Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The boardwalk reeks.

Of course, it always smelled. Not bad, exactly. Just strong. But now, the salt air off the ocean, the shit it’s washed up rotting under the pilings, the greasy cooking smells wafting off the food stalls, the oil and diesel fumes from the rides and machinery, the belch of exhaust from the road beyond, the bitter burning smell of tobacco, the sour marks of piss and beer, and the hot, thick, dense, crowded fug of salt sweat and cologne and hairspray and hormones and racing blood all melding together and overlapping and compounding on each other are very nearly overwhelming.

By the time Sam ducks into the comic store, the overpowering skunk stink of pot is almost a relief.

He can feel the two pairs of eyes that lock onto him the instant he crosses the threshold into the store’s blissfully quiet dimness, following him between the rows of racks of comic books. Sam flips idly through the colourful covers without actually seeing any of them, waiting for the owners of those eyes to approach. They’re like stray cats. Chase after them, and they’ll run away. You’ve got to let them come to you.

And come to him they do. Sam turns around the end of one row, and there are Edgar and Alan Frog, blocking the next aisle with arms folded over their chests and identical scowls on their faces.

Sam looks back and forth between them, and tries not to look too much like this was what he was counting on happening all along. “Evening, gentlemen. Wow, imagine meeting you here.”

Alan’s upper lip curls.

“So,” Edgar says, nodding down towards the book Sam brought with him, the brilliant red Vampires Everywhere! splashed in wiggly chiller lettering across the cover. “Did your homework, did you? Noticed anything weird about Santa Carla yet?”

Sam has to stuff down the hysterical laugh that threatens to tear out of him. “Yeah. Yeah, you could say that.”

He can actually hear both Edgar and Alan’s heart rates pick up. Not like listening to a tape. More like being outside a building where a rock concert’s playing and feeling the bass come up through his feet.

“Yeah?” Edgar says, obviously still trying to play it cool, keep up his disaffected tough guy act even though Sam can practically smell the excitement coming off of him.

“Yeah. Everybody here’s a Martian.”

Edgar and Alan exchange a glance, heart rates dropping again. Sam’s disappointed them, somehow. They don’t stop him when he pushes between them, just follow him down the aisle.

“You think you’re real funny,” Edgar says, putting on a Clint Eastwood drawl. It’s all Sam can do not to roll his eyes. “But this is no laughing matter. Santa Carla is crawling with the undead. Werewolves, zombies -”

“Pretty sure there’s a ghoul in the mayor’s office,” Alan adds.

“And worst of all,” Edgar says, like he’s laying down a royal flush, “are the vampires.”

Sam turns to face them both, putting his back to the boardwalk outside. He nods slowly as he looks back and forth between the two of them, sizing them up.

That excitement, those racing heartbeats, have faded. There’s no trace of humour behind the macho posturing, at least not that Sam can detect. These two don’t seem like they’re trying to wind him up. They really, genuinely seem like they believe Santa Carla’s infested with vampires.

Sam presses his lips together, giving them an unthinking lick. The pit of his stomach clenches, empty.

“Vampires,” he echoes. “Uh huh. Sure. Tell me, have either of you two ever actually seen a vampire?”

Both Edgar and Alan nod just a little too fast.

“Boardwalk’s lousy with ‘em,” Alan says, confidently.

“Night shift guards,” Edgar agrees.

“Carnies.”

“Kids, drifting through.”

“Easy prey.”

“Or predators.”

Sam nods, again, bigger and slower this time. “Uh huh. Uh huh. And how do you…know these people are vampires?”

“We have the training to recognise a bloodsucker on sight,” Edgar says, with a condescending little flick of his chin. Alan nods his agreement. “But for a civilian like you…it’s all in the book.”

“This book,” Sam says, holding up Vampires Everywhere! like the sensationalist horror comic that it is.

Alan and Edgar nod in unison.

“And this one,” Alan adds, pressing another colourful comic into Sam’s chest. Sam didn’t notice where he got it from, or when.

One peek at the title tells him why, though.

“Destroy All Vampires,” he reads off, before looking back up at Edgar and Alan. “You’re trying to tell me you two hunt vampires.”

The only response he gets to that are twin flat, steady stares.

“Our number’s on the back,” Edgar says. “Read it. And pray you never have to call us.”

“Oh, I’ll pray I never have to call you,” Sam agrees. “Because you guys have gotta be the worst vampire hunters I’ve ever heard of.”

The stares turn into glares. Sam thinks there’s a little wariness in the way Alan’s looking at him, but Edgar just looks offended. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Sam says, “that you can’t be much good at it if you can’t recognise a vampire when he’s standing right in front of you.”

He can feel it, when his face shifts, though it’s barely a twinge. More than anything, he knows what Edgar and Alan must be seeing now – the eyes, the thick, angry brows, the sunken, skeletal cheeks, the fangs – by the wash of red that bleeds across his vision.

There’s an instant of pure, dead silence.

The empty thing in Sam’s stomach knots painfully in anticipation when Alan and Edgar both let out simultaneous high-pitched, horrified shrieks.

Alan stumbles backwards, slamming blindly into one of the racks of comics. The urge to chase when Edgar turns and tries to run for the end of the aisle overpowers Sam for a second. In a blink, he’s over both their heads, landing lightly on his feet at the end of the aisle just in time for Edgar to nearly run straight into his chest. The screaming gets louder, loud enough to make Sam wince. Apparently it’s not just his nose that’s gotten more sensitive.

“Would you ftop fhat?” he tries, and then has to force his face back to normal. It’s a struggle. The Frog brothers’ slamming heartbeats are like the smell of a hot pizza pie straight out of the oven, and Sam is starving. But he still can’t talk properly around these stupid fangs. “Seriously! I’m not even a full vampire yet. I’m not gonna hurt you. I need your help.”

“Stay back! Stay back, leech!” Edgar howls, making a shaking cross with two extended fingers and shoving it in Sam’s direction.

Alan finally seems to have got with the program and figured out where the action is now, because he’s panting up behind Edgar, and – “Whoa, whoa, whoa, where’d you get the stake?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, bloodsucker,” Alan sneers. Sam has to make a face.

“Yeah, actually, now I don’t. Thanks anyway, though.”

Alan feints at him with the stake before ducking behind Edgar again. Edgar’s trying to duck behind Alan at the same time, so it doesn’t work so well. Sam can’t hold back a sigh.

“The fearless vampire killers,” he mutters, to their passed-out probably-parents, under his breath.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t get an answer.

“Help,” Edgar says, hands raised like he’s imitating a pose he must’ve seen Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee take on TV even as he and Alan both shuffle backwards like if they go slowly enough, maybe Sam won’t notice they’re moving. “You want us to help you? What kind of help, death breath?”

“Yeah,” Alan says, brandishing the stake again with a jab of his chin. He’s still standing behind Edgar, the hand not holding the stake clinging to Edgar’s shoulder, so somehow it’s not as terrifying as it could have been. “Want us to put you out of your misery?”

“What? No!” Sam raises both hands, palms out, in the universal gesture of surrender. Both the Frog brothers flinch. “I need you to help me kill the head vampire so me and my mom can go back to normal! What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with you! You’re the one who drank vampire blood!”

“It’s not like I wanted to!” Sam looks back and forth between the two trembling brothers in front of him, and lets out another sigh. They’re not exactly action heroes. Unfortunately, though, they’re the best he’s got. “They got my brother, and – Look. It’s kind of a long story.”

“So tell it,” Alan sneers.

“How about you put down the stake first? I don’t talk so well with loaded weapons an inch from my face.”

Alan doesn’t move. Edgar twists around and gives him the hairy eyeball, and they seem to have a silent conversation before Alan, grudgingly, lowers the stake down behind Edgar’s back.

“So?” Edgar demands. There’s colour coming back into his cheeks now, his heart rate evening out, but he doesn’t lower the crossed fingers he’s still pointing at Sam.

“Can’t we like, sit down or -”

“Talk.”

Sam gives his surrender-hands a little waggle. Again, Alan and Edgar both flinch. Although this time, they do do a better job of hiding it.

“Okay. Okay. Well, it all started when my asshole brother saw this girl on the boardwalk…”

…

By the time he’s finished at the comic book shop, it’s still too early for Sam to head home yet, if he wants to avoid Max. Which he very much does. If he doesn’t time his hours in and out of the house exactly right, he’ll overlap with Max picking up or dropping off his mom, or hanging around for whatever twisted vampire stepdad reasons, and then Sam’s gonna get grief for not having made his first kill yet and what does he get up to all day while everyone else is sleeping and how disappointed his mother is that he hasn’t tried to help make Max and his boys feel like part of their family.

Their family. What a joke. Like they’re the bloodsucking Brady Bunch or something. Cheaper By The – wait, no, no. Creepier By The Dozen. Married…With Hellhounds. Fang-ily Ties. All In The –

Somebody brushes past Sam, knocking him aside with their shoulder. He yelps, and spins to see –

David. The unofficial-official head of Max’s gang of ‘boys’. Michael’s new boyfriend. Arguably almost an even bigger asshole than Max. (Although nobody’s really a bigger asshole than Max.)

David’s laughing at something one of the other boys said, shit-eating smirk well in evidence, low laugh almost swallowed in the music and blaring megaphones from the rigged carnival games and the thunder of the rides. Surrounded by the usual menagerie, the little knot of vampire punks swaggering and shouting and whistling at passing girls and taking up the whole boardwalk. None of them even seem to have noticed Sam’s there.

Not even Sam’s actual brother.

Michael. With that stupid earring that doesn’t suit him glinting in the glittering lights. A feather and a couple beads in his hair, tucked behind his ear. Somebody’s painted something new on the sleeve of his no longer quite so dorkily pristine leather jacket, covering up the skid mark from the night he still won’t tell Sam where he and the boys had gone. Maybe Marko, whose own style leans more toward the decorative than Mike’s, was the artist. Or maybe Dwayne, who’s got that whole strong, silent, sensitive thing going on – even if he does ruin the ‘sensitive’ impression every time he actually opens his mouth. Somehow, Sam can’t quite see Paul, whose clothing modifications tend to lean more towards the destructive, or David handling a paintbrush.

It's too bad. Sam actually wouldn’t have hated having an older stepbrother or two with some actual fashion sense, who he could maybe steal clothes and haircare secrets from. If only the whole situation wasn’t straight out of a Hammer flick.

Whether it was Marko or somebody else who put it there, though, there’s a snake painted on the right sleeve of Mike’s jacket now. A cobra, tail wound around and down Mike’s arm, hood flared on his shoulder, bared fangs dripping green venom. It’s joined the mismatched studs and bottle-cap pins on the lapels, and the rose that Star painted up his other arm. Mike’s been collecting embellishments ever since he got his fangs, and now, laughing in the middle of the crowd with David’s arm slung casually across his shoulders, his slow, crooked grin both painfully familiar and achingly new and strange…

An unnaturally strong arm pinning Sam’s back against a chest like stone.

His mother’s quiet, shocked sobs from the other side of the room, somewhere out of Sam’s line of sight, nearly drowned out for a moment by Max’s friendly chuckle.

A broad hand, clawed, stinking of iron and dirt, clapped firmly over Sam’s nose, even as he tries desperately to keep his lips pressed tight together, to resist the urge to open his mouth for a gasp of oxygen. A broad hand cutting off his air.

