Bride (Ali Hazelwood) by Ali Hazelwood

            “Get your own bed, bitch,” I say groggily, turning to Serena.

            “Never.” She yawns, huge, with no consideration for her stinky breath or my poor nose. “So.”

            “So.” I reach up to clean my eyes, and can still smell the Vampyre blood under my fingernails. I should take a shower.

            “Let’s just get this over with,” she starts. “I know you’re mad, but—”

            “Hang on. I’m not mad.”

            She blinks at me. “Oh.”

            “I’m not going to . . . I’m not mad, I promise.”

            She searches my face. “But?”

            “No buts.”

            “But?”

            “Nothing.”

            “But?”

            “For fuck’s sake, I told you—”

            “Misery. But?”

            I press my fingers into my eyes until golden spots appear. God, I hate it when people know me. “Just . . . why?”

            “Why, what?”

            “Why didn’t you tell me?”

            She bites the inside of her cheek. “Right. So. I kind of kept an unhinged number of secrets from you in the past year or so, and I’m not sure which one you’re referring to, so—”

            “The big one.” My tone is flat. “That you’re actually, you know. Another fucking species?”

            “Oh.” She scrunches her nose. “Right. Well.”

            “I thought you trusted me. I assumed you felt you could tell me everything and our friendship was unconditional, but maybe—”

            “I do. I do trust you. It’s . . .” She flinches. Then massages her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I wasn’t sure, you know? At the beginning, especially, my body was being so weird, and there were these odd sensations, and it seemed bonkers. I wasn’t sure whether I was having delusions, and it felt like the precise type of thing that I should avoid thinking about and just pray would go away. And then, when I really started suspecting . . . Well, for one, you guys hate Weres.”

            I gasp, mortally offended. “I don’t.”

            “You make jokes about them all the time.”

            “What jokes?”

            “Come on. They run after mail carriers, are obsessed with squirrels. There was that night we met that wet dog that stank so bad—”

            “It was a joke. I had never even smelled a Were at the time!”

            “Yeah, well.” She takes a deep breath. “My blood is red. And when your father took me, I still wasn’t able to shift. I wasn’t sure. At that point, all I knew was that something weird and terrible and amazing was happening, and I swear, Misery, all I kept thinking about in the past six months was—what if I die? What if this thing inside me kills me? What is Misery going to do then? Am I going to drag her with me, am I going to be the reason my sister, the person I care about the most—the only person I fucking care about—will die, because of this weird codependency of ours, and—”

            I reach out, closing my hand around hers, like we used to when we were kids.

            Serena slows down. Stops. Then, after a few moments, she continues, and her voice is much quieter. “In the last three months I had lots of time. Obviously. And there was a surveillance camera in the attic, but it had several blind spots. Before, I had felt like I needed information. I had researched the possibility that I might be a Were, or something else altogether, like I would normally research an article. But once I was alone, all I could do was research myself. Try to feel it. And I practiced. Shifting is like flexing a muscle, except that the muscle is also in the brain. And I still don’t really understand what’s up with me, and what about me is Were or Human, but . . .”

            She takes a deep breath.

            Another.