"I'm sorry."
"What the fuck!?" The words tore out of me before I could stop them. Still stunned by the fact I was somehow alive if that's what this was and drowning in the flood of information that had just been dumped on me, I stared blankly at the jagged ceiling above. Even long after the voice had faded, its echo clung to the damp stone around me like a specter. When my mind finally caught up, the anger hit me like a storm.
"What kind of irresponsible vampire are you," I rasped, "to dump all this on the first unlucky soul you come across? I'd made peace with dying. You can pick somebody else to fight your war. I'm out."
I shut my eyes, lying flat on the cold floor, waiting for… something. A whoosh. A flash of light. The tug of the afterlife. Anything. But nothing came. The silence was thick and heavy. After a long moment, I opened my eyes again and let out a slow, bitter sigh.
"I'm really a vampire… hah."
A laugh broke out of me sharp and manic, bubbling up from somewhere deep in my chest until it was spilling into the shadows. It rattled around the catacombs, wild and unhinged. For a heartbeat, I thought I might lose my mind entirely. I had to physically clamp my teeth together to quiet it.
"This has got to be a joke," I muttered, half-expecting the mercenaries to leap out from the shadows, laughing, grinning, telling me Alvin had orchestrated the whole thing as some sick prank. But the darkness stayed empty. No footsteps. No voices. Reality was settling like a weight on my shoulders.
"I'm a vampire," I whispered. Saying it out loud didn't make it any less impossible.
I pushed myself upright slowly, my body moving as if through water. My shirt was a torn, blood-stained ruin, clinging to my skin. My left arm was bare where I'd ripped the sleeve earlier. For a moment I stared at it blankly, remembering the bullet wound in my thigh. When I looked down, there was no blood, no pain, only a neat hole in the fabric where the bullet had gone in.
Another thought struck me, absurd and chilling all at once: I'd been worried about the wound in my leg when I'd been shot in the head and brought back to life.
I sat there, staring at my pale hands. Before all this, I'd been a seasoned explorer, my body wiry but not frail, years of travel and digging through forgotten places had kept me lean but alive. Now, even without a mirror, I could tell something fundamental had shifted. My skin was pale as marble, my veins like faint shadows beneath it.
My gaze slid across the chamber. That's when I saw them.
My killers.
Their bodies lay sprawled on the stone floor like discarded dolls, but something about them was wrong. Their flesh had collapsed inward, shriveled and dry, as though they'd been left in the sun for centuries. A wave of nausea rose in my throat. I gagged, but forced it down.
"Guess you got what you deserved…" My words were barely a whisper before the scream ripped from me. "AHHH!"
An unholy hunger flared inside me sharp, ripping cramps in my gut, a gnawing emptiness so deep it felt like claws tearing at my insides. The pain doubled me over. My hands trembled as I pressed them to my stomach. It was unbearable, primal. The scent, the sight of their corpses , triggered something monstrous.
The need for blood swallowed everything. My thoughts dissolved into a single, feral urge. Those shriveled bodies, whatever they had lost, I needed it.
I woke slowly, my thoughts drifting back to me like fragments of a dream. When my eyes opened, the ceiling above wasn't the cracked stone of the catacombs. It was jagged rock.
A cave.
"Wait… wasn't I just in the catacombs beneath the church? How the hell did I get here…?" My voice sounded strange to my own ears, low, steady, and eerily calm.
I pushed myself upright from the cold ground, my limbs moving with an ease that felt unnatural. The entrance of the cave glowed with daylight. Afternoon, by the angle and brightness of the sun. Instinctively, something deep in me recoiled at that light, a flicker of primal fear crawling across my skin but I forced it down, swallowing hard.
Then the smell hit me.
First came the cave's own scent: wet rock, mineral-heavy air, a damp earthiness that clung to my nose. But when the wind gusted in from outside, a storm of smells rushed in with it. The green sharpness of vegetation. The musk of animals I couldn't see. The sweetness of wildflowers crushed under paws or hooves. It overwhelmed me, dizzying and vivid.
It felt like I had lived my whole life with a stuffy nose and a cloth pressed over it until now. Now the cloth was gone, the blockage cleared, and the world rushed into me unfiltered. My hearing was just as sharp. Leaves shifting, insects moving in bark. And God help me I could hear two rabbits rutting in the bushes just outside the cave. How I even recognized it, I didn't want to think about.
Everything came crashing back at once.
I was a vampire.
"So this is one of the perks," I muttered. "I could… get used to this."
Right then, another scent hit me thick, metallic, like old iron. My head snapped toward the back of the cave. Lying in the shadows was a bear, sprawled on its back.
Under normal circumstances, the sight of a bear in my space would have sent my heart racing. But my heart gave no signal, no thump. There was nothing but silence inside me.
I moved closer, eyes adjusting to the darkness with unnatural ease. The bear's chest didn't rise. No breath. No life. Its fur was matted and torn, claw marks raking deep gouges across its body.
"It's dead…" I whispered. But that wasn't what chilled me. It was the why. Bears don't just die like this. Something had attacked it, ripped it apart and left it.
Why leave a kill uneaten?
I crouched beside it, inspecting more closely. The wounds were brutal but deliberate. I checked that it's claws and no blood. That shocked me. The bear had been strong enough to fight back, to injure something. Yet there wasn't a single drop of foreign blood on its claws. Whatever had hunted it did so without a scratch.
As I moved my hand across its fur, I noticed two puncture marks on its thick neck. My fingers brushed over them
And like a lightning bolt, something shot through me. My vision blurred. A surge of alien memories flooded my mind, cracking open like a dam.
I was no longer myself. I was a creature of hunger, crouched over the bear, sinking fangs into its flesh. The taste of its blood burned like fire and silk. The terror rolling off the animal was intoxicating, euphoric. It wasn't just blood it was fear itself.
I staggered back, catching myself before I hit the ground. My breath or what passed for it came in ragged shudders. The echo of the bear's terror was still in my head, crawling down my spine like cold fingers.
And then, unbidden, one thought rose in my mind like a whisper from the dark:
How would the blood of the mercenaries have tasted?