I didn't go to second period.
I told myself I would stand in the east stairwell for one minute, away from the heartbeats and the smells and the sunlight. One minute became ten. By the time I looked up at the clock above the fire door, the bell had rung twice.
Nobody used that stairwell. It smelled of dust and old paint, and I was grateful, because dust didn't have a pulse.
I sat on the third step, leaned against the cold concrete, and held my hands out in front of me. They were perfectly steady. That was almost the worst part. Yesterday they would have been shaking.
Welcome home, Progenitor.
"I'm not anyone's anything," I muttered.
No answer. The voice had gone quiet since the courtyard, but I could feel it somewhere at the back of my mind, like someone standing very still in a dark room.
The door at the top of the stairs opened.
I was on my feet before I knew I had moved. One moment I was sitting, and the next I was standing with my shoulders pressed to the wall and every nerve lit up. That was new too.
"Relax," said a calm voice. "If I wanted to hurt you, I would have done it in the courtyard, while you were distracted."
It was the man from the courtyard. Up close, he looked about thirty, though the way he held himself suggested far more. His hair was the color of ash, swept back from a pale, sharp face. His coat was black, ankle-length, buttoned to the throat. His eyes were a deep, quiet gray, and they didn't blink nearly as often as they should.
He had no heartbeat. I knew it the way you know a room is empty. I had spent all morning drowning in thirty heartbeats at a time, and where he stood there was only silence.
"Who are you?" My voice came out rougher than I meant it to.
"Cassian." He came down three steps and stopped, keeping the distance carefully, as though he knew exactly how close was too close. "I have been searching for you for eleven years. Last night, I was nearly too late."
"I don't know you."
"No. But you knew what I was the moment you saw me." He tilted his head. "That is the first thing the blood teaches. It lets you recognize your own."
"My own," I repeated. "I'm not—"
The word wouldn't come. My canines pressed against my lip, and I couldn't make my mouth ignore them.
Cassian's eyes flicked to my teeth, then politely away, the way a doctor looks away from something embarrassing. "Say it. It is easier once it has been said."
"I'm turning into a vampire."
"No." He said it gently. "You became one last night. What you are turning into is something else."
I laughed, a short, ugly sound. "That's supposed to make me feel better?"
"It is not supposed to make you feel anything. It is supposed to be true." He reached into his coat, and I tensed, but he only drew out a small leather-bound book, so worn that its edges had gone soft. "May I show you something?"
I didn't answer. He took that as permission and held the book open at arm's length.
The page was brown with age. A drawing filled it: a red moon, swollen and enormous, hanging over a city of narrow towers. Beneath it stood a single figure with his arms spread wide, and around his feet knelt hundreds of smaller shapes. The writing was in a script I had never seen, yet when I looked at it, the words arranged themselves in my head.
The First Blood wakes when the sky bleeds. One rises. All answer.
"What is this?"
"The oldest record we have." Cassian closed the book. "Every vampire alive descends from one bloodline, David. Our kind has a word for the one at its root. The Progenitor. The first of the blood. Where it began, and where it may end."
"That's a myth."
"So was the sun, once, to those who feared the dark." He almost smiled. "The bloodline sleeps for a very long time. Centuries, sometimes millennia. It passes through ordinary people who never know what is in their veins: a farmer, a clerk, a schoolboy. Then, when the red moon rises, it wakes in one of them. Last night, it woke in you."
My legs felt unsteady, so I sat back down on the step. "Why me?"
"I do not know. No one does." He said it without a hint of apology. "The blood chooses. It always has."
"And the voice?" I said. "In my head?"
Something shifted in his face, so quickly I might have imagined it. "What did it say?"
"It said welcome home."
Cassian was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his tone was careful. "The blood speaks to the one it has chosen. The dreams, the voice, the memories that are not yours. It is... normal."
It didn't sound normal. It sounded like a man picking his way across a minefield. But before I could push, my stomach clenched so hard that I doubled over.
The hunger hit.
It wasn't like being hungry. It was like being a stranger inside my own body, and the stranger wanted one thing, and wanted it so completely that everything else, Marcus, school, my own name, faded into a distant, quiet radio. The smells of the building came rushing back: sweat, perfume, the sweetness of a hundred hearts beating behind a hundred walls.
"Breathe through your mouth," Cassian said, suddenly closer. "Do not think about them. Think about me. Look at me."
I looked. His eyes were steady and gray and utterly without pulse, and something in the stillness of him pulled me back from the edge, the way a shore pulls in a drowning man.
