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Stan woke staring at ceiling tiles.
For the first few seconds he tried to remember where he'd fallen asleep. Hospital was his first guess. The fluorescent lights fit, and so did the smell, though there was something colder and more chemical underneath it. Then he sat up and discovered he was naked on a stainless-steel table, at which point hospital dropped several places on the list.
“Oh.”
His voice sounded strange in the room, much too loud against the hum of the lights.
Stan looked around. Metal cabinets lined one wall beside a deep sink, and there was a drain set into the tiled floor beneath his feet. Another stainless-steel table stood a few yards away with something distinctly person-shaped beneath a white sheet. Stan had never actually been inside a morgue before, but he'd watched television and was capable of deductive reasoning when properly motivated.
Oh, fuck me.
The room was cold enough that Stan should have been freezing his balls off, especially considering the current absence of pants, but he wasn't cold at all. Now that he thought about it, he felt fucking fantastic. No headache. No stiffness. No lingering pain from whatever the hell had happened in that house.
That probably should have been reassuring.
Then he remembered the house.
Reynolds.
The sound Reynolds's body had made.
“No.”
Stan was off the table before he consciously decided to move. His bare feet slapped against the tile and nearly went out from under him, forcing him to catch himself against the edge of the steel table.
“Reynolds?”
Obviously Reynolds wasn't there. Stan knew that. He knew what he'd seen in the hallway, but knowing didn't stop him from looking.
There were two other covered bodies in the room. Stan stared at the nearest one for several seconds, already knowing he didn't want to see what was underneath the sheet. Unfortunately, not knowing was worse. He crossed the room, grabbed one corner, and pulled it back far enough to reveal an elderly man staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
Stan let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and moved to the second table. A woman lay beneath that sheet.
No Reynolds.
That should have been good news. It didn't feel like good news.
He stood between the tables, naked and disoriented, trying to force the room into some kind of explanation that made sense. There had to be one. Hospital mix-up. Clerical error. Medication. Surgery. Maybe he'd been brought in unconscious and somebody had moved him down here by mistake. Maybe this wasn't actually a morgue, despite the bodies, stainless-steel tables, floor drain, and nearly everything else strongly suggesting that it was definitely a fucking morgue.
Then Stan looked down and noticed the tag attached to his toe.
Oh, that's not good.
He bent down and picked it up.
HITCHENSON, STANLEY
Stan read the tag twice, mostly because the first reading had produced an answer he didn't particularly care for. According to the tag, Stanley Hitchenson was dead. Since Stanley Hitchenson was currently holding the tag and standing naked beside the table he'd apparently been dead on, somebody involved in this process had clearly fucked up.
For the moment, Stan chose to assume it was the hospital. Somebody entering the wrong information into a computer was considerably easier to believe than the alternative, though standing in a morgue holding a piece of paper identifying him as the corpse made optimism difficult.
“This seems bad.”
He checked himself for injuries because that was at least something he understood how to do. His head felt fine. So did his shoulders, ribs, and stomach, which didn't make much sense considering the last thing he remembered was getting the shit kicked out of him in an abandoned house. When his fingers reached his neck, they found two small wounds where he remembered the thing biting him.
Stan frowned.
The memory came back with unpleasant clarity: the thing holding him, the pressure against his throat, then pain. There should have been a wound there. A serious one.
Instead one of the punctures was already gone.
“What the fuck?”
He pressed his fingertips against the second and felt something move beneath them. Stan hurried to the sink and leaned toward the small mirror mounted above it, turning his head until he could see the side of his neck. Dried blood covered his skin and shoulder, far too much of it for the tiny mark that remained, but even as he watched, the raised edges of the puncture tightened. The wound drew itself closed in the mirror until all that remained was smooth, unbroken skin.
Stan stayed bent over the sink with one hand against his neck. He rubbed the spot, then checked the other side and came back to the first because apparently three examinations were the number required before he was willing to accept that he'd just watched his own body heal itself.
There wasn't even a scar.
His gaze drifted from his reflection to the toe tag still clutched in his other hand.
According to the hospital, he was dead. According to his neck, he'd apparently gotten better.
Stan was beginning to suspect the hospital might not be the problem.
The door opened behind him.
