Emily took a step away from me. "I'm over here, Daddy. By the back fence."

"Don't call him over here!" I whispered.

"Am I supposed to ignore him? He'll be on the phone with the police so fast . . ."

Her dad came around the corner, dressed in his robe, on the edge of panic. Emily stepped out of the shadow of the fence and faked a yawn. Her dad almost collapsed with relief.

"What are doing out here?" he said. "It's after midnight!"

"I just wanted to be alone for a while. So I could pray."

She was a fantastic actress. And full of crap. I couldn't believe she would use praying as an alibi for what we were actually doing.

Her father and I couldn't have been more than eight feet apart and we were facing each other dead-on. I felt completely exposed, and I kept myself pressed against the fence like a coat of paint. But his eyes glided right past me, unseeing. Parva was right. Humans really were blind.

I believe that was the first time I ever thought of myself as inhuman. I could see in the dark and humans couldn't. I could hear people moving in their houses and humans couldn't. Humans ate things like sandwiches and croissants. I couldn't be bothered to play house with their cardboard food.

"God can hear you from your bedroom, Emily," said her dad. "Let's go."

"Okay, but can I just have one more minute alone?"

Her dad sighed. I could almost feel his internal struggle between protecting his daughter and following his usual pattern of letting Emmy have whatever she wanted.

"One minute," he finally said. "I'll be standing in the living room, watching a clock."

"Thanks, Daddy. I'll come right inside, I promise."

He walked into the house, but once he was inside he came back through and stood by the window closest to us. He was breathing softly. Listening.

"Nathaniel---" she began, but I put a finger to my lips and pointed to the window. She didn't come any closer. Instead, she started talking. Her voice was just a breath, so quiet that no one could have heard it but me.

"Listen," she said. "Just because this happened doesn't mean that we're friends now."

"Emily---" I began, but she didn't hear it and she kept talking right over me. I realized that that was what she wanted. She wanted to give me a speech, and she didn't want to hear any arguments.

"You do not come up to me and you do not talk to me at school," she was saying. "And I'd better never hear your loser friends saying stuff about you and me getting freaky or whatever."

I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

She watched me, as though she had a torrent of things to unload and not enough time to do it. Finally, she held both hands up and said, "Just stay the hell away from me."

Then she took a deep breath and said, loudly, "Amen." She stalked away and disappeared around the house. Seconds later, the front door clicked shut.

* * *

Emily still hated me. Well, I understood why. And refusing to acknowledge me at school was something she would have done anyway, so it's not like sucking her blood would have magically made all that go away.

But something had happened between us that I didn't understand. I couldn't even think of the way I felt about her as obsessive as much as possessive. Even though the insane clinginess had left me for the moment, inside I still yearned for her. But why? Was it a side effect of biting her? If so, I'd never heard of such a thing.

I couldn't help but feel like Emily had found the place where she belonged in my life and cemented herself there. It didn't matter if she hated me or insulted me. It didn't matter that I thought she was vapid and spoiled. I didn't like her, but I had her. Whether or not either of us was happy about it, she was mine.

If only I knew what was I supposed to do with her.

I made it back home just in time to beat my mother there. When she came to check on me, I jumped in bed and pretended to be sleeping. Taking the coward's way out again, but I still wasn't ready to face her.

After she'd eaten and gone to bed, I got up but left the lights off. Now that I wasn't going to be arrested anymore, an old, perennial problem had reemerged. Homework.

I forced myself to finish my geometry and English. As soon as I was done, though, I went to work trying to find information about vampires online. Not surprisingly, I didn't find anything that sounded even halfway accurate. Everything was the same: confessions from "vampire victims" that reminded me of alien abduction stories. Lost time, waking up in an unfamiliar place with missing memories and a suspicious wound on the neck. It was all the same kind of crap on which I'd based my own beliefs about vampires before Parva unseated them all. No mention of panic or obsessive groping or weird thunks that felt like two souls merging into one.

My mind was running the same programs over and over and nothing was getting resolved. So I opened up the game script instead and made a half-hearted attempt to fix it. I couldn't focus on it. My attention kept getting pulled to the sounds of animals outside. I lounged in my computer chair and listened to them digging beneath the bushes outside. Foraging for bugs or whatever animals do. Enjoying the earth now that they had it to themselves. Their existence seemed so simple. So pure. To them, the humans were, with their noise and lights and garish colors, the nightlife.

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Before I knew it, I was up and looking for my sneakers. I had no idea what I'd done with them. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd worn them. I found them downstairs in the living room, sitting next to the sofa with a sock stuffed into each one. I put the socks on, and then the sneakers, and then I got a coat out of the closet and put that on, too. Then I walked around the living room trying to pretend I didn't feel stifled and claustrophobic. Like a mummy. Like a dog wearing a little sweater. Finally, I sloughed it all off and went outside in my T-shirt and jeans.

This was the first time in my life I'd gone outside with no purpose. I was just there. And, to my surprise, I liked it. The freezing air was invigorating, not incapacitating. The neighborhood was awash in bright, cold moonlight. I stepped off the porch and into the grass. If there were stickers, I didn't notice them. Instead, I curled my bare toes into the grass and enjoyed the crisp frost on each blade.

