Page 3 of Be Still My Unbeating Heart

“People get relaxed, forget about safety—”

“I hear you, love. No swimming.” He cocked his head. “But how about a quick sandcastle?”

“So long as you’re quicker than the hookworms that live in most tidal sands,” Whitby called as he tromped down onto the beach. She sat on a low wall, watching Bastian scoop up wet sand and mold it with his hands. He lost himself in the task, enjoying the feel of the thick clumps, taking the form of his choosing.

“There,” he said, spreading his arms to show off his creation. It wasn’t a castle, but a cat. A pretty good likeness of Whitby. “And not a hookworm in sight.”

“It can take a while for symptoms to show,” Whitby said.

“Tell me you like it, or I shall be heartbroken.”

The cat wasn’t looking at his creation anymore, though. She was squinting at a shape at the other end of the beach. A bumpy object laid out on the sand.

“What is that?” she said.

Bastian puffed hair from his face and was about to tell Whitby to stop looking for trouble, but then he smelled it: a rich, velvety scent that roved into his nostrils like perfume, causing the skin around his eyes to tighten and his throat to swell, as if he were in the grip of an allergic reaction. Something beyond his control because the thing he smelled was—

Blood.

Humanblood.

His vision distorted. Everything around the object in the sand faded to monochrome, leaving only that curious shape in vivid color.

Through the insistent thumping in his throat, Bastian noted the strange angles of the body. The arms were bent up and over the head, the legs twisted out either side like a child’s discarded doll. And there was a stillness that Bastian recognized. The kind of stillness that spoke of oblivion.

He tried to blink his gaze away, but he was transfixed by the thing in the sand, a thing he recognized with lethal clarity.

A dead body on the beach.

2

Whitby let out a low complaint in her throat, causing the hairs on Bastian’s arms to shiver.

The aroma of blood made his scalp prickle, and his gut cramped painfully with hunger. The next thing he knew, he was standing five feet from the body, which was strange, because he was pretty sure he wanted to stay as farawayfrom the body as possible.

An image flashed in his mind of his fangs in the body’s throat, gulping down great mouthfuls of rich, delicious lifeblood, a hundred times more satisfying than anything produced by a farm animal.

The scent—copper with an undercurrent of raspberry—made Bastian’s brain fizz. It lit up his extremities and he felt another dizzying pull forward, an invisible force tugging at his teeth, his body responding almost independently of his will. Hunger consumed him. It cramped and twisted every part of him.

Drink drink drink—

Pain pierced his ankle and Bastian cried out, his focus shattered. He once more heard the crashing of the ocean, tasted seasalt, and saw Whitby standing by his leg, glaring up at him. She had clawed his exposed ankle.

“What did you do that for?” he asked.

“Get away from the girl, Bastian.”

“Girl?”

As the red haze in his vision thinned, he saw that, yes, it was a young woman. Her dark hair spread like tentacles across the sand and her head was tipped back, her limbs splayed at odd angles. She wore a blue-and-white dress and a pair of scuffed white sneakers. She could be no older than twenty-five.

Her throat had been torn out.

Blood glistened like oil on the sand.

A mix of desire and revulsion crested in Bastian’s chest in a frothing wave, and he staggered backward, away from the girl. Urgently, he whispered the opening lyrics from Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”—the ones about life and happiness. He closed his eyes to focus on the words, not the blood. Anything but the blood.

The urgent thumping in his throat lessened. When he opened his eyes again, the red haze had lifted, the hunger dulling, his gut stilling. He was fine. He was in control. He was Bastian again.