Page 104 of Fangs with Benefits

‘Molly introduced me to all the best, brooding vampires of twenty-first-century literature, and I felt I had some work to do.’

‘Please, you put them all to shame. Need I remind you where you spent the last hundred and ten years? And what you were up to all that time in your tower?’

‘Fair,’ I say. ‘I’ve always been good at sulking and brooding.’

‘Are you really going to do this?’ Evangeline asks, like she has many times in the last few days. She’s walked me through the proposed ritual, the ancient spell, the injection to my heart, the intense and lasting pain she expects I’ll feel before I’m either turned human or lost to this world forever.

It’s a gamble, one she can’t say with certainty will pay off.

‘I’m sure,’ I say, and squeeze her hand again. Because life is worth the risk.

Christmas finds me shirtless, laid out on a cleared patch of floor in Jellie’s lab, where Samara has drawn several runes and lit a veritable fire hazard of thick candles in a circle around me. She and Jellie do their final preparations, neither of them pretending to be calm, but both at least as confident as they can be after our days of checking and re-checking their work.

Samara has to be the one to complete the ritual and administer the potion, but as she wipes something like mud on my wrists, ankles and the base of my throat, Jellie kneels by my side once more. I meet her nervous gaze with a steady one.

‘Brother…’ she starts, and her voice wobbles.

‘It’s going to work,’ I assure her. I don’t know that it will but I’m choosing to believe it. It’s all I can do. ‘The most brilliant people I know put it together.’

She scoffs and a blood-tinged tear slides down her cheek. There’s nothing more to say that we haven’t rehearsed again and again, so she presses a kiss against my forehead and exits the circle.

I give a final nod to Samara before she begins.

She holds a ceremonial dagger and a potion-filled syringe over my chest and chants in a language I’ve never heard, words that electrify the air, magic tangible around us. The candles flicker, the patches of mud on me seem to warm and my scalp tingles. It’s all very dramatic and surreal.

And this, of course, is how Gregory finds us.

‘What the fuck is the witch doing?’ he booms, breaking the spell woven around us, all of the candle flames going out at once.

‘Gregory, don’t—’ Jellie tries, but Gregory has none of it, pushing past her to get to me. He knocks over a candle with his boot, the wax spilling on the floor, before he hauls me up by my arm.

‘It’s not what it looks like,’ I say, though in fact it’s worse than it probably looks.

‘Mother!’ Gregory beckons, and I curse. They were both supposed to be gone another day at least, long enough for us to attempt dangerous, untested rituals in peace, but plans change. Gregory turns back to address me, ‘It looks like that witch was going to cut your heart out in some sort of suicide ritual.’ His voice drips with disdain and Samara curls her lip at him.

‘I’m no murderer,’ Samara defends. ‘Unlike some of us.’

Her comment is pointed at Gregory, who quite literally hisses in response. I push him away from us and it only serves to rile him further. Mother finds her way to us, sweeping down the stairs, demanding to know what’s happening. Jellie groans and throws her hands in the air.

‘Elijah was going to kill himself,’ Gregory says. ‘All this over a human. Come now, brother, don’t be so dramatic.’

‘He what?’ Mother shrieks. ‘Evangeline, you would let him do this?’

‘I wasn’t!’ I exclaim, but neither Mother nor Gregory is listening to me, their attention focused on my sister.

‘You misunderstand–we don’t aim to kill him,’ Jellie says. ‘Only…’

She closes her mouth before she can reveal the truth that is even more damning than killing a vampire.

‘What?’ Gregory prompts.

‘To let him live,’ Samara finishes. With her words, it’s as if all the air is sucked from the room. My mother and brother both still, processing the words and their possible meaning. I’m sure I know what they’re thinking. That this isn’t possible. What’s been done to us cannot be undone.

And yet.

‘Your project,’ Gregory says to Jellie.

‘What did you do?’ Mother whispers at her only daughter.