Indirect sunlight scorched me awake. My heartbeat pulsed once, enough for me to recoil away with an involuntary hiss.
The hotel room door caught on the chain. The police. It had to be. Wake up, little Rabbit. Wake up. I sparked my heart back to life. Blood pumped through my body again, every heartbeat emphasizing the sun-baked migraine in my skull. Everything ached. Sleep. I should be sleeping. The world spun drunkenly around me.
“Just what’s your plan?” a man yelled through the crack. Not the police. He’d clearly been yelling at me for a while before I woke up. He slammed the door against the chain again. “You think this little chain means it’s your room now? Open the door! If we have to break this door open, you’ll have to pay for it. It’s checkout time. Get out, or we’re calling the cops!”
You have got to be kidding me. “I have this room for the rest of the day,” I said.
“You bought one day.”
“Yeah. Today. I checked in early. Where’s the night clerk? We talked about this.” I was not going out into that flaming hell.
“That’s not how it works. And Joan isn’t here. It’s time to get out. Come on.”
I wobbled up to my feet, gripping the side of the bed. A shaft of indirect light tingled when it hit my bare hand. “I paid for this room at six thirty. Are you seriously telling me I would rent a room for, what, four and a half hours?”
“I’m not your financial advisor; I’m the guy telling you to get the fuck off our property. You’re holding up housekeeping. I don’t care what drugs you took, you’re going to have to crash down off them somewhere else.”
A hell of a lot of hostility. I wondered how long he’d been trying to wake me up. I was about as easy to wake up as a methhead crashing after a binge, so he could have been at it for a while.
The man peered into the dark room, eyeing me. He was that sort of bulked out muscular behemoth whose presence alone always seemed like an implicit threat. I could never understand how so many men convinced themselves this wild bulk was what most women found maximally attractive. It was something straight men found attractive—just look at the media they consumed—and they were too homophobic to own it.
“Open the door, hon. Let’s not make this any harder.”
The world wobbled with every step. I had to stop twice just to catch my balance and keep from toppling over. I hit the wall beside the door with an elbow, propping myself up to look at the man. His shirt was so tight I could measure the thick slabs of muscle, the rough patches of crinkly hair between his pecs; I could measure the colossal expanse of his ego, to think anyone would want to see so much of him. The name Mike was stitched into his breast, just over the hard point of one nipple, clear through the clinging fabric.
“This is ridiculous,” I said.
Mike shrugged. “Pay for another night and we can stop this whole conversation. You can go back to sleeping off whatever fun you had last night.”
“I don’t have any more cash.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you. Open the door, or I’m calling the cops.”
Not much of an option, then. With a groan, I shut the door, undid the chain, and opened it. Sunlight blasted me. I recoiled away, twisting and putting my back against the narrow bit of wall between the door and the window. It took effort not to scurry off to the darkness of the bathroom. I focused on breathing through the throbbing pulses of pain.
Mike stomped in and flipped on the light. He did a double take when he saw more than an isolated sliver of me—surely he couldn’t be planning to hit on me after such a charming first impression?
But sure enough, he cleared his throat and stood up straighter. He glanced theatrically around at the filthy hotel room. “Really did a number on the place, didn’t you, Princess? Messy girl.”
I debated killing him. I felt my fangs shift in my gums, gliding out of my skull. Blood pulsed heavy and thick. Then a scrawny man pushed a filthy cart into the room, covered in cleaning supplies that evidently weren’t effective, and I got myself under control.
“It was like this when I came in,” I said.
“I know, I’m kidding,” Mike said.
I scoffed and shook my head. “Aren’t you hilarious.”
“Look, I’m just doing my job. You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”
And the charming flirtation was over. Didn’t last long.
“Well thanks for a pleasant morning, asshole.” I lurched out of the room into the scorching light of day. I hit the walkway’s railing, half tipping over before I caught myself. Asphalt loomed below me. The open dome of the sky pressed down on me with the weight of a vast blue sea, crushing me against the railing, thin metal cast in floral patterns, coated in peeling brown paint. Little bits of rust dug into the skin of my palm.
