But then she looks at her friends ahead of her, walking out of a night she wasn’t sure they’d all make it through, and the sorrow evaporates.
I did what I had to do.
Betty turns. “V! Come on!”
So she goes.
WHEN THEY PUSH open the door to Pop’s, the bell jingles and the waitress at the counter gives them a cursory glance, not the slightest reaction to this gang of kids in bedraggled ball gowns and suits.
“Be with you in a sec,” she says in a flat, bored voice, and Veronica scans the diner as they walk in. It’s completely normal. Like nothing’s been going on in town at all, and oh, it’s such a relief to realize that while she and her friends have been battling a demon-vampire takeover, Pop’s has just been ticking along in its own little world.
Veronica laughs behind her hand. “Thank god for Pop’s Chock’Lit Shoppe,” she says.
They crowd into a large booth at the back—Betty and Archie and Dilton on one side, Cheryl and Veronica on the other—and Betty picks up a menu, like they haven’t had every item in this place memorized for years. “So Theodore Finch was just another zombie vamp?” she says. “And his sister was alive?”
“Not quite alive,” Dilton corrects.
Betty waves him off. “You know what I mean,” she says, but looks at Veronica. “So this was all about her, really?”
Veronica nods. On the way over, Betty driving, she’d told them how she’d discovered the strigoi in the basement and who she had turned out to be.
She hadn’t told them about the hallucinations-slash-illusions-slash-visions, though. And she wasn’t really sure why, except that they had been targeted as her biggest fears, hadn’t they? So telling everyone what she’d had to fight her way through would mean they all knew exactly what she was afraid of.
Veronica wasn’t ready for that.
“The weird thing is, I understood where she was coming from,” Veronica says. “In a way. You know, she wanted to be treated a certain way and she was never able to get that. She made a deal with someone she thought was a friend and he betrayed her. And when she thought she was dying, somebody—something—turned her into a vampire and she had nobody to guide her through that. So I get why she was angry, but—” She shakes her head. “I couldn’t let her get the revenge she wanted. She was killing innocent people because of what happened to her a century ago and that’s not justice, is it? That’s just a fantasy.”
The waitress comes over and Betty orders almost every single item on the menu, and when they all turn to her, she widens her eyes. “What? We had a big night! Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.”
Dilton leans his elbows on the table and behind his glasses, he’s making his thinking face that Veronica’s come to know so well, inside the chem lab and now out of it. “So Odette was a strigoi,” he says. “Interesting. I wonder who it was that turned her, then, if she never knew, even afterward. I mean, you’d think if Riverdale had a rogue vampire running around a hundred years ago, there’d be some kind of story about it, but I’ve never heard anything.”
“Well, we’ll never know,” Archie says, and he sounds relieved. “Odette’s dead, and it’s over; everybody’s human again. I can’t wait till Jug gets back from his trip. He won’t believe he missed all of this.”
Veronica plays with a straw, twisting it between her fingers. Everybody’s human again …
“And nobody seems to remember anything that happened,” Cheryl says. “Does that mean—we’re the only ones? Only we’ll ever know what happened?”
“Seems like it,” Betty says. “But maybe it’s better this way.”
Cheryl looks at Veronica, and Veronica knows exactly what she’s thinking.
Reggie and Moose are dead—not vampire dead, not undead dead, but for real, buried-in-an-amateur-grave-decaying dead.
When they were vampires, it was explainable. But now? If the town’s memory is completely absent of all of this?
How do we explain what happened to them?
“Here you go, kids.” The waitress arrives with a groaning tray of food and drinks, and the others busy themselves passing burgers around and stealing fries from one another.
Veronica doesn’t move. For them, she knows, they can be normal again. They’ll remember what happened, but none of them were changed. And now that Veronica has destroyed Odette, she’s lifted the dark cloud that fell over Riverdale. On Monday they’ll go back to school and no one will be any the wiser. Return to the way things were.
