The earsplitting screams shot right through all of us as if a banshee was taunting us.

  My vision shook from the frequency, thanks to my sensitive hearing, leaving me blind as a bat. Pushing through, I wrapped my arms around Autumn's waist and held her tightly against me as she shrieked. London and Carly both reached to grabbed Tori. None of us understood what was happening.

  "What's wrong?" Malachi yelled over the noise.

  "Who knows!" Hunter barked back.

  My legs weakened the longer the screaming continued, my every bone vibrating like glass about to shatter. Autumn's knees completely buckled, and I ended up having to hold her upright.

  Finally, silence came to our aid, and both girls slumped unconscious.

  Everyone took a shared breath of relief, only to quickly snap into crisis response. I fell to the ground with Autumn and could still barely see or focus. From what I could tell, the others were lying Tori down as well and arguing with each other over what to do.

  That was when she gasped awake.

  "No-!" Tori choked out, shaking like a leaf.

  "Shit!" London hissed, trying to hold her down and keep her calm.

  Tori shook her head rapidly and cried.

  "Is she okay?" Hunter called over to me.

  I couldn't do much more than blink.

  Suddenly, Tori once again slumped, and it was Autumn this time who jolted awake.

  I fought to hold her tighter while she squirmed and squealed. Even using super strength was proving difficult against her.

  They then swapped again.

  "God, it's like a loop!" Carly panicked.

  "Seperate them!" Malachi yelled.

  London waited until Tori was once again in zombie mode before scooping her up in her arms and standing to her feet.

  "Please!" Autumn reached out in her direction, and they swapped yet again.

  London struggled to hold onto Tori, too scared of damaging her to use much force. Malachi shot up to help her. The second Victoria returned to Autumn's body, the two ran the corpse back inside the house.

  "Breathe," I managed to whisper against Autumn's ear, "You won't stop until you calm down."

  "I can't..." She cried. "I can't stop it."

  "Stay here with me." I held her tighter. "I need you to try."

  "It's not–"

  And she was gone again, evident by London and Malachi's shared groan of frustration in the living room.

  "I'll go help." Carly got up. "Hunter, stay here with them."

  Hunter grimaced. He couldn't do anything else, really, not with his ankle in a moon-boot. So, he nervously scooted over to me.

  "Hey... How's things?"

  I frowned weakly. To me, he was just a blob of colour, and his voice was like radio static.

  Autumn woke up again and stole my full attention.

  "Why isn't it calming down?" Hunter panicked, helping me hold her down. "They can't see each other anymore."

  "Fucked if I know." I spat out.

  She switched again. Hunter and I sighed.

  "Tori usually swaps when she's distressed, right? I'd assume that's what's happening now, too?" He asked.

  "I can't imagine how scared she is." I nodded. "But I don't know how to help her."

  "Could we try hurting one of them?"

  "What?"

  Autumn awoke again.

  "If one of her bodies needs her more than the other, won't it want her more?" Hunter huffed, holding the girl's shoulders down against the grass. "Tori's always in pain, but what if we hurt Autumn?"

  I honestly hesitated.

  "What if you're wrong?"

  "Do you have a better idea?!"

  I grunted and shut up.

  Autumn slumped again, giving me a brief moment to consider my options. Reluctantly, I found myself agreeing that there weren't any better choices. I forced myself to sit up, begged my brain to hurry up and repair my vision damage, and took a deep breath.

  "Hurry. She'll jump again in a second." Hunter gulped.

  I let my claws shoot out from my nails, and stabbed them into Autumn's stomach.

  She woke up instantly, this time in utter silence.

  My eyes narrowed in desperation as I studied her reaction. She blinked up at the darkening sky above her and didn't say a word. Her breaths were broken and stuttered, and her hands trembled as they felt for my claws, but she didn't lash out like I'd expected.

  "Are you okay? Are you yourself?" Hunter leaned closer to her.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  She glanced to him and gulped. Blood began to infiltrate the anterior chambers of her eyes, washing over the rich blue of her irises.

  Hunter winced.

