Chapter 1

No heartbeat.

Isabella's hand pressed flat to her chest, fingers digging after the rhythm that had run her whole life. Nothing. Just stillness where the drum used to be, the quiet of a room after the furniture is hauled out. She pressed harder, knuckles to her sternum, waiting for the kick to start back up the way it always had when she was scared, the way it had hammered for eighteen years every time Father's weight hit the stairs, every time the coyotes counted the girls in the dark of the truck. Nothing kicked. The hand stayed where it was and felt the nothing, and the nothing did not change.

Dead. I'm dead. No. Moving. Thinking. Muerta pero despierta. The fuck is this.

She tried to breathe and her body did not bother. No pull, no rise, no burn at the back of the throat begging for the next one. She forced the air in, felt the lungs fill like two bags she was holding open, and when she stopped holding them they simply stayed, neither emptying nor wanting to. Her body had quit the one argument it never once let her win.

Then she felt the foil. It wound her shoulder to knee, a crackling silver skin, the kind of blanket they hand a person they have decided to save. Someone had wrapped her in it like meat for the freezer. And lower, where the cold of the desert floor came up through it and through her, something pressed against the inside of her thigh that had not come from outside her.

She worked an arm free and pushed the foil down off her body, the silver crackling as it folded back, until she lay bare on it under the moon.

Naked. Not a stitch, the way they always started her, the way she had come up out of every bad room of her life. She filed it flat, the old question riding right behind it, where the hell are my clothes, and then her thigh told her there was something it had been trying to say all along.

She did not want to look. She looked.

A packet, taped and slick, lying between her legs on the silver where her body had pushed it out. They had packed her full at the last stop before the line, full past any room a body keeps, and the dead thing she was now had done the plain thing a body does with what does not belong in it. A hard square lump sat worked into the tape, a little plastic eye, and even dead she knew a tracker when she saw one. She had carried things for men her whole life. This was the last thing they made her carry, and her body, in the one labor it would ever perform, had delivered it onto a square of foil in the dirt.

Naked again. Their poison and a chip where a girl used to be. My one pregnancy. Of course. Of course that is the only thing I was ever going to bear.

The world came in after that, all of it at once, the way a door blows open in a wind. The wind in the far scrub became a long sustained note she could lean on. The insects writing their small scratch across the dust thirty feet off. A coyote shifting its weight on stone, the pebbles turning under it. Her own dead thoughts loud in the place the heartbeat used to fill.

She pushed up to sitting and looked down at the body they had left her in.

It was hers and it was wrong. Petite the way she had always been, five foot two of small frame and lean years, the body men had been deciding things about since before she was old enough to stop them. But it had set strange. Smooth in a way skin does not go on its own. Still in a way that felt arranged, posed, a thing set on a shelf and stepped back from to admire. A thing made, not born.

She knew before she made herself check. She checked anyway. Her hand went down and found smooth where what was hers should have grown back.

I grew it back. The day I ran I let all of it grow back. Every hair mine again. The one thing in eighteen years I ever took back from him.

Gone. Bare the way Father liked his proper young ladies, the razor and the rules and the word he had for what a girl was if she let herself be a body instead of a doll. She had reclaimed exactly one inch of herself in a whole life of being spent, and dying had reached past her hands and past the running and gone all the way down to the floor of her, to the part that still answered to him under the part that fought, and it had set her back the way he wanted her. The rebellion had not even made it across. Whatever in her ran deepest had never once stopped being his.

She should move away from the packet. The little plastic eye in the tape was a leash and leashes had men on the far end of them. The thought came slow and far off, though, because something was crossing the desert toward her, and it was not trying to be quiet about it.

Footsteps. Deliberate, unhurried, out from behind a cluster of rocks. Not hiding. Not sneaking. Just coming.

There you are, cabron. The pendejo who did this.

She turned her head, the movement fluid and effortless in a way moving had never once been, and watched something walk out of the shadows.

The figure looked like death had learned to stand upright and forgotten to finish the job. Skin stretched over bone like parchment left too long in the sun, a sick ochre gone black in patches that drank the moonlight instead of throwing it back. His face had set into something bat-like, a flattened nose, sunken eyes like chips of obsidian, a mouth that showed far too many teeth when it smiled. The teeth caught the light like yellowed candles in a church nobody had prayed in for a long time, thin and sharp and wrong. He wore what might once have been ceremonial robes, tattered cloth stitched from grave shrouds and rotting vestments and animal hide, bone charms clicking on a chain at his neck. The smell rolled off him ahead of him, decay and damp earth and the cave-cold patience of a thing buried and waiting three hundred years.

