I wasn't tired, but I couldn't face my mother yet. I didn't have a clue what I was going to say when she demanded the "explanation" she'd promised to extract from me before. So I went to bed before she got home from work, sometime around midnight. I pretended to be asleep when she came in and checked my pulse and looked me over by the light of her cell phone. I knew what she was looking for: the bruises. She wouldn't find any. I just had to hope she would buy that all those wounds had been dirt and grass stains. I don't know.

At this point, it was starting to sound easier to confess to some drug use and take the punishment. Maybe I could convince her that marijuana sped up the healing process. But I didn't want to see the consternation in her eyes if I told her I was doing drugs. In some ways, me voluntarily getting high would disappoint her more than me involuntarily being turned into an undead blood-sucker.

I stayed awake all night, listening to mice crawling in the walls. Now that my neighborhood had gone to sleep and traffic had stopped, I could hear everything. I could hear the cops when they finally left Emily's house. I could hear the nocturnal animals outside. I could hear my mother breathing heavily as she slept, even though her room was on the floor below.

And my eyes. I finally got tired and I still couldn't sleep because the moon was so bright. It was like trying to take a nap during broad daylight.

I gave up on sleeping when the morning traffic started to move. Then I did the cowardly thing: I left my mom a note and headed out to Porter's.

It wasn't even eight o'clock, and that idiot had already called me three times this morning. But that's how Porter did things. Balls out, all the time. Sleeping was for the weak. For people who were content to consume and never create. Losers who had no interest in Brazilian girlfriends.

It was two miles to Porter's and I walked the whole way. I wore a pair of aviator sunglasses that my uncle had left behind the last time he visited. They weren't cool, but they were better than baking my eyeballs. The sun had returned in full force and it seared any part of me that it touched. But I welcomed the distraction. Without the pain, I would have been forced to think about Emily.

When I arrived at Porter's house, his sister opened the door. Sidney. Sidney's a year older than us guys, a little geeky and very hot. You get this sense that no one's ever convinced her she's wrong about anything. Which, now that I think about it, she has in common with Porter. Must be the privileged childhood. You would never call Sid and Porter spoiled, it's just that they fully believe that they deserve every good thing that comes their way. You gotta envy that.

"Oh, good, Neo's here," said Sidney. I guess this was a reference to my glasses. She says things like this with just enough good humor so that you can never figure out if she actually hates you or not. "Come on in. Morpheus and Trinity have been waiting for you."

When I stepped into the kitchen, she said, "Want a croissant?"

"You made croissants?"

She gave me a look. "Yeah, right. Mom brought home a bunch from Le Fleur Bleu." She pointed to the box where it lay open on the counter. "Eat 'em or not. Whatever." Then she disappeared down the stairs to the basement, also known as Sidney's-private-pad-which-to-this-day-Zero-and-I-had-still-never-seen.

I approached the croissants. They smelled good. I picked one up and bit off a corner. Nothing. No normal food that I'd eaten since yesterday tasted like food. I'd probably never enjoy eating a croissant again.

To hell with croissants. I'd probably never enjoy cheeseburgers again.

Something smelled like food, though. Sidney. Her scent still lingered in the kitchen, and that was nice. Tempting, but not enough to scare me. I knew what it felt like to be really hungry. Like your veins were frying on hot asphalt. What I didn't know was how long it would be before it happened again. How long could I live on what I'd taken from Emily? And what was I going to do to keep from hurting someone else?

I made myself eat another bite of the croissant, but then I threw the rest away. I found Porter and Zero up in the attic, also known as Porter's-private-pad-where-I've-toiled-away-long-hours-of-my-adolescent-life. They were awake and working, but still wearing the stuff they'd probably slept in. The floor was littered with energy drink cans. The room was filled with the deafening ticks of two mechanical keyboards programming at lightning speed.

"Good," Porter said, without looking up from his computer. "You lived. I was starting to wonder."

Porter's room is a gamer's haven. It's really not fair. He's got every console you can think of, and they all work. Making things work is Zero's job. Porter is the idea man. I'm not useless, but I'm definitely the grunt. I make stories, Porter rejects them, and then I make new stories. Eventually, I make one he doesn't reject. The system works, I suppose. If I'm honest, the only reason I've done it for so long is because it's good to be a part of something that objectively doesn't matter. Everything else is so freaking important. If I don't get A's, I won't get any scholarships. Then I'll end up in a public college and I won't be able to be a doctor, or whatever it is my mom thinks will allow me to be financially stable. But the game, although fun, could burst into flames and nothing would change. Porter would die of an embolism, but I'd be okay.

