CHAPTER ONE
I always know when he turns up to try to kill me, again.
And I’d like to say this is because my witchy vampire-sensing powers tingle, or that I have developed some sort of cool bloodsucker-tracking spell, or even that my crack journalistic skills always unearth his every whereabout. But truthfully—he just has this certain scent. This wintry, oddly outdated scent, like something someone’s dad might have worn around 1987.
Probably because he could have been just that.
He was certainly six feet five and completely alive back then.
Hell, he was alive centuries before that. I once asked him how old he was and he said, After the first five hundred years you sort of lose track. And then I think he tried to crush me to death with a filing cabinet, so I didn’t really get the chance to go for some follow-up questions.
I never do, really.
Or if I ever have I don’t recall that part.
And I doubt I’ll get to ask any here, either, because that icy, sort of spiced scent hits me like a slap on the way home from my semi-friend Cassie’s New Year party, and next thing I know I’m halfway up the nearest tree. There are leaves in my mouth and branches practically up my butt, and I’m pretty sure I’m upside down.
All the blood is rushing to my head.
I swear his throwing arm is unhinged.
He could lob a truck across a goddamn football pitch.
It’s just a real pity that he has no penchant for playing sports with large vehicles. Instead, he has one for finding me in every life I mysteriously get reincarnated back into—even though most witches don’t—and turning it all to shit. In nineteenth-century England it was crashing big ships into Whitby, and then stalking me across cliff tops and almost eating my friends. In the 1920s, I was a silent movie star—I have old posters of a woman who looks like me but not like me—and he bought the studio I was contracted to, and cast himself in the role of someone I was supposed to kiss.
Of course I recoiled.
Making me recoil was the whole point.
I still remember his laughing eyes when I couldn’t do it—though, to be fair, his eyes always laugh when he fucks everything up for me. His favorite thing is trapping me into hideous positions that I can’t explain to anyone, and then meeting my tormented gaze to communicate his deep amusement over my predicament.
Like in the eighties, on the boardwalk, with the funfair behind us.
Me in my video store uniform, him in leather on a motorbike, with his little vampire gang. My best friend at the time wanting to go have such fun with all of them, me unable to explain why that was a super bad idea. Because that’s the thing, you see, about being a witch. About being any sort of supernatural being.
You can’t really tell any human what is going on.
You try to explain to them that a vampire is about to peel their scalp back like a shell from a boiled egg, and somehow the words just don’t come out right. Everything you’re saying gets bleeped out, like you’re in some kind of constant magical game show.
She thought I was talking about candy floss.
I can’t even remember if she got eaten or not.
I don’t remember everything from my other lives. Just snatches, impressions, moments where he made everything awful. Some sense of my own murder, most likely at his hands. I think it’s at his hands. It always feels like it’s at his hands, and really, who else’s hands would it be? One supernatural being who likes to throw you up trees is bizarre enough. A second gunman getting me from the grassy knoll just seems excessive.
It’s him.
It’s always him.
And now he’s come to my sweet home in Hollow Brook, where I finally managed to grow up so normal that I fell in love with the place, and my family, and my job, before I even started to get the memories and all my witchy powers. My youth was spent daydreaming of being a journalist, biking through piles of leaves to report on a pumpkin shortage for a school newspaper that didn’t exist until I made it so. My teenage years involved a lot of acting like I was some horror version of Nancy Drew, doing all the crime solving and investigating every instance of paranormal activity that I was just starting to sense.
And even better: this time, in this life, I’ve actually found friends.
Real friends, who can see all the supernatural things, too.
Cassie is such a massive witch she’s created a whole sanctuary for weird creatures. Her boyfriend is a werewolf. Her microwave talks to her, and her familiar is a raccoon called Pod. And Nancy, although newer to the supernatural business, is already dating a demon and doling out magical books from her bookstore, Better Off Read. And I know that donut-faced dog of hers can talk.
It thinks I can’t hear it. I’ve heard it, all right.
