Death, as it turned out, had one hell of an afterparty.

  For starters, everything hurt.

  Ace grimaced as he tried—and failed—to sit up. His body ached with an all-consuming misery that he had never experienced before. Every bone in the Marine’s body threatened to shatter at any second, and every muscle screamed at him for something he was pretty sure he hadn’t done to it. It was like he had been run over by a truck, then punched in the face, then sprayed with tear gas for good measure.

  His mind raced as he tried to figure out where he was, or what had been going on moments before, or why he was in so much pain. There were fragments of memory, sure, but nothing concrete.

  The deafening thunder of machine gun fire.

  The hurried rustle of his tactical gear, shuffling as he raced for cover.

  A shadowy monster, lunging at Walker.

  He winced as he relived the blast of pain that had slammed through him in the seconds after he had shoved Walker out of harm’s way. The icy blast of death dragging him under. Something smiling with haunting, jagged teeth.

  Then everything had gone black.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Ace asked the empty air.

  In answer, something roared in the distance.

  Something big.

  The sergeant’s eyes snapped open to a sensory overload that would have dropped him to his knees if he hadn’t already been lying down. The world slammed into him with all the power of a flashbang going off inside his skull. His nerves lit up like someone had replaced his blood with molten steel, and every sensation cranked instantly to eleven. The dew-dusted grass beneath him didn't just tickle—each blade carved individual lines of fire across his skin, thousands of tiny razors setting his nerve endings ablaze.

  Ace sat in a woodland clearing with towering trees and a blood-red meadow, which made no sense given he had been in the middle of a firefight moments before. Pre-dawn light leaked through the trees, and God almighty, it was like someone had weaponized the sun. The shimmering half-light carved into his retinas like someone was drilling straight into his brain. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that only made things worse.

  Because now, every sound was even louder than before.

  He could hear everything. The whisper of wind through the trees. The hum of wings on an insect flying by. The thunder of heartbeats from something big stalking through the forest. Hell, he could even hear the individual threads of silk as a spider methodically constructed its web roughly twenty feet away, each strand singing like piano wire being pulled taut.

  “Get it together,” he growled to himself. “Whatever this is, it’s nothing you can’t handle.”

  His training screamed at him to move, to assess, to do something for fuck’s sake, but his body refused to cooperate. He lay there, every muscle locked rigid as he drowned in a tsunami of input that his brain couldn't begin to process.

  Whatever the hell had happened to him, one thing was crystal clear—he wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and his body had undergone one hell of an unauthorized upgrade.

  A twig snapped nearby, the crack shattering his train of thought. The hair on his neck stood on end as he sensed the potential threat. He tensed, his hand instinctively reaching for the rifle that wasn’t there, and his body roared at him yet again for having the audacity to move.

  But he wasn’t alone, and that meant he didn’t have the luxury of staying still. He had to get on his feet. He had to find his weapon. He had to figure out what had happened because his last thought had been about how saving Walker had probably gotten him killed, and yet here he was, definitely not dead.

  Status report, he thought, falling back on his training to keep the surging dread at bay. Location: Unknown. Condition...

  He paused and, through sheer stubborn grit, managed to press his fingers against his wrist.

  “No pulse,” he muttered.

  What the actual fuck.

  It had to be a mistake. An error on his part, due to the sheer overload of his haywire senses. He kept his finger on his wrist for far too long, until he couldn’t deny the truth any longer.

  The sergeant’s heart had stopped.

  And yet…

  …here he still was, somehow experiencing the world in all its deafening, deadly glory.

  To keep from completely losing his shit, he immediately began compartmentalizing the impossible situation into manageable problems. It was the only thing he could do to maintain his composure, and he clung to it like wreckage in a storm.

  Problem one: no heartbeat.

  Problem two: his senses were currently on fire.

  Problem three: a gnawing emptiness in his gut that felt less like hunger and more like a black hole trying to eat him from the inside out.

  Problem four: the giggling.

  It took a moment for the sound to fully register in the chaotic cacophony that was still assaulting him, but yes, someone was definitely giggling. A little girl, her voice trilly and light, laughed somewhere nearby.

  This mess just kept getting weirder, and he was fresh out of the patience he needed to deal with it properly.

  Ace gritted his teeth and sat up slowly, his combat instincts scanning for threats despite the vertigo. He forced his eyes open, but honestly, what he saw only made everything seem even more surreal.

  The landscape before him spat in the face of everything he knew about reality. On the horizon, obsidian mountains clawed at the sky like broken teeth, their jagged peaks threading through clouds that pulsed with an unnatural violet hue. The color was wrong, everything was wrong—those clouds churned and twisted like oil in water, occasionally crackling with veins of electric blue lightning.

  Between him and the mountains, an honest-to-God floating city drifted above an ancient forest, and the city’s crystalline spires caught what little sunlight pierced the pre-dawn sky. The massive structure defied gravity as casually as it defied sanity, rotating slowly like some ethereal carousel while waterfalls of light cascaded from its edges into the predawn darkness below.

