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S ilas led me through a maze of stone corridors, each twist and turn mapped instantly in my mind.

The scent of earth grew stronger as we ascended, damp giving way to frost, until finally a heavy iron door groaned open and the night air rushed in like a living thing.

I stopped at the threshold, overwhelmed.

The world I’d known all my life was gone, replaced by something so vivid, so raw.

It might have been an entirely different reality.

Stars weren’t just pinpricks of light—they pulsed and sang.

The wind carried stories from miles away—pine sap, deer musk, wood smoke from distant hearths.

The moon bathed everything in silver that my new eyes perceived as clearly as daylight.

This was the night as I’d never known it—not as absence, but as a realm of its own, vast and vibrant and waiting.

“Come,” Silas said, his breath clouding in the winter air. “The night won’t hurt you anymore. It’s your domain now.”

I stepped outside, feeling the crunch of frozen ground beneath my new boots. We stood in a small clearing surrounded by dense woods. No buildings were visible beyond the stone structure we’d emerged from—a root cellar entrance, I realized, disguised to look abandoned.

“Where are we?” I asked, my voice sounding too sharp in the quiet night.

“About five miles outside of Exeter,” Silas replied. “The Order maintains several facilities like this one throughout New England. Places to train, to prepare our members to fight the evil that lurks in the night. In this case, to shelter those who need... special accommodation.”

Like vampires, I thought. Like monsters.

I turned slowly, taking in the surrounding forest. The trees were winter-bare, their branches reaching toward the sky like supplicants.

I could hear the heartbeats of small animals hidden in burrows, the rustle of an owl’s wings a quarter-mile away, the slow drift of clouds across the star-field above. The sensory richness was intoxicating.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, horrified at my own reaction.

Silas glanced at me. “Beauty is irrelevant. What matters is utility.” He pointed to the woods. “Your senses are heightened. Your strength and speed are enhanced. Tonight, you learn to use these abilities to hunt.”

My stomach twisted at the word. “Hunt? I’ve had enough blood for now.”

“Not for food,” he clarified. “For tracking. For killing those who would prey on the innocent. The skills are the same, regardless of the purpose.”

He reached into a giant wooden box near the door of the facility and withdrew a small cage. Inside, a gray opossum hissed and bared its teeth. Its eyes caught the moonlight and flashed red—the same unnatural hue that now colored my own gaze.

“What happened to it?” I asked, taking an involuntary step back.

“Vampire blood.” Silas held the cage up, allowing me to see the creature more clearly. “When ingested, it can create a lesser form of infection in animals. Not a true vampire, but something in between—vicious, blood-seeking, a shadow of the real thing.”

The opossum lunged at the bars, tiny claws extended. Its heartbeat was rapid, erratic, nothing like the steady rhythm of the forest’s natural denizens.

“You’ve been creating these things?” The thought sickened me.

“We have methods of containing the infection.” Silas’s voice betrayed no emotion. “This creature was already dying—rabies. Now it serves a purpose. Your purpose.” He met my eyes. “You will track it, hunt it, and kill it before it can harm anything else.”

“And if I refuse?”

His hand moved to his pocket, where I knew he kept both stake and crucifix. “Then you’re of no use to us. And we don’t tolerate useless things.”

I looked away, unable to hold his gaze. “Fine. Release it.”

Silas opened the cage door and upended it. The opossum dropped to the ground, landing on its feet with unnatural agility. It froze for a moment, sniffing the air, then darted into the underbrush with a speed no ordinary marsupial could manage.

“It has a head start,” Silas said. “Find it. Kill it. Return to me when it’s done.”

“How am I supposed to—“

“You’ll know.” He stepped back, fading into the shadows near the cellar entrance. “Your body remembers what your mind refuses to accept. You’re a predator now, Alice. Act like one.”

I stood alone in the clearing, the opossum’s scent already fading on the wind. I closed my eyes, trying to center myself in this overwhelming new reality. What was I supposed to do? How did one track a creature through a forest at night?

The answer came not as a thought, but as instinct.

My nostrils flared, separating the opossum’s distinctive odor—fur, musk, the wrongness of vampire blood—from the thousand other scents of the forest. My ears picked up the rapid patter of small feet, already distant but clear against the background of wind and creaking branches.

Without conscious decision, I moved. Not running, not yet, but gliding between trees, each step precisely placed.

The forest floor spoke to me through my feet—here a depression where the creature had landed, there a scatter of dead leaves disturbed by its passing.

I followed, my body operating with a confidence my mind didn’t share.

The night embraced me, wrapping around my form like a second skin. I realized with a start that I was cold—I could feel the temperature, register it as information, but it didn’t bother me the way it once would have. My dead flesh had no need for warmth.