Mike looks like he belongs there. With them.

“It’s gonna be okay, Sammy. Just trust me. It’s all gonna be okay.”

And Mike doesn’t notice Sam any more than David does. Just passes by without so much as a glance, and disappears with the others into the crowd.

The relentless lights and sounds and smells of the boardwalk are giving Sam a headache, twisting the hollow in his stomach. And he’s done what he came here for.

He turns his back on the midway, and starts to drift with the crowd toward the parking lot and the dark, empty silence of the pier beyond.

…

Sam doesn’t even realise he’s following the boy until a hand closes in the collar of his shirt and yanks him to a dead stop in his tracks.

“Ow – Star! Geddoff!” Sam protests, as she drags him by the back of his shirt across the asphalt, away from the VW Beetle the boy’s walking toward. He doesn’t ask where she came from, when this deserted corner of the wide, flat lot was empty except for him and the boy a moment ago. He doesn’t ask how Star found him. They’d be kind of stupid questions, when Sam knows she can fly. And neither of them can hide, not while they have the blood inside them.

Star doesn’t respond. And she doesn’t let go. She doesn’t look at Sam, either, her gaze fixed forward on the beach and the flat, infinite darkness of the ocean she’s marching him towards.

Sam puts up only a token struggle, and gives it up after a few brief seconds. He doesn’t actually, really, want to get away. Half his mind is still back in the parking lot, still fixed on the Beetle parked comfortably away from the blaring white security lights, the gravity-defying swoop of the boy’s elaborate hairstyle. The bare arch it revealed of his delicate, perfect neck. The felt-more-than-heard bass beat of his heart, steady and only slightly fast.

He hadn’t even realised the danger he was in.

And neither had Sam.

So Sam doesn’t actually try to squirm out of Star’s grip until his feet start to slither in the crunching, shifting sand.

He still doesn’t have any success, though. Star’s grip on his collar is like iron, and it doesn’t give an inch as she hauls Sam toward the surf.

“Star,” Sam complains, stumbling in the sand.

Star still doesn’t look at him. “You can’t do that, Sam. You can’t give in.”

There’s a lump stuck in Sam’s throat, rising slowly up toward his mouth. His mouth that’s still watering at the slowly-fading thud of the boy’s heartbeat, the retreating memory of the faint blue vein just visible under the pale, smooth skin of that throat. The afterimage of Mike’s glinting earring winks in Sam’s memory, a flash of the painted fangs dripping on Mike’s sleeve.

Sam can hear the whine in his own voice, petulant and annoying like a little kid complaining about being put to bed before nine. “Why not?”

Star doesn’t answer, again. But this time, Sam digs in his heels, lets himself turn into dead weight, falling backwards and breaking Star’s grip on his shirt. He just manages to catch himself back upright with a stumbling backwards step, putting a little distance between the two of them as he does. “Why not, Star? Why are we even still fighting it, huh? What’s the point?”

For the first time, Star spins to look at him, her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted like Sam just wound up and slapped her for no good reason. In the crisp, low light of the thousands of dazzling stars overhead, she almost seems to be haloed by the softest, palest glow. Like she’s so innocent.

This time, the inside of Sam’s chest twists painfully along with the emptiness in his guts. He wonders if this is the same way she looked to Michael, that night she lured him off the boardwalk and straight into their shared nightmare. If Mike had any suspicions at all about what he was getting himself into, or if he just fell headfirst for her big cow eyes and damsel in distress routine and never looked back.

The hate that Sam’s never fully been able to squash down, never fully been able to extinguish, flares up hot and bright and furious again as he spits the most hurtful thing he can think to say into Star’s face.

“It doesn’t matter if we do kill Max. If we even can. Michael’s dead. He’s gone. Forever. And it’s all your fault.”

The flinch that Star very nearly manages to hide tells Sam he’s hit his mark.

He’s not prepared. Not prepared for how satisfying it feels, to tear into Star the way he hasn’t been able to tear into anyone else. Michael would just be confused, and then get annoyed – he doesn’t feel guilty about anything he’s done, anymore, doesn’t even see anything wrong with it. His mom – Sam could never. Max and David and all of them just think it’s funny, that Sam’s funny. But Star…

She started this. It’s her fault that Sam’s here, with a neverending emptiness gnawing at his insides and red slowly washing out his vision as his mouth fills up with fangs, trying desperately to listen only to the crash of the surf against the pilings under the pier instead of the thrumming heartbeats spread out all around him in the crowded night. It’s her fault that Sam’s mom is trapped under another man’s thumb, miserable and stifled again, but now even more unable to escape. It’s Star’s fault –

It's her fault that Michael’s dead.

If Star had never looked in Mike’s direction, then none of this ever would have happened.

And Sam’s not prepared for how viciously satisfying it is to hurt her. Or how fast that satisfaction fades. How quickly he just wants to do it again.

“What’s the point?” he repeats, a little more vehemently, like if he fans the anger up enough maybe he can escape the hollow despair he can feel creeping up behind it, now, inexorable as the tide. “We’re not getting out of this. Those two weirdos at the comic book shop were our best hope, and they’re useless. They’ve never even actually killed a vampire before, did you know that? They admitted it! Mike’s not gonna help us, he’s totally drunk the Kool-Aid. Max won’t let Mom out of his sight. He even got to Nanook! My dog is a Hound of Hell! I haven’t even seen Grandpa since the night Mike came home with fangs, who knows what they did with him or what shallow grave he ended up in!”

“Sam -” Star starts, but now that Sam’s going, he can’t stop.

“We can’t fight them! Not just the two of us! We can’t fight them, we can’t protect Laddie, we can’t even protect ourselves! My whole family, Star! My whole family is just gone! My brother’s gone completely off the deep end into vampireland, and Max will kill my mom if we go up against him and lose, which we will, and we’re on our own, and I’m just – I’m tired, Star, I’m tired and I’m – I’m just – I’m so hungry -”

“Sam,” Star repeats, her voice and the softening look on her face heavy with understanding. She reaches out to grip Sam’s shoulders, and Sam has to clench his teeth, biting down on whatever else he might have wanted to say. He doesn’t trust himself to open his mouth right now.

He’s expecting Star to pull him forward, to gather him closer to her.

He’s not expecting her to suddenly spin him around and shove him into the surf.

Sam’s already having trouble keeping his footing in the shifting sand, already starting to lean toward Star. The only way he could possibly catch himself before he hits the water would be to fly, and doing that on command is still a little beyond him.

A leaping little wave breaks over Sam’s head and catches him full in the face. The barest sliver of a second later, the water smacks into his back like a concrete wall, driving all the breath out of his lungs in one freezing gasp.

It’s obviously not deep here, right on the shore. All Sam has to do to get his head back above water is sit up. He sputters and retches out the lungful of saltwater he just accidentally inhaled, glaring up at Star, who’s got her feet just in the edge of the surf where it laps relentlessly and eternally against the sand, eroding the shoreline away little by little. Thankfully, she at least doesn’t look like she’s trying not to laugh. Also thankfully, she – and the night-dark beach she’s standing on – don’t look washed in crimson anymore.

“What the hell, Star?” Sam demands, as soon as he can gasp in a breath again. He scrubs seawater off his face with both hands, pushing his sodden hair back from his face before he raises both arms and looks mournfully down at his dripping clothes. The red lettering from the cover of Vampires Everywhere!, tucked into a pocket of his vest, is already starting to seep through one tan stripe near his hip. It looks nothing like blood. Too bright. Too garish.

The emptiness in his stomach gives a little twinge anyway. But the cold water’s effectively doused his anger, shocked him out of the dangerous direction his thoughts were starting to take.

“You can’t think like that, Sam,” Star says, like she’s reading his mind. Sam really hopes she’s not. “You can’t give up yet.”

Sam looks up at her, so clear to his eyes now even in the consuming darkness, and feels the last of his frantic, desperate anger bleed out into the vast coldness of the ocean around him. He’s not sure what it is about her expression, about her face. She doesn’t actually look any older than maybe eighteen or nineteen, like she always does. But there’s something…something tired, around her eyes, that makes Sam wonder just how long she’s been eighteen or nineteen for.

The flash of shame and guilt that tears through him takes him by surprise. He has no idea how long Star’s been half a vampire. How long she’s been living like this, trapped in this awful twilight existence. How many times she’s had to stare down this exact same truth and keep going. That the odds are impossibly stacked against her. And she’s on her own.

But Star’s not on her own, not any more. Now, unexpectedly, she has Sam. And Sam understands, with a shock of clarity as cold and disorienting as the sudden impact with the water, that if he gives up now then she will too.

And if Sam and Star both give up…that’s it. That’s the end. For Laddie, and Sam’s mom, and anyone stupid enough to live in or visit Santa Carla.

The bloodsucking Brady Bunch, indeed.

“Sam?” Star asks, a wary note working into her voice.

And, well. Sam’s got two options. He can keep sitting here, cold and wet, with the surf slapping into him over and over and over again, and keep on hating Star for getting them into this mess until the sun comes up. But she’s a victim of Max and his boys just as much as Sam and his mom and even poor Mike are. They’re in the same boat, now.

They both lost Mike when he turned.

They’re all they have left.

“Aww, my hair is wrecked,” Sam grumbles, and Star breaks into a small, relieved grin. “How’m I supposed to fix it now, with my reflection all -”

He waves a hand, gesturing vaguely towards his torso.

Star shakes her head, but she’s still smiling. “I’ll help. You didn’t think David gets his hair like that on his own, did you?”

“I am not going to rock a mullet cut,” Sam warns her, and Star’s smile gets a little wider. She wades into the surf a little farther, the glittering hem of her skirt dragging in the lapping water as she reaches out a hand to Sam.

“Come on. I’ll buy you a funnel cake.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Fine, then. I’ll steal you a funnel cake.”

Sam looks Star in the eye, and then reaches up and takes her outstretched hand. Star hauls him back up onto his feet, out of the freezing ocean she threw him into in the first place. She barely shows that it takes any effort at all.

Sam tries to wring the water out of his heavy, sodden vest as they crunch back up the beach toward the boardwalk. When he tries to extract the soggy remains of Vampires Everywhere!, though, the pages come apart in clumps in his hands.

Star interrupts him by slinging an arm across his shoulders, the same motion Sam had seen David do to Michael earlier, pulling Sam in against her side with a casual swing of a hip. The gesture is friendly, familiar, as is the way she musses his flattened hair with her fingers. Sam swats at her hand, and she shoots him an evil grin before reaching over and doing it again.

All any of the straggling late beachgoers they’re starting to pass must see, Sam realises from the grin a motherly-looking woman gives them when she and her husband walk by, is a teenage girl and her little brother. Stuck together for the evening out of obligation and parental concern. Not a dark, inhuman bond of blood between them. Just the regular kind.

It’s almost ironic. Sam is a little brother. But…

All Max wanted was for all of them to be his children. Like brothers and sisters. But it’s entirely because of Max’s twisted idea of family that Sam’s actual big brother isn’t his big brother anymore. And never will be again.

As if she’s reading Sam’s mind again – she’s not, right? – Star wraps her arm a little lower around Sam’s shoulders in a half-hug, squeezing just a little too tight. Sam doesn’t protest, doesn’t try to wiggle away. If he leans in to her side a little, well, who’s keeping score.

