Page 20 of Bride

“No need to get testy, honey. We all want to think that we’re important to the people who are important to us. But sometimes, our best friend is someone else’s best friend.”

I closed my eyes to roll them behind my lids.

“Did you two maybe have a fight?” the officer asked.

I crossed my arms on my chest and sucked my cheeks in. “That’s not the point—”

“Ha.”

“Okay.” I frowned. “Let’s say Serena secretly hates me. She still wouldn’t leave her cat, would she?”

He paused. Then, for the first time, he nodded and picked up a notepad. I felt a spark of hope. “Cat’s name?”

“She hasn’t gotten around to naming him yet, though last we spoke she’d narrowed it down between Maximilien Robespierre and—”

“How long has she had this cat?”

“A few days? She still wouldn’t let the little asshole starve,” I hurried to add, but the officer had already dropped his pen. And even though I went back to the station three times that week, and eventually managed to get a missing person report filed, no one did anything to find Serena. The hazard, I guess, of being alone in the world: no one to care that she was safe, and healthy, andalive. No one but me, and I didn’t count. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and I wasn’t. But apparently I still had the capacity to feel hurt.

Because no one cared whetherIwas safe, or healthy, or alive. No one but Serena. The sister of my heart, if not of my blood. And even though I’d beenplentyalone, I’d never felt so lonely as after she was gone.

I wished I could cry. I wished for lacrimal ducts to let out this horrible terror that she’d left forever, that she’d been taken, that she was in pain, that it was my fault and I’d driven her away with our last conversation. Unfortunately, biology was not on my side. So I worked through my feelings by going to her place and taking care of her damn fucking cat, who showed his gratitude by scratching me every single day.

And, of course, by looking for her where I shouldn’t have.

I had the keys, after all. Because the key to everything is but a line of code. I was able to rifle through her bank statements, IP addresses, cell phone locations.Heraldemails, metadata, app usage.Serena was a journalist, one who wrote about delicate financial stuff, and the most likely option was that she’d gotten embroiled in something fishy while working on a story, but I wasn’t going to exclude other possibilities. So I went through everything, and found... nothing.

Absolutelynothing.

Serena’s poof had been quite literal. But one cannot move in the world without leaving digital traces, which could only mean one thing. One terrible, blood-curdling thing that I couldn’t even put into words in the privacy of my own head.

And that’s when I did it: I kneeled in front of Serena’s damn fucking cat. He was playing like he always did after dinner, pawing at a crumpled receipt in a corner of the living room, but managed to squeeze a couple of hisses into his busy schedule just for me. “Listen.” I swallowed. Rubbed my hand on my chest and then even slapped it, trying to dull the ache. “I know you only knew her for a few days, but I really, really...” I scrunched my eyes shut. Ohfuck, this was hard. “I don’t know how it happened, but I think that Serena might be...”

I opened my eyes, because I owed it to this asshole cat to look at him. And that’s when I got a good view of it.

The receipt, which wasn’t a balled-up receipt at all. It was a piece of paper torn from a journal, or perhaps a notebook, or—no. A planner. Serena’s incredibly outdated planner.

The page was for the day of her disappearance. And there was a string of letters on it, written quickly in black marker. Gibberish.

Or maybe not quite. A distant bell rang, reminding me of a game Serena and I used to play as kids, a primitive substitution cipher we made up to gossip freely in front of our caregivers. We’dnamed it the butterfly alphabet, and it mostly consisted of addingb- andf- syllables to normal words. Nothing complicated: even rusty as I was, it took my brain only a few seconds to untangle it. And once I was done, I had something. I had three whole words:

L. E. MORELAND

CHAPTER 4

They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Sporadic bouts of teenage idiocy notwithstanding, I doubt a Vampyre has been in Were territory for centuries.

I felt it in my bones last night, as my driver sank farther past the river. Serena’s damn cat fidgeted in the carrier next to me, and I knew that I was really,trulyalone. Being with the Humans was like living in a different country, but here? Another galaxy. Deep space exploration.

The house I was brought to is built on a lake, surrounded by thick, gnarly trees on three sides and placid water on the remaining one. Nothing cave-like or underground, despite what I’d have imagined from a wolf-related species, and yet odd nonetheless, with its warm materials and large windows. Like the Weres teamed up with the landscape and decided to build something beautiful together. It’s a bit jarring, especially after spending the last six weeks shuttling between the sterility of Vampyre territory and the crowded bustle of the Humans. Avoiding the sunlight is going to be an issue, and so is the fact that the temperature is kept considerablylower than is comfortable for Vampyres. I can deal with that, though. What I was really bracing myself for was...

In my third year as the Collateral, at a diplomatic dinner, I was introduced to an elderly matron. She was wearing a sequined dress, and when she lifted her hand to pinch my cheeks, I noticed that her antique bracelet was made of very unusually shaped, very pretty pearls.

They were fangs. Pulled from the corpses of Vampyres—or live ones, for all I know.

I didn’t scream, or cry, or attack that old hag. I was paralyzed, unable to function properly for the rest of the night, and only started processing what had happened when I got home and told Serena, who was furious on my behalf and demanded a promise from the caregiver on shift: that I would never be forced to attend a similar function again.

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