“What did you call me?” Mike demanded behind me. His voice was far away, an irrelevant throb beneath the pain.
I hissed a breath through my teeth, gathering strength, and wrestled myself forward, stumbling along the second story walkway. I had no idea where I was going.
A truck screeched past on the highway below, windshield catching the sun, sending a lance into my retinas that made me clutch the railing.
At the base of the stairs, a wall of direct sunlight awaited me. Hurricane winds of radiant fire, bleaching away the world. I could face it; I just couldn’t face it for long, not if I wanted to stay sane through the scorching agony.
Think, Valerie.
Footsteps stomping down the stairs behind me. A hand on my shoulder, twirling me roughly around, shoving me into a wall, pinning me in place. Mike, glaring down at me. “Say that again.”
I didn’t have the energy to feign intimidation. “Don’t touch me.”
“You think you can just say whatever you want, don’t you, you entitled fucking cunt? And what, I’m just supposed to take it? Show a little respect.” He spat out each word, leaning into my personal space, hemming me in against the streaked paint of the motel.
His carotid artery was an engorged throb in his heavily muscled neck. Fast.
Needing a glimpse of the flavor, I clouded my eyes half-consciously.
In clouded sight, all the color vanished into a grayscale of perfect detail. Shadows filled with clarity, and direct sunlight became a wall of white fire. The only color left was blood. My own fluoresced a dangerous indigo; I was starving. I’d started last night magenta—pekish, but not enough to be distracting—but I’d boiled through so much blood last night that now I could hardly think. But my own blood was irrelevant.
Because this asshole, Mike, was a throbbing vascular platter, deliciously laid out before me in a vascular wireframe of synesthetic scarlet fire. Healthy. Athletic. A fine steak, high quality, the color spiced to perfection with his emotions. Hot rage flavored his blood like peppers. I preferred cold anger, like wasabi, but at least this was something different, for a change, even if there was a familiar dash of lust, that familiar sweet caramel syrup. Over it all was a tinge of a anxious inadequacy, citric grapefruit, a distant cousin to the lemony twang of fear.
These veins held a delicacy; a tantalizing glimpse of flavor.
Turning my eyes as milky as something off a three day old corpse was reckless in the extreme, of course, but I’d slept in a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses and was still wearing them. Enough cover for instinct to hide behind. Between the pain of facing the day and the wet hunger in my heart, instinct rent at the edges of my conscious mind.
Mike shoved me one more time into the wall, then stormed off toward the main offices. “And get the fuck off our property!”
Without thinking, I stalked behind him, licking the blood from my teeth as they rearranged in my skull. I could face a few moments of scorching hell for something this delicious. I wouldn’t hurt him; I’d just take a taste.
I stepped blindly into the road—and was broken open by a battering ram of steel.
The car slammed into me from the side. The world ripped out from under me. Sky. Trees. A view of the motel office. A horn, blaring. My spine tipped left as steel swiped out my legs. Bones snapped. My skull splintered glass—a windshield—and my left thigh cracked open like a baby bird squeezed too tight.
Then I was being torn forward. Wind ripped at me. The force pushing me released with the screech of tires catching on asphalt. And I was flying through the air like a dancer in a lift. Tumbling. Hair spinning out.
I hit the ground hard with my right shoulder. More bones snapped. My skull whipped down and struck the pavement, cracking across the temple, then the momentum rolled me head over heels. My pelvis bounced off the ground. A joint popped free from its socket. My arms tangled. Then I was flipping up again as another car flew at me from the parking lot—no, no it was parked, but I was rushing face first at its driver’s side door. I tried to catch myself, but I was moving far too fast, and my body was already broken.
I smacked the car door. My brow splintered. Vision through my right eye turned into a vague smear of dim shapes. Something shattered in my right forearm. Muscle tore. Bone jutted free into the open air.
Then, abruptly, the world lurched into utter stillness.
I was on the ground, staring under a grimy parked car.
People were screaming. The pain rose slowly, creeping up on me out of the numb chaos.
Thoughts rolled limply through my skull.