“Ugh,” Star announces, to the vast, cool night sky and the glaring, garish lights of the stinking, sweltering boardwalk. “Sam. You’re dripping all over my dress.”

But she doesn’t move to let go of Sam’s shoulders.

Somewhere overhead, the roller coaster cars thunder past, taking a chorus of fading screams that make Sam’s stomach flip and gums ache with them. The blare of rock music mixes with the carousel’s eerie calliope, the hot, greasy stink of fair food mingles with the roller coaster’s exhaust.

Somewhere in there, in that teeming throng of humanity, Michael and his new best friends might be sizing up a meal.

Somewhere in there, in that teeming throng of humanity, his mom might be trapped behind the video store counter, Max’s enormous white hellhound baring his too-sharp fangs any time she stares too long or too wistfully out the glass doors to the boardwalk beyond.

Somewhere in there, in that teeming throng of humanity, two Rambo-wannabe comic book geeks might be scouring their back issues of Destroy All Vampires and sharpening stakes, looking up Sam’s address in the phone book, waiting for the sun to rise.

“Funnel cakes?” Star asks Sam, her mouth twisting up in that mysterious smile of hers.

“Funnel cakes,” Sam agrees.

Star pulls Sam a little closer against her for a second before letting go, and starts up the stairs to the boardwalk.

Sam takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with salt sea air and bonfire smoke, and then follows her.

Chapter Text

Sam only just has time to think oh, shit before David’s gloved hand on the back of his neck forces him to his knees.

The hardwood slamming against bone is not exactly comfortable. Sam keeps his head down, staring hard at his own hands, fingers clawed against the wood. Literally, clawed. He’d never have been caught dead with his nails looking like that, before.

The world’s washed red. He can feel the awkward weight of fangs in his mouth.

The whole house stinks of blood.

From somewhere beside him, Sam can hear Star’s pained whimpers, muffled like there’s a hand over her mouth. Sam’s not sure if it’s her own hand or someone else’s. From somewhere in front of him, Sam can hear his mom, using the voice she always uses when she’s upset with him or Mike. It’s not him she’s talking to, though. Or Mike. “Max! What do you think you’re doing to my son!”

“What I should have done weeks ago, Lucy,” that asshole Max says, from just in front of Sam, infuriatingly calm, infuriatingly reasonable. “I’ve indulged the boy, for your sake, but this is exactly why I didn’t want to.”

Two sharp taps of heels against the hardwood. The toes of Max’s leather dress shoes step into Sam’s vision and stop. The smell of blood grows closer, stronger, until it fills the whole world.

Sam’s insides twist and writhe like a snake, thrashing desperately towards the source of that smell. He bites his own tongue deep enough to cut, trying not to let out a moan.

“I mean, vampire hunters!” Max says, like he just can’t believe it. “In our own home!”

There’s a sharp, short, muffled cry, and then a sickening thud as a body drops to the floor right in front of Sam.

Sam can’t help it. He looks.

Edgar’s left leg is lying at a weird angle from the knee down. Something about how his shoulder sits doesn’t look right, either. His hands are tied behind his back, and he’s been expertly gagged with his own bloodstained bandana. He’s almost as pale as Max, as Mike, as Sam’s starting to get, with a fine sheen of sweat beading on his forehead like he’s fighting a fever.

But it’s not a fever that’s the reason he’s so pale. And it’s not just the broken leg or bound hands that’re keeping him from getting up and running.

No, that’d be the myriad of bleeding bite marks covering his neck and shoulders and dotting down his arms.

They’re not neat little puncture wounds, either. Edgar looks like he’s just gone three rounds with a pissed-off sabre-toothed tiger. His shirt and army surplus jacket are both drenched in gore. Some of the cuts seem to be trying to clot, but the damage is already done. Edgar’s lost enough blood for the fight to start to drain out of him, too.

Sam meets Edgar’s eye, the one that isn’t pressed against the hardwood floor, wide and frightened under a flop of sweat-drenched hair, and does his best not to breathe.

“Let him go, David,” Max says, like he’s talking to Thorn. Sam hears his voice like it’s filtering down through a swimming pool. Filled with red. “Let nature take its course.”

Sam’s mom’s outrage sounds even farther away. And even less important. “Max!”

The cool leather grip forcing Sam’s head down vanishes. But he doesn’t move. Can’t. Doesn’t dare. Every muscle in his body is locked into place. If people could turn into stone, Sam would be it.

If he tries to move at all right now, he knows, if he tries to shift even a fraction of an inch, he’s going to rip out Edgar’s throat.

“You’re going to feed him his friends?” Mike’s voice, of all people, pipes up out of nowhere. Sam’s so dumbfounded to hear his brother speak up on his behalf, even if it is more vampire bullshit he’s spewing, that it almost distracts him. Almost. “Max, come on. There’s no way those little punks were ever any real threat to us.”

“Tell Marko that,” somebody grumbles. Sam doesn’t care enough to try to work out who.

“Shut up, Marko’s gonna be fine with a little blood and bed rest. Sam’s already worked up enough about making his first kill, this isn’t gonna help. Just let us take care of the Van Helsing twins, and then we’ll take Sammy out later and get him turned and everything. It shouldn’t take long after all this -”

“You see what I mean, Lucy,” Max says, over Mike. “Boys need discipline.”

Edgar’s stare is still boring into Sam, like if he keeps watching he can keep Sam from biting. Sam’s uncomfortably aware of the way his lungs are starting to burn. He can hold his breath for a real Guinness world record of a time, now, but he’s still only half a vampire. He still needs to breathe.

Although, if he gives in and takes a breath now, he probably won’t have that problem for very much longer.

“This is exactly what we talked about,” Max is still prattling. “Why they need both a mother and a father. This is why they need a strong male influence in their lives. Talking back, defying orders, bringing home such inappropriate friends, these mindless teenage rebellions…Sam could have really gotten somebody hurt with his recklessness, tonight. And now he needs to make it right.”

“Max -”

The most infuriating thing about Max is that, even when he’s being the pure evil head vampire of Santa Carla, he still sounds like a goddamn insurance salesman. “No, Lucy. Either Sam kills both these boys, now, tonight, deals with the threat that he dragged home and shows us where his loyalties really lie…or there are going to have to be consequences.”

There’s a moment of tense silence after consequences.

Sam catches Edgar’s eye, and sees his own hope reflected there. He doesn’t know what the vampires have done with Alan. But he does know that Max said he’d have to kill both Frog brothers. Which means Alan’s still alive.

Now Sam just has to keep himself from tearing Edgar into a million pieces in the next five seconds. Which unfortunately seems like it’s going to be easier said than done.

Max calling off his other dog has given Sam one advantage, though. Nobody stops him, nobody forces him back down to his knees, as he shakily straightens up from the kneeling crouch he was trapped in. He can see, now, that Mike’s holding his mom back, that Dwayne’s got Star’s arm twisted up behind her back and a hand squeezed over her mouth. And of course Marko’s upstairs still nursing a stake wound to the ribcage, the only vampire their planned ambush had actually managed to catch off guard. Paul and Laddie are nowhere to be seen. Small mercies. Or, well, not. Sam still doesn’t know where Alan is. What they might be doing to him.

He dares to take the tiniest sip of air, just trying to ease the burning in his lungs, and has to squeeze his eyes shut as his vision pulses with red.

He can’t actually tell whether Max is impressed or disappointed when he says, “Sam?”

It’s a tremendous risk, opening his mouth. But at least Sam’s nose isn’t practically in a puddle of blood anymore. “You’re just gonna have to give me the consequences, then. Because there’s no way. I’m not giving you what you want. I’m never going to do this. I’m never going to kill. Never!”

“David,” Max says, looking over Sam’s shoulder, and Sam braces himself to get his nose rubbed in Edgar’s bleeding body again, like a puppy who’s messed on the carpet.

But Michael, behind Max, is staring over Sam’s shoulder, too. And instead of a leather-gloved grip on the back of his neck, Sam just hears a voice from behind him. David’s hateful sarcastic drawl.

“No, I think I’d like to see him face these ‘consequences’, too. Max.”

Max – nods, once. Like he’s considering David’s words, and deciding they’re fair.

“Well, if that’s what you want,” he says to Sam, still sounding like an insurance salesman.

“Yeah,” Sam says, shaking with adrenaline and the force of holding himself in place, holding himself back. “Yeah, that’s what I want. You’re just gonna have to kill me -”

“Sam!”

“- because no matter what you do to me,” Sam presses on, trying to ignore his mother’s horrified gasp, “I won’t -”

He doesn’t even see Max move.

His abdomen just explodes in pain. This time, Sam drops to his knees entirely of his own accord, and barely even feels the impact with the floor. Both hands come up reflexively, clutching at – the hole piercing right through him, going in just above his hipbone and coming out just beside his spine.

And the foot-long, sharpened piece of lumber jammed right through him that made the hole.

Sam can barely hear his mom’s furious, terrified shriek over the pounding of his own blood in his ears. The whole world is bathed in blood, actually – the smell of it sloshes around him like a neverending sea, the taste of it rises, bitter and metallic, in the back of his mouth, the slick stickiness of it pours over his fingers as he tries helplessly to hold it inside his body. Only the crimson colour of it’s faded from his vision. It doesn’t take a probing sweep with his tongue to know his fangs have gone again.

His hands are too weak to pull Edgar’s stake out of his stomach. His own blood makes it too slippery to grasp.

Every breath is a fresh explosion of pain.

“Of course I’m not going to kill you, Sam,” Max says, like he’s hurt that Sam would even think it. “I did promise your mother.”

Sam’s never heard his mom swear on purpose in front of him and Mike before.

“What the hell!” Mike shouts, adding harmony to her vitriolic chorus. “You said Sam wouldn’t get hurt -”

“And he’s not going to. Are you, Sam?”

It takes Sam entirely too long to register that Max is talking to him. Too long, and also Max’s hand gripping his chin painfully and turning his face up to meet Max’s glittering eyes. It feels like all of Sam’s strength is leaking out of him around the stake, along with his blood. He knows, right now, he might actually give in and bite Edgar. He wants to. Shit, he really, really wants to.

But he’d have to get to Edgar, first. And Edgar, lying literally a foot from Sam, might as well be on the moon.

“It’s no worse than what your friends did to Marko,” Max says, sounding mildly annoyed, like this is a completely normal conversation they’re having. “You know you’ll heal in instants, just as soon as you stop being obstinate and just drink -”

Sam doesn’t see Mike move, either. Just feels the sudden absence of Max’s hand on his chin, and hears the sickening crack when Mike decks Max full in the face.

For a deadly silent second, Max doesn’t move. Just raises a slow, incredulous hand to his cheek, like he can’t believe anyone would dare to lay a finger on him.

And then he and Mike both vanish in a snarling, shrieking blur.

Sam blinks, and his mom’s crouched over him, patting at his face with both hands and repeating his name over and over with increasing panic. Star’s there, too, tugging on the stake. Which tugs on Sam’s punctured insides. This time, he can’t stop the moan.

“No, no – with an, a penetrating wound, it’s best to leave the object inside, so they don’t bleed out,” Sam’s mom babbles at Star, who nods her head once.

“If the wounded person’s human, yes.” She wraps both hands around the blunt end of the stake, looking Sam in the eye. “Right now, it’s just getting in the way of the wound healing closed. Sam? This is going to hurt.”

