Chapter 1 : Wrong Body, Right Blood
The last thing I remembered was the glow of a computer screen. The hum of the office AC. Then pressure in my chest—the kind that doesn't go away when you shift in your chair. I was twenty-eight, on my third energy drink of the night, finishing a quarterly report for people who wouldn't read it. My heart stuttered. The floor rushed up. Everything went black.
That wasn't the strange part.
The strange part was waking up.
I bolted upright, gasping, and my head cracked against something hard. Ceiling. Too low. A ceiling that wasn't my apartment's. I was in a narrow bed, tangled in sheets that smelled like fabric softener and teenage boy—Axe body spray, stale chips, the accumulated funk of years.
My hands—
My hands were wrong.
Tan. Strong. Young. I turned them over, flexing fingers that felt too smooth, too unworked. These weren't the hands of a man who'd spent six years typing himself into an early grave. These were the hands of a teenager.
I threw myself out of bed and stumbled through the dark. My legs were too long, my center of gravity shifted wrong. I banged my shin on a dresser, swore, and found a door. Behind it: a cramped bathroom with a flickering fluorescent light.
The mirror showed me a stranger.
Blonde hair, cropped short. Blue eyes. A jawline caught between boyhood and manhood. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Handsome in that all-American way that gets you cast as the quarterback in every teen drama ever made.
And I knew this face.
The realization hit like ice water. Fragmented memories—not mine, couldn't be mine—surfaced in jagged pieces. A TV show. Vampires and werewolves and teenage melodrama. The Vampire Diaries. My ex-girlfriend had made me watch it during our six-month stint of what she called "bonding" and I called "hostage viewing."
Matt Donovan.
The human. The normal one. The guy who spent the entire series getting his ass kicked by supernatural forces while everyone around him developed powers or fangs or both.
The guy whose sister died in the first season.
I gripped the sink. The porcelain was cold under my palms—too real, too solid for a dream. I'd died. I'd definitely died. Heart attack, stroke, something had killed me at my desk like a cautionary tale about work-life balance.
And now I was here.
My hand slipped. The razor—old, disposable, left on the sink's edge—clattered, and I grabbed for it instinctively. The blade bit deep across my left palm.
"Shit—"
Blood welled up. Dark red, almost black in the bad lighting. It pooled in my palm, and I turned toward the cabinet to find bandages, already calculating how badly I'd screwed up my new body's hand—
The blood moved.
Not dripped. Moved. It coiled up from my palm like a living thing, climbing toward my fingers, defying gravity with the casual indifference of something that had never heard of physics.
I froze.
The blood kept moving. It wrapped around my index finger, then my middle finger, threading between them like red silk. My heart hammered. This wasn't the show. Matt Donovan didn't have powers. Matt Donovan was aggressively, tragically ordinary.
My concentration broke. The blood splattered—walls, mirror, floor, a Jackson Pollock of crimson that would've been beautiful if I wasn't hyperventilating.
Focus.
The thought came from somewhere deep, instinctive. I stared at the blood on the floor. Move.
It trembled.
Move.
A thin stream detached from the puddle and rose. Wobbling, uncertain, like a newborn learning to stand.
I held my breath. The blood responded to the shift in my attention, drifting sideways, then collecting into a rough sphere that hovered an inch above the floor. It was the size of a golf ball. It pulsed.
My vision swam. The cut on my hand still bled freely, and I was losing more than I should, and none of this made any sense.
A fist pounded on the door.
"Matt! Some of us actually have places to be!" A girl's voice, sharp with morning irritation. "You've been in there for like twenty minutes!"
Vicki.
The sphere collapsed. Blood hit the floor with a wet splat. I grabbed a hand towel and pressed it against my palm, then yanked open the cabinet and found a box of bandages. My hands shook as I wrapped the wound—sloppy, but it would hold.
The mirror showed me Matt Donovan's face, pale now, eyes too wide.
I wiped down the sink first. Then the floor. The walls. The blood came away easily, like it wanted to be cleaned, like it was cooperating. I didn't have time to think about what that meant.
"Matt!"
"One second!"
I balled up the bloody towel and shoved it deep in the trash, then covered it with crumpled toilet paper. The floor was still wet. I threw a dry towel over it, hoping she'd assume I'd stepped out of a shower.
I opened the door.
Vicki Donovan stood in the hallway. Dark hair, liner smudged from last night, wearing a tank top and shorts that had probably been pajamas once. She looked exactly like she had on screen—pretty in a wasted potential way, tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Alive.
My chest tightened.
"Finally." She shoved past me. "You look like crap, by the way."
"Thanks."
The door slammed shut.
I stood in the narrow hallway of what I now recognized as a trailer—the Donovan trailer, single-wide, perpetually falling apart. The kitchen was visible through an archway: dishes in the sink, half-empty bottle of something on the counter. The living room held a couch that had seen better decades.
Home.
I walked to the bedroom. My bedroom now. It was small—barely enough space for the bed and the dresser and a desk covered in textbooks. Football posters on the walls. A jersey hung on the back of the door.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress springs groaned.
The trailer smelled like stale cigarettes and cheap air freshener. Someone had tried to cover the smell of neglect with something that came in a spray can. It hadn't worked.
I looked at my bandaged hand.
Blood manipulation. That was the power. Whatever cosmic joke had dumped me in this body had also given me something that Matt Donovan never had—a fighting chance.
I'd need it.
Because if I remembered the show right—and I did, three seasons' worth of reluctant viewing—Stefan Salvatore would arrive in September. Damon would follow. And sometime in October, Vicki Donovan would die.
I had three months.
Think.
The Vampire Diaries was a death trap. Vampires with centuries of experience. Werewolves who turned every full moon. Witches drawing on ancestral power. Originals who couldn't be killed. And at the center of it all, a supernatural soap opera that churned through side characters like fodder.
Matt Donovan survived the whole series. But he survived by being useful and staying out of the way. He survived by luck.
I wasn't counting on luck.
My phone—a Nokia brick sitting on the nightstand—buzzed. A text from someone named "Tyler L": Training at 6 tomorrow? You in or out?
Tyler Lockwood. Werewolf gene carrier. Best friend. Another dead body walking.
I typed back: In.
Then I opened the phone's calendar. June 3, 2009.
Ninety-six days until Stefan walked into Mystic Falls High.
Ninety-six days to learn what I could do. To gather resources. To build a plan.
Ninety-six days to figure out how to save Vicki's life.
I closed my eyes. My hand throbbed. The blood beneath the bandage pulsed.
First things first.
I needed to know what I was working with—how the blood manipulation worked, what the limits were, whether I could actually use it to fight. And I needed to do it without anyone noticing that Matt Donovan had become someone else entirely.
Get through the day. Test the ability in private. Don't reveal anything.
Simple.
I pulled my phone back out and checked the date again: June 3, 2009. Wednesday.
School would be ending soon for summer. Football conditioning started in a few weeks. I had time.
I had to make it count.
The bathroom door banged open. Vicki emerged in a cloud of steam, makeup fixed, looking marginally more awake.
"Mom called," she said, not looking at me. "She's 'working late' again." Air quotes. Bitterness old enough to vote.
"Okay."
She grabbed her bag from the living room. "I'm getting a ride with Kelly. Don't wait up."
The door slammed.
I sat in the silence she left behind. Somewhere outside, a car engine turned over. Tires crunched on gravel. Gone.
My sister. Alive. Annoyed. Completely unaware that in three months, she'd meet a vampire who would kill her.
I looked at my bandaged hand.
Not if I can help it.
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