Blood Sugar

LazCampus security sends three cars for one dead warlock and parks every one of them on the back lawn. My father pays a man to cut that grass with what I’m pretty sure are nail scissors. Somebody’s getting a very polite email.The blue lights roll across the side of the house, over and over. Half the party’s hanging out of the upstairs windows, filming. I’d tell them to stop, but then I’d be the guy yelling at people to stop filming, and that clip would do better than the body.I wipe my mouth with my pocket square. It’s silk, it was a birthday present from my grandmother, and now it’s ruined, which is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to it.The blood isn’t the kid’s. It’s from a very nice junior on the house donor list, who signed the consent form two minutes before all this and then asked if I’d sign her forearm too. The form’s folded in my inside pocket. Dated, timed, initialed in two places.I could walk across this lawn, hand it to Hallowell, and watch him choke on e

LazThe guy in the Patagonia vest has been pitching me his app for six minutes. It’s Uber, but for blood donors. He’s said “disrupt” four times.“Go back to your friends,” I tell him, and I lean on it a little. “Tell them it went great.”His face goes soft and happy. He thanks me like I just bought his company, and he wanders back across The Vein to tell a table of other tie-wearing dicks how great it went.I may be partial to wearing suits myself, but mine are hand-tailored works of art, not a banal attempt to fit in with my buddies.The thing that has him looking so satisfied is the Pull. I want something, I lean into it with purpose, and a human is powerless to resist. He’s the third one tonight, and every time I do it, I feel a little worse about myself, then I do it again when someone starts annoying me.“You can’t keep doing that,” Rory says, with his mouth full of fries.“He had a PowerPoint presentation on his phone.”“He’s a person, Laz.”“He’s a person with a pitch I’m not i

LazHallowell gets both hands on my chest and shoves, and for somebody who looks like he lives on gas station coffee, he’s a lot stronger than he has any right to be.I stumble backwards, getting my balance back just in time to watch him slam through the fire door. Then an alarm’s going off right over my head, loud enough to make my fangs hurt.Wonderful. Now I’m standing in a pitch-black hallway with glass all over my suit, next to a screaming door, which doesn’t exactly scream innocence in light of recent events.I wasn’t waiting here to make a suggestion to Hallowell, whatever I told him. I wanted to say the thing about Fang & Sons to his face, somewhere quiet enough that his heartbeat was the only one I could hear, so I could listen to what it did.A heart trips when somebody’s lying. I busted half the pledge class sneaking uninvited guests into the house that way, and I’ve caught Per more times than I want to count.Hallowell’s heart tripped, all right. Then it sped up and kept g

LazIt’s four in the morning when I let myself in through the kitchen door, and there’s a black rabbit sitting on the counter next to a mug of tea that went cold hours ago.Rory waited up for me. He got so worked up that he stopped being a person, and the tea’s grown a skin since then.“Shift back,” I tell him. “I know you want to yell at me, and you can’t do that with whiskers.”He jumps down and disappears behind the island. Rory keeps a pile of clothes folded on the bottom shelf of the pantry, because he shifts in this kitchen about once a week.When he stands up, he’s in a sweatshirt with a cartoon dinosaur on it. His golden-brown hair’s sticking up on one side, and his face has gone all blotchy.He shoves his phone into my hands hard enough to hurt.It’s a video. Some guy with a vape hanging out of his mouth is sprawled across the hood of my car and giggling into the camera, outside a bar with two letters missing from its sign. FANG & SONS, 2:31 A.M. It’s got four hundred comment

LazFATHER: Eat at home.That’s the whole text. It came in at six this morning, which means he watched a video of my car parked outside Fang & Sons and decided I went down there hungry, looking for someone to bite.Gordon had every copy of it scrubbed by midnight. As far as my father’s concerned, the matter’s closed. He didn’t think of Per once, and I hate how grateful I am for that.I ate at seven, off the house donor list, like a good son. Which means that right now, sitting outside a laundromat at half past three in the afternoon, waiting for Hallowell, I can’t even blame the hunger.The dean’s email came at nine. Marcus Bell’s friends won’t come in to talk to the board, so the dean’s sending the two student reps to them, on the theory that they’ll open up to people their own age.Nobody seems bothered that one of us lives in the house the body was found behind.The door beside the laundromat opens, and Hallowell comes out with his hands shoved in his pockets. He sees the car and s