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the center.
    My father’s too stunned to react, so I take my next arrow from him myself and aim again. I don’t even bother pulling out the first arrow. I draw, aim, fire, and this arrow ricochets directly off the first.
    “Well, I’ll be damned.” he says. “You’re a natural.”
     
    *****
    It rained that night. By morning, Portland’s covered in puddle-lakes and miniature rivers, steeped in that distinctive smell of the ground after rain. It’s like nighttime, that smell. You can’t start to describe it, but you know exactly what it is and it smells beautiful. At least, it used to. Today, the smell of rain serves as a reminder of how incredibly bizarre a turn my life took yesterday. I feel in a very real way that I was in a second life. My old, childish, innocent one stolen away yesterday and replaced with this strangely fascinating one of monsters and hunters and peril.
    Dodger and I eat lunch every day at the same table, usually with four or five other girls we were both friends with. Today, however, I meet with Dodger in the hallway before lunch so we can talk in relative privacy.
    “How was your bus ride today?” Dodger asks. “Uneventful, I hope?”
    “Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
    “You haven’t seen that man again, have you?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at his face. I could’ve seen him somewhere and not recognized him.”
    “That’s not good,” she says, chewing at the end of her finger as if it were her cigarette wand.
    “So what are we going to do about this, Dodger? You think he’s dangerous?”
    Dodger gives me a look that says no shit, Sherlock.
    “I mean, do you think he’s gonna care about who he kills? Or is he just going to attack whoever?“
    “The latter, unfortunately. I have a bad feeling he’s new. If he’s new, he’s going to be hungry. I remember my first decade. I was so hungry, Scout. And I’d eat and eat and eat and I couldn’t slake my hunger...” she must’ve seen the horrified look in my eyes because she quickly clarified “I tried to eat animals at one point. I’d hunt down deer and raccoons trying to find a substitute. I tried everything, and nothing worked. I needed human blood, Scout... lots of it. At what time that period of hunger ends is hard to pin down, but if that really is the kind of vamp we’re dealing with here... I need to stop him.”
    “How long did it last for you?”
    “Ten or twelve years. The good news here would be the older a vamp, the stronger. So if he’s that new I could easily put him out of his misery.”
    All these “I’s.” I’m starting to get annoyed at her, but then I realize she doesn’t know I’m a slayer. I haven’t made my mind up yet over how or if I should tell her. I just listen as she thinks aloud.
    “I’m sure he’s new,” she continues. “And I’m pretty sure he wants to die. I had that moment too. You said he screamed ‘why won’t I die’ right? Yeah, I had that feeling. He tried to kill himself with that bus. I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge when I first turned and all I managed to do was float in the Hudson for a few hours.”
    “So, what all this means is that yes, he’s dangerous?”
    “Most likely.”
    I sigh. I had hoped it wouldn’t come down to this, but Dodger’s phrasing left little doubt about it. “So we’re gonna have to take care of him, then? Before he starts killing people.”
    “ I am going to see what I can do about this. You keep yourself safe.”
    “Dodger, I can take care of myself.”
    “Hate to rain on your parade, but I don’t think you can really take care of yourself against a vampire. I mean, you’re only human.”
    I bite my lip. The words “I’m a slayer” form at the bottom of my throat and threaten to escape my lips but I fight them back. Dodger seems confident that she can handle this man. There lingered, however, another question.
    “So if he’s new, then who turned him?” I ask.
    “Are you saying it’s