*BITE! TEAR!*

  She trashed and wrenched in my grasp trying frantically to pull away.

  *BITE! TEAR!*

  Her wails and screams were muffled, my hands holding her face pressed into my shoulder, not letting her unclasp or retreat.

  *BITE! TEAR!*

  She lashed out, carving at me with her claws, breaking ribs with her fists, but I was too far gone to let go.

  *BITE! TEAR!*

  Again.

  *BITE! TEAR!*

  Again.

  *BITE! TEAR!*

  Again.

  Over and over I ripped into her neck like a frothing dog, tearing away chunks of flesh and spitting them out.

  Black, tar-like blood cascaded over my face, covering my eyes and nose, flooding my mouth. I didn’t bother spitting it out or trying to breathe.

  Swallowing down the foul ichor and continuing to bite, my entire existence reduced to that simple act of biting down and tearing off.

  *BITE! TEAR!*

  AGAIN!!!

  Only when my teeth struck and splintered into her spinal cord did I stop, realizing that she had gone still a while ago, and I had just kept biting into an unmoving carcass.

  My hands finally let go of the back of her head and flopped to the side. I didn’t even have enough strength to wipe the vampiress’s blood off my face.

  Through the blurry muck of gore covering my sight I watched the midday sun blaze through clouds and smiled through a mess of shattered teeth.

  “I win…”

  And passed out.

  The Moon hung overhead, pale and gibbous, its soft light casting a faint glow across the dark sky. It was the first thing I saw as I came to, my breath catching sharply, like a man breaking the surface after too long underwater.

  Something heavy and brittle pressed down on my chest, and instinct sent a jolt of fear through me, thoughts of wandering corpses flooding my mind. I lashed out, flinging it off me and snapped onto my feet and into a low crouch.

  Wait.

  On my feet? A crouch?

  I shouldn’t be able to stand up let alone do any of this.

  What happened?

  How was I even alive?

  How long had I been unconsciou…

  A stab of pain tore through my skull and I doubled over.

  Thirsty.

  I was so thirsty.

  Why? What had happe…?

  The jolt came again, redoubled.

  The thirst hit like a hammer, its gnawing hunger drilling into my mind, merciless and unyielding. It demanded, it consumed, it wouldn't be ignored. Every thought, every ounce of focus, was swallowed

  whole by it, only to return fiercer, as if it had grown into a living thing, stalking me, tormenting me.

  My blood boiled, searing beneath my skin.

  My tongue felt thick, cracked, like parchment left too long in the sun.

  My mouth hung open, unable to close, as four sharp points—long and unnatural—protruded from my gums..

  Was this what dying of thirst felt like?

  I had to find something to drink. Water… no. Not water.

  The very idea of it turned my stomach, a violent gag rising in my throat. But the thirst clawed at me, a primal need that could not be ignored. I needed something. Not water.

  What was happening to me? I tried to focus, tried to concentrate, to pay attention to the dried-up mummified corpse that I had flung off me. The entire left side of her neck and shoulder was missing, gnawed off to the bone as if by some rabid ani…

  The overwhelming thirst struck me again, accompanying vertigo scything my legs from under me, howling, roaring to be fed, reverberating like thunder in my skull.

  I fell to my hands and knees, a silent, wheezing cry escaping my dried up throat.

  I was so cold despite the blood boiling in my veins…

  “Tha-Thump”

  The pain and vertigo ebbed away like fading mist, and the thirst, for a fleeting moment, withdrew to the darkest corners of my mind, replaced with a single-minded focus I had never experienced before.

  “Tha-Thump”

  My head snapped in the direction of the noise, eyes narrowing in the gloom. Everything was sharp. Every glimmer of light shone like lightning. Every smell was magnified and every sound was thunder in my ears.

  “Tha-Thump”

  I surged from the ground, barely a conscious thought in my movement, tilting my head slightly to the left. One more time. I needed to hear it again, to lock onto its source, to trace its path through the night.

  It didn’t even register that I could see the tiniest ridges on the tree bark despite the cloak of darkness. Nor did I question how I could make out the faintest rustle of insects moving beneath the dry leaves, their tiny scuttles as loud to me as a storm.

  None of that mattered. Not the hows or the whys. All that existed in the moment was that sound. The promise it carried.

  “Tha-thump”

  I shot out into the woods like a projectile from a cannon, tearing through branches and foliage as if they weren’t even there.

  The world blurred at the edges of my vision, a streak of motion I’d only ever known while speeding down a hill on a scooter.