A woman carrying a clipboard stepped into the room and stopped so abruptly that one of her shoes squeaked against the tile. For a moment neither of them said anything. Her eyes moved from Stan to the empty steel table, then down to the toe tag still hanging from his hand. Stan watched the color disappear from her face and raised both hands automatically.
“Okay, ma'am, I need you to stay calm.”
The academy had covered frightened civilians. It had covered confused civilians, injured civilians, intoxicated civilians, combative civilians, and several varieties of civilians who absolutely did not want to speak with the police. Stan could not remember any scenario involving a civilian discovering the naked corpse of a police officer wandering around the morgue.
Great fucking choice of words, Officer.
The woman screamed and stumbled backward into the wall hard enough to lose her clipboard. Stan winced and tried to look nonthreatening, which was difficult considering he was naked, covered in dried blood, and still holding the toe tag that presumably explained why she had expected him to remain horizontal.
“Yep, that's fair. Look, I know how this—”
Stan glanced down at himself and stopped.
“Actually, no. That's bullshit. I have no idea how this looks.”
Apparently it looked bad, because she screamed again.
“I'm Officer Hitchenson,” he said, falling back on the increasingly questionable assumption that identifying himself as a police officer would help. “I'm a cop.”
Her eyes dropped toward the tag in his hand.
Stan followed them and grimaced. “Was, apparently. Okay, that's not helping.”
The woman turned and ran.
Stan started after her on instinct, intending to stop her long enough to explain that he wasn't dangerous, though he had absolutely no idea what he planned to say after that. Sorry about the screaming, ma'am. There appears to have been a misunderstanding regarding my death didn't seem likely to improve the situation.
He had barely taken a step when he heard something through the wall.
Stan stopped and listened.
A faint, steady rhythm moved beneath the hum of the fluorescent lights. His first thought was ventilation or some piece of hospital equipment running nearby, but the sound wasn't staying in one place. It was moving away from him.
The woman.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Stan turned slowly toward the door. “What the fuck?”
When he concentrated, the sound sharpened. He could hear the individual beats now, fast and heavy with fear. Stan didn't know much about medicine, but he knew what a heartbeat sounded like.
The woman was already somewhere down the hallway, separated from him by at least one wall, and he could hear her fucking heart.
Before Stan could decide what to do with that information, he became aware of another sound beneath it. Softer. Wetter. A rushing pulse that rose and fell with each beat. He listened for several seconds before his brain supplied an answer he very much wished it hadn't.
Blood.
He could hear the blood moving through her.
Stan's mouth watered.
The reaction was so sudden that for a moment he didn't understand it. Then he caught her scent through the open doorway. She was alive and warm, and suddenly Stan could smell that warmth with an intensity that made the chemical stink of the morgue disappear. He could hear her heart. Hear the blood moving through her neck.
Something deep inside him responded with simple, horrifying certainty.
Food.
Oh fuck.
Stan took a step toward the door before catching himself. His body had moved without any conscious decision to follow her, and the realization frightened him enough that he stopped breathing.
Several seconds passed.
Then Stan realized he hadn't started again.
He sucked in a deliberate breath and held it before letting it out. Nothing changed. No tightness developed in his chest. There was no growing need for another breath. Stan waited until the silence inside him became unbearable, then pressed a hand flat against his chest and searched for his heartbeat.
Nothing.
He shifted his fingers and tried again, as though his heart might have relocated itself slightly to the left while he'd been dead.
Still nothing.
“What kind of Twilight bullshit is this?”
The woman's heartbeat was getting farther away, but Stan could still hear it. Every step. Every pulse. He could have followed her through the building without seeing her, and the knowledge made the hunger twist harder inside him. His fingers tightened around the edge of the stainless-steel table while he fought the urge to move.
Metal groaned beneath his hand.
Stan looked down and found four deep impressions in the steel beneath his fingers. He stared at them for a moment, then tightened his grip experimentally and watched the edge of the table bend.
For a few glorious seconds, being dead, waking up naked in a morgue, having no heartbeat, and developing an alarming interest in the circulatory systems of innocent civilians all became significantly less important.
OH FINALLY SOMETHING FUCKING COOL.
“Holy shit.”
Because he was twenty-two years old and apparently some things survived death, Stan immediately tried it with the other hand. The steel bent just as easily.