  "Her eyes are red. Is that okay? Is she gonna bite me?"

  "She's hurt." I muttered, refusing to remove my claws despite how she tried to grab my wrist. "My eyes do the same thing. It's just a hyphema... maybe a vampire version or something."

  Malachi cautiously came back out to the yard and sighed.

  "Whatever you did, it worked. Tori's gone husk again."

  "We stabbed her!" Hunter exclaimed, half in amusement, half in shock. "Well, Zach did."

  "Oh, ouch." Malachi cringed.

  "Who's bleeding?" I cut in sharply, my only working sense being on overdrive.

  Malachi froze for a few seconds, not following. He then very suddenly ran back inside.

  "I'm okay!" Carly called after a moment. "Just a few scratches on my hands."

  I sighed in relief.

  "Zach." Autumn choked out.

  I snapped my head back to her and frowned.

  "Are you alright?" I asked stupidly.

  She glanced from me to Hunter and back again, eyes a burning crimson.

  "I wanna go home."

  An apologetic smile crossed my face and I nodded, cautiously removing my claws so that she could heal her wound.

  "I'll take you home in the morning–"

  "No, I-I'm not staying here." She panicked, her voice strained. "I can't be near that... thing."

  "I'll get the others to babysit her at one of their houses instead." I gently cupped her cheek in my palm. "I don't want you alone overnight. You need to recover from whatever the fuck just happened, Vic."

  She shook her head, tears forming.

  "I don't wanna be here. I don't wanna be her. I wanna go home."

  I exchanged a look with Hunter.

  "Where's home? Autumn's place?"

  "No, I... I don't know."

  "Just stay with me for the night. Please, Victoria."

  I ran a bloody thumb over her the new skin on her abdomen, checking that she had healed alright. She didn't reply. My eyes met hers again, and the way she looked at me... God.

  "I don't wanna be alone anymore." She cried.

  I nodded and hugged her tightly, letting her tears stain my sleeve.

  "I promise we'll fix all of this." I whispered. "I'll do whatever it takes to make you whole again."

  -

  "There has to be something in here about compulsion." Diego growled.

  His shoulders tensed further with every page of the notebook he turned over. None of it was serious. None of it was direct. None of it was confident. Just a collection of jokes and comedic sketches that masked the true documentation hidden beneath. He couldn't understand what was sarcastic, what was satirical, and what was solemn honesty.

  His hope returned as he stumbled across a page titled 'Weird-ass mind control stuff'. Sounded real trustworthy. He rolled his eyes and began to read it aloud.

  So I thought I can mind control people but honestly idk. The other day it was working and I managed to make some rich assholes at my mum's charity event agree to gimme money every week! I told em the money would go towards the charity itself, but I didn't even need to try and persuade them, they each started setting allowances up straight away. Right as I thought I'd gotten the hang of it, it stopped working! I tried to use it on my mum to get her to stop hitting me and instead she just gave me a scowl and yelled at me for apparently ridiculing her parenting. Damn!

  "Nothing." Diego sighed, turning the page. "How could there be nothing?"

  There was a page on fang anatomy, a page on eye anatomy, and a page on claw anatomy, but not what he needed to find. Diego swore he'd read the book over a hundred times, yet firmly believed he was missing something.

  "Come on, kid. You write a whole guidebook on becoming a vampire but you don't write about your damn curse?"

  He supposed the sections in the diet chapter almost counted. They went into detail on the experience of feeding from different people, ages, animals, and situations. Between the lines, there were a few out of place comments and notes about the experiences, but all of the writing was so 'teenager' that he couldn't validate the claims.

  "I always feel really anxious when I feed on cats, dunno why. Dogs make me feel hyperactive. Birds just make me feel guilty." Diego murmured under his breath, reading a specific note. "What do you mean 'dunno why'? Damn it, Zach! How could you not think about it?"

  "Want some?" Avery held out a plate of raw steaks as she passed by.

  Diego snapped out of his thoughts and sighed. He shook his head.

  "Sorry. Too stressed to eat."