  This wasn’t running—not by any stretch of the imagination. It was something primal, something fast and fierce, too low to the earth, my hands scraping against the dirt, lunging across the mossy forest floor like a jungle cat, pushing me forward with a speed that was beyond human.

  It didn’t matter.

  I couldn’t focus on the hows, the strange way my body moved, the way the world had become a blur of shadows and motion. All that mattered was the sound—the rhythmic thump-thump-thump that thrummed in my bones, calling me forward like the voice of a siren, irresistible, drawing me closer with each heartbeat.

  It was all I could hear. It was all I could feel.

  The sound and its promise.

  In the distance, high-pitched shrieks echoed through the trees, a frantic, gibbering sound that made my skin prickle, shrill grunts and the unmistakable sound of metal cutting flesh. But I was deaf to it all save the drumming song that had drawn me.

  The underbrush offered no resistance, branches snapping like brittle bones beneath me as I surged through, each stride pulling me further into the darkness. My mouth hung wide open, wider than should’ve been possible, the stretch of my jaw threatening to tear the skin, but I didn’t care.

  Instinct had brought me here, pulling me towards that sound—the rhythm of a drumbeat that throbbed in my veins like a living thing, a beautiful, maddening song that promised something beyond comprehension. And then, as I tore through the last of the shrubbery, I saw it for what it truly was.

  The drumming wasn’t from any instrument.

  It was the steady, pulsing beat of hearts.

  Without hesitation, my wild dash shifted into a single, predatory leap—a pounce driven by something older, darker, more urgent than reason.

  Starvation.

  Seven walking corpses were surrounded and stabbed at by five diminutive humans, not a one taller than 4 feet, crude spears held in overly large leathery hands. The one I had targeted turned just fast enough for me to see his narrow slitted pupils constrict like needles in the far too large, pus yellow orbs of his eyes.

  Then I rammed into him and nothing mattered other than his throat.

  My hands wrapped around its shoulders even as I barreled the almost-human looking creature off its feet, burying my teeth into the warm meat of its neck before we even hit the ground.

  Blood, hot and alive, cascaded from his wound and I gulped down mouthful after ravenous mouthful.

  It was ambrosia.

  It was ecstasy.

  More addicting than the purest drug.

  More satisfying than the most beautiful woman.

  And I drank every last drop, feeling the creature’s bones snap and give way beneath my grip. My arms constricted around it, tightening like the coils of a snake, squeezing the life from it as if it were nothing more than a juice box, desperate to drain every last trace of warmth.

  The sensation was visceral, primal, as its blood flowed into me, soothing the gaping hole in my gut. Feeding it. Quenching the all-consuming fire of thirst.

  Only when the well ran dry did I let the creature’s corpse flop to the group, it’s chest caved in and arms broken from the force.

  And it was most definitely an “it”, not a “him”. Not a human.

  The thirst had abated enough for me to be able to think a little clearer. Not crystal, but enough to observe, to pay attention.

  Small, sickly-green skinned, with twisted, oversized clawed hands and grotesque heads that seemed too misshapen for the body they clung to.

  Their beady yellow eyes bulged in horror, wide and unblinking as they fixed on me. Far too large mouths, packed with an unnerving array of yellowed teeth, hung open in silent, frozen screams that never escaped their twisted lips.

  Like someone had tried to parody a human from half heard words, or some barely remembered dream.

  Gruesome and grotesque.

  As the fog in my mind cleared, a terrible realization set in. I knew what they were.

  These creatures—horrific, nightmarish things—were the very monsters I'd battled countless times in the RPGs I’d loved so much and in the pages of the fantasy books that I enjoyed reading so much.

  “Goblins?”

  The voice that came from me was barely recognizable, deep and guttural, more growl than speech, but it was undoubtedly mine. It was slurred, thick with something foreign, as if the very shape of my mouth had changed. I couldn’t quite close it all the way, my teeth feeling too large, too sharp, especially around the canines, which jutted out in a way that felt wrong, unnatural.

  Of the remaining four “goblins,” two had turned at the sound of the fifth’s life ending, their wide, beady eyes locked on me in stunned horror. They didn’t move, frozen in place as if some invisible force held them there.

  Why? I wasn’t a giant, not by any means—barely more than a slightly solidly built man, no more threatening than any other. Yet the terror radiating from them was palpable, almost suffocating.

  Then, as if they had finally broken from whatever spell held them, they screamed.

  The shrill, desperate sound cut through the air, a primal wail that shattered the silence and ignited something in me. Panic and fear fueled their cries, but it was their terror that stirred my blood, sending a rush of red fury through my veins.