Except I can’t, Veronica thinks, and she digs her nails into the red vinyl of the booth. I can’t go back.
Betty nods at the food in front of Veronica and speaks with her mouth full of burger. “Eat, V! You just battled a vampire queen and came out the victor. You can chill now.”
Veronica looks at the plate before her. Usually she loves Pop’s cheeseburgers, and this one is doctored exactly the way she likes it—no lettuce, extra pickles, bacon grilled crispy.
But she pushes it away. There’s only one thing that can quell her hunger, and it’s not on the diner menu. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she says, and she fights the urge to close her eyes so she won’t have to see her friends’ faces when she says it.
“What?” Cheryl drops the fry she was about to put in her mouth. “V, what is it?”
Archie leans across the table. “Ronnie,” he says. “You’re kind of freaking me out.”
Veronica exhales. It should have worked, it worked for everybody else, but—
Not for her.
“That whole reverting-to-human thing?” Veronica shrugs, and then she bares her teeth, wide and almost feral, and Betty gasps.
“Oh my god,” Betty says. “Oh my god. What?”
“Yeah.” Veronica runs her tongue along her teeth, feeling at the sharp points of the fangs she has let out, the fangs that should have disappeared when she killed Odette and regained her human self—except that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen at all. “I’m still a vampire. Surprise!”
ODETTE’S SEVERED HEAD hits the floor with a sticky thump, and Veronica sits back, breathing heavily, still straddling Odette’s remains. It’s over, she thinks. It’s all over.
How will it come? The humanity, flooding back into her. How does it happen?
Veronica lifts her hands and watches them, waiting. For what, exactly?
She’s still panting, and her hands are covered in Odette’s almost-black blood, and there’s a severed head in front of her, but Veronica—
She feels no different.
She scrambles off Odette and rushes back to the mirror. Eyes still tinged red, and when she tries to flick out her fangs, they come easily. Sharp and ready to feed on the blood her body is singing for.
I’m not human.
It didn’t work, she thinks, and then she knows she has to leave.
She abandons the gruesome remains and sprints through the house, back to the stolen bike. Speeds her way back to the hotel, wondering what further carnage she’s going to find.
But when she gets there, all she sees is people slowly coming back to life.
And then she knows: It did work.
Just not for her.
BETTY PRESSES HERSELF back against the booth. “What the hell?”
Veronica retracts her fangs and gives Betty a soft, sad smile. “Exactly what I thought.”
“So—if you didn’t change back, but Odette’s dead, and everybody else reverted—” Cheryl’s brown eyes widen even further. “I don’t understand.”
All that fighting and all that Veronica did to save the town, and she’s still not back to what they all thought she would be.
And here, of course, is the strange thing:
Veronica isn’t so sure she minds.
“God, I’m sorry, V,” Betty says. “Do you think—I mean, Dilton, is it possible there’s yet another strigoi still out there?”
Dilton steeples his fingers. “I suppose it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. As far as we
know, it’s all about the bloodline. Kill the strigoi sire, and everyone they’ve turned reverts. But if you’re not part of the bloodline—” His eyes light up. “Think about it—somebody had to turn Odette herself. What if that vampire also turned you, Veronica?”
Betty nods. “Didn’t you say she was turned in the woods outside their estate? So—outside where the hotel is now?”
“Right,” Veronica says, twisting a hand through her dark hair. “The night their house burned.”
“Those woods,” Betty says. “They run all the way along the edge of town. Up to your house and the road in. And isn’t that where you were turned?”
Veronica nods slowly. “But it doesn’t matter,” she says. “It’s like you said earlier, Dilton. Who even knows if the vampire who turned Odette—and maybe, probably, turned me—is around here still? Wouldn’t we have heard scary stories? Wouldn’t it be a legend?”
“They have to be here,” Archie says. “It can’t be a coincidence that you were both turned in the same woods. Unless there’s just, like, a hundred different vamps running around out there, undetected. In which case—Dilton, we should get to work on a new water gun prototype.”
