My eyes fluttered open. The room was dark, a pale sliver of moonlight cast across the bed. Rubbing my aching temples, I rolled out of bed and pulled back one of the curtains, admiring the bright orb that blared through the window.

The full moon.

My eyes darted to the trees at the edge of the forest that bent toward the house. Somewhere out there, Caleb and Luke and Rolf and Robbie were hiding, hunting, their rational minds warped by their animal instincts. Caleb and Luke and Rolf would be stalking through the Crookshollow Forest, on the prowl for a tasty snack, whereas Robbie would be somewhere far away by now, somewhere I could never hope to find him again, even if I wanted to.

Which I didn’t. Not at all.

Robbie. I hoped he was okay. I wondered where he had gone. Did he go back to his father? Surely he wouldn’t, not after everything that’s happened—

No, I shook my head, trying to shake away the thoughts. You don’t get to worry about Robbie any longer. Whatever he does from now on is his business.

I grabbed my phone and checked the time. 8:12 p.m. My stomach growled. I stared at the bakery box Elinor had left beside the bed. The end of the pastie had crusted over, and the lemon tart had melted into an unappealing yellow puddle.

That won’t do. My stomach rumbled. I needed food before I could begin another night of drinking away my pain. I grabbed a hoodie from off the floor, and threw it on over my pyjamas. The tick tock tick tock on the grandfather clock punctuated the still silence of the hallway. I had no idea if Serenity was out, and I didn’t particularly care. I shoved my hands into my pockets, and made my way down the darkened staircase.

I didn’t turn on a light until I got to the drawing room, where I clicked on one of the garish carved lampshades and slumped into the chair by the fire. My bottle of scotch still sat on the table from where I’d been drinking with Caleb and Eric. Three dirty glasses sat next to it. I grabbed one of them and filled it, sipping the burning liquid while I dialled Pete’s Pizza.

“Hey, Pete.”

“Hey, Bianca. Sorry to hear about the shop. I hope they get the wankers who did it.”

“Me, too.” I winced as my chest tightened. “Can I get a delivery up to The Prim?”

“Sure thing. Do you and Robbie want your usual?”

Another sharp pain jabbed into my chest. I sucked in a breath, willing myself not to break down. I kept my voice even. “No, it’s just me tonight, so you can hold the Meatsplosion with the extra BBQ sauce. Just hit me with a double Hawaiian, and an extra order of those lemon pepper wedges.”

“You want sour cream with the wedges?”

“Sure. You only live once, right?” A tear spilled down my cheek. Pete continued with my order regardless, as if ordering pizza for one was the most natural thing in the world, and not a sign that I’d lost the only person I’d ever really cared about. I garbled my way through my credit card number, and hung up with a promise from Pete that he’d arrive within a half hour.

I leaned back in the chair, raising the glass to my lips. As I tipped the liquid down my throat, a shadow in the corner moved. I darted around, and noticed a silhouette in the doorway, the outline of a person’s head drawn by the bright moon.

My blood turned cold. Someone’s in my house.

It’s okay. It’s probably just Serenity coming home, or some other artist wanting to crash at Prim. The website does say, “Open all hours.”

“Hey,” I called into the darkness. “Don’t just lurk in the shadows. Let me get a good look at you.”

“As you wish,” a familiar voice simpered back. The figure took a step forward, her face falling under the warm glow of my lamp. I relaxed when I recognised Serenity. “Hello, Bianca.”

“Oh, hey.” I gestured to the sofa opposite me. “I thought you had gone out. How did you get in here?”

“Oh, the door was open. I thought that was your policy here at The Prim – anyone is welcome.” She took another step towards me, an odd, lopsided grin spread across her face. She had her hands clasped behind her back, like some cheeky kid about to present his mother with a live lizard he’d found in the garden.

“Well, since you’re back, come on down and have a drink with me.” I held up the bottle. “Are you still in town for anything in particular? I know we discussed some more ink but with my shop destroyed, I won’t be able to take any bookings until I’ve got the okay to go back to work. Which given some personal setbacks, might be some time yet.”

