Chapter 1
It was not Eddie’s bike that came and got me from my apartment the next weekend. It was a four-door sedan with tinted windows. It was green like cupcake frosting—a sort of offense to the eyes. It looked like Gumby. Even the headlights looked like eyes if you squinted.
The Gumby car pulled even to the curb with me, and the passenger window rolled down.
“Hey,” a familiar voice said. It was a familiar face, too: dark black hair, hanging down in a side part, and thick eyebrows overtop a pair of dense glasses. Eyes blue like ice, and a chiseled jaw. He looked like Snape if he were in his mid-thirties and had a computer science degree.
“Victor?” I asked.
“Vic,” he said. “Please.”
“Where’s Eddie?”
“He said to tell you he couldn’t make it. The Worm Moon is still causing all kinds of mess. One of the deadies made it into a hospital morgue, got a mortician and a couple of nurses, and all that caused a chain reaction. He and the crew are sorting out the pandemonium.”
I stared at my phone in my hands. I wanted to scream. Instead, I blinked back tears.
“This really sucks,” I said.
“Yeah,” Vic said. “Look. I don’t like this any more than you do. We barely know one another, and the last thing I want to do is go screwing around summoning things on a Worm Moon. Let’s make a deal, okay? We both just get this over with.”
There was something to his tone—a dismissiveness that bothered me.
“You know, I really appreciate you coming out here, but the whole point of this was for me and Eddie to do something together. I can go by myself.”
“No,” he said, voice flat and commanding. “You can’t.”
“Yes,” I said, and I was belligerent about it. “I can.”
“Look. Get in the car. I don’t have time to educate you since you seem to know so much about everything—” He said this with obvious sarcasm. “But Eddie told me to protect you while you were doing this, so we’re going. Whether you like it or not.”
“I just won’t go then,” I said.
“Eddie said you’d say that. He said you’d say that and then sneak off on your own.”
“That does sound like me,” I said. “Wow, he must really be paying attention to me. I think he must like me.”
“Personally, I don’t see the appeal,” Vic replied, and it was just so casual the way he said it that I couldn’t make myself get mad.
I was shocked. This was the first time we’d ever spent together one on one. I wasn’t sensing hostility, just an absolute lack of regard. There was a calm, almost serene expression on his face as he patiently looked at me. I arched my eyebrows up at him.
“I’m sorry, can you say that one more time?”
“I’m not certain what sway you have over Eddie’s affections,” he said. There was no meanness to his voice when he said this—just a pure, calm tone, almost robotic in its expression.
“I’m not sure how familiar you are with concepts like politeness, but any other woman would take that as an insult,” I said.
“Well, sorry for them,” he said. “I said what I said. Would you rather me be honest, or would you rather me lie to you about my feelings?”
Well, when he put it that way, I guess it was good to have things out in the open. That didn’t mean he wasn’t being a prick, though. I wasn’t sure how to respond, to be honest.
“Are you going to get in the car or not?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes, opened the door, and slid in.
“Buckle up,” he said, and then his foot hit the gas.
Chapter 2
