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My parents were killed by a werewolf on my prom night.

I was seventeen.

A shoo-in for prom queen.

My boyfriend, Colton Hughes, was going to be crowned prom king.

He was the star quarterback. I was the head cheerleader.

Living the American fucking dream. So cliché, so saccharine sweet, it made your teeth hurt when you thought of it.

Which was why I made a habit of not thinking of it.

Of that night.

Of them.

Of what came after.

The interviews, the raised eyebrows, then the sympathetic looks, then the whispers, the social worker. Finally … the shrinks.

The shrinks were called as a last resort, of course.

Gerald Hughes—Colton’s dad, the man who already considered me a daughter—had been friends with my parents since high school. Fuck, he’d dated my mother, bowing out gracefully when my father came along, when he and the rest of the town saw what true love looked like.

The story was legendary.

So utterly fucking corny and Stepford, it had once seemed romantic. Now it made me want to gag. I’d once believed in true love, wearing that story on my heart like a badge of honor. I’d been ready to take that proverbial torch, for me and Colton to become the golden couple of Dreadwood Falls. I really loved Colton. Even though sometimes, I fantasized about a tall, dark, slightly villainous man—a real man, not a boy—coming in to steal me away.

My fantasies all died the night I saw my parents torn apart by a monster.

Which was the story I stuck to… for a while.

Until Gerald brought the shrinks in. I didn’t blame him. In hindsight, at least.

There came a point when one had to call the shrink, even if you were a small-town cop with a duty to protect dead people and a healthy mistrust for new age science and outsiders.

That point being when I started talking about the werewolf who killed my parents.

The shrink—the one with the tortoiseshell glasses and red lipstick on her teeth—was what jerked me out of my stupor. Some latent survival instinct kicked in. I realized, quickly, just in time, what I was doing. I was committing myself to an insane asylum.

Medication. Locks. Bars.

Things that would make it very fucking hard for me to figure out what exactly killed my parents, where it came from, and how to kill it.

So I got smart. I rubbed my eyes, sobbed dramatically, and made my voice start to shake, my words not stringing together. I started an act I didn’t even know I was capable of. I buried the true feelings threatening to poison me—desperation, trauma, insatiable need for vengeance.

I turned into what everyone was expecting me to, what Gerald Hughes needed me to be in order to protect his worldview.

I was perceived as the damsel in distress.

The innocent little girl who constructed a fantastical story to replace the agony of the truth.

The truth being that some wild animal, or someone on a hefty amount of bath salts, had come into the house and torn my parents apart, their blood splattered all over the ceilings—original molding and all. An unlikely thing to happen in a sleepy town in Connecticut, but not unheard of.

Once I got with the program and started telling a story that was easier to digest, there was a collective sigh of relief from everyone involved. Dealing with a teenage orphan was one thing. Dealing with a batshit crazy teenage orphan was quite another.