“Oh, I’m afraid you won’t be going back.” Serenity grinned wider, stepping right in front of me, so she loomed over me the way my mother did when I’d done something naughty. She whipped her hands from behind her.

The lamplight caught the glint of a long, sharp kitchen knife.

A nervous itch blocked my throat, and I choked out a weird, strangled laugh. “What’s that for?”

“It’s for you, Bianca.”

“I’m sorry?” I tried to inch around her, but she shuffled closer, her gaze never leaving mine. “You’re trying to give me a knife? That’s nice, I guess, but I’m not exactly a master chef—”

“You still don’t recognise me, do you?” Anger flashed in her eyes. “I can’t say I’m surprised. For all your big talk about being different, you never cared about anyone but yourself.”

I stared at her face, willing the features to knit together in a memory, to connect the dots to the familiar feeling I’d had from her since the moment she arrived. And suddenly … it clicked. I remembered where I knew her from.

“Sally Smith,” I moaned, my lip trembling. Sally Smith, the mousy girl in my high school class with no friends, a girl I’d taken pity on at a party once and snogged in a cupboard. A girl who I’d “dated” for about a week before Mother caught us together and chased her away and I’d been sent off to get reprogrammed by the nuns and then got distracted by a hot football player at another school and never talked to her again.

But if this really is Sally Smith, what is she doing here, in my house, with a knife? Why did she have a new name and pretend to be a reporter?

“You do remember.” Sally’s lip curled back. “I am touched. Of course, I’ve had a bit of a makeover since high school. New name, a bit of work done, a new outlook on life. A great job, where I have freaks like you yapping at my heels for just a bit of attention. Now, I get to be the person who decides what’s cool. I can’t tell you how much fun it’s been to watch you the last couple of weeks, knowing you didn’t have a clue who I was.”

“But why? I don't understand why you pretended—”

“I didn’t pretend anything. My name is Serenity now. I had it legally changed. If you’d confronted me about my identity, I wouldn’t have denied it. I was just waiting to see how long it took you to recognise me.”

“Well, colour me impressed,” I choked out.

“This isn’t really a joking matter. Now, hand over your phone.”

“Sally, I—”

“I don’t want to hear what you have to say, Bianca. You never once listened to me, you never took the time to care about me. I worshipped you in high school. I thought you were fucking perfection in Docs. But you were just as bad as those snotty bitches you hated so much. You let me get close to you … I confided my deepest secrets, my darkest fears. I opened up in a way I never had before. You gave me the courage I needed to consider coming out of the closet. But then, you crushed me. I wasn’t alternative enough for you, so you let your mother terrify me and then discarded me without a single thought. Do you think I’d just forget that?”

“No, I didn’t know—”

“Of course you didn’t know. You didn’t even think to ask how I felt. It was always about you, you, you. Now you’ll see how it feels to be betrayed. How it cuts you, right here.” She mimed jabbing the tip of the blade right into my chest. I shrunk away. “Phone, if you please. Next time I won’t ask so nicely.”

Numb with shock, I handed over my phone. I expected her to smash it, but instead, Sally held it up to her face, expertly texting with one hand while keeping the knife – and her eyes – trained on me.

“What are you doing?”

She flipped the phone around, showing me the text she’d just sent Robbie. A text telling him to come over, that I needed him.

My heart sank to my knees. Please, don’t bring him into this. “Why do you want Robbie?”

“You mean you haven’t put it all together yet?” Sally laughed. “It doesn’t surprise me. You always thought you were so clever. But you’re really nothing special. Not like me. People don’t notice me, because I blend into the background. You haven’t noticed me following you for the last week, and your boyfriend didn’t notice me standing right in the hallway while he changed into a werewolf the other night. But it doesn’t matter, because I got the whole thing on video.”

Shit.

“I’m going to be the first person to break the story that werewolves are real. I’ll be giving a harrowing eyewitness account of how I went to visit my old girlfriend, Bianca Sinclair. And how I was just in time to witness her being torn to pieces by her ex-boyfriend, who had transformed into a vicious werewolf and who was also probably responsible for several recent animal attacks around the Crookshollow Forest area.”