Her dead nose read him before the rest of her caught up. Old blood baked into bone. Under it the copper-rot of something that had died a long time ago and stayed anyway. Her own scent answered his, copper and grave dirt, new and raw where his was ancient. Same species. Different vintage.

So. Death gods are real. Vampires are real. What is next, chupacabras. Is Bigfoot going to walk out of the rocks too. I am dead and I am fine. Sure I am.

"You are awake." His voice came like stone ground against stone, dry and old and deliberate. "Interesting. Most do not rise with such... composure."

Isabella got to her feet. She was already bare and she did not reach for the foil. Let him have looked his fill while she slept. Let him be the one who had to decide where to put his eyes now. She stood in front of the death god with her chin up and every inch of her in plain sight and made it his problem, the way she had made it every man's problem her whole life, because a body they expected you to cover was a body you could turn into a weapon the second you refused to.

Look all you want. I am the one running this. Not you. Never you.

Then her hand passed over her own skin again and the rage came up cold and total.

"What did you do to my hair."

It was not a question he could answer fast enough. She was already checking, hands moving over herself, and everywhere they went the skin was smooth. Bare. Wrong. Not the bare she had spent eighteen years being ordered into. The other bare. The one she had taken back.

"You shaved me." Flat. Quiet. "You killed me and then you groomed the body. What kind of a thing does that."

"I did not." The obsidian eyes had dropped for half a second and snapped back to her face, and now they widened, something in them that might have been honest confusion. "I did not touch you so."

"Then where is it." Her voice did not rise, and she knew that was the part that frightened, and she let it. "I grew it back. The day I walked out of that house I let every inch of it grow back, because it was mine, because growing it was the one decision about my body nobody else got to make. And now I am smooth as a doll on a shelf. So you tell me where it went."

The insects had all gone silent at once.

Ah Puch chose his words like a man crossing a river on stones. "The form... reflects what is deepest. What the soul believes itself to be, beneath whatever it tells itself. Your body has set to the truest picture you carry of it."

"My truest picture." She stared at him. "You are telling me I did this. That somewhere in me I think I am supposed to look like this."

And she understood it all at once, and it was worse than anything he could have done with a razor.

Not his hand. Mine. The part of me under the part that ran still keeps me the way he set me. Smooth. Posed. A thing on a shelf. The doll he spent eight years building under the girl, and when something reached in and asked my body what it was, she is the one who answered. She handed them back the doll.

"So even dead," she said, "I am still the thing he made." Not a question. Something landing, and it tasted like battery acid. "He reached past all of it. Past the running, past the dying. He built a version of me so far down I never knew it was holding the rest up, and when the question came, that is the one that spoke."

Ah Puch said nothing, watching her take the weight of it.

"That is worse." Her voice cracked once and she dragged it flat again. "If you had shaved me I could hate you. This is mine. This is the part of me that never once stopped being his, wearing my skin now, for good."

She wrapped her arms around herself, not for cover, just suddenly needing the shape of her own arms around her.

"Can I change it." It came out raw. "Can I make it mine again."

His silence was the whole answer but he spoke anyway. "The vampiro form is fixed at the turning. What you are now, this is what you will be."

Fixed. The doll set in me for good, and now set in the flesh for good on top of it. He won twice. Once in the house and once here, in whatever this is.

"So never." She looked down at herself, at the smooth that would not grow back, at the body arranged to a dead man's taste. "This is it. This is me now. Forever."

"The form follows the soul's deepest image of itself," Ah Puch said, careful. "To change it you would have to change that, all the way at the root, where you truly believe what you are. That can take..."

"How long."

"Centuries. If ever."

Centuries carrying his doll inside my own skin. Centuries as the thing he made, set somewhere I cannot reach to break it. I would rather burn.

"Get away from me." Cold. "Get away from me before I find out whether killing you takes me with you."

Ah Puch took a step back, the obsidian eyes widening a fraction. She had knocked him off whatever script he had walked out here carrying.

"You would..."

"In a heartbeat. If I still had one." She did not move toward him and the threat did not need her to. "Right now death sounds better than forever in this body. So do not test me."

