Chapter Two
CHARLIE
There’s a sense of floating, neither asleep nor awake, suspended in a deep, quiet nothing where time dissolves, and my body feels far away.
Fear doesn’t reach me here, neither does weight.
Only a distant, drifting peace, as though sinking beneath dark water and letting the world disappear.
Then suddenly, it erupts without warning, ripping through me from the inside out.
My body arches hard against it, an instinctive, useless reaction as agony crashes through every nerve at once.
It’s searing, crushing, and invasive, like something is tearing me open and rebuilding me wrong, cell by cell, bone by bone, nerve by nerve.
I thrash mindlessly in the dark, muscles locking and releasing in brutal waves, as if my body is trying to escape itself.
There’s no rhythm to it, no place to brace, no way to lessen the blow.
The pain is everywhere, under my skin, inside my skull, burning through my veins, too much to process, too vast to understand.
I can’t think.
I can’t scream.
There’s no language for this, no frame of reference, only raw, unrelenting agony tearing through whatever I was and forcing something else into place, reshaping me whether I survive it or not.
I can’t tell whether I am in this hell for mere seconds or what feels like a lifetime.
Time has no meaning here.
And then, without warning, consciousness slams into me.
My eyes snap open.
The realization doesn’t land immediately. Panic does. Raw and instinctive, surging through me as my body refuses the command to inhale. Air doesn’t rush in, my lungs don’t burn. There’s no desperate gasp to ground me back in myself.
Nothing happens.
My chest doesn’t rise. My throat doesn’t pull in oxygen. The pain recedes just enough for awareness to flood in, and that’s when the terror truly takes hold.
I’m awake.
I’m aware.
And I’m not fucking breathing.
I try to inhale.
My body ignores the command.
I clamp a hand to my chest, fingers digging in hard enough to hurt, waiting for something— pressure, burn, the frantic thud of a heartbeat kicking into gear.
There’s nothing.
Only silence beneath my ribs, a hollow stillness where motion should be.
The realization lands slow and sickening.
Sound crashes in next, overwhelming and merciless.
Too much of it. Too close. Every noise sharpens into something separate and distinct—the hum of electricity in the walls, fabric shifting somewhere nearby, distant heartbeats pulsing through the building, loud and intrusive, a chaotic chorus I can’t shut out.
I squeeze my eyes closed, but it doesn’t help.
Darkness doesn’t mute anything, it only makes it worse.
My skin crawls.
I feel everything, the grain of wood beneath my palms, the cool weight of the air against my skin, the vibration of footsteps far away and yet impossibly clear. Emotion slams into me just as violently. Fear spikes, sharp, and confusion follows, then something darker threads through it all.
Hunger.
But not hunger the way I understand it.
Not an empty stomach.
Not weakness or nausea.
This is a deep, gnawing pull that coils somewhere beneath my ribs and spreads outward, sharp and insistent, as if something inside me has woken up and is demanding to be fed. My mouth floods with saliva, my throat tightening painfully, as if it remembers something my mind refuses to name.
I don’t know what I want.
I just know I need it.
My limbs feel different when I move, heavy and light at the same time. Weak in a way that makes my joints ache, but beneath that weakness, there’s strength. Too much of it. I push myself upright and overshoot, my hand slamming into the surface beside me hard enough to splinter wood.
I freeze, staring at the damage.
That shouldn’t have happened.
There’s no surge of adrenaline, no racing heart to explain it. My body just… settles. Perfectly balanced, perfectly still, as if it already knows exactly how much force it takes to break something.
Panic rises again as the hunger sharpens, turning focused, predatory. The world feels too vivid, too fragile, like everything around me is made of glass, and somehow, I’m the dangerous thing in the room.
I’m not suffocating.
I’m not alive the way I was.
The thought slides in cold and undeniable, and something inside me answers with a low, satisfied hum.
Whatever I am now doesn’t need air.
It doesn’t need a heart.
It needs something else.
And I don’t know how long I can go without it.
The ceiling above me looms vast and alien, exposed beams crisscrossing against concrete that seems to pulse with texture I shouldn’t be able to see in the darkness.
Except it’s not dark.
Not really.
