I stayed lying on the bed, listening to the subtle bustle of the kitchen. Parsing the sounds brought a strange comfort. The moment I stopped analyzing them, all imaginable and unimaginable noises merged into a discordant orchestra, a chaotic melody that filled my mind and pushed away the intrusive, nagging thoughts. Until now, I had only managed to drown out external noise before sleep when utterly exhausted—a rare state in the hospital room. Daily equipment-free workouts, Kostya had shown me, were the secret. Once my body had regained enough strength after the forest incident, he guided me through exercises to keep my senses sharp and my muscles ready.
Forcing myself upright, I shuffled to the computer desk and switched on the laptop. The monitor's glare pressed uncomfortably on my eyes, and I quickly remembered the key combination to soften the light. Once the display stopped stabbing at my vision, I opened the browser and began scanning the news from the past week. According to Stas, his father and Kostya had explained my sudden disappearance from the school disco as an unfortunate accident in the forest. I needed to see how the local papers had reported it—preparation was crucial if I was to return to school. Friends who came by the hospital tended to skirt questions, but the rest of my classmates wouldn't be so careful. At the very least, the public story had to align with the main facts.
The first site devoted about half a page to my "adventure." Its crude tone made me smirk. Supposedly, police officer Konstantin Cherny had called his daughter, instructing her to pick up the house keys near the school entrance so the parked patrol car wouldn't alarm the teens. But the "careless" daughter, newly arrived in Ksertom and ignorant of local customs, had rushed back to the dance and chosen to cut through the forest. There, she—me—encountered one of the local wild animals, and the encounter did not end without consequences. Thanks to the vigilance of a classmate, Stanislav Smirnov—a young man from the city's founding family—she was rescued in time. Stas appeared in the article as a true hero, guarding the frivolous newcomer. The article claimed he scared off the "attacking beast" before anything irreversible occurred, leaving me with only a serious bruise and a couple of scratches.
When I supposedly became a "Moscow resident" was a mystery, but the article's tone dripped with judgment. I was painted as a member of a narrow-minded, city-bred class, unfit for life beyond urban comforts. Strange, reading such distortions. Isn't journalism supposed to care about facts and verification? Had the writer paused his personal dislike long enough to gather actual information, he would have realized I grew up not in Moscow, but in Rostov. But of course, the journalist had his own motives, barely aligned with reality. I couldn't blame him. A proper inquiry would have unearthed uncomfortable truths anyway, many of which I already saw glaringly in the article's inconsistencies.
For instance, my father had not worked on Halloween. I only recently discovered that Kostya rarely took afternoon shifts and always arranged his days off around the full moon and the following day. On the thirty-first, Dad lied once again about an urgent call to work and headed for the forest, ostensibly hunting. At the full moon, the werewolf was at its peak strength, and Kostya never missed a chance to track the cunning prey in our area. In reality, Dad had been nearby, and as soon as Kostya caught the scent of blood, he raced toward the forest edge where Nik tried to manipulate me under his mother's command—ignoring one crucial detail: heredity.
Only now, in hindsight, did I understand the true nature of our relationship. Every time Karimov touched me or looked into my eyes, I thought I was feeling desire—but it was a hollow imitation, a pitiful manipulation by a blue-eyed vampire. The craving I had mistaken for emotion was nothing more than his calculated control.