Tutting over my wine-colored stockings and my too-blunt bangs.
Hideous, I heard him say, last time I stopped by the store. And now I can actually reply one day, and maybe talk to them about witchy things, and then explain to them all about my vampire stalker and how to avoid him, and it’ll be okay. This time it will be okay. They will be safe in a way no one else could ever be.
They might even be able to help me do something about him.
But the problem is, I have to get out of this predicament first.
And things are not looking good on that front.
I can hear him pacing down below. The heavy thud of his no-doubt-enormous boots. Something rustles, and he curses, and I know he’s up to no good. He’s probably creating some kind of death trap. Or working out a way to saw down this tree—most likely by chomping through it with his enormous fangs.
And there’s not a thing I can do about it.
I couldn’t even manage to save the slice of cake Cassie had given me for my supper. That hint of pink I can see through the leaves is almost certainly the remains of it, smashed all over the dirt path. In fact, I know it is, because I hear his dry-as-a-desert-bone voice singsong up at me a moment later. “Oh, what a shame—strawberry flavor, your favorite,” he says, like the absolute motherfucker he is. Throws me up a tree, rips my best leather jacket, smashes my slab cake supper, and then mocks me over it?
“I’m shocked you even know what strawberry smells like, after a thousand years of a diet of blood. Oh, what on earth should I have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner today, red slop or red slop or red slop? That’s you, all the time.”
“Yes, I managed to fathom the joke, such as it was.”
“I’m gonna make you fathom my foot in your ass the second I get down.”
I hear him sigh. If all the leaves weren’t in the way I’m sure I would see him rolling his eyes. Although with him it’s not really much of an eye roll. He’s been alive so long all his expressions are faint, haunted versions of what they should be. A flicker of one lid, the barest hint of a look upward. “Haven’t we already done feet in butts, Mathilde? It feels a little passé, I have to say,” he says.
And now I’m spitting words at him through gritted teeth.
“I told you the last time you tried to kill me not to call me that.”
“Well, forgive me, after four goes at trying to do this it tends to get muddled.”
God, I think. Has it really been only four? It feels to me like ten thousand. Like we’ve been doing this since the dawn of time. He even says it like it’s secretly more, and I just don’t know it. “You’re not muddled. You know every one of the names I have had. And you know this one, too. You always know, you goddamn stalker,” I say as I do my best to shift position. I can see the curve of one of his enormous shoulders. A hint of that dirty-blond hair; the tip of one big boot. But I need more. I need some flesh, something soft and as close to vulnerable as he ever gets.
And if I can just reach this lower branch with one sneakered toe, if I can just slide around like this, on my stomach, nice and silently so he doesn’t clock what I’m doing, I might be able to get to it.
Especially now that he’s close to monologuing.
“It’s hardly stalking to notice the name Marley Maples under a picture of a person who is clearly you, in the window of this twee town’s bizarre newspaper,” he says, voice just a little less flat, a little less bored, now that he’s getting into the swing of things. “Though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it is bizarre, considering who’s writing every headline. My strange little witch, still always ready to say and do the most ridiculous things.”
“Gee, I wonder how I got this way. Couldn’t possibly be all the strangling.”
“How dare you. I have never stooped to anything as common and human as strangulation. In fact, if I recall, you were the stooper. You were the dirty strangler. You even said, as you committed this act of embarrassing mundanity, Oh, I love doing great big stranglings of you, Halsten.”
He puts on a high, breathy voice for that last part, startling enough that I almost overlook the problem with everything he just said. Because yeah, sure, I did once try to choke him out. Foolishly, considering he doesn’t actually breathe.
But the rest of it is a complete fabrication.
I would genuinely rather die than call him by his given name.
