Chapter 3: The First Hunt
The fluorescent light above them buzzed, a thin, constant sound that Sabine Moreau had never noticed before, not until this moment when she could hear the filaments straining inside the glass tube. She lifted her hands, turning them over slowly, drinking in the sight of her pale gray skin. The auburn hair at her temples seemed darker against it, almost black. She flexed her fingers and felt the new strength coiled in them like a wire drawn tight.
"Isolde," she said, and her voice came out different. Lower. Smoother. She touched her throat with those strange new fingers and felt the vibrations of her own vocal cords, felt the blood moving beneath the skin.
Isolde watched her with a satisfied smile, leaning against the row of lockers with her arms crossed. "How do you feel?"
"Hungry," Sabine said, and the word came out as a confession. "God, I'm so hungry. It's like I can taste the air."
She could. The locker room smelled of metal and cleaning solution and the faint, sour tang of old sweat from the staff who had used it before them. And underneath all of that, something else. Something living. Something warm.
The soft shuffle of footsteps in the corridor outside made them both freeze.
Sabine's head snapped toward the door, her nostrils flaring. She could smell the old woman instantly. Powdered skin, lavender sachet, the metallic whisper of blood moving through veins that were thin and fragile as tissue paper. Mrs. Hale. The librarian from room 214, who read mystery novels past midnight because sleep eluded her.
Isolde's pupils dilated. She felt the hunger spike through her like a jolt of electricity, sharp and immediate, curling in her belly and making her fangs ache in their sockets. She could hear Mrs. Hale's heartbeat. Slow, steady, a little irregular. A faint click of her dentures as she shuffled past the locker room door on her way to the common room.
"It's just Mrs. Hale," Sabine said. Her voice had gone thick, and she took a step toward the door before she caught herself. "She wanders every night. Insomnia. She told me once she reads until her eyes burn, and then she walks until her legs ache."
Isolde moved to block her, not aggressively, just placing herself in the way. "Not her, Sabine. Think. She's a resident here. If she goes missing, if she's found drained, there will be questions. Police. Autopsies. That's the last thing we need."
Sabine's jaw tightened. She could feel the hunger pulsing in her veins, thrumming in her ears. The old woman was twenty feet away. A few steps. A bite. She had never wanted anything so badly in her life, and she had never hated herself for wanting it, and that was the strangest part. There was no guilt. Just a clean, bright hunger that demanded to be fed.
"You're right," Sabine said finally. She forced herself to take a step back from the door, then another. Her hands were shaking. "God, you're right. But then what? Who do we feed on? Staff will notice if one of the nurses goes missing. Visitors would raise alarms."
Isolde smiled. There was something wicked in it now, something that had not been there before. Her crimson eyes caught the fluorescent light and threw it back faintly, like a cat's eyes in a headlight beam.
"We hunt," she said simply. "Out there. The city is full of people. People who drink too much and stumble home alone. People who take shortcuts through dark alleys. People who disappear and no one asks too many questions. We find them. We feed. We choose carefully."
Sabine stared at her for a long moment. Then she laughed, a low, husky sound that she would not have recognized as her own an hour ago. "I never thought I'd be doing this. I spent my whole life following rules. Doing the right thing. And now I'm standing here, fresh from the grave, planning a hunt."
"Does it bother you?"
Sabine considered the question. She touched her own face, felt the sharp points of her ears beneath her fingertips, the smooth curve of her fangs behind her lips. She looked down at her hands pale gray and strong and unmarked by the decades of small cruelties that life had dealt her.
"No," she said. "It doesn't bother me at all."
They stood together in the locker room, listening to Mrs. Hale's footsteps creak down the corridor toward the common room. The old woman's heartbeat was a slow, ticking metronome. Isolde could feel it in her teeth, a kind of ache, but she pushed the hunger down. There would be easier prey tonight. Safer prey. And this one she had worked with for seven years. She knew the woman's granddaughters, knew her favorite books, knew the way she liked her tea at three in the afternoon.
"Not tonight, Mrs. Hale," Isolde murmured under her breath. The words were half a promise, half a threat.
Sabine came to stand beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. "Is there anywhere in the city you know? Somewhere quiet. Somewhere no one will look."
