I waited for the next vision to hit. I was sure it had to be coming… some instinct deep in me kept insisting it would. I could feel the strain of the world pressing in from every side, reminding me of everything I still had to do. But the longer I stood there, watching the elder dissolve into that spreading mound of meat and blood, the more it felt like nothing was going to happen. It was one of those strange moments where I found myself wishing the vision would come… or that Death would say something, anything, to tell me what my next step was supposed to be. I just wanted to move, wanted to act, to kill, to keep pushing forward until there was nothing left in my way.

  But first, I had to deal with the body. It would be a considerable eyesore to the civilized world, which would guarantee questions. That would cause problems not only for me, but my friends.

  So I sent out a pulse of my sonar-like sense, a ripple of awareness cutting through the air. I had only one target in mind: Alex. I needed to make sure she was still alive after everything that had happened… and, if I was honest, I needed her ability. She had this strange power now, a way of drinking blood without ever touching it. It wasn’t physical the way normal feeding was; it was like she pulled the blood’s energy out of a person and turned it into something invisible that drifted straight into her mouth. I had seen it only once before. If anyone could help me take care of the elder’s remains, it was her.

  The pulses rolled out in widening waves across the city, sweeping through streets, alleys, buildings, hunting for the signal that was her. I only needed three pulses before I found her location. That was enough. My body moved before the thought had even finished forming.

  I crossed the darkened city like a train on rails, every step deliberate, every motion precise. The world around me blurred past: dirty sidewalks crusted with the last patches of winter grit, half-melted clumps of ice slumped against the curbs, the air still carrying the faint leftover bite of cold. Winter was ending, finally giving way. Soon there’d be no sign it had ever been here. Spring would break over everything: new colors, new growth, new life warming its way across the surface of the world.

  That thought made me slow for just a moment, not out of hesitation, but recognition.

  The elder had said something earlier, back when he was talking to the spider-woman, before he even knew I was in the area. He’d whispered something like, “The hunger rises in us all. This is a new age…” At the time, it hadn’t meant anything. But now, moving through a city shedding its dead season, the words came back in a way that felt different.

  I didn’t understand it, not yet. But Alex might. I’d have to ask her.

  I slipped through trees and along the darker cuts of the city, moving through shadows so easily I might as well not have had a body at all. No one saw me; no one even sensed a shift in the air. I passed people without them realizing anything had been near them. A monster in the dark… death brushing against them so closely, yet they never knew just how close to it they were.

  When I reached a spot about a hundred yards away from Alex, I stopped cold. I didn’t freeze out of caution… I froze because what I sensed didn’t line up with anything that should have been there. Something was wrong. And I needed to understand it before I took another step.

  Alex was tucked into a narrow pocket of space between the dumpsters. The alley was walled in by brick on three sides, the fourth sealed off by the café’s decorative fence; a waist-high metal barrier designed to look quaint during the day and pointless at night. She wasn’t alone. There were three people crammed into that little concrete hollow: Alex, another woman, and a man.

  I pushed my senses deeper, stretching my awareness through the dumpsters, around the fence, and between the structures like smoke finding cracks. The place behind the café was small, barely enough space for two dumpsters. The shadows pooled thick there, but I saw everything. The woman who wasn’t Alex had the man locked against the dumpster in a grip that looked casual, but wasn’t… her fingers were dug into his throat hard enough that the metal behind him was creasing.

  She was speaking, but the sounds didn’t come out as words. They were sharp bursts of feral snarling and broken phrases, like language had to fight its way out between fits of rage that didn’t want to let go. A faint ringing coated every noise, but something else was there too… hunger, or grief, or something primal I didn’t have a name for.

  None of this made sense. Alex didn’t make friends. She barely tolerated people. And she definitely didn’t run with anyone who would openly corner a human like this. If she hunted, she hunted alone… and she hunted vampires. This situation didn’t match anything I knew about her.

  Still, she looked good… healthy, even. Better than the last time I’d seen her. Her crimson hair was tied back in a straight ponytail that ran straight down her back. She wore jeans that actually fit normally and a plain long-sleeved black shirt. Not her usual tight-knit clothing that she used as a lure. Even the plain tennis shoes felt off, like she had deliberately stripped away anything that might catch a roaming eye.

  She wasn’t out feeding. Not for herself. She was here for something else… watching.

  Once my senses settled fully over the alley, everything snapped into clarity at once.