  And because apparently reality had decided to go full metal album cover on acid, two titans clashed in the distance. One was unmistakably a dragon—all gleaming scales and serpentine grace, its wingspan casting shadows larger than any aircraft he’d ever seen. The other... Damn it all. The other thing looked like someone had given a nightmare steroids and wings. Its body seemed to drink in light rather than reflect it, leaving only a vaguely draconic shape of absolute darkness, broken only by eyes that burned with pools of molten silver.

  The creatures slammed into each other with the force of cruise missiles, their screams echoing across the valley with enough force to shake loose stones from the cliffs in the distance. Each impact sent shockwaves rippling through the air, making those strange purple clouds swirl and dance in their wake. The shadow bit into the dragon’s neck, and they both crashed into the forest far below, disappearing beneath the leaves like stones falling beneath the surface of a lake.

  Ace had seen some serious shit during his tours, but this made the Middle East look like Disney World.

  The giggling grew louder.

  “Oh, you’re going to be fun,” said a voice that somehow managed to be both childlike and ancient.

  Ace pivoted toward the voice, his hands coiling instinctively into fists, only to find a young girl floating cross-legged at eye level. She wore a frilly blue dress that seemed to shift colors in impossible ways, and her smile contained far too many teeth to be natural.

  She giggled again and clapped her hands together. “Most people waste time screaming or crying, but you’re already scanning for threats! I knew I had picked a delicious batch this time, but you’re just too good!”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “You might even become my favorite,” she added with a mischievous little smirk, entirely ignoring his question.

  Floating girls.

  Dragons.

  Cities in the sky.

  The more his brain tried to rationalize it, the crazier it all seemed—and when things didn’t make sense, his inner sarcastic asshole took over.

  “Let me guess,” he said to the little girl, his voice dripping with disdain. “You’re either Death, or I’m having the mother of all morphine trips right now.”

  “I’m even better than morphine!” She spread her arms wide, and that broad smile expanded to an eerie, inhuman degree.

  “I doubt that,” he said flatly. “What did you do to me?”

  “Me?” The little girl pouted, her hand flying to her chest as though she were deeply wounded by the accusation. “Why do you think I did anything?”

  Given that she was floating several feet above the ground with her legs tucked delicately underneath her, he simply tilted his head in silent admonishment.

  “You really are good.” She chuckled and shrugged sheepishly, as though she had been caught with her hand in a cookie jar. “I made you better, Ace. Even better than you were before.”

  “How do you know my name?” he demanded.

  The little girl continued as if he hadn’t said anything. “I gave you the sort of power others would kill for. You died, and I brought you to my world. I saved your life.”

  “And my squad?”

  “They’re fine.” She dismissed his worry with a flick of her tiny wrist. “You saved Walker from certain death. Odd choice, Sergeant, to sacrifice yourself like that.”

  Right.

  The lovecraftian horror.

  “What was that thing?” Ace pressed, determined to get answers. “You clearly know more than—”

  “Can you guess what I changed you into?” she interrupted.

  He squinted in a furious blend of confusion and annoyance. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your newly enhanced senses.” She gestured toward him with one hand, her eyebrow lifting as she fed him clues. “You have so many delightful new skills to try out, Ace. Not to mention those teeth.”

  Instead of responding, Ace ran one thumb across his upper canines, only to find they had, indeed, grown longer—and sharper.

  “Holy shit,” he said under his breath, all but stunned into silence.

  There was only one thing he knew of that had fangs like these, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the word out loud. He had awoken to an insane new world, sure, but this pushed the limits of what he could believe just a little too far.

  “Ah, you get it.” The little girl lifted her chin, apparently impressed. “That’s right, Ace. I turned you into a vampire.”

  The sergeant impulsively opened his mouth to call bullshit, but he recalled the lack of a pulse. The enhanced senses. The surreal new landscape. The fucking spider spinning its web, which he had most definitely never been able to hear before.

  Whatever she had done to him, he wasn’t human anymore. That was for damn sure.

  “A vampire,” he said under his breath, testing out the word as he struggled to keep up with this wild new life he’d been handed.

  He had, in fact, died, and now he was a vampire of all things.

  While he was trying to process the sheer insanity of it all, the floating child leaned forward and booped him on the nose. Her touch sent an icy ripple of energy through his body. Cold. Haunting. Dire, and full of dread.

  It was like being touched by Death itself.

  “You’re going to love this,” she promised with an eerily wide smile.

  Before he could respond, blue light shimmered in his vision, resolving into what looked like a holographic heads-up display overlaid on the wild purple world around him.

  ———

  NAME: Logan ”Ace” Blackwell

  LEVEL: 0

  CLASS: none

  RACE: Vampire (Nightseed)

  STATS:

  Strength: 11

  Vitality: 13

  Dexterity: 7

  Intelligence: 17

  Wisdom: 9

  POWER:

  HP: 360/360

  SM: 440/440

  EXP SOLUTES:

  Human: 0%

  Vampiric: 100%

  Monster: 0%

  Dragon: 0%

  ———

  “What in the—”

  “It’s your stats sheet!” she interrupted. “Those are your starting stats based on your previous life.”

