CHAPTER 1: The Bite
1050 Words
I woke to the sound of glass breaking downstairs.
Then my mother's scream cut through the darkness.
I sat upright so quickly that my head spun, staying frozen beneath my blankets for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling and trying to convince myself I had imagined it. A vase, perhaps. A window. Maybe my brother had knocked something over.
Then I smelled it. Metallic. Heavy. Wrong.
Blood.
My heart slammed against my ribs. I threw the blanket aside and rushed toward my bedroom door. The hallway was dark, but I could already hear something downstairs, a low voice that belonged to my father, followed by silence.
"Mom?"
There was no answer.
"Dad?"
Still nothing.
Fear crawled up my spine. There was a window beside my bed, with a tree standing just outside it, one I had climbed down countless times whenever I wanted to sneak out of the house. That night, I did not use it. I ran downstairs instead, and I have regretted that decision every day since.
I will not describe everything I saw in the living room. Even now, remembering it makes my stomach twist. My parents were gone. My little brother was gone. And standing in the middle of the room was a man I had never seen before.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, unnaturally calm. There was something almost beautiful about him, and that somehow made him more terrifying. His clothes were untouched, not a single drop of blood staining them. He looked as though he had simply walked into our home for an ordinary visit.
Then his eyes found mine, and I could not breathe.
"You must be Raye," he said, my name sounding strange coming from his lips.
"How do you know my name?"
He smiled faintly but did not answer. Instead, he began walking toward me. I stepped backward, then again.
"Stay away from me."
He kept coming. I turned to run, and his hand closed around my arm. I gasped. His fingers were warm, too warm.
"Let me go," I said, struggling against him, though his grip was impossible to break.
He leaned closer, his breath brushing my ear. "Survive this."
"What?"
Pain exploded through my shoulder as his teeth sank into my skin. I screamed. Fire poured through my body, not simply pain, but something that had entered my veins and was racing through every part of me, burning everything in its path. My legs gave out, and he caught me before I hit the floor.
"Survive this," he whispered again, his voice strangely gentle against the chaos consuming me. "And you will understand everything."
I wanted to ask him what he meant. I wanted to ask him where my family had gone. I wanted to scream. But my vision blurred, the room tilted, and the last thing I saw was his golden eyes before everything went black.
When I was six years old, my father used to check every window in the house before bedtime, every single night. I never understood why. One evening, I watched him lock my bedroom window for the second time.
"Dad?"
He turned. "Yes, sweetheart?"
"Why do you keep locking the windows?"
He laughed softly, though something in his eyes did not match the sound. He walked over and sat beside me on the bed. "Because the world has more in it than you know yet," he said.
"Like what?"
He smiled. "Some of it is wonderful." Then the smile faded slightly. "And some of it is not."
"So what do we do?"
He gently brushed my hair away from my face. "We keep the wonderful close."
"And the bad things?"
"We keep them outside."
I giggled. "That is a strange answer."
"Someday, it will not be," he said quietly.
At the time, I thought he was only being mysterious. I did not know he was afraid. I did not know my mother was afraid too. I did not know they had spent years looking over their shoulders. I did not know why my father checked the locks twice every night, or why my mother sometimes stared toward the forest as if she expected something to come walking out of it.
I did not know any of it, until that night, until everything I thought I knew about my family disappeared.
When consciousness finally began returning, I was not sure if I was awake. My body felt like it was burning. My fingers twitched. I tried to open my eyes, but even that felt exhausting. Somewhere nearby, I heard voices.
"Her pulse is stabilizing."
"That cannot be right."
"She lost too much blood."
"Then explain how she is still alive."
I wanted to speak. I could not. The voices grew distant again. Then I felt something cold against my skin, a hand checking my pulse. The moment their fingers touched my wrist, something strange happened. I heard a heartbeat, loud and clear, far too loud.
Thump.
My eyes opened. The ceiling above me was white. Bright lights burned my eyes.
A hospital.
I tried to move, but pain shot through my body. A nurse leaned over me. "Easy. You are safe," she said, her hand resting lightly on my shoulder. Safe. The word almost made me laugh. My family was dead. My home was gone. And I had no idea what had happened to me. Yet something felt different. Wrong. I could hear footsteps outside the room, someone coughing down the hallway, a machine beeping several rooms away, rain tapping against a distant window. I could hear all of it at once.
My breathing quickened. The nurse looked at me strangely.
"Raye?"
I stared at her. "Why can I hear everyone's heartbeat?"
She froze, her mouth opening as though she meant to answer, but before she could, a deep growl rolled through my mind. Not outside me. Inside me.
Run.
My blood turned cold. I looked around the room. Nobody else reacted. The growl came again, closer this time.
They are already here.
My heart began pounding. Then I heard footsteps approaching my hospital room, slow, heavy, deliberate. They stopped outside my door. The handle moved. And just before the door opened, I understood something terrifying. Whatever had happened to me that night had not ended when I lost consciousness. It had only begun.
- Writer
