Muffled gasps and shuddering sobs. It was a chorus of fear rising from behind walls and windows, from those who had watched through cracks and curtains, hidden but helpless. Their cries, fractured with disgust, hammered against her ears.
No!What had she done? Consuming the monster’s heart and power, taking it into herself.
She dropped to her knees and jammed her fingers into her mouth.
Her nails, razors now, tore into her throat as she forced them down, desperate to purge the taste, the texture, the memory of blood and brain and sinew. But the substance clung. It refused to release its hold. Nothing came up.
Her stomach rolled, and inside her, something shifted.
It moved—not sentient, not quite, but alive in the way mold is alive, in the way plague dances between bodies. It threaded through her gut and wound around her heart, pulsing up behind her eyes before settling in her skull.
And it wanted blood. It wanted life. It wanted to spread.
She staggered upright and reeled back at the realization. Whatever had made the monster into a vampire now lived inside her, wriggling through her veins. There was no voice, but its purpose pounded inside her bones.
Her teeth ground as her vision narrowed and every muscle braced to strike, to tear, to burn.
She hadn’t asked for this.
That thing had used her, violated her body, warped it, and tried to make it in its own image. It had corrupted her without her consent, rewriting the essence of what she was.
She turned back to the mangled corpse, shoulders trembling. A sob tore loose as she stepped forward, her legs unsteady, as if the ground beneath her had turned uneven and uncertain.
“Death isn’t good enough for you!” she hissed. “Why did I let you do that, you fucking monster!”
Her rage turned inward.
“You should’ve known better. You should’ve been ready. You shouldn’t have even been here, thinking you were untouchable, you stupid, arrogant bitch!”
Snarling, she crossed the space between them and raised her wrist to her mouth.
Something—instinct or hunger, it didn’t matter which—guided her hand.
Her fangs tore through flesh, and blood spilled freely.
Beginning at the corpse’s head, she bathed it. Her blood soaked through tangled hair, down ruined features, pooling in the hollowed chest. She moved methodically, painting every inch of the monster’s form in red.
Only when it was done did she lift her wrist to her mouth.
She licked the wound, tasting the blood in measured strokes, and when she pulled her arm back, the skin had already sealed, smooth and unbroken.
Waiting, silence stretched around her, pressing against her ears, heavy with the weight of what was coming.
Rynna’s fingers flexed at her side, and she watched as the corpse twitched beneath her.
Bone fragments began to shift, clicking and grinding together. One by one, they found each other. Splinters reformed, and fractures sealed. The skeleton reassembled itself as though guided by invisible hands, each segment slotting into place like a puzzle too well-practiced to fail.
Flesh came next.
Blood and fluids gushed in reverse, flowing back into torn cavities, reoccupying veins and organs with mechanical obedience. The viscera realigned, congealed patches smoothing out as if time itself had unraveled and played backwards at her feet.
Rynna didn’t blink. She couldn’t look away.
Skin finally blossomed over the vampire’s frame, spreading in smooth waves, fresh and unmarred. Her mouth snapped shut. Her eyes inflated, lids fluttering before sealing tight. What had been pieces now lay whole again, reborn in a grotesque, inverted choreography of death.
Rynna stepped forward, boots squelching in the blood-slick mud. Without ceremony, she leaned over the newly restored figure and spat directly onto its face.
The vampire flinched. Her brow furrowed in disgust, and a hand shot up, fingers scrubbing at the moisture with a startled grimace.
