Midnight, April 30th, 2005

  I still remember the way the rain hit the windows that night. It was sharp, and insistent, like it was trying to claw its way inside. Like it knew something I didn’t.

  The entire apartment felt too big for me. Too empty. I hadn’t seen her in almost two weeks. After the rooftop... after her “test”, she vanished. No calls. No notes. Just silence. The kind that doesn’t just fill the room. It presses against your ribs, slithers into your ears, and whispers maybe it wasn’t real.

  Maybe I could still go back to class, turn in my midterms, get drunk at that shitty bar down the street, and pretend none of this ever happened.

  I tried. God, I tried.

  But I couldn’t stop looking at doorways like she might be standing there. I couldn’t stop hearing her voice threaded through the silence of my room. Couldn’t stop wondering what would’ve happened if I hadn’t passed whatever sick game she put me through. I fucking killed a man. Someone who looked me in the eye and begged me to spare him. I slit his throat, and the worst part is I couldn’t even explain why.

  Then, one night, the silence broke.

  A single buzz from my phone. No name. No number. Just an address, sitting there like a loaded gun.

  It was a dead part of the city. Even the streetlights seemed scared to shine brightly, lest they reveal something that was supposed to be hidden.

  I should’ve thrown the phone out the window and never looked back. Maybe if I had, my life could have gone back to normal.

  But I was already hers.

  I just hadn’t bled for it yet.

  The address pointed to an old church, or what remained of one. Whatever god had lived here had packed up and left decades ago, probably without bothering to lock the door on the way out.

  Cracks spider-webbed every panel of the stained glass. The pews were splintered and pushed aside like an angry giant had thrown a tantrum in the house of god.

  The altar stood bare, stripped of its crosses, its icons, everything but a single black candle flickering defiantly against the darkness, as if it guarded some ancient, ugly secret.

  And there she was.

  Lucena stood in the center of the ruin like a queen returning to her broken kingdom.

  She wasn’t in a dress this time. No, it was something looser, flowing, something older than fashion, older than sense. A Deep crimson color that shimmered like a bloodstain every time the candle caught it. She had pulled her hair back and pinned it with what looked like a dagger; the blade caught glints of dying light.

  And her eyes...

  Her eyes burned with that same awful, beautiful certainty that had haunted my dreams.

  She turned toward me, slow and deliberate, as if she had known down to the second when I would walk in. I half expected some dumb line like “I’ve been expecting you”.

  Instead, she smiled that thin, knowing smile that stripped me bare with no violence or force, just... inevitability.

  “You’re late,” she said in the same matter-of-fact tone like she was speaking an irrefutable fact.

  I shrugged, my voice low and raw. “I wasn’t coming. Then I did.”

  Her smile widened. There was no warmth, nor cold, on her lips. Just truth.

  “As is the nature of desire,” she murmured, stepping closer with a grace that made the crumbling church look even uglier by comparison.

  As she moved closer,: I remained perfectly still. I couldn’t move, no matter how badly I wanted to. I wanted to run, whether out the door or into her arms, I had no idea.

  Her hand rose, slow and deliberate, tracing a path up my chest without hesitation. I felt the chill of her skin even through the layers of my shirt, but after the cool touch came warmth that spread through my very bones. I wanted to collapse into her arms. To beg her to never leave me again. The thought disgusted me. I didn’t flinch at her touch. Maybe I couldn’t anymore.

  “And fear,” she added with a shrug.

  “You don’t even know which one brought you here, do you?”

  Her fingers curled lightly at the base of my throat, her thumb brushing over my lips like she was studying me.

  I tried to answer, tried to summon something clever, something defiant, but there was nothing left to give her. Nothing she hadn’t already taken.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, leaning closer, voice a soft blade. “They lead the same place.”

  Her thumb lingered on my lip, tracing the shape of words she hadn’t spoken yet.

  “Death.”

  I should have screamed. Should have demanded answers. Should have demanded why she’d dragged me into this nightmare, why she had made me spill blood and sanity and soul across that rooftop. Instead, all that came out was a broken, whispered question:

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  “Why me?”

  Her hand shifted, cupping my cheek like a lover would. Gentle and almost tender. But there was no warmth in her touch. Only cold. Endless cold.

  “Because you’re cracked, darling,” she said with a lighthearted chuckle. “And cracks let the dark in.”

  She leaned in until her breath ghosted over my jaw, her words sliding under my skin.

  “You’re smart, you’re hungry, you hate the world, but you still want to fix it. You’re perfect.”

  Her lips brushed the shell of my ear, and my entire body shuddered like she’d slipped a key into the lock of my bones.

  “All you needed,” she whispered, “was a push.”

  There was no warning. No prelude.

  One second, she was inches away, and the next…

  A sharp, frozen pain at my neck that quickly gave way to bliss so intense I could write about it for 1000 years and I wouldn’t come close to fully encapsulating it.

  My whole body locked up, a thousand screams trapped in my spine as icy fire flooded my veins. My knees buckled, but she caught me, pulling me close like a lover catching a collapsing partner.

  Only this was no romance.

  This was a ritual she had thought out well in advance.

  This was an execution.

