What am I willing to do for family? The answer has always been anything. I need to show them they’re my family now. Earn it, and then win the competition. If I do all that, then it can’t be taken away from me.

I take slow steps until I’m staring at Adam’s chest.

“Please,” he begs. “I have a little sister.”

I shake my head, and then the stake is gone from my hand and in his chest, but I didn’t put it there. Xander’s hand is tight around the hilt.

Adam gasps, his mouth opening and closing like he’s desperate for air.

Red blooms briefly on his shirt before the wound starts disintegrating to a gray dust. Xander and Reina let go of him, and he drops to my feet as he continues to turn to ash from the wound outward. He flails, and one of his hands finds my ankle for a moment, and I stare at that and nothing else until it turns to ash too.

I step out of the water and then I bend at the waist and wrestle down the urge to heave up everything inside me, but even when I’m in control, I don’t look up. I can’t. I can’t look at them at all.

I thought killing vampires would heal my open wounds, but I feel like I’ve opened a new one instead. Another memory I won’t be able to shake.

I hear the others whispering behind me, and when I look up, only Xander’s still here.

He’s made of nothing but shadows, standing across from me. He prowls toward me like a monster from a nightmare, and I take a step back into the water. Cold dampness greets me, but my bones are colder.

“Hey.” His voice is soft. He’s not stalking closer—he’s moving slowly because he knows I’m spooked.

I just watched someone I knew poof away like a piece of newspaper in a bonfire.

I can’t make the fantasy of hunting monstrous creatures fit with stabbing a high school bully in the chest with a stake. He sat behind me in math class. I’m pretty sure he threw more than one gum wrapper at my head. He’d walk through the door at the same time as me so he could shove me in the shoulder.

But that was a ruse—his bullying gave Stacie an in to befriend me.

My first real friend was a freaking vampire.

And so was my first kiss.