The Light Is Bright, But the Soul Is Dark
Part One: The Fever
By the fourth day, Karen stopped opening the curtains.
It was not because of the sunlight exactly. That would have been too simple, too cinematic, too useful. She did not burst into flame. She did not hiss and recoil like something from an old Hammer film. The sun did not kill her.
It accused her.
It came through the thin student-house curtains in bright white sheets, flattening the room, exposing the plates by the bed, the damp towel on the chair, the lecture notes she had not touched, the jeans she had worn to the party and still had not washed. It made everything look ordinary. That was unbearable.
Ordinary rooms should not contain monsters in progress.
Karen lay on top of the duvet in a vest and shorts, sweating through fabric that already smelled wrong. Outside, the street shimmered in the heat. Cars ticked in the sun. Someone’s speaker played Afrobeats two gardens down. A dog barked with the dull persistence of summer boredom.
The world was bright, busy, careless.
Inside Karen, something dark was learning her shape.
She had been bitten at a party six nights earlier.
Not attacked. That was the worst part. Attack would have given her a clean story. Police. Hospital. Victim. Procedure. Instead there had been music, cheap vodka, warm cans of cider, fairy lights in a back garden, people from college she half-knew and wanted badly to know better.
There had been a girl called Elise.
Or Elsie.
Or maybe that was the name Karen had given her afterwards because memory had begun to rot around the edges.
The girl had worn a white sundress and heavy boots. Her hair was cut short and black, stuck to her forehead with sweat. She had laughed too closely and touched Karen’s wrist as if reading her pulse.
“You look like you’re waiting for permission,” she had said.
Karen, drunk enough to be honest and not drunk enough to survive honesty, had replied, “Maybe I am.”
The girl smiled.
Later, behind the shed, where the fence smelled of hot wood and spilled beer, the girl kissed her.
Karen remembered that clearly.
She wished she did not.
The kiss had been clumsy, thrilling, humiliatingly welcome. Karen had been lonely all summer in that specific way eighteen-year-olds could be lonely: surrounded by messages, half-plans, group chats, photos of other people doing better, and the constant sense of having missed the correct entrance to life.
Then the girl’s mouth moved to her neck.
A bright pinch.
A sound from Karen, half laugh, half pain.
The party lights turning into stars.
After that, fragments.
Someone shouting about a broken glass. Someone vomiting into a flowerbed. Karen in the bathroom, staring at two red marks above her collarbone and touching them with fascination. The girl in the white dress gone. Her friends saying she looked pale. Her insisting she was fine.
Fine.
The word had become an insult.
On the first day, she thought it was a hangover.
On the second, flu.
On the third, she woke at 3:12 in the morning with her mouth full of blood because she had bitten through her own lip in her sleep and swallowed before she understood what she was doing.
On the fourth, she realised she could hear her housemate Priya breathing through the wall.
Not loudly. Not even unusually. Just breathing. Air moving in. Air moving out. Blood moving with it, rhythmic and warm. Karen lay rigid on the bed, eyes open in the dark, counting the breaths until counting became hunger and hunger became a picture so vivid she had to press both hands over her mouth.
She did not sleep after that.
Now it was day five, and college started again in three days.
Three days until induction sessions, timetables, corridors, crowded lecture theatres, girls with bare throats laughing over iced coffees, boys leaning too close in queues, friends hugging after the summer, bodies everywhere, alive and careless and warm.
Karen rolled onto her side and stared at her phone.
Seventy-six unread messages.
Most were from the college group chat.
Anyone back Sunday?
Freshers thing looks tragic lol.
Karen you alive?
Priya says you’re ill.
You better not miss enrolment.
Pub Monday?
KAREN RESPOND YOU GREMLIN.
The last one was from Mia.
Mia, who had shared her chips in the first week of college when Karen had been too anxious to enter the canteen alone. Mia, who sent voice notes instead of texts because she said punctuation was “hostile architecture.” Mia, who trusted everyone too quickly and forgave people before they had finished apologising.
Mia, whose pulse Karen could imagine with disgusting clarity.
Karen threw the phone onto the carpet.
Then immediately reached for it again because being alone with herself was worse.
Her hands had changed.
Not obviously. Not enough that anyone else would notice. But she noticed. The nails were harder. The skin around the knuckles paler, almost translucent. A small burn on her thumb from the kettle had healed overnight, leaving only a silver patch. When she pressed her tongue to her teeth, the canines felt sharper than they had yesterday.
She went to the mirror once every hour and told herself it was not happening.
The mirror told her very little.
Her reflection was still there, which seemed rude. She looked unwell, not undead. Sweaty hair tied back badly. Face thinner. Dark crescents under the eyes. Lips cracked. Bite marks at the neck now faded to two bruised dots, like punctuation.
A colon, she thought.
Something beginning after it.
In the kitchen, Priya was making toast.
Karen had waited until she heard Priya leave the hallway before opening her bedroom door, but the smell hit her anyway. Not toast. Not butter.
Priya.
Salt, heat, shampoo, deodorant, skin, blood.
Karen gripped the banister.
Priya looked up. “Oh my God. You look awful.”
Karen tried to smile. It felt mechanically incorrect.
“Thanks.”
“No, I mean medically awful. You need a GP.”
“I’ve got a virus.”
“You’ve had a virus all week.”
“Persistent virus.”
“Karen.”
There it was. The concerned voice. The one that made Karen want to cry and bite at the same time.
Priya was twenty, doing nursing access before a degree, and therefore impossible to fool with vague illness. She had kind eyes, practical hands, and no patience for romantic self-destruction. She was wearing pyjama shorts and a T-shirt from some charity run, hair tied up, neck exposed.
Karen looked away too fast.
Priya noticed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Light hurts my eyes.”
“You’ve been in your room for two days.”
“Because the light hurts my eyes.”
“Have you eaten?”
Karen almost laughed.
“No.”
“I’ll make you toast.”
“No.”
“Soup?”
“No.”
“Anything?”
The hunger in Karen rose suddenly, violently, like something standing up inside her.
You, it said.
Not in words. Words were too human. It was a direction. A solution. Priya standing there in morning light, alive, worried, close enough to reach.
Karen stepped back.
Priya’s brow creased. “Kaz?”
No one called her Kaz except people who loved her badly.
Karen clamped both hands around the stair rail until the wood creaked.
“Don’t come closer.”
Priya froze.
The toast popped up.
Both of them flinched.
Karen laughed then, but it came out broken. A horrible little sound, half sob.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Priya moved to the bottom of the stairs.
Karen bared her teeth without meaning to.
Priya stopped.
Something passed between them then. Not understanding. Not belief. Something earlier than that. Animal recognition. Priya had worked night shifts in care homes; she knew when a body was no longer safe just because it was familiar.
“Karen,” she said carefully. “Go back to your room.”
Karen nodded.
It was pathetic how grateful she was for an instruction.
She backed into the bedroom and shut the door. Then locked it. Then pushed the chest of drawers in front of it with a strength that made her cry harder, because it was proof.
She was stronger.
She was healing too quickly.
She was hungry for her friends.
She slid down the door and sat on the floor, knees against her chest, while Priya stood in the hall on the other side.
Neither spoke for a while.
Then Priya said, “I’m calling someone.”
“No hospitals.”
“You don’t get to say that if you’re scaring me.”
“No hospitals, Priya. Please.”
“What happened at that party?”
Karen closed her eyes.
The white dress. The boots. The bite. The moment of feeling chosen before being infected.
“I don’t know.”
That was a lie, but not entirely.
Priya’s voice was softer when she spoke again.
“Did someone hurt you?”
Karen pressed her forehead against her knees.
