The moon hung like a silver coin pasted onto a black velvet sky. Its light spilled across the dark, placid water, turning the wet sand to a sheet of polished obsidian. Only the gentle, rhythmic sigh of the waves broke the silence, a soft percussion against the frantic drumming of his own heart. He stood on the beach with Frankie, both naked under the moonlight.

  She embodied heat and shadow and the brine-scent of salt. Her skin burned warm under his hands, her lips moved with fevered intensity against his. Every touch communicated a desperate, primal language they both understood perfectly, a raw conversation without words. The world shrank to this single stretch of sand, to the press of their bodies, the tangle of their limbs. She arched against him, a low, guttural sound rumbling deep in her chest, a vibration of pure pleasure that resonated through his own bones, addicting and wild.

  He buried his face in the soft curve of her neck, inhaling her essence, wanting to drown in the intoxicating mixture of sea and her skin. This connection, this palpable energy, mirrored what he had witnessed on the water—that raw, untamed power, now focused entirely, devastatingly, on him. A terrifying and exhilarating force pulled him under.

  Her lips traveled from his jawline to the thrumming pulse in his neck. A shudder of pure anticipation coursed through him. But her mouth did not deliver a kiss.

  It delivered a bite.

  Not a playful nip, not a lover's mark, but a sharp, piercing pressure that shot a bolt of white-hot agony through his entire body. He could feel the slickness of her saliva against his skin, cold and wrong, a horrifying counterpoint to the heat of the pain. A cry caught in his throat. He tried to pull away, to shove her off, but she held him with impossible strength, her hands gripping his shoulders like steel clamps bolted to his frame. The exquisite pleasure curdled instantly into stark panic, warped into a slaughter. Her teeth sank deeper, a horrifying pressure grinding against the cartilage and bone of his throat.

  Her head lifted with a wet, tearing sound that would echo in the chambers of his soul for eternity. A gush of warmth spilled down his chest, a sickening tide followed by the shocking cold of the night air on his exposed windpipe. He tried to scream, but only a wet, gurgling rattle escaped his lips, a sound of drowning on his own lifeblood. He stared at her, his vision already swimming, the moonlit world pixelating at the edges into a dark, meaningless static.

  The face above him no longer belonged to Frankie. Not the haunted, beautiful girl from the beach. Her eyes glowed with a faint, predatory luminescence, and a dark, bloody smear framed her mouth in the moonlight. She regarded him not with passion or regret, but with the cold, detached satisfaction of a predator over its kill. The last thing he registered before the blackness swallowed him whole was her smile, sharp, triumphant, and terrible-

  Damon bolted upright in bed with a throat tearing grasp. The scent of salt and blood filled his nostrils, thick and cloying. His hands flew to his neck, fingers frantically probing the smooth, unbroken skin, searching for the phantom wound. Alive. Whole. The reality slammed into him.

  His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird beating itself to death. Cold sweat soaked his sheets, clinging to his skin with a clammy embrace. The phantom pain in his throat lingered, so real he could almost feel the gurgle, the desperate, failed attempt to draw a single breath. He scrambled out of bed, his legs unsteady, and stumbled into the bathroom, flicking on the light. The sudden brightness stabbed at his eyes.

  A pale, wild-eyed face stared back from the mirror, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He leaned over the sink, his knuckles white as he gripped the porcelain edges. He sucked in deep, shuddering breaths, trying to force the clean air past the phantom wreckage in his throat. A dream. Just a nightmare. His mind, struggling to process the things he had seen—things that defied every law of nature—had conjured a monster from his anxieties and desires.

  But this felt like more than a simple dream. It possessed the weight of a warning, the sharp clarity of a revelation. A glimpse beneath the surface of the girl he couldn't stop thinking about, a look at the impossible, terrifying thing she concealed so well.