Isolde thought about it. She had lived in this city her whole life. She knew its corners, its hidden places, the spots where the streetlights flickered and the patrol cars never came. The industrial district after midnight. The old railroad tracks that ran behind the docks. The park where the city's homeless gathered, and where some of them vanished without anyone noticing.
"The docks," she said. "There's a stretch of warehouses that's been abandoned for years. The security cameras are all dead. The cops only patrol there once a night, and always before two. We can find someone there. Someone who won't be missed."
Sabine nodded slowly. Her auburn hair brushed against her pale gray cheek, and Isolde noticed, for the first time, that there was something beautiful in the sharpness of her features now. A kind of predatory elegance that had been hidden beneath the stern, practical exterior of a head nurse.
"Then we hunt," Sabine said. She held out her hand.
Isolde took it. The grip was strong, cool, alive in a way that living flesh never truly was. She felt the rush of connection between them, twin predators, two new creatures in a world that did not yet know they existed.
Outside, the night waited. It was dark and deep and full of possibilities.
Isolde led the way out of the locker room, through the empty corridor where the night shift's fluorescent lights hummed their thin, constant song. Sabine walked at her side, and together they moved past the nurse's station where Peggy was dozing with her head propped on a clipboard, past the dimly lit common room where Mrs. Hale had settled into her favorite armchair with a battered paperback, and out through the staff exit into the cool, damp air of the loading dock.
The night washed over them both like a living thing. Isolde felt it sink into her pale gray skin, felt the dark energy swell in her chest until her heart, or whatever had replaced it, beat with a slow, powerful rhythm. The moon hung low and full behind a veil of clouds, and the city spread out before them, a glittering grid of lights and shadows and secrets.
"We take my car," Sabine said. "It's parked in the staff lot. Less conspicuous than walking half an hour in the dark."
They crossed the lot together, and Isolde could feel the thrum of Sabine's new hunger matching her own. There was no space between them now. They had become something else together, something that walked the line between the living and the dead, and the bond between them was already tight and warm.
Sabine's car was a modest sedan, beige and unremarkable. She slid into the driver's seat, and Isolde took the passenger side. The interior smelled of hand sanitizer and coffee and the faint ghost of cinnamon gum. Sabine's hands were steady on the wheel as she backed out of the lot, though her knuckles were pale gray against the black leather.
"The docks," Isolde said. "Take the service road off Harbor Street. It loops behind the old warehouses. No cameras out there."
The city slid past them, bright and sleeping. Bars disgorged their drunks onto the sidewalks. A taxi idled at a curb. A group of college students laughed their way across a crosswalk, oblivious to the two pale women watching them pass.
Sabine's jaw tightened. "I can smell them," she said. "From inside the car. I can smell their blood. It's like they're all just walking around with their veins on the outside."
"Wait until the hunger gets worse," Isolde said. "The first time you feed, it's like nothing else. The world snaps into focus. Everything becomes clear."
"How do you know? You said you woke up this morning. You fed before, then?"
Isolde shook her head. "No. I haven't fed yet. Not properly. I don't know what it will be like. I only know what I feel."
Sabine turned onto Harbor Street, and the city lights fell away behind them. The warehouses rose up on either side, dark and silent, their windows boarded and their loading bays choked with weeds. The pavement was cracked and littered with broken glass. The streetlights here were few and far between, and the ones that still worked flickered with a dying, sickly orange.
"This is the place," Isolde said. "Pull over up there, by that gap between the buildings."
Sabine eased the car to a stop and cut the engine. The silence that settled around them was deep and heavy, broken only by the distant groan of a ship's horn and the lap of water against the pilings somewhere beyond the warehouses.
They got out of the car together. The night air was cold and salt-tinged, and Isolde could feel the hunger curling in her gut like a living thing, coiling and uncoiling, sharpening her senses. She could hear rats skittering in the dark, could hear the water lapping, could hear the distant hum of the city. And somewhere ahead, a sound she had not expected. A heartbeat.
Sabine heard it too. She stopped, her head tilted, her crimson eyes narrowing.
"Someone's here," she whispered. "A man. He's walking. Coming this way."