Sam doesn’t understand the question. Everything hurts.

There’s an enormous crash from overhead, and a howl. Broken bits of mezzanine railing shower down around the three of them, huddled on the floor. Max’s awful laugh echoes throughout the darkness of the high-ceilinged room, from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Sam wonders, vaguely, where David and Dwayne went. Whether they’re up there somewhere, joining in the vampire fight, and if so, on whose side. Or if maybe they’ve just found a quiet spot out of the way to hole up and wait to see who comes out on top.

And then Star yanks the stake out of him, and Sam stops giving a shit about David or Dwayne or Max or anything.

When he can think straight again, his mouth is full of somebody else’s blood.

“It’s okay! It’s okay,” Star reassures Sam, before he can really start to freak out. The pressure against his lips, the gush of rich thick liquid, vanishes as she raises her hand to show off the bloody tear in her wrist. Sam tries to follow it upwards without thinking, and is quickly and painfully reminded why trying to use any of his abdominal muscles right now is a bad idea. “You weren’t going to be able to kill me. You couldn’t even hold your own head up. And there’s enough human left in my blood, it should help heal -”

“What happened to Edgar? Where did my mom -” Sam starts to ask, but his questions get cut off by a screech whipping by overhead and a crunch.

Star whirls. Sam tilts his head back, over her knee, so he can see what’s caught her attention.

Upside down in his vision, he can see the sliding twin doors to Grandpa’s taxidermy room. They’ve been shut since the night Mike came home with fangs, the night Sam and his mom and even his dog were forced to drink vampire blood and Grandpa disappeared. But now the doors are wide open again, and, like they’re lit with a spotlight, Sam can see the jumble of bones and antlers and pelts piled on the table just inside.

Can see the mounted antelope horns pointing towards the open door, in place of pride, like they’re just waiting for something to fly through that door so they can impale it.

Like, for example, the vampire who used to be Sam’s brother.

Mike’s gripping the doorframe above his head with both hands. His fingers digging into and splintering the wood above him must have been the crunch that Sam heard. He’s fully vamped out, his whole face twisted up in an inhuman snarl as he pushes forward, kicks out, twists, trying to get out of the door, away from those wickedly sharp horns.

But he’s losing.

And there’s vicious triumph in Max’s face as he pushes Mike closer and closer to spiky, impending death.

“Star,” Sam gasps out, trying to push himself to his feet. Key word trying. He just ends up sprawled on his face on the floor, trying vainly to breathe through the stabbing pain shooting through his quickly-closing new piercing. “Star, we gotta help him!”

Star doesn’t move. She just stares blankly at the fight, like she doesn’t recognise what her own eyes are seeing.

“Star!”

A fresh wave of panic crests over Sam, this time for an entirely different and opposite reason. The thing clinging to that doorframe for his unlife isn’t Sam’s brother anymore. Sam knows that. Sam’s seen that. In the last few weeks since what used to be Michael forced Max’s tainted blood down Sam’s throat, the things Sam’s seen him do, the things Sam’s heard him joking about with the others…

The person who could do those things, and then talk about them later with a smile, can’t be Mike. Mike would’ve died first. Sam’s studiously ignoring the little fact that Mike kind of did die first.

And he’s barely spoken to Sam, when they’ve both been around. Barely acknowledged that Sam even exists. When he does, it usually ends in a fight over Sam’s reluctance to kill or Mike’s total lack thereof. All-consumed with his cool vampire powers and his new, awful buddies and the Santa Carla nightlife. If Mike hasn’t been right on board with Max’s crazy plan to turn them all into one big happy bloodsucking family every step of the way, he hasn’t shown a single sign of it.

Until now. Until tonight. When all of a sudden, out of the blue, Mike’s committing suicide by head vampire just because Max literally tore Sam a new one.

And this is the worst possible timing for Sam to discover that there might be more of his brother left in the monster wearing Michael’s face than he’d realised.

Sam tries, again, to push himself to his feet. This time, he’s able to use his arms to lever himself up enough to get a leg up under him, without tearing open the hole in his stomach again too badly. But then the toe of his sneaker slips in the blood puddled on the floor around them, and Sam slams facefirst back into the hardwood. Cracking his chin, hard. Landing with all his weight directly on the injury.

For an endless second, his vision goes white with agony. All he can hear is a distant ringing whine.

When Sam comes back to Grandpa’s living room, Max is monologuing. Again. Sam’s not sure how long he’s been at it. He also doesn’t really care. Every second Max spends yammering Mike’s ear off is another second he’s not spending making Sam’s brother into a vamp-kebab. Which means another second for Sam to try to figure out a plan.

“- shows real guts,” Max is saying, almost conversationally, like this whole knock-down-drag-out fight hasn’t even made him break a sweat. “Taking on a head vampire, alone, at just a few weeks old. I admire your loyalty to family, Michael, really I do. It’s one of the reasons I wanted you to join mine. But certainly even you have to admit, under the circumstances, you’re being a little overzealous.”

Mike just snarls at him, wordless and feral.

“Discipline,” Max says, to no one in particular. “And respect. I really feel they’re lacking in this younger generation.”

And then he lets go of Mike’s shoulder with one hand so he can whip up, snake-fast, and crush Mike’s wrist.

Sam can hear the bone snap from clean across the room, a sharp, nasty little crunch that echoes the sound of Mike’s fingers digging into the doorframe. Even Mike’s howl of pain can’t erase the echo of that crunch from Sam’s ears.

Mike lets go of the doorframe reflexively, dangling by one remaining hand, and Max grabs him by the throat and tears him away from the frame. A sob of relief catches in Sam’s throat when Max throws Mike to the floor, facedown, in front of the fireplace instead of onto those antlers, but it’s short-lived. Mike’s just starting to get to his feet when Max pins him down with a shiny shoe planted firmly in the middle of his back.

“I think you could use some time to cool off. Have a good hard think about your choices,” he says. “Shall we say a week in the coffin?”

It’s clear that figuring out how to use words again is posing a challenge for Michael. He twists his head around to scowl up at Max as best he can from under deeply ridged brows, but manages, at last, to grate out, “Coffin?”

“The other boys haven’t mentioned it?” Between one blink and the next, Max’s face is back to his human mask, an expression of mild surprise crossing it. Sam will never make the mistake again of thinking this makes him any less dangerous. “It’s exactly what it sounds like.”

Mike’s lips curl back from his fangs, but he seems to have remembered how people talk now. “You’re gonna bury me?”

“Only for a week. Don’t look at me like that, you don’t actually need to breathe,” Max says, matter-of-fact. “It’s a rather literal interpretation of ‘grounding’, I’ll admit, but I’ve found it does the trick.”

He raises his head and searches the shadows clustered thick around the ceiling, ignoring Mike’s one-handed scrabbling against the floor like Sam ignores Nanook pawing at the closed bedroom door when Sam’s trying to sleep. “David? Dwayne? Come down here, give me a hand with your brother.”

From overhead, Sam thinks he hears a faint rustling, like the flapping tails of a long overcoat. Or maybe the beat of leathery wings.

There’s no other response.

“David?” Max repeats, a note of something dangerous bleeding into his carefully-patient voice. “Come on, now. Don’t make me ask you twice.”

There’s another rustle, right beside Sam’s ear, and he tries to jump before discovering that that was a painful, painful mistake. It’s only Star’s skirts, though, the spangles attached to the fabric shivering as she rises to her knees with frightened eyes still fixed on Max.

She glances down, and, catching Sam’s eye, raises a finger to her lips in the universal sign for silence.

Sam nods, and then sucks in a hard breath through his nose and holds it as Star grabs him under the arms and hauls him up into a sitting position. It hurts like a son of a bitch, but it doesn’t momentarily wipe Sam’s entire consciousness out in a flash of searing agony, this time. He gingerly ghosts a fingertip into the ragged hole in his shirt – thankfully, one he’d picked out specifically because he wouldn’t be too devastated if it got shredded in battle – and finds the skin underneath almost unbearably tender, but whole.

So there is one thing he’s going to have to grudgingly admit to appreciating about vampirism.

“We have to get out of here,” Star whispers, very close to his ear. “Sam? Can you stand?”

“I’m not gonna just leave Mike like this! He’s my brother!”

Star’s quiet voice is grim. “Not any more.”

Sam’s leaning heavily across Star’s shoulders, testing whether his legs will hold him, when Max says to the rafters, “I know you’ve gotten attached. But I can’t just let you and your brothers go around challenging me willy-nilly without any consequences, now, can I? And believe me, David, if you make me tell you again, both you and Michael are going to regret it.”

Sam’s knees aren’t steady. And standing upright pulls on the tender new tissue in his side in new and exciting – and tearingly painful – ways. He gratefully lets Star take most of his weight, half-baked plans of charging to the rescue disintegrating in his head. He tried to come charging to the rescue once already, bringing Edgar and Alan in, planning to stake the bloodsuckers in their metaphorical beds before the sun could set. He failed. They all failed. And that was when they had the advantage of sunlight and surprise.

Sam’s not going to go charging to anyone’s rescue.

Sam’s going to be lucky if he makes it to sunrise alive.

Okay. Half-alive.

The shadows around the ceiling rustle, again. Unlike the night Mike came home with fangs, though, it’s not accompanied by mocking laughter from everywhere and nowhere. Just a deathly, suspenseful silence.

Max gives a long, disappointed sigh.

And stamps down on Michael’s back.

Mike doesn’t scream. Just lets out a grunt like all the air’s been knocked out of him at once. The crackling snap that Sam suspects is coming from several of his ribs makes it likely that that’s exactly what just happened.

There’s a furious fluttering, a sense of huge black wings – and then Max’s arm flashes out and catches David out of the air one-handed just before David can slam into him. He holds David out effortlessly by the throat, with his heavy boots kicking through empty space.

“I thought that might get your attention,” Max says, apparently unconcerned by the way David’s clutching and clawing at his wrist. Max looks around the living room, and raises his voice just slightly, making it clear that this is an announcement. The way his eyes lock with Sam’s, then Star’s, sends an icy chill coiling down Sam’s spine. “The problem is, I think, that I’ve been too lenient with you kids lately. Let too much slide. You’re getting spoiled. It’s my own fault. But there are going to be some changes around here. We’re a family, and we’re going to start acting like it.”

The last word’s barely left his mouth when the bloodied point of a stake erupts through the middle of his chest.

Max blinks, once, and lets David drop to the floor as he looks down at the stake.

Sam can’t breathe. He’s sure the way he’s digging his fingers into Star’s shoulder must hurt, but she doesn’t seem to have noticed, as transfixed watching Max as Sam is. Waiting. For what, Sam’s not sure. An explosion of gore? Screaming? For Max to disintegrate into a thousand pieces?

Whatever they’re waiting for, though, it definitely isn’t for Max to sigh, again, and yank the stake the rest of the way through his own chest, leaving a ragged hole behind.

“Lucy, darling,” he says, sounding disappointed, and turns to face – Sam’s mom, standing behind him, breathing hard, tears glistening on her cheeks along with the weirdly glittery blood that had clearly sprayed her when the stake went in. “And here I thought you really knew the way to a man’s heart.”

Sam’s mom just stares back, her jaw set, her eyes ferocious.

