By the time the week was coming to an end, Sam had stopped asking the Frog brothers for help with his brother. They went to the hotel once or twice to investigate, confident he would be there if he hadn't left town. The only evidence anything has changed since their last visit was the absence of the little vampire's corpse.

"Must've rotted," Alan decided, giving Sam and Edgar a grave look, "there's no coming back from a staking."

"You're sure?" Sam asked, not for the first time. "You'd think there would still be bones or something…"

"No other explanation. I don't know where your brother is, but he's not here." Edgar was so confident, he didn't even linger to examine a patch of suspiciously wet earth. He was a man of action, not thought.

So Sam decided maybe his grandpa was right, and if Michael came home at some point then everything would be ok. Maybe he'd even get a sheepish call from Phoenix or some town over and his brother would pour his heart out about running away. He could only hope.

He didn't know what to say when his mom began to spend her afternoons after work wrapped in a shawl on the porch, waiting for Michael to come home. On Sunday, she pulled Sam into a hug so tight he thought they'd both break. Maybe they already had.


"Alan?" Edgar whispered his brother's name, hovering over his bedside. No response. Out like a light. Nodding to himself, Edgar went back to his own bed and knelt down beside it to pull a shoebox out from underneath. His secret collection. He smiled proudly, sitting down on his mattress so he could open it.

He swiftly looked back over at Alan, just to be sure he wasn't waking up. Hard to keep secrets when you were stuck sharing a room with your brother most of your life.

He pulled out a small journal, a couple of pens, a lock of blonde hair tied neatly into a bow, a charm he'd swiped from his first dead vampire's jacket, a bulb of garlic long dried with only a faint odor of death on it, a charred claw, and a cigarette. The last one wasn't his favorite souvenir, but it was all he had time to grab. All of these were his treasures.

Tenderly, reverently, Edgar picked up his journal to relive those kills, and the very first. Before the vampires. With one hand, he fingered the lock of hair, reminding himself he thought she was one of them, so it was really ok that he'd done it. After all, it was still good practice. No harm in practicing. It wasn't as if anyone missed his little sister anyway.


Sam's visits with the brothers became more about just hanging out and reading comics—with vampire hunting as a topic separate from his personal life. Their first official 'club' meeting took place the day before school started. Sam was late.

Alan and Edgar sat at the kitchen table together, busily working on restocking their toolkits. They'd managed to get through three packs of pencils, shaving them down with Bowie knives until the tips were razor sharp. Edgar proudly admired each and every finished work with a satisfied smile, and Alan picked through them to pick their best work to wrap in a canvas tool bag roll.

"Can't believe we didn't think of this before," Alan remarked, "way better than dowels."

This was their Tuesday night tradition. Prep their tools, make their plans, flip through fresh comic inventory to scrawl their number on the back. They'd perfected the whole system in middle school when their parents went on a six month stint of forgetting to pay the electricity bill on time. The garage was full of homemade weapons and water guns. Ed's dream was to line the guns up on bead board for easy access, but cardboard boxes would have to do until then.

"We'll have to expand soon," Edgar said, nodding to agree with himself, "with business picking up like this." In all honesty, they'd only ever actually hunted vampires once. Still, once was more than enough to prove to themselves they had a gift. Five in one night, after all. Almost eight, if they'd had to deal with the halflings too. Edgar was confident that taking on the little one would have been a piece of cake if they hadn't been interrupted. Every once in awhile he'd bring it up and complain about it, and Alan would just let him rant.

Alan swept a hand across the table to dust away pencil filings, "I still think we should put our numbers on some of those flyers. I mean, I bet you ten to one that most of those missing people are bloodsuckers by now. We find the missing person, we stake them. It's basically double the reward."

Edgar nodded, "Santa Carla is lucky they've got you and me to protect it."

The doorbell rang. Edgar and Alan jumped up at once, grabbing a few crosses from the table and some freshly sharpened pencils. They tripped over each other scrambling to the front door, ready to face their guest with all the force of intimidating machismo they could muster.

Sam looked at them both as they wrenched open the door. Lucy's car was parked in front of the driveway, where she waited intently for Sam to give her the signal to leave. Since Michael left, she'd gotten stricter about watching Sam go anywhere.

"I got pizza," Sam lifted up two stacked white cardboard boxes in his hands, "otherwise, I'm unarmed."

Neither Alan or Edgar picked up on his sarcasm. They stepped aside, eyes narrowed. Silent.

"…Right. Yeah," Sam said as he bobbed his head, continuing, "no invitations. Guess I forgot." He turned his head back to signal to Lucy that he'd be fine and stepped into the house.

"So what's the plan?" Sam asked, surveying the entryway. Alan never much liked the way the other kid's nose scrunched up when he visited like he was picking up on some sort of smell. For the sake of numbers and protection, though, he never said anything about it.

"We've already got tools ready, we just need to plan out intel. Figure out which locals to listen to, find a trail," Edgar explained, throwing a hand on Sam's shoulder.

"Right," Sam replied, nodding slowly. He gave the pizza boxes a quick pat, "but maybe we start with food and like a movie or something? MTV?"

"Evil never sleeps, Sam," Edgar pointed out.

"Okay, yeah, but it never eats pepperoni either. You guys got Pepsi in the fridge, right?" Sam shouldered his way past the Frog brothers towards the kitchen. Alan didn't want to admit that the kid's plan sounded kinda tempting. He loved pepperoni.

