Chapter 1: Needles and New Growth
The gym smelled like sweat and cheap floor cleaner. I focused on that, on the squeak of sneakers against polished wood from some earlier practice, on anything but the needle in Coach Roy’s hand. Flu shot clinic. Extra credit for Bio 202. A simple trade.
My chair was metal, cold through my jeans. All around the perimeter of the bleacher-less gym, under lights that buzzed like angry insects, people sat in identical folding chairs. Professiors, students, the guy who mopped the halls. We all waited our turn.
“Next. Kale, is it?”
Coach Roy Beckham didn’t look like a nurse. He looked like a bulldog squeezed into a too-small polo shirt, his shoulders straining the seams. His fingers, thick and calloused, snapped a vial with unsettling ease.
“Yeah. Darren.”
“Roll up the sleeve, Darren. Look at the exit sign. Won’t hurt a bit.”
It did hurt. A sharp, bright pinch. But it was what came after that felt wrong. Not pain, but a spreading warmth that seemed too deep, too… cellular. It flooded down from my deltoid, a wave of artificial heat that settled in my bones. I rubbed my arm as I stood.
“You good?” Roy asked, his eyes already sliding past me to the next victim. “Move along.”
I didn’t move along. I found an empty spot against the cinderblock wall, pretending to check my phone. My heart was beating a little too fast. A low, electric hum seemed to be vibrating just under my skin. I felt alert, hyper-aware. The flicker of the fluorescents was suddenly strobe-like, annoying.
Across the gym, Lucas Orton laughed. A booming, confident sound that echoed. The star quarterback was surrounded by a few other guys from the team, all biceps and backward caps. Roy waved him over.
“Orton. Let’s get this over with.”
Lucas swaggered up, pulled the sleeve of his tee to his shoulder without being asked. He grinned at his buddies. “Hit me, Coach. Make it good.”
Roy administered the shot with the same brusque efficiency. Lucas barely flinched. He popped his shoulder afterward, rolling it. “Feels weirdly warm, man.”
“It’s supposed to,” Roy grunted, but he was staring at the vial in his hand with a strange focus. There was a little left. He looked at Lucas’s retreating back, then at the liquid. A shrug, so small I almost missed it. He turned slightly away, brought the needle to his own thick neck, and pressed the plunger.
My breath caught. That wasn’t protocol. That was… something else.
I pushed off the wall, the weird energy in my veins propelling me toward the double doors. I needed air. As I passed Lucas’s group, he was flexing, making a muscle.
“No lie, feel a pump already,” he joked. His friend shoved him.
But I saw it. The vein in his bicep, usually a faint blue road map, was pronounced, throbbing. The muscle itself seemed… denser. Fuller. Like it had inflated in the last ninety seconds.
“Freak,” his friend laughed, but the laugh sounded unsure.
Outside, the autumn air was crisp. I gulped it down, leaning against the brick. The warmth inside me was consolidating, becoming a steady, pervasive thrum. My thoughts were clear, sharp-edged. I could hear the crunch of every leaf on the path twenty yards away. I felt strong. Not emotionally. Physically. Like I could sprint for miles.
The door banged open. Lucas and his crew spilled out.
“Kale!” Lucas called. He never called my name. I was background noise, the quiet guy in the back row of the lecture hall.
He walked over, his gait different. More deliberate. He seemed taller, his frame wider, crowding my personal space. His jersey stretched tight across his chest. His scent hit me—sweat, but beneath it, something chemical, coppery, like ozone after a lightning strike.
“You got the juice too, right?” His voice was lower. Gravelly.
“Yeah.”
“Feel it?” His eyes, a bright, piercing blue, scanned me. Not my face. My shoulders, my arms, my chest. It was an appraisal, cold and clinical. “You look… tighter.”
I didn’t. I looked like me. Mousy hair, lean build. But under his gaze, I felt exposed. “Just cold,” I mumbled.
He reached out, and before I could flinch, his thumb and forefinger pinched the flesh of my forearm, right over the bicep. He squeezed, testing. A jolt, not of pain, but of something else, shot through me. His touch was electric, invasive.
“Huh,” he said, his gaze fixed on where he held me. His own fingers seemed thicker, the knuckles pronounced. “You might fill out.” He finally let go, leaving a phantom heat on my skin. He smiled then, but it wasn’t his usual cocky grin. It was slower. Hungrier. “See you around, Darren.”
He clapped me on the shoulder—a gesture that was almost a blow—and walked off with his friends. Their laughter echoed, but it sounded different now. Strangled. Tense.
I stood there, my heart hammering against my ribs. The extra credit wasn’t worth this. None of this was right.
I went back to my dorm, tried to study. The words on the page blurred. My body wouldn’t settle. Around midnight, a cramp seized my gut, doubling me over. I stumbled to the mirror above the sink.
My hazel eyes were bloodshot, the pupils wide. And in the stark bathroom light, I saw it. A tracery of fine, dark veins, like cracks in porcelain, spreading from the injection site on my shoulder. They pulsed in time with my heartbeat. When I flexed my hand, the muscle in my forearm jumped, defined in a way it had never been before. Not bulky, but corded. Efficient. Strong.
A notification chimed on my phone—a campus safety alert. Unconfirmed reports of aggressive behavior near the athletics complex. Students advised to shelter in place.
Aggressive behavior.
I thought of Roy injecting himself in the neck. The look on his face—not curiosity, but craving.
I thought of Lucas’s fingers on my arm, his dilated eyes, his new voice.
The thrum in my veins crescendoed into a deafening roar. This wasn’t a flu shot. This was an invitation. And something had already RSVP’d.