  Who cared why they were so scared.

  I was still thirsty, and one had not been nearly enough.

  The two goblins shouted for their comrades, belching out words in a gibbering vomit of speech and snarls, holding their crude spears in front, trying to keep me away.

  I charged into the points, one piercing my stomach, the other my shoulder, the wounds doing nothing to slow my momentum.

  The rusted iron points of their spears sank into my flesh, jagged metal scraping through my skin, but the pain barely registered. It was there, undeniable, but distant—almost as if it was beneath notice.

  A trivial little thing.

  With two splintering cracks the crude spears broke at their hafts, the points still lodged in my body.

  Bug-eyed and reeking of fear, the goblins didn’t even get to scream before I closed my hands around their throats and slammed them, heads first, into the ground.

  A shrill scream drew my attention.

  “No!” I roared, but it was too late.

  The remaining four goblins had only barely managed to hold the horde of walking dead with their spears. Now reduced to two, the wailing creatures were swiftly swallowed by the writhing mass of rotten flesh, torn apart in a monstrous display of mindless brutality.

  I bellowed, red, raw rage filling me at the sight of all that precious blood wasted.

  “My prey. My blood.”

  Brackish, tar-like blood poured from my wounds as I ripped the shattered spear shafts from my body, the iron tips now gripped like daggers in my hands.

  With a savage roar, I hurled myself at the shuffling, chittering mass, my every movement driven by instinct and fury.

  The first two rotbloods fell, my spear-daggers buried in their foreheads.

  A skinless, clammy hand grabbed at my forearm and I spun, ramming the length of iron in the dead thing’s belly, then levered it over my shoulder, sending it tumbling in a heap.

  A fourth spasmed itself into a pounce, gore flecked teeth aiming for my face. The top of it’s head burst in a spray of putrid ichor, my spear taking it in an upward thrust, piercing through the chin and coming out through the crown of it’s skull.

  The rotbloods were a writhing, gnashing horde, each one as strong as they had been in life, their claws raking and jaws snapping with feral hunger. But they were slow and clumsy.

  And I was anything but.

  Even in the haze of my thirst, my movements were sharp, fluid, predatory—like a hunting hyena. I flowed in and out of the fray, striking with ruthless precision, carving my way through meat and bone, retreating before they could even react.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Within moments, it was over. The horde lay in ruin, scattered and broken, twisted bodies crumpled to the ground like discarded playthings.

  The last rotblood spasmed in my grasp, spear-tips buried deep to either side of it’s head.

  By the time it fell, I was already stalking back to the two unconscious goblins I had slammed into the ground.

  “My prey. My blood.” the growl spewed out from my mouth.

  Perched atop the largest of the old oak’s branches, fifteen feet above ground, the tree’s dense foliage and the night might as well have made me invisible. I could see as clear as day through the gloom and watched on as the second patrolling group in an hour had emerged into the clearing.

  There were only three Goblins in the group this time, dressed in loincloths and armed with crude weapons just like their kin I had butchered not two hours before.

  The only difference was that one held a rusty chain tangled across the neck of some…thing, a hound-like creature, looking like the unholy crotch spawn of a dog, rat and lizard orgy.

  The moment they saw the hillock of rotblood and goblin corpses I had left out in the open, the group fell into a tight, defensive formation. They moved quickly, back to back, spears raised in front of them, their every motion tense with caution. The dog-thing, a hulking creature with a blank, eyeless face, lifted its head, sniffing the air greedily.

  But I was too high up. The wind was too much in my favour and the scent of the dead masked my presence. The dog-thing prowled, its head twisting in every direction, but it never caught my scent.

  After a few tense minutes the goblins relaxed their posture, and their focus shifted to scavenging. They tore at the remains of their fallen comrades, ripping at any valuables, weapons or whatever else they could pilfer, seemingly more than indifferent to the fact that they were kin.

  Ten more minutes later, the patrol moved on, leaving behind nothing but pilfered carcasses and a mess.

  “Scavengers” the vampiress had said, and her words were a fitting description.

  “Let’s tally up. First zombies. Then Vampires. Now Goblins”

  I didn’t climb down from the tree. Not yet.

  The quiet, the relative safety, gave me space to think—space to reorient myself.

  After drinking from the last two goblins, the madness driven by my thirst had finally subsided. I could think clearly once more, my mind sharp and focused.

  Which had lead to the past hour feeling like nothing more than an endless string of questions. And all I had in place of answers were assumptions and conjecture.