I just got hit by a car. And now I was a broken thing, oozing blood, baking on the scalding pavement. Raw, undiluted sunlight scorched down upon me.
Someone was screaming, the sound distant and vague. People gathered around me. I saw their shadows, but I couldn’t move my neck to see the people casting them.
“Don’t move her!” a man yelled, voice cracking. “I-I don’t think you’re supposed to move someone.”
Bones of shattered glass jabbed through my muscles. Pain sharp enough to make me sick. Some animal panic pulsed. Blood was already pooling around my wounds, swelling the vasculature until it bloated in a varicose mass around every broken bone. Instinct demanded I start stitching myself back together.
My collarbone snapped like a piece of glass being hammered back into place, shattering again and again until the mass of broken shards fit their old shape, then an agonizing heat smelted it all together.
I was boiling through a lot of blood, but there were people all around me. Enough blood to spare.
“Mama is she gonna be alright?” a child sobbed.
Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god, there is a child here, Valerie. Stop. You need to stop now, or you’re going to go feral.
“Jenny, get back, sweetheart,” a woman said. “I don’t want you to see this. I’m calling an ambulance. Jenny. With me, we’re going inside.”
My blood was boiling fast, and so long as my heart was beating, I couldn’t stop it. An inhuman survival instinct had taken over, and all I could do was watch. Instinct knew there was fuel all around to do whatever it needed to fix my broken body. I could drain the blood from the man with the cracking voice. I could drink my fill on the woman calling an ambulance.
And for an appetizer, I could eat the woman’s child.
Oh sweet heaven.
I wasn’t in any danger at all—but they were. Within a minute, I was going to start killing these people. This child. My blood was boiling fast, bubbling away all rationality and self-control. Already I was creeping through the depths of foreboding indigo, tinging closer and closer to the feral hunger of cerulean.
Moments. I had moments—they had moments.
My nerves were a network of cold agony through my body, threads of pain cast from deepest pits of hell, where the devil lays frozen in a lake of ice. Cracked ribs knifed their shards into my lungs. The blood flowed out of me like liquor at a spoiled playboy’s party, pulsing on every frantic heartbeat.
Stop your heart, little Rabbit. Stop it now.
I poured all my focus on that fluttering thing, threading my mind through the muscle fibers. Instinct snarled back at me as I clutched my heart in a death grip. It took six heartbeats to wrestle control away.
Riding the feral edge of cerulean, my blood went to slush, stilling in my veins as I cinched my heart still. I slumped bonelessly against the pavement. The agony of my ruined body slipped out of my mind like an alligator ducking back beneath the waters of a swamp. It was there, waiting to rip my mind open, but I couldn’t see it unless I went looking.
The sun boiled overhead, scorching on my exposed skin, corkscrewing a migraine into my skull. But that pain was as distant as any other, even if I knew it would linger for days when I let myself feel it—but even with a timeline so tight as mine, a week of disabling agony was a small price to pay to save this many lives.
My senses were a disjointed mess. Time slipped away like an oiled fish. Moments slurred out as raw sunlight blasted on my torn flesh. The accident must have ravaged my shirt. I could heal myself, but my clothes were ruined. Absurdly, the cheap, rhinestone emblazoned jeans seemed fine. One shoe had flown loose in the accident. They were high top sneakers; how did that even happen?
Clearly my mind was slipping, because right then, my missing shoe suddenly as important a catastrophe as anything else. You had to be careful when you stopped your heart. Your mind went slow, and it caught on things. I’d never stayed this way for more than a day, but supposedly it got worse the longer you let it go on. You could spend days thinking of a word; weeks wasting away on a memory; lifetimes, trying to remember the lullaby your mother sang when you were a child.
“Oh Jesus H Christ! You all saw! She just stepped right out into the road!”
“I saw how fast you flew in, that’s what I saw!”
That sparked an argument that steadily drew in more people. While they argued, someone came in close to me. Like a spider in its web, I had an impulse to leap out and snatch my prey. I caught my heart before it could send out a single heartbeat. If I’d still been lost thinking about that sneaker…
Focus, little Rabbit.
