Sunday passed with an uneasy calmness, and even though I was relieved of patrol duty for the foreseeable future, I slept as poorly as ever. Gary wasn't in school on Monday, which, even though I expected it, disappointed me.

Even Isobel remarked on it at lunch. "Your boyfriend's playing hooky?" she teased. I didn't have the heart to rise to the bait. Dawn didn't usually get lunch, but today she had, and I was convinced it was just so she had something to keep herself occupied. She pushed her food around on her tray, mind somewhere far away.

"What's with your hand?" I asked, desperate to change the topic. Isobel's expression soured, and she tucked her Ace-bandaged hand under the table.

"Sprained my wrist at lacrosse practice," she said.

"That sucks," I said. I think she'd mentioned she played lacrosse before. I mean, she must've at some point during our Dawn-less lunches. "How long until you can play again?"

"Not sure," she said. She sucked the mashed potatoes out of the tines of her plastic fork absentmindedly.

"The doctor didn't tell you?" Dawn asked, having returned from her reverie.

"Yeah, like six weeks or something." Isobel's tone was on the defensive. Despite their natures, I'd never seen the two threaten to clash before. "Whatever."

Whatever, indeed. We left the topic at that.

I found an unexpected message waiting for me in the afternoon.

Going to the park tonight at eight. I need to tell you something.

Leave it to Gary to be so cryptic. What was this about now? I thought back to his conversation with Drew that I'd overheard what felt like years ago now, then squashed the hope bubbling up inside of me that he was going to ask me out or something like that, now that the temporary chill between us had defrosted.

At ten minutes before eight, I stepped outside into the cold November air. I could make it to the park by eight at a casual pace, but the chill kept my steps brisk. Tonight was the first night I'd had the foresight to wear a hat, and I tugged it farther down my forehead against the breeze that bit into my nose and cheeks.

The darkness seemed to close around me, and I tucked myself against the streetlamp to bathe myself in its orange glow. It wasn't any warmer than the dark, but I could at least trick myself into thinking it was. The only sounds were the last leaves rattling on their branches and the occasional, distant roll of car wheels. The fact that I was utterly alone and entirely exposed suddenly hit me.

I hadn't been alone and outside so late for a long while. Certainly not since Gary's warning. I reassured myself the odds were low. I checked my watch. Eight oh two. I'd give him three minutes before I allowed myself to officially start freaking out. I pressed my side tighter into the streetlight and tucked my gloved hands under my arms. Where on earth was he?

There was a sudden pain at the back of my head, sharp enough to make me see stars, and everything went black.

—

I didn't know how long it'd been before I came to. I tried to press a hand to my head to push my pulsing skull back into place, but I found that my hands were conveniently tied behind my back.

It was dim, wherever I was. Crates upon crates were stacked around me in my chair. I could smell the sea. I hadn't been to the harbor in ages, but I was certain this was it. As if in confirmation, a foghorn sounded, muffled by the walls of the warehouse.

I supposed if I were going to kidnap someone, one of dozens of cold, identical brick warehouses in a dying boatyard would be a pretty safe place to keep them.

I wished desperately that Gary and I had some kind of psychic connection like he and Red did once. How long of a distance did it work over, anyway? He hadn't known when Red died. I tried to throw my thoughts as hard as I could toward him, imagining them soaring out in waves like radio music. Gary, please. Come now. I don't know where I am. I need you. And the others, too. Mostly you. Can you hear me? Please find me.

I felt exerted by the effort. And pretty stupid. Taking the more pragmatic route, I fiddled with the rope tied around my wrists, but I couldn't slip out of it nor untie it. I shuddered as the cold started to seep through my coat. My hands, ungloved, were already aching and stiff. When had I taken off my gloves? Had I even put them on? That hit to the head had done more damage than I'd thought.

The combined effect of the cold and my brain thumping against the inside of my skull almost convinced me that the figure appearing from around a stack of crates was a hallucination. I blinked dumbly. It took me several long seconds, but I recognized this girl.

"Isobel," I said, the name coming out of my mouth in a whoosh of relieved breath. I didn't care how she'd gotten here (or how I'd gotten here, as a matter of fact), but I suppose I could only thank my lucky stars it was someone I knew. Maybe she'd been kidnapped, too, and had managed to escape.

"Leaf!" she practically sang as she approached. "You're finally awake!"

Isobel smiled at me for the first time, the first real time, her full lips pulled back away from her teeth. And then I saw them.

A row of fangs. Not two like everyone said, but an entire row of gleaming white, wickedly pointed teeth, ready to rip out my throat at a moment's notice. A mouth of shark teeth, and I was the fish.

Man alive, I had to stop tempting fate with my stupid jokes.

"You know, you really are cute," she drawled. "I wonder if you taste as good as you look."