  No, this wasn’t rocket science.

  And it sure as hell didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened. Even if this vampiress had alluded to being of a different world or whatever else, it wasn’t much to come to a conclusion.

  Primarily in folklore, Vampires procreated by exsanguinating someone close to death, then forcing the victim to drink the Vampire’s own blood.

  During the fight against her I had bled from multiple wounds, so that was the exsanguination part done.

  And when I’d torn into her throat I had swallowed a lot of her blood.

  Not like it had been on purpose.

  I was drowning in it.

  After waking up, I hunted and drank blood like a beast.

  I no longer had a pulse.

  A heartbeat.

  Hell, it had taken me 25 minutes to realize that I hadn’t taken a single breath—and that I no longer needed to.

  As ridiculous and far-fetched as it sounded, I had most likely become like her.

  A leech. A vampire.

  The realization settled on me like a shadow, dark and undeniable. But I wasn’t one to crumble under weight like that. I didn’t break. Not over this. Not over anything.

  So, I’d become a damn vampire. So what?

  Just another shit sandwich life had decided to force-feed me. What else was new?

  So I stood, looking down at my hands— fingers, unnaturally still, unnervingly cold—steady, calm. I wasn’t going to panic. Hell, I didn’t have time for panic. I was still me, even if the world around me had tilted on its axis.

  But still… the idea lingered. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach, something gnawing at me, a cold, creeping thing that didn’t feel like the hunger I’d experienced before. No, this was different. This was deeper.

  It whispered to me like a voice in the back of my head, a hunger that went beyond thirst, beyond flesh.

  I violently shook my head and smacked myself a few times, hammering a fist into the back of my head.

  No.

  Don’t think on it. Don’t linger on it. You drown if you do that.

  If becoming a vampire was the next test life had for me? Well, I’d face it head on, like everything else.

  It was of no matter.

  I was still here.

  My body may not be “alive” in the traditional sense, but I was the furthest thing from dead.

  That part, at the very least, our mythos got it wrong. In our folk and fiction, Vampires were usually described as either damned souls or empty husks.

  And I was anything but empty. I was still myself. Still Jon.

  All my memories, hopes and dreams, very much present.

  And the cocktail of emotions rolling in my head, from pride at how I had fought to apprehension at the brutality I had displayed, meant I was most definitely not a hollowed-out shell.

  I was myself where it mattered. The same living soul.

  At some point during my rumination, by force of habit, I had taken off the small wooden cross from my neck and held it in my hand. I’d never been overly religious or liked the church too much, but I did consider myself a man of faith. Faith had kept me going in my darkest moments and this was no exception.

  Fortunately the part of folklore regarding symbols of faith being anathema to Vampires seemed to also be wrong.

  Hadn’t burst into flame from holding it, so there was that.

  That’s not to say I could call it just a necklace. Not anymore.

  As soon as I had held it, I’d felt something from it. Like an aura. A spark that spoke of unfathomable strength and infinite kindness.

  I ran my tongue over teeth that had already retracted, taking extra notice around my elongated canines and shrugged, putting the necklace around my neck.

  I wasn’t nearly smart or wise enough to start contemplating the nature of the divine.

  The small wooden cross felt right and warm in my hand the same way it had when I had been “alive” and that was enough for me.

  Keep it simple. I’d done that my entire life, wasn’t about to change it now.

  So… simple.

  What I knew.

  I was stronger and faster now. Considering how I had handled the Goblins and rotbloods, at least twice as strong and three times as fast as I had been before becoming… whatever the hell I was now.

  Vampire. Most likely.

  My hand-eye coordination was flawless now, sharper than it had ever been. I could see beyond perfectly, where before I’d needed glasses to see ten feet in front.

  My other senses? I could probably hear and smell a squirrel’s fart from a dozen yards away now.

  And as for my durability? Well, I was a hell of a lot tougher than I used to be.

  The spear wounds had healed and closed up completely in less than thirty minutes. I could feel the fresh skin stretching beneath my fingers, like the battle had never even happened. My flesh wasn’t concrete-hard, not like hers, not like the vampiress, but it was tough. The skin felt like boiled leather and the muscles beneath were rigid. Tough like stringy game-meat.

  But all these were things I knew from my rampage, assumption and conjecture. Approximations and hunches.

  And that was a problem. In order to survive, I needed to know what I could and couldn’t do.

  Enough time had been wasted here.

  There were still too many unknowns for me to afford just thinking the night away.

  One of the most important things I didn’t know yet was how my new body would react to the sun.

