Sherry turned fully toward me. Her fingers stayed resting on the spine of the book, as if she needed that solid anchor of leather and paper to steady herself.

Her expression was composed on the surface—cool, intelligent, controlled—but underneath it burned that specific intensity of someone who had already decided she wanted the truth and was simply waiting for me to hand it over.

"Tell me everything," she said softly, her voice low enough that it felt intimate in the quiet of the stacks.

"Let’s sit first," I said.

We found the desk in the corner. Sherry crossed her legs and looked at me with the patient attention of someone who had already cleared space in her head for whatever was coming.

"What have you put yourself into?" she asked. The concern in her voice was real. Not performed. Sherry didn’t perform concern.

"It’s nothing major," I said. The lie came out smooth, calibrated to keep her sharp rather than scared. I needed her mind working at full capacity, not clouded by worry.

She smiled. The doubt smile, the one that meant she had already identified the lie and was choosing not to fight it. "Let me guess," she said. "It’s connected to the blue girl."

"Azure," I said.

"It’s connected to Azure." She repeated it back with a tone I recognized. The tone of someone who had been counting and had reached a number they found interesting.

I looked at her. There was something in how she said it, a slight edge, the beginning of a pattern of behavior I was going to need to think about later. Not now.

"Sherry," I said, leaning forward. The chair creaked under my weight. "There’s something on this campus. Something that moves at night."

"I saw it," she said.

The words stopped me cold.

"You did?"

"Last night." She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, the soft rustle of fabric loud in the stillness. "Ivy insisted we switch the lights off. I’m not used to sleeping in complete darkness anymore."

I looked at her. The girl who had grown up in Goth, inside walls, with Max Donman between her and the worst of it. She had never needed to make peace with darkness the way I had.

"I felt something was wrong," she continued, her voice dropping. "So I looked out the window. There was a female figure... mist rising from her body like cold vapor off dry ice as she moved through the shadows. I couldn’t see her face. Just the shape. Tall. Elegant in a way that felt... wrong."

Celestine. It had to be.

"I knew no one would believe me," she said. "So I didn’t say anything."

"When were you going to tell me?"

"Today. I was coming to find you." She held my eyes. "Is that what Azure whispered to you at the door?"

"Related," I said tightly.

She connected the pieces instantly, the way she always did—reading the gaps and silences better than most people read plain text. Her expression didn’t change much, but I saw the subtle tightening at the corners of her eyes.

"How bad is it?" she asked.

"It might be hunting me specifically," I said.

The silence that followed was thick enough to taste. Somewhere in the outer reading room, a page turned. A chair scraped faintly.

She worked through it for a moment, then simply asked, "Why you?"

I didn’t answer. There were details in that answer that would open conversations I wasn’t ready for.

She read the silence. "Whatever. How can I help?"

That was Sherry. No performance of being offended by the gap. Just the direct pivot to useful.

"I need to understand what it is," I said. "And what it’s afraid of."

"It operates at night," she said immediately, leaning in. "Whatever it was, it belonged to the dark."

"And avoids direct sunlight," I added, thinking of the Vale mansion, the trees, the balcony shade, Celestine standing in the dark even in the morning.

"It drinks blood," Sherry said. Not a question.

"Yes."

She was quiet for a long second, processing. Then, with calm certainty: "That’s a vampire, Bram." 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

I looked at her.

"We’re in a library," she said, already standing. "Let’s find out."

***

The inner room felt older, heavier. The shelves here were dark wood, scarred by decades, and the books thicker, their spines faded and gilt lettering worn to ghosts.

The air smelled stronger of leather, dust, and secrets. We found the right section almost too easily, as if the institution had always kept these particular truths close at hand.

Sherry pulled The Mystery of Vampires from the shelf. I took the one beside it: Weaknesses and Strengths of a Vampire. The cover was coated in a fine layer of dust, as though no one had dared—or needed—to open it in years.

We sat. Opened our books. The first line of mine had been typeset in a different font from the rest, like it had been added later by someone who felt it needed to come first.

The Vampire is one of the primordial curses still present in the world.

Chapter one: How People of the Old Used to Kill Vampires.

I stared at the page, the words blurring for a moment. Then I glanced across at Sherry. She was already deep in her book, one finger tracing lines with focused intensity, her brow slightly furrowed in that way it did when she had decided something mattered enough to matter completely.

Somewhere outside this library, Vince Vale was walking these halls with his jaw set and a score he intended to settle.

Somewhere outside these walls, Bala’s mission was four days away.

And somewhere in these pages, between dust and old warnings, might be the exact fragment of knowledge that decided whether I survived the coming night... or became another ghost story whispered in School Central’s shadows.

I turned to Chapter one and started reading.

A vampire that drinks from an ability user may inherit aspects of the ability.