"You will feel this for three nights," he said quietly. "After that, if you have not fed, you will not choose who you hurt. This is why I came to you now."
He drew a silver flask from inside his coat and held it out.
I knew what was in it before he unscrewed the cap. My whole body leaned toward it.
"I won't," I whispered.
"David—"
"I'm not drinking someone's blood."
"It is animal blood. Drawn this morning, from a farm outside the city." His voice was patient. "No one was harmed. No one will be."
I was still shaking my head, but my hand had already closed around the flask. I tipped it back before I could change my mind.
It was warm. It was the best thing I had ever tasted. And I hated how good it was.
The ache in my gums eased. The roar in my ears thinned to a hum. When I lowered the flask, my fingers were wet, and I wiped them on my jeans and stared at the red stain, ashamed.
"That is the hardest part," Cassian said. "Wanting it. It does not mean you are a monster. It means you are alive. Differently alive."
"Everyone's going to find out."
"Not if you are careful. And I will help you be careful."
"Why?" I looked up at him. "Why do you care?"
For the first time, he hesitated. "Because I served the last Progenitor, a very long time ago. And because the last time the blood woke, the world was not ready, and neither was he."
Before I could ask what that meant, footsteps echoed from the corridor below, two sets, one heavy, one light, and a familiar voice calling, "David? Dude, are you in here?"
Marcus.
Cassian was already gone. I hadn't seen him move. One breath he was on the stairs, and the next there was only the faint swing of the fire door at the top, closing on its hinges.
I shoved the flask into my bag and wiped my mouth with my sleeve just as Marcus came around the corner, Mr. Hale's hall pass in his hand and a look of enormous relief on his face.
"There you are. I looked everywhere." He frowned. "You're sitting in the dark."
"It helps my headache."
"Okay." He didn't sound convinced. He glanced up the stairwell, as if sensing something. "Was someone just here? I swear I saw a guy in a coat."
"No one's here," I said. "Just me."
"Huh." Marcus sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose. "Why does it smell like a butcher shop?"
My heart, the slow, patient heart that didn't need to beat, skipped.
"Pretty sure that's the cafeteria," I said, and stood up. "Come on. Let's go to class."
I don't remember the rest of the school day. The teachers' voices blurred together. I sat with my hood up and my back to the windows, breathing through my mouth. The flask in my bag felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
By the time the final bell rang, the sun had dipped low enough that I could walk outside without burning. I stayed under the long shadows of the buildings and told Marcus I'd see him tomorrow.
"Text me when you get home," he said. "Seriously. Don't go quiet on me."
"I won't."
I walked home slowly, trying to feel normal. The city looked different now. Every window held a heartbeat. Every alley held a story. A dog barked at me from behind a fence and then went silent, whining, backing away on its belly.
By the time I reached my apartment, the sky had turned the color of an old bruise. I locked the door, drew the curtains, and leaned my forehead against the wood.
It's just one night, I thought. Tomorrow you'll figure out how to live like this.
I kept my promise and typed a message to Marcus with slow, careful thumbs, afraid I would crush the phone in my hand. Home. Alive. Still a noodle. His reply came in two seconds: Liar. Eat something.
I almost laughed. Then I scrolled back, past his message from this morning, to the one that had been bothering me all day. Don't look at the moon. Sent at 2:07 a.m. By me, to him.
Something else sat in the call log just beneath it. Nine outgoing calls between 1:40 and 2:05 a.m., all to the same number. No name. No contact photo. Every call had lasted zero seconds, as if I had dialed and hung up before anyone could answer. Or as if someone had answered, and there had been nothing at all to say.
My thumb hovered over the number. Some part of me knew I shouldn't. I pressed it anyway.
One ring. Two. Then a flat, recorded voice: "The number you have dialed does not exist."
The screen flickered red, just once, like a blink, and went back to normal.
I set the phone down on the table very carefully, as if it might bite me, and stood in the dim, silent apartment with my own thoughts, which were suddenly too loud.
A knock came at the door.
Three slow raps.
I stopped breathing, which didn't hurt anymore. "Cassian?"
No answer. Then, from the other side of the wood, came a voice I had never heard before, a woman's voice, soft and almost sweet:
"David. Open the door. You and I have so much to talk about."
Every instinct screamed. I knew without knowing how that there was no heartbeat behind that door, and that the smell creeping under it, cold and sweet like old flowers, was not Cassian's.
And in the back of my mind, the quiet voice woke, sharper than I had ever heard it:
Do not open it. She is not the one who called you.
The knob began, very slowly, to turn.