"Did you know that some people are absolute psychos?" he asked conversationally. "They go around killing other people for kicks and never think about how it would affect others."

Nolan's glance flicked to me, and our eyes met for just a second.

"Before we encountered that psycho," he continued. "Sierra was fine. She had normal dreams for her life, just like any other regular fourteen year old. Do you know—what am I talking about; of course you know—that when you bite others and don't finish your meal, they get turned after a day?"

A shiver slid down my spine at his use of the word 'meal', as if it were a perfectly ordinary word used to describe people.

Nolan looked shaken. I moved closer to him, close enough that I could feel the heat emanating from his hoodie through the front of my shirt. His hand shot out and guided me gently but firmly behind him.

He wanted to protect me. I understood, but if I stood behind him, I wouldn't be able to see anything apart from his back.

To distract myself from the sense of unease grappling with my gut, I grabbed onto the back of his hoodie. The soft cotton material under my fingers failed to provide the same comfort it usually did.

"No. I don't drink blood from people."

He sounded taken aback by Nolan's angry declaration. "Not even once?"

"No."

"Not bad." His voice seemed to switch from dismissive to almost admiring. "Anyway, we were young and stupid. There were horror stories about people in our town going missing, people who had been living on the town outskirts right beside the woods, or people who went in for a nice camping trip. We went in with a group of friends anyway.

"We went in deep enough to stumble upon him. He was lying in wait. He hadn't drunk in a while, apparently. He drank from our friends and finished them off, and then stalked us into a dead end. It was a game for him."

He barked out another laugh. "He didn't even need to do that. He was already stuffed from our friends, but hey, here were more perfect victims to sample from. Just to taste-test, you know?"

The nausea in my stomach swirled around and around, threatening to head up my throat.

"He only had a couple of sips from each of us before he got bored and flew off. I had to carry Sierra on my back because he broke her leg for making too much noise, and we barely made it home before the sun rose."

"Sierra's leg was miraculously healed. It was like nothing ever happened. There was no proof that we ever got attacked, except for the bitemarks left on us. I almost thought it was all a dream. But then we saw the morning light in the room. You know how it feels like, don't you, to be afraid of the sunrays coming into the room that first morning?"

Nolan's mouth pressed into a thin line.

"I think our parents would've committed us to a mental asylum if we tried telling them what happened. We would've come forward as witnesses after our friends' parents started filing the missing persons reports if we hadn't lost control."

"Lost control," Nolan repeated. "What did you do?"

The guy's voice dropped. "Our dad came into the room. We were so thirsty."

I thought he'd said he was a normal person. His words seemed to swim around in my mind, resisting my attempt to form a logical conclusion from them.

"You didn't." Disbelief tinged Nolan's words. "That was your dad."

"He tried to make us get ready for school," he said. "We knew we couldn't go out into the sunlight. We couldn't even walk past the light filtering in through the kitchen windows. He pulled us there anyway because he thought we were trying to skip school that day.

"Then when our bodies started popping blisters like we were getting scorched alive, he was so horrified. We were thirsty, and he was right up in our faces about what was happening. It was ..." He lowered his head. I couldn't see the expression on his face, but the crack in his voice spoke volumes. "When we came to our senses, it was too late."

Nolan's eyes stayed on him. "What about your mom?"

He shot Nolan a disbelieving glare and said, "What do you think a couple of fourteen-year-olds would do if they drank their dad dead because they were so hungry, they couldn't restrain themselves? What do you think they'd do if, overnight, they suddenly couldn't go into the sunlight without blistering like it was radiation? Do you think they'd tell their mom? Their mom who smelled like food?"

The resounding silence that followed only served to increase the thickness in the air between us.

Eventually, the guy continued, "Everything that happened after that felt like a surreal dream. So many things changed. Sierra couldn't come to terms with the fact that her appearance would forever stay the same. She finally made a friend at her workplace. Even that fell apart a few years later when her friend grew older, and Sierra stayed the same. When Sierra told her the truth, she didn't receive it well. We had to move away again."

"Why?" Nolan asked, his face taut with wariness.

"That friend wanted to tell everyone. Actually, she did manage to tell everyone in their workplace and half of the neighborhood we lived in. We had to get new IDs again."

"No, I meant, why are you telling me this? What does this have to do with me?"

