And inside, I was shaking. My whole world was shaking. It wasn’t just the draug, though we all were afraid of them …. I was afraid of me, of what I was, what I was capable of doing to the people I supposedly loved.

Love. Did I even really know what that meant now? Had I ever really known? What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking, risking her life every time I was around her? I’d thought I had it all under control, handled, fixed, and then … then all my illusions of being in charge of the monster broke.

I paced, and tried not to think about how good that had felt. I hadn’t realized how on guard, how tense, how desperately tight my control had been until I’d been forced to let go.

Something went very still inside me, and I paused in my rambling, because Eve was coming.

I heard her walking toward me in the hall, despite the thick carpets; I could smell Eve’s skin, the individual and soft perfume of her.

The door opened and closed behind me. Now I could smell the peach-scented shampoo she’d used, and the soap, and the salty hot blood beneath all of that.

I didn’t turn around.

“Where’s your shirt?” she asked me.

“It itches,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not cold.” But I was. Room temperature, except when her skin warmed me up. Cold as the dead. “I’m going to go look for something else.”

I turned then, but Eve was blocking my path to the door. My heart didn’t beat anymore—not often, anyway—but it still felt like a stab straight into it when I looked at her directly. She was standing there, fearless, chin up, with a white bandage on her neck and a scarf trying to disguise the damage I’d done. That was Eve, all over—hurt, and hiding it. The Goth look had always been armor against her terror of the vampires. The retro polka-dot dress, the shoes, all of it was just another form of armor now. Some kind of shield to hold between the real girl and the world.

And me.

“That’s it?” she asked me. “Your shirt itches, and you’re going to get another one? That’s what you’re going with in this conversation, here.”

I couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, I sat down on a camp bed and sleeping bag—not mine; mine was a shredded pile of fluff. I fiddled with the shirt in my hands, and pulled it over my head again. It wasn’t the clothing that was the problem, anyway. It was me that itched all over, remembering … remembering what it had felt like to utterly surrender myself to hunger. I hadn’t stopped myself. I wouldn’t have stopped myself. Drinking her blood had been … bliss. Heaven. As close as I would ever come to it, now.

I’d thought I understood what being a vampire was all about, until that moment of sheer, red pleasure when I’d grabbed Eve and mindlessly fed. It felt like the floor had broken open under me and all my assumptions, and now I was in free fall, grabbing for a life that was moving away from me at light speed.