I put my bag down next to "my" computer. It's actually Porter's. I have a laptop of my own, but it's ancient and wouldn't have been able to keep up with the demands we were going to put on it. The first time Porter ever saw it, he gave it the bird and set me up with one of his old PCs. "Old" means the one he built last year.

"What's up with your face?" said Porter.

I touched my jaw. "What? What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing's wrong with it. I thought you got mugged."

"Oh. That." I took a notebook out of the bag. "I mostly got it in the gut."

Porter cringed. Zero blinked. Now there was a strange guy. His glasses were so thick that the top half of his face was nothing but eyes. So when I say he blinked, we're talking garage doors going up and down.

"Did you puke?" Zero said.

"Almost," I admitted, thinking of Parva's disgusting kiss of death.

"I told Zero you broke your phone," Porter said. "Let him take a look at it. Maybe he can fix it."

Crap. I had said that. I slipped my phone out of my pocket and peeked at the screen. Not a crack in the damn thing. I was way too careful with my precious phone for that. Why did I have to tell Porter they'd stepped on it?

There was no hope for it. I was going to have to crack the screen myself. I picked up a penny from Porter's desk, and then, with a silent apology to my phone, I put the penny against the screen and pushed.

The phone snapped in my hands.

Tiny shards of glass slipped away from the shattered screen, glittering as they fell. The plastic casing had broken cleanly in half. I held it up by the top half, and the rest of the corpse dangled in mid-air connected by the electronic guts. Porter looked over and gaped.

"You talked to me on that?" He sat back in his chair, in awe. "All hail Samsung, I guess."

My phone. I'd destroyed it! How did I---how could I have---I didn't even push that hard!

Zero took the phone from me, careful not to cut himself. He held it the way a girl would hold a dead lizard, with two fingers.

"I think it's DOA," he said.

I just nodded. Maybe it had gotten cracked during my fight with Parva. The back of it. But I didn't think so. I thought about Parva's pro-wrestler strength and realized I must have inherited a little of it. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. Mostly because I loved my stupid phone and now it was mince.

"Speaking of DOA," Porter said, "Did you hear about Emily Harding?"

Luckily, Porter was looking at the monitor when he said this and didn't get to see my complete failure at not looking panicked and suspicious. I said, "What about her?"

"She's in the hospital."

I couldn't breathe. But I managed to squeak out, "The hospital?"

"Yeah. One of her friends found her passed out. She almost died, supposedly."

Almost died. Almost died. There were no two sweeter words in the English language. I said, "How did you find out? I mean, where did you hear about that?"

He snorted. "Where have you been? We've been invited to 'Pray for Emily Harding' at least a hundred times on social media. She's such an angel. Everyone just loves her."

He clicked his mouse a couple of times and said, "Here's the most recent entry: 'God has been merciful, and has not taken the light of our lives, our Emily, away from us. Doctors say her prognosis looks good, praise the Lord. We can't wait for her to wake up and show us her beautiful smile. Keep praying!'"

Guilt and fear that I had killed her had not been able to make me cry, but relief that I didn't made hot, humiliating tears splash onto my face. I tried to act cool as I hid my face and wiped them away.

Not dead. Not going to die. Parva was wrong. I didn't need to kill in order to live.

Of course, this meant that I would be caught and put in an institution/science lab/jail. But that wasn't important right now. If I could take blood without killing, there was a chance that I might be able to come out of this with my soul intact.

Then I realized something I hadn't thought of before. Parva hadn't killed me, either. Instead, she'd changed me. What if I'd changed Emily?

No. There was no way I'd done that to her. Parva tortured me before she left. She bit me twice---

I'd bitten Emily twice.

No. Parva had---I don't know. Poisoned me. Drugged me. My whole body, burning---I definitely had not done anything like that to Emily. It had been pretty much painless for her, right? Drinking was one thing. Parva had . . .

What had Parva done?

Thinking about Emily again had stirred up some very contradictory feelings. I kept remembering her skin. How warm it was. The way it smelled: the fresh grass and sweat, and the more fundamental smells that were just her. Salt and oils, pheromones and blood. I thought about her hands on me, fighting and clawing at my face to get away, and yet the memory of her touching me was almost fond.

What the heck was this? I couldn't possibly be getting a crush on her. I know the way I'm describing it sounds all romantic, but it's definitely not erotic. I didn't like her. I didn't even want her. Not like that. But this feeling was so intense. Undeniable. Her body. Her warmth. Her essence.

I missed her. Longed for her.

I needed her.