Out of habit, I head to J Street, where more people gather at night—a vampire might find warm, drunk bodies and easily accessible necks there. After fruitlessly hunting all these years, I don’t really believe I’ll find one, but I still peek down the occasional dark alley, looking for anything odd. And I’m ready if I do find one. I’m fast. I’m more comfortable with a stake in my hand than a pencil. I spent years watching vampire movies and mimicking the moves of vampire hunters until my muscles remembered every action. I’ve seen every vampire movie twenty times. Not because I like them. I hate them—the scenes that make them seem good or sexy make my stomach turn—but they’re all I have. Because nobody knows shit about vampires except that they’re out there.

Vampires revealed themselves when I was eight—just two weeks before I found Mom with dripping wounds on her neck that looked like bite marks. The adults wrote it off as some type of animal attack. When she died, I didn’t know vampires existed yet because we didn’t have a television. But once I got placed in a temporary home where the television ran all day, I knew what really happened to Mom. I felt it in the way my skin froze watching that redheaded bastard on television brag about how he hadn’t killed anyone in a long time. His name was Gerald. There were a few others, but his face was on the television every day for weeks. The foster-whatevers I lived with at the time were obsessed with it. They had the news on constantly even though I said it scared me. They made me sit with them in the living room, all our dinners on trays, and watch news story after news story until all I could picture was that vampire’s smirking face. All I could imagine was his teeth on my mom’s neck, even though it probably wasn’t him. He lived in Paris, but it didn’t matter. I stopped sleeping.

That’s when I started hunting.

In one interview, they asked him if a wooden stake to the heart really killed vampires, and the bloodsucker didn’t answer, but I saw the way his mouth tightened and knew it was true. That was the first night I snuck out after the foster-whatevers went to sleep. I armed myself with pencils and made it only a block before I turned around and went back, but it felt good to be out there in the night doing something instead of crying and remembering.

A vampire took Mom from me. Me and Parker. I wanted to kill one, just one, to pay them back. If I could do that, I thought, then maybe I had a shot of smiling again and finding a family, because families liked happy kids, not kids who woke up crying.