“Okay, first of all, in none of my lives have I ever called you Halsten.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to end that serious accusation on what you actually refer to me as. You massive butthole just doesn’t have the gravitas. And nor does … what was the other one you used to call me? Face … fucker? Fucking face? Maybe it was some combination of the two … fuckbutt. Holeface. Holebuttfacefuck,” he says, and I would be madder about it, I really would, if it weren’t giving me the chance to lean just a little to the right, and mime drawing back a bow with my hands.
Though of course I pretend I’m concentrating on the conversation.
“Oh my god,” I say. “Oh my god, where is a filing cabinet when you need it.”
And he sighs, in reply. “I told you, that was an accident.”
“And I told you, you never met a lie you didn’t fall hopelessly in love with.”
“That does sound like me, to be fair. But to be even fairer, stop trying to distract me in the hopes of getting a clear shot,” he says, and I have to laugh at that. He’s as good at this dance as I am—always drawing the eye with one part of the magic trick, while the other hand does the dirty work.
I bet he’s about to launch himself at my face.
But it’s fine, because I am already way ahead of him.
“Oh, fuckface. You should know by now I already have one,” I tell him.
Then I let the gleaming arrow I’ve made with my magic fly. Right through the perfect hole between the leaves, right through that frame around the left side of his face, so fast it whistles through the air, so unreal it almost looks like it isn’t there.
But it sure hits him as if it is.
It gets him square in the eye, plunging right in like a needle through an overripe grape. I almost hear it pop, and then he spins, stunned, flailing. And there it is: that needle-sharp tip emerging from the back of his skull. Straight all the way through, as if his head is a heart drawn on a teenager’s notebook.
Amazing to see, but I don’t have time to admire it.
I’m too busy making the gesture I use for flying—a fist first, then an open hand, and finally fingers curled over to wave once, twice, three times. Breath tightly held, half of me sure the spark isn’t going to happen. It frequently refuses to happen, when I panic too much and try to force it. Staying cool is always the name of the game when I’m doing my little magic moves.
But then I see it. A flicker of glittery blue, like all my best spells get.
I part my fingers and it stretches into a thread, ready to be wrapped around whatever I want to use to fly with. There’s just one problem, really—my options are pretty limited. In a pinch I could use my own legs, or maybe my boots. But the last time I tried that I ended up accidentally blasting across the Atlantic while upside down. Like a mad scientist in a movie who inadvertently invents hover shoes.
So much blood rushed to my head people thought I’d painted my face purple.
I don’t want to end up in France looking like a beetroot again.
So that leaves my satchel, which I know is going to be far too soft, and the contents of it, all of which are completely impractical. Notebooks and journals are my life, but they are barely going to carry one butt cheek. And of course I chose today to not bring my flying umbrella.
My usual one is long and pointy and perfect.
The thing I now have in my hand is as stumpy as a mushroom and so flimsy it flies inside out if someone breathes on it too hard. I try to extend it and it just groans. But unfortunately for me, fuckface is starting to think around the hole I put through his brain. And that gives me precisely zero time to think twice about it. He stops staggering and waving at the arrow currently impairing his ability to strategize, and starts trying to bellow my name in anger.
“Moopy Mables,” he manages.
And I just go for it.
I tuck the umbrella between my legs like some really uncomfortable-looking sex toy, and grab as much of the handle as I can, and kick off as hard as I am able to without completely unseating myself. Though of course it almost unseats me anyway. The umbrella comes close to squirting out of my grip, leaving me to spiral through a thousand branches and onto the cake-spattered ground.
Only my iron thigh muscles save me.
I squeeze with the strength of all the god knows how many girls before me who tried to crack his head like a walnut, and I stay on. I stay on. I’m sort of flying at a weird diagonal, and a branch just hit me in the boob, and I have lost one of my favorite boots, but I do not plummet to my death. And I manage to keep going, too. Fast, so fast it turns my hair into a dark streamer. It makes the world below no more than a smudge.
I hit Main Street before he’s even managed to get the arrow out.
