I should have minded my own business.
But here I was, crouched behind a rusted dumpster in downtown LA at two in the morning, watching my boyfriend sneak around like he was in some spy movie. The smell of rotting garbage mixed with the usual city stench – exhaust fumes, stale beer, and something I couldn't quite place that made my stomach turn.
My name is Ella Black, and I'm supposed to be the good girl who stays home and studies for her Psychology midterm. Instead, I'm playing detective because Mark Hunter, my perfect college boyfriend of three months, has been acting weird lately.
Not weird like "forgot our anniversary" weird. Weird like disappearing every Tuesday and Thursday night with lame excuses about "study groups" and "helping his roommate." Tonight he said he was going to the library. But UCLA's library closed two hours ago, and I checked.
So yeah, I followed him.
Sue me. I've been lied to enough in my eighteen years to recognize the signs.
Mark's tall frame moved through the shadows ahead of me, his brown hair catching the occasional streetlight. He kept touching the back of his neck – that nervous habit he did when something was bothering him. His left hand, the one with that weird scar on his wrist he never talked about, was shoved deep in his jacket pocket.
I pulled my black hoodie tighter and kept my distance. John, my adoptive father, had taught me how to move quietly. "Hunters need to be invisible, Ella," he used to say during our training sessions in the basement. "Your enemies won't give you a second chance."
John believed our family had been hunting vampires for generations. He'd raised me on stories about the Black family legacy, teaching me to identify bloodsuckers by their cold skin and red-tinged pupils. Most people would call him crazy. Most people didn't grow up sharpening silver knives and memorizing the weak points of supernatural creatures.
But right now, John's paranoid training was actually useful for something normal – like following my potentially cheating boyfriend through the sketchy part of downtown.
Mark turned left onto a narrow street I'd never seen before. The buildings here looked older, like they belonged in a different century. Gothic architecture that seemed out of place in modern LA. The streetlights were dimmer, casting long shadows that moved wrong in the slight breeze.
I bit my lower lip – my worst habit when I got nervous – and tasted the metallic tang of blood. Great. Nothing like bleeding all over yourself during a midnight stalking session.
Mark stopped in front of a narrow three-story house squeezed between two abandoned storefronts. The building looked like it hadn't been renovated since the 1920s. But what made my blood run cold wasn't the peeling paint or broken shutters.
It was the symbol carved into the front door.
My breath caught in my throat. I knew that symbol. I'd seen it countless times, etched into the concrete wall of John's basement, right above his weapon collection. A twisted spiral with three slash marks through it. John had never explained what it meant, always changing the subject whenever I asked.
"Family business," he'd say. "You'll understand when you're older."
Well, I was older now. And my boyfriend was walking straight toward that symbol like he knew exactly what it meant.
Mark looked around once, his brown eyes scanning the empty street. I pressed myself deeper into the shadows of a doorway, my heart hammering so loud I was sure he could hear it. After what felt like forever, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and metallic. A key.
He had a key to this place.
The heavy wooden door swung open with a creak that made my skin crawl. Mark disappeared inside, and the door closed behind him with a solid thunk that seemed to echo off the surrounding buildings.
I stood there for maybe ten minutes, staring at that carved symbol and trying to make sense of what I'd just seen. My boyfriend – sweet, normal Mark who brought me coffee every morning and helped old ladies carry groceries – had a secret house with symbols that matched my vampire-hunting adoptive father's basement.
This was either the biggest coincidence in history, or I was about to discover something that would change everything.
A scream cut through the night air.
It came from inside the house. High-pitched, desperate, and definitely human. Then another scream. And another.
My hands shook as I pulled out my phone, finger hovering over the emergency call button. Should I call the police? What would I even say? "Hi, I followed my boyfriend to a creepy house and now someone's screaming inside"?
The screaming stopped.
The sudden silence was somehow worse than the noise. I wrapped my arms around myself, every survival instinct John had ever drilled into me telling me to run. Get out. Go home. Pretend this never happened.
But I couldn't leave. Not without knowing if Mark was okay.
Not without knowing what the hell was going on.
I crept closer to the house, my sneakers silent on the cracked pavement. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up, but I could see a thin line of light seeping through the gaps. I pressed my ear to the cold wood, trying to hear something, anything that would tell me Mark was safe.
Voices. Low, urgent conversation I couldn't make out. Then footsteps, getting closer.
I scrambled back into the shadows just as the front door opened.
Mark stepped out, and my heart nearly stopped.
His white t-shirt was splattered with dark stains that looked black in the streetlight. His hands – those same hands that held mine during movies and tucked my hair behind my ear – were stained with something wet and dark. His usually warm brown eyes looked cold. Distant. Like he was somewhere else entirely.
He locked the door behind him, pocketed the key, and started walking back toward the main street. Back toward campus. Back to his dorm where he'd probably shower off whatever was covering his clothes and pretend he'd been at the library all night.
I followed him again, staying further back this time. My mind was racing, trying to process what I'd just seen. The blood – because it had to be blood, what else could it be – the screaming, the symbol that connected Mark to John somehow.
None of it made sense.
Mark took a different route back to campus, sticking to well-lit streets where security cameras could see him. Smart. He knew how to avoid being noticed, how to create an alibi. This wasn't his first time doing... whatever he'd been doing.
By the time I made it back to my dorm room, my hands had stopped shaking but my mind was still spinning. Sarah, my roommate, was fast asleep with her computer science textbooks scattered across her desk. Normal college student problems. I envied her.
I sat on my narrow dorm bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out what to do next. Confront Mark directly? Tell John what I'd seen? Pretend it never happened and hope my boyfriend wasn't a serial killer?
My phone buzzed with a text message.
Mark: Hey babe, just got back from the library. Study group ran way late. Hope you're sleeping well. See you tomorrow? ❤️
I stared at the screen for a long moment, then typed back:
Me: Of course! Sleep tight.
I hit send and immediately felt sick. He was lying to me. Right to my face, through a text message, like I was some naive little girl who would believe anything.
But I had questions now. Big ones.
Like why did Mark have a key to a house marked with the same symbol from John's basement? Why was he covered in blood? And why did the whole thing feel less like a coincidence and more like a family reunion I wasn't invited to?
I pulled off my hoodie and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror above my dresser. Same green eyes, same black hair that never stayed in its ponytail properly, same pale skin that barely tanned even in LA sunshine. I looked exactly like I always did.
But something had changed tonight. Something fundamental had shifted in my world, and I wasn't sure I could shift it back.
My phone buzzed again.
Mark: PS - I love you.
I stared at those three words and felt my heart crack a little. Because despite everything I'd seen, despite the blood and the lies and the mysterious house, I loved him too.
Which was probably going to make whatever came next a hell of a lot more complicated.
I turned off the light and lay down, but sleep was impossible. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that symbol carved into the door. The same symbol that had been staring at me from John's basement wall my entire life.
Tomorrow, I was going to get some answers.
Even if I didn't like what I found.
End of Chapter 1