The food in the cafeteria wasn’t half bad. In fact, Rachael was impressed with her own work when it came to creating chefs and other staff who were willing to work at this secret facility when they could’ve been working at gourmet restaurants by the taste of the cuisine. Not that she’d put anything too fancy on her plate when she had made her selections, but the pizza and garlic bread was much better than any of the local places near her apartment in Baltimore, and the fettuccini alfredo Rex had in front of him looked pretty darn good, too.

It took Jazz a few minutes to join them. She was chatting with some guy, a student Rachael hadn’t met yet. He was kind of cute, but definitely way too young for her--probably Jazz’s age. He had dark hair and looked like he probably lifted twice a day all the way through high school and beyond.

When Jazz finally found her way to the table, the uncomfortable silence that had settled around them was instantly lifted. “Sorry guys, but he was just too cute not to chat up.” She looked over her shoulder with a smile, watching the boy take a seat at a fairly crowded table next to a blonde girl and a redheaded boy. All of them had to have been fairly new recruits, they were so young. It didn’t seem to deter Jazz that he was sitting next to a pretty girl.

“No problem,” Rachael said with a smile, biting into her pizza. She finished chewing before she asked, “Do you know him?”

“I know his name is Jorge, and he’s a Lower Spring. I think there are only ten people in that group. I guess it’s hard to get recruits in the spring semester. I’ve talked to him a few times, but usually that blonde girl, Claira, is around.”

“Is that his girlfriend?” Rachael asked, taking a sip of her soda. She didn’t remember inventing any of these people.

“I don’t know,” Jazz said with a shrug. She took a big bite of lasagna, so Rachael had a feeling she wouldn’t be saying more for a while.

“She’s not,” Rex said, twirling his fork through his pasta. “I think she’d like to be, but they’re not a couple.”

“How do you know that?” Jazz was still chewing, but at least her mouth was mostly empty.

“Just do.” He smiled at her slightly and shrugged, and as Jasmine started talking about how cute Jorge was, Rex pulled his phone out of his pocket. Rachael couldn’t blame him for not wanting to listen to his neighbor talk about how cute another guy was. Rex wasn’t bad looking, but Jazz seemed to like guys who were more outgoing.

Jazz was in the middle of a story about some guy from her high school that all the girls liked. In her opinion, he looked a lot like Jorge but not as hot, when Rex made a low humming noise and whispered, “Oh, shit.”

It was enough to make Jazz stop talking mid-sentence, which was saying a lot. “What is it, Rex? What are you watching?”

“I was just scrolling through social media, but a video popped up that a friend of mine from high school tagged me in because he knows I moved out this way. Apparently, a family was slaughtered last night in a suburb of Baltimore. He was just telling me to be careful, but… when I looked at the video… I have a feeling this might be something more than just a homicide.”

“Can we see?” Jazz asked, scooting around the table so that she was sitting at Rex’s elbow before he even answered. He leaned away from her for a moment, clearly uncomfortable, so Rachael decided to walk around to the back of his chair to watch, rather than sandwich him between two women.

Rachael watched the news report and didn’t notice anything unusual until the very end when the cameraman panned across the exterior of the house. Next to one of the windows in the front of the house, there appeared to be something etched into the wood. If Rachael hadn’t been looking carefully, she would’ve missed it. How Rex even knew to look for it was unbeknownst to her. He backed the video up slightly and froze it right in the exact spot she needed to see. “Is that an S with a slash through it?”

“Yeah,” Rex said. “Not good.”

Rachael remembered that Rex’s family had been in this line of work for a while, so that must be how he knew what the symbol meant. Jazz just looked confused. “So?” she asked, leaning in closer to the phone.

“So… that’s the mark Sasha Thornsby leaves when she attacks,” Rex replied. “She must’ve left it on the outside of the house to make sure we saw it, even if we didn’t know she was back.”

Rachael sunk into her chair, pushing her tray out of the way. Her appetite was gone. Sasha Thornsby was the most violent, most powerful vampire ever to walk the face of the earth. She’d been Chell’s arch-nemesis for years, and they’d battled in some of the craziest places--on the ledge of rooftops, mountainsides, even under water. Chell had eventually figured out a spell that had locked Sasha in a cavern beneath a glacier in Greenland late last year, but now that Chell was gone, the spell must’ve been broken.

It hadn’t occurred to Rachael that killing Chell would free Sasha. In fact, she hadn’t intended to write it that way at all. She was going to have Sasha get free eventually, once Rachael figured out who her new protagonist was, and had her thoroughly trained and ready to fight. Now, however, Sasha was back, and Rachael had no control over what was happening with anyone, not even herself.

By the time Rachael had tuned back in, Rex was halfway through explaining how awful Sasha was and how she was responsible for killing hundreds of people, as well as turning dozens more. “She’s been gone for a few months,” Rex said, “but it definitely seems like she’s back now.”

“And she leaves that mark whenever she kills someone?”

“Yeah. It’s usually more difficult to find, but in this case, I think she wants us to know,” Rex was saying.

“Huh.” Jazz scooted back around in front of her food and started eating again while Rachael tried not to stare at her, or anyone, but it was hard because she wasn’t sure what to think about any of this. After all, it was sort of her fault that the worst vampire in creation had suddenly been released into the world--and this time she had no idea how to stop her.