“Yes.”
There was a silence.
“Do you know who?”
“No.”
“Are you in danger?”
Karen looked at her hands, at the pale fingers digging crescents into her own skin.
“Yes.”
Then, because honesty finally broke through shame, she added:
“But I think I’m the danger.”
Priya did not dismiss it. That nearly destroyed Karen.
A worse friend would have said don’t be stupid. A safer world would have allowed that sentence to be absurd.
Instead Priya said, “Then we make a plan.”
Karen lifted her head.
“I can’t go back to college.”
“Not yet.”
“I can’t be near Mia.”
“Not yet.”
“I can’t be near anyone.”
“Not like this.”
“I’m turning into something.”
Priya was quiet for a second.
Then: “Then we slow it down.”
Karen almost laughed again.
“You don’t even believe me.”
“I believe you’re ill. I believe you’re frightened. I believe something happened to you. The vampire bit is pending evidence.”
Karen touched her tongue to her teeth.
“I have evidence.”
“I said pending, not rejected.”
Despite everything, Karen smiled.
It hurt.
By evening, the heat had become unbearable.
The house trapped it in the walls. The carpet seemed warm. The air in Karen’s room thickened until every breath felt reused. Priya had left water bottles outside the door, along with paracetamol, a thermometer, a notebook, and a packet of iron tablets. The iron tablets made Karen gag just looking at them.
She drank water until her stomach cramped.
It did nothing.
Priya sent texts from downstairs instead of speaking through the door.
Less emotional bleed, she said.
Karen stared at the phrase.
Emotional bleed.
Priya was treating the impossible like a care protocol. Observe. Record. Reduce triggers. Maintain boundaries. Hydrate. Do not moralise symptoms. It was absurd and beautiful and not nearly enough.
At 9:40, Mia called.
Karen let it ring.
Mia called again.
Then a voice note arrived.
Karen should have deleted it.
She played it.
“Oi, corpse bride. Priya says you’re being mysterious and dramatic. I respect the brand, but I’m coming round tomorrow with Lucozade and those horrible jelly sweets you like. You can’t stop me. Also, if you’re avoiding college because of anxiety, I will lovingly bully you through it. If you’re actually dying, please give me notice because I’ll need to choose an outfit for the funeral. Love you. Bye.”
Karen listened to it three times.
On the fourth, the hunger answered.
Mia’s voice became texture. Breath. Mouth. Pulse. Karen imagined Mia at the door, arms full of sweets, pushing into the room, laughing, unaware. Karen imagined opening her mouth against Mia’s wrist.
She threw the phone across the room.
It hit the wall and cracked.
Then she dragged herself to the notebook Priya had left and wrote in large, shaking letters:
I WANT TO LIVE.
Under that, after a long time, she wrote:
I DO NOT WANT TO LIVE BY EATING THEM.
That was the first good thing.
Not good as in hopeful. Good as in structurally sound. A beam in a burning house.
By midnight, Karen had filled six pages.
Symptoms. Memories. Fears. Things that made hunger worse. Things that made it quieter. Sunlight hurt but did not burn. Running water helped slightly. Human voices made the hunger personal. Recorded voices were worse than text. Anger sharpened it. Shame fed it. Laughter confused it.
That mattered.
Laughter confused it.
At 1:15 in the morning, she opened her laptop and searched the party photos from the group chat. Her hands trembled as she scrolled past blurred faces, garden lights, red cups, sweaty grins, someone wearing sunglasses indoors, Mia doing peace signs with both hands.
Then she found the girl.
White sundress. Heavy boots. Black hair. One hand raised to block the camera.
The image was blurry, but there she was behind the shed, half in shadow, smiling at Karen as if they shared a secret.
Karen zoomed in.
The girl’s face pixelated.
Then changed.
Not much. Just enough.
The smile widened one degree too far.
The eyes looked directly at Karen through the screen.
A message appeared beneath the photo.
Not in the chat.
On the image itself, written across the garden fence in dark red letters:
COME BACK BEFORE YOU SPOIL.
Karen slammed the laptop shut.
For a few seconds she could not breathe.
Then she opened the notebook again and added a new line.
She knows where I am.
Outside, in the hot summer dark, something scratched once at the window.
Karen did not look.
The scratch came again.
Then a girl’s voice, soft and amused, spoke from the other side of the glass.
“Poor little light. Burning so hard. Let me in, and I’ll teach you how to stop hurting.”
Karen stood very slowly.
Her whole body leaned towards the window.
Behind the bedroom door, Priya knocked once.
Not entering. Not demanding.
Just one sharp human sound.
A signal.
Karen grabbed the curtains and pulled them tighter.
“No,” she whispered.
The thing outside laughed.
The room grew hotter.
Karen sat with her back against the door until dawn, notebook in her lap, hunger in her bones, and one sentence repeated so many times it became almost stronger than prayer.
I am still here.
The Light Is Bright, But the Soul Is Dark
Part Two: The House Protocol
By morning, Priya had made rules.
She did not call them rules. She called them controls, because Priya had the moral temperament of a nurse and the vocabulary of a risk assessment.
Karen found the list pushed under her bedroom door on a sheet of lined paper.
1. Door stays locked unless agreed.
2. No surprise entry.
3. Communicate by text unless urgent.
4. Record symptoms every two hours.
5. Avoid voice notes.
6. No visitors.
7. Curtains closed, but room ventilated.
8. Fluids every hour.
9. If hunger spikes, say “red”.
10. If you think you may hurt someone, say “black”.
Underneath, in smaller writing, Priya had added:
11. This is not your fault.
12. But it is your responsibility now.
Karen sat on the floor and read the last two lines until they blurred.
Not your fault.
Your responsibility.
It was the first thing anyone had given her that did not feel like either denial or doom. It did not forgive her in advance. It did not condemn her. It simply put a rail beside the drop.
She texted:
Thank you.
Priya replied:
Don’t thank me. Drink water.
Karen drank water.
It still did nothing.
Her body had become a house with something terrible moving inside the walls. Sometimes she could almost ignore it. For twenty minutes at a time she would be only ill: fevered, weak, light-headed, sweating through the same old vest while the city baked outside. Then a sound would reach her through the plaster: Priya washing a mug, a neighbour laughing, a delivery driver speaking on the phone below the window, and the thing inside Karen would turn its head.
By eleven, she could hear heartbeats.
Not constantly. Not like a superpower. More like the world was leaking through itself. Thud behind wall. Flutter below floor. Pulse in the street. Each one different. Priya’s was steady but tired. The postman’s was fast, irritated by the heat. A child outside had a quick bright rhythm that made Karen clap her hands over her ears and whisper apologies to no one.
She wrote it all down.
Hunger worse with: proximity, voices, heat, shame, thinking about Mia.
Hunger weaker with: running water, cold objects, written text, counting, Priya being bossy, bad jokes.
At midday, Priya texted:
I’m leaving food outside. Don’t be dramatic. Try it.
Karen opened the door two inches after Priya retreated.
On a tray sat toast, a banana, a bowl of soup, two ice packs wrapped in tea towels, and a mug with a sticky note on it.
NOT BLOOD. TEA. RELAX.
Karen nearly laughed.
Then the smell of the soup hit her and she gagged so hard she had to crawl back from the door.
Food had become furniture. It looked like something humans used to keep themselves alive, but the category no longer included her. She tried the tea. It tasted of hot coins. She tried the banana. Her mouth rejected the sweetness as if it were a lie.
The hunger rose, offended.
She shoved the tray back into the hall and slammed the door.
RED, she texted.
Priya’s reply came immediately.
Cold pack. Neck. Count backwards from 300 by 3s. No voice.