  The girl’s voice was little more than a whisper in his ear, and he tensed as he glared over one shoulder to find her floating behind him. Her smile widened as their eyes met, but there had been a sinister edge to her voice. He glanced back to where she had been floating moments before, but the air was empty.

  She could summon people from nothing, float above the ground, and apparently teleport.

  Great.

  “Ooh, highest Intelligence I’ve seen in ages from a greenie like yourself!” she continued when he didn’t respond. “Most soldiers have everything already dumped into Strength. How refreshing!”

  Ace flicked his wrist at the stats sheet, trying to make it go away, but his hand simply glided through it. When it wouldn’t disappear, he opted instead to ignore the stats entirely as he tried to focus on what mattered.

  “Send me back,” he ordered.

  “Hmm?”

  “To Earth. I have Marines to protect and a war to finish. My men need me, and I’m not about to let them down. Send me back.”

  The little girl chuckled. “Oh, no, no, no, Sergeant. That’s not how this works.”

  She floated a little higher, and an invisible talon stroked down his spine. He resisted the urge to shiver as he met those wide, ominous eyes.

  “I can’t have you leaving before we even get to play together,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’d be no fun, and I have such scrumptious things in store for you, Ace. You wouldn’t want to leave a little girl hanging, would you?”

  The sergeant’s mind flashed with his final moments on earth. The gunfire. The beast. The screams. He had a life to get back to. If she had drawn him here, then she could send him back.

  “Now,” he ordered, his voice dangerously low.

  She clicked her tongue in disappointment, and though she opened her mouth to speak, she paused. Her eyes glossed over, as if she were debating something internally, and her icy gaze shifted slowly toward him.

  It was unsettling, to say the least.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said quietly.

  All of the chipper mischief in her voice was gone. Her tone was deadly serious, now, and her eyes flashed with an ominous warning. She drifted closer, and the temperature dropped with each inch.

  “Tell me, Sergeant,” she whispered, now circling him like a shark. “How many men have you killed?”

  The question caught him off guard, but years of training kept his face neutral. “What does that have to do with—”

  “Everything.” She stopped directly in front of him, those fierce and ancient eyes boring into his. “Your hands are already stained with blood. I can see it in the way you hold yourself, in your expression, in that deadly glare of yours. All those confirmed kills. All those lives ended in the line of duty.”

  His jaw clenched. “That was war.”

  “Exactly.” Her smile returned, but there was nothing childlike about it now. “And in this world, it’s all war. The kind that makes your little earthly conflicts look like playground squabbles. Surviving here has costs.”

  “What costs?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” she said with a bored flick of her hand. “All it will cost is a little piece of your humanity.”

  His fingers curled into a fist so tight that his knuckles cracked. “That’s not for sale.”

  “No?” She pouted and tilted her head, the gesture too dismissive to be genuine. “Then perhaps I should just kill you now.”

  His eyes narrowed in defiance.

  Her grin widened, splitting her face like a crescent moon made of razors. Each tooth gleamed with an unnatural sharpness, too long and too numerous to belong to anything human. The smile kept stretching, far past where any normal mouth should end, until it nearly reached her ears. In the predawn darkness, those teeth seemed to glow with their own sickly light, like pale daggers arranged in a predator’s jaws.

  It transformed her whole face, shattering any remaining illusion of innocence. No child had ever smiled like that—it was the kind of grin that only existed in nightmares.

  “Let me put it this way, Sergeant,” she said through that grotesque display of fangs. “This world demands bloodletting, and the only way to survive it is to have friends in high places. Namely, me. That’s why I’m going to make you an offer no one can refuse.”

  He studied her warily. “And that is?”

  “It’s quite simple,” she said sweetly. “If you want to go home, you must first become a monster. Namely, my little monster.”

  The words hit him like a physical blow.

  His brain kicked into overdrive, breaking down the situation with ruthless efficiency. It was pure instinct, drilled into him through years of combat scenarios and close calls. Assess. Analyze. Adapt.

  But for the first time in his career, the tactical part of his brain came up empty.

  No amount of CQC training covered negotiating with reality-bending children. No field manual explained what to do when you woke up as a vampire in a world where dragons duked it out overhead. And sure as hell nothing in his extensive combat experience had prepared him for the way his body was already betraying him, craving something his mind refused to name.

  The whole situation reminded him of his last moments with Walker. He had seen the end coming, watching that inevitable arc of death bearing down, and he still had absolutely nowhere to go. Sometimes all the training in the world wasn’t enough to change a damn thing. It was like he’d been left standing there, watching the inevitable happen in slow motion.

  The little girl's eyes gleamed with ancient malice as she watched the realization settle over him. “You're already part of the way there, you know. Those enhanced senses? That gnawing emptiness in your gut? Your body's already crying out for its first taste of blood. The only question is whether you'll embrace it, or let it drive you mad.”

  Before he could reply, a notification pulsed in his vision:

  ———

  HUNGER STATUS: Critical

  Warning: First Feed Required.

  Time Until Feral Rampage: 23 hours

  ———

  “Tick tock, Sergeant,” she whispered, her voice carrying echoes of the screams he’d heard back at base.

  The exact screams, as a matter of fact.