If killing my sire kills me too, that is a feature, not a bug. At least I would go out on my own terms. At least I would not spend forever as his doll.

The desert held still around the two of them, the cold coming up off the ground and through the soles of her cheap sandals and finding nothing left in her to warm, the moon a quarter further along than it had been when she woke and laying the shadows of the creosote down at a new angle, and somewhere out past the rocks, far enough that a living girl would never have caught it, a coyote set its weight onto a flat stone and she heard the grit turn under the pad of its foot, and all of it reached her now as information and nothing else, which was how everything would reach her from here on.

The ancient thing studied her a long moment, and then said the last thing she expected. "I am... sorry. For what my gift has shown you."

"Your gift did not show me anything. My own head did that." She let her arms fall, because hiding it was handing it power, and she was finished giving this body any power over her. If she was stuck in it, she would do what she had always done with a body men wanted. She would make it a threat instead of a wound.

He wanted me built like this. Fine. Watch me make it the worst thing in the room for you. The body does not change. What it means is mine to set.

She turned a slow circle in front of him, unhurried, gave him the line of her back and her spine and then came around to full front with her arms open wide, every inch of her laid out in the moonlight.

"This is what you wanted to look at. When you stripped me down and decided how I should be set." Flat, and flat was the threat. "So look. I am giving you permission. Stare all you want, papi. It lasts longer if you take a picture."

His bat-face twisted into something that on a living man would have been shame.

"I was not..."

"Yeah. You were."

She dropped her arms, hands to her hips, weight on one leg, owning the patch of dirt she stood on. "God knows what you did to a body while it was a corpse. At least you did not leave me glazed or cream-filled."

Ah Puch's composure broke the rest of the way, the bat-features pulling back in genuine revulsion. "I did not. That is, the dead do not. Vampiros cannot. That function does not survive the turning."

"So you are saying you could not, not that you would not." She watched his face. "Honest. Good. One less thing on the list."

She looked around the small clearing, at the scuffed dirt and the silver of the foil. "So, death god. Where are my clothes, or is naked the look you were going for."

He gestured stiffly toward a pile near the rocks. Her jeans. Her torn red crop top. The cheap platform sandals.

"You kept the clothes." She did not move for them yet. "Just decided not to leave them on me."

"Your underthings were fouled in the turning. I burned them. The rest I left for you."

She went still, and an old suspicion came up out of a deep place. "Burned them. You did not, by chance, make puta tea out of them first."

The bat-faced thing stared like she had spoken in tongues. "I do not know that word."

"Hot water. The crotch of a girl's underwear in it for flavor. A little agave to sweeten the pot." Her free hand had closed into a fist she did not feel herself make. "My father's recipe. So. Did you. Yes or no."

"I burned them," Ah Puch said. "Only burned them. Whatever your father did with cloth, I did not."

The relief hit so hard her knees nearly went. She put a hand against the cold of the rock and breathed a breath she did not need.

"Good." She crossed to the pile at last. "Not that kind of pervert, then. Noted."

Not like Father. Not like the recipe. Anything but that.

She pulled the jeans up over legs that did not shake the way she expected, dragged the torn top down over her head, half of it stiff with dried blood, stepped into the sandals. Then she bent and gathered the foil, the silver sheet she had peeled herself out of, and wound it around her shoulders, because the desert had a cold in it she could feel even if it could not reach her, and because a thing that wrapped around you like armor was a thing worth keeping.

My own Shroud of Turin. The dead get one cloth with their face printed into it. This one is mine, and I am taking it with me. Sister Mercedes would faint dead away.

Dressed now, barely but dressed, she turned to face him square. "There. Now we can do this without the naked floor show getting in the way."

"The transformation requires..."

"Nothing. It requires nothing except you deciding to be less of a pervert about it."

Clothes are power. Always have been. I stayed bare while I checked what kind of thing he was. Now I am dressed and he is the one off his feet.

The little clearing sat quiet around them, the scuffed dust and the scattered foil throwing back what light the moon let down, the packet lying where her body had left it with its small plastic eye turned up at the stars, and past the rocks the country ran out flat and silver and patient in every direction, ground that had been swallowing footprints and screams and small buried things for ten thousand years and would go on swallowing them long after tonight was something nobody living remembered.

"So." She crossed her arms. "What do you want. Because a man with power over a girl always wants something. Always."

"I granted you sacred transformation..."