He was still staring at it when the woman's heartbeat reached him again from somewhere farther down the hall, and the excitement vanished.
His head turned toward the door before he told it to. His weight shifted forward, and Stan suddenly understood that whatever had happened to him wasn't simply making him hungry. Some part of his body was tracking her automatically—distance, direction, movement—with the same thoughtless ease he'd once smelled food when walking past a restaurant.
Except the word his brain supplied wasn't woman.
It was prey.
Stan recoiled from the thought. There wasn't an evil voice whispering inside his skull or some monster wrestling him for control. That might actually have been easier. He was still himself. He knew exactly what he was doing, and whatever new instincts had come with the rest of this bullshit simply didn't see anything wrong with chasing the woman down.
That frightened him considerably more than the super strength.
“No.”
Stan said it aloud because he needed to hear himself say it. He wrapped both hands around the bent edge of the table and stayed there until the woman's heartbeat had nearly disappeared.
He didn't know what the fuck had happened to him. He didn't know why he'd woken up on a morgue table, why his wounds disappeared while he watched them, why his heart wasn't beating, why he could hear blood through walls, or why stainless steel now had roughly the structural integrity of a soda can. He didn't know what he was.
But he knew what would happen if he followed that woman.
Stan looked toward the door she'd escaped through, then toward another door at the back of the room. He had no idea where the second one went, which under the circumstances made it the better option. Wherever it led, there wasn't a terrified woman with a beating heart on the other side.
“Good enough.”
Stan ran.
* * *
It took Stan three days to accept that he was a vampire. Technically, it took about six hours. The remaining sixty-six were mostly denial.
Vampires weren't real. Stan knew this. He had known it with complete confidence for twenty-two years, and he wasn't prepared to throw away a perfectly good understanding of reality just because reality had spent the last several hours presenting some admittedly compelling counterarguments.
Unfortunately, those counterarguments kept piling up.
The lack of a heartbeat was difficult to explain, and breathing had apparently become a habit rather than a biological requirement. He discovered he could see perfectly in darkness after spending nearly ten minutes wandering around an unlit warehouse before realizing he'd never once thought about finding a light switch. A few minutes later, while trying to get farther inside, he pulled on a locked door and tore the entire thing off its hinges.
Stan stood there holding it for a while.
He'd only meant to open it.
The door itself appeared otherwise fine, which somehow made the situation more ridiculous. Eventually Stan leaned it carefully against the wall and continued into the warehouse. He wasn't sure why he'd bothered. Leaving it on the floor had simply felt rude.
Then there were the teeth.
He discovered those sometime around three in the morning in the bathroom of a closed gas station. He'd gone inside mostly because the building was empty, the bathroom had a lock, and after several hours of wandering around half-dressed and covered in dried blood, Stan had begun appreciating privacy on a spiritual level.
He was washing his face when he noticed something wrong with his reflection.
Stan leaned closer to the cracked mirror and opened his mouth. Two teeth were longer than they had any right to be. He closed his mouth, considered the situation, then opened it again because apparently the first inspection hadn't been sufficiently scientific.
The fangs were still there.
“No.”
He touched one carefully. The point was sharp enough to hurt his fingertip, although the tiny mark disappeared almost immediately.
Stan watched that happen too.
“Nope.”
He shut his mouth and stared at himself for several seconds before checking one final time, giving reality every reasonable opportunity to reconsider.
It hadn't.
“Fuck.”
For the next several hours Stan attempted to prove that all of the obvious conclusions were wrong. He wasn't sure what medical condition could make a person lose his heartbeat, grow fangs, develop superhuman strength, hear blood through walls, heal injuries in seconds, and wake up in a morgue, but he was twenty-two years old and still had some battery left on his phone, so naturally he asked the internet.
His search history deteriorated rapidly.
no heartbeat but conscious
can shock stop pulse but person awake
why can i hear heartbeats through walls
puncture wound disappeared immediately
fangs medical condition adult
Stan stared at that last search for several seconds before adding not teeth grinding. The results were not encouraging.
At one point he considered rabies. Stan knew very little about rabies, which bought him approximately forty-five seconds of optimism before he remembered that rabies generally did not make people dead. He searched that too, just to be thorough, and was disappointed by how little support the internet offered his theory.
Food produced equally poor results.