"We need a plan," Edgar pointed out, "school is going to take up half the daylight. You know how many hours that gives us?"

"Uh…" Sam beelined to the kitchen to put the pizzas on the table and began ransacking the fridge for soda, "we get out at 3, so I guess 3-4 hours?"

"If we're lucky," Alan said with a sneer.

Sam rolled his eyes and grabbed a six-pack of Pepsi from the back of one of the shelves, "you guys really need to clean this out. That head of lettuce in there looks old enough to drive, dude."

Alan fished a slice of pizza from one of the boxes, putting on his toughest face just to be sure neither his brother nor Sam knew just how stoked he was to eat it.

"Got any plates?" Sam asked, glancing around the kitchen. There was that look again. The second he saw the arguably very small pile of dishes in the sink, he wrinkled his nose and shook his head. "How long have those been there?"

"We don't need plates," Edgar insisted stubbornly, slapping a hand on the table, "I've got an idea."

"I mean we could just wash—wait, where's your soap?" Sam scowled at the sink and counters as he spoke. King of judgmental buttholes, Alan thought bitterly.

"Woo're oot," Alan mumbled through a mouthful of pizza. He was too hungry to slow down enough for proper sentences.

"There's Pert in the shower if you need it," Edgar offered, snatching the Pepsi from Sam to tear a can from the plastic rings. The siren song of pizza was becoming too much for him to resist.

"You wash your dishes with shampoo?" Sam blurted out, horrified.

"It's 2-in-1," Alan replied defensively, wiping greasy fingers on his shirt, "that's like twice as good as normal soap."

Sam shook his head, snapping off his own Pepsi from the pack and setting the rest on the table. "You know what? We can just skip the plates."

Edgar shrugged, flopping down into one of the table chairs, "your choice."

Alan stared intently at the open pizza box, doing the mental math on how much he could get away with eating before the other two complained. "Hey Sam," he said, remembering belatedly why they called for this first club meeting, "I think I saw your brother last night."


They lounged on the shore, watching pink-stained water lap at the remains of the night's party. The tide was mesmerizing in their sated states, following its own predictable yet unpredictable rhythm.

Paul's skin still seemed to itch when he was close to water, but the deep sting in his bones had finally dissipated enough for him to enjoy the beach again. He sat propped up on his elbows, one leg drawn up and the other lazily thrown over Marko's chest. It had been a good night.

Dwayne sat beside them, claws idly flipping through one of their victim's blood-spattered wallets. Behind them, David and Michael sat together. Death and resurrection aside, things were much better now. Paul would melt a thousand times if it meant Max was gone forever. Even for a vampire, he was a psychopath and a bastard.

"Hey," Paul called to Marko through their shared mental bond. They all heard him. It was impossible to hide their thoughts from each other. Even Michael heard him.

Marko looked over at Paul, nodding back, "what?"

"You pick up on the weird vibe when those assholes staked you?"

Marko shrugged, "I guess. They smelled like corn chips."

Paul frowned, looking back towards the shore, "nah, the other thing. The really weird one."

Dwayne looked over at Paul, lowering the wallet he'd been flipping through, "he was like Max."

They let a silence settle between them again. After a good half hour of so, Michael finally spoke up.

"What does that even mean?" He asked, drawing Paul's gaze towards him. He wasn't startled, but his brain was already getting fogged by his third joint of the evening, so he struggled to understand the question.

"He's not there," David explained, tapping at his right temple with a gloved index finger, "Max wasn't either. Something didn't click. He made me and Dwayne, but we never bonded. He wasn't capable of it."

"Thank fuck for that," Paul added with a giggle. He earned himself a side-eye from Dwayne.

Marko smirked, sitting up and knocking Paul's boot off his chest, "Dave figured it out when he went on a bender and dosed Pauly with his blood. Max didn't say a fucking thing. Didn't know he wasn't one of his. Couldn't even fucking tell."

Dwayne reached towards Paul to snatch his last joint, especially satisfied with himself when he earned Paul's own side-eye in return.

"Then we met Marko, tried it again," Dwayne added, preferring their more intimate communication over speaking aloud, "and he got this idea about family. Liked the idea."

"I don't regret it but it kind of fucked everything up. Boys need a mother and all that bullshit. He thought you were his too, Michael. We let his blood infect those who we just wanted to toy with. You got lucky and we liked you." David mused.

"Lucky? that's what you call it?" Michael asked with a half-amused smile. Joining them hadn't been an especially easy transition. Better than being dinner, though. Paul hadn't been nearly as astonished that their newest member was fully turned once he'd been revived from death as he had been when the brunette threw a punch at David after their first race together. Their leader never got that excited about bringing anyone back to the hotel.

Dwayne waved a hand towards their drained victims in the sand, "better dead like us than dead like them."

Paul settled back in the sand, letting the gentle haze of weed and blood carry him. He didn't notice the thoughtful look on Michael's face. He didn't notice Marko idly rubbing at the spot near his heart where he'd been staked. He didn't notice David's self-satisfied smile as he pressed a reassuring hand on Michael's shoulder to draw his attention. He also didn't notice Dwayne picking the wallet up again and pocketing a few bloody bills. He didn't have to notice anything at all. That was the nice thing about being pack. You just knew things. Sharing thoughts or idle chatter didn't much matter in the grand scheme of it all.