“Wait.” I looked at my brother in disbelief. “You actually said that? To a teacher?”

“Charlie, you didn’t see this list—”

“You insulted your teacher’s course plan on the first day of class? That’s pretty pretentious—even for you.”

Reg hissed and pulled back his lips before he remembered he didn’t have fangs.

“Wow.” I cringed. “That really does look ridiculous.”

Reg said nothing, still fuming, but I noticed a slight pink to his cheeks as he covered his mouth with his hand.

The sidewalk gave way to the muddy shoulder of country road, and we emerged from the canopy of maples and oaks into full sun.

“I get it,” I said, squinting against the sudden brightness. “All day I just wanted to rip out someone’s throat and bleed them dry.”

“Like you did that boy?” he snapped.

This again.

“He lived.”

“No thanks to you.”

“That’s right!” There was only room for one bad attitude in this sibling relationship, and Reg knew damn well that was my job. “It’s thanks to you. Thanks to you leaving him outside that emergency room door. Thanks to you for confessing. Thanks to you, we’re in this mess. If you had just let me—”

“Let you what? Let you turn him? Let you leave him there to bleed until he died?”

I took a deep shaking breath. “I was going to say, if you’d just let me handle it, I could have come up with . . . something.”

“Handle it.” Reg shook his head. “When you take that much of their blood, the only way to ‘handle it’ is to turn them, save them, or bury them.” He ticked the options off on his fingers. “If we’d done anything but save him, the punishment would have been worse.”

“Like there’s anything worse than this.” I pouted.

“If you had violated the treaty and turned one that young, a stake through the heart would surely be your punishment. Better sunlight than a stake.”

I glared at the sun—or rather, since that was unreasonably painful, I glared instead at everything the sun touched, which was everything, period. It winked off golden corn tassels every time they swayed in a breeze; it caught the flat edge of worn rocks in the road so they glowed white; it shimmered in the distance like water that wasn’t really there.

The sun, if you asked me, was awfully full of itself. I preferred the subtlety of night.

“I’ll take the stake,” I said, my voice growing shrill. “Over the sun. Over Iowa. Over school.”

Reg slowed his pace, and the anger slid out of his voice. “You don’t mean that. High school may be hell, but it’s only a year—”

I shot him a look.

“Okay, two for you,” he amended. “But then we’ll both be adults, officially. Perhaps then we can renegotiate our immortality.”