Though I know exactly when he does. That deadening crunch is the feel of him crumpling my magic up in his fist. The sense of something fading is the last sparks dying out, as he flings them into the bushes. And that terrifying boom that almost seems to shake the world around me? That has lights being switched on all over Hollow Brook, as people try to figure out if the end of the world is nigh?
That’s him breaking the sound barrier as he launches himself into the air.
Because, yeah, he can fly. And hooooo boy, he can do it a lot faster than I’ve ever been able to. He once did a drive-by of Chicago and blew out every window on the twentieth floor of twelve buildings. Local news stations called it a freak weather event.
I call it having about ten seconds before he’s on me.
And I’m still twenty seconds away from the Gazette.
Come on, come on, come on, I urge my tiny umbrella, as he more than likely gets to the height he wants, and then starts his descent toward me. And when begging yields no results, I do something very inadvisable. Something I told myself not to try again—but I’m desperate, all right, I’m desperate.
He’s almost on me.
And I’m so close to safety.
Ten more seconds, just ten more.
I won’t have to control it for long, I tell myself, and then I squeeze my eyes shut tight, and make the gesture. Faster, I urge the umbrella, with my magic. Faster, faster, faster, I spell, and oh god, the way the whole world seems to lurch when I do. It’s like being punched in the gut by a fistful of oxygen. I immediately almost slide right off, and only manage not to by throwing myself sideways.
But that just sends me into a spiral.
I actually go all the way around, like I’m on some sort of hellish fairground attraction. My hair brushes the ground; my legs flail around in the air. And I’m entirely upside down when I get within striking distance of the front door of the Gazette. No way am I going to be able to successfully magic it open, I know. Most likely I’m going to end up crashing through plate glass, while my spell hits the attic room window and lets in a nice chill breeze.
Though I do it anyway.
I smell his winter scent, and feel the cold of his touch almost claiming me, and I just do it. I aim at whatever I can, and curl myself into as much of a ball as possible, under the circumstances, half of me screaming between clenched teeth and half of me moving too quick to get sound out.
And oh my days, the door is open.
The door is fucking open.
I’m through, I think, with such a surge of elation and relief that I don’t realize two very important things. The first being the grip he has on my clothes when I do all of this. And the second being what exactly is going to happen to said clothes when I barrel into the offices of the Gazette.
While he stays on the outside.
But oh, I sure know it once I’m sprawled on the dusty green-and-gray-checked floor—umbrella flung fuck knows where, breath coming in ragged gulps, hair like something from an eighties rock band—and then unthinkingly try to stand up and be all triumphant. Because the moment I do, the front half of my entire outfit peels off me like the skin from a banana, and flops onto the ground.
I’m left with two sleeves, and my underwear.
And even my underwear is barely holding on.
Somehow he managed to snag half my pantyhose, along with my skirt and jacket and top. Though I say somehow, when really the evidence of how he did it is right there. He’s standing in my doorway, with the entire back of my outfit still clutched in one of his fists. And the fist itself is as fucking enormous as I remember. He could probably rip the rings off Saturn with that thing. I’m amazed he didn’t take half my skin along with everything else.
I can’t be grateful he left half my skin behind, however.
He can currently see just about everything I have.
Or at least he would be able to, if he was looking. But he has mockingly averted his gaze in a way that is even more maddening than if he’d just stared. “Oh, you’re such a gentleman,” I spit at him as I’m forced to grab a folder to cover my near nakedness. It has a sticker of a smiling pumpkin on the front that Nancy stuck there last time she stopped by to chat.
You know, just to add some extra indignity.
Even though I’m already at maximum.
“Well, you know, I have seen it all before,” he says, so casually that for a second I find myself wondering. I go back through my catalog of lives, searching around for some incident. And something does sort of glimmer in the back of my mind, I have to say. A shadowy hint of bare skin, a sense of someone’s hand on my back. But then I remember who I’m dealing with.
“As if I’m gonna fall for that. You have never seen my nude body.”