  The other woman began to shake… but not physically. It was the air around her, the atmosphere, vibrating in a tight, high-pitched frequency that clawed its way into my skull. I could feel a ringing in my ears. She lifted off the ground by a few inches, just enough to pull the man with her, their feet leaving the concrete together. The red glow that started in the man’s chest flickered to life like someone had struck a match inside his ribs, illuminating his insides like shadows across his skin.

  He screamed, high, sharp, almost childlike. Terror ripped through his voice so violently that for a second, I thought everyone in the surrounding street would hear. Alex didn’t move, didn’t flinch. She just watched. Before his scream could reach its peak, a line of cars rolled past the front of the café, engines rumbling loud enough to swallow the sound entirely. No human could have heard the scream.

  I shifted my focus back to the floating woman. Seeing her like that… it was familiar… too familiar. She hovered only a few feet up, suspended just below the café’s fence line so no one outside could see her. She was wearing jean cutoffs. Just regular, frayed-edge jean shorts and a white V-neck T-shirt. They were clothes someone might wear to a grocery store or a family barbecue. It made the sight feel wrong, surreal. Supernatural abilities paired with the most common female outfit imaginable. That was the new normal for me now, I supposed. Things no one should believe were now just… Tuesday night.

  The red light inside the man’s chest thickened, pushing out of his skin like mist bleeding through fabric. It drifted upward in a slow, controlled stream toward the woman’s mouth. Her dark brown hair rose around her like she was underwater, drifting upward toward the sky in a slow ripple. And under it all was that ringing… so sharp and hot it felt like it came from inside my skull. My senses were amplifying it, pulling the vibration straight into my brain.

  If this was what the man felt, if this sound was burrowing into him the way it was tearing into me… I didn’t want to imagine it.

  Then the realization hit me like a shock.

  Who was this man? Who was this woman? Why was Alex… who avoided people, who hated unpredictability, who never let strangers near her, just sitting there watching while someone drained a human in a way that looked disturbingly close to the ability she’d gained from Hunger’s shard?

  None of it added up. And that meant I needed answers… now.

  I slipped out of my hiding place without a sound. The distance between me and the café vanished in a few strides, driven more by instinct than thought. I scaled the side of the building, fingers and claws finding grips no normal person would notice. The rooftop greeted me with cold tar and a thin sheen of moisture, and I stepped to the edge to overlook the alley below.

  A cloud slid past the moon, peeling back the darkness like a curtain, letting pale light spill across the alley. I could see just fine, but it was like the world wanted me to see this now.

  Alex’s head snapped up instantly, and whatever quiet she’d held shattered. Her entire posture changed. One second she was watching, calculating… the next she was a creature of pure territorial fury. She felt my approach.

  Her eyes burned crimson, but darker veins of black branching out from the pupils like cracks spreading through glass. Hunger’s mark lived in her. It breathed through her. It moved through her skin. The psychic hiss she released brushed against my thoughts like a blade skimming across my mind.

  And under all that rage, I felt it… the flicker of fear. She didn’t recognize me. To her, I was just a monstrous silhouette, staring down at her from the roof like a predator ready to pounce.

  The other woman didn’t react at all. She was locked, body and mind, into the man she was consuming. Suspended in the air, limbs rigid, hair drifting upward like a drowned corpse dragged toward the surface. Her fingers dug deeper into the man’s throat. The red energy was pouring out of him now, no longer a trickle but a violent torrent of mist. And then the flesh began to peel. Skin first, curling back and sloughing off like wet wallpaper falling from a rotten wall. But it was consumed in that same reddish energy that streamed into her face. Then the muscle… thinning, weakening, unraveling in sheets that were stripped away from bone faster than gravity could claim them. Tendons snapped, floated, dissolved. Everything that made him human broke apart, piece by piece, until he was nothing but a shrinking, collapsing skeleton of a body.

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  It wasn’t blood anymore. It wasn’t flesh. It was sustenance, as Hunger had shown me in her memories. A feeding that didn’t just strip life, but devoured the very structure of living things. It was the way she had consumed that ancient forest, swallowing entire creatures and leaving nothing but hollowed-out pits and the echo of bones that never touched the ground.

  Alex had never done this. When she fed, she only pulled blood… never flesh. This woman didn’t take the bone like Hunger had in that memory. But still… who… or what was this woman?

  I stepped off the rooftop. Just one step. I dropped the height without thinking, landing hard enough to split asphalt with a crack that rolled through the parking lot. Alex surged forward, ready to tear into me with everything she had. I couldn’t blame her. The last time she saw me, my head was being torn away from my shoulders. There was no reason she would assume the shadow dropping from the roof was someone she knew… someone she had watched die.