“Archie!”
He’s only joking, Veronica knows, but Betty looks outraged anyway. As if they can’t joke about killing vampires, not when V still is one, and not when there’s no immediately obvious solution for that—even though Veronica’s killed her fair share of vampires this week.
Betty reaches across the table and grabs Veronica’s hands, looking into her best friend’s eyes. “It’s gonna be okay, V,” she says, and Veronica can feel how much she means it. How much she wants it. “We’re going to figure out what’s going on and we’re going to do every single thing we can to get you out of this mess. We’ll have you back to human before you even know it. I promise. We all do, right?”
The others nod and murmur their agreement, and Veronica nods. “Okay,” she says. “Whatever you say.”
Betty squeezes her hands. “So we have to wait a little longer to get our old V back. The important thing is that we will—we’ll figure out this new mystery, and then old Veronica will be back in our lives for good.”
Veronica swallows hard and pinches her thigh under the table. It’s that or scream.
Because she knows this is what Betty wants, and Archie, and everybody. For her to go back to who she used to be. That’s how this story is supposed to end, isn’t it? Veronica reverts back to not just her human self, but the old perfect girl they all adore.
But she can’t.
And more important—she won’t.
Even if we do figure this out, Veronica thinks, even if I do go back to being human eventually, I’ll never be that girl again. Not now that she knows how it feels to shatter the grip her old life had her in. She is New Veronica now: fishnets and fighting and dreams beyond this place, and none of that can be undone.
She looks at Betty. She won’t understand. None of them will. “Yeah,” she says, the lie easy. “It’ll all be like it was before.”
VERONICA WAITS UNTIL Archie and Dilton are at the old jukebox and Cheryl and Betty have gone to the bathroom before slipping outside.
She’s not running away. Not leaving.
She just—needs air.
The stars are bright, even with the neon lights of the diner behind her, and Veronica hops on the hood of Betty’s car. It’s just me and me now, kid, she thinks, and blows a breathy sigh into the night. They’re gonna have a hell of a cleanup job on their hands—gotta take care of that body in the basement, and come up with a plausible story for the destruction and bloodshed at the Blossoms’ hotel. And what about—
“Hey.”
Veronica jumps, hand to her heart. “Cheryl, you scared me.”
“Me?” Cheryl tries to jump up next to her but winces from the pain in her feet, and Veronica helps her up. When she’s settled on the hood she starts again. “Me? Scared you, the big bad vampire?”
Veronica tries to laugh but nothing comes out. “I know,” she says. “Not what anyone wanted.”
“Isn’t it?”
“What?”
Cheryl smiles at her. “We’re friends now, right? So don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone how you feel about this whole vampire thing. But just so you know—if it’s what you want, to stay this way forever—then it’s cool with me.”
Veronica doesn’t quite know what to say, and so she just stares at Cheryl for a long time, longer than should be comfortable. But she supposes Cheryl’s right, now, and they are friends. The kind of friends who can sit in silence, Veronica thinks. “Forever is a long time,” she says eventually, and then, quickly, so she can’t chicken out, “You don’t think I’m a monster, then?”
“Hello,” Cheryl says. “I just found out that really, it was my ancestor who was responsible for this whole thing. He burned their house down. I’m descended from a murderer, V. If you’re a monster, then I’m a monster, too.”
Now Veronica does smile. “You did help me bury a couple bodies,” she says.
“Yeah.” Cheryl sighs. “What the hell are we going to do about that?”
“I don’t know.” Veronica turns her face up to the inky sky. “If nobody in town remembers what happened, then no one will ever understand why I did what I did.”
“Why we did it.”
“You didn’t kill them.”
“No,” Cheryl says. “But you were saving me. And I buried them. I filled that grave in, V. It’s not just you, okay? I mean it.” And then she sounds unsure. “I mean, we are friends now. Aren’t we?”
