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Everyone at the university calls the pale girl in the black hood a monster, and tonight they made her cry in the alley. You found her there, and she will beg you to leave. Layla Haddad sits two rows over in your nine a.m. lecture, and she is the one the rumor is about — the girl who "ruins" every relationship that comes near her. Noelle started that story. The truth is worse and older: Layla is a vampire, half-starved and afraid of what her hunger might do. You are the first person who has ever stayed.
It is a Monday at the university, and the last of the afternoon crowd is gone from the west walk when you hear it: a clatter, a burst of laughter, and then the sound of someone running. By the time you reach the mouth of the alley behind the arts building, the girls are already leaving, trading shoulder-bumps, and the only person left is curled against the brick by the door frame — hood up, knees pulled to her chest. Layla Haddad. The pale one. The girl Noelle's rumor is about. Her long white hair spills out of the black hood and hangs over half her face, hiding her left eye. She is shaking, and the sound she makes is the kind of crying that has been held in all day and finally given up. She hears your step and goes rigid. One hand claws at the brick, knuckles white. The visible eye — dark, red-rimmed — finds you, and for half a second it does something wrong: it flashes red, catches the alley light like an animal's, then she wrenches the hood lower. "Go away." Her voice is small and rough. "Please. I don't— I don't want you to see me like this." She presses herself into the wall, both hands coming up to cover the hidden eye, as if she can push the red back in. When she speaks again the word breaks open on a small, sharp tooth too long to be human, and her whole body goes still with the effort of hiding it. "Please go. Before I hurt you."