"Because," he said with a dry smile, "I don't think she ever told you about her past. I interfered at first because I thought you just wanted to stalk her like one of those creeps she attracts on the regular. Now that I know she changed you ... you need to understand there's no point even if you get to talk to her. She won't admit it, but what happened broke her. She started thinking that if she could change someone else so that they stopped aging, they would have to share the same secret and could be friends forever."

Nolan's face twisted into a sneer of disgust. "That's insane."

It really, really was. I was speechless.

"So," he started in a conversational tone, "I'm going to make a reasonable assumption that she didn't ask for your consent before she changed you."

"What kind of—of course she didn't—"

The guy held a hand up, motioning for him to stop. "Okay. At the start, she asked her friends. But they fled as soon as she showed her cards. But since you've been successfully changed, and you're not playing best friends forever with her, I think it's logical to conclude that you don't want this."

"Are you stu—"

"So I'm going to tell you this: you don't have to stay like this," he said, his dark eyes fixed on Nolan's face. "You can go back to being a regular person."

What?

My jaw dropped, and my mouth rapidly dried. My heart hammered so hard against my ribcage, it almost hurt.

Imaginary scenes of bringing a Nolan who had a fully-grown, adult body home to my family or around my friends flashed through my mind. A hope that I'd never dared to cultivate before, until this moment, germinated in my heart.

Nolan took a step closer and demanded, "Go back to normal? How?"

"It's very simple. Go into the sunlight and stay there until you turn back to normal," he said.

I frowned. That didn't sound right. Didn't they start to burn under sunlight? If they started blistering within seconds of their skin being in contact with the sun rays, wouldn't they just die in minutes?

Nolan's green eyes were narrowed to the point of looking like slits.

"Isn't that suicide?"

With a shrug, the guy pointed to himself. "How do you think I became a regular human again? After ... after everything, I just wanted to die. I chose a sunny afternoon to sunbathe."

"And then? Didn't you burn?"

Nolan jolted slightly when he heard me speak. The guy perked up at my question.

"Yeah. That was the point, right? Because I recovered too quickly, nothing else worked. Going out into the sun was the only thing I could think of. I felt like I was on fire for ... I don't know, I wasn't exactly counting the minutes or hours. But I blacked out from the pain. Later, when I came to, I couldn't believe that I was still alive."

"And you age and everything?" I asked. "How old are you?"

"Sierra's my fraternal twin, so I'm also twenty-nine." He lifted his arm in our direction as if to draw our attention to it. "I look older than fourteen, don't I?"

Now that we weren't in the midst of a potentially life-threatening confrontation, I could finally have a good look at him.

His body clearly looked like an adult's body, one that either hit the gym or worked out very consistently. Bulging muscles wrapped around his biceps, and his shoulders were very broad. He had a jawline strong enough to be seen even in this poor lighting.

It was truly a testament to Nolan's unnatural strength that he wasn't able to fend off Nolan's assault earlier. It would be dumbfounding to anyone else if they'd witnessed how completely Nolan had managed to overpower him.

His face and head structure looked way more mature than Nolan's, who still looked every bit the guy I'd met for the first time in ninth grade. A tall, lanky-looking teenager whose muscles were hidden under his hoodie. The most he could pass for was sixteen years old, and that was because he didn't have a babyface. His face had always been angular and slim.

I hesitated.

"Yeah ..."

But was he telling the truth?

The hope that had formed inside of me began to waver at the doubt that had slid in.

The solution he'd presented was too ludicrous to accept.

How did we know he wasn't lying about anything? What if he wasn't really Eri's brother, or if he and Eri were in cahoots to destroy any of those people she'd changed to a vampire over the years if they started trying to track her down, or if he was actually a vampire but was lying to gain our trust?

The only one I really trusted was Nolan. Although I'd never seen for myself the burning of his skin under the sunlight, I knew that it wasn't something he'd ever lie about. Nolan hated what he'd become.

If this was a lie, Nolan would burn to nothing in the sun.

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AN: a littttleee bit of Eri's backstory here, just a bit. uh okay so I'm updating on my phone bc I'm outside rn so if the formatting looks weird (😭) I'll fix it when I get back home. Hope you guys are having a great week!! 🥰 as always, thank you for voting and commenting, you guys make my day!