One sed I was bag away from her, and the —She was on me.

  Cold! Oh my god, she was so cold! Her arms ed around me like dead weight.Sharp! Something pricked my throat—

  I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.Her hand was already there g over my mouth with the effit, casual brutality of a butcher at work.

  And then I felt it.

  A slow, pulliion, deep in my veins, spreading outward in waves. Warmth leaving me. Draining. I felt the blood being taken—a slow siphon, deliberate and rhythmic.

  The world blurred at the edges. My heartbeat—loud, sluggish, wrong.

  She swallowed. And oh god, I heard it. She sucked at my throat, her lips suing against my skin as she slurped.

  Thick. Warm. Wet.

  My blood.

  Being pulled from my body, ed, taken, owned. My vision dimmed. I was going to pass out.

  Theopped.

  The pressure on my throat vahe pull snapping away like a cut lifeline. I gasped, colpsing to my knees, my fingers g at my own skin, expeg to feel the blood still p. But there was nothing. No open wound. No seeping warmth but the dull ache of something that had already healed.

  I looked up.

  She was standing over me, too still. Still unblinking. Then, she took a deep, steadying breath, her lips still red. Her fangs hadn’t retracted.

  She still wanted more.

  For a split sed, I thought she was going to lunge again.

  I could see it. A raw, agonizing battle behind her dead, waterless eyes. Beyond hunger.

  Instinct.

  Her entire body shuddered, as if she fought invisible strings pulling her back. Her shoulders shook, then slowed. The look on her face became more rexed. I heard a low, choking sound escape from her lips – almost a whisper. She cmped her mouth shut as if physically f herself to swallow it down.

  I watched her chest rise with the motion.

  Then I realized—She wasn’t breathing out.

  I don’t know how loayed like that. Seds? Ay?

  No sigh. No exhale. Just… stillness.

  Finally, her fingers rexed. The tension in her jaw eased. She took a step back.

  "Are you okay?" she asked.

  For the first time, she didn’t sound like a robot anymore. She sounded ashamed. Sad, lonely, and like she was trying to apologize.

  I stared at her. At her perfect, fwless face, at the slight frown pulling at her lips.She looked like she wao cry, but no tears came.

  Because they never would. Not anymore.

  Her tear ducts had stopped w. Maybe a long time ago.

  My hao my throat. She bit me. She drank my blood. And now she was just standing there, asking if I was okay?

  I coughed, f words past my raw throat."You… you’re dead."

  She tilted her head slightly. And for the first time, her expression flickered—just for a moment. A small, brief shift, like she hadn’t expected me to say that out loud.

  Then—She nodded. Small, tired, resigned.

  "Yes," she said simply.

  Her voice was so casual, so matter-of-fact, that it made my stomach turn.

  I swallowed. My heart was hammering against my ribs, but the adrenaline was fading. I could still feel her ohe weight of her, the cold. She could have killed me easily. But… She didn’t. She didn’t move closer. She didn’t expin herself. She just stood there. And that scared me more than anything.

  My pulse thudded in my ears. I looked at her hands. She didn’t reflexively twitch. She didn’t move to adjust her bance. She simply stood there. Still. Motionless. Alien.

  I looked at her chest. Not rising. Not falling. I looked into her dull, waterless eyes.

  She could have easily passed as one of the mannequins in the Meadowbrook Mall, but I khe truth.

  Dead. But it was something else to see it, to feel it, to uand it.

  "I… I ’t help it," she whispered. “When I saw the… your blood.”

  The words barely left her lips. They weren’t an excuse, just a statement.

  She fed on me.

  I felt terrified. Dizzy, and I felt… off-bance.

  She ran a hand through her hair, looking away. I watched the motion, so human, but too perfect. Too fluid. Precise. Like an i. She didn’t fidget. She didn’t shift her weight, scratch her leg. Her eyes didn’t even dart. She just… existed.

  It was too much. I turned on my heels to run straight to the Crest Moon Academy. I hadn’t even made it a siep before I felt her fingers, cold as steel, around my wrist.

  "I’m sorry. Just… Please. Don’t go."

  And it was those words that, finally, stopped sounding polite and forced. Real. Raw. Vulnerable.

  My chest tightened because, for the first time, I saw her. Not the monster. Not the instinctual predator.

  Just a girl. She was a girl. A girl who used to be alive and she was failing because this is what she was now. Sad. Hurt, pleading, and there’s no going back.

  I nodded and quit trying to rationalize… I couldn’t anymore.

  “Okay… it’s… it’s okay,” I mao get out. I lied.

  I wasn’t okay.

  She took a slow step towards me and stuck out her hand. I saw her take a breath, and I knew she was about to speak.

  “Let me help you, please. My name’s Shion Kurozawa. I just started at Crest Moon Academy. It’s my first day here.”

  I swallowed hard, toug my throat. The ski smooth. Unbroken. But the memory was too fresh.

  I looked up at her.

  “You… didn’t want to stop, did you?” I asked, waiting to see what she’d say.

  A flicker, anger? Guilt? I couldn’t tell, but it had been there.

  “Hmm… you’re an observant one, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. We studied each other.

  “…no. That… that’s why I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself when I saw… you know. Your blood. But –”

  The thi smile parted her blood-stained lips.

  “I did stop, though. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be talking to yht now. You’d just be…” She rolled her wrist in the air, searg for the word. I heard her take another breath so she could finish speaking. “Empty.”

  I felt goosebumps rising on my skin. I didn’t know what was worse – the matter-of-fact tone or the way she clearly didn’t want to say it at all.

  And the was the only person that I had met here so far.

  And she was me her hand to help pick me off the ground.

  “Thank you. I’m…”

  Who? I stopped myself just in time before I blurted out the name of a forty-four year old man from West Virginia. I didn’t even want to call myself Andy here. Andy didn’t sound right.

  “Ryu. I’m Ryu Kazeyama,” I said.

  I said my new name for the first time, soundily like someone saying their name for the first time. Shion smirked, and I knew she looked skeptical. She had every reason to.

  Was I Ryu Kazenyama? Was I Andy Benjamin Davis?

  My hand touched the spot on my neck where Shion bit me. It had healed. pletely. Was I even human anymore?