POV (Aria)
The world broke open in blood.
Leo's scream was cut short as the dead thing's teeth ripped through his throat. Hot spray misted across my cheek, burning and metallic, and for a single heartbeat, I thought it was rain. Then the scent hit me—copper and salt and endings. My boyfriend's body jerked in my arms, strength leaving him like sand through an open palm.
"Leo—" The word cracked, thin and useless. My hand pressed against his wound, but my fingers only slid across the flood of his life spilling free. He gurgled, his eyes wide, glassy, desperate. The world collapsed into the tremor of his hand gripping mine.
Behind us, Ethan shouted something—a warning, a curse, maybe my name. His voice cut through the chaos like broken glass, and for one twisted moment, my heart lurched toward the sound. Even now. Even with Leo dying in my arms.
Three hours ago, Ethan had cornered me on the fire escape. His confession had tumbled out raw and desperate: I love you, Aria. I've always loved you. The words I'd dreamed of hearing for years, finally spoken—just as the sirens started wailing across the city.
And then the creature turned on me.
I felt the bite before I saw its face. Teeth, jagged and slick, burrowed into the curve of my shoulder. White fire tore through me. My cry was ripped into something monstrous, a guttural growl that clawed its way from my throat. The sound didn't belong to me—it was raw, feral, alien.
I tried to scream Leo's name again, but my voice was gone. My breath broke into harsh, animal snarls as I tore away from the thing. Leo lay there, his blood running into mine where it dripped from my wound. Our skin slick, our lives mingled. I clutched him tighter even as he convulsed.
"Stay with me, please, stay—"
But his eyes had already begun to cloud.
Dr. Sarah Martinez was suddenly there, hands red, movements frantic. Her lab coat was drenched, her face hard with the practiced calm of someone fighting death with every tool but never enough time. She pressed gauze, shouted for clamps, begged for someone to bring more light.
"Aria, keep pressure here!" she barked, shoving my hand harder against the wound. My fingers slid uselessly.
"Where's Ethan?" I gasped, the question tearing from me before I could stop it. Even as Leo bled out beneath my hands, part of me reached for my best friend. The guilt was acid in my throat.
"He's getting the others to safety," Sarah said, not looking up from Leo's wound. "Focus on this."
I was burning. Not just from the bite but deep, deeper—like every nerve in my body was unraveling. My mouth filled with the taste of iron, thick and irresistible. I tried to blink away the heat in my eyes, but the world was swimming in a red haze.
Sarah cursed, sharp and desperate. "I can't—He's losing too much. Too much."
Leo's lips moved. A whisper, broken. My name? Or just air leaving for the last time? His body jolted once, twice, then stilled.
Something inside me split.
I pressed my forehead to his, rocking him like I could keep him tethered, like my arms could make him stay. The blood between us was warm, almost tender. It soaked my shirt, my skin, our hands tangled together slick with it. His ring—a promise ring he'd given me last month—scraped against my palm one last time.
I should have chosen you, I thought, and I couldn't tell if I meant Leo or Ethan.
Then Leo was gone.
The hunger came like a tide, rushing in to fill the hollow he left. My veins screamed with it. My jaw clenched until it hurt, until I thought my teeth would crack from the pressure. A low growl shuddered from me again, vibrating through Leo's body where I still clung.
Sarah's hand touched my shoulder. "Aria—your wound—we need to—"
I snapped my head toward her.
Her face froze. Her pupils dilated. She knew.
I didn't. Not yet.
But I felt it. The hunger sharpening, curling around the edges of my grief. Every heartbeat in the room thudded against my skin like drums. Sarah's pulse thundered so loud I could taste it. My nails dug into Leo's cooling flesh, a soundless plea to anchor me to what I was.
What I had been.
The red haze thickened, vision tunneling. Leo's face blurred. All I could see was the soft rhythm of Sarah's throat, the fragile promise of life beneath it.
"No," I rasped. The word scraped like broken glass. "No—no—"
Sarah's eyes brimmed with something too sharp to be pity. Fear. And sorrow. For me. For what I was becoming.
Ethan, I thought desperately. Where are you? As if he could somehow anchor me to humanity the way Leo never quite could. As if loving him might save me from this.
I wrenched away from Leo, his hand slipping from mine, leaving a streak of blood across my palm. My body convulsed, the bite a furnace swallowing me whole. The growl built again, louder, tearing me open. My bones trembled. My teeth ached with the need to sink, to tear, to drink.
The virus—if that's what it was—moved through me like liquid fire. I could feel it rewiring my nervous system, my brain chemistry shifting, synapses firing in new patterns. The frontal cortex, where rational thought lived, flickered like a dying bulb. But something else stayed bright. Memory. Emotion. Love.
Both kinds. The steady, comfortable love I'd felt for Leo. And the wild, desperate love I'd never been brave enough to claim with Ethan.
The textbooks called it cellular necrosis with selective neural preservation. The dead called it hunger. I called it hell.
I collapsed to the floor beside Leo, my hands clawing at nothing, at air that felt too thin. The taste of him still lingered on my tongue, memory or reality I couldn't tell. My heart hammered once, twice—then stopped.
Death was supposed to be an ending.
For me, it was a doorway.
My core temperature plummeted. My breathing ceased. But my brain—my stubborn, loving, human brain—refused to surrender completely. The infection couldn't claim what it couldn't understand: grief so deep it burned, love so fierce it defied biology.
Ethan, I thought one last time as consciousness faded. I should have told you yes.
But the hunger would not let me rest.
My body stilled. The world muted, muffled, then sharpened again with a clarity so brutal it felt inhuman. I was cold and hot at once, veins molten but skin ash. Sound became texture—Sarah's sob a rough caress against my eardrums. Light fractured into spectrums I'd never seen before, each color a flavor on my tongue.
Somewhere far away, I heard Sarah whisper a prayer.
My muscles contracted, rigor mortis setting in, then releasing as something else took hold. The infection worked like a master craftsman, preserving what it needed, discarding what it didn't. Motor functions: essential. Digestive system: obsolete. Pain receptors: muted but functional. Memory centers: guarded like treasure.
I was becoming something between life and death. Something new.
Something hungry.
The scent of blood—Leo's blood, my blood, Sarah's living blood—painted maps across my consciousness. I could track every pulse, every breath, every fearful flutter of a human heart. The knowledge came unbidden, instinctual: where to bite for maximum flow, which arteries would yield the sweetest feast, how long it would take for screaming to stop.
But underneath the predator's wisdom, I remained.
Aria. Twenty-two. Art student. Leo's girlfriend. Ethan's almost-love.
Still me. Still here.
Still damned.
My eyes snapped open.
And the world greeted me, for the first time, through the gaze of the dead.