Born of Blood

Dahlia and Lucita had almost reached the front door when a shape rose out of the dark, blocking it — a man’s silhouette, eyes burning red, fangs catching what little light there was.

“What the fuck is that?” Lucita whispered.

Neither of them moved. For a moment, neither did the shape.

“This is a prank, right?” Lucita’s laugh came out thin. “Come out now. We’re not scared of you.”

The figure took a step forward, and the laugh died in her throat.

Dahlia saw it clearly then. This was no prank. This was real.

“Run!” she screamed.

Lucita’s sprained ankle didn’t slow her down — she moved like she’d never been hurt at all, fear burning straight through the pain. But the thing was faster. It was in front of them before they’d covered ten feet, and both girls went down screaming, hitting the floor hard.

Dahlia cursed, scrambling up, but a hand closed around her arm and hauled her back to her feet.

“Let me go!” She kicked at empty air. The figure lifted her higher than should have been possible and slammed her down. The thud of her body echoed through the hall.

She hadn’t caught her breath before its fangs found her neck.

The pain was a white-hot line through her whole body. She screamed.

It kept biting until Lucita, sobbing now, grabbed a chair off the floor and swung it into the thing’s back with everything she had. It let go, looked at Lucita once — long enough that she felt it memorizing her face — and was gone into the dark.

Lucita crawled to Dahlia and pulled her into her arms. Dahlia wasn’t moving. Blood soaked through the front of Lucita’s shirt.

“Help! Somebody help us, please!”

The hospital hummed with the particular chaos of a night shift — a baby crying somewhere down the hall, a gurney rattling past, low voices behind a curtain. It sounded less like healing and more like a waiting room between two worlds.

At least Dahlia had the room to herself. She sat propped against the pillows, watching the lights outside the window, working through her fifth bottle of water that afternoon. She couldn’t explain the thirst. It didn’t feel like ordinary thirst — more like something inside her demanded to be filled, and water was the only thing she knew to offer it.

A nurse stepped in.

“Miss Spivot, you’re cleared to go home.”

“Oh, thank God.” Dahlia reached for her bag, then stopped. “Actually — my friend isn’t here yet. She was supposed to help me pack. Can I wait?”

“Of course,” the nurse said, and left her to the beeping monitors and the too-white walls.

Dahlia set the bottle down and paced. Waiting made the thirst worse. She pressed her forehead to the glass, and that was when the wind hit — a sudden, unnatural gust that had no business being inside a sealed room. Cold raced down her spine.

She wasn’t imagining it. Someone was watching her.

She turned slowly. A man stood in the doorway, still as a photograph. Under the fluorescent light she recognized him at once — the same shape from the front door, the same face that had been inches from her throat.

He ran the second she moved.

She went after him, and the speed she caught herself moving at should have frightened her more than it did. Days out of a hospital bed, and she was closing the distance like her body had never been hurt at all.

“Thank you so much, Doctor,” a woman said, stepping out of an office down the hall.

“Don’t thank me yet. We just hope he wakes up so we can see some improvement,” the doctor said, walking her out.

“I hope so too.”

She turned to go — and was shoved to the ground by the man Dahlia was chasing.

“What the hell!” the doctor snapped. “This is a hospital!”

Dahlia tore past a second later, and it stopped him cold. She was his patient. Nobody three days out of a hospital bed should be able to move like that.

“Are they mad?” the woman asked, trying to get up.

“I’ll be right back.” He took off after Dahlia, calling her name, but she wasn’t listening to anything except the pulse of her own instinct — the certainty that the man watching her window was the same one who’d put her in that bed, and that if she lost him now, she’d never know why.

She was so close. Then she slammed into someone and hit the ground, and by the time she looked up, he was gone.

“Would you at least watch where you’re going?” she snapped at the person she’d bumped into, then muttered a curse, out of breath.

“Dahlia!” The doctor caught up, chest heaving.

“Yes?” She was still scanning the crowd.

“Why are you out of your room, and why are you chasing someone?”

“Listen, Doctor, I don’t have time for a lecture. I’ve gotta go.” She pushed past him and out of the building.

The search was useless. Whoever he was, he’d vanished.

She looked up. The sky was darkening fast. Lucita was supposed to have picked her up an hour ago and still wasn’t there.

The doctor found her sitting on the front steps and held out a bottle of water. “Here.”

She took a long drink and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Thanks.”

“You’re a fast runner.”

“Wasn’t running. Just going after someone.” She peeled at the label, avoiding his eyes.

“Isn’t Lucita coming today?”

“Probably out partying again,” she said, and almost smiled.

“You can’t sit out here — it’s getting dark.” He hesitated. “You could come to my place. If you want.”

She looked at him for a long moment and laughed. “That’s bold.”

“I meant it decently.”

“Decent? I don’t even know your name and you’re inviting me to your house.”

“I’m Richard.”

“How do you not know my name when you’re the doctor assigned to me?”

“Maybe I don’t,” he admitted, and she almost liked him for it. “Offer still stands. My shift’s over.”

“No thanks. Lucita will be here any minute.” She stood. “Get home safe.”

She walked back inside without looking back. Richard sat there a while longer before he finally got up, started his car, and took one last look at the hospital before he drove off — no idea that by morning, half the city would be talking about what happened next.

Dahlia wandered the halls instead of going back to her room. A door marked with a cold-storage symbol caught her eye, and she slipped inside, letting it shut behind her.

She didn’t feel the cold at all. That, more than anything, should have told her something was wrong.