“It’s a little more to the left,” Max says, giving the stake in his hand a toss before raising it –

At first, Sam thinks he’s hallucinating. Imagining things. It’s been weeks, without a word, without a trace.

There’s no way that’s actually his grandfather’s truck outside, the engine rumble growing louder as the horn triumphantly blats a few offkey notes of ‘La Cucaracha’.

“What -” Max starts to say, turning to face the source of the sound. Behind his back, Mike springs up with remarkable energy for a guy with so many broken bones, and pulls their mom down to the floor. Star yanks Sam sideways and down, his side bursting into a fresh nebula of agony at the sudden jolt of movement as the horn gets closer –

The wall Sam and Star were standing in front of a moment ago explodes.

A hail of wood shrapnel fills the air, bursting outward from the bed of the rustbucket old truck that punches through the wall. The truck slams to an abrupt stop on impact.

But the cargo it’s carrying doesn’t.

Sam catches just a glimpse of Max’s face, full fanged, almost comically startled. And then the huge, pointed-tipped fenceposts that came flying off the back of Grandpa’s truck hit him. Throwing him back into the fireplace. Not so much impaling as obliterating.

Sam’s half-convinced the explosion that follows is the world ending around him.

When the thundering noise finally starts to die down, when the floor stops shaking underneath him, when debris stops hailing down on his back, Sam dares to try and raise his head. Every square inch of him hurts, head to toe. Somehow even his hair feels bruised. But the healing hole in his side hurts worst of all, a dull, constant throb like he’s being punched in a bruise, over and over and over again in a steady, plodding rhythm. His heart is racing, hammering in his chest so hard and fast that he has a hard time catching his breath. The inside of his mouth is tacky and dry and tastes like he’s been licking rusty machinery. The air is thick with choking dust, blurring out the sharp details no matter how much Sam blinks and muffling scents out into a flat one-note dullness and –

Wait.

It’s not just the dust.

His heart is hammering, Sam realises, with a terrifying lurch of hope. Not crawling. Not sluggishly pulsing along like it’d rather he just gave up so it could quit. He can feel the blood rushing into his face when he tries and fails to cough up the dust that’s coating the inside of his lungs with every breath. Can hear his own heartbeat thudding in his eardrums.

And nobody else’s.

Every thump of pain in his injured side, every gasp of precious oxygen, every pulse of blood through his veins, it’s all a chorus of the sweetest song Sam’s ever heard.

Alive.

Alive.

Alive.

Beside him, there’s a sudden, piercing scream. Sam whirls, too fast, leaving his side burning and his head spinning. But it’s just Star, clasping her hands to her head, her chest, the pulse point just under her jaw. The shriek’s already morphing into wild laughter, her shoulders shaking hard enough to be visible even to Sam’s newly pathetic mortal eyes.

She catches Sam’s eye, and, without even a moment of hesitation, throws herself forward to wrap her arms around him. Sam flinches and freezes on instinct – the hot, human solidity of her, so close, so unexpected, her blood rushing by so near to the surface, just a bite away – but the twisting, painful emptiness in his guts, the ache in his gums, never come. He’s still holding his breath when Star grabs his face in both hands, her eyes huge and shining like her namesake, and plants a kiss right in the middle of his forehead.

And then she’s scrambling to her feet, shaking drywall dust and splinters from her spangled skirt. Her head snaps up at the distant sound of her name, called in a childish voice from somewhere upstairs. “Star! Star!”

“Laddie!” Star cries, and starts clambering over the rubble that used to be the living room, heading for the stairs.

She pauses for just a moment at the foot of the staircase, one hand on the splintered railing, looking back. Sam follows her line of sight, and isn’t surprised to see Michael, pushing aside fenceposts and broken chunks of fireplace rock so he and Sam’s mom can both sit up. They’re both scuffed up, a little bloodied, and very dirty, but as far as Sam can tell, neither of them are too badly hurt. Mike’s even already using the hand that Max had snapped at the wrist. Sam doesn’t see David, or any of the others.

When Mike glances over toward Star, she breaks her stillness and his gaze, turning and hurrying up the staircase.

While Sam’s still considering whether it’s a good idea to try to stand up, the front door of Grandpa’s truck swings open. The old man swings himself down, looking identical in every way to how he had the last time Sam saw him. It’s the weirdest feeling. After everything that’s happened, the weeks that feel like lifetimes, the house that looks like it got bombed, it doesn’t seem right that anything should be exactly the same.

“Everybody alive in here?” Grandpa calls out, scanning the living room.

Mike snorts a half-laugh as he heaves a fencepost off their mom’s legs.

“Dad?” Sam’s mom asks, incredulously, taking the arm Mike offers to help her to her feet. There’s a huge rip in the front of her sweater, and one of her shoes has lost a heel. But she just kicks both shoes off as she walks toward them, like she’s walking over fresh-cut grass and not broken rock and splintered wood. “I thought – Max -”

“Where’ve you been, old timer?” Mike asks. Sam can’t tell if that twist of smile is relieved or amused.

Grandpa doesn’t answer either of them, just beelines for the kitchen. Sam tests his legs, finds them wobbly but strong enough to carry him. He trails along after his mom and brother as they follow his grandfather into the kitchen.

“Dad?” Sam’s mom asks, again, as the refrigerator light bathes all of them, temporarily wiping out Sam’s night vision and turning everything around the glowing box into pure, impenetrable black. It’s gonna be hard to get used to that again.

Still, worth it to not be standing here thinking Grandpa smells like dinner.

Sam’s grandpa straightens up and turns his back to the refrigerator light without closing the door. It’s impossible for Sam to read his deeply-shadowed expression as he pops the top on – a bottle of root beer, right now, is he serious – and takes a swig.

“One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stand,” he says, almost casually. Sam might be imagining that his eyes skip over to Mike, but after Grandpa’s next words, he doesn’t think he is. “All the damn vampires.”

Michael stares back, steady, wary, defiant. Their mom grips his arm just above the elbow and tucks her other arm around behind his back, gently, like she’s ready to hang onto him or maybe hold him back.

The staring contest lasts only a couple more interminable seconds before Grandpa tips his head back to take a long drink from the bottle he’s holding. He smacks his lips with exaggerated satisfaction when he emerges, grinning that awful grin he always puts on when he brings Sam a new taxidermied monstrosity.

“You boys better not have been getting into my shelf while I was gone,” he says, with a wink in Sam’s direction.

Sam tries, not very hard, not to look like he’s just thrown up in his mouth.

Mike gives his head a shake, with a twist of half-smile, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling as he turns back towards the living room. “Crazy old coot.”

Sam’s mom lets him go to wrap both arms around Sam from behind, instead, and buries her face in his hair.

Chapter Text

Sam’s mom really deserves an Academy Award for her performance in the emergency room.

“It was my boyfriend’s dog,” she babbles hysterically at the nurse who leads her over to a chair, as several orderlies rush the gurney they laid Edgar out on back through the swinging double doors. “The boys were sleeping over at our house, and I don’t know what happened – Thorn just went ballistic! Out of absolutely nowhere! I’ve never seen a dog act like that before in all my life. Never!”

“Any chance of rabies?” the nurse asks, glancing back at the swinging doors as they slowly swing shut.

Sam’s mom pulls a tissue out of her purse and dabs delicately at her cheeks. “Oh, it couldn’t possibly be. Could it?”

“Ma’am, where is the dog now?”

“He got loose. Max was going to go find him. You don’t think anyone else could be in danger?”

She’s expertly laid the groundwork for not only an explanation of the awful shape Edgar’s in that won’t get them all locked up in padded rooms without their shoelaces, but also a possible reason for Max to mysteriously disappear after tonight. Sam’s impressed.

He was right about Edgar’s leg – broken – and shoulder – dislocated. And Edgar’s lost almost too much blood. Alan, thankfully, is nowhere near as badly off. The one long, shallow slash across his neck and the ones marking up his arms, he explains to the nurses as coming from trying to fight off the dog attacking his brother. To Sam, in the privacy of his screened-off hospital bed in the middle of the ER, he admits that they’re actually from Paul making sure that Marko got his blood and bed rest. Especially the blood part.

“The big one who looked like an accountant told Twisted Sister to draw it out,” Alan says. “Make me last. He wanted you to be the one to finish the job.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, feeling a little chill waft through him and then drift away. His stomach basically hasn’t stopped rumbling since the fireplace exploded, but absolutely nothing about the sight of Alan’s bandages seems appetising. It feels like a minor miracle. “I know.”

Their cover story does mean the Frogs end up having to take a full course of rabies vaccine. Which uses some big, big needles. Sam’s not entirely sure what the tiny twist of smile that flickers across his mom’s face when she finds out is all about. And she doesn’t tell him.

Explaining away Sam’s situation takes a bit more brainpower. Thankfully he doesn’t still have a huge, gaping hole punched right through his middle, but it definitely didn’t heal enough while he still had supernaturally fast healing for him to just pretend like nothing happened. And if he doesn’t get some painkillers soon, he thinks he’s gonna scream.

In the end, they wind up telling the doctors that he got knocked through the stair railings trying to get away and took a bad blow from falling on the end of a broken spoke. Sam has the prickling, uneasy feeling that the doctors and nurses aren’t buying this story quite as completely as they did Edgar and Alan’s. He just tries to keep his face open and innocent and, when he gets asked an awkward question, plays up how much pain he’s in, moaning and groaning and redirecting the conversation to morphine. Eventually, thankfully, they stop asking him questions about what happened and start asking questions about what hurts and how much, which Sam is much more eager to answer.

So then the biggest question mark left is Michael.

The other boys seemed to almost evaporate after Max bit the dust. Sam’s not sure where they went, or whether they’re going to come back. He doesn’t hold out much hope that his family’s seen the last of them.

It seems like everybody else shares his sentiments. There’s no real reason why Star and Laddie needed to tag along to the hospital. And they probably really should have left Nanook, who Sam’s hoping is as back to ordinary now as he is, back at the house instead of out in his mom’s dune buggy in the parking lot. But, even though nobody came right out and said it, Sam knows that none of them wanted to be left alone in that house.

Hopefully David and company are satisfied with torturing the Frogs for staking Marko, and David’s little rebellion is a good indicator of the general sentiment toward Max. If they’re feeling interested in a little bloody vengeance…

But Mike didn’t vanish along with the rest of the boys. He tagged along to the hospital, actually, following Mom’s car and Grandpa’s convertible on his bike. He’s spent the last hour sitting out in the waiting room with their mom and Grandpa and Star and Laddie, an empty seat between him and Star.

Sam wishes he wasn’t so surprised by that.

He tentatively probes the subject while he’s waiting behind a curtain in the ER for the results of his scans. His mom’s gotten up to go chase down a nurse and find Sam something a human can eat, leaving Sam and Mike alone. The bubble of quiet inside the curtain, muffling the bustling noise of the ER beyond, is unbearable until Sam breaks it. “Wow. I didn’t know Grandpa was so stake-happy. You sure you didn’t want to disappear into the night with your buddies?”

Mike fixes the oxygen pump hanging over Sam’s bed with a long-suffering stare. “Believe me, right now I’m reconsidering. Did your buddies have anything to say about whether we can be bored to death?”

“I don’t think it’s a widely-accepted vampire hunting technique.”

The crooked grin Mike flicks in Sam’s direction is as familiar as it is strange.

But it’s gone again in a second. “D’you think Grandpa knows?”

