Ah, December! The time of year when everything smells like mint or chocolate, sometimes both, you can’t get that annoying version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” out of your head (and let’s face it, which version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” isn’t annoying?), and everyone has a crazed look in their eyes like they’re trying to be happy despite the fact that you know if they remember that they’ve forgotten just one more person they needed to buy a present for, or one more social event they neglected to put on their calendar, they’re going to end up in an asylum somewhere muttering about “crack-nutters” and “rotten fruitcake” for the next few months until spring hits, and we can all escape from the doldrums. It really is the most wonderful time of the year isn’t it?
Actually, I’ve always liked Christmas for the most part. I’m only fifteen so I don’t have a lot of responsibility when it comes to planning or shopping. As long as I remember to buy a little something for my parents, sister, and grandma, I’m pretty good. This year was different, however. This year, I was on the verge of losing my mind myself, and it had nothing to do with an overweight elf potentially sneaking into my home late at night to eat desserts in exchange for a package or two.
No, this year, all of my mental instability had to do with my older sister, Cadence, and whether or not she was responsible for the deaths of two of her best friends. I say deaths—at this point, I’m not even really sure if her ex-boyfriend, Jack Cook, is dead or not. More on that in a bit. But ever since Cadence snuck off with her friends the night before Thanksgiving to attend an Eidolon Festival in the neighboring town of Villisca—where six people were murdered at the turn of the last century by an axe-murderer—everything has been freaking weird around here, and I was just about to the point where I had it all figured out, too, when the brainwashing began. And now I have no idea what’s real or what’s fake. For all I know, said obese elf might be real after all.
My mom, Liz Findley, is a Christmas junky. We always have two trees up in our house, one in the living room, and one in the game room upstairs. She’d put up more if my dad, Eli, would let her. But he says two is already one too many. Sitting around the house, listening to my mother’s Christmas music, smelling scents of gingerbread and other Christmas cookies baking in the kitchen, and watching the same plot with different actors over and over again on the Hallmark Channel Countdown to Christmas movies was wearing on me, and I was honestly wondering if things would be better once school started again in early January.
Christmas break had come a little early this year because of Jack’s death. Part of me was glad to have a break from school and from my friends, but hanging around the house with my mom was starting to get to me. I was used to Cadence being home, but she wasn’t. She had allegedly taken a job with some security company in Kansas City. I’d done my best to try and unravel exactly what was going on and had gotten so close when one of her new coworkers, Elliott, had put the kibosh on it. Actually, he was the one who had given me a last-minute reprieve and called off my own brainwashing, though my two best friends, Lucy and Emma, now have no idea that they spent the last month trying to help me figure out whether or not my sister is a vampire. The fact that I feel horrible for helping erase their memories is one of the main reasons why I haven’t called or visited either of them much this past week.
I was actually at Lucy’s house when we discovered a video on YouTube that seemed to show a team of people dressed in black, just like all of Cadence’s new colleagues usually dress, chasing what appeared to be a vampire in front of this lady’s house. She called herself Montana Mama, and not five minutes after we stumbled upon the video, not only was it gone, so were all of the social media accounts where she’d posted about what she saw. Then, one of Elliott’s associates, a woman by the name of Hannah who sounds like a shrink and looks like Connie Britton, showed up at Lucy’s house and made my friends shred all of their notes and delete everything we’d discussed since Thanksgiving. I would’ve done the exact same thing if Elliott hadn’t sent me a text warning me not to. Even though he doesn’t want me to know what’s going on exactly, it turns out he’s been watching over me for a very long time, like since I was a baby, and I guess he trusts me enough not to try to do something so detrimental as stripping my mind of so many memories.
Not that he hasn’t done it before. The night she and her friends went to the Eidolon Festival, Cadence’s friend Drew died. I started hearing weird noises on the roof and caught on to the fact that Cadence’s mysterious new boss, Aaron, was sneaking into her room late at night to talk about work-related problems. I grew more and more curious about what was going on when I saw Aaron easily leap from Cadence’s second-story window and take off like a blur across our front yard. What was even more alarming was when I saw my very own sister move that quickly. This is when I started to think she might be a vampire. Elliott showed up at our house and convinced me all of this was normal, that Drew had fallen while rock climbing and cut her neck, and that my sister was just going away to work at her new job for a little while. If it hadn’t been for my notes and Lucy’s persistence, I probably would’ve forgotten everything back then.