  The vampiress hadn’t burst into flame in the daylight, but by her words she had been centuries old. And even with this “undead” body, I was nowhere near as durable, strong or fast as her.

  I was enough of a nerd to know that, at least as far as folk and fiction was concerned, Vampires grew stronger with age.

  And I was a fledgeling. A newborn Vampire. The sun might only weaken her, but that didn’t mean it would be the same for me.

  I’d have to test this. I had to test a lot of things.

  But first. Shelter.

  Landing softly from my perch, crouching low, senses honed and alert, scanning the darkness around me, I stared into the gloom, waiting, listening, feeling every shift in the air, every creak of the branches above. The world had become sharp, vivid—clearer than it had ever been in the daylight.

  Nothing moved.

  No monsters. No lurking threats. Only the rustle of dry leaves, swept along by the wind, and the soft, rhythmic song of nocturnal insects and small critters, scuttling through the underbrush.

  Something tugged at my attention. For once, not something hostile.

  A faint shift, a pull in my focus that led me back to the mound of corpses I had left in my wake. I hadn't noticed it at first, too lost in the aftermath of my frenzy, but now, the sight of the twisted pile of bodies seemed to draw me in, beckoning me like a magnet.

  It wasn’t the bodies themselves—it was something else. Something... alive in the air around them. A faint pulse of energy. Like electricity.

  I could feel it. Smell it.

  Like some magnetic force screaming for my attention. Drawing one of the spear-daggers I had tucked into my belt, I drew closer.

  It felt similar to the heart-beat drum that had led me here, but altogether separate. Where the drum had tugged at my thirst, this new feeling tugged at something just as primal.

  Power.

  The word just sprang into my mind like an intrusive thought and only grew louder the closer to the mound I got.

  Power. Raw, primal, untainted and wild.

  Felt like static electricity coursing through my fingers as I pressed my hand against the cold, clammy flesh of the rotbloods. Something deeper into the mound. It wasn’t coming from the rotbloods.

  I moved the corpses away, and then drew back slightly.

  Splayed with arms akimbo, glassy-eyed and throat savaged from my teeth, the dead goblin just lay there, as cold and lifeless as when I had thrown it onto the pile. But there was no denying the simple fact that the pull came from it.

  The chest to be exact.

  I pulled it out from the pile and knelt next to it, pulling the second spear-dagger and steeling myself. The rational part of me along with the part that had watched an unhealthy amount of horror movies, demanded that I move away from the obvious jump-scare setup before something straight out of H.R. Giger’s worst moments of inspiration snapped out of the goblin’s chest and struck for my face.

  But another part of me, the curious young man, won over.

  I pierced both spear-daggers into the goblin’s chest and began sawing, cutting through bone and cartilage, trying not to cringe at the gurgle and pop of flesh and ribcage parting.

  Nothing burst out.

  Instead I just stood there, transfixed by what I saw. Thumb sized, malformed, all jagged edges and pulsing with arcs of blue, the small black stone thrummed, almost vibrating with raw power.

  By the time realisation hit me, I had already dug it out of the goblin and was holding it in the palm of my hand. It tickled my skin, as if charged with static.

  I knew it was valuable, despite it’s look and shape, the sheer aura around it spoke of inherent value.

  Just didn’t know why it was valuable. Another mystery of this, apparently, melded world that Earth had become.

  If the vampiress hadn’t just been bullshitting me.

  Without hesitation I carved open the other four goblins, adding four more of the curious stones to my collection, and wrapped them in a makeshift pouch, improvised from the t-shirt of one of the rotblood corpses.

  Even more curious, the rotbloods didn’t have the same crystals, nor did they pulse with that energy.

  Well. Not that it mattered.

  What were the stones? Why did the goblins have them and the rotbloods not? Why did there exist rotbloods and goblins in the first place? Did it have to do with what the vampiress had said about our worlds having collided?

  All I had at this moment were unanswered questions and no clues. So all I could do was focus on the here and now.

  And the here and now meant “try to survive”.

  Or at least the rough approximation of what a vampire could call “survive”.

  I shook my head and the intrusive thought with it.

  “5 hours until sunrise” I muttered to myself, checking the screen of my, now even more cracked, smartphone.

  One of the rusty hatchets pilfered from the butchered Goblins comfortably in my hand, the makeshift pouch secured to my belt, I started to make my way towards the old school building at the top of the hill. Abandoned long ago, used more for storage nowadays, the chance of finding it as overrun with rotbloods as the main building was much lower.

  …Probably.

  …Maybe.