"For free. Out of the goodness of your shriveled black heart." She laughed with nothing in it. "Nobody does anything for free. My father wanted a wife who could not leave. The coyotes wanted paying in skin. You want what. A soldier. A servant. A fuck-toy. A pawn to throw at something."

"I want nothing."

"Sure." She did not believe him, not an inch. "That is why I woke up bare in the dark next to you with my clothes in a pile. Pull the other one, pendejo."

He drew himself up and the old ceremony came back into his voice. "I granted you teoxihuitl. Sacred death made flesh. The body that carried suffering, remade into a vessel that carries strength..."

"Real poetic. Real mystical." She cut across it. "Still did not answer the question. What do you want from me, because we have established you are either a pervert or you are here for something else. Pick one."

The script fell away from him and he spoke plainer. "Your survival. You lived through what breaks most of them. You kept your mind where others lost theirs. That is rare, and I do not waste rare."

"So you think you saved me." Her voice went flat. "You think this is salvation."

"I granted death before defilement..."

"Before." She laughed, sharp and bitter as a broken bottle. "Before."

The rage came up then, out of someplace deep and old and never once let out in the open.

"You want to talk to me about defilement, cabron." She took a step toward him. "My father had me for his wife before I could bleed, and kept me there until I sold myself to the cartel to get out from under him. Said my hair reminded him of my mother. Every night waiting for the door. Every month praying I was not pregnant by my own father. ¿Donde estabas? Where the fuck were you then."

He started to speak. She talked over him.

"The coyotes passed me down the line like a bottle going around. Made me pay for every mile with the only thing they would take. Where were you then."

Her voice was climbing now, years of it bleeding up through the flat.

"I prayed for death. For years. And now you show up. Now." She was in his face, close enough to watch the obsidian eyes widen. "You did not save me from anything. You are years too late. You got my father's leftovers and the coyotes' leavings, and you want a thank-you for it."

She stopped, and the flat came back down over the heat, colder for it.

"Don't you dare call this salvation."

Silence sat in the desert. Even the insects had quit.

"You are correct." Ah Puch's voice had dropped the ceremony entirely. "I was not there when the child cried out. I am here now, when the woman demands an accounting. I did not save innocence. There was none left to save. I weaponized what did survive."

He let that land.

"I am sorry I was not there when you needed me, little one. I am here now, and I have made you a thing that can answer the men who did this. But you will pay for that power in blood. That is the only price, and it is not one I set."

She said nothing for three full seconds.

He is not playing hero. He is saying he made me a weapon. That is more honest than I did this because I love you, or I did it for your own good. Still bullshit, taking the credit for what I am. But he gave me fangs. Late as hell. He gave them.

The hunger hit her then, sudden and total. Not the hollow ache of too many days without food. Deeper. A want with a shape to it, pointed at something specific, something red and warm and moving.

Her senses snapped wide. The desert that had been background pressed in close and exact, every far sound stepping forward out of the dark. Three hearts beating somewhere past the rocks to the east, each at its own rate, and her dead body could tell them apart by the size of the lungs that drove them. The salt-copper smell of living blood riding the wind, sweeter than anything she had ever wanted while she breathed. A jackrabbit froze forty yards out with its pulse going like a hammer in its throat, and she could see the heat shimmer off it, faint, a thing her old eyes would never have caught, and the exact set of its haunches for a bolt it had not made yet. It thought it was hidden. It was not hidden from her at all.

Feed. Take. Drink until the void is filled.

Dios mio. What kind of intrusive-thought horseshit is this. Last thing I need is another critic in here.

She filed it the way she had filed everything her body had ever been put through without her say. Name it. Box it. Survive it. The hunger was real and it was just one more thing to manage, like learning a father's moods, like learning which coyotes would settle for less.

"So what am I." Her voice held steady over the hunger clawing at her. "Vampire. Demon. Zombie with a liquid diet."

"Vampiro." He inclined the bat-head. "The mortal dies. What remains walks. I am Ah Puch, and I am the last face a great many of your kind ever see. You, I think I will be seeing again."

"Cool. Great." She did not slow. "What else kills me besides going hungry. Give me the whole list, death god."

He seemed relieved to be back on solid ground. "Sunlight will burn you to ash. Fire takes our kind fast. Losing the head. Destroying the heart. Those are the certain ones."

"Standard vampire rules. Got it." She turned it over. "Crosses. Garlic. Running water. All the movie shit."

