Bloodline

Teeth In The Walls

Damien dropped the phone like it had grown fangs. The basement suddenly felt smaller, the concrete walls pressing in as if they could smell the change in him. His heart hammered against his ribs — too loud, too fast, like a war drum in his ears.

He ripped the bandage off. The wound had split open again, but it wasn’t bleeding red anymore. A thick, blackish fluid oozed from the punctures, and the veins around it pulsed visibly beneath the skin. The flesh around the bite looked wrong — too shiny, too elastic, as if it were already trying to knit itself into something stronger.

“Bullshit,” he hissed. “This isn’t how it works.”

He had killed dozens of them. He knew the progression: fever, rage, then the full break on the third night under the moon. It had only been hours. This was too fast. Unless…

Unless Aunt Ruth was right.

He hauled himself upstairs, leg screaming with every step, and tore through his grandmother’s old bedroom. The room still smelled like her — lavender and gunpowder. He yanked open the bottom drawer of the ancient dresser, the one she’d always kept locked. A hairpin and brute force took care of that.

Inside: yellowed journals, a rusted silver collar that looked more like a restraint than jewelry, and a single photograph. His father, young and smiling, standing next to a boy who looked just like Damien. Both of them had the same unnatural glint in their eyes.

Damien flipped open the top journal. His grandmother’s cramped handwriting filled the pages.

“The curse doesn’t come from outside. It sleeps in our blood. Every generation we feed it silver and lies. But it remembers. It always remembers.”

A floorboard creaked behind him.

Damien spun, pistol already in hand. Nothing. Just the empty hallway. But he could smell something now — faint copper and meat, coming from the street outside. Someone was bleeding. Not badly. Just… a cut finger, maybe. Three houses down.

His stomach clenched with sudden, ravenous hunger.

“No.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until stars burst. “Get a grip, Vale.”

He forced himself back down to the basement, chained his good leg to the steel loop in the floor out of habit, and loaded a syringe with enough sedatives to drop a horse. The needle shook in his hand. When he jammed it into his thigh, the pain barely registered.

Sleep came like drowning.

He dreamed of forests that had never existed in this city. Of running on all fours beneath a moon so bright it burned. Of tearing into warm, screaming things that tasted like freedom. When he woke, sweat-soaked and gasping, the chains around his ankle were snapped clean in two.

And there were deep gouges in the concrete where claws — his claws — had raked the floor during the night.

The sun was barely up, but the city outside was already loud with sirens. Another body had been found two blocks away. Throat torn. Not by him. At least… he didn’t think so.

His phone lit up again. Aunt Ruth.

This time he answered on the first ring.

“You need to come to me,” she said without greeting. “Before the next night. The family has ways to slow it down. But you have to know what we really did. What your great-grandfather bargained with.”

Damien looked at his hands. His nails were darker. Slightly longer. The hunger hadn’t left.

“And if I don’t?” he asked, voice low and dangerous.

“Then you’ll become what you hate most. And the rest of us… we’ll have to hunt you.”

The line went silent.

Damien stared at the broken chains, at the journal lying open on the floor, at the black fluid still leaking from his leg.

For the first time in his life, the hunter felt like prey.