  The hovering woman finally reacted. She froze mid-feed, the red mist cutting off abruptly as her head snapped toward me with a motion too fast to be human. Her mouth opened in a scream, except it wasn’t really a sound. It hit my mind like a blast of static, a psychic roar that churned through the air and rattled something deep behind my ribs. It felt like she was trying to tear into me the same way she tore into her prey. Then… I finally saw her face clearly.

  It was wrong, twisted in ways that reminded me of the fully revealed vampire faces I’d seen before: Alex, Martin, and Charles. All of them had that monstrous shift when they let the mask drop. But this woman had more.

  She had features that were familiar in a way that made something cold crawl up my spine. The ridges, the unnatural lines in her cheekbones, the slight splitting through her jaw structure… it was Alex’s chitinous form distilled down into something more compact, more controlled. Less armor, more anatomy. Her face wasn’t a full transformation like Alex’s, but it wasn’t just a vampire’s true form either.

  As my senses wrapped around her piece by piece, layer by impossible layer, I felt something that didn’t belong in a human body. A resonance… Primeval, but not the same as in Alex or the elders. This was… thinner… distorted, like hearing a familiar song played through a warped speaker. The flavor of it brushed the edges of my mind in a way that felt unmistakable, but altered. My senses recoiled from it and leaned into it at the same time.

  But then the true horror arrived. Not the power, the alienness of it all, or even the bones dropped carelessly beside her feet. It was her face.

  Beneath everything monstrous… I knew her. I recognized her. Even with the vampiric distortion pulling her features into something predatory… even with her maw monstrously split in the way only a Primeval-touched creature could manage… I saw the girl behind the monster.

  It hit me like someone reached into my chest and ripped out the air in my lungs.

  “Autumn…”

  The name escaped me half-breath, half-sound…

  I stepped out of the shadow fully, the moonlight catching me. Alex’s entire body snapped rigid, then crumpled into recognition so quickly she almost stumbled. She didn’t understand how I was alive, but she knew it was me. She felt it through whatever psychic tether existed now between us.

  But Autumn…

  Autumn’s power slowly receded like a tide pulling back from the shore. The shrieking psychic hum dimmed until the air merely vibrated with the aftershock of it. The man’s ruined body fell from her grip like a puppet with its strings cut.

  He hit the pavement in a wet, hollow slap.

  What remained of him wasn’t a body. It was a sculpture of death, shriveled flesh, peeled muscle bunching like old fabric, bone gleaming pale where it had been stripped clean but not consumed. The areas where she’d fed were almost polished, disturbingly pristine.

  And she had done that. Autumn… she had done it all…

  I couldn’t speak. My brain kept trying to pull meaning out of the scene, out of the last memories I had before the elder tore me apart. But nothing found a shape.

  “Alex… what is this?” My voice cracked. “Autumn… are you… Are you okay…?”

  Two steps forward. That was all my body could manage.

  Autumn drifted downward until her feet touched the pavement. Her monstrous form stayed, clinging to her features as if unsure whether it wanted to release her. Her eyes… those soft, warm brown eyes that used to look at me like I was someone worth saving… were gone. Replaced by pits of blood-red glass, threaded with black veins that pulsed like living cracks.

  She stared at me like she was trying to remember how she knew my shape. Intrigue, confusion, and fear… it was all there. And something else… something deeper, buried under layers of instinct and hunger and whatever Primeval stain now lived in her marrow.

  She had become something that should not exist in this world. An unfinished thing. A creature caught between the hunger of monsters, the taint of Primevals, and the soul of a human girl who never asked for any of this.

  And she looked at me like I was just a stranger interrupting a meal.

  I took one more step toward her, and everything changed. Autumn hissed and stepped back. Her mentality seemed more animal than anything, sensing a predator much more dangerous than her, challenging her in her own territory. She let out a low snarl, warning me to back away, but I couldn’t stop moving towards her. Then, understanding that I wasn't backing down, she leaped up from the pavement and disappeared into the night sky. It happened so fast, I wasn't prepared. Not because she was faster… but because I just didn’t expect that from her. Seeing Autumn like this… it was just nothing like the girl I knew before.

  I watched with my black eyes, enhancing my senses as I stared in awe into the night sky. She was… flying. She was fucking flying. It wasn’t fast… but she steadily moved away from me, disappearing into the night sky. She was moving toward the city. More towards the downtown area.

  “Fuck!” I heard Alex say quickly to herself, but she stifled her words.

