Excerpt: Imagine

My parents don't notice the blood on my hands as I pass through the living room, but everyone waiting in my room sees it as soon as I opened the door.

“So you found him?” Jamesina asks. She sits on my dresser, swinging her tiny leather shoes against the bottom of the top drawer. She's high for someone made of porcelain, but she's always liked heights. And she's proud of the cracks were she'd been glued back together after previous falls.

“No,” Briar says, turning her mouth into an ugly sneer as she tosses a cluster of perfect ringlets over her shoulder. “She murdered someone else in frustration because he hid so well.”

Murdered. Can't say I liked the word. I sit on the bed and try not to be sick.

“It wasn't murder,” Jamesina says in quiet voice. “He was going to hurt people. There wasn't any choice.”

Cameron stays silent, but he pushes off the wall he's been lounging against to go into the bathroom and wet a washcloth for me. I want a shower more than a wipe down, but it's a sweet thought. Briar glares at him, but he squares his shoulders and brings me the washcloth regardless. That means the world to me, because normally Cameron goes to pathetic lengths to get onto Briar's good side.

“Thanks, Cam.”

“No problem.” He gives me a gentle smile, then retreats back to the edge of the room while I start rubbing the cloth over my skin.

I focus on my hands, just needing them clean enough that I can change clothes without getting blood on the clean things. What I was wearing is toast. It's not just covered in blood, but covered in blood my step-mom won't be able to see and thus probably can't help me remove. I'll try, but I'm not the anti-stain goddess she is.
I open the door and clean off the handle. I'd clean the front door too, but the family members who can't see the gore would be able to see me giving the nob a wipe down. They'd say I was going OCD, see that as as a sign all the issues I had when Mom died were coming back. They'd have me in therapy. The therapist would have me on medication. And I'd be back to lying to my dad and hiding pills I can't let myself swallow under my tongue.

The Imaginaries are bickering amongst themselves and I try not to listen to them, not to let Briar get to me. She was closer to Reese than the others were, she's feeling the pain of his death more. Not more than I am, she didn't have to watch him die. She didn't have to kill him for being exactly what she Imagined him to be.

It wasn't Reese's fault that he was hurting people. It was my fault. I was the one who spent too much time reading vampire novels, the one who brought into being someone who needed the blood of others to survive.

I hadn't expected him to bleed. I thought it would be like on Buffy, with him exploding into a poof of ash. It wasn't like that. And the stake didn't go in easy. That may be the worst part, how hard it was. And that he just lay there and let me do it.

I should have killed him another way. Found something less painful. Quicker. But I didn't. As soon as the wood touched his chest, I'd been committed and I saw it through, even knowing that I shouldn't. He thought he deserved it, because of the little girl who's in the hospital because of him. But I'm the one who deserved it...