Kiran

I stumbled out of the club. People commented on my “costume” as I walked. The street outside was busy, so I wandered aimlessly until I found an empty alley.

My wings were so large that fitting in a tighter space was uncomfortable, so I took to the skies.

What was I supposed to think? I had assaulted that woman. I hadn’t actually laid my lips on her, but my intentions were clear to both of us.

Then she cowered when I got close to her neck. I recognized the instinct because I had felt it myself. She was protecting an invisible scar. There had been a wound there that some magic had healed, but the pain persisted in her memory. I knew what it had brought out in me. I turned to aggression, eager to never let it happen again.

The redhead had turned to freezing pleading fear.

She was scared of me.

That was a new feeling. No one had ever been scared of me before.

The events of the past few hours spun around me. I had done several unforgivable things that night. I’d lost control with Abby. I’d taken control of those guys. I’d pinned the redhead to the ground and done everything in my power to have control over her.

That was why I had tried to end it. I wasn’t capable of controlling myself. Every stray thought was acted on. Every impulse was brought to fruition. I hated it. I hated having so much control over others but so little control over myself. I had been cursed with incredibly great power and the responsibility was too much to bear.

The redhead said there was another like me. One of my friends had killed me during Murder in the Dark. Audry had made Jack out to be much darker than I had previously thought.

Things were adding up.

I thrust upward into the sky. It was time I stopped running. I had to go back to where this all started. If Jack wanted me dead, it was time for him to finish the job.

Brianna

No one came to check on me. Even at my most vulnerable, I was so much of a predator that none of the mortals in line for the bathroom dared cross the threshold.

I had never felt like more of a monster.

I didn’t deserve comfort. I didn’t deserve mercy.

Look at what I’d done when either was presented to me.

My grandfather hadn’t deserved the wealth nor comfort that he lived in, and he certainly hadn’t deserved mercy, which was why I’d shown him none.

We were too alike. Was this just destiny for someone like me? Was it inevitable that immortality and hunger would distance us from our mortal beginnings enough that we turned to monstrosity?

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Someone was calling. I didn’t have the strength to answer.

The call ended, but after a second of silence, it began to buzz again.

It had to be my mother.

I resented that word. She wasn’t my mother. She was my murderer. In her own fit of hunger and passion, she had stolen my life from me. How dare she pretend to care about what I did with my undeath?

The buzz ended and began anew.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket and threw it with abandon. I heard it break, but the buzzing continued.

“Stop,” I whispered between heaving breaths. “Stop trying to help me.”

Helping people like me only hurt more people.

Helping me was what had gotten my old friends killed. Helping me was what had gotten my mother turned. Helping me would only lead to more thralls, more death, more pain.

But what could I do?

I could lay like this for eternity, but eventually, hunger would come. Unleashing that version of myself onto the world would only end in more hurt.

I could admit defeat and return to the enclave, but what if I lost control again? What if I got well enough that I gave into the hubris of thinking I could change?

Change was impossible. Mortals could change. The fleeting bright light of their lives allowed them to mature. They could learn and grow. My kind was stagnant. We didn’t age. We didn’t grow. I had been stuck in this body ever since being turned, regardless of my distaste for it. That had become a constant in all my research and conversations with others of my kind.

The only exception was our slow march into monstrosity, but that wasn’t even change. We were made in a fit of violence. Some of us kidded ourselves into believing we could move past it, but we couldn’t. All my kind could do was admit that we were exactly the same as the moment we were made.

What could I do?

I was death, violence, hunger, and pain. At my core, I was a hunter that knew how to kill. I had done it before. I had killed a vampire.

My breathing steadied as my emotions faded away in the resolve of despair.

I would kill everything that hurt me until it finally killed me first. I thought of the knife. With any luck, it wouldn’t take long.

Kiran

Fallen leaves rustled around me as I slowed my wings into a gentle landing. I hated being back, but that was good. The fear kept me in check.

Audry’s apartment was only a few feet away. I walked up and tested the sliding patio door. It wasn’t even locked.

I could smell that this place belonged to the girl I loved once I stepped inside. Something about the detergent she used, or the lingering scent of her conditioner.

I was doing this for her.

Mixed in with the familiar was an altogether new presence. The living room felt stale, like no living thing had tended to it while the moisture from outside slowly took hold.

I wasn’t the only one to have come here, clearly. Cushions had scratch marks, blankets were shredded, and the coffee table was broken in half.

Had I done this?

The scratch marks lined up with my new talons. Had I torn this place apart and not realized it?

Music was playing softly in a bedroom to my left, Audry’s bedroom.

