The world was a blur of cold stone and silence when Jamie opened her eyes. Moist air clung to her skin, carrying the scent of damp earth and something ancient—rot, perhaps, or memory itself. She blinked once, twice, and the shadows began to take shape: a low ceiling, rough walls, a faint shimmer of water seeping through cracks.
She sat up too fast. The motion was effortless—too effortless—and the echo of her movement cut through the chamber like a blade. Her pulse hammered in her ears, or so she thought. Then she realized: there was no pulse.
The silence inside her was more terrifying than the darkness around her.
Jamie pressed trembling fingers to her throat. The skin was cool, the texture alien, and beneath her fingertips—two small punctures, almost healed, but unmistakable. Images rushed back like shards of broken glass: the narrow alleyway, the stranger's pale face, the flash of teeth. The world spinning into black.
"No," she whispered, though the word came out like a breath of frost.
When she rose, her movements were fluid, predatory. Every sound in the chamber was painfully vivid—the drip of water, the distant scurry of a rat, the faint heartbeat of something living far above her. The smell of blood—faint, metallic, intoxicating—pulled at her with invisible threads.
She stumbled toward a stone archway and pushed through it into the night.
Outside, the city of New Haven sprawled beneath a bruised sky. The streets shimmered with rain, and the lamps cast halos of golden light that flickered against wet pavement. Every detail burned bright and sharp in her eyes. She could hear footsteps blocks away, laughter, the soft thrum of human hearts like a distant orchestra.
And beneath it all, hunger.
It clawed at her from within, a low, aching need that drowned reason. She caught sight of a couple standing outside a café, the girl's neck tilted in laughter, a pulse dancing just below the skin. Jamie's throat burned. The scent hit her like wine—sweet, warm, alive.
She took a step forward. Then another.
Her reflection in the café window stopped her—a pale face, eyes glinting red beneath the lamplight. The sight of herself—unfamiliar, monstrous—snapped her back to the surface.
"No," she breathed, retreating into the alley's embrace. "I won't."
The hunger screamed, but she turned away, pressing her palms against the cold brick wall as if she could push the craving out through her skin.
The city breathed around her, alive and unaware. Somewhere in that pulse and chaos, she realized, she was no longer part of it—only something that haunted its edges.
And in that moment, as the first sliver of moonlight touched her skin, Jamie understood the truth.
She wasn't the prey anymore.
She was the thing that hunted.