The thought arrives with surprising clarity through the haze of pain and failing breath. This is what it feels like when life leaves your body, when blood stops carrying oxygen to your brain, when your heart forgets how to beat because there’s nothing left to pump.
My hands, still scrambling weakly at her shoulders, lose strength. My fingers go numb. Everything goes numb except the burning cold in my throat where she’s still drinking, still taking, still emptying me out as if I’m nothing but a vessel meant to be drained.
The darkness at the edge of my vision creeps inward, swallowing the stars, swallowing the city lights, swallowing everything until there’s only the sensation of her mouth on my throat, the cold spreading through my chest, and the distant, fading rhythm of my heartbeat slowing, slowing, slowing…
Then, she pulls back.
Air rushes into my lungs in a desperate gasp that tastes like copper. My eyes flutter open.When did they close?And her faceswims into focus above me. Blood stains her mouth, dark and glistening.
My blood.
So much of my blood.
“Almost there,” she whispers, and her voice sounds as if it’s coming from underwater, distant and distorted. “Just a little more.”
Her wrist comes up to her mouth, and I watch through failing vision as she bites into her own flesh, tearing it open with those terrible fangs. Blood wells up, darker than mine, thicker, with a smell that makes something ancient and hungry wake up in the dying parts of my brain.
“Drink,” she commands, pressing her wrist to my lips.
I moan in disgust, trying to turn my head, trying to clamp my mouth shut, but my body doesn’t listen anymore. The first spill of blood hits my tongue, hot and thick, coppery enough that my jaw tightens reflexively. It tastes like metal, salt, and heat, too rich, too alive, flooding my mouth until there’s no space left for air or thought.
And then something else slips in.
Sweet, not sugar-sweet, but deep and dark, the kind that settles at the back of my throat. It tastes of power layered over iron and flesh, of something ancient waking up inside me, like drinking starlight laced with poison, beautiful and impossible to stop swallowing.
I swallow, not because I want to.
But because my throat convulses automatically, forcing it down.
She makes me drink and drink and drink until my stomach rebels and my mouth fills with the taste of her ancient power mixing with my human mortality.
Until something fundamental shifts inside my chest, like the world tilting on its axis.
Until I’m not sure if I’m dying or being reborn into something worse than death.
When she finally pulls away, I’m gasping, choking, drowning in air that my lungs can’t seem to process anymore. My vision dissolves completely, the world bleeding to black at the edges.
The last thing I see is her face above mine, beautiful, terrible, and utterly inhuman.
The last thing I hear is her voice, soft, satisfied, and drenched with promise…
“I have plans for you, little scion.”
Then… the darkness swallows me whole.
And somewhere in that darkness, my heart stops beating.
Chapter Two
CHARLIE
There’s a sense of floating, neither asleep nor awake, suspended in a deep, quiet nothing where time dissolves, and my body feels far away. Fear doesn’t reach me here, neither does weight. Only a distant, drifting peace, as though sinking beneath dark water and letting the world disappear. Then suddenly, it erupts without warning, ripping through me from the inside out. My body arches hard against it, an instinctive, useless reaction as agony crashes through every nerve at once. It’s searing, crushing, and invasive, like something is tearing me open and rebuilding me wrong, cell by cell, bone by bone, nerve by nerve.
I thrash mindlessly in the dark, muscles locking and releasing in brutal waves, as if my body is trying to escape itself. There’s no rhythm to it, no place to brace, no way to lessen the blow. The pain is everywhere, under my skin, inside my skull, burning through my veins, too much to process, too vast to understand.
I can’t think.
I can’t scream.