“I haven’t? Huh. Maybe you’re right. I must be thinking of the other woman I’m immortally stalking across time itself. She’s much nicer than you—I don’t have to grow back a fucking eyeball every time we meet.”
“Awww, was it hard? Did it hurt?”
“No, it felt like being licked by kittens,” he drawls, face so deadpan it almost hits whatever is past that. Zombie Crock-Pot, I figure—though that isn’t the impressive part. No, the impressive part is the way he snaps into a snarl a second later. “Of course it fucking hurt, you made a tunnel through my brain. I can still see moonlight from the inside of my skull. A second ago I could speak perfect Swedish and now I can’t remember a single Swedish word.”
“Oh, give me a break, you can. It’s your first fucking language.”
“You don’t know that. Stop trying to say it like you do just so I’ll admit it.”
“I don’t need you to admit it. Your incredibly thick accent is right there for everyone’s ears to hear. No one in the world could miss it—you make the Swedish chef sound like Harrison Ford,” I say, in part because it’s true.
But mostly to cover what I really think, and suspect he knows:
That to me, his accent sounds like a slow-moving river, sliding over the smoothest stones. Sometimes he starts in on some villain monologue, and I find myself actually listening. Like he’s some soothsayer sitting in front of a fire, telling stories in a way that has people traveling miles to hear.
It’s just a shame that the content of the stories is so annoying.
“Fine, I’m going to do this one from now on just to spite you,” he tells me, his sentence trailing off into what can only be described as a British actor’s version of someone from the Deep South. It makes my hair just about stand on end.
“Oh my god, don’t you dare. Oh, good lord, that is ear nightmare fuel.”
“Well, boy, howdy, I rightly don’t know what you mean, little lady.”
“Fuck. Why does it show so much of your normal non-vampire teeth when you do that voice? That is so unsettling,” I exclaim—because somehow it does. Though after a second, I realize why. “I never noticed before how much you talk with your lips almost closed. Like a ventriloquist.”
“I prefer to think of it as cultivating an air of cold mystery.”
“Honestly I don’t think you need your lips to do that. The giant fangs do it the moment you let them jump out of your incisors and attempt to chew off my face,” I say, much to his deep irritation. He rolls his eyes, like I’m a student who just refuses to learn anything from his many worldly lessons.
“I’ve told you a million times before they don’t jump out of my incisors. How would jumping out of incisors even be possible? Teeth are solid, they would break apart the moment my razor blades tried to burst out of them. No, they come from the gums above, like so,” he tells me.
And even though he gives me warning of what he’s going to do, even though I’m safe behind the barrier of no invitation, I still somehow fucking jump the second he does it. Though, to be fair, it’s quite a bit more gnarly than it looks in most movies and shows. They’re so large and sharp they sort of distort his upper lip. You can see the curved shape of them just underneath the flesh between his nose and his mouth, and not just because they emerge from the gum.
There’s more than two.
More like six, total—four of them smaller than the incisors and so, less visible, but still definitely there. And the sound he makes when he snaps forward to show them off. It’s like the hiss of some ancient and enormous reptile. I jerk just hearing that, never mind anything else.
But I think I hide it well.
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I boring you? Would you like me to do the eye thing, as well?” he asks, and when he does I have to force myself not to think about it. They’re worse than the teeth, in some ways. Feral seeming somehow, and pale as winter. Like evil sucked all the color right out of them.
“Sorry, I’ll have to pass,” I say, in as withering a way as I can manage. “I have four episodes of Gilmore Girls to watch, and I need my eyeballs intact for that. But you know, enjoy your lurking around outside the home you’re not invited into.”
Then I turn, and head toward the stairway up to my apartment.
Folder behind me, of course, to make sure he doesn’t get too much of my ass.
Though I get the feeling he doesn’t much care about what I’m almost flashing. And doubly so when he laughs. Oh, I know that laugh. It’s the one he uses when he knows something I don’t, and it makes me freeze. It makes me look back over my shoulder, just in time to hear him speak.
