Sarah Benadine is Dead

Chapter XXI, Part I

Perhaps it was always bound to end this way. Perhaps from the very start this was the only way it could play out. Perhaps this was all fated right from the beginning.

I, for one, do not know. What I do know is this: by halfway through May, 1956, Shannon Malone was walking with one foot in the grave.

Antonia Guaraldi was attacked by a vampire on a Tuesday night. Shannon Malone woke up to the phone ringing at half past ten. Her mother peeked into her room ten minutes later, unsurprised to find her awake. Una had looked at her with a fear that was ancient and told her the news: Toni was in the hospital in Medula. During the time the Guaraldis had been away to watch Frankie's baseball game, Toni had been attacked by something. She had stayed home because she had not felt well. Her family had come home to find her sprawled in the living room, blood coating her neck and chest. She was only just breathing. There had been noises in the backyard, but by the time anyone got out there there was nothing to be seen. The assumption was that the family had chased away whoever it was that had done this. And not a moment too soon.

The news shook Shannon to the core. Her worlds had collided: supernatural and normal. That year, up to that point, she'd been doing her best to keep a strict division between the two; she had begun to understand why none of the Clearwater students talked about the school. It was easier to keep them split up. There was less of a chance of letting anything slip to the wrong person.

And perhaps it was Shannon's last ditch effort to hold onto some gleaming thread of disbelief.

That was no longer possible. Someone—something, a vampire, Shannon had no doubt—had tried to kill her best friend, the girl she hadn't spoken to in months. The vampires had entered her world, her safe, normal world, and she had had enough.

She wanted it over. She wanted it finished.

When she told Caleb, Dexter, Jared, Ginger, and Ollie, none of them took it well. She hadn't expected them to. But she didn't expect their help, either. She understood Allison better now. She understood the need, the driving desire to do something even if it was stupid. Something, some monster had shattered the divide between normal and not normal (realandnotreal) and had tried to take something precious from her. The fight she and Toni had gotten into seemed ridiculous now.

Caleb was the first to speak, looking at her a little like she was an animal that he was afraid would pounce.

"Shannon, you know what happened the last time we tried to hunt down the vampires."

And of course she did. She hadn't forgotten that easily. And yet she found she didn't care. It was not an earth-shattering discovery; she thought of a time a thousand years ago when she'd sat in an ice cream parlor with a boy and a girl who'd told her about a missing friend that needed to be found. In trying to find her they'd stopped and stuttered and spent a lot of time doing nothing perhaps because they were too busy, or too afraid, or perhaps—just perhaps—because they had not reached that point yet. Perhaps because they knew what the cost would be.

Shannon told her friends she didn't expect them to help her. In a moment of déjà vu, she found herself having the same conversation they'd had with Allison in the infirmary in March, only she was on the other side.

"Shannon, you can't," Ginger said.

"I have to," Shannon replied. And she thought maybe, despite their protests, all of them knew that. She'd told them about what had happened to Toni. She could feel the ghost of Mabel Starkowski hanging about in the room.