She continued talking, but I could barely hear her. Shocked out of my cold stupor by some instinct that had been awakened by those teeth of hers, I was too busy surveying my surroundings for an escape route and trying to look like I wasn't surveying my surroundings for an escape route.

"...Yellow." My head perked up minutely at the mention of the girl's name, and a smile that was anything but reassuring spread across Isobel's lips. "You know Yellow? She was so sweet. And I bet you know Silver, too." She leaned in, her breath on my ear. "He told me all about you."

If saving my own ass wasn't enough motivation to get myself out of here, the opportunity to curb-stomp that traitorous son of bitch sure was. I knew it. I'd known it. He'd wanted me dead from the start. I bet he'd passed all of Rossignol's plans straight on to her. I bet he'd run them around in circles, keeping them away from the truth of the recent attacks. I bet he'd been the one to murder Red.

I bet he was planning to pick off the rest of them, one by one.

Isobel didn't seem interested in my revelation. "It's so hard to find good help these days," she was saying. "Back when people actually believed in vampires, it was so much more fun. I remember when Dracula first came out. Stoker had it totally wrong, but, oh, what a time that was."

So, not the 1992 Gary Oldman movie. The fact that this thing, that looked like a teenage girl, was old enough to be at least my great-great grandmother, didn't unsettle me as much as I would've expected it to. Considering the past month and a half or so, this was pretty much par for the course.

"Isn't it funny?" she asked, her lips spreading into a smile as if to accentuate the hilarity of the whole situation. "You're totally at my mercy. I could kill you"—her smile grew wider, impossibly, to show off her shark teeth—"or I could turn you into one of my ever-faithful servants, like Silver." I watched, mesmerized, as her teeth shifted to a rather normal human set, bar the two canine teeth that were almost long enough to comically stick out of her mouth. "At least, before he became such an uppity louse. I was actually looking for a replacement today when I came across you, standing around so innocently."

The idea that she might have somehow used Gary's phone to lead me out into the open, entirely vulnerable, crossed my mind, but I discarded it. Whatever powers vampires might have had, I refused to believe hacking was one. I found it hard to believe she would have had the opportunity to steal his phone and impersonate him either.

"Now the question is," she continued, "which one do I choose?" Isobel traced a finger from my neck to my chin, and I suppressed a shiver at the sensation of her nail scratching along my skin. The bandage from earlier was gone, and I could see spindly cracks, as if in stone, that ran across her wrist and the back of her hand. She noticed.

"Oh, that." She pulled away, frowning. "Yeah, your dear friend Red did that. Unfortunately, we don't really heal from that sort of thing, so it'll be an irritating little reminder for the rest of eternity."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said, but she took it seriously.

"I know, right? It's horrible. I'll have to single-handedly bring gloves back into fashion. Oh, if only it could be 1850 again. Things were simpler back then." She seemed a little lost in thought. "Anyway, I don't see what you could possibly have against my turning you into one of us. All of your best friends will otherwise live on agelessly without you. You don't have much to lose, either. You said yourself that your mom barely spends time with you. And your dad's been gone for...four years?" She looked to me for confirmation I didn't offer.

It stung. I'd opened up to this bitch about family gripes and resentments that I hadn't even had the balls to talk to a therapist about. Had she just been vetting me the whole time? Looking for someone desperate enough to come be her willing underling? There was no way all of the secrets she'd shared with me were truthful. And I'd bought them—hook, line, and sinker. I'd never felt more foolish.

She hummed. "Silver's arriving. I'd better get this over with. He's not very good at…controlling himself."

Without warning, she twisted my head in a vise-like grip to bare the side of my neck to her. I was utterly immobilized as I felt her lean closer, felt her cool breath fanning my throat and the scraping of her teeth. I couldn't tell how many teeth there were, which was something of a concern at the moment.

Not that either option was particularly appealing.

"I wish you could have the good sense to fall down, shudder, and die already."

There was the ear-splitting sound of an explosion—a gunshot, it registered somewhere in my mind—and suddenly Isobel seized up beside me, her breath leaving her in a sharp exhalation on my skin. She stumbled away from me, her hazel eyes wide, mouth opening and closing stupidly like a beached fish. Her hands were clasped to her chest as a dark stain spread across the fabric of her thin jacket under her fingers.

I whipped my head around to the entrance, where, with a gun still in his raised hand, stood Silver. Of all people.

"Silver bullet," he said, blowing across the tip of the gun's barrel like in an action flick. I sniggered.

"Silver—"

"I regret saving you already."

Silver strode over and nudged the shoulder of Isobel's motionless body with his foot. Seemingly satisfied with her lack of response, he spit at her.

"Cocky piece of shit," he said, the curve of his lips so small I might have been imagining it.

He didn't bother untying the rope binding my hands together but ripped it apart. It unravelled from my wrists with a little nudging from my frozen fingers, and I pushed myself out of the metal folding chair I'd been seated in.