  I could feel it, my life bleeding out of me, rushing out of the tiny pinprick holes in my neck and pouring into her. Each heartbeat slowly got weaker, each thought dimmer as the surrounding lights darkened and the darkness slowly approached.

  I tried to scream. Tried to fight. I shouldn’t enjoy this perverse act, but god it felt so good… I was no longer in control.

  My body wasn’t mine anymore.

  Through it all, her voice murmured in the back of my mind, smooth and venomous,

  “You’re doing so well, darling.”

  ”Your destiny was always a beautiful death.”

  The world spun around me. As I stared up at the ceiling as it spun above me and dissolved into a mess of colors and swirling patterns, I weakly grabbed for her hand, desperate for some small comfort, but I found none.

  The candlelight bled into rivers of stars.

  My heartbeat slowed... and slowed... until it was just a faint tapping, soft as knuckles against a coffin lid.

  And then…

  Oblivion.

  I don’t remember hitting the ground. But I remember waking up there.

  Every nerve in my body shrieked.

  Every sound felt like a blade pressed to my skull. I could hear rats breathing in the basement, hear the water rotting in the pipes, hear the soft, pitiful heartbeat of some poor bastard pissing himself in an alley two blocks away.

  Lucena knelt over me, the silver dagger that held her hair up glinting in one hand. Her other wrist bled steadily, a dark, thick ribbon.

  “Drink,” she said, voice low and absolute. Not a request. A command.

  I hesitated. Some scrap of me, some last pitiful shred that hung onto logic and reason, screamed to run.

  “Drink,” she repeated, and the surrounding air seemed to thicken with the command.

  I drank.

  And it wasn’t just blood.

  It was fire and velvet and shadows and her.

  It was the sound of her voice threading into my bones like the world’s most soothing song.

  It was her pain filling my teeth, as my jaw didn’t seem to want to close the way it should have.

  It was her will suffocating mine.

  I drank until I forgot how not to.

  When she finally pulled her wrist away, I collapsed onto the cold stone, trembling, twitching like a puppet with half its strings cut.

  My fingers clenched and unclenched without my permission.

  My mind stuttered and spat sparks, trying to piece itself back together after she shattered it.

  Lucena leaned down, brushing my sweat matted hair from my face before kissing my forehead with something almost like a mockery of tenderness.

  “You were always going to be mine, dear,” she whispered. “Now you finally are.”

  I think I cried, but no tears came.

  Only hunger.

  The candle guttered out, and darkness swallowed the church.

  I remember her heels clicking away on the ancient stone floor, each step echoing like the toll of a funeral bell ringing right inside my skull. I reached out a hand in her direction as I begged and pleaded for her to come back. My begging fell on deaf ears.

  And then, silence.

  The silence that seeps into your bones and never leaves. The kind that clings, even when the sun forgets how to rise.

  I woke up again, how many hours later I don’t know, face-down on the cold stone Like a corpse too stupid to stay dead.

  My skin was ice cold. Not skin-deep cold, but hollow cold, like someone had scooped the heat out of me and replaced it with ashes.the ashes of the damned.

  My clothes were damp with sweat... or blood... or both. Hard to tell anymore.

  Every one of my senses was screaming at me. Every breath felt wrong.

  The hum of a dead lightbulb.

  The heartbeat of a rat behind the altar.

  The faint, tinny ring of someone laughing down the street.

  I tried to take a deep breath to stabilize myself and realized I couldn’t. Not really.

  My chest moved because it remembered how, but no air filled my lungs.

  I didn’t need it anymore.

  And then the hunger hit like a truck.

  It started as a whisper, a scratch behind my ribs, a voice in my head..

  It grew into a growl.

  Not a metaphorical one, an actual growl, raw and animalistic and desperate. Like a wolf caught in a bear trap, ready to gnaw its own leg off.

  I staggered toward a cracked mirror leaning against the wall, an abandoned vanity half-buried in rubble. The glass was stained and warped, but it didn’t matter.

  There was no reflection waiting for me, at least not one I recognized. Looking into the mirror revealed an image that was twisted and disproportionate. Black smoke curled from my outline, obscuring even my silhouette, while a million tiny fingerprints seemed to blur the image.

  My skin was too pale when I looked down at my hands. My senses were too sharp.

  I opened my mouth and felt the sharp, unfamiliar curve of fangs.

  That’s when it sank in.

  I wasn’t human anymore.

  My fingers brushed something unfamiliar in my jacket pocket.

  Trembling, I pulled it out, a single folded sheet of cream-colored parchment. Heavy and expensive feeling, as always. Lucena’s handwriting flowed across it, every letter elegant, deliberate, like the cut of a knife.

  Your humanity is gone. Your new name, as I dub you, is Ransom. Survival is your second test. You’re a sharp thing. A sharp thing should cut.

  I’ll be watching from the dark.

  Find me when you’ve become strong enough to stand in it.

  “- L.”

  No address. No instructions.

  Just the taste of a leash, still warm, still wet, slipped tight around my throat with all the comfort of a noose.

  She hadn’t freed me.

  She had unleashed me.

  And she was already waiting for the thing I would become.