That was the horror of it — the thing that has kept me up on the nights since.

I looked at the man who had stood beside me at my wedding, into the familiar laugh lines around his eyes, searching for the sociopath I now knew was living inside that skin, and I saw nothing.

I saw the man I had shared scotch with last Tuesday.

I saw my friend.

There were no fangs, no cold flat killer’s eyes, no visible mark of what he was.

There was only Luca, warm and disheveled and frightened, exactly as he had always been, and the fact that I knew, with certainty, that this same warm face had chosen a poison and placed it on his sleeping wife’s chest did nothing to change how ordinary and kind he looked.