“I don’t think she’s breathing,” a man said, looming over me. He sounded familiar. Mike, the asshole from the hotel. “Should we do something? Does anyone know CPR?” Not completely irredeemable, then.
“An ambulance is on the way!” the mother yelled from the office.
“Keep Jenny in there!” a man yelled.
The man who hit me had broken off from the argument and started up a stream of nonsense prayers below my feet. Back toward the road? It was hard to pick out positions in space. There seemed to be something wrong with a part of my brain. Little surprise, there. “…Oh Jesus H Christ, Jesus Jesus Jesus it’s because I walked out on Claire, isn’t it? This is my punishment. But what choice did I have? We were so young and…”
“Can we even give her CPR? If we move her, won’t it just do more damage?” Someone asked.
“Brain death is worse. Somebody help me get her flat.”
Someone dragged me a few inches down. Flesh stretched and tore. They flopped me onto my back to stare up at the scorching sun. Satanic fucking devils.
A woman set her palms on my chest. I couldn’t see anything other than a vague whisper over the blinding glare of the sun. She started trying to do chest compressions, but she was mostly just pushing my breasts around. A good thing too. What would happen if she started manually pumping my heart?
I only had a few seconds to frantically search out a solution before someone noticed how ineffective she was being. They cut open my shirt and bra, letting the woman shimmy her hot palm in against my skin. Tantalizing blood pounded through her capillaries.
She thrust her palms down at my heart. A broken rib dug into my lungs. Blood pulsed through my vasculature. Pain screeched out in a wave of fire as that first artificial heartbeat pulsed blood out across my arteries. Molten sunlight poured into my neurons.
And with it came the hunger. Nothing mattered before the cerulean tide. My fingers clawed at the asphalt. Oh god, no. Another compression. Bone snapped and reforged.
“Did you hear that? I think you’re breaking bones.”
“Doesn’t matter.” The woman doing CPR huffed between chest compressions. “She needs oxygen to the brain.”
Flesh ripped and melted, muscle stitching back together beneath the skin. Instinct was fixing the structure of my neck, collarbone, and jaw. Enough for the next step.
“Stop,” I wheezed.
“Did she just say something?”
“Just air getting pushed out.” The woman huffed. The compressions didn’t stop. Bones shifting. Hunger rising with every heartbeat.
“Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with her eyes?”
“You never seen a blind person before? No wonder she walked into the street.”
“I don’t know, man. She looks fucking dead.”
Wet hollow need ached in my heart, demanding I fill it, and there was a cornucopian spread right here.
“You have to stop,” I begged as loudly as I could. But no one heard. My lungs were popped and I couldn’t get the air.
“Could I have some space!” the woman said, then she stopped doing compressions and bent over me for mouth to mouth.
And a cerulean hunger consumed my mind.
Heart pulsing hungry life, I hissed, clawing, lurching up through the hateful sunlight. I caught flesh in my teeth. Where the blood pounds fast and thick. Screams, irrelevant screams. Citric panic filled my mouth with a river of life.
Too slow, even flowing fast as the carotid did. I unfurled my ruined body, coiling one arm around the woman. Boiling blood into my muscles until they were livid with strength, I crushed her chest against mine, juicing her down my throat. Pints flowed into my hungry heart before the taste went rotten with death.
I spat out the dead blood, and clawed through the corpse to my unsteady feet, hissing at the hateful sun.
Shattered bones shifted in my body. The pain was irrelevant; the lack of function was all that mattered now. I couldn’t move my left arm to push away the hand when someone screamed and tried to grab me. My collarbone was shattered. I had to duck under the arm instead, making the split femur shift in my right leg. I boiled blood into the surrounding muscle until it went livid with strength, enough to keep myself from collapsing.
And I couldn’t collapse, not now, because there was a crowd of scarlet delicacies. Five fruits in an orchard, all for me. Two of the ripe ones came at me, offering themselves. Shielding the others. Their blood was sour as pure lemon juice with panic.
I launched myself at the nearest. My heart salivated for him. Titanically muscled. The color of his blood tasted familiar. A sharp scream. He tried to punch me, but by then, my heart was beating three hundred times a minute. His fist moved like tai chi.
