“Hey, Trav,” I heard Monroe as soon as I closed the door behind me. “Be careful.”

“I will, I will,” Travis said, before Monroe started backing out from the lot he parked in. I thought I saw him stare me down before he drove off, but I probably imagined it.

Travis walked up to me and smiled. “Monroe and I talked earlier before getting you, and we wanted to let you stay at our place for a bit and help you out and stuff. Is that okay with you?”

That’s awfully nice of them to do, I thought to myself.

“Yeah,” I said. I was actually pretty surprised that they offered to let me stay. Thinking about it more, I figured it would have been much better than sneaking back into my house and scaring the living hell out of my family.

And almost instantly, this feeling of gratefulness washed away from the thought of my family. I looked out over to where the alleyway was, although I couldn’t see it from where I was.

Travis must have figured I was thinking about it. “Do you want to go see?”

I wanted to say no when they asked, but I thought that maybe I could remember something about what happened if I did. I mean, that makes sense, doesn’t it?

I nodded, and Travis grabbed my hand once again, leading me out to the alleyway. The sight of the yellow tape was getting clearer as we walked closer, and slowly I felt my anxiety kicking in.

 “Monroe and I are close friends with one of the doctors’ daughters,” Travis told me. “Her name is Mallory Sheng. She practices witchcraft with me at the Academy. Her dad, Li Sheng, has this sort of power where he can look into your memories to determine the causes of many of his patients’ deaths or injuries.”

I had no idea where Travis was going with this conversation, so I remained quiet.

“Dr. Sheng tried to look into your memory to see what happened to you,” Travis continued, looking up at me. “He doesn’t know if some sort of spell was casted on you before you were attacked, or if something was done after, but he couldn’t find anything when he looked in you.”

Great, I thought. Maybe going back to the alley would be a bad idea after all.

“You’re a very rare case,” Travis told me. “Maybe even the first case. Usually no one gets attacked here. Every being here is either just born supernatural or ordinary. But there has been a rise of newly turned vampires coming here.”

“Vampires?” The thought of vampires just showing up out of nowhere seemed very odd to me.

“Yeah, vampires.” Travis and I stopped walking as we stood in front of the alley, blocked by the caution tape. “Monroe and I have found many of them wandering around the town this summer, before you showed up here. From what they had told us, they came from out of town—some even out of state—and they have no recollection of how they ended up here. We still have no idea what brought them here.”

This was a lot to take in, especially as I stared at the scene of where I was killed. The blood had dried onto the concrete and brick wall, and some was spotted all over the side of a dumpster.

“To be perfectly honest, we have no idea what you are.”

I looked over at Travis, confused. “What do you mean?”

“The way you were attacked was nothing like anything I’ve ever heard or seen,” Travis explained. “It was like you were attacked by a werewolf, and the bites looked undeniably similar to those of a werewolf’s, but there hasn’t been a full moon in weeks. And like Monroe said, he’s the only known werewolf in the city.”

Travis saw the bites. I couldn’t describe how I would have felt if I saw something like that.

“I told the police that I heard another person, because I did,” Travis told me. “I heard a man’s voice along yours. I even had Dr. Sheng to check my memory to confirm, but the police wouldn’t accept that. I don’t know if this man was some half-breed that went on a frenzy one night. I don’t even know if he was a vampire, because of those bites.”

“C-could there have been like a feral vampire?” I heard the words come out of my mouth, but I didn’t fully register them as being my words until I saw the expression on Travis’s face.

“A… feral?” It was as if they never heard of such a thing, but then they seemed to space out in deep thought. “Feral… vampires…”

I had no idea if they thought the concept was ridiculous or just straight up unusual. They had this way of expressing themselves that just seemed a little counter-intuitive at first.

“That makes sense, actually,” they told me after a long second of silence. “It would really explain the attack and the voice I heard. But the thought of a feral vampire being on the loose just doesn’t settle with me.”

Almost immediately after saying this, Travis grabbed my hand and said, “Come on, let’s talk more about this in my place.”

———————————————

Travis and I made our way to their unit and sat together in the living room area—which was a small section consisting of a ridiculously huge sofa sitting across from a mounted flat screen TV and a coffee table sitting between the two. I was only able to sit here for a few seconds before the strong dog smell made me nauseous.

So then Travis and I went to their room, which was somehow free from the dog smell. The room was decked out with posters of various things—from boy bands of different ethnicities to cartoon and anime characters, and even some games that I’ve played— and there were containers of incense everywhere I looked that gave the room a very light scent of sugar cookies. 

It was very delightful if I do say so myself.

“Before we talk about anything, I want to see something first,” Travis told me, handing me an unlabeled juice box from the mini fridge near their bed.

I was confused about what they wanted to see, but I took the juice box. I was pretty thirsty, so I thought that would maybe help suppress the hunger I felt earlier.

But the moment I poked the straw into the box, the smell that caused my hunger hit me without any warning. I felt my gaze on the juice box growing intense, and my hands began to shake. I couldn’t make sense of what this substance was that made me react this way, but after the talk I had with Travis, I could only think of one thing that would give me such an intense reaction: Blood.

My teeth were aching like crazy. I had very sensitive teeth, but this feeling was unlike anything I ever felt in my life. I groaned and held my jaw. Something in my mouth was scratching at my gums, so I opened my mouth.