A 20-foot fall doesn’t sound like much. The human body can survive much worse.

  But what no one tells you is how all the air bursts out from your lungs when you impact the ground. How every bone in your body just sort of… pops out… and then slides back into their sockets.

  Or maybe I was just being dramatic.

  In my defense, I was already in a massive amount of pain by the time the pavement met us.

  The shrieking monster took the brunt of it, slamming into the stone, back of her head bouncing off the pavement with an audible crack.

  I landed on top of her, my body folded to the side, arms cocked around my head. I had fallen off enough scaffolding on my job to know how to take an impact. But that had been on five, ten feet heights. On soft, freshly scooped-up dirt.

  This was anything but soft. Just cold, unyielding stone.

  I felt the crushing force of my body land on top of hers, her fragile form crumpling under my bulk. But she was small beneath me, her frame too lithe and petite to cover the entirety. My head and shoulder might have been spared, but there was no room for my legs.

  And when the side of my kneecap struck the pavement, it didn’t just hurt.

  It shattered.

  I rolled off her, hands shooting to my knee as the pain flared like wildfire. The impact had robbed my lungs even of the air needed to scream. My chest heaved in desperate, silent gasps, each breath a struggle as I lay there, paralyzed by the sheer agony of the moment.

  For several long seconds, I remained on the ground, curled into myself. My hands gripping my ruin of a knee, as if somehow I could squeeze hard enough to force the pain to stop, to make the world slow down. But nothing changed. It was just a cascading tide of pain, and all I could do was lay there, trembling, swallowed by it.

  Finally it dulled into a tormenting ache and I managed to draw in a lungful of air.

  Everything hurt.

  Everything.

  My left arm throbbed from the bite, every inch of it pulsing in dull, fiery shards of agony. My right hand felt like it was shattered, the fractured knuckles sending sharp waves shooting through my wrist. My jaw ached from the backhand, and now, my entire left side was probably just one mass of bruises, tender and swollen. And that didn’t even take into account the state of my knee— reduced to a broken, unsalvageable mass of splinters, rolling in a skin pocket.

  I finally released my knee, letting my body fall bonelessly onto the pavement. The cold concrete felt oddly soothing against my back as I stared up at the clear sky. A brief moment of stillness, of quiet before everything came crashing down again.

  There were small mercies, if you knew where to look.

  Through my tumble, I hadn’t seen any of the corpses around. They must had wandered off, distracted by the lack of sound. The noise of screams and gunshots would have been impossible to trace from the outside, bouncing in echoes across the silent campus.

  Or maybe this was just a momentary lull before a herd would come crashing down on me and turn my generous ass into their midday snack.

  A wet, wheezing laugh bubbled up from deep within me, the sound escaping before I could stop it. The sharp, fresh jolt of agony that followed nearly made me gag, but it didn’t stop the laugh from coming again, weak and strangled, but there nonetheless.

  I’d won. In a form that left me dead to rights, true, but I’d won.

  So I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “It… hurts to laugh… or talk” I managed to wheeze out and continued to chuckle despite the aches.

  ….until her ruined body twitched out of the corner of my eye.

  “Oh… Fuck... You… Leech!” was all I could spit out, before she launched herself on top of me.

  The vampiress was a night terror made flesh.

  Her head, a red mass of slug-holes, her left eye, a gaping hole of broken flesh. A long gash went along the crown of her head to the bridge of her nose from where she had split her skull open on the pavement, brackish blood oozing from it in black spurts.

  With a banshee wail, she raked for my face, claws outstretched, rabid fury in every swipe. Adrenaline flooded my insides, arms shooting up just in time to block the attack, the sharp sting of her talons carving shallow trenches across my forearms as she ripped and tore, reduced to nothing but animal brutality.

  All that effort.

  All that pain, and all for nothing. She survived.

  No. No, not nothing.

  I was weathering the storm. For all her vicious, rabid wrath, I was actually weathering her assault. She didn’t have that impossible, irresistible strength anymore.

  “That damnable, weakening Sun” she had said. It may not have burst her into flames like our folklore said, but direct exposure clearly weakened her. She was still stronger than any man I had ever met, she still struck harder than Andreas’s punches and was witheringly quick, but it was in the bounds of reason.

  It was something I could fight back against.

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  With a frustrated roar, the woman swung her arms high above her head, attempting to hammer through my guard with a brutal overhead strike. But it was a reckless move—an amateur's mistake, made by someone accustomed to overwhelming power.

  It left her wide open.

  An opening I didn’t hesitate to exploit.