I quickened my pace, sliding between trees, leaping over fallen logs with effortless grace.

The opossum’s trail grew stronger—it had paused here to sniff at a hollow tree, changed direction there when an owl swooped low.

I was reading the forest like a book written in scent and sound and subtle signs.

A part of me marveled at this new ability, this effortless communion with the night world.

Another part recoiled, recognizing the predatory nature of my pursuit.

I wasn’t tracking the opossum out of curiosity or scientific interest—I was hunting it.

My body thrummed with the ancient rhythm of predator and prey, a dance as old as life itself.

The chase led me deeper into the woods, where the trees grew closer together and the underbrush thickened.

I caught glimpses of movement ahead—a flash of gray fur, the twitch of a naked tail.

The opossum was fast, unnaturally so, but I was faster.

The gap between us narrowed with each passing moment.

As I ran, memories flickered through my mind—incongruous, unwelcome. My father teaching me to track rabbit prints in fresh snow. “God gives us signs, Alice,” he’d said, crouching beside me. “In nature, in scripture, in the quiet moments of prayer. We need only the wisdom to read them.”

What signs was God sending me now, in this mockery of the hunt? What wisdom could I glean from the monster I’d become?

The opossum veered suddenly, climbing a gnarled oak with frantic speed.

I followed without hesitation, my fingers finding purchase in the rough bark, my body moving with a spider-like agility that should have been impossible.

I climbed twenty feet in seconds, the branches barely swaying under my weight.

The creature had reached a hollow near the top, its red eyes gleaming from the darkness within. It hissed, showing teeth too long for its mouth, a grotesque parody of my own transformation. Its heartbeat thundered in my ears, frantic with fear and the corruption in its blood.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, not sure if I was addressing the opossum or myself.

I reached into the hollow, faster than thought. My hand closed around matted fur, feeling the creature’s spine beneath my fingers. It twisted, sinking its teeth into my wrist. I felt the pressure but no pain—another reminder of what I’d become.

With a quick, brutal motion, I snapped its neck.

The sound was deafening in the quiet forest—a sharp crack that sent sleeping birds scattering from nearby branches. The opossum went limp in my grasp, its red eyes dulling to gray in death. Blood seeped from its mouth, black in the moonlight, staining my pale skin.

I held it for a long moment, this small creature corrupted by the same darkness that now flowed through me.

Had it understood what was happening to it?

Had it mourned its loss of self, its transformation into something unnatural?

Or had it simply surrendered to new instincts, embracing the hunger and speed and strength without questioning their source?

The knowledge that I’d killed something—ended a life with my bare hands—hit me with physical force.

I’d never even swatted flies as a human, always capturing them in cups to release outside.

My father had done the hunting and butchering in our household; I’d prepared the meat but never witnessed the death that preceded it.

Now I had killed, and part of me—the new, monstrous part—had enjoyed it.

I climbed down from the tree, the opossum’s body dangling from one hand. My movements were smooth, economical, nothing like my human clumsiness. My feet touched the ground soundlessly, and I stood in the silent forest, moonlight filtering through bare branches to pattern the earth around me.

The memories came then, not in fragments but in a flood.

My father reading scripture by lamplight, his voice rising and falling with the ancient rhythms. My mother, before consumption took her, teaching me to bake bread, her hands guiding mine through the kneading.

The warmth of the church on Sunday mornings, sunlight through stained glass, the comfort of familiar hymns sung by familiar voices.

All gone now. My father murdered on our doorstep. My mother long in her grave. The church forever closed to me—its prayers like knives, its crosses like fire. The world I’d known was as dead as the creature in my hand, and I couldn’t even weep for its passing.

I tried. Standing there in the moonlit forest, I tried to cry for all I’d lost. I felt the grief, the overwhelming sorrow, but no tears would come. My dead body refused this final human release.

“Dear God,” I whispered, flinching at the pain the words caused, “what am I now?”

The forest offered no answer. The stars continued their cold burning, indifferent to my suffering. The wind carried no message, no comfort. I was alone in my damnation.

I looked down at my hands—pale, strong, stained with the opossum’s blood. They were trembling, not from exertion or cold, but from the weight of understanding. These hands would kill again. These hands would never again fold in prayer without agony. These hands were no longer human.

Taking a deep breath I didn’t need, I turned back toward where Silas waited.

The path was clear to me, marked in scent and memory, a straight line through the tangled woods.

I followed it, the opossum’s body swinging at my side, each step taking me further from the girl I’d been and deeper into the darkness I’d become.

The night embraced me, claimed me as its own. And somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard Mercy Brown laughing.