My legs coiled around his waist and I tore him to the ground. I wriggled under his muscular torso, shielding myself from the sun. In my clouded sight, the blood in my veins burned a brilliant cerulean, sharp as the blazing sky. I was boiling blood as fast as I consumed it. Blood pounded. Wounds snapped back to perfection. Skin bubbled and healed. The man fought at my legs, but I poured in the blood. Livid strength. Bloated arteries. A spiraling labyrinth of thick, varicose veins. People crowded, trying to pry the man out of my grasp. With all the blood I was boiling into the surrounding muscle, my femur fused back together in three heartbeats.
“Sweet god what is happening!”
I coiled, arching my neck, tilting the man’s jaw as he fought, searching out the spot.
“JESUS CHRIST GET HER OFF OF ME! SOMEBODY—”
His screams cut off as my fangs carved through flesh. Blood drenched in citric terror. I clenched tighter. Tore deeper. Give me more. Still so hungry. And the pain. That infernal sun, baking into my skin. Melting the sense out of me. Around throatfuls of blood, I growled my hatred as the sun baked me alive.
Someone had a gun. Steel, glinting in the white light. Wary. Fear. Shaking hands.
“She’s killing him, just shoot!”
I saw the blood twitch in his finger, and thrust the man I was eating between me and the path of the bullet. The gunman fired, hitting my meal, blasting out skull fragments and brain matter. The blood went rotten in my mouth.
I writhed out from under the corpse, screeching through the scorching sunlight.
My body was nearly healed, and I still had four more delicacies. I lurched at the gunman. A thunderous shot, hammering into my chest, shattering a rib. Another into my abdomen.
None of that.
I was on him before the third shot. With a boiling pulse of livid strength, I ripped his arm out at the socket. He died of shock before the gun hit the ground.
Three.
A woman next. I slammed into her, momentum hurling us under the overhang of the motel’s second story walkway.
Oh blessed shade.
She fought at me as I hid under the stairs, wrenching her down with me, shimmying back until I had concrete above, below, and behind me. A den. A burrow. I could take more time with this one. I leveraged her down, and bit while she fought in a sobbing panic. The blood was foul. A sedentary life stained with terror.
While I drained her, I dug through myself with one hand, seeking the bullets lodged in my flesh.
One of my other meals had run to their car, fleeing, while the last, a little one with hardly any blood at all, was in a panic just beside the stairs, screaming irrelevant words.
I dug the bullets free and healed over the ruined flesh. Muscle stitched. Bone reforged. The fleeing meal slammed out of the parking lot and took off down the highway. I growled, a feral dog with a bone stolen from their mouth.
My wounds were finally healed. As more blood drained down my throat, rationality returned in weak flutters between my hungry heartbeats. The woman’s pulse fluttered a little weaker with every beat; a little faster; a little more frantic. A sprinting gazelle just beginning to stumble as the lions closed in. The world drifted away until all that was left were my lips and her heartbeat. I tightened, nuzzling in, taking all she could give me.
One last stutter, a stumble.
And the lions took the gazelle to the ground and tore the life out of her.
Still one last body for the taking. Delicious, fresh blood. Small. A child, sobbing for their dead mother.
I uncoiled off the body, clawing at the concrete steps, wrenching myself around the corpse. My fingernails were torn and jammed full of flesh and dead blood. A few were bent back at the nail bed. I tore the broken nails free and tossed them aside as I dragged myself up to my knees, then lurched toward the child as she stumbled away from me with a scream. My meal had left me barely a droplet into indigo. I needed more.
Words. The girl was pleading some words I didn’t stop long enough to understand. She was a meal, and I was so hungry I could barely think—but I could think, if only barely.
And if I could think, I could stop. So with a growl, fighting every instinct screaming at me to finish this feast, I wrenched myself out of the cerulean frenzy the instant I was able, and shut down my heart, collapsing bonelessly to the concrete.
One.
I’d managed to spare one of them.
Over the girl’s sobs, I heard the distant howl of an ambulance.
More were coming.