat scurry up the hill, I could see there was something weird about it, the way it moved, how much it seemed to be able to grasp hold of branches, roots, and even trees as it ascended upwards at a startling pace.

But I didn't have time to really think about the cat. My eyes were abruptly drawn to the top of the hill, to a figure standing all by herself, staring down at us. She was covered by a flowing cloak, and had dark lips twisted into a disdainful smile.

The cat conquered the hill, and then jumped from the ground up onto her shoulder, perching there and staring down at us with her.

I knew her. We'd gone to school with her, I was sure of it. I noticed a crazy glimmer in her eyes, and realized who it was. The girl from my senior English class. The one that said, “Nightmares are dreams, too.” She just didn't have all the goth makeup on right now. Though, she was startlingly pale without it.

I hadn't really noticed, but my friends and I had walked off the road, on past the shed with the giant pile of salt, and were standing precariously close to the bottom of the hill.

That was strange, and not in a good way. Okay, time to stop staring and say something.

“Hey there!” I called up to her. “I think we had a class together in school.” Totally smooth of me.

She didn't answer. What she did do was hold up her hand to show us that she had something in it. And that something, inexplicably, was a grenade. I watched in horror as she made a show of reaching up, pulling the pin out, and then tossing the grenade in our direction.