They melted back into the shadows between two warehouses, pressed close together in the dark. Isolde could feel Sabine's body against hers, cool and solid, the slow rhythm of her new heartbeat matching her own. They waited.
The man appeared moments later, stumbling slightly, muttering to himself. He was middle-aged, heavyset, wearing a stained work shirt and carrying a brown paper bag in one hand. A bottle clinked inside it. He had the unsteady gait of a man who had been drinking for hours and had nowhere else to go.
"Perfect," Sabine breathed.
Isolde caught her arm. "Easy. We don't just rush him. We don't know if anyone else is around. Let him get closer. Let him see us, let him think we're just two women alone in the dark. He'll come to us."
Sabine's lips curved into a slow, wicked smile. She understood.
They stepped out of the shadows together, into the faint spill of a flickering streetlight. Isolde let her posture soften, let her shoulders slump, let her voice drawl with a hint of vulnerability.
"Excuse me," she called, pitching her voice high and uncertain. "We're lost. Our car broke down and we don't have a phone. Can you help us?"
The man stopped. His eyes widened when he saw them, two beautiful women in the dark, one blonde and one auburn, both dressed in what looked like nurse's scrubs. His lips split into a grin that showed his stained teeth.
"Well, now," he said, taking a step toward them. "What are two pretty things like you doing out here?"
"Our car's just around the corner," Sabine said, matching Isolde's tone. "We can't get it started. Maybe you know something about engines?"
The man laughed, a low, greasy sound. "Oh, I know a thing or two." He took another step, then another, and the bottle in his hand swung loosely at his side. "But I might need a little payment for my trouble."
He was close now. Isolde could smell him. Stale beer, cheap cologne, sweat. And beneath all of that, the slow, steady thrum of his blood, thick and warm and rich with alcohol. Her fangs ached. Her mouth flooded with a strange, metallic anticipation.
"I'm sure we can work something out," Isolde said, and her voice dropped, losing the vulnerable waver and taking on a low, predatory purr.
The man's grin faltered. Something in the air had changed. He looked at Isolde's face, at her eyes, and for the first time he seemed to notice that they were glowing, that her skin was the color of old ash, that her teeth were longer and sharper than they should have been.
"What the fuck," he muttered, taking a step back.
Too late.
Isolde moved. It was not a lunge, not a pounce. It was simply a blur, and then she was there, in front of him, her hand wrapped around his throat, lifting him off his feet. The brown paper bag hit the pavement, and the bottle inside shattered.
The man's eyes bulged. He clawed at her wrist, his feet kicking, but she was stronger than any living thing had a right to be. She held him there, suspended, and leaned in close until her lips were almost at his ear.
"Don't scream," she whispered. "It won't help."
She bit.
Her fangs sank into the side of his neck, through the thick muscle, through the vein, and the blood flooded into her mouth. It was hot. It was alive. It tasted of iron and salt and something deeper, something that sang through her body like electricity. Isolde's eyes rolled back in her head. The world snapped into crystalline focus. She could hear the man's heartbeat slowing, could feel the pulse of his life draining into her, and it was exquisite. Every nerve in her body lit up. The hunger that had been gnawing at her all night, all day, since the moment she had awakened in that alley, surged and then subsided, and in its place there was only a bright, fierce joy.
She drank until the heartbeat stuttered, until the man's struggles grew weak and then stopped. And still she drank, until the last ragged beat faded to nothing. Then she let him drop. His body crumpled to the pavement in a heap of shabby clothes and broken glass.
Isolde stood over him, her lips slick and red, her eyes blazing. She turned to Sabine.
Sabine was frozen, staring at her, her mouth half open, her own fangs extended. The hunger was naked on her face, ragged and desperate.
"Your turn," Isolde said softly. "But we need another one. I'm not sharing that one. Find your own."
Sabine's eyes scanned the darkness. Her nostrils flared. She turned her head slowly, tracking. And then she smiled.
"There's another one," she said. "Two blocks down. By the old cannery." She licked her lips. "Come on. The night is young."
They left the dead man where he lay and moved deeper into the shadows together, two pale gray shapes moving through the dark like smoke. The night was vast and hungry, and it stretched out before them, eager to be claimed.