“Take a number.” I snatch Hope’s money and get up from my chair. “Fair warning, though: Adriana’s grandmother is a witch, and I’m going to ask her to help me put a love and/or sex whammy on Gunnar, so you better act fast.”

Adriana frowns. “My abuela is not going to help you put a sex whammy on someone.”

“What if I say ‘pretty please’?”

“What if you just show her his picture?” Hope suggests, her eyes still on the lithe, broad-shouldered boy behind the counter. “I mean, I’m a hundred percent gay, and even I kinda want to put the sex whammy on him.”

“But, see, though?” I sit back down. “What if I show Ximena his picture and she decides she wants to put the sex whammy on him for herself?”

A yelp of unbridled panic escapes from deep in Adriana’s throat. “Can we please stop talking about sex and my abuela?” At the next table over, a mother with three young kids turns to glare at us, and Adriana lowers her voice. “I hate my life so much. Auggie, what’s your vampire drama?”

“Vamp— Wait, what?” Hope does a double take, her gaze skittering between us. She’s not originally from Fulton Heights, and like all newcomers, she still freaks when she hears the v-word.

The problem is, I don’t really know Hope very well. She moved here from Minnesota at the beginning of the school year, and she lives with her uncle, but I haven’t spent much time with her outside of our independent study. I don’t know if I want to bare my deepest, scariest thoughts about Jude and what’s either a potentially deadly brain tumor or else a dire, unearthly terror with my name on it. After a pause that lasts a hair too long, I confess a lesser truth.

“They’ve been finding dead animals in my neighborhood,” I report at last, and Adriana sighs heavily, as if she’d known it all along. “Vampire snacks. Mostly birds and rabbits, but a stray cat turned up over the weekend, and I guess some stoners found a deer in the woods on Saturday. Bone dry.”

“A deer?” Adriana startles.

Contrary to myth, vampires don’t need to drink a lot of blood; they like to eat, of course, and it gives them strength—but as far as anyone knows, starvation is not among the things that will kill them. So generally, they just take what they need and move on; but a two-hundred-pound deer has about as much blood as a similarly sized human, and for it to be completely exsanguinated …

“How many bite marks?” My best friend’s face is ashen.