“What is this?” I murmured, poking the strange crusted seal beneath the door. “Fucking… superglue?” I blinked, disbelieving, and tried not to gag at the foul chemical scent oozing from it. It stank like rot and regret. I sighed, resigned to the inevitability of this obstacle, and pushed myself back to my feet.

  Then I froze.

  Something was wrong.

  My hand, as if acting on its own, crept toward my head—slow, reluctant, and trembling. Fingers brushed against my hair and came away wet. Not sweat. Colder. Viscous.

  Eyes wide, I tilted my head back.

  Water.

  Water spilled from above like veins slit open in the walls, trickling down the staircase in tendrils at first—then surging, slithering like something alive, pooling around my ankles, soaking into my boots.

  “No. No. Nononono… For real?!” My scream cracked as panic erupted from my chest. The dam. The fucking dam. They were flooding the stairwell.

  They knew.

  Whether by intelligence or pure convenience, they had found a way to turn my worst fear into a weapon.

  And it was working.

  With feral desperation, I turned back to the door and raised my sword, smashing it against the wood with every ounce of strength I had. Splinters slashed into my hands, embedding themselves beneath skin and nail, but I felt none of it. My body was no longer my own—just a conduit for fear and fury.

  I kept hitting. Again. Again. And the water climbed higher.

  It reached my shins. My knees. It wasn’t just water anymore—it was thickening. Turning crimson. Blood-red tendrils swirling in the flood like drowned memories. I wasn’t just afraid—I was breaking. I screamed with every strike, every scream louder than the last, until my voice was nothing but a raw rasp of madness echoing back at me.

  Then I saw it—movement.

  Through the jagged hole I had managed to carve, an arrow snapped through the gap, a whisper of death I barely deflected with my blunted blade. The shaft splintered against metal, scraping my face. But I didn’t care. I couldn’t.

  I was somewhere else now.

  I wasn’t just bashing a door anymore—I was exorcising demons with every swing. I was reliving every moment I had drowned before. Every gasp that never reached the surface. Every limb that thrashed helplessly in the dark, dragged down by the weight of powerlessness.

  The hole filled with water, gurgling like a throat about to scream. The tide reached my waist. My chest. I began stabbing blindly, twisting wood like a trapped animal trying to claw through its cage.

  Why was I doing this?

  Why was I so desperate?

  The questions drifted like ghosts across my mind, already drowned beneath the waves. There was no logic left. No cunning. No plan. Only instinct. Terror. Rage. I wasn’t a vampire. I wasn’t Cupid. I wasn’t a soldier, or a girl, or even a weapon.

  I was just a scared little child again. Alone. Helpless. Dying in the dark.

  My mind fractured.

  I didn’t even realise I had stopped moving.

  Not until the cold reached my chin.

  I didn’t know how I ended up pressed against the stairs. How I ended up slipping underwater. But there I was—thrashing, flailing, gulping water as if it could answer the pain in my lungs. My thoughts turned to mush. My vision blurred. I was losing. I was—

  Thunk.

  Something hit me.

  A flash of pain in my side. Something sharp. Something real.

  An arrow, flying underwater without resistance.

  A gift from a beaver who had no idea what it had just done.

  I gasped, inhaling half water, half life. Blood filled my mouth. A low, guttural growl escaped my throat—something primal and feral.

  Everything else vanished.

  The fear of water? Gone.

  My past? Irrelevant.

  The memory of Luna’s mangled body, the weight of her name? Even that dimmed.

  All that remained was hunger. Not only for blood—but for violence.

  A red veil descended across my vision. I saw the swimming beaver, writhing in the water like a rat, and my lips curled into a snarl. I lunged. I couldn’t swim—I flailed and writhed—but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

  He dove through the larger hole I must have made in my frenzy.

  I followed—impossibly.

  Even submerged, I saw him. A shadow in murky crimson. He moved like a ghost, but I had one weapon left.

  Slamming my sword into the wall, I pulled myself downward—dragged by rage, not by breath. I wrenched myself toward the exit, hand first, arm pushing through the shattered wood, body pressed against the dam like a predator tunnelling through bone.

  The other arm soon followed, elbow bending, muscles shaking with strain as I forced myself through the splintered maw of the door. The ragged wood clawed at my skin like hungry fingers, but I didn’t care. I fit. Barely—but I fit.

  With a wet slap, my body spilled through the hole and collapsed onto the other side where the water barely reached to my ankles. I landed hard, coughing water and bile into a shallow puddle slick with blood. The smell was rancid—iron and wet fur, the scent of prey and rot—and it electrified every nerve in my body.

  My teeth bared in a grin not my own.

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  I rose, slowly, a grotesque thing born of blood and fear and rage.

  And then they fired.

  Three arrows slammed into my chest.

  They thunked into me like accusations—but I only laughed, the sound sharp and cracked, like a bone breaking inside my throat. The pain felt thrilling to me, fuelling my rage and hunger. There they stood, the source of the arrows: three of them. Pathetic. Living. Warm.

  Meals.

  I didn’t wait.

  Before they could even blink, I was among them, slamming one into the wall and diving my teeth straight into its throat. Blood gushed like a fountain, and my body sang. My veins lit up with it, euphoric, ecstatic, sacred. Objectively, it did taste like fish—but it was layered with something else. Something addictive. Something primal.