“Sally, you can’t—”

She grinned, shuffling closer, that knife raised to her shoulder, ready to strike. “I’m about to become the most infamous journalist in England, probably the world. And you’re going to help me do it. After everything you did to me, it seems only fair that you could give me this.”

“If you want me dead, you’re going to have to stab me. Robbie would never lay a hand on me. You’ll never get him to kill me.”

“I don’t have to.” She whipped out her own phone, and swiped the screen a couple of times. Robbie’s voice echoed through the room, high-pitched and tinny through the tiny speakers. “… on the full moon, I’m a wild beast. I operate completely on instinct. For a wolf, instinct is tied up with scent. And right now, my instincts are screaming that Rolf is my rival, and anything with his scent on it is a direct challenge to me. For example, if I smelled you wearing clothes that had Rolf’s scent on them, in my wolf form, I’d think you betrayed me, and I’d probably attack you …”

“You’ve been spying on us.” I remembered Robbie’s paranoia about Rolf, that he was sending me flowers and watching me. I’d thought he was just trying to get me to throw Rolf out, but it was Sally all along. And the person who wrecked my shop … that must’ve been her, too. “You destroyed Resurrection Ink.”

Sally clapped, her grin exploding across her face as she broke into terrifying giggles. “Well done! Ten points! Yes, I’ve been following you ever since you sent the press release about The Prim to my boss. I was just going to write a gloriously unflattering piece about this place and destroy you that way, before your business could even get off the ground. But then your boyfriend transformed into a werewolf in the middle of the party, and I got an even better idea. Why not destroy you and break the story of my life at the same time?”

“But you said in your piece that it was just special effects.” Keep her talking. You can find a way out of this. I inched my way along the sofa, my eyes fixed on the gleaming blade. If I could shuffle her around, maybe I could run for the door before she had a chance to catch me. The heavy table lamp sat on the table between us. If I could grab it, maybe I could knock her out …

As slowly as I could, I shifted my weight to my back foot, ready to spring into action.

“Of course. I wasn’t about to give your place that kind of free publicity. I’m not here to help you by bringing a horde of werewolf hunters down upon your doorstep. No, I need to break this in a way that will give you just as much pain as you gave me. And you’ve given me the perfect excuse—”

I lunged for the door. My shin slammed against the coffee table, sending it flying. A cascade of magazines and empty absinthe glasses cascaded to the floor. I grabbed the lamp and hurled it at Sally. It hit her in the chest, sending her flying back.

My fingers grasped the door doorframe. I swung myself into the hall, scrambling for the front door. Run run run—

Something hit me in the side, knocking the wind out of me. My right leg collapsed, and I fell heavily, banging my knee on the hardwood floor. My hip ached, like someone had punched me. I rolled over and turned around, and saw a wide grin spread over Sally’s face as she yanked the knife from my hip.

She stabbed me.

A pool of blood spread across my leggings, staining the fabric a deep pink. As soon as the blood registered, the pain came – a great sweeping tide that flowed through my body, driving out all breath and thought. It was as though the knife had twisted right inside of me, and wriggled its way through my veins.

“No!” I grabbed at my hip, trying to stop the bleeding. Blood soaked through my fingers. Panic rose inside me. I’m bleeding. I’m going to die.

Sally’s face faded, wobbling into the wallpaper behind her head. Dull roses and grinning portraits spun around me. The panic rose up, overwhelming the last vestiges of rational thought. I tried to crawl away, but I had no idea what direction I was moving in.

Another punch hit my shoulder. Dully, I realised she’d stabbed me again. She slashed at my head, and I pulled back just s the knife darted in front of my eye. Something stung my temple, and my vision blurred with red.

I toppled backward, my head bouncing on the carpet. The last thing I heard was a thud of the door hitting the wall, or maybe it was my body as it slammed into the ground. Then the whole world wobbled again, and went black.