"The old stories keep pieces of the truth. Faith can wound, if the one wielding it truly believes. Holy ground can bar you. Running water, less than they say."

"That is not a yes or a no." She cut him off. "Do crosses work or not."

"If the one holding it believes, yes."

"Great. So my father's church friends could never have touched me. Hypocrites, every one." She rubbed her face. "Fine."

The jackrabbit was still out there. Forty yards, heart unchanged, blood up because it could feel something wrong with the night. Her own body answered it without asking her, the hunger sharpening from a pressure to a point. She filed that too. Hunger locks on fast. Watch it.

"You know what. Never mind. I will figure it out. I have survived worse with less."

"I can teach you..."

"No." It came out harder than she meant. "No. You have done enough."

Every time he opens his mouth I hear Father. Every time he calls this sacred I taste agave and hot water. He is not Father. I know he is not. Different mouth. Same script. And my body does not care. Every cell is screaming run, and I learned a long time ago to listen to that scream.

"I need a name," she said, and the words came with an odd clarity. "Isabella was a girl things happened to. She died at a kitchen table a long time before tonight. What is left needs a different one."

"What shall you be called." For once there was no weight in his voice, only curiosity.

She turned the question over, felt the new thing settling around her like the foil on her shoulders.

"They called me muñeca on the road. Babydoll." The word came out bitter and sweet at once. "A little doll. A thing to dress and move and set on a shelf. The coyotes made it small and cute, like I was theirs to play with."

Take what they called me and make it mine. Same as I did with everything else. They named the doll. Fine. I will be the doll that bites.

"I am keeping it," she said, and her voice found its feet. "Babydoll. But it is mine now. Not theirs. Not yours. Mine."

She met the obsidian eyes straight on.

"And if you ever call me daughter, or child, or any of that family shit, I will work out how to end you. Clear."

Something that might have been approval moved across the bat-features. "Clear."

"Good." She pulled the foil tighter at her shoulders. "Now tell me how not to die at sunrise, and point me at the nearest town. I have an undead life to go ruin."

"The sun announces itself," Ah Puch said, falling into a teacher's cadence with plain relief. "You will feel the dawn before it comes, a wrongness in the bones, a weight in the chest. That is the warning. Find dark. Underground is best. Walls and no windows. The silver will hold the light off you in the open, but only a little while."

She nodded, filing it next to sunlight and fire and a cross in a believer's hand.

While he talked the night went on stacking itself around her in layers she had never once had the equipment to notice, the dry hiss of wind coming down off the higher ground to the west, the faraway diesel and hot asphalt of a road too many miles out for any living nose, the mineral breath of the rocks letting go of the day's heat, and under all of it, steady and red and impossible to stop hearing now that she had heard it once, the small hearts beating away to the east, so that she found some buried part of her had been counting them the whole time his mouth moved.

"Blood is what holds you up," he went on. "Human blood most of all, the deepest and most complete. The thing inside you will not care where it drinks. It takes what it can reach. You have to be the one who decides."

"The thing inside me."

"The hunter under your skin. It grows with hunger, with rage, with fear. Master it, or it masters you and leaves bodies where they will be found."

"So I bite people and try not to kill them." She worked the logistics. "Is there a manual. Do I seduce them first. Am I going to be one of those sexy vampire types."

Sexualized my whole life, and now I have to weaponize it on purpose. Of course. Of course I do.

"There are no rules past survival," Ah Puch said. "How you feed is yours to decide. Some use seduction. Some use terror. Some move through sleep and leave no memory behind. The method matters less than the discipline. Feed. Stay in control. Leave no bodies to be found."

"Erase the memory. I can learn that."

"In time. Much will come to you as you grow into the power. What comes will be yours alone, shaped by what you survived. You will not go looking for it. It will find you."

For a moment she let herself feel the size of the thing he was laying out, the centuries of it, the long dark ahead with no morning at the end she could ever walk back into, and the desert seemed to lean in close and go enormous at the same time, the stars layered back behind the stars in a depth her dead eyes pulled apart without trying, more of them than she had ever known were up there, old and indifferent and not the least bit interested in whether she lasted the night.

"Superpowers." Despite all of it, a flicker of dark humor crossed her face. "That part is almost worth it. What do I get."

"I cannot say. Each of us is different." He paused. "But I feel strength in you. The way you read others, the way you turn them. That will not leave you."