Sam considers that. “He knew way more than he let on about everything. If he hasn’t clocked you yet, I’m gonna say he definitely will by sunrise.”

Something about the way Mike looks at the curtain leading back toward the waiting room makes Sam add, “Mike? Don’t eat our grandpa. Mom’ll kill you.”

“Wasn’t gonna,” Mike says, but just a little too lightly.

“Liar.”

The bubble of quiet settles back around them. Somewhere outside, there’s a flurry of beeping, squeaking wheels, and rushing footsteps. Someone’s shouting out instructions. Busy night in the ER.

“Is it rough on you being in here? With people bleeding all over the place and everything?” Sam asks, the thought striking him for the first time.

The slow sinister smile is entirely unfamiliar on his brother’s face. “I haven’t been starving myself to death, Sammy.”

The chill that shivers through Sam must show on his face. Because Mike gets defensive. “You know Max had a point, right? You’d be totally healed already if you’d just -”

“Are you seriously gonna be evangelising vampirism to me like some kind of shitsucking supernatural Mormon for the rest of my natural life?”

The accusation doesn’t seem to cut Mike as deeply as Sam’s fear of him had. The smile Sam gets is innocently amused, and so much like his brother he could scream. “You’ll come around eventually.”

“Why’d you fight him, then, huh?”

“What?”

“Max. If you’d just left it alone for a couple more minutes, I’d have been fang-faced for unlife. Why’d you punch him?”

Mike looks at Sam like he’s counting Sam’s marbles, trying to make sure they’re still all there. “He was being a dick. Nobody stakes my kid brother.”

Sam doesn’t want to feel a rush of some warm, fraternal something or other at those words. “I thought you had new priorities now.”

Mike sounds so deeply disgusted and wounded that Sam feels a little like a heel despite himself. “You’re still my brother, Sam. Shit.”

“And that’s never gonna change?”

Mike’s stare is direct, piercing, almost a little frightening. But completely, totally honest. “Never.”

Sam swallows around the lump that’s risen in his throat. It takes two tries.

…

The first thing Grandpa says to Mike, when he and Sam and their mom find him in the waiting room, is, “If you wanna go to sleep under my roof and wake up still undead the next night, then your days of drinking human blood are over.”

“Told you,” Sam mutters, nudging Mike in the side with his elbow. Mike shoulder-checks him back without taking his eyes off of their grandpa.

“Dad,” Sam’s mom says, looking around the waiting room. For the moment, it’s deserted, but Sam’s not sure how much the nurses and doctors and orderlies can hear. There’s no doors, and sound carries. “Can this wait until we get home?”

Grandpa doesn’t so much as twitch. “I ain’t stepping foot out these hospital doors until I get a promise from him, Lucy.”

Mike scrubs a hand into his hair, huffing out a laugh like the whole thing’s absurd. “A guy’s gotta eat, Gramps.”

“And you will. Like a king.” Grandpa somehow manages to keep a perfectly straight face as he starts listing things off on his fingers, but somehow, Sam still gets the sense that he’s having fun with this. “Whitetail. Antelope. Muskrat. Possum.”

“Mom. Grandpa’s trying to feed me roadkill!”

“Oh, Michael, it’s not that bad. And you won’t be doing it alone.”

Grandpa’s head snaps up. For maybe the first time since they moved in, Sam sees what it looks like when he’s genuinely surprised by something.

Sam can’t exactly blame him. He’s staring at his mom in disbelief, too.

Sam’s mom gives a little sniff, raising her chin and squaring her shoulders back like a queen. “Well, I don’t expect that you only meant for the rule to apply to Michael, Dad. That wouldn’t be very fair.”

“…Mom?” Sam asks, and his mom gives him the pursed lips and tilted head that have caught him in a thousand lies.

“Oh, come on, Sam, why did you think Max wasn’t pushing that hard for you to finish turning sooner?” She bites down on her lower lip, but pushes on with the same matter-of-fact manner. “Sometimes in life – and, I guess, in undeath – you have to make compromises.”

“Lucy? That means -”

For the first time, Sam’s mom looks down at her feet. “It wasn’t anyone we knew, Dad.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” Sam protests. For some reason, that’s the thing that stings the worst. “Neither of you told me?”

“You didn’t give anyone a chance! I’ve barely even seen you these last few weeks, Sam. It’s like you don’t even live with us anymore.”

“You don’t live anywhere anymore,” Sam mutters, but it’s got no teeth in it.

His mom gives him a long look, like she’s going to say something. But in the end, she just turns back to Grandpa. “Dad, I’m happy to respect your boundaries. Michael, you’re old enough to make your own decisions. But I hope you know how disappointed I’ll be if you decide your own satisfaction’s more important to you than your family.”

“Way to lay the guilt trip, Mom,” Mike huffs. “Why do we even have to stay with Grandpa, anyway?”

“Michael. You know that’s not the point. And I don’t even want to see what those friends of yours consider a roost.”

“That’s not -” Mike shakes his head. “Nobody’s using Max’s house anymore. And I’m gonna guess he definitely had at least one room lightproofed. If I were you, I’d be a lot more comfortable there than in the house with a giant hole in it. At least for today.”

Sam’s mom’s voice is carefully controlled, but Sam notices the fingers of her left hand curling slowly into a tight fist. “I’d…rather not.”

Grandpa’s nodding along. He’s still watching Sam’s mom with a mournful expression, but he seems to have gotten over the shock of finding out his only daughter’s a vampire pretty quickly. Then again, Sam’s guessing he didn’t have a whole mental breakdown over vampires being real to have to process at the same time, either. “Moving into Max’s place the day after he died’d send a pretty strong message. One I’m not so sure you want to be broadcasting.”

Sam’s mom frowns at him. But she doesn’t look upset. More like she’s thinking hard.

“A message,” she says, slowly.

Sam can’t quite tell what his grandpa’s thinking, whether that hard stare is supposed to be a warning – or an encouragement. “That’s what you’d do if you wanted everything with fangs to know you plan on taking his place.”

Sam’s mom shifts her weight back onto one hip, turning that considering gaze onto a poster about the dangers of drinking while pregnant.

“Hm,” she says.

…

By the time they find Star, Sam’s mom is talking herself into it.

“My name is on the land title, now, on Max’s bank accounts. Even on his will. I’m sure he thought the will was just for show, just a very funny joke between the two of us, but it’ll sure come in handy in about seven years,” she’s saying, as they come up to the nurse’s station. “And I don’t exactly want to go on raising my boys in the murder capital of the world. Santa Carla could stand to try a change or two.”

Sam’s grandpa doesn’t say much in response. But when he notices Sam looking in his direction, he flashes a smug smile at Sam, raising both eyebrows like he’s inviting Sam in on a private joke.

Sam can’t resist the urge to smile back. Okay, so the rest of his family are vampires. But they’re still his family. And he’s not dead, and whatever painkillers they gave him have almost completely wiped away the pain in his side, and he’s not dead, and the Frogs aren’t dead, and Star and Laddie aren’t dead, not even half, and his mom and Mike are – well, mostly not dead, and his grandpa’s looking out to keep them mostly on the track of humanity, and Sam’s not dead. And fucking Max is ashes and bits of corpse strewn all over the living room floor. And his mom’s already doing a victory dance all over his memory.

Yeah. All things considered, Sam’s got plenty to smile about.

That smile, and the feeling of well-being that brought it on, both disappear in a rush, though, when Mike frowns at the nurses’ station and asks, “Why are there cops here?”

The sinking feeling in the pit of Sam’s stomach only gets stronger when he sees who the cops are talking to.

But Star, when she sees them coming up, doesn’t look guilty or afraid. There’s a sadness in her eyes, but she’s smiling.

“There was a poster,” she says, like it’s an explanation. “I saw it on the bulletin board in the waiting room.”

Sam looks past her shoulder, and sees one of the police officers leaning on the end of a gurney – where Laddie’s sitting, looking sullen, being looked over by a nurse.

“His family was searching for him,” Star says, smiling so wide it almost reaches her eyes. “He’s going home.”

She gathers Laddie up in one last long big hug, before they leave. And doesn’t turn back when he calls after her, sounding lost.

…

They end up splitting up in the parking lot. Grandpa takes Sam and Star and a dozy Nanook in the convertible, heading back to the house to check out the damage.

Mike and Sam’s mom take the other turn out of the parking lot. Heading for the house that was Max’s as the horizon starts to pale in the east.

It doesn’t escape Sam’s notice that the promise Grandpa said he wouldn’t be leaving the hospital without getting from Michael didn’t actually get made.

Sam doesn’t bring it up until the next night, though. He waits to see if Mike’s actually gonna show his face back at the house, first.

When his mom shows up in the dune buggy, alone, without a motorbike kicking up dust in her wake, Sam resigns himself to not expecting his brother. He’s sweeping sawdust off the mezzanine when the rustling sound of huge wings just behind him makes him whip around, brandishing the broom like that’ll do anything against a determined vamp with the element of surprise.

Michael takes a quick step back, raising both hands with the palms out in the universal gesture of surrender. “Whoa! Cool it, Sammy. You could put somebody’s eye out with that thing.” His eyes fix on the yellow rubber gloves Sam’s wearing, and he grins. “Aren’t you just the domestic goddess.”

“You’re so funny, I forgot to laugh,” Sam says, lowering the broom. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I had a stop to make first,” Mike says, at the same time as Sam hears his grandpa’s voice from downstairs.

“Now, I don’t recall inviting you all back here.”

Sam would recognise that smug, I-know-something-you-don’t voice even with earmuffs on and under six leagues of water. “Cleanup crew, Gramps.”

“Seriously? You brought them?”

Mike just raises an eyebrow at him. “You really wanna be hauling chunks of rock around with your intestines stuck together with spit and bubblegum?”

Sam really doesn’t.

The boys, unsurprisingly, end up spending most of their time goofing off, playing with Nanook, breaking more of Grandpa’s house, and bothering Sam. Marko seems none the worse for being staked the night before. Sam doesn’t really want to think about what that implies.

The only actual work any of them do is under Sam’s mom’s direct instruction and supervision. It’s weirdly hilarious to watch her step in and take charge, handing out jobs in the most matter-of-fact way possible to anyone who looks like they don’t have enough to do. Like nobody involved ever tried to kill each other. Or even just thought about it a little bit.

There’s one tense moment, not long after the boys get there, when Sam’s mom tries to hand David a rag and a pail of soapy water and he doesn’t take it. Just watches her, warily, with a smile that looks closer to a threat.

They both stand there in a silent standoff for a moment before he asks, with fake amusement that only barely conceals a knife, “And what’re you gonna do to make me?”

Sam’s respect for his mom grows another three sizes when she doesn’t so much as blink. “Oh, absolutely nothing, it’s not your house. But we could use the help. Since you’re here anyway.”

Neither of them move, or break eye contact, for the longest ten seconds of Sam’s life.

Then David’s smile ratchets up a notch or two, until his amusement actually looks genuine. Somehow he manages to make taking the rag and pail look mocking, sweeping a little bit of a bow as he does.

Sam’s mom still doesn’t blink. Just smiles her own mild, sweet smile. “Thank you. You could make a start on the upstairs bathroom, it’s going to be quite a job getting all the blood out.”