  More arrows hit me—my ribs, my hip—but I didn’t feel them. I felt everything else.

  With my hands, I tore the creature open like wet paper, viscera spilling between my fingers. I laughed, mouth coated in gore, and grabbed a liver just to watch it slip through my knuckles. The blood ran up the walls, sprayed across the ceiling, splattered the horrified face of the beaver next to him.

  It was art.

  The color. The warmth. The texture of life reduced to meat and fluid. I was no longer hunting—I was celebrating.

  When I let the first corpse drop, hollowed and twitching, my gaze fell on the second.

  His pupils shrank.

  I didn’t speak. I didn’t have to.

  He tried to scream, but I was already there. My nails dug into his shoulders with ease, puncturing flesh, grinding against bone. I lifted him like a toy and felt his body tremble in my grip.

  The scent of his terror was delicious.

  I ripped downward, tearing through sinew and joint like tearing cloth. A gargled shriek burst from his throat as his arms peeled away like wings clipped from an angel. He fell into the rising pool of blood and twitched once before I landed on top of him, sinking my teeth into his neck and drinking.

  He went still quickly.

  So did the world.

  Silence, except for the wet dripping of blood and my gulps. The water beneath me was red now—so deep and dark it looked like wine—thick, reflective, mesmerizing.

  When I stood, I was whole again.

  The arrows clattered to the ground like discarded bones. My flesh healed. My strength returned, tenfold. This was what I was meant to be. Not some fearful creature haunted by drowned memories.

  But a predator.

  I turned—and there another one was, scrambling on all fours like the little rodent he was. Pathetic. Slow.

  I didn’t even need to run.

  I jogged beside him.

  “No… please… don’t kill me,” he whimpered, his voice cracking under the pressure of my presence.

  And gods, it was beautiful.

  I grinned—wide, toothy, stained—and grabbed him mid-run by the back of the neck. With a flick of my wrist, I slammed his head into the wall with a sickening crack. Blood smeared like paint, a line dragged down the wood as he collapsed.

  I stepped forward, licking the blood from my lips—then—

  Pain.

  It hit like a hammer.

  I howled, clutching my skull as something deep inside screamed. My legs buckled. Fire lit behind my eyes. A flood of noise and memories returned uninvited. Images. Drowning. Luna’s corpse. That cold, choking pressure. The silence of death under the surface.

  Water.

  No.

  I staggered back, sobbing, teeth clenched.

  “No… no, not now…” I begged no one. “Let me stay… let me be this...”

  The bloodlust tried to claw back to the surface, but it was already fading. My breathing turned ragged. My hands trembled. The water lapped at my ankles again, and I saw not blood, but her face—dead, pale, her eyes open beneath the surface.

  I collapsed to my knees, screaming into the red water that now felt cold.

  Why can’t I just stay a monster?

  “Go on, Lucinda… eat the meal right before you.”

  The voice curled around my ears like smoke—seductive, low, velvet smooth with ancient malice. It was familiar. So familiar it almost yanked me from the depths.

  My eyes twitched. My hands flexed. The fleeting spark of self burned out like a candle smothered by blood.

  And I lunged.

  The beaver didn’t even scream. My knee collided with its gut, doubling it over as air shot from its lungs in a pathetic wheeze. I grabbed its snout, yanked it up, and dug. My fingers tore into the throat like knives, peeling sinew and tendon apart, ripping through the soft flesh with feral precision. My nails scraped the spine. My hands were soaked. I smiled.

  The thing thrashed weakly as blood erupted like a geyser. I let go only to plunge deeper—my arm slipping into the creature’s chest as if I were searching for something precious.

  And I found it.

  The heart pulsed once in my hand, then stilled.

  I raised it high above me, triumphant, and clenched.

  Thick crimson rained down into my open mouth, over my cheeks, my chin, down my throat. I drank greedily. It wasn’t hunger. It wasn’t need.

  It was devotion.

  When the last drop had fallen, I dropped the heart. It made a quiet plop in the red-tinged water now littered with chunks of gore and shredded skin.

  I rose.

  Around me, the hallway had transformed. No longer a corridor—it was a shrine. A macabre gallery. Walls painted with arterial sprays, organs bobbing gently in the shallow water, limbs splayed out like broken marionettes. The three corpses lay in varying degrees of ruination, torn open, defiled, reduced.

  A smile tugged at my blood-slicked lips.

  This was beauty. This was purpose. This was what it meant to be alive.

  The scent of blood hung heavy—metallic, sweet, intoxicating. But under it… more. The scent of fear. Of prey. Of possibility.

  “Yes, my child,” the voice came again, deeper this time. Richer. “Indulge yourself… in the pleasures of a vampire.”

  But I wasn’t listening.

  I was already moving.

  My feet splashed through the blood-flooded corridor, hands twitching, mouth open in a silent snarl. My thoughts were no longer my own. The name Lucinda echoed faintly, distant, a whisper from a life I had left behind. She didn’t matter. Not anymore.

  There were more hearts to devour.

  More screams to carve from trembling throats.

  And the dark, decadent hunger inside me howled for more.