"Thanks, Captain Obvious. Trauma will do that." She cut him off. "Anything else before you let me get on with figuring this out alone."

"You speak as though you want me gone."

"Gold star." She held his gaze. "Look. I appreciate the fangs, papi, really, better late than never. But you stripped me and stared and set my body to a dead man's pattern, which makes you a creep at best. And every time you talk I hear my father, and I have had enough of him to last whatever forever this turns out to be. So go."

The death god looked at her a long moment, the obsidian eyes unreadable.

"You are not like the other Claudias."

"Claudias."

"The abandoned ones. Young vampiros turned and left to fend alone. Most do not last the first night. Most cannot carry what they have become." He paused. "Most were not already forged before I ever found them."

"So I am special because I was broken early." She laughed without humor. "Great. Congratulations on the childhood, it got you ready to be dead."

"I mean that you survived what would have destroyed another."

"Surviving is not living, death god. The only reason I am still standing is that God never once answered the part of me that begged Him to let me stop." She turned from him. "Now go, before I change my mind about not testing the killing-my-sire thing."

She did not wait to see whether he went. She crossed to where the packet lay in the dirt, the little taped brick with its plastic eye, and crouched over it. The drugs she had no use for. The eye was another matter. She worked it loose from the tape with one nail, a hard little chip the size of a back tooth, its red light ticking away patient and stupid, and held it up to the moon. A leash. They had sewn a leash into her to keep her on the line, to keep the merchandise from walking off before the buyer paid. She turned it over in her dead fingers and felt the first thing close to pleasure since she woke. A leash ran both ways. Whoever sat on the far end of this, watching a dot that was supposed to be a girl packed full of product, was a man, and a man was blood, and this one was already coming to her.

They built me a dinner bell and never heard it ring. So ring it. Come see what you bought, cabron.

She closed her fist around the chip and left the gutted packet in the dirt. The product could feed the desert. The eye was coming with her, blinking its small red promise the whole way north.

She started walking. North felt right. Away from the line. Away from all of it.

"The hunters will come," Ah Puch called after her. "There are those who hunt our kind."

"Then I will deal with them when they show." She did not look back. "I have survived hunters before. They just had other names."

She walked into the dark, the cheap sandals crunching gravel, the torn top barely covering her, the foil throwing the moon back like a silver ghost. Her dead eyes painted the night in colors that had no names, sounds that cut the silence, smells that told stories she was only starting to learn to read.

The land opened in front of her into grassland, pale and smooth under the moon, the kind of country that did not care whether you crossed it or died on it and did not trouble to mark the difference. The wind carried nothing but sage and distance. Behind her was Mexico, and ahead was not, and the line between them was a thought somebody had had a thousand miles away that the rock and the wind never once agreed to.

The steel fence cut the land almost invisibly, dark wire marking where men had tried to divide a desert that did not want dividing. She had passed fences like it on the crossing, watched girls scrape themselves raw squeezing through, watched the small ones cry quiet in the dark while the coyotes told them crying carried too far out here. She walked at it now, not around it, and when she reached the rusted mesh she went through it like it was nothing at all. Nothing stopped her. Nothing was going to.

No heartbeat. No breath. No family. No home. No name except the one I took. Just me and the hunger and the night.

Far back, Ah Puch watched until the dark took her, and then he turned. "The first who ever threatened me with the fangs I gave her," he said, to no one. "Magnificent. And terrible." He stepped back into the shadows he had come out of.

If she heard it, she gave no sign. She kept walking.

Babydoll, no longer Isabella, no longer muñeca, no longer anybody's property, walked north into the desert night with nowhere to be except away. The hunger gnawed harder with every step. The foil crinkled at her shoulders. The cold came in through the torn top, and she felt it the way she felt the diesel on the wind and the heat off a far jackrabbit, as information, one more signal she would learn to read or learn to die ignoring.

But she was walking. On her own terms. In her own direction.

For the first time in years, nobody was telling her where to go.

Feed. Need. Blood. Now.

She scanned the dark, reading it with a predator's ease. Somewhere out there, blood moved. Hearts beat. And she was very, very hungry.

First, figure out how to feed without getting caught. Second, find dark before the sun. Third, last long enough to work out what I do with forever.

She kept walking, trusting the body to know things her mind had not caught up to yet.

Behind her, the patch of dirt where she had died and woken faded into the dark.

Isabella Martinez was gone.

Babydoll walked forward.