She interrupts Paul and Marko’s hooting jabs at David as he slouches up the stairs by pointing them toward the exploded fireplace and saying that their help hauling out the broken rock would be very much appreciated. Sam watches in awe as both vampires meekly turn and start picking up the biggest chunks of rubble they can get their hands on.

Nobody challenges his mom’s instructions again, after that.

Star volunteers to haul loads of garbage to the dump, apparently just to avoid the vampires. David volunteers to go with her, apparently just to see her squirm. Sam can’t shake the mental image of him as an oversized cat toying with a captured mouse. Playing with his food.

But by the time the sky starts turning grey to the east, the worst of the debris has all been cleared out of the living room, the broken wall’s been shored up with two-by-fours and covered over with a couple of tarps, and the place is almost habitable again. And nobody’s died. Unless, of course, the boys grabbed some poor schmuck to snack on on the way over.

It’s that thought, nagging at Sam, that finally makes him ask Mike the thing that’s been gnawing at the back of his mind. But of course, Sam’s still a little brother, so he can’t resist the opportunity to poke a little fun at the same time. “So what does David think of your new dietary restrictions?”

Mike gives a huge roll of his eyes. Sam decides to take it as a good sign.

“Oh, they all think it’s hilarious,” Mike says, and Sam breathes out relief. But that relief’s short-lived. “But he also reminded me. Grandpa’s an old man. He’s not going to live forever.”

There’s an awful note of triumph, of self-satisfaction, in Mike’s voice when he says, “But I will.”

It takes Sam two tries to swallow through his suddenly-dry throat. He hates himself just a little, for that. “So that’s it? You’re just gonna wait until we die, then just go right back to being a ruthless killer?”

“Aw, Sammy.” Mike’s smile seems, somehow, just a little too full of teeth. “I never stopped.”

“You don’t intimidate me, you know,” Sam says, despite all evidence to the contrary. “I’ve seen you try to talk to girls.”

Mike locks an arm around Sam’s neck and furiously noogies him until their mom comes over to see what Sam’s shouting about.

…

Star leaves a few days later.

Sam’s mom seems blindsided, and about ready to throttle Mike. But Star insists it’s not because of him. It’s not because of anyone but herself. She can’t stay in Santa Carla any longer.

“Do you have family waiting for you?” Sam’s mom asks, and Star’s face twists.

“Somewhere.”

She doesn’t elaborate. And she doesn’t actually say she’s going back to them. But Sam’s mom still stops trying to persuade her to stay.

The bus leaves Santa Carla at ten in the morning, so Star says most of her goodbyes the night before. She thanks Grandpa and Sam’s mom for putting her up, for helping her out of a bad situation. She seems to have a little more trouble with what to say to Mike.

In the end, what she settles on is, “For what it’s worth, Michael… I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I don’t think it would’ve worked out between us, anyway. Sam’s going to miss you like crazy, though.”

“That’s not – Not because I’m leaving.”

Mike glances over at Sam, like he’s hoping Sam will translate. But Sam can’t help him. If he doesn’t understand why Star’s apologising, he never will.

The fact that she is apologising makes something deep in Sam, some slow-burning vein of resentment, gently smolder away into embers, though.

“About getting me mixed up with David and the boys?” Mike asks Star, finally, with a shrug and a shake of his head in Sam’s direction. “Because I know I was pissed about that before, but – that was before. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“I know you think that now.” Star takes a step closer to him, reaching out to grasp his arms just above the elbows, her eyes searching his face. Michael doesn’t move, frozen in place, staring back at her like she’s a riddle he’s right on the edge of solving. For a second, Sam thinks they might be about to kiss.

But when Star’s lips part, it’s just to let out a few quiet words. “I’m just trying to apologise to a headstone.”

A shadow passes across Michael’s face, there and gone in an instant. He takes a sharp step back, shaking Star’s hands roughly off of him.

“Go home, Star,” he snaps, turning away. So Sam’s the only one who sees the way Star’s face falls. “Go home to your family. Santa Carla’s no place for a girl like you.”

Sam goes with Star to the bus station, the next morning. It’s sunny and bright, hot against Sam’s back, but there’s a nip in the fresh salt wind. The dying end of summer is starting to give way to fall.

Sam takes a deep breath, like he can inhale the sunlight, and holds it until his lungs feel like they’re in danger of bursting.

Star promises to keep in touch with him, to send him postcards. Sam promises to write back, but Star gives her head a shake with a sad smile.

“I don’t plan on staying in one place for long enough to have a fixed address.”

“You’re not going back to your family?” Sam asks, and Star shakes her head again, a little more vehemently this time.

“Sam…listen. Just because someone’s family, doesn’t mean they’re good. Or good for you. Even if they love you. Sometimes especially if they love you.”

“I’m gonna be okay, Star,” Sam says, and Star sighs, brushing her masses of hair back out of her face with one hand.

“I know you want to believe they’re different. That they’re still the family you love, that they love you, that they’d really give up hurting people just because they love you, that they’ll let you make your choices and live your life…”

“Star -”

“Just – Sam…” Star looks at him with those big, dark eyes. For a moment, even in the bright morning sunshine, even with the flush of human health in her cheeks, she looks every bit as strangely young-old as she did that night on the beach when she pushed Sam into the surf. “Be careful.”

“You, too,” Sam says, and Star shoots him a smile that looks more like a grimace before pulling him into a huge hug and holding him there.

They stay that way until the bus driver blats the horn and starts to close the folding doors.

1995

Mike’s jeans are blown out at the knees. He’s added a threadbare flannel under the leather jacket, which is now sporting an elaborate painting of the Arizona desert taking up the entire centre back panel. His hair curls just an inch or two longer under his jaw. But otherwise, he hasn’t changed.

“You look like a construction worker,” Sam says anyway, because once a little brother, always a little brother.

Mike grabs him into a headlock and doesn’t let go until he shouts for mercy. Nanook bounds in circles around them both, barking wildly and joyously and trying to jump up and lick anyone in reach to death.

Sam’s mom doesn’t say a word, when she first lays eyes on Sam. She just hurries across the room and throws her arms around him.

Sam tucks his own arms around her in turn, lets her bury her face in his chest, and tries not to listen for the steady thump of a heartbeat he knows he won’t find.

“I’m really sorry, Mom,” he says. It feels inadequate.

“Oh, Sam,” his mom says, looking up at him, and then buries her face in his shirt again.

Somehow, they’ve managed to wrangle the funeral for the tail end of sunset. Sam’s mom wears dark glasses, elbow-length gloves, and a heavy black lace veil draped over her hat and face, looking old-fashioned but appropriately bereaved. Mike seems just a little too cheerful about the whole occasion, but at least he’s dressed up in a nice black suit, his hair combed into submission for once. The morbid thought crosses Sam’s mind to wonder whether it’s what they would have buried Michael in, if he’d ever gotten a funeral.

Sam has to dab at his eyes with a tissue to hide the laugh that bubbles uncontrollably out of him. Unless he counts his dad, and he’s less and less eager to do that with every year that passes without a word from the guy, everyone else in his family is dead.

Sam’s mom introduces him to a little old woman who must be ninety if she’s a day, at the reception afterwards. Mircalla Johnson can’t be more than four feet tall, with rosy round cheeks in a face like a Halloween dried-apple witch, wispy white hair, a slouchy black dress that might have been chic in nineteen twenty-something, a black Mary Poppins hat covered in bright red wax cherries, an enormous smile that leaves Sam unable to resist smiling back, and a taxidermy lapdog tucked under her arm. She pinches Sam’s cheek with painfully sharp nails and doesn’t let go until it’s starting to get seriously awkward.

“Dad introduced us, a few years back,” Sam’s mom says, as Sam tries to rub feeling back into his cheek. “It turned out we had more in common than either of us had known.”

The smile they exchange is knowing, and suddenly Sam understands.

“I was just telling your mother how much I’ll miss your grandfather,” the widow Johnson says, in a high, quavering voice. “What a shame, to have him struck down so unexpectedly in the prime of his youth.”

Sam’s mom meets Sam’s eye over the widow Johnson’s head, meeting his raised eyebrow with one of her own. Sam has to wonder just how old the widow Johnson really is.

“He was a fine man. A very fine man,” the widow Johnson goes on, giving Sam an appraising look from head to toe. “I can see the family resemblance.”

“Aw, Grandpa,” Sam mutters under his breath. “Why.”

“She’s…certainly a character,” Sam’s mom says, when the widow Johnson’s finished giving Sam’s hand too many slightly clammy pats and his cheek another bruising pinch and moved on to torment Mike. “But she’s been a rock. Especially in the early days. I couldn’t have done any of this without her.”

“I noticed the ‘Murder Capital’ sign’s gone,” Sam says. It’d be a non-sequitur to anybody who doesn’t know Sam’s mom isn’t talking about her father’s death.

Sam’s mom nods. “Without Mircalla’s support, we couldn’t have cleared the troublemakers out of town.” She glances over toward Mike, who’s leaning against the buffet table trying to get out of range of the Widow Johnson’s affectionate talons, and smiles a fond little smile. “Well, most of the troublemakers, anyway.”

Sam’s not sure, exactly, what he’d expected. He’s not sure why that suddenly sits uneasily on his shoulders. “That’s all you do? Run them out of town?”

Sam’s mom gives him a blank look, like the question, or maybe the tone of it, has confused her. “If they can’t follow the rule about no killing in the city limits, yes. Of course, some of them decide to make trouble about it, but…well, that’s when it pays to have Mircalla as an ally. And your brother and his friends get a little excitement.” She smiles at Sam like she’s complimenting a piece of macaroni art he’s presented her with. “Your friends, those two…intense young men, they’ve even lent us a hand a few times. Though I’m not sure they really know they’re doing us a favour. It’s just such an advantage to have someone around who can work in daylight.”

Sam doesn’t know why he can’t just let this drop. It’s his grandfather’s funeral. He doesn’t want to be picking a fight with his mom. It’s just – “So it’s fine if Luna Bay or Sunnydale or, I don’t know, Woodsboro get overrun with vampires? Just as long as Santa Carla doesn’t?”

Sam’s mom looks at him like he’s just asked her why it’s okay to throw used paper towels in the garbage, but not priceless jewels. “My boys don’t live in Luna Bay or Sunnydale or Woodsboro.”

“Your boys don’t even all live in Santa Carla, either.”

“Sam, San Francisco is such a dangerous city. You know I wish you’d come home and stay.”

Sam barely resists the urge to tell her that San Francisco might be less dangerous if she stopped turfing vampires out of Santa Carla instead of just introducing them to the sharp end of a stake. This conversation is going nowhere. And he really doesn’t mean to pick a fight. “One more semester, Mom. Then you’ll be seeing more of me.”

“I know, I know,” Sam’s mom sighs. “It’s just, with Dad gone, and so unexpectedly…it’s just reminded me, so strongly, how people I love are mortal.”

Sam’s only half-listening. He’s spotted trouble outside, through one of the windows lining the reception room. Trouble, wearing a red bandana. “Mom, I’m so sorry, but can you hold that thought?”

“Sam? What -”

“I’ll be right back. Just – go save Mike from the widow Johnson, will you?”

He ignores his mother’s call of his name as he hurries out into the chill of the night.