Stan broke into a convenience store after closing and worked his way through two bags of beef jerky, a protein bar, half a package of powdered donuts, and something from the refrigerated section that claimed to be a chicken sandwich. None of it tasted particularly good, but the bigger problem was that none of it touched the hunger. He tried water, then an energy drink, and finally found himself standing alone in the darkened store holding a bottle of chocolate milk like it represented the last remaining connection to his former life.
“This better fucking work.”
Five minutes later he was kneeling behind the counter throwing it back up. The hunger remained exactly where it had been, gnawing steadily at him, and Stan decided that whatever supernatural bullshit had happened to him was already asking a lot. Taking away chocolate milk on top of everything else was unnecessarily fucking cruel.
People made everything worse.
Stan had always thought cities were noisy, but he'd never understood how much of that noise came from the people themselves. Every person passing an alley carried a heartbeat with them. Every apartment had people breathing behind its walls. He could hear blood moving beneath skin from distances that made absolutely no fucking sense, until walking through the city stopped feeling like moving through a crowd and started feeling like being locked inside a restaurant while starving.
By the second night, the hunger actually hurt.
Stan spent most of that night beneath an overpass, sitting with his back against a concrete support while cars passed overhead. He tried thinking about anything other than eating somebody. Somewhere in the distance a siren wailed, and for a few seconds he wondered whether it was someone he'd met during his four magnificent days of gainful employment.
Then a man appeared on the sidewalk about fifty yards away, and Stan heard his heartbeat before he really noticed anything else about him.
His head lifted automatically.
No.
The man kept walking, completely unaware of him. As he drew closer, Stan could smell him too. He could hear each contraction of the man's heart and almost follow the pulse through the vessels in his neck. His body responded with the same awful certainty it had in the morgue. His muscles tightened and his weight shifted forward as some new instinct told him exactly how easy it would be to get up and close the distance between them.
Don't.
Stan dug his fingers into the concrete beside him and stayed exactly where he was.
The man passed beneath the overpass without ever knowing that the figure hidden in the shadows had spent the better part of thirty seconds fighting the urge to chase him. Stan listened until the footsteps disappeared and the heartbeat finally faded beyond even his new hearing.
Only then did he let himself relax.
“Fuck you,” he muttered at his own stomach.
The hunger didn't care.
That was the part that actually scared him. There hadn't been some evil voice whispering inside his skull. No monster had taken control of his body. He hadn't blacked out or suddenly become somebody else. He had simply smelled food and wanted to eat, and as far as whatever new instincts had taken up residence inside him were concerned, there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Stan remained beneath the overpass for a long time after the man was gone.
Sunlight settled the argument the following morning.
By then he'd managed to convince himself that several vampire-related conclusions were still premature. The teeth were admittedly difficult to explain. So was the blood thing. The lack of a heartbeat probably presented the strongest argument, along with the whole officially-being-dead problem, but movies had gotten plenty of shit wrong before. He had no direct evidence regarding sunlight.
So shortly after dawn, wrapped in a blanket he'd taken from a donation bin, Stan extended one hand into the morning sun.
Nothing happened.
He left it there for several seconds. His skin didn't smoke. Nothing caught fire. There wasn't even any pain.
“Huh.”
That felt promising enough that Stan stood, tightened the blanket around his shoulders, and stepped cautiously out from beneath the overpass.
He made it approximately three steps before every nerve in his body informed him that this had been a terrible fucking idea.
Stan launched himself backward into the shadows, hit the concrete on one shoulder, and rolled until the sunlight stopped touching him. By the time he managed to wrap himself back inside the blanket, small wisps of smoke were curling from one sleeve and the smell of scorched fabric had joined the increasingly long list of things wrong with his morning.
Stan stared out at the sunlight.
“Okay. Vampire.”
There really wasn't much left to argue about.
Accepting it, unfortunately, didn't tell him anything useful. There hadn't been an instruction manual waiting in the morgue. No ancient mentor appeared to explain his new abilities. No mysterious society of vampire hunters arrived to hand him a convenient list of rules. Stan had a nearly dead phone, four days of police experience, a stolen blanket, no money he could safely access, and an increasingly alarming desire to bite people.
His family thought he was dead too.
