Taylor grunted in pain, her arm outstretched over the bathtub as reddish purple blood splattered the white linoleum tub liner. Even her blood, which should've been so familiar to her, wasn't what she remembered. It was darker now.

The cut itself wasn't deep, but the sliver of glass was longer and thinner than she'd expected. She let out a chuckle, thinking how she should be thankful that it wasn't a silver dish that had shattered. Glass didn't kill vampires — next to nothing killed vampires, in fact. Taylor wondered, if she let the glass just sit in her arm, would it eventually push its way out, rejected by her rotting body?

In hindsight, she should've seen the signs. The exhaustion during the daytime, the sudden energy she got at night. The sudden disappearance of her desire to eat, and the newfound hunger that sat low in her stomach, and was unfamiliar to her. Her sense of smell, her sensitivity, was on overdrive, and now her blood was different.

She was what the Lost Boys had called a halfling, because she hadn't fed yet, but she would soon. Now that she knew what she needed to feel full again, the hunger inside her was only calling louder.

Taylor cleared her head, focusing her thoughts instead on the task at hand. The glass piece might come out on its own, but she wasn't going to rely on that, and she she returned to pulling it out. It was wedged tightly, going in where her wrist and forearm connected and trailing its way almost up to her elbow. If she wasn't a vampire, Taylor thought, she'd likely be feeling more pain now. Either that, or she was in shock.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. "It's open," She sighed, knowing that whoever it was knew well enough that there were no locks on any doors in this house. Or, at least, in Taylor's room. Silently, she prayed it wasn't Lucy. That was the only face she couldn't bear to see right now — the woman who had birthed her, and then given her a new life, but a cursed one.

Thankfully, it wasn't Lucy. It was David.

His clear eyes were apologetic, and his head hung low.

"Do you need help, Taylor?" He gestured toward her arm, but she knew he was asking about much more than that.

For starters, though, she offered him her arm.

"I can't get it out." Taylor sighed. David handled her body gingerly, even more lightly and lovingly than he had that night in the cave. "It doesn't hurt that much, either. Is that a vampire thing?"

"Could be," David nodded. "We feel pain differently, more numbly than humans do. But, if you can't feel it at all, then that might be shock, honey."

His breath caught at the last word - honey - as if he'd never used it before. At least, Taylor noted, it was possible he hadn't used it in a very long time. Before she could speak about it, David looked up at her.

"It might be easier with a pair of tweezers."

Nodding, Taylor moved to her bedroom, rummaging through a few boxes with her good arm to pull out yet another makeup bag, slightly larger than the one currently resting on her bathroom vanity. From the bag, she produced a thin pair of precision tweezers. She brought them over to him.

"I don't…" David trailed off. "I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't," Taylor replied, although she knew it was a lie. He already had hurt her. He set to work on pulling the glass out. "Can I ask you a question, David?"

"Hm?" He said, determined not to break off the sliver in her arm.

"Why is my mother like that?" She sighed. "It's like the vampirism did something to her, brought out her bitterness and her ugliness from the divorce. She doesn't act like my mother anymore, not like I used to know her."

"When you're like us," David sighed, not wanting to say what they were. "Time passes differently, especially when you don't live with humans. Days feel like years, and years feel like days. Sometimes, being turned can bring out your worse traits, can make you into the type of person you tried so hard not to be, but who always sat underneath the facade you put on. Lucy was unhappy when she met Max, and then, when vampirism was offered to her, she thought it was a chance to be happy again. I think she feels like it's failed her."

"It doesn't seem like it," Taylor shook her head, gesturing towards herself slowly and carefully. "She's obviously really gung-ho about it, or she wouldn't have changed me."

"When you're angry — truly angry — you want others to suffer too. With Michael, though," David said, anticipating her next question. "His is different. A lot of his anger has to do with Star, with her rejection of him. He became a vampire for her, you know? He didn't know what he was doing, he was trying to show off, but he turned before your mom did."

David smiled cockily, holding up the tweezers to reveal the sliver of glass stuck between. He crushed it up in his hand, his palm remaining unscathed, and threw the dust away in the trash can. He placed the tweezers on the vanity, and turned to look at Taylor. She was avoiding his eyes.

"When I turn," She caught herself. "If I turn. Will I be like them? Bitter, and angry?"

"No," David said quickly, shaking his head. "It can bring out the ugly parts in you, but it can't take you over if you don't let it. It's like anything else, you just have to fight to be happy."

"Except with murder and bloodshed." Taylor cracked an insane smile.

"Yeah, there is a bit of murder and bloodshed involved." David smiled back at her.

()()()

David led her to bed that night, and it was she who begged him to stay.

"Please, I don't think I can be alone in this house anymore. I don't feel safe, not with her downstairs." Admitting that she was afraid of her mother was hard for Taylor, and David knew that. But, after their interaction in the kitchen, he understood.

After he and Taylor had left, he'd overheard Lucy yelling at Michael to clean the blood off the floor before it stained. It had made David's cold blood boil.

Although they'd been together before, they hadn't touched afterward, and David knew part of that was his fault. Instead of allowing it to continue, David pulled Taylor closer to him in the large bed, wrapping an arm around her thin frame and resting their foreheads against each other.

"I'm scared, David." She whispered. "I'm scared of what I'm becoming. I didn't think I could ever be like you."

Like you. David took a sharp intake of air.

"Do you think I'm a monster, Taylor?" He said, his eyes closed. He didn't want to look at her, to see her face, outlined in the moonlight, as she answered him. "After everything you've seen, between me and Laddie and the other boys, do you think we're monsters?"

For a few moments, there was silence in the room.

"I don't know," Taylor said. For a moment, David's heart fell, but then Taylor reached up and ran a hand over his cheek, and he felt alive again. "But I do know that whatever you are, I am. We're the same now, monsters or not."

David leaned down and kissed her, tasting her in a way that was different from a few nights ago. That had been about sex, about getting what they both wanted so badly. This was about something more than that.

It pained David to say the next words.

"There's another way, you know." He pulled away from her, his eyes scanning her face in the dark. "There's a way for you to not be like us."

He waited for her answer, knowing what she would say before she said it, and knowing that it would break his heart.

"Tell me."