Karen pressed an ice pack to her throat. The shock steadied her. She counted.
300. 297. 294. 291.
At 276, she began crying.
At 249, she stopped wanting Priya quite so badly.
At 213, she realised that the hunger was stupid.
Not weak. Not harmless. But stupid.
It wanted one thing with the brutal simplicity of a baby, a parasite, a fever. It could make her body ache and her mouth water and her nerves light up at the sound of blood, but it could not solve a maths problem. It could not follow a plan. It could not care about consequences five minutes away.
Karen could.
That mattered.
She wrote:
The virus is strong but narrow. I am weak but wide.
Then she underlined it twice.
At three in the afternoon, Mia arrived.
Karen knew before the doorbell rang. She heard her coming up the road, not by footstep, but by pulse. Mia’s heartbeat had a bouncing impatience to it, absurdly recognisable, like the rest of her. Then came the slam of the garden gate, the rattle of keys, the doorbell pressed three times in a rhythm only Mia would consider charming.
Karen’s entire body leaned towards the bedroom door.
Her teeth hurt.
From downstairs, Priya shouted, “No.”
Mia shouted back through the letterbox, “Rude. I brought medical sweets.”
Karen slid down the wall and pressed both hands over her mouth.
Priya opened the front door on the chain.
Karen heard it all too clearly.
“She can’t see anyone.”
“Is she contagious?”
“Yes.”
“With what?”
“Something nasty.”
“I’m not scared of flu.”
“You should be scared of me. Go home.”
Mia’s voice changed. The joking fell away.
“Priya. What’s actually wrong?”
Karen squeezed her eyes shut.
Please go. Please don’t go. Please come upstairs. Please never come near me again.
The contradictions tore through her so hard she dug her nails into her arms. Blood welled where the nails broke skin. Her own blood smelled wrong. Thin. Bitter. Turning.
Mia said, “I just want to talk to her.”
Priya said, “Text her.”
“She isn’t answering.”
“She will.”
“You’re being weird.”
“Yes.”
“Is she hurt?”
A pause.
Priya said, “Yes.”
The word moved through the house like a dropped glass.
Mia’s heartbeat changed.
Karen could hear it quicken. Fear, concern, love, all of it becoming heat and rhythm. The hunger in Karen opened like a flower in darkness.
BLACK, she texted.
Priya’s phone buzzed downstairs.
The house went silent.
Then Priya said, very calmly, “Mia, you need to leave now.”
“What? No.”
“Now.”
“Priya—”
“Now.”
Karen crawled to the chest of drawers and pushed against it with both feet, even though it was already jammed against the door. She could feel the hallway beyond it like a scent. Stairs. Front door. Mia’s living blood.
Her phone buzzed.
Priya:
Bathroom tap. Full cold. Now.
Karen crawled to the small en suite cupboard that barely deserved the name bathroom, turned the sink tap on full, and shoved both wrists under the cold water.
Pain helped.
The water hammered her skin, shocking the hunger back into its cage for one second, then another. Downstairs, Mia was crying now, angry crying, which was worse because it sounded like loyalty.
“You can’t just shut me out,” Mia said.
Karen whispered, “You have to.”
Mia could not hear her.
Or maybe she could, because for one second her crying stopped.
Then the girl from the party spoke from outside Karen’s window.
“Elise” or “Elsie” or whatever she was leaned close to the glass, though Karen had not opened the curtains. Her voice came through the cloth as if the fabric were smoke.
“You could have her, you know.”
Karen froze.
Water ran over her hands.
“You could keep her,” the girl whispered. “That’s the first lesson. Hunger isn’t murder if you call it love.”
Karen gripped the sink.
“Shut up.”
Downstairs, Mia said, “What was that?”
Priya said, “Go home.”
The girl outside laughed softly.
“She wants to save you. That’s the dangerous type. They come close. They put their wrist in your mouth and call it friendship. Then they blame you for biting down.”
Karen turned off the tap.
The room roared with silence.
Her reflection in the little bathroom mirror looked back at her. Pale. Wet hair. Black eyes.
Not fully black.
Not yet.
The pupils had spread too wide, swallowing most of the iris. Her mouth had changed too. The teeth were not monstrous, not like films, but the shape was wrong now. Efficient. Designed.
Outside, the girl said, “Let her upstairs, Karen. You’re so lonely.”
Karen picked up the only thing on the sink: a cheap can of dry shampoo.
She threw it at the window.
It bounced off the curtain and clattered to the floor.
Pathetic.
The girl laughed harder.
Then Priya knocked once on Karen’s bedroom door.
The human signal.
Sharp. Annoyed. Real.
“Karen,” Priya said through the wood. “Mia’s gone.”
Karen collapsed onto the bathroom floor.
The hunger screamed inside her, not with words but with chemical outrage. Prey had come close. Prey had left. The body had failed its new purpose.
Karen shook until her teeth clicked.
Priya stayed in the hallway.
“I’m sitting outside the door,” she said. “I am not coming in.”
Karen managed, “Good.”
“Was someone at the window?”
Karen swallowed.
“Yes.”
“The girl?”
“I think so.”
“Can she get in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you invite her?”
Karen looked at the closed curtains, at the bright summer afternoon burning behind them.
“No.”
“Then we assume no. We work with assumptions until better data arrives.”
That was so Priya that Karen started laughing.
The laugh turned into sobbing almost immediately.
“I nearly went for Mia.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I wanted to.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I could have.”
“But you didn’t.”
Karen pressed her forehead to the tile floor.
“Stop making that sound like it matters.”
“It does matter.”
“It shouldn’t. Wanting it should make me evil.”
“No. Doing it would make you dangerous. Enjoying it might make you evil. Wanting it makes you ill.”
Karen hated how much she needed that distinction.
At five, Priya found the party girl.
Not physically. Online.
She sent Karen a screenshot from someone’s social feed. A group photo from the party. White sundress. Heavy boots. Short black hair. The face still blurred at the edges, as if the camera had refused to keep her properly.
Caption: WHO BROUGHT THIS GIRL LOL?
Comments underneath:
thought she was with you
nah she came with ryan?
who is she
she was fit but weird
anyone get her insta
she bit tom lmao
tom’s been off sick too
Karen stared at the last line.
Tom.
She barely knew him. Tall, nervous, did media studies, always smelled faintly of weed and Lynx. He had been at the party. She remembered him trying to balance a plastic cup on his head while people chanted.
Tom had been bitten too.
Maybe more than Tom.
Karen texted:
Need to warn him.
Priya replied:
Already looking.
Karen:
College starts in 3 days.
Priya:
Then we have 3 days.
Karen:
For what?
Priya did not answer for nearly a minute.
Then:
For a better option than locking you in a bedroom until you eat the postman.
Karen laughed again, properly this time, a short ugly bark of laughter that startled her.
The hunger flinched.
There it was again.
Laughter confused it.
Not because laughter was holy or pure. Karen was beginning to understand that nothing about this was moral in the simple way stories wanted. Laughter confused it because laughter changed the body without offering blood. It interrupted fear. It bent shame sideways. It made the hunger lose the thread.
She wrote:
Laughter = interference.
At sunset, the heat finally broke.
A thunderstorm rolled in from the west, slow and purple-black, pressing the summer air flat before it. The first rain hit the window in fat drops. The smell of hot pavement rising into wet air filled the room even through the closed curtains.
Karen stood near the glass.
The girl outside was gone.
Or hidden.
Priya texted:
Storm helps?
Karen considered.
A little.
Rain made the world less bright. The sound on the roof gave her something to rest inside. Water everywhere, moving, falling, washing heat from brick.
