Page 49 of Dead Ringer

It was almost funny that the only human left in this town was more interested in the fog’s origins than anyone else. Sicily had been at her father’s when the fog rolled into town (and then rolled back out just as fast), so she wasn’t affected. I’ve still never been more thankful for anything in my life.

“We don’t know for sure,” she argued.

“While that might be true,” I began, taking a math textbook from the pile and plopping it beside her plate. “My hand is gonna have a lot more impact on your backside if you don’t hop to it.”

That got her to smile again (mostly because I’d never laid a hand on her and never would), and she nodded sarcastically, scooping up more ravioli and prying the book’s pages open. I sat back, watching her reluctantly glance at her math homework, and somewhere in my chest, I felt my heart ache just a bit.

Sicily took after her father, with his brown hair and eyes instead of the messy red nest that sat atop my head, and for good and for bad, she reminded me of him whenever I really got a good look at her.

Her father was someone I’d met in Branson, the largest city from Windy Ridge and over two hundred miles away. His name was Alton Reid, a man who’d come from old money but acted as kind as the poorest of us. But that was then and this was now and as my mama used to say—there weren’t no point in dwelling on the past.

I heard someone calling my name from another table and so I stood up, kissing Sicily on the head before rushing back onto the floor.

When Sicily was born, I’d made a promise to myself to make sure she could leave this place. She could leave and never come back to Windy Ridge if she wanted to—she could make a name and a life for herself somewhere in the big world, maybe Branson or maybe somewhere even bigger. And I would do my damnedest to give her every possibility of freedom and release from this tiny, backwoods town the two of us had grown up in.

But God must have a bad sense of humor, because all Sicily wanted to do was stay. Stay and find out what in tarnation was going on in Windy Ridge. She wanted to find out why everyone had changed when the fog rolled in, whyI’dchanged.

But the last thing I wanted was for her to stay here, trapped in this town because of me.

Chapter Two

It was about one in the afternoon when I took my break.

And that was saying something because I’d already worked all night. But one of the things about being a vamp was that we rarely get tired. I could go four or five days and nights in a row without feeling the need for any shuteye.

The windows were shuttered closed—you know, becausesunlight—so I had to watch the clock vigilantly until it was time for me to clock out. Once that time was upon me, I untied my apron, slipped into the back kitchen, and spotted Dorcas Melbourne already sitting at the back table. I tried to keep my face from scrunching too much.

Dorcas, who owned the diner, used to be an old woman. Back then, she was so deaf, we’d had to shout into her eardrums just to be heard. Now, it wasn’t much better, because best we could tell, she’d turned into some kind of mole-rat and the rest of her hearing had all but disappeared. That didn’t stopherfrom talking, but the rest of us had to resort to improvised sign language and written notes to communicate with her because now she really couldn’t hear a darned thing.

Dorcas turned to me as I entered and yelled, “YOU’RE ON LUNCH TOO EARLY.”

Her voice sounded like it was coming from the open end of a megaphone. I frowned and shook my head as I took my seat across from her.

“YES, YOU ARE,” she yelled back, staring at me from her beady, little eyes. “YOUR LUNCH AIN’T UNTIL ONE.”

I sighed, spreading my hands out in front of me.Yes, Dorcas, I did read the schedule.

“DON’T SASS ME.” Somehow, Dorcas frowned even deeper and pointed to the door with one of her odd, dirt-digging mole claws. The rest of her was covered in satiny grayish-brown fur. “GET BACK ON THE FLOOR OR I’LL HAVE YOU GONE BY THE END OF THE DAY, TWILA.” It was a threat she laid on me daily. “I SWEAR, YOU ALL WOULDN’T KNOW A HARD DAY’S WORK IF IT HIT YOU OVER THE HEAD!”

Most days I felt like hittingherover the head. With something hard.

I snapped my fingers in front of her eyes, cutting her rant off before my ears started to ring. Grabbing my notepad, I sketched out a quick:it IS one pm, Dorcas.and shoved the note in front of her. She stared at it for a long minute, then huffed, folding her arms and sitting heavily back into her chair.

“YOU DON’T GOT ANY RESPECT FOR THE ELDERLY. I AIN’T NEVER SEEN SOMEONE AS SNIPPY AS YOU, TWILA, WITH YOUR SMART MOUTH RUNNIN’ ITS WAY ‘ROUND TOWN. NOW, WHENIWAS A WAITRESS BACK IN ‘57—”

It was easy enough to tune out her rambles, loud as they were. I was much more focused on the ache that had been growing in my head over the last few hours. It wasn’t your normal headache; I could feel my veins pulsing inside my skin, twinging like a dehydrated kidney, and that meant one thing: I was getting hungry.

And that was the part I liked least about being a vamp.

In the beginning months, after Sicily returned to Windy Ridge, she studied the newly changed townfolk and determined that I had the fastest speed, hardiest constitution, and most strength out of everyone in town. Thatalsomeant I had to feed far more often. According to Sicily, the benefits I enjoyed also meant I went through my energy storage quickly, which was more of a hassle than a treasure, in my humble opinion.

If I didn’t drink some of the red stuff at least once a day, I turned into a useless heap, but I never let myself get that low—usually because the headaches became too bad to bear. And I didn’t wanna risk Sicily being the thing my iron-starved monster mind deemed a good meal. Not that anything like that had happened yet—that was another thing all those vampire movies got mostly wrong—vampires, as far as I was aware, could control our hunger. Yeah, if we didn’t eat for a while, we got hangry but no more than any human on a no-carb diet.

But back to my daily need for blood—that was exactly what had gotten me suckered into joining Bud’s investigative team. Well, ‘investigative team’ of sorts. The ‘monster hunters’ as we’d become known to the folks of Windy Ridge were responsible for weeding out the as-of-yet undiscovered cryptids that wandered the woods.

When the fog rolled into town, it hadn’t just affected the townspeople, but it also affected the animals, domesticated or not. So now the forests were full of all sorts of weird creatures that might have started as deer, bears, coyotes or skunks but were now anything but.

Anyway, the monster hunters investigative team was made up of Boone, the now cancerless immortal, Bud, an obese werewolf, and a lizard creature that used to be Ol’ Ned. Most of their equipment were traps and snares, but even before the monster business, they set hunting traps in the deeper reaches of the forest pretty frequently.

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