Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

The silence spun out endlessly. And to the point where she was really starting to feel the cold. Though she had to imagine he was too—his nightie was even more flimsy than hers. She could see his very human but very hairy ankles and feet sticking out the bottom.

But he wasn't hurrying this along.

He just stared, and stared, like he was waiting for something from her. Even though she was the one who needed some kind of response. She even knew what response it was supposed to be.

So she decided the best course of action was to prompt him.

"You're not saying, ‘Oh my gosh, of course I'm not, Cassie.'"

And got flat nothing for it. No immediate agreement. No laughter.

In fact he just looked pained for a second.

"Believe me, I want to. But then I'd be lying to you."

"You never had problems with trying to lie before."

The pain on his face deepened. "Yeah, and I'm turning over a new leaf."

"And this is what you start with?" she asked. "Being a whole-ass supernatural being?"

"Well actually, werewolves aren't classified as supernatural beings. They're in the creature category. You're thinking more of vampires and fairies and even ghosts, I'm pretty sure ghosts are considered… more like… they.…" His words simply dried up. And she knew exactly why too. She could feel it happening before he even explained. "Okay, I'm gonna stop there because your eyes look like they're about to fall out of your head."

"Of course they are. You just made my every childhood nightmare real."

"Your childhood nightmare wasn't vampires or fairies or ghosts."

"Maybe it should have been, if they fucking exist. Are you telling me they exist, Seth? Answer me now, immediately," she couldn't help saying. And she couldn't help the rising panic in her voice either. Honestly it was all she could do not to grab him and shake him, because holy fuck was he seriously confirming there was more than werewolves? As if werewolves alone weren't impossible enough?

It certainly seemed like it. But she needed him to spell it out.

Even if he quite clearly did not want to.

"Maybe I can answer you later," he said. "Much later."

"No, there's no later, Seth. You're gonna tell me now."

"But I think maybe you need to calm down first."

"And exactly how am I going to do that when you just dropped a bomb on reality? Because you get that you've done that, right? Like, you can see how completely wild this all is. One second everything is ordinary, and the next your mortal enemy is confirming that the supernatural stuff you last laughed at in an old episode of Buffy actually exists somehow."

She spread her hands, like she was waiting for him to fill them with answers. But all she got was a sigh. And an eye roll . An actual eye roll.

"Okay, for starters it's nothing like Buffy ," he said, in this withering tone.

As if scorn for the verisimilitude of an old TV show was what mattered, instead of anything more sane. And of course, now she had to go with him on this absurd media-based scale of how fucked things were. "So what is it like? Underworld ? Chilling Adventures of Sabrina ? That movie where all the vampires eat everybody and then they turn into vampires and eat the people they just ate?"

"You mean Daybreakers ."

"Don't tell me what I mean. Just tell me how frightened I should be."

"Well, I mean, not constant vampiric cycle of cannibalism frightened."

Thank fuck , her brain said. About thirty seconds before she realized that he'd kind of hedged there. He'd left things open to other levels of being frightened. And the way he was trying not to meet her eyes confirmed her suspicions.

"But I'm guessing not The Addams Family –level of relieved, either."

"Probably not, no. I mean some of them are pretty scary," he said. And then he saw what was undoubtedly her face falling three feet, and rushed on. "But honestly? Their scariness is really nothing you should worry about. I mean, vampires in particular don't really interact with humans at all the way they usually do in movies and shows. They just… go about their own business."

"Yeah, but their business is occasionally drinking blood."

"True, but any blood will do. And it does, as far as I know."

"As far as I know doesn't fill me with confidence, Seth."

He raised a curious eyebrow. "Then what would fill you with confidence?"

"Well, for starters, you could warn me about where their nearest castle is."

"They don't live in castles," he said, and honestly she had no idea why that was the thing that stopped her dead. But it did. In fact for a whole thirty seconds she stared at him, waiting for him to say "Psych." To tell her all about their fancy halls and floofy blouses and goblets full of probably murdered people.

But all she got was him looking at her, with the same level of matter-of-factness that he'd had in his words. Like this was just obvious, and how didn't she know. Even though she could never have known. Not only were vampires apparently not real, they weren't even massive-ridiculous-castle dwellers.

And that was just insult added to injury.

"Oh my god. You take that back," she finally said, more fiercely than she intended.

But even the fierceness didn't make him bend reality back to what it was supposed to be.

"I can't, it's the truth. There are no castles at all. Or even fancy houses. In fact, I know of one of them who lives in an apartment with two other dudes. And the apartment is pretty crappy. Two of them share one bedroom—and not in the cool way, either. In the sad way that makes me want to ask them how come they've been alive for hundreds of years but don't have so much as a bean between them." He sighed and shook his head. Then seemed to consider something, before adding, "Though to be fair, I'm not sure I really need to ask them that. It's pretty obvious, when one of them thinks televisions have tiny people living inside them."

And what could she say to that? Except what was now dawning on her.

"So basically you're telling me that What We Do in the Shadows is somehow the closest," she said, and to her astonishment and horror, he just shrugged. He shrugged . He even did it with his face—lips pressed inward, chin out.

"I want to say no, but honestly after I devoured the movie and the TV show, and maybe wept because I felt so seen for the first time in over a decade, I spent an entire afternoon frantically googling everybody involved to see if I could unearth any signs of their obvious supernatural secret."

He wept , she thought. And felt yet another little pang for him.

Truly it was becoming an epidemic inside her.

"And did you find anything?" she asked.

"Well, no. Though that doesn't mean anything."

"It must. I mean there would be signs. There have to be signs."

"You know there aren't. In fact, you and me used to talk all the time about how disappointing it was that there wasn't so much as a hint of any of this being real," he said. Then looked away, eyes suddenly hazy.

And she knew he was doing what she had been trying not to since he'd turned up on her doorstep. He was thinking about their shared past. About the way they used to whisper together, while tangled in the nest of old clothes and discarded bubblegum wrappers and popcorn crumbs that was her closet. Sometimes sticky with summer heat, more often freezing from the frost that crept in underneath her rickety bedroom windows.

It's so unfair that nothing is fantastical , she remembered saying to him.

And him saying something similar to her, when they'd found that hollowed-out tree in the woods. The one that they'd been sure held something creepy inside, but turned out to contain nothing but bugs and mulch and bits of bark. Still cool for a hideout, but not quite what they had hoped. Not enough to stop him turning to her, in that faded, forever dusty darkness, to tell her: I was thinking this would be our door to somewhere other than this, but instead it's just rot and ruin .

Then he looked back at her, and she knew she'd been right. She could see the memory of those times all over him a moment before he spoke. Softly, wistfully. "It was good to have someone to be disappointed with. Someone who got it. By the time all this happened to me, you weren't even living here anymore."

And now she was the one who had to turn away, before he could see how glossy her eyes were no doubt getting. Because he was right: it had been good. But more than that, it reminded her powerfully of all the things they could have had. All the talks about this they could have shared. The turmoil they could have gone through together, as they realized reality was not what it seemed.

But instead, she'd had nothing.

While he'd fumbled through this torment alone.

"Well, it's not my fault that we moved away. And definitely not my fault that you don't have someone who gets it anymore," she said, and hated how sour her voice sounded. But what else could she do? She couldn't just forget it all and go back to how they'd been. Most likely he didn't even want her to.

Though, man, he made it sound otherwise.

"I know," he simply said in this soft, sad way.

And then she found she could look back at him, no problem.

"I bet it's not been so good or so bad anyway. It just seems like it's the way everything is. Only, you know. With more deranged things attacking you, followed by weird sweating and bottom-lip-eating and all your clothes getting annihilated."

"Yeah. It's really more okay than anything else."

"Right. You just go about your business. Like the castle-less vampires."

"I do. Heck, most of the time I wouldn't even know anything was going on."

"You look like nothing else is going on right now."

"Well, sure—I mean, apart from the fact that my arm is inside out."

He held it up when he said it. Almost like a joke, she thought.

But then the fabric of the nightdress fell away, and honestly she almost screamed again. She had to grit her teeth to stop it happening, and even so a groan leaked out. Understandably so, because god in heaven the look of it.

It was like his elbow was caught in his sleeve.

Only the sleeve was skin . It was flesh .

And it was surrounded on all sides by bones that weren't supposed to be there. Honestly, she had no idea how she hadn't seen it before, because even under the nightdress it should have been clear. It was the wrong shape, the wrong everything; it was horrendous in ways she couldn't process.

Clearly transformation isn't straightforward , her logical side was saying. But the rest of her was just screaming about the supernatural being real and bodies turning into entirely other things and the fact that he wasn't somehow dead. It should have killed him, the state he was in. He should have been sprawled on the floor.

So it wasn't a surprise when he sagged.

And then did just that.