As we made our way out of the warehouse, I checked my phone. Twenty new messages, thirty missed calls, between Gary and Dawn. How long had I been out? A day?

The others of Rossignol were waiting outside on the wharf for us. We'd barely gotten in sight when Gary began striding toward me, and I nearly cowered at the stormy expression on his face. He was downright apoplectic, and I had about two more yards to fix it. "Gary, I—"

He grabbed me roughly by the shoulders, and, instead of the violent what the fuck were you thinking shaking I figured I'd get, he planted one right on me.

Kissing Gary was everything I'd thought it would be. And more.

Finally, after nursing a crush on my best friend for the past five years, I was exactly where I wanted to be: his arms holding me tight, my hands bunched in his shirt, his mouth hot and heavy on mine. It was one of those kisses where an eternity passes in a moment. He wanted it as much as I had. As if he hadn't dropped enough hints through the years. And I didn't give one iota about the circumstances.

He broke away, much to my disappointment, both of us left breathless.

"What the fuck were you thinking."

Ah.

There it was.

"Look, Gary—" He raised a hand to interrupt me.

"You know what? I don't care. I'm just too glad you're not a corpse right now." He blew out a relieved breath. "Of course, I'm going to totally get on your case later."

"Of course."

—

Now that Isobel was gone, things were returning to normal. Then again, normal at this point had become something of a relative term. Herriot called off the patrols, to more than my relief—I guess the others had gotten tired of them, too, although for beings who didn't sleep, what else was there to do all night?

Before then, however, we'd needed to get through the rather awkward phase of Silver's admission. You know, the whole double-agent thing. His apology, although stiff, felt more authentic than I'd expected, and he wasn't banished into potential future antagonist territory. It helped that he could explain himself and the details of Isobel's plot.

She was a powerful vampire, that much we'd already known—powerful enough to conceal her true nature from other vampires. (Herriot, Gary explained, had the same ability.) That was precisely why Rossignol couldn't find her or me that night in the warehouse and why if not for Silver leading them there, things could have turned out supremely poorly. Not to mention the boatyard wasn't a typical patrolling spot for them. That night, she'd been on the prowl for his replacement—that much she'd already told me—and I'd been conveniently waiting there for her to snatch. When I tried to blame Gary for showing up late, he insisted he'd never meant that we would meet up at the park. He said we were going to the park; I must have misunderstood him. I let him have his little victory.

Gary, as promised, tore me a new one, although without the threat of Isobel I couldn't take him as seriously as I probably should have. There was no guarantee that no one else would show up to terrorize the town in her place. I left that worry in some dark, dusty corner of my mind, however.

Instead, I'd been having a hell of a time as an honorary member of the Club, and, not to brag, getting pretty damn good at gin rummy. I wasn't good enough to beat even Dawn, the most inexperienced of them all, but I'd come close on a couple of occasions. My crowning achievement, however, was introducing them to the game of Mao and making fools of all of them. (Drew claimed they knew how to play and were just humoring me—a likely story coming from the consistent loser of the group.)

Yellow, in the aftermath of losing Red, had become close to Herriot. She'd gone so far as to become a student teacher under him. How they'd pulled that off and gotten the principal's approval for someone without a degree in pedagogy, I had no clue, but no one minded. She was a fast favorite, especially among the boys, despite—or maybe because of—her demure and bashful nature.

These days it was too cold and too snowy for bikes, so we walked home. It was the last Friday in January when I brought it up for the first time.

"So you're going to live forever?" I asked. What Isobel had said was still bothering me, months afterward. All of your best friends will live on agelessly without you. It was a hard pill for a girl to swallow.

Gary scooped up some snow, packed it tight, and nailed an unsuspecting mailbox. "Yeah, that's the plan, I guess."

"Don't you think that'd be lonely?"

He shrugged. "I've got friends. And Drew." He looked over at me with a smile. "What, you worried about lil ol' me?"

No, my question was infinitely more selfish than that. Maybe my opinion would change once we'd spent some time apart at uni, but right now, growing old without Gary Oak felt like my own personal brand of hell.

"Oh, I'm sure you'll do just fine," I said. "I wonder what it would be like, though. Living forever." I gave it a few seconds before I sprang for it. "Could you—"

"No." I began to protest, but he cut me off again, reading my mind. "I'm not turning you."

"And why not?"

"I'm not putting you through that without any real need. And anyway… I don't even know if I could." His brow furrowed, his expression guarded. "I'd probably end up killing you or something."

"Wait, what?" I shook my head. "What are you talking about? Why didn't Paul kill Dawn? Why didn't Isobel"—he flinched at the name, but I didn't care—"kill Yellow, or Silver?" My hands were shaking fists. The very real fear I'd been pushing down for months was now boiling up to the surface. "Am I too weak? Am I—"

"I'm not a real vampire!"

A/N: whoops