“Right. Well. About that,” he says.
And I watch, in horror, as he lifts one big boot and just levers it right over the barrier I assumed was there. You know what they say about that word, I think, mindlessly.
As my monster steps fully inside.
CHAPTER TWO
Of course I know right away the mistake I made. Never trust zoning laws when it comes to identifying the boundaries of your home, in order to secure it from vampires. Because, sure, the paperwork says the domicile starts at the door of the building. But supernatural shit doesn’t care about paperwork. It cares about whatever nonsense it’s randomly decided on.
And in this case, it has apparently decided that my home is up two flights of stairs and through a different door altogether. The door I do, admittedly, treat like a different entrance. I have deadbolts on it. Keys to get into it. A spy hole.
Oh god, is the spy hole the reason I’m fucked?
I don’t know. I don’t have time to know. I am nearly nude in the offices of the Gazette with a six-foot-five-inch psychotic vampire, about ten minutes after I shot an arrow through his head. If I give him even a second he’s going to wrench my arms off and use them to play my body like a pair of bongos.
He even tells me so. He says something that sounds like: “I cannot wait to turn you into the percussion section of my own personal orchestra” as he stalks toward me. And it doesn’t take much stalking, either. Two massive strides and he’s within spitting distance of me. Two more and he’ll have me by the throat. Yet all I can do in response is stumble, and then scrabble backward on my butt, too flabbergasted to come up with anything better.
Though, to be fair, fleeing while half naked is no joke.
My stockings are in shreds, and they dig into my thighs when I try to scramble onto my front. I think one of my bra straps is gone because I can feel things sliding around in a real distracting way. Part of me wants to grab the cup and hold it up, but I know I don’t have time for that.
If I flash my tits, I flash them.
That cold I can feel is him leaning down to get ahold of my ankle. He almost grabs it, in fact. I sense something brush my heel about a second before I manage to snatch it toward my body, get my foot under me, and push off. I practically lunge for the stairs and fling myself up. Two at a time, almost on all fours, hands scrabbling for purchase as much as my feet are.
And it’s still not enough.
Of course it isn’t—he can move so fast he becomes a blur. Sometimes it looks like a magic trick: he went in that door, now he emerges impossibly from the other. Yet still, somehow, I scream in shock when he gets me. “No, no, no,” I yell frantically, and kick out at the hand that has my ankle, like some silly little kid.
But can you blame me?
It’s like being hauled down into the mouth of a shark.
I think of the movie Jaws before I’ve even looked back at him, of that old grizzled guy sliding toward that gaping, chomping maw. I imagine myself being swallowed whole, and can’t help panicking.
And of course he’s a fucking ass about it.
“Come on, Marley, you can do better than this. Where are the fireballs, the sudden holes in the floor, the attempts at turning me to stone. Hit me hard, you can do it,” he’s saying as he drags me inexorably toward him. Fangs bared in what is almost a smile, those eyes like holes in the middle of the ocean, hands almost like a caress now, almost like a plea, almost like something that could seduce me in and never let me go. For a second I get the strangest doubling sensation, and it doesn’t just feel impossible to escape him.
It feels impossible that I might want to. And then those teeth get close enough to kiss my skin, and I shake it off. I see the real horror. I feel it, right down to my bones.
He’s going to bite me.
For the first time, I’m going to feel those teeth sink into my tender flesh.
Though of course I always think he must have once before. I just don’t remember it, I don’t recall; my mind has blacked out this harrowing memory. Surely, I always think, surely he did, even as the brand-new horror of this grips me. I come close to begging him. To saying his name—Halsten, please, please.
Then even stranger, I hear it in a different language in my head.
Snälla gör mig inte illa, I think.
Maybe I even say it, I can’t tell.
I only know that he lets go, abruptly. And when he does, every bit of sense in my head comes flooding back. The panic ebbs, and is replaced by the intense understanding of what I am. A fucking witch, I think, as fierce as the sun, and then I bring my hands together. I do it hard, so hard it sounds like a gunshot when they connect. My palms sting; it feels as if dust billows out from that point of contact.
