For two days, Frankie's bedroom lay like a tomb.

  The monster lived inside her. The last shred of denial had ripped away in that greasy diner, leaving her with the cold, hard, terrifying truth. She became a freak. A predator. A thing that craved blood.

  The knowledge, a poison, seeped into every corner of her mind. She barely moved from her bed, the curtains drawn tight against a world now too bright, too loud, too full of tempting, beautiful smells. She became a prisoner in her own house, haunted by the ghost of the girl she used to be.

  The hunger remained a constant companion. It presented a low, dull ache in the pit of her stomach, a physical manifestation of the empty, howling void that had opened up inside her. Her body starved, but the thought of food—real food—repulsed her. The memory of the lettuce in her mouth, the limp, tasteless vegetation, made her gag.

  Her reflection seemed a thing of nightmares. She avoided the mirror, but she would catch glimpses of the pale, hollow-eyed stranger in the dark screen of her phone or the glass of her window at night. The girl with the too-white skin and the dark, hungry eyes.

  The worst part, the loneliness, crushed her. A silence so profound, it bellowed louder than any scream. Her mother tried coaxing her out, her voice muffled, heavy with a worried love Frankie couldn't bear to face. She couldn't tell her the truth. Hi, Mom. Your daughter is turning into some kind of… vampire. Pass the salt? She would break her mother’s heart. Or worse, Maka would call Dr. Harris again. They’d think she’d completely lost her mind. Maybe they’d be right.

  Her friends were a constant, painful presence on her phone.

  Ted: Are you okay? Call me. Dee Dee: Frankie, answer your phone!!! I’m coming over with bad movies and ice cream. Tell me that won’t cure you. I dare you. Ted: Seriously, Frankie. My mom said you just need rest, but this isn’t like you. Dee Dee: That’s it, I’m staging an intervention. Prepare to be befriended. Violently.

  She ignored them all. How could she explain? How could she make them understand a horror she barely comprehended herself? She imagined their faces. Ted, the pragmatist, would try to find a logical, scientific explanation. Dee Dee, the writer, might think it a great story, but not a real one. They would look at her with pity. With confusion. With fear. They would leave.

  Their leaving terrified more than the hunger itself.

  By the end of the second day, she frayed to the breaking point. The isolation of a physical pain, as real as the ache in her gums. The monster inside her was screaming, and the silence of her tomb became its echo chamber.

  She couldn’t survive this alone.

  Her hand, trembling and pale in the dim light of her room, reached for her phone. Her thumb hovered over Ted’s name, then Dee Dee’s. She couldn’t choose. She needed them both. She created a group chat, her fingers clumsy.

  Me: My house. Now. Please.

  She hit send before she could lose her nerve.

  The replies were instantaneous.

  Ted: On my way. Dee Dee: See? Violent friendship works. Be there in five.

  Frankie sat up in bed, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. This moment she would tear open her life and show them the ugly, monstrous thing living inside.

  And they were probably going to run screaming.

  They found her huddled in the corner of her dimly lit room, wrapped in a blanket like a trauma victim. Her face, pale and drawn, her eyes wide and haunted. The air in the room was stale and heavy with fear.

  “Frankie?” Ted said, his voice soft as he stepped inside. He stopped short when he saw her, his usual calm composure faltering. “What’s going on? Are you sick again?”

  Dee Dee stood right behind him. The usual bright, quirky energy surrounding her seemed to dim as she took in the scene. She knelt in front of Frankie, her green eyes full of concern. “Talk to us, Frankie. You’re scaring us.”

  Frankie looked from one to the other at the two most important people in her world. Her two anchors. And she was about to cut the rope.

  Her voice, when it came out, was a choked, tear-filled whisper. “It’s not the flu.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  She told them everything.

  In a frantic, desperate rush, she unleashed the words, as if they'd been pent up inside her for an eternity. She started with the cove, the feeling of wrongness, the strange compulsion to open the chest. She described the winged, blurry thing that had burst out, the sharp, searing pain in her neck that had vanished without a trace.

  She told them about the sickness that followed—the light that cut like knives, the food that tasted like poison, the water that tasted like ash. She told them about the trip to the clinic, about Dr. Harris’s calm, clinical dismissal of her terror. About the diagnosis that had almost convinced her, she felt insane.

  “She thinks I had a panic attack,” Frankie choked out, a bitter, humourless laugh escaping her lips. “She thinks… she thinks I made it all up.”

