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She pulls me into a recessed doorway, both of us breathing hard despite the relatively short distance. Around us, the night continues as normal—cars passing, pedestrians walking unhurriedly along the sidewalk, oblivious to the bloodshed we’ve just left behind.

“What the hell just happened back there?” I demand, my voice barely above a whisper. “Your face—the acid should haveburned you, but look at you. Look at you.” I reach out and grab her chin between my fingers, examining her in the dull light, surprised at how well I can see her. “You’re healed.”

She nods, wincing.

I squeeze her face a little harder, unable to comprehend any of what I saw. “You moved faster than any human could move.”

Something like resignation comes over her eyes until finally I release her.

“I think you know what happened,” she says quietly. “Part of you has always known, even if your conscious mind refused to accept it.”

“Known what?” I cry out softly, throwing out my arms as if God will finally bestow me with an answer to this mess.

“What I am.” She takes a deep breath, as if preparing for rejection. “I’m a vampire, Callahan. I was born this way, my abilities manifesting when I turned twenty-one. That’s why I can heal so quickly, why I’m stronger and faster than humans. That’s why I can compel people, most people anyway, except for you.”

I blink at her.

Vampire.

The word echoes in my mind, colliding with fragments of forgotten folklore, pulp fiction, and childhood nightmares.

Vampire.

The stuff of horror films and penny dreadfuls. Yet I’ve just witnessed the impossible with my own eyes—her face regenerating, her inhuman speed as she disarmed a trained thug.

“That’s insane,” I say, though without conviction.

“Is it?” She leans in closer, her scent—that distinctive jasmine—enveloping me, her eyes becoming darker and darker. “Haven’t you felt it from the beginning? The connection between us? The recognition?”

“Recognition of what?” My voice sounds distant to my own ears.

“Of your own kind.” She reaches up, touching my face with cool fingers, her gaze searching. “You’re a vampire too, Callahan.”

I blink at her, harpooned by her words.

“That’s what’s happening to you,” she goes on. “Why you’re having blackouts, why you killed Marco without remembering. You’re in transition, your true nature emerging at thirty-five, just as it does for males. But you never knew what you were…until now.”

The world tilts beneath my feet, reality shifting like quicksand. Memories flash through my mind—the taste of blood in my mouth after blackouts, the heightened senses, the hunger…the hunger.

“That’s not possible,” I whisper, but even as I say it, I know it’s true. Some deep, buried part of me recognizes the truth in her words, accepts it with a strange relief.

It explains everything. It explains the connection I felt to Lena from the first moment I saw her—recognition of another predator, another immortal walking among humans.

But no, no.

How the fuck can this be?

“I can help you understand what you are,” Lena says gently. “I have friends, other vampires who can teach you to control your hunger, your strength. Who can figure out how to bind yourself so you’re always in control. You don’t have to face this alone.”

Vampires. Other vampires. A society hidden within human society, invisible except to those who know where to look.

And I’m one of them.

Have always been one of them, though I never knew it.

“Did I kill Elizabeth Short?” The question escapes before I can stop it, the fear I’ve been carrying since my first blackout finally voiced.

Lena hesitates, then shakes her head. “At first that was my worry too. But I don’t think so. Her murder was a ritual, planned. We think it could be the work of other vampires—a Russian family called the Ivanovs. They might be the Europeans she talked about.”