But it isn’t just dust that results.
It’s thunder. Hands together is thunder.
And the sound of it alone, in this small space, booms him backward. He goes ass over tit down the stairs and back out into the office, papers and pencils and the bunting from the Halloween fair billowing with him. It’s like seeing a strong and sudden gust of wind—and one he does not appreciate.
He stops the roll he’s in with one hand out, those sudden iron claws digging furrows into my fucking floor. Then he gives me an even more horrendous snarl than I got at the door, thick with what seems like frustration. This time he gets the vampiric eyes, and yeah, they’re as bad as I remember. Like his soul has been stripped away.
But it’s okay.
Something else usually comes with thunder, after all.
Something that makes the lightbulbs in all the lamps blow as one. They snap, crackle, and pop like Rice Krispies, and with that comes the stench of ozone. The heat of electricity, caught in a too-small place. Threads of it ripple over the walls, the ceiling, my desk. Something catches fire, but I don’t care.
He’s just lost that furious, teeth-bared expression.
He sees that electricity and it folds like a bad poker hand. His eyes go wide; he jerks back. He even lifts his hands, palms out, in the universally accepted gesture for have mercy. “Wait, wait, wait,” he says, but oh, too late, motherfucker.
My feet are already lifting off the ground. My hair is standing straight up off my head. I can feel my eyes in their sockets, no longer a soft and ordinary hazel, but swirling like whirlpools made of lightning. “But darling, I thought you wanted the witch?” I say, in the exact same tone he used to taunt me over the cake.
Then I simply let loose.
Like pitching a ball, only the ball is lightning. It blazes, blowing a hole in his shoulder. He actually makes a noise that almost sounds like agony the moment it passes through. And once he’s on his back, faintly steaming, he can’t at first get it together. He touches the bloody, ragged wound with an almost offended look on his face. Then turns to me, near pouting about it.
But to be fair to him, it is enormous.
I can see most of my noticeboard through it. He could probably fit his hand right in there and wave at me from the back. If he didn’t happen to be a fucking psychopath, and he wasn’t already healing, I’d be sorry. Instead of what I actually am: ready to seize this opportunity to get the fuck out of here.
I’ve got about five seconds, I reckon, so I don’t bother with the stairs, searching for my keys, the door. I simply aim for the ceiling, and blast a hole right through to my apartment. Then just as he realizes what I’m doing and scrambles to get at me, I aim lightning at the floor.
Sloppily, I have to say.
The sight of his fangs and his claws makes me panic, just a little, and it hits a little too much to one side. I get propelled upward, all right, but slightly on the diagonal. Jagged plaster teeth scrape at my arm; I think I crack my leg against some floorboards. And it slows me down just enough that I’m sure I feel something.
His hand on my ankle, suddenly desperate.
The brief sense of being dragged back to my doom.
I scream and kick, and get a hand on the tufted remains of my cheap blue carpet. Then another, when I can feel that’s not going to be enough. I practically ball it up into my fists—though it’s not this that saves me.
It’s my phone.
My asshole phone, that refused to have any part of me going to this party.
You reveal that you’re a witch to anyone or anything in this silly town, and you’re going to attract your supernatural stalker, she had said. Keeping it a secret is the only thing that’s kept him away from you. And she had been right, quite clearly. She’s going to be insufferable about it, obviously.
But she must hear me crying out in terror, because she makes her own sound in return. Something so high-pitched that I can hardly hear it—like a broken whistle, blown far away. Only that’s clearly not what it seems like to him. He hears it and almost immediately lets go. I see him just beyond my body, through this hole, and he’s clutching at the sides of his head.
He’s on the floor.
It’s fucking with his bat-like hearing, clearly.
And it gives me all the time I need to haul myself up, and through, to something like safety.
Copyright © 2026 by Charlotte Stein.