She peeled the bandage off her neck without thinking. The bite from the man at the door — the wound that should have needed stitches — had healed to nothing.

Along one wall, boxes sat in neat, deliberate rows, and something in her pulled toward them the way hunger pulls toward the smell of food. She read the label on the nearest one: TYPE B.

A blood bank.

She told herself she was only curious as she picked one up. She told herself that even as she tore it open.

The first swallow silenced the thirst in a way five bottles of water never had. She dropped to her knees and reached for another, and another, emptying the entire box before some small, distant part of her caught up to what her hands were doing.

She looked down at the drained bags. At the blood covering her fingers.

“Oh my God.” Her voice cracked. “What did I do?”

*

Sirens tore through the city for the rest of the night. Ambulances lined the streets. Paramedics zipped body bags while police tried to hold back a crowd that kept growing.

At the hospital, Richard and every nurse on shift moved without stopping.

Body after body came through the doors, and every single one was already dead.

“Where the hell are all these coming from?” Richard demanded.

“Doc, at least one on every street,” a nurse said. “All with the same bite marks on their necks.”

“Autopsy says cause of death is blood loss,” said Nurse Abigail. “Every one of them.”

“Bite marks.” Richard’s stomach turned. “Not one of them survived long enough to make it here alive?”

“Not one.”

“Let me see a body.”

He followed her into the morgue. The mark on the corpse’s neck stopped him cold — the same wound, the exact same shape, that he’d seen healing on Dahlia’s throat the day she was brought in.

What is going on?

Movement caught his eye through the small window. Dahlia, walking past the morgue like it was nothing.

“What’s she doing down here? Her room’s on the second floor.”

“Sorry, Doc?”

“Excuse me.” He was already moving.

He followed her at a distance, silent, and watched her disappear into her room and drop straight into sleep. He eased the door open and crossed to her bed.

Dried leaves were tangled in her hair. Her clothes were streaked with dirt. He brushed the hair back from her neck, needing to see the wound again — and found smooth, unbroken skin. Nothing. Not even a scar.

Then he saw her hands. Both of them, stained dark red to the knuckle.

Why is she covered in blood? Didn’t she go home hours ago?

His pager buzzed against his hip, and he had no choice but to leave.

The moment the door clicked shut, Dahlia’s eyes opened.

Somewhere far from the hospital lights, a windowless room glowed only with a dull red haze. Bound figures huddled in the corner, and a man sat above them on a raised throne, a glass of something dark and red turning slowly in his hand.

A second man entered, smiling like he’d already won something.

“Mission accomplished,” he said.

“How?” the one on the throne asked, without looking up.

“Dahlia Spivot completed her transition tonight. Her first drink of blood.”

“The whole town’s already flooded with the aftermath.”

The man on the throne finally lifted his eyes, and something like satisfaction moved behind them.

“Interesting,” he said, and set his glass down.

Dahlia woke to find Lucita in the room, folding clothes into a bag, and had no memory of her walking in. Every sound in the room was suddenly too sharp — the rustle of fabric, her own pulse, and beneath it all, Lucita’s heartbeat, steady and warm and unbearably loud.

Lucita turned and flinched at the look on Dahlia’s face.

“What? Why are you staring at me like I did something?”

“Where were you?” Dahlia’s voice came out low. She looked away before Lucita could see her eyes.

“Somewhere.”

“Somewhere doesn’t have a name?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“I’m sorry — something came up, that’s why I didn’t make it,” Lucita said.

“Something like a party?” Dahlia stood, closing the distance between them.

“I wasn’t at a party. I was with our course rep. We went on a date.” Lucita’s voice climbed, defensive. “And so what if I was? I didn’t ask to be your only babysitter.”

“You’re always doing exactly what you want. Dates, parties, whatever you feel like. And me? I’m always second.”

“Second? Dahlia, you’re in the hospital because of one bad night, not because of me —”

“After everything, you still had the nerve to go on a date, you worthless piece of —”

“Excuse me?” Lucita shoved her, hard, and something in Dahlia’s face cracked and cleared all at once, the anger draining out of her as fast as it had come.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that.” Her voice broke. “I’m just — I was alone here last night, and there was a man outside my window, watching me, and I chased him and I couldn’t catch him and I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

She was crying now, and Lucita pulled her into a hug without hesitation, all the anger gone from her voice.

“It’s okay. I’m here now.”

That was when Dahlia felt it change. Her fangs slid free. Her eyes burned red at the edges of her vision. Her nails lengthened against Lucita’s back.

She could hear it again — blood, moving through Lucita’s veins, closer than it had ever been.

She leaned in, fangs bared toward the girl’s throat —

—and the door flew open.

She froze. The fangs vanished. Her eyes cleared like nothing had happened at all.

“What’s going on in here?” Richard asked, taking in the two of them locked together.

“Nothing,” Lucita said quickly, eyes still on Dahlia.

“Okay. I heard you’re being discharged, Dahlia?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Take care.” He left, and the door shut behind him.

“Ooh,” Lucita said, arching an eyebrow. “You made yourself a friend.”

“He’s not,” Dahlia muttered, dropping onto the bed, her hands trembling in her lap.

“Girl, you’re filthy. Go shower.”

“Okay.” Dahlia pushed off the bed and shuffled toward the bathroom on legs that didn’t quite feel like her own.

She stared at her reflection in the mirror — at the face that still looked like hers, and the eyes that, for one second in that hospital room, hadn’t.

What is wrong with me?

What am I becoming?