  He twisted the shower knob, stepping into a spray of water as hot as he could stand it. He scrubbed at his skin, a frantic effort to wash away the memory of her teeth, the ghost-sensation of his own blood cooling on his chest. It offered no relief. The image of her predatory smile remained burned onto the back of his eyelids, a permanent afterimage seared into his mind.

  After he dressed, the small apartment suffocated him. He needed air. He needed to walk. He needed to plant his feet on the solid, sensible world of a new day and remind himself that throats did not get ripped out on moonlit beaches.

  He stepped outside into the cool morning. The salty air, crisp and clean, provided a welcome contrast to the stale atmosphere of his nightmare. The town of Port Blossom began to stir around him. A few early-morning fishermen headed toward the docks, their faces weathered and calm, etched with the simple concerns of tide and catch. The bakery down the street emitted the warm, comforting smell of fresh bread, a scent of normalcy that felt alien to him now. Everything appeared ordinary. Everything seemed sane.

  His own mind, however, remained a battlefield. As he walked, his thoughts churned, a toxic slurry of reality and nightmare. The images refused to fade. Not just the dream, but the real-life clips that had fueled it, playing on a relentless loop behind his eyes. Frankie Rivera. A homeless woman grabbing her arm. And then the shove. A casual, almost dismissive push that sent a grown woman flying like a rag doll.

  The scene made no sense. The physics twisted into an impossible knot. The biology defied all understanding.

  Then he remembered the surf competition. He had watched her, and the display went far beyond mere skill. He had witnessed something else. A raw, untamed power. An impossible burst of speed that nearly caused a deadly collision. A grace that was both perfect and deeply unnatural. Tasia’s explanation—drugs—offered a simple answer. And a completely wrong one. Drugs didn't grant a person the ability to do what she did. They didn't let you bend the rules of reality.

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  The dream, in its own horrific way, felt more honest than any logical explanation he could conjure. It suggested something ancient and predatory lurking just beneath her skin. Something that could smile as it killed you.

  His aimless walk carried him farther than he intended, past the quaint storefronts and quiet residential streets, toward the industrial outskirts of town. He approached a familiar, derelict wasteland where a hulking silhouette rotted against the pale morning sky. The old fish cannery. He stopped short, his breath catching in his throat, an icy dread prickling his skin.

  And in that moment, he saw them.

  Frankie, Ted, and Dee Dee. They did not head for the beach or the diner. They walked with a grim, secretive purpose directly toward the cannery. His instincts, honed by years of reading the subtle language of the ocean and now supercharged by the horror of his nightmare, screamed a silent alarm. They were headed somewhere they did not want anyone to see them.

  He had to follow. The dream had twisted his deep, unsettling curiosity into a desperate, gnawing need to know the truth.

  He kept his distance, using parked cars and street corners for cover. A creep, a stalker. The labels screamed in his head, but the memory of those glowing eyes in his dream pushed him onward, a silent, terrifying propulsion. He trailed them to the edge of town, to the rusting, forgotten building that seemed to bleed decay into the morning air.

  He watched from across the street as they slipped, one by one, through a gap in the crumbling chain-link fence and vanished inside the rusting hulk.

  What are they doing in there?

  His mind raced, spinning out possibilities, each one darker than the last, all tinged with the bloody hues of his nightmare. A dangerous meeting? Some kind of trouble Frankie couldn't escape? Was the monster from his dream about being let out of its cage?

  He had to know.

  He waited a few minutes, his heart pounding a nervous, unsteady rhythm against his ribs, then crossed the street. He found the same gap in the fence and slipped through. Up close, the place exuded an even stronger aura of dereliction. The air hung thick with the smells of decay, rust, and old, dead things. He located the main door, the wood around a broken padlock splintered and torn. He pushed it open just a crack; the hinges groaning in protest, and peered inside.

  The cavernous space lay in shadow, filled with the monstrous, silent shapes of old machinery. Faint, echoing voices drifted from the far side of the factory floor.

  He slipped inside, letting the heavy door swing shut with a soft thud behind him. He moved through the shadows, his sneakers making no sound on the dust-caked concrete floor. A lifetime on a surfboard had taught him a thing or two about balance and stealth.