Stan learned quickly that thinking about them led places he wasn't ready to go. His parents would have been notified. His friends knew. Somewhere there were probably people deciding what he should be buried in and what picture to use at his funeral. He had the insane impulse more than once to call somebody just to tell them he was alive, only to remember that alive had become a fairly complicated claim.
Whenever his thoughts headed in that direction, Stan found something else to concentrate on.
Reynolds was harder.
He kept seeing him on the floor of the abandoned house. Sometimes it was the sound that came back first. Other times it was Reynolds yelling Back, Hitchenson! or the way he'd put himself between Stan and the thing in that hallway without apparently needing to think about it.
Stan had obeyed Reynolds for approximately none of it, and over those first few days he replayed that fact often enough to drive himself fucking insane. If he'd stayed back, would Reynolds still be alive? Probably not. Maybe. Stan ran the scene over and over until he'd produced a dozen different endings. Reynolds died in most of them. In a couple Stan died first. One particularly optimistic version had backup arriving thirty seconds earlier and everybody walking out alive.
Stan hated that one the most.
Eventually he recognized what he was doing. He was trying to investigate the past as though enough repetition might uncover the one piece of evidence that allowed him to change it.
There wasn't one.
Reynolds was dead.
There was, however, one thing Stan could still do something about.
The thing that had killed Reynolds was still out there.
The thing that had killed him.
Stan remembered the abandoned house, the hallway, and the pale face smiling at him while Reynolds lay dead on the floor. Whenever his thoughts drifted toward his family, his funeral, or the increasingly difficult question of whether there was even a Stanley Hitchenson anymore, he focused on that face instead.
He wanted some fucking payback.
Stan had been a police officer for four days. Four days wasn't much, but the academy had at least managed to hammer one principle into him: when somebody hurts somebody, you find them.
So Stan investigated his own murder.
He was bad at it.
Not completely useless, which Stan took as a small victory, but there was a fairly substantial difference between learning investigative procedure in an academy classroom and conducting an off-the-books homicide investigation when the homicide victim was yourself.
Still, procedure gave him somewhere to start.
He returned to the abandoned house after midnight. Standing outside it again was harder than he'd expected. For several minutes he remained across the street looking at the dark windows, remembering Reynolds beside him and the two of them waiting for backup before the screaming started.
Then Stan crossed the street and went back inside.
The house still smelled like blood.
He forced himself through the hallway slowly, reconstructing what he could remember and photographing anything that seemed useful with the last of his phone battery. He marked where Reynolds had fallen. He found damage from the fight, blood that might have belonged to any of them, and enough physical evidence to remind himself that four days as a cop did not remotely qualify him to process a crime scene alone.
So he wrote down what he knew.
SUSPECT: UNKNOWN MALE
Stan considered that for a moment before adding:
DESCRIPTION: PALE. FAST.
That looked useless.
He thought for another few seconds and wrote:
EXTREMELY FUCKING FAST
Stan immediately imagined Sergeant Miller reading the report, sighed, and crossed out fucking.
Professional standards still mattered.
Apparently.
The property itself gave him somewhere to begin. Stan worked backward through names associated with the house, old records, vehicle registrations, utilities, and anything else he could still access using credentials belonging to a man the city currently believed was dead. The credentials lasted longer than he expected, which didn't inspire tremendous confidence in departmental cybersecurity.
Eventually somebody noticed.
When his access stopped working, Stan improvised.
Improvising mostly meant trespassing.
It wasn't elegant police work, but elegance had become a lower priority now that he couldn't walk into the station without creating several serious administrative problems and at least one probable religious crisis. He followed names and addresses, dug through whatever records he could reach, and scared the absolute shit out of a night janitor who had not expected a legally deceased rookie cop to be wandering around an office building at two in the morning.
He also discovered that perfect night vision was extremely useful for breaking into places.
Stan felt conflicted about how convenient that was.
His investigation was not without setbacks. At one point he spent forty minutes watching a completely innocent suburban house before finally checking his notes and realizing he'd transposed two digits in the address. Stan stared at the number he'd written down, then at the number bolted beside the front door across the street, and quietly said, “Goddammit.”
He packed up his extremely unofficial surveillance operation and decided that particular mistake would never appear in any report.
Eventually, through a combination of actual investigative training, stubbornness, and dumb fucking luck, Stan found the thing that had killed him.