Edgar and Alan Frog are dressed in black, too. But not for mourning. They’re crouched in the bushes surrounding the funeral home, peering through the window at the reception going on inside.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Sam hisses from behind them, and they both try to whirl around and jump up at the same time, only succeeding in falling over in a clattering heap. “Are those stakes? Guys, put that shit away before my mom sees you!”

“Sam! Didn’t know you were back in town,” Edgar says, with an entirely failed attempt at nonchalance.

Sam ignores him. “You’ve got ten seconds to give me one good reason why you’re crashing my grandpa’s funeral in full vampire hunting kit.”

Alan gives Sam a dark look. “Anybody told you yet how your grandpa died?”

“What? I – I mean, it was sudden, it was unexpected -”

Both the Frog brothers are nodding along.

“That’s all we can find out, too,” Alan says.

“Know what that means, in Santa Carla?” Edgar asks, and bares his teeth in a silent hiss without waiting for Sam to answer.

“He was eighty-four!”

“There’s no age where you become magically immune to vampire attacks,” Edgar says.

“I just mean his heart probably gave out! Why is everything always vampires with you two?”

Edgar and Alan exchange a look that says, to Sam, I know. I think he’s crazy too.

“There are at least four bloodsuckers in that room there right now,” Edgar says, flatly, as an answer.

“Four? You counted four? Who -” Sam cuts himself off with a shake of his head. He can’t let himself get dragged into his friends’ obsession. Not right now. “Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. My mom’s grieving, guys. You can’t do this right now.”

“Oh, but our dear, formerly-vampiric friend,” Edgar says. Sam rolls his eyes. “Now’s the only time we can do it. Did you know we knew your grandpa before you came looking for help with your fanged little problem?”

That, Sam actually hadn’t known.

“Who did you think turned us on to the undead presence in Santa Carla? Who did you think tracked the old man down, warned him so he came back in time to save all our asses back in ’87?” Edgar pushes himself to his feet, brushing the worst of the flowerbed dirt off his pants. “He knew more about things that go bump than anybody else we’ve ever met.”

“May his memory be a blessing,” Alan agrees, solemnly.

“You seriously hung out with my grandpa? He never mentioned.” But even as he’s saying the words, it occurs to Sam that that’s absolutely no proof that his grandpa didn’t know about something – or someone. Tight-lipped to the end, apparently.

“Yeah. We did. And he told us it was his last wish to be staked before he got tucked in for his dirt nap. Didn’t want to wake back up with a set of fang dentures.”

“And we heard the widow Johnson was gonna be here,” Alan adds, also clambering to his feet, using the windowsill to help himself up. “Do you know how rare it is that she goes out? This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -”

“It’s my grandfather’s funeral, you assholes! Nobody’s staking anybody!” Sam shuts his eyes, draws in a deep breath, and presses a hand against his forehead to try to ward off the headache he can feel starting to build behind his eyes. The old gut wound, the one that means he has to be careful what he eats if he doesn’t want to spend an agonising and humiliating couple hours in the bathroom afterwards, the one that has a tendency to start hurting again when he gets really stressed out, is pulsing dully under his skin. “Look, what’s it gonna take to get you guys to lay off for tonight? Just for tonight.”

Edgar and Alan share another look. Sam can’t decipher this one.

“Come back home with us,” Edgar says, at last, apparently the result of silent consensus. “You’re planning on staying overnight with them, right? Don’t. Stay at our place instead.”

“I think I’m getting a little old for sleepovers.”

“Then don’t. But if you want to keep getting older, get yourself a motel room instead. Or at least sleep in a garlic nightshirt, because buddy, if you think a mama vamp who just unexpectedly lost one mortal family member is going to let her extremely soft and squishy baby boy just walk out of that house in the morning still human -”

“Thanks,” Sam says, as flatly as he can. “But I think I’m good. The worst they’re gonna do to me is feed me tuna casserole that’s been in the freezer since the last time I visited.” He says it with as much confidence as he can muster, hoping he sounds convincing. Hoping he sounds convinced.

“Your funeral, Emerson.” Edgar leans in close, never breaking eye contact, so close their foreheads almost touch. Close enough that if Edgar was anybody else and this was any other situation, Sam might think they were about to kiss.

But Edgar just taps the centre of Sam’s chest with the blunt end of the stake he’s holding, right above Sam’s heart. Past his shoulder, Sam can see Alan’s face set into his customary sneer. For a moment, he’s so overwhelmed by a rush of love and gratitude for both their stupid, stubborn selves, never changing, that he almost chokes on it.

“Your. Funeral,” Edgar warns him, with one more pointed tap of the stake, before he and Alan both retreat back into the night.

…

Sam’s mom has worked wonders on the inside of Max’s house.

The first time Sam was here, he was struck by how…sterile it seemed. Everything impeccably trendy, new, shiny, and up-to-the-minute modern, in a way that made it look like a furniture dealership showroom or a glossy design magazine spread. It hadn’t looked like anybody lived there.

Of course, that had been because nobody lived there, but. Semantics.

But since Max was declared officially dead this past summer and Sam’s mom inherited, she’s poured his money into the place. And it’s almost unrecognisable. Even though they never lived anywhere that looked like this when Sam was growing up, there’s something cozily familiar and almost nostalgic about the overstuffed furniture, the big watercolour floral prints, the warm wood and warmer colours that his mom’s packed the place with. A macrame wall hanging that Sam suspects his mom made herself dangles over what he thinks is a genuine antique walnut writing desk, pale pink marble surrounds the fireplace that dominates the living room, a standing lamp with a stained-glass shade patterned with flowers throws its dappled light over the rag rug. Everywhere Sam looks, there’s something pink or orange or yellow or perfect deep summer-sky blue. It’s like someone tried to capture sunlight and hoard it inside this little – well, okay, not so little – collection of rooms.

That thought makes an unexpected lump rise in Sam’s throat.

He tells himself he thinks nothing of it when he takes the glass of red wine his mom hands down to him, where he’s sitting on the couch. He doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t search her face. He doesn’t note the way she’s already turned away from him when he looks up to meet her eyes, asking Mike if he wants something to sip on as well.

Sam tells himself he thinks nothing of it.

They’re his family, after all.

“Twenty-one already,” Sam’s mom says disbelievingly, settling into the armchair across from him with her own stemmed glass of what is decidedly and obviously not red wine. “I just can’t believe it. My baby boy is a big, grown-up man. Time just sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?”

“Sam’s got to visit more often so it’s less of a shock how decrepit he’s getting every time he does turn up,” Mike says, with that crooked half-grin.

“I’m nearly finished with school,” Sam reminds them both. The weight of the liquid in the glass he’s holding shifts unpredictably in his grasp. He doesn’t look at it. “One more semester.”

Sam’s mom nods, like she’s starting to get a little tired of hearing it. “One more semester. Sam, I hope you know how proud I am. How proud we all are. Your grandfather -” She puts a hand delicately over her mouth as her voice cracks. “He was so excited to see you convocate…”

“He was working on a very special graduation present. Just for you,” Mike says, with a conspiratorial grin that tells Sam that at some point this visit, he’s going to have to face whatever unholy dead-animal art project his grandpa thought would make a good graduation present. He doesn’t even try to suppress the shudder.

It’s a good evening, even with the lingering funeral atmosphere. Normal. Nanook wakes up and comes plodding out of the laundry room to curl up on the couch beside Sam and lay his big, fluffy head in Sam’s lap, despite Sam’s mom’s stern and completely empty warning to stay down. While Sam absentmindedly strokes Nanook’s dense, soft fur with the hand not holding his wineglass, his mom gives him the third degree about school, friends, the apartment, whether he’s seeing anyone special. Mike makes fun of his hair and asks if he still hears from Star, these days.

(Sam does, now and then. She’s even visited him a few times, when she blows through his way. The last postcard she sent him had redwoods on it.

He doesn’t tell Mike and his mom that last part.)

They all share their favourite stories of Grandpa’s weirdest moments, and by the time Sam’s finished his first glass of wine they’re all in stitches. He can’t tell if the tears streaming down his face are from grief or laughter.

Mike heads out about a quarter to one, when a hurricane of revving motors and flashing headlights descends around the house. Sam’s mom sighs a long-suffering sigh. “I thought I asked them not to do that anymore.”

“Special occasion, Mom. Sam’s home.”

“Your boyfriend still hates me, huh?” Sam teases, and Mike huffs.

“You’re the one who literally had a boyfriend last year.”

“Yeah, and that was way less weird than whatever’s going on between you two.”

“He’ll come around,” Mike says, apparently deciding to ignore Sam’s excellent point. “Eventually.”

Sam’s not sure if Mike means David’ll come around about Sam, or himself. But he doesn’t ask. He’s long since stopped trying to understand what the hell’s going on with the two of them.

Mike pushes himself up from where he’s been sprawled on the rug with his back against the couch, gives Nanook’s ears and then Sam’s hair a ruffle and grins into the glare Sam shoots in his direction, leans over to press a kiss to their mom’s temple as he passes. He vanishes out into the night in a swirl of cold wind and a chorus of raucous cheers and laughter. Sam’s not sure if he’s imagining a mocking echo of his own name among them, a shout for little Sammy to come on out and play.

Sam stays firmly put inside his mom’s cozy living room. He might willingly sleep overnight in a building he knows houses two bloodthirsty vampires, but he’s not stupid.

…

Sam’s finished off three glasses of red wine – really pretty good red wine, his mom says the producer’s local, and by that time it’s way too late to worry about so Sam just does his best Bela Lugosi at her about not drinking…vine until she breaks down and laughs – and is starting to really feel it when he decides he needs to turn in. Even though he’s still feeling kind of wired and jangly, every limb feels like it’s melting deliciously into the suddenly so-comfortable couch. He’s even managed to forget completely about that old injury in his side, for once, not even so much as a twinge coming from it to remind him. The irresistibly heavy drowsiness that comes after a good cry is setting in, and he still has to brush his teeth and wash his face before he can pass out.

He's exhausted from all the travel it took to get here on short notice, from the funeral arrangements and the funeral itself, just from the wringer of emotion he’s just been put through. He’s still running high on the excitement of seeing his family again. He’s not used to these late nights anymore. And he’s a little tipsy from finishing off the better part of a bottle of pretty good red wine.

That’s all.

His mom stops by his room as he’s contemplating just flopping facedown across the bed and staying there until morning. She knocks on the doorframe, smiling that sweet, loving, familiar smile that makes Sam’s whole chest hurt, these days. “Hey, sweetheart. Need anything before you hit the hay?”

“No. Thanks, Mom.”

“No? Not even a check for the closet monster?”

The laugh they share smooths over that aching thing in Sam’s chest almost like it was never there. For a moment, he feels like he must be glowing, just from the sheer uncontrollable amount that he loves her.

He says something vaguely to that effect, and his mom’s lower lip wobbles.

“I love you, Sam,” she says, leaning heavily against the doorframe. “I’m so glad you came home.”

“Me too,” Sam says, and watches his mom’s smile shore up until it reaches her eyes again, transforms her whole face with joy. “Goodnight, Mom. Love you.”

“Goodnight, Sammy. See you tomorrow night.”

Sam tucks himself into the guest bed, and sleep washes over him like the tide. He sinks into it, willingly, gratefully, letting the softness of the bed and his own dreamy exhaustion overpower him.

One last stray thought flits across his mind, before he finally surrenders to the gentle darkness drawing him down.

Max, in the end, did have a point.

Boys need a mother.