  Avery frowned and set the plate on the coffee table before him. She crossed her arms.

  "I think you should talk to him." She shrugged. "His friends have probably told him about how you confessed to knowing everything."

  "I know." Diego rubbed his forehead. "But if I tell him why I need the book, he'll only want it more."

  "Can't you scan the pages and give it back? Keep a digital copy?"

  "I don't want him to have it." He set his glasses atop his head. "If he finds something in here that I can't, or that I haven't, he'll try and do it all himself."

  "Is that... bad?"

  "Let me put it this way," Diego put the book down, "When you were nine, and your tooth got stuck instead of falling out, what did you do? You threw a tantrum and insisted that you could get it out on your own. I told you I was going to take you to the dentist instead, and you know what I woke up to at three in the morning?"

  "Me screaming because I ripped out a nerve?" Avery chuckled.

  "Exactly that." Diego muttered. "Zach's an adult, I know. But barely. When I was 19, I thought smoking would give me a raspy voice and make the girls in my course be all over me."

  "You met mum when you were 19." Avery frowned.

  Diego paused.

  "Not the point."

  "I get it, you think he won't want your help." Avery nodded. "He'd try it and mess it up."

  "Zach doesn't even know half of the things I do about our kind." Diego groaned. "He wouldn't pass a fifth grader's test on vampires if he tried. Him having never met another vampire only makes him assume that everything individual about his condition – everything that's subjective – is fact."

  "Why don't you change that, then?" Avery scolded. "If he's so lost, why not help him out? At least introduce yourself, you don't have to be a mentor."

  "I was considering that until he killed Victoria." Diego glared. "Now is not the time. Perhaps in the future, after this whole mess has been wiped off the walls."

  "I think that's stupid, I'm sorry!" Avery raised her hands. "If it were me, I'd run to tell the kid everything I knew before he made another huge mistake."

  "Zach is so stubborn that even if I told him everything, he'd think I'm deceiving him." Diego rolled his eyes. "I'm doing what I think is best, Avery."

  "There's gotta be a better way." Avery shook her head, heading out of the room. "You only became a principal to watch over him in the first place, and you clearly couldn't even get that right, because he went and made a zombie right under your nose."

  Diego winced slightly at the reminder. He couldn't pretend he didn't feel responsible.

  With a sigh, he reached for the plate before him, and began to cut up the steak.

  -

  Never in this man's almost eighteen years of parenting had he earned enough experience to know how to handle the situation he found at his front door at 8pm on a normal weekday.

  "You're not bringing that thing in the house." He grimaced.

  "Dad, she's not a thing!" London groaned. "She's the reanimated corpse of my dead best friend and she can't stay at her house tonight because the body that her soul got shoved into when she died has to spend the night there and the two can't be in the someplace at the same time."

  The man just blinked with dead eyes.

  "You're telling me this is Victoria?" He muttered.

  "Mmhm." Carly smiled casually. "Well, it's her body. She's not in there right now, but she might be later."

  This definitely wasn't in the parenting books he'd obsessed over the day he found out he was having twins. They warned of chaos, but not to this degree.

  "Your friend... went missing... and came back as a zombie... and you want her to come have a sleepover?"

  "You can't tell her parents! Or the police!" London stated firmly.

  "I think the only person I'd wanna call is a priest."

  "Dad, please? We'll watch over her the whole time. You won't even know she's here!" Carly whined.

  The man made eye contact with the corpse. He'd known the girl for a long time, she'd come for emergency sleepovers many times throughout the years whenever her home wasn't safe. He'd never had much of a conversation with her, but seeing her body standing before him half rotted, half alive, staring at him with pale white eyes made him want to vomit. This was why he didn't like his girls being friends with a boy he was pretty sure was some sort of demon, or cursed child. Weird things just kept on appearing on his doorstep.

  "If you need me, I'll be in the garage with a pack of beers and some Billy Joel." He grumbled as he walked away and out to the backyard. "Ay, me cago en dios."

  The twins exchanged a look with one another.

  "That's a yes!"