Episode 1
MONSTERS AND MADNESS
I felt grief before I even opened my eyes. It had settled in my heart like stones, like human-size boulders, weighing it and me and everything down so I knew I shouldn’t open my eyes. I should never open my eyes again.
But I had to. I had to see.
I had to confirm the awful thing my bones and blood and soul seemed to know before my mind could catch up.
Because all I could smell was blood. Could sense that it was everywhere. My skin was sticky with it. It was cold now, but the coppery smell lingered like a wet blanket in the air. The sheer intensity of it forced me to open my eyes because there was so, so much.
Only that wasn’t what worried me. That wasn’t what dragged my heart into my stomach and bubbled up in my throat like acid.
What worried me was that blood was everywhere, and I wasn’t hungry for it.
With this amount of blood, I should be insatiable. Instead, my already bloated stomach wretched at the idea of drinking more. Even while my incisors refused to shrink back. They stayed engorged, pushing awkwardly into my bottom lip and crowding out my raw tongue. This wasn’t how it worked. This wasn’t how any of it worked.
Why were they stuck like this? Why did the blood in the air sing to my spirit at the same time dread curdled like rotten milk in my gut?
When I finally peeled back my eyelids to behold the destruction, I had the answers to all my awful questions.
This wasn’t blood I was ever supposed to drink. This wasn’t blood I’d ever wanted to drink. What had I done?
Oh my God, what had I done?
His head lolled in my lap, eyes unseeing, mouth frozen in a silent scream of agony. A vicious gash in his neck gaped open and was too grotesque to look at for longer than a second. No blood poured from the wound. He’d been drained dry. Completely dry. His once tanned, perfect skin was as red as mine—coated in his own blood and gore and death.
That realization made me even sicker. A sob caught in my throat while my head reeled with the possibilities of what happened and how we got like this.
No, that wasn’t true.
I knew what happened. It was me. I happened.
I wanted to puke, but my stupid body wouldn’t let me. No matter how much excessive blood I’d consumed tonight, my body would only burn it as fuel. It would never reject something so precious. Something so delicious.
Something I’d been depriving it of for years.
That moment right there—with my belly full of blood that wasn’t mine and the boy I’d loved so fiercely dead in my arms—was my first truly hopeless moment. There was only despair. Only grief. Only heartbreak. The deafening, shattering, upending kind of anguish.
Things had been bad before, but never like this. Never so wrong.
Never so utterly and unforgivably my fault.
As I became more aware of my surroundings, I could hear sirens blaring in the distance. The room I was in was dark, but my superhuman eyesight zoned in on the fresh coat of blood splashed over the walls, the ceiling, and the couch all around me. So much blood.
Too much blood to have been from just one body.
The sirens screamed closer. Several of them. Were they coming here? Were they coming for me?
I shook my head, my damp hair dripping with blood dragging red streaks across my bare shoulders and cheeks. I ran my tongue over my stubborn, sharp teeth that refused to retract. I pushed at them with my tongue but only managed to slice the sensitive skin. More blood filled my mouth—mine this time—and I gagged at the too-full feeling that pulsed through my stomach.
My head felt so fuzzy. Why couldn’t I remember what happened? Why couldn’t I remember what triggered my loss of control? Not just prompted it but blew the dam and opened the floodgates of the monster that always lurked inside.
Had I lost my mind? Finally?
My consciousness seemed to float outside my body, hovering around the perimeter of reality but struggling to touch down. I felt like I had a bird’s-eye view of my body, of my life, as my hand reached up to cradle Blake’s tormented face. “I’m so sorry.” Tears streamed from my eyes and a keening wail worked itself into my throat.
Why, why, why, why, why…? At some point I’d started rocking back and forth, clutching his dead body to my chest. How could this have happened? How could this have happened? HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?!
I loved this man. Loved him. Not just like some high school, teenage, stupid, make-believe love but truly loved him.
We were going to get married after high school. He was going to get me away from my family. I was going to follow him around the world as he pursued his dream of becoming a Marine. We were just two short years from our happily ever after. How could I have ruined things so completely?
How could I have ruined him so permanently?
But that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. I never would have let myself spin this far out of control.
I was reckless, but I wasn’t stupid.
I wasn’t stupid.
I wasn’t.
Oh my God, then why was he dead???
The sirens shrieked louder and louder. They were here. They’d come to this house. I should go. This looked so bad.
This was so bad.
I didn’t even know where we were or whose house we were at. Had we done something earlier tonight? Taken something? Drugs?
I jerked my chin back and forth, desperate for the fuzziness to dissipate. I needed to think. I needed to remember. I needed to do something. The truth was there, buried somewhere in the after haze of blood lust. Closing my eyes in an effort to conjure the events of the night was like swimming in a sea of inky, black nothing. The last thing I remembered was . . . I couldn’t even say definitively. Today? Earlier today? Or was that yesterday? God, what had happened?
My frantic gaze fell on Blake’s lifeless one, and the howl working its way out of my mouth finally broke. I hiccuped a sob and released the screaming grief into the dark house. I clutched Blake’s limp body against my chest and prayed to anyone who would listen to believe me.
I didn’t mean to do this.
I would never hurt him on purpose.
I loved him.
I loved him.
I loved him.
And he loved me.
Policemen and paramedics and firemen arrived. The door broke down. Armed police officers with flashlights and guns burst into the room, then collectively took a step back. I felt their eyes roaming, judging, deciding.
“I’m sorry,” I cried around my incriminating incisors before they could fully put the pieces together. “I’m so sorry!”
I might have slipped back into the darkness after that. There were glimpses of reality—cold handcuffs around my wrists, the way my sticky, blood-soaked skin stuck to the squad car, the moment they took Blake away from me, and the desperate way I fought to get him back. There was the horrified way the detective spoke to me too—the way he assessed me and read me my rights and sensed that I wasn’t like him. The way he never took his eyes off my sharpened, knife-point teeth.
I wasn’t like him.
Not even a little bit.
I wasn’t like any of these people. Which was why, only a few hours later, my parents burst into the interview room I’d been deposited in while the police gathered what information they could to interrogate me. They were furious. And not just with me. This couldn’t stand. A girl like me could never be tried in human courts under human law. It wouldn’t be justice. It would be a witch trial. And I would pay a very steep price for being different—no matter how much I deserved it.