Everything glows with a strange, silvery luminescence, shadows carved into sharp relief, every crack in the concrete standing out.
I try to stand up, and the movement comes too fast.
My body responds before my brain catches up, launching me upright with inhuman speed that sends my head spinning.
The motion should be impossible. It should require effort, muscle coordination, and the slow gathering of strength.
Instead, I’m vertical in an instant, my hands braced against cold concrete beneath me.
Where the hell am I?
The warehouse stretches around me, vast and abandoned, its emptiness pressing in from all sides.
Graffiti mars the walls in violent splashes of color that seem to writhe under my gaze.
Broken glass litters the floor, each shard catching impossible light, glittering like diamonds scattered across the concrete.
The air smells of decay, old paint, rust, and beneath it all, something alive and copper-sharp that makes my throat constrict.
Blood.
Old blood soaked into the floor, the walls, the very structure of this place.
My stomach twists violently, but nothing comes up, just dry heaves that rack my body with a force that should hurt but doesn’t. Everything inside me contracts, every muscle seizing at once as if trying to expel something that isn’t there anymore.
Because something’s gone.
Something fundamental.
Something that made me, me.
I press a hand to my chest, searching for the familiar rhythm, the steady thump-thump that’s accompanied every moment of my existence since birth. My palm flattens against my sternum, pushing hard enough that I should feel bone give, but there’s nothing there except solid, unyielding stillness.
No proof I’m alive beyond the fact that I’m thinking, existing in this body that no longer knows how to be human.
Terror slams into me, ice-cold and absolute. My hand flies to my throat, fingers scrambling for the pulse point that should be there, has to be there, because hearts don’t just stop while you’re still conscious, still aware, still capable of movement, thought, and fear.
Nothing.
Not even the faintest whisper of circulation beneath my skin.
The realization crashes down on me with a crushing weight. Air sits stagnant in lungs that don’t expand or contract, that serve no purpose anymore, because whatever I am now doesn’t need oxygen to survive.
A scream builds in my throat, but it dies before it can escape because screaming requires breath, and breath requires a working respiratory system, and I don’t have that anymore.
What the fuck happened to me?
Memory tries to surface, fragmented and disjointed, puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit together anymore.
Jake.
His name was Jake.
At the lookout.
Making out on the hood of his car.
His hands on my skin.
His mouth on my neck.
Then…
Her.
The woman. Beautiful, terrible, and utterly brutal. Eyes that burned red in the darkness. Fangs that gleamed wetly in the moonlight. The cold of her grip was as if death itself wrapped around my wrist. Jake’s neck snapped with a sound that still echoes in my skull, sharp, final, and real.
The pain as she bit down.
The horror as she drained me.
The sickening sweetness as she made me drink.
The remembered words, ‘I have plans for you, little scion.’
My hands shake violently, tremors running through fingers that suddenly seem too pale, too perfect, skin appearing as marble in the strange light.
I hold them up, staring, and the details assault me with painful clarity.
Every curl of my fingerprints stands out in sharp relief, every crease in my palm seems carved with precision, and the veins—God, the veins that should carry warm blood beneath skin that should be flushed with life—they’re dark, visible, threading through me like shadowy rivers that no longer flow.
I push to my feet, and again the movement comes too easily.
My legs shouldn’t support me this smoothly after whatever happened.
I should be weak, disoriented, struggling to find balance.
Instead, I’m standing in a heartbeat, steady as stone, my body responding to commands with frightening efficiency.
Something’s broken inside me.
Something fundamental has been rewired, replaced, and remade.
The hunger hits again without warning.
One second, I’m standing here, trying to piece together what the hell happened to me.
The next agony detonates in my gut with volcanic force, a yawning emptiness that eclipses every other sensation.
It’s not the gentle rumble of missing a meal, not the dull ache of going too long without food.
This is violent, all-consuming, a void opening up inside me that demands to be filled with something I can taste at the back of my throat, even though I don’t know what it is.
My gums ache.
Sharp and deep, a pressure that blooms along my jaw and spreads like fire beneath the skin. It pulses, tight and insistent, as if something is pushing its way forward from the inside. I whimper, the sound startled out of me, and clamp my teeth together on instinct.
The pressure doesn’t stop.
It forces its way down.