  I turned my gaze towards her after I could no longer sense Autumn. Alex was on guard again, arms up like she was ready for a fight.

  “Come here to try and take it from me?” Alex asked with rising anger in her voice.

  “Take what?” I asked, confused. “Alex… what is happening?”

  Alex’s eyes faded from the crimson-black, returning green for just a moment as she asked, “Sam…” Then, her visage returned full force. She didn’t hear my words. All she saw was a threat.

  “Alex… It’s me,” was all I could say before she began shifting into her monstrous form. Rusty red patches started appearing all over her skin in the blink of an eye. Her form grew taller, her hair longer, and more bloody in color. Her eyes returned to the completely red pools of blood I had seen them become when she transformed before. The same snaking lines of black were there in them as the rest of her body changed.

  Alex’s jeans and shirt fell away, her shoes split as her feet grew sharper and angled with scaly plates that couldn’t be contained in some lightweight tennis shoes. Her body grew larger than her first transformation, standing somewhere between eight and ten feet tall as she solidified into the transformation. In a very quick few seconds, Alex stood in front of me in all her new glory. She was a chitinous humanoid predator of claws and death, but somehow still held the resemblance of her more feminine features. Her hair stood on end, just as it had before, and just as Autumn had a few moments ago.

  She rose from the ground only a few inches before a shrill, razor-sharp noise cut through my mind. It was her… Alex. She was speaking into my mind… screaming into me.

  “DON’T EVER COME AT ME LIKE HIM! DON’T EVER TAKE HIS FORM!”

  Then, without another word or warning, Alex rushed forward like a freight train. It happened fast.

  So, very quickly, I lashed out with my monstrous power. It wasn't a physical assault, but an undeniable presence. I stopped trying to be a shadow in the night and let the unquenchable killing intent toll out of me like nothing else could. My eyes turned pitch black, my talons extended, and I prepared to meet her momentum. But this wasn't to fight. This was to control.

  I could see it in her eyes. The moment I let it out, just a little, she knew. I wasn’t sure why she thought I was someone else, aside from the fact that she knew I was dead, or at least she thought so. I guess coming back from the dead wasn't something she thought I was capable of, so I had to be someone else. A shapeshifter, maybe. Maybe she thought I was the prime elder. Maybe they had encounters on the surface ever since he pulled my head off.

  We collided hard by the dumpsters. Most would have thought that her massive form would have been too much for me to stop before she collided with the building, but I anchored myself with all my strength and redirected her momentum quickly. I swung her around and back towards the parking lot, only to keep her from sending us both through the bricks of the building. Then, I planted her into the pavement with a little more force than I would have liked. She just came at me too hard, so there was only so much I could do.

  When we hit, I positioned myself to land just beside her, and not crush a part of her as I landed with so much strength and controlled force. The moment we hit the ground, her demeanor changed. If it was the aura, the strength, or just the feeling of my hands on her, I wasn't sure. Whatever it was in that moment, I could see it in her returning green eyes… she knew it was me. Everything changed…

  Her form shrank rapidly, returning completely to her human form. In a matter of only five seconds, Alex was sitting up beside me, completely naked and sobbing tears of blood. In that moment, she had something that she never thought she’d have again. We were back together.

  I held her close to me, trying to comfort her as she latched onto me like a tick. She had her hands around me and just wouldn’t let go. She only said a few words every few seconds.

  “Sam… how are… where have you been… I didn’t have any other choice,” it went like this for a few minutes. She couldn’t complete her sentences or come up with anything else to say.

  I obviously had some major questions I needed answering, but I had also taken stock of the situation.

  I wasn't a complete dumbass and could tell a few things from the brief encounter I saw. Alex was here with Autumn. She was observing her, watching what she was doing… hunting and feeding on someone. The way Alex was dressed told me this was not a hunt of her own. Autumn seemed feral, almost uncontrollable. She also had similar abilities and an appearance that was eerily similar to Alex. I didn’t know for certain, but if I just used some simple logic, I knew that somehow, Autumn had become something similar to Alex. Then, there was what Alex had said as I held her there on the pavement. ‘I didn’t have any other choice…’ She had done something… something to Autumn.

  I didn’t know the facts, and I had fears of my own that were ripping through me. I tried to push them down, tried to deny things I knew that I would have to face now… but part of me was just glad she was alive. I had to force those fears down, just like I had learned to before. I compartmentalized and pushed forward. But I only had one real question once I pushed all of that down: what the fuck happened while I was gone? And… where was Autumn now?