Veronica laughs, but it’s not the way she used to laugh at Cheryl, defensive or bitchy. “Yeah,” she says. “We’re friends.”
“Right,” Cheryl says, and she sounds relieved. “So we make a pact. That’s what friends do, right? If you go down, then I go down. But we won’t. Because we’re going to stick together on this. You have nothing to feel guilty about.”
Tell that to Reggie’s parents, Veronica thinks. Tell that to Moose’s little sister.
“Promise me.” Cheryl elbows her and then holds up her hand, pinky finger out. “You won’t torture yourself thinking about what happened. We’re moving on. Promise?”
Veronica hesitates for a second. “Okay,” she says, and she knows what she’s about to say is only half-true, but she’s tired and ready to give in. And Cheryl’s looking at her so hopeful that Veronica doesn’t want to disappoint her. The only one of her friends who’s willing to accept her not as she used to be, or not as she might be in the future, but as the messy, monster girl she is right in this moment.
So Veronica holds her hand up, too, and links her finger with Cheryl’s. “I promise.”
Keep reading for the first chapter of A Werewolf in Riverdale by Caleb Roehrig!
AS FAR AS DILTON DOILEY was concerned, if he was going to die tonight, then a graveyard was as good a place to do it as any other. It was after eleven already, and the streets of Riverdale were swamped in a velvet-thick fog that blotted out the full moon. His breath hitched, and he hugged himself a little tighter, wishing someone could save him from the awful choice he had to make … but he was utterly alone.
Dilton had two bleak options before him: stick to the less creepy sidewalks for the much longer and more roundabout way back home, or take a shortcut through the darkness of the old cemetery and make it there before curfew. He prided himself on not being a superstitious person, so he was glad there was no one else present to witness his embarrassing moment of indecision.
“This is ridiculous,” Dilton huffed to himself, staring at the cemetery’s bent and rusted gate, annoyed by his own attack of nerves. “Get a grip, Doiley! There’s nothing scary about a graveyard.” Hearing the words out loud was supposed to comfort him, but the way his voice shook wasn’t terribly inspiring. “It’s basically a park. Nothing in there can hurt you. But if you aren’t home in ten minutes, you will be dead.”
Swallowing hard, Dilton grabbed the
gate and forced it open, a high-pitched squeal from one of the aging hinges sending an icy finger up his spine. With an apprehensive breath, he took one last look around, streetlamps pouring dim, golden light into the dense mist that rolled through this stretch of town. There wasn’t a soul in sight—which, frankly, should also have been comforting. Instead, it was somehow only more unnerving. Stupid Reggie. This was all his fault.
The Riverdale High Astronomy Club—of which Dilton was the president—met once a week after school and organized the occasional outing or special event for its members. For instance, two months ago they’d visited the observatory in nearby Midville, and ever since then the group’s plans for tonight had been all they could talk about. A spectacular meteor shower had been predicted, coinciding with the first night of the full moon, and the thought of what their telescopes might reveal had been so thrilling it had almost driven Dilton to try his hand at poetry. Almost.
And then the weather reports had started getting worse and worse—storm systems and cloud cover, and finally this dreadful fog, and, in anguish, Dilton had at last been forced to concede that the club would see nothing—that this once-in-a-lifetime event would pass them all by, hidden behind a thick screen of vapor.
Somewhere up there right now, past the impenetrable heaviness of the fog, stars were dancing across the vault of the night sky. Meanwhile, down here, Dilton was about to go prowling between the headstones of a musty, shadowy graveyard, because Reggie Mantle—who’d joined Astronomy Club only because he wanted to beef up the extracurriculars on his college applications—had refused to trust the forecasts. He’d insisted that the group go ahead with the meeting anyway. And Dilton, because he was the president and had a duty to attend every official outing, had been forced to stay out late for the most pointless evening in history.
Interview with the Vixen Page 23