We said good night to Lina and stepped out into the cool gray light of morning. She kept the car idling to make sure we got safely inside, putting it in gear only when the front door opened to reveal Sal on the threshold. I stood on the front porch, watching Sal watching Lina, until the sun broke fully over the cornfields, flooding the whole sad scene in a blaze of light.

And so the night ended as it had begun, with the slayer refusing to come out and the vampire refusing to come in. I supposed this was how it had always been and how it would always be—two worlds, sun and shadow, destined to stand on opposite ends of an eternal battlefield, lined with wooden stakes.

And in the middle were me and Reg, mere mortals tasked with gathering up humans for slaughter. To be fair, it was the nondeadly kind, but it still felt like a slaughter. Something would definitely die in the days to come, and it would be at least partially our fault. But as long as human lives were spared, then wasn’t the death of a place called Nowhere a fair price to pay for immortality?

Gravel crunched under the tires as Lina’s car finally pulled away, steering into the sunrise. I watched it go until it was swallowed up in a cloud of dust.

We couldn’t stop what was coming. All we could do was pick a side, and with no good options, the best side to pick was our own. In the fight between immortal and mortal, eternal life versus inescapable death . . . I chose life.

I chose vampire.

Thirty

The Twilight Between

The decision seemed easy there on the cottage porch, at the end of the night I’d been awaiting for months—ever since we’d been stranded in Nowhere, Iowa. But the next day, surrounded by humans in the bright hallways of Hope High, what had been so clear was suddenly a little cloudy. I was deliberately late to school Monday morning, to avoid our daily gathering at Poe’s locker; I feigned illness to get out of gym class with the twins; I silenced my phone so I wouldn’t see Dex’s texts; and I squirmed all through French as I tried to picture Madame Bissett in some other classroom, some other school, some other town.

I had to remind myself over and over that we didn’t have a choice in what happened to Nowhere; our only choice was whether we played a part. The futures of Dex and Syd and Soph and Poe, of all our teachers and classmates, were inevitable. Our own destinies, though, still hung in the balance. Our actions might not make a difference for Nowhere, but they would mean life or death for me and Reg.

Still, I managed to avoid eye contact with anyone at all for the entire day.