Then another message arrived.
Unknown number.
The preview read:
You are spoiling because they are starving you.
Karen did not open it.
Another came.
Do you think restraint is virtue? It is only delayed appetite.
Another.
Your friend Mia cried in the alley.
Another.
She tastes of orange sweets and panic.
Karen threw the phone onto the bed.
The room tilted.
The girl had followed Mia.
Or wanted Karen to think she had.
That distinction did not matter enough.
BLACK, Karen texted Priya from her laptop.
This time Priya did not stay outside.
She opened the bedroom door with her key before Karen could protest, but she did not enter alone.
She had taken precautions.
She wore her thick motorbike jacket, zipped to the throat despite the heat. Heavy gloves. A scarf wrapped around her neck. A clear plastic face shield from her nursing placement kit. In one hand she held a spray bottle labelled GARLIC? in black marker. In the other, a wooden chair leg.
Karen stared at her.
“What the hell are you wearing?”
“PPE.”
“You look insane.”
“You’re turning into a vampire. Standards have shifted.”
Karen laughed.
Then cried.
Then backed away, because under the jacket and gloves and scarf, Priya was still Priya, and Karen could still hear the blood.
Priya stopped in the doorway.
“Do I come in?”
Karen’s whole body said yes.
Her mouth watered.
“No.”
Priya nodded once.
“Good answer.”
“I need to find Mia.”
“No. I texted her. She’s home. Her mum answered. She is alive and confused.”
Karen’s knees weakened.
Priya continued, “Unknown messages are bait. We do not obey bait.”
“You came in.”
“I came to the door. Difference.”
“You shouldn’t be near me.”
“Correct.”
“Then why are you?”
Priya’s eyes behind the face shield were tired and fierce.
“Because isolation is making you worse.”
Karen gripped the edge of the desk.
“I could hurt you.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not scared enough.”
“I am extremely scared. I’m just busy.”
That, more than anything, steadied Karen.
Priya placed a new stack of papers on the floor and slid them into the room with her foot.
“I printed everything. Party photos, comments, the bite cases we found, and some extremely stupid vampire folklore.”
“Folklore?”
“I said extremely stupid. But sometimes stupid things are distorted survival advice.”
Karen looked at the papers.
“Garlic?”
“Unclear. Mostly culinary racism and medieval medicine. But I’m not ruling anything out.”
“What about crosses?”
“You’re not religious.”
“Is the virus?”
“Excellent question.”
Despite the fear, they both smiled.
The hunger faltered again.
Priya noticed.
“There,” she said. “That.”
“What?”
“You smiled and your eyes changed back a bit.”
Karen touched her face.
“Did they?”
“Yes.”
Priya crouched, still outside the threshold.
“Karen. It isn’t just blood. It’s state-dependent. Hunger, shame, fear, isolation—those push you one way. Humour, choice, cold, running water, written language—those pull you back.”
“You’re saying I can vibes my way out of vampirism?”
“No. I am saying your nervous system is still in the loop. You are not gone.”
Karen looked down at the notebook.
I am still here.
For the first time, the sentence felt less like prayer and more like data.
At ten that night, they held a planning session with the door open and Priya sitting in the hallway outside a line of salt, garlic cloves, and duct tape that probably did nothing but made them both feel slightly more organised.
They found four likely bite victims from the party.
Karen.
Tom.
A girl called Leanne who had posted that she had “sun poisoning” despite not going outside.
A first-year called Ash who had uploaded a selfie with sunglasses indoors and the caption summer flu is homophobic.
All due back at college in three days.
All connected to the same party.
All potentially hungry.
All potentially ashamed enough to hide.
That was the virus’s advantage, Karen realised.
Not just blood.
Embarrassment.
No one wanted to admit they had been bitten behind a shed by a beautiful stranger at a hot, stupid party. No one wanted to say they were craving their friends. No one wanted to become a problem at the exact age they were supposed to become a person.
The vampire virus fed on secrecy before it fed on blood.
Karen wrote:
Step 1: break secrecy.
Priya nodded.
“How?”
Karen looked at the group chat on her cracked phone.
Seventy-six unread messages had become one hundred and twelve.
College in three days.
Friends in three days.
Crowded corridors in three days.
Bodies everywhere.
Or a warning before then.
“I need to send a message,” Karen said.
Priya’s expression sharpened.
“To who?”
“Everyone from the party.”
“You can’t tell them you’re a vampire.”
“No. They’ll think I’m joking or insane.”
“They may already think that.”
Karen ignored that.
She began typing, then stopped. Deleted. Typed again. Deleted again. The words were too dramatic, then too vague, then too unbelievable.
Finally, she wrote:
Anyone who was at Ryan’s party and got bitten, scratched, kissed by someone who then vanished, or has had weird fever / light sensitivity / hunger / hearing stuff since: message me privately. Not a joke. Not drugs. Don’t be alone with people until we know what’s happening. Please.
She hovered over send.
Her thumb shook.
“This will make me a freak.”
Priya said, “You are currently barricaded in a bedroom with suspected vampirism. Social risk has peaked.”
Karen snorted.
The hunger recoiled.
She pressed send.
For thirty seconds, nothing happened.
Then Mia replied publicly:
KAREN WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL
Then:
also glad ur alive x
Then Tom messaged privately.
Just three words.
You too then?
Karen stared at the screen.
Her fear did not vanish.
Her hunger did not fade.
The thing inside her was still there, dark and patient and furious.
But somewhere beyond the bedroom, beyond the hot house and the rain and the shame, another infected person had answered.
Not cure.
Not salvation.
A line across the dark.
Karen typed back:
Yes. Don’t feed. Don’t be alone. We’re making a plan.
Outside, under the thunder, the girl from the party screamed.
Not in pain.
In anger.
The Light Is Bright, But the Soul Is Dark
Part Three: The Bite Group
By morning, Karen had become a group administrator.
This felt unfair.
A person should not have to manage both undead transformation and message moderation. Yet there she was, sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor in yesterday’s vest, curtains pinned shut with bulldog clips, fever crawling under her skin, creating a private chat called Ryan’s Party Weirdness because Priya had refused to let her call it Potential Vampire Victims Support Group.
“Tone matters,” Priya had texted from the hallway.
Karen replied:
Tone matters less than fangs.
Priya:
Fangs are also tone.
The first members were Tom and Leanne.
Tom wrote in short bursts, as if every sentence embarrassed him.
got bit by girl behind garage
thought it was a sex thing
not a cool sex thing
been ill since
can hear neighbours
ate raw mince at 4am
please don’t tell anyone
Leanne was more direct.
I can’t go outside. I hissed at my mum. Actual hiss. I’m wearing sunglasses in the bath.
Then Ash joined.
Ash sent a selfie in a hoodie, sunglasses, and a scarf wrapped up to the nose, captioned:
absolutely thriving babes
Then, three seconds later:
I cried because my brother had a nosebleed.
Karen stared at the screen.
There were four of them.
Four infected. Four half-turned. Four separate bedrooms. Four sets of family or housemates moving around them like warm accidents waiting to happen.
There might be more.
Probably there were more.
The girl from the party had not bitten at random. Karen understood that now. She had not been hungry in the ordinary sense. She had been recruiting. Seeding. Spoiling. Leaving little fires in separate houses and waiting for them to burn through the people nearby.
The virus wanted them isolated, ashamed, silent, hungry.
So Karen did the opposite.
She made a spreadsheet.
Priya approved of the spreadsheet in principle, then objected to Karen’s columns.
“Don’t write ‘bloodlust intensity,’” she said through the door. “Write ‘hunger spike.’”