Down the hall, someone screamed. It was a sound of pure, animal terror, cut off abruptly.
The lights in my room flickered, then died, plunging me into a darkness that felt alive, and waiting.
The scream was gone, but the silence it left behind was worse. Thick. Consuming. I stood frozen in the center of my dorm room, the only light a pale blue ghost from my dead laptop’s screen. My own breathing sounded obscenely loud.
Aggressive behavior.
The words from the alert pulsed in my head, syncing with the weird, deep thrum in my veins. It wasn’t a hum anymore. It was a drumbeat. A war drum.
A fresh, searing pain lanced through my lower back. I gasped, stumbling against my desk. It felt like my spine was cracking, vertebra by vertebra, making room for something new. My skin was on fire. I ripped my t-shirt over my head, fumbling for the desk lamp. The switch clicked uselessly.
I had to see. I needed a mirror.
I staggered into the tiny bathroom, using the light from my phone screen. The pale beam shook in my hand. When I raised it, the face in the mirror was mine, but wrong. My jawline seemed harder, the bone pressing against skin that was flushed and hot. The network of dark veins had spread, a grotesque latticework from my shoulder down across my pectoral, down my ribcage. They weren’t blue. They were black.
Another cramp, this one in my gut, so vicious it dropped me to my knees on the cold linoleum. I dry-heaved, my whole body convulsing. It wasn’t illness. It was reconfiguration.
My biology textbook flashed in my mind—mitosis, protein synthesis, sudden mutation. This wasn’t any of that. This was a factory reset. A hostile takeover.
The pain crested, receded, leaving a terrifying clarity. I could hear everything. The drip of a faucet three rooms down. The frantic, rabbit-like heartbeat of someone hiding in the dorm across the quad. The low, rhythmic groan of the pipes in the walls. And beneath it all, a new sound: a steady, potent, magnetic pull coming from the direction of the athletics complex. It felt like a hook behind my navel, tugging.
I pushed myself up, my hands splayed on the sink. My hands. The knuckles were broader. The tendons in my wrists stood in stark relief, wires under strain. I flexed, and the muscle in my forearm didn’t just jump—it rolled, a dense cable of pure potential.
A door slammed somewhere in the building. Running feet. A howl of pure, uncomplicated rage that was cut off by a wet, crunching thud.
They were here. Whatever they were now.
The pull from the gym intensified. It wasn’t just sound or feeling. It was a scent. Musk. Iron. Salt. Testosterone made manifest. It was them. Roy. Lucas. The others. They were the epicenter. And my changed blood sang a harmony to their call. A part of me, the old me, wanted to hide under the bed and weep. The new thrumming instinct wanted to run toward it. To join the source.
“No,” I whispered to my reflection. The voice was mine, but layered. Rougher.
The door to my room, which I’d locked, rattled on its hinges. Not a knock. An impact. A body throwing itself against the cheap wood.
THUMP.
I backed into the shower stall, my heart a jackhammer. The phone light pointed at the doorway, a tiny shield.
THUMP.
The wood around the lock splintered.
I wasn’t a fighter. I was a reader. A note-taker. I got extra credit. The absurdity of it almost made me laugh, a hysterical bubble in my tight chest.
The door exploded inward.
It wasn’t Lucas. It was Mark, a guy from my chem lab. We’d never spoken. He was short, scrawny. Usually. Now he filled the doorway. His clothes were torn. His eyes were wide, pupils swallowing the irises, fixed on me with a terrifying hunger. His neck was thick, corded. Spit strung from his teeth.
He sniffed the air, a sharp, animal gesture. He took a step in, his movements oddly jerky, like he was learning his own new strength.
“Kale,” he hissed. It was a question and an answer.
He lunged. Not with skill, but with pure, reckless speed. I threw myself sideways. His body slammed into the bathroom counter, and the porcelain sink cracked with a sound like a gunshot. He roared, spinning, shards of ceramic falling from his arms. He didn’t seem to feel them.
There was no time to think. The pull from the gym was a scream in my blood. The fear was ice. And beneath both, a new current—a raw, surging anger at this violation, at this thing in my space. This competitor.
He came at me again. I didn’t plan it. My body moved. I ducked under his wild grab, and my fist, driven by a panic that had been distilled into pure adrenaline, shot upward.
It connected with his jaw.
The pain was electric and bright, shooting up my arm. But the sound was worse. A crack. A give.
Mark’s head snapped back. He stumbled, a dazed growl gurgling in his throat. He blinked, looking at me with a flicker of confusion, of shock. I looked at my fist. The skin over the knuckles was split, bleeding. The blood was dark. Almost black. I felt no pain there anymore. Just a steady, pumping heat. The bones beneath felt solid. Unbreakable.
He touched his jaw, his fingers coming away wet. The hunger in his eyes wavered, replaced by something primal. Fear. Submission. He took a staggering step back, then another, before turning and fleeing into the dark hall.
I was alone. Breathing hard. The metallic scent of my own blood filled the small room. I looked from my bleeding hand to the wreckage of the door, to the cracked sink, to the stranger’s face in the mirror—sharpened, furious, alive with a terrible new power.
The thrum in my veins settled into a conqueror’s rhythm. The pull from the gym was no longer a suggestion. It was a summons. And I was ready to answer.
My spine straightened, the final, aching adjustment clicking into place. My shoulders pulled back, broadening, the muscles across my chest and back knitting into a new, heavier architecture. The last vestige of softness melted from my torso, replaced by defined, rigid planes. A deep, final shiver racked me from skull to heel, not of cold, but of profound becoming.
He transforms.