It was living in an old two-story house on the other side of the city.
Stan found the place irritatingly ordinary. After finally accepting that vampires were real, he'd half expected an underground lair, a gothic mansion, a crypt, or at minimum something with gargoyles. Instead he got peeling paint, a detached garage, a patchy front lawn, and a satellite dish mounted slightly crooked on the roof.
He spent almost an hour watching the house from across the street before deciding he had the right address this time.
Stan had also acquired a tire iron from an abandoned car.
That was the extent of his tactical preparation.
Calling for backup was impossible. Calling anyone was impossible. Going into the house alone to confront a supernatural creature that had already killed him once was obviously an atrocious plan, and the longer Stan stood in the shadows thinking about it, the more obvious that became.
Unfortunately, he had not generated a second plan.
He looked down at the tire iron in his hand. It remained a tire iron and offered no meaningful tactical advice.
“All right.”
Stan crossed the street.
The vampire laughed when he walked through the door.
By then Stan had accumulated three days of deeply unfortunate supernatural evidence, so there wasn't much point pretending he didn't know what he was looking at anymore. Pale skin. Impossible speed. Fangs. Blood. The whole waking-up-dead thing. The list of plausible alternatives had become extremely short.
A vampire.
His vampire, apparently, judging by the delighted expression on its face.
“There you are,” it said. “I wondered how long it would take you to come back.”
Stan tightened his grip on the tire iron.
He had imagined this conversation more than once. In most versions he said something intimidating. Something about Reynolds, or justice, or what happened when you murdered a police officer and turned his idiot rookie partner into a bloodsucking corpse. During one particularly hungry stretch beneath the overpass, Stan had constructed an entire speech that had sounded pretty fucking good at the time.
Standing there now, he couldn't remember a word of it.
“Yeah.”
The vampire smiled at him with the pleased expression of a parent whose child had finally learned to walk.
“Come here, child.”
So Stan hit it with the tire iron.
He really hadn't thought his plan through, and the conversation deteriorated from there.
The first hit worked considerably better than Stan expected. The tire iron caught the vampire across the side of the head and launched it backward into a table hard enough to destroy the thing. Wood exploded across the room, and for approximately two seconds Stan stood there holding the tire iron and wondering if he'd dramatically underestimated how powerful he'd become.
Then the vampire stood back up.
“Oh.”
It crossed the room before Stan could react and hit him hard enough to send him through a different table.
Stan landed in a pile of broken wood with most of the air knocked out of him, which was impressive considering he apparently didn't need air anymore. He lay there just long enough for several important facts to rearrange themselves in his head.
Apparently they were both super strong.
That seemed like the sort of information he probably should have obtained before beginning the fight.
Stan got up anyway.
What followed was less a fight than a prolonged argument conducted with furniture. Stan lost the tire iron, found it again, lost it a second time, and gradually discovered that his opponent had a fairly substantial advantage in experience. The vampire moved with purpose. Stan mostly reacted, survived, and occasionally smashed something when an opportunity presented itself.
At one point a chair broke across his face, teaching him that being technically dead did absolutely nothing to make blunt-force trauma more pleasant. A little later Stan tackled the vampire through a door and experienced perhaps half a second of genuine pride before the vampire responded by throwing him through the next one.
His shoulder broke somewhere during the landing. Stan knew because he heard the crack and because arms were not generally supposed to point in that direction.
“Fuck!”
He grabbed it automatically, and beneath his hand the joint began to move.
Stan stared as bone shifted beneath his skin and the shoulder slowly pulled itself back where it belonged. Pain receded almost as quickly as it had arrived.
The vampire punched him through a cabinet before he could decide how he felt about that.
By then Stan had become genuinely offended by how much better the other vampire was at being a vampire. He'd only been doing this for three fucking days. The learning curve seemed unreasonable.
Eventually, though, something changed.
The vampire stopped laughing.
Every time Stan dragged himself back to his feet, the amusement faded a little more. Stan wasn't faster. He wasn't stronger. He definitely wasn't better at fighting. But apparently being too stubborn to stay down counted for something, because what had begun as entertainment gradually became irritation and then anger.
The vampire caught him by the throat and slammed him into a wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind him.
“You belong to me now.”
Stan sagged against the wall, dazed and covered in dust. His shoulder barely hurt anymore.
