Part of me wants to tell them about it, but I don’t want to say the words out loud. Instead, I focus on what I need to know. Facts.

I take a step back as Xander holds up his perfectly smooth hand. “It’s okay, Ava. I’m fine.”

“How did you do that? Did you just use blood magic?”

It seems like it. The way the blood disappeared from his palm was the same way it disappeared from my skin but not the ground that day with my mom.

“Healing is incredibly hard,” he says. “Vampires can do it instantaneously because their curse uses the blood magic automatically. For us, we need to think about using blood magic, and for more serious wounds, we usually need more power too.” He holds up his cuff. “But the only time we use it is when it’s already spilled, and only to heal.”

I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it blurs the lines between them and vampires.

But Mom did it…

And then she died. There were consequences.

“Let’s get on with this,” Aristelle says.

Xander’s nodding, heading back to the tree.

But there’s a tremor in my fingers that I can’t stop.

Before I can even consider throwing, Diantha and Reina step in front of me. Diantha searches my eyes for a moment as Reina says, “I think we should stop for now and have a girls’ night.”

I groan. “I can’t take one more viewing of Tomb Raider.”

“No,” Reina says. “We’re going out.”

We don’t get many tourists in downtown Sacramento. It’s more for the people who live and work there. You can count on seeing the same faces on the same nights—tired people looking for the same escape. On some nights, it feels less like an escape and more like a different side of the same cage.

Downtown Santa Cruz is different. Energy and excitement buzz along the tree-lined streets. Tourists gawk in windows at beach-themed novelties while locals stroll by on the way to a market everyone else passes without a glance. People perform on the street. I fish a dollar out of my pocket and toss it in the guitar case of a man strumming his own tune with his eyes closed. He’s not any good, but he looks like he’s playing for nobody but himself, swaying slightly to his own lack of melody.

We stroll under a canopy of leafy trees that line the street every twenty feet or so. Even though night has already closed in, it’s bright. Streetlights punctuate the sidewalk, and strings of round bulbs connect every lamppost.