I rinsed, spat, then met Annie’s eyes in the mirror. “Breakfast?” I said, aiming for casual, but I could see she already knew something was coming.
She grinned, but it went weird at the edges. “You’re not making me eat another breakfast casserole, are you? Because I still haven’t recovered from the last one. My pancreas is staging a protest.”
I grinned back, forcing a brightness I didn’t feel. “We’ll go to the place in town. The one with the blueberry donuts you said were better than sex.” I said this with a straight face, which made her snort toothpaste foam out her nose and half the tension in my chest evaporated.
We dressed—she in a faded band shirt and my softest flannel, me in jeans and a T-shirt that somehow still smelled like her after the wash—and walked out to the car. The GTO roared to life, satisfying as ever, and she did the thing she always did, cranking the radio to something loud and forgettable and rolling the window all the way down. The wind blew her hair straight back, and she turned to me with cheeks pink from the cold, looking so alive it almost hurt.
I parked us in front of the bakery and walked Annie up the ramp so she wouldn’t slip on the dust-slick tile steps. The place was full of morning—sugar and yeast and strong coffee in the air, and a clatter of voices from the counter and patio. Annie headed for an outside table, dragging me by the hand like a kid desperate to stake out the playground. Her hair whipped aroundher face, wild and perfect, and I wanted to eat her more than anything on the menu.
We sat, and the server—human girl, barely of age, eyes rimmed with glitter liner—brought menus and stared at me like I was the first demon she’d ever seen up close. Annie ordered for both of us, two blueberry donuts, an iced coffee for her, an Americano for me. She didn’t let go of my hand the whole time.
I waited until the plates were down, the server gone. “You’re acting weird,” I said, going for gentle but missing the mark and landing more on the side of interrogation.
Annie blinked, then snorted, “Wow, thanks, Sam. Most guys just tell me I look tired.”
“You don’t look tired,” I said. “You look like you’re waiting for the ground to open up and eat you.”
She smiled, but it was all teeth, no warmth. “That’s because it’s Valley of the Damned. The ground does that sometimes.” But she was winding herself up for something, I could tell. She was spinning the spoon in her coffee so hard the handle vibrated, which wasn’t her usual nervous tic. She was about to say something, maybe confess the thing that had been ghosting between us for days, when a shadow slanted across the table and a voice cut in—thin, nasal, and absolutely unwelcome—cut in.
A guy, human, wearing a rental car windbreaker and a haunted, sunburnt face. As soon as I saw Annie’s body language—stiff, then a snap to angry—I knew who it must be. I didn’t recognize him, but he looked like the kind of guy who’d collect Funko Pops and wear ironic socks to funerals. He was carrying himself like the idea of confidence, without any of the substance.
“Annie.” He stopped right in front of the table.
Annie’s whole body jerked, like she’d been zapped. Then she went steel-cold, the way I’d seen her in the split second before she decided to run or punch. She set her coffee down, slow and deliberate, and folded her hands on the tabletop.
“What are you doing here, Seth? I told you we are through,” she said, voice so flat it could have been a warning label.
He looked like he’d practiced a speech but lost the script. “I couldn’t leave,” he said, then darted his gaze to me, lingering on my veins, arms, face, then back to Annie. “Not after seeing you in his house. This isn’t what you want.”
Now I was doubly shocked. Not only was Seth here—but he had been to my house. And Annie had kept it from me. I could see Annie’s jaw flex, a twitch at her temple like she wanted to take a swing at him. But I didn’t care about that—not right now. What I cared about was the fact that this loser had been in my house. Our house.
I wanted to believe he was lying, that this was just human drama, not what it sounded like. But Annie’s face did a thing—a tiny, almost nothing spasm at the corner of her mouth—that told me he wasn’t.
“When were you at our house?” I said, as calmly as I could manage. My voice came out low and cold, nothing of the human-friendly rumble I practiced for customer service or the driveway block parties.
“Last week,” Seth said. “She didn’t tell you?”
My hands curled under the table, claws pressing into my palms. The world shrank to the space between Annie’s silence and my rage. The bakery noise went thin and tinny, voices fading until all I could hear was the echo of my own pulse, and the scratch of Annie’s thumbnail against her coffee cup.
“Annie?” I said, not trusting myself to make it a question.
She looked at me, and I saw her make a choice—fight or flight—but this time, she didn’t run.
“He showed up,” she said, not looking away. “He brought flowers and a speech. I didn’t let him in. He left.” She swallowed, and her voice dropped. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you would hunt him down and kill him.”
I watched Seth take me in. I wanted to rip his head off. I breathed through my nose, trying to rein myself in. I waited—long enough for the silence to go from tense, to brittle, to a vacuum that hurt your ears if you moved.
Seth broke first. I watched him really look at me for the first time, the way my shirt barely contained the mass of my shoulders, the black veins crawling up my forearms, the claws that could slice through skin. I could see the moment he clocked the horns under my hair, the color of my skin, the eyes that didn’t quite work like a human’s. He looked at me, then at Annie, then back at me. I could see the math in his eyes—height, reach, bite force. He blinked hard, then tried to compose himself, the way men do when they know the brawl is lost but want to salvage their pride.
“You don’t have to do this,” Seth said, voice low, as if he wanted to block me from hearing. “You don’t have to stay with… with him.” Not even the nerve to look at me when he said it. “I know you. This isn’t you. You’re afraid?—”
Annie’s eyes went cold as she cut him off. “You have no idea what I want, Seth, and you never did.” Her voice was a deadly whisper. I’d never seen Annie so angry.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Not of him. I’m staying, Seth. I’m in love with him. And before you ask? He doesn’t need me to fix him, or pretend to be less, or apologize for breathing. He actually likes it when I talk back. He treats the cat better than you treated me on your best day.” She took a breath. “You can go.”
My mind was whirling chaos. Annie loved me. She loved me. We’d yet to say those words to each other. But now was hardly the time to tell her the feeling was mutual. Not with her ex-boyfriend standing there.
He stood there stunned, like he was waiting for a punchline. Then his jaw set. He looked at me, and for a second, I thought he might do the thing men do—try to assert dominance, square off,make a scene. But he did something perhaps even more foolish and grabbed Annie by the wrist.