  Ted and Dee Dee were silent, their faces a mixture of shock and disbelief. Ted had a frown of deep concentration, as if he were trying to fit her impossible story into a logical framework and finding that none of the pieces fit. Dee Dee just looked horrified, her hand covering her mouth.

  Then Frankie told them about the diner. About the smell of the blood. About the sudden, overwhelming, monstrous hunger. The craving.

  “It wasn’t me,” she whispered, her voice cracking with shame. “It was something else. Something inside me. It… it wanted it. It needed it. And my… my teeth…” She trailed off, unable to say the rest.

  She looked at their faces, searching for a flicker of belief, and saw only stunned confusion. It did sound insane. It sounded like the plot of one of Dee Dee’s pulp horror novels.

  Desperation clawed at her throat. She had to make them understand. She had to show them.

  “You don’t believe me,” she stated, the words flat.

  “Frankie, we…” Ted started, but he didn’t know how to finish. “It’s just… a lot to process.”

  “I’m not crazy,” she said, her voice gaining a sharp, hysterical edge. “I am not crazy!”

  With a sudden, decisive movement, she pushed the blanket off and stood up. She strode over to Ted, who flinched back instinctively.

  “Look,” she commanded.

  Her hands were shaking so hard she could barely control them. She hooked her finger into the corner of her mouth and pulled her lip back, baring her teeth.

  “Look at them,” she hissed.

  Ted and Dee Dee leaned in, their expressions shifting from confusion to stunned awe.

  In the dim bedroom light, it appeared subtle. Almost unnoticeable if you weren’t looking for it, yet it persisted. Her canine teeth differed. They extended longer than usual, sharp and nearly translucent at their tips. Not yet fangs, they certainly weren't normal human teeth either. They exemplified a predator's teeth.

  Dee Dee gasped, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and wonder.

  Ted stared, his scientific mind scrambling to find a rational explanation and coming up empty. Gingivitis? A strange calcium deposit? Nothing fit.

  “And that’s not all,” Frankie said, her voice trembling. She let her lip fall back into place. She turned to Ted. “Your mom… she shone a light in my eyes at the clinic. It hurt. But she didn’t see what was really happening.”

  She looked at him, her gaze intense. “Ted. Get your phone out.”

  He hesitated for a second, then pulled his phone from his pocket, his movements slow and uncertain.

  “Turn on the flashlight,” Frankie commanded. “And shine it right in my eyes.”

  “Frankie, I don’t think…”

  “Do it!” she snapped.

  With a deep breath, Ted aimed the phone. “Okay. On three. One… two…”

  He pressed the button.

  A harsh, bright beam of LED light cut through the dimness of the room, hitting Frankie square in the face. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t cry out in pain. She just stared straight ahead, her eyes wide open.

  The skepticism on her friends' faces melted away, replaced by a shared, grim horror.

  In the direct, harsh light, her pupils, which should have contracted instantly to tiny pinpricks, barely reacted. They remained wide and black and deep, swallowing the light like two miniature voids. They were the eyes of a nocturnal hunter—the eyes of something no longer entirely human.

  Ted snatched the phone back as if it had burned him, the beam of light skittering across the wall. He stared at Frankie, his mouth hanging open, all his logic and reason shattered.

  Proof, positive, and terrifying.

  The silence that followed felt heavy and absolute. The impossible had just become real.

  In that moment, in the dim, dusty light of Frankie’s bedroom tomb, their friendship, forged in sunshine and saltwater, reforged in darkness and fear. It solidified into something new. Something harder. An unbreakable alliance against a nightmare.

  They believed her.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Dee Dee found her voice. Shaky, but resolute. “Okay,” she said, nodding slowly. “Okay. So… what do we do?”

  Frankie sank back to the floor, the last of her strength gone, relief and terror warring within her. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  They sat with her, a silent, grim circle of three. They were just teenagers. What were they supposed to do? Call the police? Hi, officer, my friend got bitten by a thing from a box, and now she’s turning into a vampire? They’d be laughed out of the station. Or locked up.

  They were on their own.

  Ted finally broke the silence again. He remained pale, shaken to his core, but the analytical part of his brain rebooted, searching for a path through the chaos.

  “Okay,” he said, his voice low and steady. “Okay. We have a starting point. The cove. The chest.” He looked at Frankie, his eyes full of a new, grim determination she had never seen in him before.

  “If this is what’s happening to you, Frankie…” he said, voicing the question that suddenly hung in the air, heavy and cold as a tombstone. “What happened to the thing that got out of the chest?”