Brie has been dating a vampire and her friends have mixed feelings about it. But then everything changes when a murder victim appears on the beach with a bite mark in her neck.

Shaken Awake

The next morning, I was shaken awake by Pamela. “Brie!” she yelled in my ear. “Brie, are you okay?”

I blinked away my blurry vision and sat up carefully to avoid hitting my head on the top bunk. “Yeah, I’m fine. What’s going on?”

“Oh, thank goodness.” She sank onto the floor with a sigh of relief and put her hands over her face. “When I came in and saw you laying there with that mark on your neck, I—I just assumed the worst.”

My hand went to the spot on my neck. It hadn’t faded much in just a day and the concealer must have rubbed off while I slept. “Um, it’s just a hickey,” I mumbled, looking away from her. “Wait, you just came in? Where were you last night?”

“I slept over at Erin’s house,” Pamela said quickly. “Didn’t you get my text?”

I hadn’t opened any of her messages in several days, but I didn’t want to admit that. “Oh, yeah, that,” I said, reaching for my phone.

There were notifications filling up my screen. Ten messages from Pamela, twelve from Erin, two from Luciana, three from Damian—why was my phone blowing up? Then I saw that it wasn’t even eight yet. Yawning, I asked, “Why are you up so early on a Sunday?”

Pamela snatched the phone from my hands and began typing furiously. “I ran back here to make sure that you’re okay.” She thrust the screen back at me. “I thought that might be you.”

I blinked, trying to focus, and had to take the phone from her because her hand was shaking so bad that it was hard to see. “Teen girl found dead on Santa Cruz beach,” a headline said in bold text, right above a photo of a body sprawled on the sand. Her face was hidden but there was a tangle of red hair in a similar shade to mine.

I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand. “That’s horrible. But why would you think it was me?”

“Read the cause of death,” Pamela snapped.

I scrolled down the page. More words jumped out at me. “Two puncture wounds on her neck–drained of blood…” My brain short-circuited. I stared up at Pamela again. “They can’t mean…”

“Oh, they’re dancing around with euphemisms, but they mean exactly why you think.” Pamela folded her arms. “A vampire killed her. One of those disgusting things ignored all the laws, fed off that girl, and dumped her on the beach. They didn’t even try to hide it.”