  My fist collided with her jaw and this time her head shot back, jolting her in a backwards spasm. There was no more of that stone-like durability. Her flesh, still cold to the touch, had softened—as soft as flesh should be.

  Now, she felt as fragile as any human, her body no longer a wall of impossible resistance. And she was light.

  Beneath her withering speed and strength, beneath it all, she was still a whipcord-thin, fifty-pound creature—petite and deceptively fragile.

  And the slums teach you one thing before all else. How to brawl.

  My right hand shot out in a quick jab, fingers clawing at her hair and I shifted my entire weight in a sudden jerk, unbalancing the little beast. We rolled in a tangle of flailing limbs, each shift in motion sending waves of pain from my shattered knee.

  But the pain didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Except the venomous spite, turning agony into fuel, drumming my heart in a thundering chorus that hammered in my ears like a staccato bass.

  I hated her.

  I hated how much pain she had caused me.

  I hated how callouselly she had spoken of killing me.

  I hated the strength she had over me.

  We stopped rolling. And this time, I was the one straddling her.

  All hesitation, all humanity and all conscience had drained from me, replaced with a cold brutality that mirrored her own and I let loose with my own scream, spearing my thumb into her remaining good eye, bursting it like a rotten fruit.

  She shrieked and twisted like an eel, thrashing and battering at my arms, trying to throw me off, but I was so much heavier and for all her strength, she was prone. Unable to muster the strength necessary to shake me off.

  Not that I would give her the chance anyway.

  Blood-covered hands tangled into the collar of her shirt and I heaved, jolting her up as I slammed my forehead into her face.

  *CRUNCH*

  Again.

  *CRUNCH*

  Again.

  *CRUNCH*

  Over and over, I pulped her skull, bone and cartilage shattering, features reduced to a morass of split flesh.

  My own head felt like it would burst, but I didn’t stop.

  I refused.

  I couldn’t.

  This second wind was the only thing keeping me alive and I knew the moment I’d stop she’d kill me.

  I had to kill her first.

  I could bleed out without regrets then.

  Her clawed fingers had dug deep into my chest, raking, trying to push me away, but I was too far gone to give them attention. My entire body was one big bruise, I couldn’t care less over a few extra gashes in my pectorals.

  Maybe if I hadn’t been in such pain or so single-mindedly desperate, I would have paid more attention when she had torn the claws out and grabbed the back of my neck.

  Maybe I would have felt her pull instead of push when I made to headbutt her one more time.

  Maybe. But hindsight is a luxury.

  In a spasm of motion, her maw split open once again, thumb-long canines and serrated teeth glinting in the light, ready to shred my throat to red ribbons as she tugged me down mid headbutt.

  It was only by pure frantic reflex that I jerked to the side, a hair's breadth away before she bit down. Fangs like daggers cut and shred, ripping into the muscle between my shoulder and the base of my neck, narrowly missing my carotid, spearing into the bone beneath.

  The sharpness and suddenness of it all knocked the second wind right out of me and I tore at her hair, trying to unlatch the monster that was gulping greedily at the blood spraying from my flesh.

  It was no use.

  Cold was already spreading into my hands and feet, as though I had dunked them in ice water.

  Dread seeped into me as I realized the truth: the leech didn’t even need to hit my carotid artery to drain me of blood. Somehow, it was being pulled from every part of my body, feeding into her. With every passing second, I was growing weaker, my strength bleeding away, while she, impossibly, grew stronger again. I could feel it, the life slipping from me, and the terror that followed.

  She whirled, weight shifting and we rolled again, my back hitting the pavement with a brutal thud. Her mouth had remained latched firmly onto my trapezius, the pressure suffocating, each pull from her leaving me more and more drained.

  “It’s not fair” I murmured, futilely trying to pull her off, hands still tangled in her hair.

  So close, the side of her head pressed against my cheek, arms crossed around my back in some perverse parody of a lover’s embrace, I could hear the malicious chuckle at my words in between gulps of blood.

  I had been so close.

  So agonizingly close to winning.

  The cold spread from my arms to my shoulders, my sight blurring and darkening around the edges.

  “Die as spitefully as I can” my own words reverberated into my mind. They seemed so shallow now. So empty of value and weight…

  And they would be. If I allowed them to.

  “Not… finished… yet….” I spat, bloody phlegm edging my lips.

  Humans are animals, a fact we often forget in the veneer of our civilized lives. But when the pressure mounts and survival is on the line, that simple truth resurfaces.

  And there’s one thing that comes as naturally as breathing when desperation claws at you.

  The most primal of instincts, buried deep in the ancient folds of our brains, waiting for the right moment to surface.

  The instinct to bite.

  And my teeth tore into the vampiress’s throat.