I didn't know whether to be pleased or concerned. I liked everything about this new, early-morning world, but I shouldn't have. I was, as my mother would have put it, a hermit. I wanted my bedroom. I wanted my games. The only time I went anywhere was so I could hang out in some other guy's bedroom and play his games. I'd never enjoyed camping, sports, hunting, fishing, lawn work, car maintenance, hanging out shirtless near a convenience store, or any of that stereotypical man stuff that required one to be outside. Yet here I was, breathing in the smells of crushed grass and wild animals as though I belonged here. But if I belonged here, where in the heck had I been living for the last sixteen years?

I walked from one end of my neighborhood to the other, taking everything in without prejudice. I used yards and alleys instead of the streets. I prowled all the side roads and explored the end of each cul-de-sac. I jumped locked gates and climbed fences. I drew the line at peeking through open windows, although I wanted to. I felt like I wouldn't be able to rest until I'd mapped out every inch of my neighborhood.

I began to notice that I was unconsciously looking for something. But what? Criminals? Mountain lions? I had no idea. But in the back of my mind was that same yearning for Emily, that same low-key hum of possessiveness, and it compelled me to pace off a boundary around the area where we both lived and assure myself it was "clean," whatever that meant. All I knew was the more territory I covered, the more at ease I felt. There was nothing here that might threaten Emily. Nothing, of course, except me.

Once I was satisfied that I wasn't going to find whatever it was I was searching for, I started to pay attention to smaller, less threatening sounds. Animals. I could smell them everywhere, hear them scratching in flower beds or under trees. They could smell and hear me, too, and whenever I approached them they froze and pretended to be part of the scenery the way I had frozen in front of Emily's dad. Still, there was always something to give them away. A musk of alarm. A thrumming heartbeat of fear. They couldn't hide from me, not really.

I started to think of it as a game. How close could I get to something before it realized I was there? After a few experiments, I discovered: really freaking close. I learned that if I could smell the animal, that meant I was downwind and it couldn't smell me. I began to figure out how to put my feet down so that they made almost no noise at all. Soon I was sneaking up on cats and raccoons. I tried to catch one and had to get clawed before I realized that sneaking wasn't the only thing I needed to learn.

I found a rat and I stalked it until I was only a few feet away. Then I tried doing that thing I'd done to Emily. I told it to calm down. Not with words, obviously, but I don't know how else to say it. Urged it. Pushed it. Whatever it's called, it didn't work. The rat darted away and left me wondering what I was doing wrong. And then I wondered if it mattered. What was I supposed to do with a captured rat, anyway? I wasn't going to eat it.

Or was I?

Well, why not? Animals had blood in them, too. And maybe I could use it. Avoid the unsafe human-biting practice altogether.

I decided to test it out. I crept around until I ran across a family of rabbits. They were eating lettuce in a garden and didn't notice me sneaking up on them until I had one of them in my hand. It struggled and kicked and tried to bite me, but I didn't let myself drop it. I had to try. It was either bite the rabbit or resign myself to a life of attacking and maybe killing human beings.

I held the rabbit in both hands so it wouldn't claw me and lifted it to my face. It smelled oily. And musky and wild. But I managed to convince my canines to come out by promising them nice, warm blood. I put my teeth against the rabbit's throat and tried not to breathe too much.

The rabbit screamed.

I had no idea that rabbits could scream. If I'd been a hunter, maybe I would have known. But I didn't, and the scream shocked me so much that I almost dropped it.

But I held it still and silently begged it to shut up [https://img.wattpad.com/c3486b5ea8ce8cd08514885a0871fc6764a0aa9d/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f6875306c5f686c756e6e657679673d3d2d313336313235313934372e313737303938346539623730363231333432303333363135313936312e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]

But I held it still and silently begged it to shut up. By some miracle, it shut up. It still wriggled, though, so I told it to be still. It stilled.

Then it lay in my hands, its tiny heart fluttering in terror. So I told it to go to sleep, and it did.

I didn't know why it worked on the rabbit and not the rat. Maybe the rat was too dumb to be controlled. Or maybe I could only stun something I was about to eat. But I held my breath and tried to bite the rabbit.

I didn't even break the skin. That should have been a clue that my subconscious vampire nature had no interest in this rabbit snack, but I wasn't going to back down from the challenge. I closed my eyes and pushed past the fur, past the hide, until blood erupted from a pierced vein. The blood tasted like the rabbit smelled. Wild and gamy and blah. Not interesting. Not satisfying. Not food.

I pulled back from the rabbit and watched it to see if it would live. I had to know. There was nothing I could have done to save it if it died, but I couldn't stand the thought of leaving its little body in the garden without knowing.

But the bite wounds closed over quickly. More quickly than any cut I ever got before I was a vampire. And the rabbit's heart continued to beat as it slept. Relieved, I placed it in the garden between two rows of lettuce. Now I knew. Local rabbits weren't going to do the trick. It had to be human blood. Only the finest red wine for Monsieur.

I finished exploring and made it home as the sun was rising. Then I got in the shower and stood under the warm water for a long time. I felt like I had a hundred layers to wash away. The dirt from my barefooted prowling. The smell of rabbit. The sweat from my nightmares. My mother's mistrust. Emily's hatred of me. My fear of myself.

After my shower, I took my time getting dressed. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I put my homework in my backpack and made myself cram my feet into my sneakers. Then I grabbed the ridiculous aviator sunglasses and headed downstairs.

It was seven o'clock on a Monday morning, and if I didn't hurry I was going to be late for school.