“No.”
The vampire paused.
The confusion on its face almost made Stan laugh.
He spat blood onto the floor and pushed himself upright as much as the hand around his throat allowed.
“No.”
“You don't understand what you are.”
Something about the words caught in Stan's head.
It.
For three days he'd called the vampire it. The thing. Monster. Murderer. Something that looked like a person but wasn't.
Now Stan knew what it was.
And if that was an it—
Shit, am I an it now?
The thought hit harder than he expected. It was stupid and frightening and, beneath both of those things, far more serious than Stan wanted to examine while somebody was actively trying to murder him for the second time that week.
The vampire smiled, apparently mistaking his silence for fear.
“You will understand.”
Stan felt something beneath his foot.
The tire iron.
“Yeah.”
He let his gaze drop toward it.
“I'm getting that.”
The vampire followed his eyes.
Stan moved.
Oh shit.
Afterward, Stan would never be entirely sure which swing ended it.
The fight kept going until suddenly it didn't.
One moment there were fists, broken furniture, blood, and the tire iron moving through Stan's hands. The next he was standing in the wreckage waiting for the vampire to get back up.
It didn't.
Stan remained there for a while, staring down at what was left of his maker. His clothes were ruined. One shoe had disappeared somewhere during the fight. Blood covered his hands and shirt, some of it his and some of it not, and his entire body hurt despite the increasingly debatable question of whether his body was capable of hurting for very long.
He was also breathing hard.
Stan noticed that eventually.
He didn't need to breathe. He knew that now. Apparently his body had simply decided that nearly getting beaten to death—again—felt like an appropriate occasion for old habits.
The thing that had killed Reynolds was dead.
It wouldn't hurt anyone else.
Stan waited for that realization to become satisfaction.
It didn't.
Instead he slid down the damaged wall and sat on the floor beside the remains of the worst thing that had ever happened to him. For the first time in three days, nothing was chasing him, tempting him, burning him, or demanding his immediate attention.
That was when Stan discovered the fairly significant flaw in his revenge plan.
He had never considered what happened if it worked.
For three days there had always been another task. Escape the morgue. Don't eat anybody. Find somewhere dark. Figure out what the fuck had happened to him. Find the thing responsible. As long as another problem existed, Stan could keep moving without looking too closely at everything he'd lost.
Now there wasn't another problem.
The vampire was dead at his feet, and Stan was still dead too.
He couldn't go home. He couldn't go back to work. Walking into the station and announcing that Officer Hitchenson had returned from the dead and would appreciate being placed back on the schedule seemed unlikely to go well. His family thought he was dead. The department thought he was dead. Somewhere, people he loved were probably grieving him while he sat in a wrecked house covered in another man's blood.
And Reynolds actually was dead.
Stan rested his head against the wall.
For the first time since waking in the morgue, he let himself sit there without trying to solve anything.
He had wanted to be a cop. Four days. He'd gotten four fucking days, and somehow that tiny piece of his life already felt like something that had happened to somebody else.
Stan looked down at his hands.
“Well,” he whispered, “what the fuck do I do now?”
For a moment, nothing answered.
Then something heard him.
It wasn't God. Stan would eventually become quite certain about that.
Whatever turned its attention toward him was older than anything he could have understood in that moment, something that existed beyond the little boundaries by which human beings divided the possible from the impossible. Its attention settled upon a dead young man sitting alone in the wreckage of a ruined room.
It saw what had been done to him.
It saw what he had become.
More importantly, it saw what he had refused to become.
Stan felt something change.
At first he thought the house had gone quiet, but that wasn't right. The silence was larger than the room. The distant traffic disappeared. The settling creak of damaged wood vanished. Even the tiny sounds he'd become accustomed to hearing with his new senses seemed to fall away until Stan was sitting inside a silence so complete that he slowly lifted his head.
“What the fuck?”
The floor disappeared beneath him.
Stan dropped, except there was nowhere to fall. The room stretched upward and sideways at the same time, walls bending into angles that made his eyes hurt. For one impossible second he saw the wrecked house from above, from inside, and from somewhere so far away that the entire city seemed no larger than a handful of lights.
Then even that was gone.
Stan had just enough time to realize that reality itself appeared to be folding around him.
“Oh, come on—”
And the world vanished.