“It’s bloodlust.”
“It’s also a healthcare-adjacent incident log.”
“You are sanitising vampirism.”
“I am making it easier to read under stress.”
Karen changed the column to Hunger Spike 1–10.
The group filled it in every two hours.
Light sensitivity. Hearing changes. Temperature. Food tolerance. Dreams. Bite condition. Eye colour. Emotional triggers. What helped. What made it worse.
Patterns emerged.
Cold helped everyone.
Running water helped Karen and Leanne, but not Tom.
Written words helped Karen.
Music helped Ash.
Bad jokes helped all of them, though nobody wanted to admit this formally.
Garlic did nothing except make Tom sick and Ash say, “I’m Italian now by exposure.”
Crosses had mixed results. Leanne borrowed one from her grandmother and felt calmer holding it, but Ash touched a crucifix necklace and said it made their hand itch “in a Catholic way,” which nobody knew how to interpret.
Sunlight hurt, but not lethally. It caused nausea, headache, skin pain, and emotional collapse.
Raw meat reduced hunger for twenty minutes, then made it worse.
Human blood was still theoretical.
They all wanted to keep it that way.
By noon, Mia had found a way into the chat.
Karen did not invite her. Karen would never have invited her. Mia arrived by force of personality, screenshots, and the social engineering of three mutual friends.
Her first message read:
I am here because you are all idiots and Karen is my idiot specifically.
Karen typed:
Leave.
Mia:
No.
Karen:
It’s dangerous.
Mia:
That has been explained. Badly.
Karen:
Mia.
Mia:
Karen.
Karen put the phone down, stood up, and walked in circles around the room until the hunger stopped surging. Mia was too much. Too loved. Too known. Even her texts had a pulse because Karen’s body remembered the person behind them.
Priya noticed the silence.
“You gone red?”
Karen pressed her forehead to the wall.
“Orange.”
“That isn’t on the system.”
“It is now.”
Mia kept typing.
Priya says voice notes are bad, so I’m typing like a Victorian hostage. I won’t come round. I won’t do anything stupid. But you don’t get to vanish because you’re scared of wanting things. That was your thing before the vampire problem, by the way.
Karen stared at the message.
The hunger twisted into something more painful.
Not appetite.
Recognition.
Before the party, before the bite, before the fever, Karen had already been disappearing. Not dramatically. Just little withdrawals. Leaving messages unanswered. Cancelling plans. Standing at the edge of rooms waiting to be invited into her own life. She had thought it was shyness, anxiety, tiredness, being eighteen and badly assembled.
The virus had not invented the dark parts.
It had amplified them.
That was harder to bear.
She typed:
I’m scared I’ll hurt you.
Mia replied:
Good. Stay scared enough to make choices. Not scared enough to be alone.
Karen cried for ten minutes, silently, with the phone face down beside her.
Then she added Mia to a separate chat called Non-Bite Support / Do Not Visit.
Priya joined.
Mia joined.
Leanne added her older brother, Callum, who had once done mountain rescue and therefore considered every crisis primarily a logistics problem.
Ash added their aunt Saf, a biology teacher with alarming calm.
Tom added no one at first.
After two hours, he added his grandmother.
Her first message was:
Thomas says he has become vampiric. I have made tea. Please advise.
That was when Ash sent seventeen laughing emojis, then immediately apologised for being disrespectful.
Tom’s grandmother replied:
Laughter is acceptable in this house.
Karen wrote that down.
At three in the afternoon, they held the first meeting.
Not in person. Never in person. Video was rejected after Karen saw Tom’s neck on camera and had to put her hands under the cold tap. Audio was rejected after Leanne said Ash’s breathing made her “want to climb the wall.” So they used a shared document and text chat.
It became chaotic almost immediately.
Leanne wanted to barricade herself in the garage.
Ash wanted to “find the bite girl and punch her into folklore.”
Tom wanted someone to tell him whether he was going to die.
Mia wanted addresses for everyone, which Karen refused to provide.
Priya wanted symptom discipline.
Saf wanted samples.
Nobody liked that.
Saf clarified:
Saliva, hair, photos of bite marks, temperature logs. I am not asking children to post blood in the mail. Please unclench.
Tom’s grandmother asked whether anyone had tried black pudding.
Karen stared at the screen.
Then replied:
No.
Tom’s grandmother:
It is already blood, cooked, legal, and available at Morrisons.
The chat went quiet.
Priya texted Karen privately:
She has a point.
Karen hated that she had a point.
By evening, Callum had produced a practical plan.
Stage one: keep infected isolated but not alone.
Stage two: replace secrecy with controlled disclosure to trusted people.
Stage three: identify all party attendees and possible exposures.
Stage four: find the source.
Stage five: prevent college outbreak.
“Outbreak” was the word that changed the room, though the room was virtual and distributed across four frightened houses.
College was no longer just Karen’s private terror.
It was a feeding ground.
Hundreds of students returning in late summer heat. Parties, cramped flats, shared kitchens, awkward hugs, cheap drink, freshers’ events, people desperate to belong. Perfect conditions for hunger disguised as intimacy.
The bite girl knew that.
Karen felt it with sick certainty.
Elise, Elsie, whatever she was, had seeded them just before term because she wanted them to break among people. To feed accidentally. To infect. To multiply through shame and desire and the particular loneliness of young people trying to seem less lonely.
Karen wrote in the group:
She picked us because we’d hide it.
No one replied for a while.
Then Leanne wrote:
She picked wrong.
Karen looked at those three words until her breathing steadied.
She picked wrong.
At sunset, the bite girl sent them all the same message.
It appeared simultaneously on Karen’s cracked phone, Tom’s laptop, Leanne’s tablet, and Ash’s old gaming PC.
No sender.
No app.
Just white text on black screen.
MY LITTLE LIGHTS.
YOU ARE NOT SICK. YOU ARE UNFINISHED.
COME TO THE PLACE WHERE YOU WERE OPENED.
COME BEFORE COLLEGE.
COME BEFORE HUNGER MAKES YOU ORDINARY.
Underneath was a photograph of Ryan’s garden.
The shed.
The fence.
The place where Karen had been kissed and bitten and turned into a crisis with legs.
In the photograph, the girl stood in the dark beside the shed, white dress luminous in the heat, boots sunk in the grass. Around her stood other figures.
Five? Six? More?
Too blurred to count.
Karen’s hunger answered her image with a horrible little thrill.
It recognised authority.
That frightened her more than the teeth.
The group exploded.
Tom:
no no no no
Ash:
absolutely not going to murder shed
Leanne:
my bite is burning
Mia:
Karen don’t you dare
Priya:
Nobody goes anywhere. Record symptoms. Cold protocol now.
Karen’s bite had begun to hurt too.
Not like infection. Like a hook being pulled.
She stood in the middle of her bedroom, arms wrapped around herself, while the call inside her deepened. Come back. Be finished. Stop hurting. Stop choosing. Become what you are becoming anyway.
The curtains stirred though the window was closed.
Outside, the summer evening was gold and blue and unbearable.
Karen’s phone buzzed again.
This time the message was private.
From unknown.
Poor Karen. Still asking permission. Come and I will make you brave.
The words went into the old wound.
Not the bite.
The older wound. The one the girl had found at the party. The part of Karen that had wanted someone else to decide she was wanted, chosen, transformed, necessary. The part that mistook surrender for confidence because it had never learned the difference.
Karen nearly opened the window.
Her hand was on the curtain when Priya knocked once.
Human signal.
Then Mia texted:
Bravery is not letting some undead groomer in boots do your personality for you.
Karen barked a laugh so sudden it hurt her throat.
The pull weakened.
