softly. There’s no one here. She must have left.
Talia couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe anything else. She slid her phone back into her purse and set it down along with her shopping bag. Get a grip. But her hands shook so hard, she had to make fists to stop them.
She left the door open behind her as she tiptoed inside. She’d lived there for two months, but suddenly the place felt alien. Lamps, tables, the so-ugly-it-was-cute pink china poodle with the bobblehead. They might as well have been rock formations on another planet. Nothing felt right.
Her boot bumped against something. Talia sprang backward, her dead heart giving a thump of fright. She stared, organizing the shape into meaning. A suitcase. One of those with the pull-out handle and wheels. Big and bright red.
It was Michelle’s.
“Michelle?” Talia meant to shout this time, but it came out as a whisper. “What the hell, girl?”
She groped on the wall for the light switch, suddenly needing the comfort of brightness. The twin lamps that framed the couch bloomed with warm light.
Oh, God.
Her stomach heaved. Now she could see all that red, red blood. Scarlet sprayed in arcs across the wall, splattering the furniture like a painter gone all Jackson Pollock on the decor. Talia shuddered as the carpet squished with wetness.
The smell could have gagged a werewolf.
She dimly realized one of the bookshelves was knocked over. There had been a fight.
“Michelle?” Her voice sounded tiny, childlike. Talia took one more step, and that gave her a full view of the living room. Oh, God!
Suddenly standing was hard. She grabbed the wall before she could fall down.
Her cousin, tall and trim in her navy blue cruise hostess uniform, lay on her side between the couch and the coffee table. Drops of drying blood made her skin look luminously pale. Beneath the tangle of dark hair, Talia’s gaze sought the features she knew as well as her own: high forehead, freckled nose, the mouth that turned up at one corner, always ready to smile. Born a year apart, they’d always looked more like twins than plain old cousins.
They still looked almost identical, except Michelle’s head was a yard away from the rest of her body.
Talia’s eyes drifted shut as the room closed in, darkness spiraling down to a pinpoint.
Beheaded.
Talia’s grip on the wall failed, and she started to sink to the floor. The wet, red floor. Sudden nausea wrenched her. She scrambled for the kitchen, retching into the sink. She’d fed earlier, but not much. Nothing came up but a thin trickle of fluid.
Beheaded.
She heaved again, the strength of her vampire body making it painful. Talia leaned over the stainless-steel sink, shaking. The image of her cousin’s body burned in her mind’s eye. Whoever had done it had meant to kill her . Taking the head was the usual way to execute vampires—a lot more certain than a wooden stake.
She died because of me. They thought she was me .
Talia’s breath caught, and caught again, dragging into her lungs in tiny gasps that finally dissolved into sobs. She pushed away from the sink, grabbing a paper towel to mop her eyes. There was no time to fall apart.
But she did. She pressed the wadded towel to her mouth, stifling her sobs. The tears were turning to a burning ache that ran all down her throat, through her body, and out the soles of her feet.
This was no good. She had to get out of there.
Before whoever murdered Michelle came back.
Before someone called the cops and they blamed her, because she was the monster found next to the body.
Talia braced herself against the counter and stared into the sink until her eyes blurred and she squeezed them shut. This was the moment when the movie hero swore revenge, made a plan, and went after the bad guy.
All she felt was gut-wrenching grief.
A rustling sound came from the hallway, as if something had brushed against the shopping bag she’d abandoned by the door.
Talia spun around, terror rippling over her
Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar