Blood Doesn't Lie
215 Words
Mara didn't sleep that night.
She lay in her bed staring at the ceiling while her mind replayed everything on a loop — the wolf bleeding on her doorstep, the vampire killing her roses without touching them, and the way both of them had looked at her like she was something they recognized but couldn't quite name.
Like a word on the tip of a tongue.
She pressed her palm flat against her chest and felt her own heartbeat — steady, human, completely ordinary. Nothing about it suggested she was anything other than a seventeen year old girl in a border town who had made two catastrophically bad decisions in one night.
But Soren's words wouldn't leave her alone.
Why something from both sides of that darkness is suddenly so very interested in you.
Both sides. Not one. Both.
She sat up and looked around her bedroom — the peeling wallpaper, the stack of books, the curtains she had kept faithfully drawn every night for seventeen years.
Her grandmother had been very specific about those curtains.
Keep them closed after dark, Mara. Keep yourself invisible.
She had always assumed it was general advice.
But what if her grandmother had known something specific about her specifically?
Her hands were trembling when she reached for the light.
- Writer