Not gone.
Weakened.
She sat down hard on the floor and typed:
We need to go there.
Priya replied instantly:
No.
Karen:
Not to obey. To end the call.
Mia:
Still sounds like murder shed.
Saf:
It may be locus-based conditioning. Returning could strengthen or break it depending on mechanism.
Ash:
biology aunt please don’t encourage boss fight
Leanne:
If we don’t go, she calls us until someone cracks.
Tom:
I’m going to crack.
That settled it.
Not because Tom was weak. Because he was honest first.
Karen could feel herself cracking too.
The call would continue. Tonight, tomorrow, the next night. Then college. Then crowds. Then harm.
They needed a better plan than endurance.
Priya came to the bedroom door.
This time she spoke, low and controlled.
“You are not going to that garden hungry.”
“I know.”
“You are not going alone.”
“I know.”
“You are not going near Mia.”
Karen closed her eyes.
“I know.”
“We need containment.”
Karen looked at the spreadsheet. The controls. The group chat. The list of things that interfered. Cold. Water. Writing. Laughter. Noise. Trusted people at distance. Bad jokes. Human friction.
Then she looked at the storm drain outside her window, where rainwater still trickled from last night’s thunderstorm.
A thought began to form.
Not a cure.
A novel solution.
“What if we don’t fight the hunger?” she said.
Priya was silent.
Karen continued, because the idea was assembling itself faster than fear could dismantle it.
“What if we feed it the wrong thing?”
“You mean animal blood?”
“No. That made it worse. Raw meat made it worse. It wants people. It wants intimacy. Panic. Shame. Consent twisted into hunger.”
“That sounds terrible and not like a plan.”
“It gets confused by laughter. By cold. By written words. By people refusing the story it wants. What if the hunger isn’t just biological? What if it’s behavioural? Like a virus that needs a mood.”
Priya said, “A psychosocial parasite.”
“Exactly.”
“God, I hate when your humanities brain becomes useful.”
Karen almost smiled.
The idea kept moving.
The bite girl wanted them back at the party site because the place held the emotional pattern: heat, music, wanting, shame, secrecy, bite. A ritual without candles. A transmission environment.
So they would contaminate the ritual.
Not with purity.
With embarrassment.
With supervision.
With bad planning.
With aunties, grandmothers, printed forms, cold packs, torches, group protocols, thermos flasks, emergency whistles, and people who knew exactly what was happening and refused to make it sexy.
They would turn the vampire’s seduction nest into a safeguarding incident.
Karen texted the group:
We go to Ryan’s garden tomorrow before dawn. Infected stay separated. Support people present. Cold packs, running water if possible, written statements, lights, cameras. Nobody goes alone. Nobody lets her speak uninterrupted. We don’t fight like vampire hunters. We make the place unromantic.
Ash replied:
weaponised cringe?
Karen:
Yes.
Mia:
I was born for this.
Priya:
You are not coming within biting distance.
Mia:
I can be annoying from range.
Tom’s grandmother:
I have a camping urn and folding chairs.
Leanne:
My brother has floodlights.
Saf:
I can bring sample pots.
Ash:
Aunt Saf, respectfully, you are terrifying.
Karen sat back.
For the first time since the bite, the future did not narrow to a throat, a wrist, a mistake.
There was still terror. Still hunger. Still the dark shape inside her, waiting for weakness. But around it, something else had formed.
A network.
Messy. Frightened. Funny. Inadequate. Alive.
The vampire virus had wanted secrecy.
Karen gave it a committee.
Near midnight, the girl came to the window again.
Karen felt her before she heard her. The room warmed. The bite marks throbbed. The hunger inside Karen lifted its head like a dog hearing its master.
“Little light,” the girl whispered. “You’re making this ugly.”
Karen sat on the floor with her notebook open, ice pack against her neck, Priya in the hallway, Mia texting insults from two streets away, Tom’s grandmother sending black pudding recipes to the wrong chat.
“Yes,” Karen said.
The girl’s voice sharpened.
“You think they can save you?”
Karen looked at the list beside her.
Not your fault.
Your responsibility.
The virus is strong but narrow.
I am weak but wide.
She picked wrong.
Weaponised cringe.
“No,” Karen said. “I think we can make me difficult.”
For a long moment, there was only the sound of distant traffic and the fan turning uselessly in the hot room.
Then the girl outside hissed.
Not seductive now.
Not amused.
Hungry.
“Come tomorrow, then.”
Karen’s mouth hurt. Her bones hurt. Her soul, if she had one, felt bruised and half-lit.
“I will.”
The thing outside withdrew.
Karen leaned her head back against the door.
On the other side, Priya knocked once.
Karen knocked back.
Not cured.
Not safe.
Not alone.
The Light Is Bright, But the Soul Is Dark
Part Four: Weaponised Cringe
They went to Ryan’s garden at 4:30 in the morning.
Not midnight. Not the witching hour. Not under a seductive moon with mist moving over the grass and doomed young people whispering each other’s names.
4:30.
The hour of delivery vans, cold pavements, foxes in bins, and human beings making bad decisions with clipboards.
Karen sat in the back of Priya’s car wearing sunglasses, a hoodie, two scarves, fingerless gloves, and three ice packs taped under her arms. She looked less like a vampire than someone being smuggled out of a festival after heatstroke. Her teeth ached. Her bite marks burned. Her whole body pulled towards Ryan’s street with an animal certainty that made her ashamed before she remembered shame was part of the trap.
Priya drove.
Mia was not in the car. That had been non-negotiable. She was stationed two streets away with Callum, a first-aid kit, and instructions to be annoying only by text. She had objected for twenty minutes, then accepted because Karen had said, “If I see you, I’ll want you.”
That had stopped the argument.
Not painlessly.
But it had stopped it.
The others arrived separately.
Tom came in his grandmother’s old Nissan, wrapped in a blanket, looking grey and humiliated and alive. His grandmother, Mrs. Bell, wore a floral raincoat and carried a tartan shopping trolley containing a camping urn, black pudding, hand towels, a flask, and what she described as “a stout stick.”
Leanne arrived with her brother Callum’s friend in a van full of floodlights, extension cables, bottled water, traffic cones, and a portable generator. She sat in the passenger seat with ski goggles on and her hood pulled tight, jaw clenched so hard Karen could see it from across the road.
Ash came with Aunt Saf, who had labelled sample bags, a thermometer gun, nitrile gloves, and the expression of a woman prepared to collect data during the apocalypse.
Ryan himself had not been invited until the last minute, because it was his garden and because Priya said trespass would complicate an already poor operational posture. He opened the front door in tracksuit bottoms, hair flattened on one side, face full of sleep and disbelief.
“You lot are insane,” he said.
Karen, standing ten feet away behind a line of traffic cones, said, “Yes. Also your shed is haunted by a vampire recruitment event.”
Ryan looked at Priya.
Priya said, “We need access to the garden.”
“Is this about the party?”
“Yes.”
“Was someone spiked?”
“Worse.”
“Worse than spiked?”
Mrs. Bell lifted her stout stick. “Young man, open the gate.”
Ryan opened the gate.
The garden looked smaller than Karen remembered.
That almost broke her.
Trauma had made it large: a hot private kingdom of fairy lights, music, sweat, invitation, the girl’s mouth at her neck. In daylight’s earliest grey, it was just a tired student garden with flattened grass, a leaning shed, a broken plastic chair, overflowing bins, and a fence stained with spilled drink and rain.
The place where everything changed was not a temple.
It was a patch of dead lawn behind a shed.
Karen wanted to laugh and cry and bite someone.
The hunger rose as soon as she stepped through the gate.
