(Aria)
Times Square was no longer a cathedral of light.
Billboards still flickered above me, fractured with static and smoke, their colors bleeding into the night air like stained glass. The great city's heart had slowed, its pulse irregular, clogged with bodies both living and not. I staggered through the wreckage barefoot, glass crunching under my soles, but I felt no pain. The scents drowned everything else.
Blood. Sweat. Fear.
Each one struck me like a chord plucked inside my chest, reverberating, demanding. The air itself was thick with it, intoxicating and suffocating. Every breath seared my throat, every heartbeat around me flashed like lightning in my vision.
I pressed my hands to my ears, but it wasn't sound I wanted to block. It was scent. The perfume of the living was unbearable. Each note sharp, bright, drawing me closer like invisible chains wrapped around my ribs.
My stomach twisted. Hunger—or what hunger had become. No longer an ache but a song, harmonizing with the symphony of terror that painted the air.
I stumbled past a half-toppled taxi. Its windshield was shattered, blood streaking across it like paint on canvas. My reflection swam in the glass—eyes pale as winter frost, veins like dark vines reaching across my skin. The face that stared back wasn't me. Wasn't Aria who'd kissed Leo under starlight just days ago. Wasn't the girl who'd finally heard Ethan say he loved her.
But the hunger didn't care who I had been.
I smelled her before I saw her.
A woman, mid-thirties, her leg twisted at an impossible angle beneath a chunk of concrete. She dragged herself across the asphalt with broken fingernails, leaving crimson trails. Her sobs were weak, her breaths sharp with panic and agony.
"Help," she whispered to the empty street. "Someone... please..."
I heard her pulse in her thigh, a rhythm hammering against the shattered bone. My vision shifted without my permission—her body mapped itself in glowing lines, veins blazing like rivers of light beneath her skin. Each vessel a road, each beat an invitation written in languages older than words.
The predator part of my brain catalogued her automatically: femoral artery compromised but intact, carotid strong, subclavian accessible. The infection had rewired my nervous system, downloading hunting instincts like software into hardware that had once worried about art history finals.
My mouth filled with saliva that tasted of copper and want.
I moved before I could think. My body bent toward her, sinuous, predatory. My lips parted, my throat humming with a growl that belonged to something else. She turned, eyes wild, and tried to scream. But her voice was only fuel for the fire building in my chest.
"No," she gasped, scrambling backward on her elbows. "No, please, I have—I have children—"
Children. The word should have stopped me. Should have reminded me of humanity, of the person I'd been just hours ago. Instead, it only made her scent sweeter. Fear seasoned with love, desperation aged with hope.
I dropped to my knees beside her, teeth already extending—when had that happened? When had my canines sharpened into needles? She raised her hands to ward me off, and I caught her wrist.
Skin to skin contact sent electricity through me. I could feel her pulse under my thumb, could taste her heartbeat on my tongue. Her body heat radiated like a furnace, and I was so cold, so empty, so hungry I thought I might collapse into myself.
My teeth brushed her skin. Heat radiated from her blood, a promise waiting to be opened. The scent of iron and life made my head spin.
When I bit—
The world split.
Warmth burst into my mouth like liquid fire, flooding every dead space inside me. It wasn't just taste—it was memory, ecstasy, life itself made consumable. Her blood ran down my throat, filled my chest, every nerve suddenly blazing with borrowed vitality. My body shuddered with the euphoria of it.
But with the warmth came him.
Leo.
The taste dragged me back, not to this broken place, but to the night on the rooftop when we first kissed. The city had been whole then, lights glittering in windows like earthbound stars. Leo's lips had been wine, his tongue soft, his breath sweet with promises neither of us knew we wouldn't be able to keep. He had smiled against my mouth, and I'd thought: This is what forever feels like.
The memory carved through the hunger like a blade. My body seized. I pulled back, choking, blood spilling from my lips, staining my chin. The woman sobbed beneath me, alive still, though her breath rattled with terror and blood loss.
"Leo," I whispered. My voice was ruined, raw, like vocal cords strung too tight. "I... I'm sorry."
The apology hung in the air, meaningless. Leo was dead. This woman was dying. And I—
I was something in between.
The memory slipped away like water through my fingers. Hunger rose again, stronger, furious at being denied. My veins thrummed, vision narrowing. The glowing rivers inside her flared brighter, irresistible. The infection fought back against my humanity, flooding my system with neurochemicals that screamed feed, survive, consume.
But part of me—the part that remembered Leo's laugh, Ethan's confession, the weight of choices that mattered—that part fought back.
Choose, I told myself. You can still choose.
I lunged—not at her throat, but away. I threw myself backward, rolling across broken glass and debris until I hit the wall of a building. The impact drove air from my lungs, but it also drove back the hunger. For a moment.
The woman stared at me, blood seeping from the bite mark on her wrist. Her eyes were wide with shock and something I didn't expect: gratitude.
"Thank you," she breathed. "Oh God, thank you."
I pressed my back against the brick, fighting the urge to finish what I'd started. Her blood was still on my tongue, still singing in my veins. Every instinct screamed to go back, to feed, to take what I needed.
Instead, I closed my eyes and thought of Leo's face. Of Ethan's voice saying my name. Of the person I'd been before hunger and the need to consume flesh rewrote my DNA.
When I opened them again, the woman was crawling away, leaving a trail of blood from her torn arm that made my mouth water and my teeth ache. But she was alive. Wounded, traumatized, missing chunks of flesh, but alive.
I'd chosen.
For now.
The hunger prowled inside me like a caged thing, promising that next time would be different. Next time, I wouldn't be strong enough. Next time, there would be no memories bright enough to hold it back.
But for now, I was still Aria.
Still me.
Still capable of mercy.
The thought terrified me more than the hunger itself.