  Then, small figures in a vast, decaying arena appeared. He saw what they were doing. Training. At first glance, the scene looked absurd, like children playing superheroes in a junkyard.

  He needed a better vantage point. He spotted a rusted metal staircase ascending to a long catwalk that ran the length of the building. He crept toward it, staying in the deep shadows cast by a massive, silent piece of machinery that looked like a sleeping iron beast. He climbed the stairs, each step a silent prayer that the corroded metal would hold his weight, each groan of the structure a fresh jolt to his nerves.

  From the high catwalk, hidden in the oppressive gloom, he watched. And the world stopped making sense.

  What he witnessed below defied all logic. It shattered all reason. It made his nightmare feel less like a dream and more like a prophecy.

  He saw Frankie training, her failures on full display. But her failures were more terrifying than anyone else’s successes.

  She stood before a thick wooden support beam, easily a foot thick and solid oak. She drew back her fist. She punched it. He didn't see the impact so much as the result: the beam exploded into a cloud of splinters and dust. A concussive crack like a rifle shot echoed through the cavernous space. A chunk of it the size of a cinder block flew across the room and slammed into a corrugated metal wall with a deafening bang, leaving a massive dent.

  His eyes widened. His mind scrambled, fumbled, and failed to process the information. Impossible.

  He saw Ted and Dee Dee set up a clumsy obstacle course of dented barrels and splintered crates. Frankie tried to run it. She didn't run. She moved. His brain failed to stitch the images together. She existed in one spot, and then, without transition, in another, a flicker of motion too fast for his eyes to properly track. A smear of color and shape. She left a vacuum in her wake, crashing into the far wall with a sickening crunch because she couldn’t stop her own momentum. The speed itself violated nature.

  Impossible.

  He watched her practice jumps. From a standing start, with no crouch, no gathering of power, she launched straight into the air. Her head almost brushed the low-hanging steel girders fifteen feet above. She landed with a clumsy, brutal thud that cracked the concrete floor beneath her feet, the impact sending a spiderweb of fractures through the slab. But the leap itself…

  Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.

  His mind, a vessel for rational explanation, cracked and gave way. There was no rational explanation. What he saw was not human. It was the thing from his dream. The raw, untamed power. The monster.

  He leaned forward, his hands gripping the cold, rusted railing of the catwalk. He needed a better look. He needed to make his eyes believe what they were seeing. He shifted his weight, a fractional, thoughtless movement.

  A mistake.

  His foot nudged a stack of old, rusted barrels left on the catwalk, forgotten for decades. They sat in a precarious balance. His slight touch was all it took.

  The top barrel teetered for a half-second, a slow, agonizing scrape of rust on rust. And then it fell.

  It dropped through the silent air and hit the concrete floor below with a deafening, echoing crash of metal on metal, a sound like a gunshot magnified a hundred times in the vast, silent space. The clang reverberated off every surface, a sound of pure catastrophe.

  Down below, the trio froze, three statues carved from shock.

  Frankie's head snapped up. Her eyes, now fully accustomed to the dim light, pierced the gloom of the high catwalk. They locked directly onto his. No confusion clouded her gaze, no searching. She knew exactly where he was. For a terrifying second, the haunted girl he knew vanished, replaced by the cold, assessing predator from his nightmare.

  There was no hiding. No escape.

  Trapped in the spotlight of their three terrified, upturned faces, Damon slowly stood up from the shadows, his own body feeling heavy and disconnected.

  The secret was out.

  He looked down at Frankie, at her friends, at the scene of impossible, monstrous power. The splinters of the shattered beam. The cracked concrete. The dented wall. He looked at her, and the image of her blood-smeared face from his dream superimposed itself over her shocked, pale one.

  And with a deep, shaky breath, knowing that his life had just been irrevocably altered, he started down the stairs, each metallic clang of his footstep a descent into a new, terrifying reality.