It knew the place.
The bite marks at her neck pulsed. Her mouth flooded. The air filled with remembered bodies: cider breath, sun lotion, deodorant, exposed skin, loneliness heated by alcohol. Tom gagged near the bins. Leanne hissed and clamped both hands over her mouth. Ash crouched on the path, shaking with silent laughter or panic, maybe both.
The garden had a signal.
Not magic exactly. Not only biology. A behavioural groove worn into place by the party, by the bite, by desire and secrecy and heat. The vampire girl had used the garden like a trap: turn the lonely, shame them, call them back, finish the conversion.
Priya saw Karen sway.
“Status?”
Karen swallowed.
“Red.”
“Not black?”
Karen looked at Tom’s exposed wrist where his sleeve had slipped back.
The hunger leaned.
Karen forced her eyes away.
“Red with black edges.”
Priya nodded once. “Containment spacing.”
Everyone moved according to the plan.
The infected stood at four separate points in the garden, each marked by cones and chalk circles. Not mystical circles. Distance markers. Ten feet minimum. No direct approach without verbal confirmation. Support people remained behind them, never in front, never close to exposed skin.
The generator started with an ugly cough.
Floodlights came on.
The garden vanished under flat white work light.
The shed, the fence, the bins, the dead grass, the bite site: all exposed, overlit, stripped of atmosphere. The romantic horror of it collapsed into a minor council inspection.
Aunt Saf began taking temperature readings.
Mrs. Bell set up the camping urn on a folding table.
Priya taped printed signs to the fence.
NO ONE IS CHOSEN.
DO NOT OBEY HUNGER.
BITE RESPONSE PROTOCOL IN OPERATION.
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, STEP BACK AND DRINK WATER.
Mia, watching by video from Callum’s phone two streets away, texted:
This is the least sexy vampire ritual in British history.
Karen read it and laughed so hard it hurt.
The hunger recoiled.
Good.
Ash raised one trembling hand. “I vote we add bunting.”
Aunt Saf said, “I have hazard tape.”
“Even better.”
They strung hazard tape across the garden.
Ryan watched from the kitchen door, pale. “This is going to lower the rent, isn’t it?”
Priya said, “Focus.”
The air changed at 5:03.
The birds stopped.
Not all at once. One by one, as if the morning itself were being muted. The generator noise thinned. The floodlights flickered but held. Karen felt the bite marks open inside her, not physically, but as memory. The shed. The girl. The kiss. The bright pinch. The shame afterwards.
Then Elise stepped out from behind the shed.
Or Elsie.
Or whatever name she had stolen for the night.
She wore the same white sundress and heavy boots. Her black hair was damp with dew. Her skin looked luminous in the floodlights, but the effect was wrong now. Under proper lighting, the beauty became visible as technique. Pale foundation over rot. Smile over command. Youth worn like a borrowed dress.
Behind her, five figures stood in the shadows.
Other turned things. Not fully human. Not fully gone. Former students, maybe. Party ghosts in modern clothes. One wore a rugby shirt. One had glitter still caught in his beard. One girl clutched a cracked phone and stared at the screen as if waiting for permission to exist.
Karen felt the call slam into her.
Come.
Be finished.
Stop fighting.
The other infected felt it too. Tom dropped to his knees. Leanne pressed her forehead against the fence. Ash whispered, “Nope, nope, nope, nope,” with admirable rhythm.
Elise smiled.
“My little lights.”
Priya blew an emergency whistle.
The sound was vicious.
Elise flinched.
Mrs. Bell shouted, “Don’t you little-lights them, you nasty cow.”
The garden held its breath.
Then Ash burst out laughing.
Leanne followed. Tom too, weakly, from the grass. Karen felt the call stutter.
Elise’s smile tightened.
“This is not for them,” she said to Karen. “They cannot understand what you are becoming.”
Priya raised the whistle again.
Elise’s eyes sharpened. “Do that once more and I will take your tongue.”
Karen stepped forward to the edge of her chalk circle.
The hunger surged. Elise’s presence made it worse and better at the same time. Worse because every cell in Karen’s body recognised hierarchy. Better because the spell had cracked. Elise was no longer the girl behind the shed. She was a predator standing in a garden full of traffic cones while an elderly woman guarded a camping urn.
“You infected us,” Karen said.
“I opened you.”
“You groomed lonely teenagers at a party.”
Elise’s face changed.
Only slightly.
Enough.
“That is an ugly word.”
“Yes.”
“You wanted me.”
Karen’s throat tightened.
There it was. The old wound. The part of her that still remembered wanting the kiss. Wanting to be seen. Wanting to be chosen by someone impossible.
“Yes,” Karen said.
Elise smiled again.
Karen continued, “And you used that.”
The smile faded.
Not gone. Faded.
Karen understood then that Elise’s power needed confusion. It needed consent blurred with hunger, shame blurred with desire, secrecy blurred with intimacy. It needed the victim to feel implicated enough not to resist cleanly.
So Karen made it clean.
“I wanted a kiss,” she said. “I did not consent to being turned into something that might hurt my friends.”
Tom whispered, “Same.”
Leanne lifted her head. “Same.”
Ash said, “I mostly wanted to look mysterious near the bins, but also same.”
Mia’s text appeared on Priya’s phone.
READ THIS OUT LOUD: CONSENT DOES NOT INCLUDE VAMPIRE TERMS AND CONDITIONS HIDDEN IN NECK BITES.
Priya read it out loud.
The floodlights flickered.
The five figures behind Elise shifted uneasily.
Elise hissed, and for the first time she looked less like a girl and more like the thing wearing one. Her mouth stretched too wide. Her eyes darkened. Her fingers lengthened, nails turning glassy and black.
“You think words save you?”
“No,” Karen said. “People do.”
“That is childish.”
“So is hanging around student parties biting insecure freshers.”
That one came from Ash.
Aunt Saf said, “Accurate.”
The hunger inside Karen recoiled again, confused by ridicule. Elise felt it. Karen saw the moment she realised the garden was no longer tuned to her. The emotional weather had changed. Shame had become testimony. Seduction had become safeguarding. Hunger had become a symptom log.
Priya began reading from the spreadsheet.
“Subject Karen. Hunger spike reduced by cold, laughter, written affirmation, group contact. Subject Tom. Reduced by grandmother presence, cold compress, cooked blood substitute pending evaluation. Subject Leanne. Reduced by direct challenge and controlled breathing. Subject Ash. Reduced by music, humour, and antagonising the predator.”
“Stop,” Elise said.
Priya continued.
“Hypothesis: parasite relies on affective isolation, eroticised secrecy, and coerced identification with aggressor.”
“I said stop.”
Mrs. Bell poured hot water into a mug. “Let her finish. It sounds important.”
The figures behind Elise began to flicker in the floodlight.
Not vanish. Waver.
Karen saw their faces more clearly now. They looked young. Frightened. Hungry. Ashamed. Each one held by some private version of the same wound.
Elise turned on them. “Stay.”
One of them, the girl with the cracked phone, began to cry.
Karen stepped to the edge of her circle. The hunger screamed at her to cross it, to go to Elise, to kneel, to feed, to stop being torn in half.
Instead Karen spoke to the figures.
“You don’t have to stay finished.”
Elise whirled back.
“There is no cure.”
“Maybe not,” Karen said. “But there are controls.”
“That is not life.”
Karen thought of her room, the notebook, the thirst, the shame. She thought of Mia two streets away, furious and safe. Priya at the door in absurd PPE. Tom’s grandmother making tea for vampirism. Leanne saying she picked wrong. Ash surviving by making the worst jokes imaginable.