I turned into the small hallway that separated the back two bedrooms from the living room. Audry’s door was slightly ajar.

I could feel a presence inside. For a hopeful moment, I thought I knew who it was.

“Audry?” I asked as I pushed the door open.

The room was even more destroyed than the living room. There were holes in the walls and the mattress had been torn nearly beyond usefulness.

The stale smell was strongest here. It felt like something had starved in here, cut off from the outside world until it shriveled into dust.

I took another step forward so that I could see into the adjoining bathroom.

I screamed and jumped back.

Three bodies were laid on the floor of the bathroom, their skin dry and stretched across their emaciated faces. I had been more right than I ever wanted to be.

“Audry?” I shouted, worried that somehow one of the bodies was hers.

The three’s faces jumped out at me. In blinks, I saw them as they were, but also as perhaps they used to be. I knew them. Matt, Meg, and Audry. It was me. I was the monster. I had done this to them. What other explanation was there?

“No!” I cried as my knees gave out.

“Please, no.” The three’s faces were so decrepit they looked like mummies now. “I didn’t– I don’t even remember…”

I was slumped in the doorway, half in the tomb of a bedroom, half in the lion’s den of a bathroom.

I lost myself in grief until a gentle weight circled around me.

“Let go,” whispered a voice into my ear. “Give yourself over and all those feelings will go away.”

I was confused. The room was spinning just a bit. It was getting harder to think, like my thoughts were trudging through mud.

“What…?”

I went to wipe away a tear, but my hand was caressed and gently pressed away.

“Give in to me, Kiran.” The words felt like cartoon lines wafting off of an apple pie. My thoughts were no longer trudging through mud, they were floating in honey.

“But I…”

“Shh. Let it go and give yourself over to me.”

It felt like being wrapped in a sunset.

My eyes struggled to stay fully open, settling into a fluttering half-open state.

“That’s it. You’re being such a good girl.”

“I– I’m a good girl?”

That thought spread out from my crown to my toes like an amber wave. Every bit of will I let go of, I felt better. Things felt easier. My worries and anxieties and fears faded with the sunset wrapped around me.

I wanted to please. I wanted to wade into the feeling and let go of everything.

“Just a little more. I know you have it in you.”

“Oh… Okay.”

I was bliss and smiles and everything I had gone searching for after leaving Audry behind.

Audry.

The sunset was fading. The warm orange flow darkened into a lonely blackness.

I opened my eyes enough to look again at the mummified bodies in front of me.

Was one of them Audry?

The images I’d seen the first no longer appeared, but it was a trial to keep my eyes focused on one point.

Everything about me wanted to relax and slide away.

Was one of them Audry?

I willed away the brown darkness crowding me. One last look. One more clear thought and then I could give myself out to the twilight.

The mummies’ faces sharpened as I brought them into focus. Somehow I was closer than before. I did recognize them, but not as the three I had seen visions of mere seconds ago.

The three on the ground were some of my old friends. They were Audry’s roommates, the other ones who lived in this apartment.

“Let go,” the voice that had at first been so smooth was thorny. “Give in to me.”

“I don’t…”

I was on the edge of understanding, but the setting sun was taking me with it. The hold around me started to run cold as its light faded.

“Stop it, Kiran. I said let go.”

The voice’s words called up a memory.

“See you soon, Kiran.” I had heard him say that, the last thing I remembered before my death.

“You…” It was so hard to think with the dark fog that had settled over me. “You know the real me.”

“The old you, now submit.” I felt the blanket of darkness, now cold, tighten its grip on me.

“You…”

Finally, the darkness began to recede. I felt empty when it left.

“You killed me.”

I should just give in. Cold was better than nothing. The darkness wanted to help. It took the pain away.

“Fucking idiot. Can’t do anything right.”

No, the darkness was an enemy, not an ally.

“You. Fucking. Killed me.”

A red energy flared up inside of me. It was familiar. Kira was rearing her head.

The darkness was bathed in my red-hot will. Sharpness returned and with it, an awareness that I was constrained.

“You will submit to me.”

I knew that voice. It was Jack. He was the one keeping me prone.

I was lying on my stomach. Jack had a clawed hand wrapped around my skull, one boot on my back and the other on my wrist.

He dug the sharp points of his claws into my head, drawing blood.

“Stop telling me what to do,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Idiot. Do you know how much trouble you’ve caused?”

He wrenched my head back further so I could look into his eyes.

“Not enough.”

I spat at him.

It threw him enough off guard that I pulled my arm out from underneath where he stood on it. He lost his footing and then his hold on me shattered entirely.