My father compelled the officers on duty while my mother gripped my arm and dragged me out of the station with a quiet rage that trembled through the ground and up through my bones. “What did you do?” she hissed in my ear while my blood-coated bare feet stuck to the faded tile, leaving flaky, crimson footprints in our wake. “We told you this was a bad idea,” she scolded. “We knew you couldn’t handle a human high school. Not after last time. And now look at the mess you’ve created.” We walked by confused police officers, oblivious to my escape. “Look at what you’ve done.”
There was more. She didn’t stop snapping and snarling until we were safely shut up in the solitude of her Town Car. She went on and on and on as I went under, deeper into my pain and grief and shock.
Eventually, my father slid into the seat across from me, as disappointed and frustrated as my mother. “And?” he demanded, his refined features pinched in a scowl. “Did your hunger strike prove your point?”
It was a cruel jab at the worst time. A sob shivered through me, and I faced the window. Not just because I couldn’t face them and their “I told you so” and total lack of sympathy but because I couldn’t face their future versions of me. I couldn’t face the now permanent responsibilities and roles they would demand of me. I couldn’t face any of it.
I wanted to go back to jail.
I wanted to accept the judgment I deserved.
“For God’s sake, Fallon, put your teeth away. You look like a feral animal.” My mother’s shrill tone pulled me back from the brink of running away, of facing the consequences of my actions.
Without looking at her, I admitted, “I can’t. I don’t know why, but they won’t go back to normal.”
Silence met my confession. Benton, my father’s driver, lurched into traffic while my parents stared aghast from across the small space of the car. The heavily tinted windows shut out the predawn light of the day, and it felt more appropriate than ever to be shrouded in darkness, locked in a tomb of our own making.
“They won’t go back?” my father asked in that scary, quiet voice he usually reserved for business dealings.
I shook my head as tears continued to roll down my cheeks.
“My God, Thomas, she’s broken those too.” My mother’s horrified whisper wasn’t meant for my ears, but I heard her loud and clear nonetheless.
I’d broken those too.
Because I broke everything.
I ruined everything.
Collecting his shock, my father slid forward and reached for my hand, gripping it between his ice-cold ones. “You tried, Fallon. You really tried. But it’s time to give up this ridiculous fantasy and take your place among your peers.”
As if my heart wasn’t broken enough, he had to stomp the shards into dust. “Please, Daddy, don’t make me.”
“It’s already done, buttercup. There’s no other way for you to be safe with humans.” The pause between that sentence and his next one felt like iron chains snaking tightly around my ankles and wrists and throat. “There’s no other way for you to keep them safe from you.”
Them.
Humans.
Everyone.
This was the final death. The life, the responsibility, the cage I’d been running from my entire life had finally caught up with me. The human world had been a glossy daydream, soft and gauzy and not really possible. The irony was that when the prison doors were finally closed, bolted, and sealed on my life, it wasn’t my parents who turned the lock and threw away the key . . . it was me.
Episode 2
SCHOOL SUCKS
“Fix your face before we walk into that building.” My mother sat straight and serene across the back seat of our driver-driven Town Car. Her legs were crossed primly at the ankles, and her hands were folded tightly in her lap. Her dark hair was in a loose side ponytail that had been styled and curled and set by her personal stylist earlier this morning. Her makeup was exactly as it should be for someone of her position, simple yet striking. And her skin was as flawless and ageless as ever. The vampire queen looked the part.
And apparently, her only daughter did not.
I took a steadying breath and unclenched my jaw. My father was oblivious to the tension in the car. He was too busy typing out emails at lightning speed on his phone to notice my mother was seconds away from losing her head. To my fangs.
Or vice versa.
Running my tongue over my stumpy incisors, I deflated a little. After the . . . incident, my teeth never retracted. I saw countless vampire specialists and doctors and even a human psychiatrist who specialized in PTSD, whom my father later compelled to forget she’d spent the weekend conducting an intensive session with a real-life vampire. But nothing worked. My fangs had remained extended, often cutting my bottom lip and tongue. I’d been embarrassed to be seen even by our estate staff. And I straight up refused to leave our grounds until they went back to normal.
They were a haunting reminder of who I was and what I was capable of.
And of the heartbreaking grief that still crashed against my breastbone like a stormy sea against rocky cliffs—unrelenting and unyielding.
So with my fate definitively sealed for Trinity Academy—the only supernatural school in the eastern United States prestigious enough for a girl of my standing—my mother had them filed down to an acceptable—yet functional—length.
Even with the constant stream of painkillers, the procedure had been agonizing. The narcotics had been a futile attempt at comfort anyway, as my body had burned off the cushion of drugs almost as quickly as they hit my system.
The sound of the file scraping away at the most defining pieces of me had cut straight through me. Like nails on a chalkboard but screaming. The sound hadn’t just attacked my ears; it had gone directly to my core. To my soul. And now, when I saw myself in a mirror, I hardly recognized the girl who stared back.
I didn’t look like me. I couldn’t even act like me. My fangs could no longer extend to a normal feeding length. They couldn’t sharpen at will or do any of the other things vampire fangs were intended to do. They’d been sharpened to a point so I could still eat, but now I only looked like a human pretending to be a vampire and not the vampire royalty I was supposed to be.
More than the physical pain of losing a vital part of who I was, I was humiliated.
Humbled in a way I didn’t know how to come back from.
My mother tried to make it seem fine, like I wasn’t some kind of murdering, short-teethed freak. But I knew the truth. And so would every supernatural student at Trinity.
Vampires were already the bottom of the barrel as far as supernatural hierarchy went. And to imagine my smile wasn’t going to make me the butt of every joke was just willful stupidity.
“I refuse to pretend I’m happy to be here,” I told her boldly instead of painting on a plastic smile that no one with a brain would buy.
We’d been over this again and again. I’d tried the human route. I’d tried the homeschool route. I’d tried the animal-blood-only route. I’d tried everything except the natural vampire way, and my mother was sick and tired of my failed attempts to be anything other than what I was born to be.
In her defense, my family was the vampire family. My father was the king of our coven. And even though the High Council stopped recognizing royalty a century ago in an effort to modernize and include all supernatural species, the coven very much still acknowledged and respected my family’s ancient bloodline.