“No,” Karen said. “It’s maintenance.”
Elise lunged.
She moved too fast for anyone human. One second she was near the shed; the next she was at Karen’s chalk circle, hand reaching for her throat.
Karen should have frozen.
She did not.
She stepped back and shouted, “Black.”
Priya hit the floodlight switch they had rigged to a second generator.
The garden erupted in brightness.
Not sunlight. Harsh portable work light, blue-white and brutal. Elise screamed and covered her face. At the same moment Callum, from the alley, opened the hose line he had connected from the outside tap and fed through the fence.
Cold water blasted across the dead grass.
Running water.
Mess.
Noise.
Floodlights.
Whistles.
Mrs. Bell’s camping urn.
Aunt Saf shouting, “Do not contaminate the sample area,” because some people remain themselves under pressure.
Elise slipped.
Not because she was weak. Because the garden was no longer a ritual site. It was a badly managed incident response exercise, and she had lost the room.
Karen felt the hunger inside her surge at Elise’s pain.
For one terrible second, she wanted to fall on her. Bite her. Tear the darkness out of her and swallow it. Become stronger than the thing that had hurt her.
That would be another trap.
Power wearing revenge’s face.
Karen dropped to her knees and shoved both hands into the cold muddy water.
“I am still here,” she said.
The hunger bucked.
“I am still here.”
Elise crawled backwards, face steaming under the lights and water. Not dying. Not destroyed. But exposed. The five figures behind her scattered, some into the alley, some towards the side gate, one collapsing near the bins where Aunt Saf immediately moved in with a foil blanket and a sample kit.
Elise fixed Karen with a look of pure hatred.
“You will feed eventually.”
Karen breathed through the pain.
“Maybe.”
That surprised everyone, including Karen.
She continued.
“Maybe I’ll always want to. Maybe this never goes away. But wanting is not doing. Hunger is not law. You are not my future.”
Elise’s mouth twisted.
“You will never be normal.”
Karen looked at Priya. At Tom on the grass with his grandmother’s hand on his shoulder. At Ash wrapped in hazard tape like a deranged maypole. At Leanne breathing through clenched teeth. At Mia’s messages appearing one after another on Priya’s phone, increasingly profane and increasingly alive.
“No,” Karen said. “But normal was overrated and badly timetabled.”
Ash whispered, “Put that on a hoodie.”
Then dawn came.
Again, not dramatically. No golden blade. No divine judgement. Just the ordinary summer sun beginning to edge over the roofs, turning the wet fence orange, catching in the floodlight stands, showing everyone’s exhausted faces without mercy.
Elise looked towards the light.
For the first time, she seemed afraid.
She ran.
Not into smoke. Not into bats. Down the side alley, one hand over her face, boots slipping on wet concrete, white dress stained with mud. One of her turned followers went after her. The others did not.
No one chased.
That was another control.
Do not let pursuit become hunger.
The garden after sunrise looked catastrophically stupid.
Mud everywhere. Hazard tape sagging. Floodlights humming. Traffic cones knocked over. Ryan’s shed door hanging open. Mrs. Bell pouring tea into paper cups. Aunt Saf labelling a tube of something unpleasant. Tom crying into his blanket. Leanne laughing and shaking. Ash lying flat on the grass saying, “I have become lawn.”
Karen sat with her back against the fence, ice pack melting in her lap.
Mia appeared at the gate.
Priya immediately said, “No closer.”
Mia stopped.
She looked at Karen from ten feet away.
Her eyes were red from crying or lack of sleep or both. She held a carrier bag full of orange sweets and did not try to make a joke.
Karen wanted her so badly it became pain.
Not only blood. Not mostly blood.
Her friend. Her ordinary life. Her almost-love, maybe. Her possible future. All of it standing at a safe distance because safe distance was what love required now.
Mia lifted the bag.
“I brought these.”
Karen laughed weakly.
“I might never be able to eat them.”
“I know. I panicked.”
“Thank you.”
Mia nodded.
They did not hug.
That hurt more than any bite.
It also saved them.
College started two days later.
Karen did not go to the first induction event.
Neither did Tom, Leanne, or Ash. Instead, Priya helped them submit medical deferrals with language so bland it could have covered anything from glandular fever to spiritual collapse. Aunt Saf wrote a safeguarding note. Callum drafted a rota. Mrs. Bell established a cooked-blood substitute trial with butcher’s blood, black pudding, iron supplements, and the stern warning that nobody was to become “fussy about texture during a crisis.”
It was disgusting.
It helped.
Not enough.
Enough.
That became the shape of Karen’s new life.
Enough.
She moved into the small box room at Priya’s aunt’s house for two weeks because it had blackout curtains, a lockable door, and a bathroom opposite. She attended college online at first. Then in person for one hour. Then two. Always fed beforehand. Always with cold packs. Always with an exit plan. Always with someone who knew.
The hunger did not vanish.
Some days it was a whisper. Some days it was a fist in her throat. Some days she woke from dreams of Elise and spent an hour under the cold shower, sobbing with rage because part of her missed the voice that had promised to make everything simple.
She wrote that down too.
No clean lies.
Mia stayed near but not too near. Their friendship changed shape. It became more careful, more honest, less easy. Sometimes Karen hated that. Sometimes she thought careful honesty might have been what she needed before all this, only she had mistaken intensity for proof.
Priya made more protocols.
Ash designed a logo for the support group: a cartoon bat wearing sunglasses, holding a clipboard.
Leanne hated it, then used it as her profile picture.
Tom relapsed once.
Not fully. He bit his own arm until it bled, then called his grandmother before he called the hunger victory. Mrs. Bell arrived with bandages, soup, and a level of disappointment that apparently frightened the undead impulse into retreat.
Two more bitten students came forward after term began.
Then a third.
Karen met them by text first.
Always text first.
She learned to say the opening lines calmly.
This is not your fault.
It is your responsibility now.
You are not alone.
Do not feed.
Tell us where you are.
Put cold water on your wrists.
Count backwards.
We are making a plan.
A month later, someone reported seeing a girl in a white dress outside a freshers’ night in Leeds.
Karen read the message three times.
The hunger stirred.
Fear too.
Then something harder.
Not revenge.
Readiness.
She forwarded the report to Priya, Mia, Aunt Saf, Callum, Mrs. Bell, and the group.
Mia replied first.
Road trip? Obviously with boundaries, PPE, and no romantic neck exposure.
Ash replied:
weaponised cringe regional tour
Tom:
please no sheds
Leanne:
I’m in
Priya:
We plan properly. No one improvises near predators.
Karen looked out of her room.
It was late afternoon. The autumn light was low and gold, bright enough to hurt but not enough to stop her looking. Students crossed the campus below, laughing, carrying bags, leaning into one another’s lives. The world remained dangerous because the world was full of people, and people were warm.
Karen touched the faded bite marks on her neck.
The light was bright.
The soul was dark.
But not only dark.
That was the lie Elise had tried to finish inside her: that darkness, once present, owned the whole room. It did not. It could sit there, hungry and resentful, while other things existed around it. Friendship. Systems. Bad jokes. Cold water. Forms. Refusal. Care with boundaries. A life made out of controls and choices and enough.
Karen opened the group chat and typed:
We don’t chase her because we’re hungry. We intervene because someone else might be where we were.
Then she added:
Also no one lets Ash design the posters unsupervised.
Ash replied:
censorship is how vampires win
Karen smiled.
Her teeth were still sharp.
Her hands still shook sometimes.
The hunger was still there, waiting for heat, shame, loneliness, an open throat.
But Karen was still there too.
Wider than the hunger.
Difficult.
Unfinished.
Alive enough.