Mendoza looked at me again, then back at Kael. “Right,” he said, smiling.

“You two know each other?” Austin pointed between them. I sat there, observing. Confused. Austin was as surprised as I was.

“Yeah, man. He’s my fucking brother.” Mendoza’s voice was loud and happy. If it were a color, it would be yellow. Where Kael’s was more of a dark navy blue.

Wait, were they actually brothers? They were different races, but that didn’t mean anything, really. Or was this soldier talk, always calling one another family?

“We were in basic together. And we deployed—”

“Mendoza, this is Karina,” Kael interrupted, looking at me.

“My sister,” Austin said to both guys.

“We met before. I don’t know if you remember,” I said.

It shouldn’t have rattled me that Kael and this guy knew each other, but it did. Military bases always seemed so small, but they were really their own cities with hundreds of thousands of people. When someone said, “Oh, your dad’s in the Army. I bet he knows my cousin Jeff, he’s in the Army too!”—it didn’t really work that way. So, Mendoza knowing Kael and Austin, and sort of knowing me, was a coincidence, to say the least.

“I do. We met a couple times.” Mendoza cocked his head to the side. “Didn’t we go to the castle one night? What was that, like last summer?” I thought back to the end of summer, riding in my dad’s van, which had been too full of Austin’s friends. Definitely squished.

“We did,” I told him. “I forgot all about that.” Brien was there, too. We had just met, in fact. I didn’t mention that.

“Your brother and that damn castle.” He laughed, and Austin flipped him off.

Kael was looking at us both like we were crazy.

“Have you heard about it? Dracula’s castle?” I asked. It sounded ridiculous out loud.

He shook his head and I continued to explain. “It’s not really a castle, but it’s this big stone tower that everyone says was haunted.”

“IS haunted!” Austin argued.

“Is haunted,” I said, rolling my eyes. I had gone to Dracula’s castle at least five times with Austin since we’d moved here. I didn’t know if the story about the kid getting electrocuted at the top was really true, but the old tower had earned a reputation for being haunted by ghosts. “Actual ghosts!” is what everyone said. There were all kinds of stories.

“Anyway, so it’s a tower and people drive up there at night to drink and try not to get caught,” I explained to Kael.

“She’s acting like she’s cool now, but she’s always the first one to run back to the car.” Austin held up his drink to Kael and Mendoza, laughing.

“Oh, fuck off.” I shot him a look—more laughter followed.