Chapter 3

Need to move. Need shelter. Dawn coming.

Yeah, she felt it. The wrongness building in her bones like an itch she couldn't scratch.

She'd been walking north for what felt like hours since leaving Raúl cooling in the dirt. No destination. Just the vague understanding that north meant away, and away was the only direction that mattered.

The desert in the hour before dawn had its own particular register that she was starting to read without trying, the way the creosote gave off a different scent-signature at this temperature than it did at midnight, the mesquite stands marking their positions by the specific hollow in the ambient sound around them, the San Pedro River making itself known three hundred yards ahead through a change in air moisture that her dead body parsed the same way her new eyes parsed light, the whole approaching geography writing itself into her awareness like a map she hadn't asked for but couldn't put down.

Her hands had stopped shaking maybe thirty minutes ago, but the hollow feeling in her chest remained, not hunger this time, just the recognition that killing him hadn't fixed anything. Hadn't healed anything. Had just... ended him.

The killing had left its evidence everywhere, dried rust across her chest and arms, smeared across her face where she'd reached up without thinking. The torn crop top pulled at her shoulders, gritty and stiff but mostly clean. The foil shroud crackled across her back like the world's loudest advertisement that something weird was happening here.

She looked like a disaster.

The road descended toward the bridge through scrub flats where rabbit brush and cholla held their positions in the dark with the patience of things that grew in bad soil by learning to need less than anything else did, the border country's particular aesthetic of survival-through-minimalism that she understood better than she wanted to, the whole landscape oriented toward the river corridor ahead as the single green fact worth navigating toward in terrain that had decided warmth was optional.

The road sloped downward toward what a faded sign promised was Hereford, though all she could see was a single-lane bridge stretching across a ribbon of water that called itself the San Pedro River. Calling it a river felt generous. In most places it would pass for a creek, maybe a drainage ditch after summer storms. But the cottonwoods marked its passage through the desert scrubland, green defiance against endless brown.

Water. Finally. Can wash this blood off before the smell drives me completely insane.

She approached the bridge cautiously, enhanced senses mapping every shadow and sound even though her brain was too exhausted to process half of it.

The bridge was utilitarian, rust-brown steel trusses bolted and angled across a skeleton of weathered timber spanning maybe twenty feet of shallow current. The trusses themselves were oxidized to deep reddish-brown, industrial and blunt against the predawn dark. Guardrails painted yellow by decades of sun and wind. Wooden planks that creaked under phantom weight. She could make out "E HEREFORD RD" stamped into the metal of the bridge deck itself, the letters worn but legible. Above and beyond the structure, the gallery of cottonwoods formed a corridor along the river, dark shapes against the pre-dawn sky, leafy and substantial, nature's own shelter. No lights. No traffic sounds. No witnesses at this hour, just the San Pedro flowing cold and shallow beneath the trusses, carrying minimal water but enough to murmur against stone.

The cottonwood gallery beyond the bridge ran north along the river's bend for as far as her enhanced senses could track it, the individual trees distinguishable from each other by height and canopy spread and the specific wildlife using each one, a great blue heron standing motionless sixty yards upstream with its body heat the only warm signature in a corridor of cool riparian dark, the whole scene suspended in the stillness that came just before the desert's nightlife finished its business and handed the world back to daylight.

She set the foil shroud down carefully beside the bridge approach, the material crinkling as she arranged it on dry ground. Abandoning it felt dangerous even for the few minutes she'd need to wash.

Following the bank down to the water's edge, Babydoll pulled the stiff crop top over her head, wincing as dried blood cracked and flaked against her skin. The night air hit her bare chest with desert coolness. No goosebumps. No shivers. Just cold, and her body didn't give a fuck.

The San Pedro ran cold enough that she could feel the current against her feet without finding anything to object to about it, her dead body treating temperature as information rather than experience, and the contrast between the river's mineral chill and the desert air's dryness was just data now, everything that should have been sensation reduced to a stream of inputs her new wiring logged without the nervous system's old habit of deciding which ones mattered.

No heartbeat. No breathing unless I force it. Dead girl washing a dead man's blood off in the middle of nowhere. What am I supposed to do now?

She knelt at the water's edge, using the shirt like a rag, scrubbing at the blood crusted on her skin. Her chest. Her arms. Her face. The water was cold against her room-temperature flesh. She registered the temperature difference but her body had no opinion about it. No urgency to get warm. Just... cold.

The blood came off in reddish-brown streaks, staining the crop top she used to clean herself. Some of it had set too deep. Would never come out.

She held the ruined shirt over the current and watched the last threads of red-brown dissolve downstream in the direction of whatever came next, the pre-dawn dark pressing in from the east with the particular quality it had in the half-hour before the sky started changing colors, dense and almost solid, the cottonwood canopy amplifying the effect until standing in the gallery forest felt less like standing in the open air and more like standing inside something that hadn't decided yet whether to hold or release.

Some things can't be washed clean. Some stains are meant to stay.

"Fuck. Another one."

The voice came from across the river, flat and economical, carrying the particular tone of someone who'd learned that wasted words meant wasted life.

Babydoll didn't startle. Years of reading dangerous men had taught her that sudden movements invited violence. She stopped scrubbing and lifted her eyes to the opposite bank, hands still in the water, senses mapping the threat. She left the wet shirt where it lay. Reaching for it would tell him she gave a damn who was looking, and she did not hand a man that for free.

He emerged from shadows beneath a battered mesquite like he'd been part of the landscape. Tall and lean, built from desert hardness and sun-scorched muscle, wearing faded camo that had seen actual use. A poncho draped across one shoulder. Around his neck, a necklace of bone and teeth caught moonlight.

Native features, weathered. Eyes that tracked her with the same methodical attention she'd seen in cartel enforcers and border patrol agents, professionals who evaluated threats before deciding whether to engage or eliminate.

But he was wrong. Dead like her, but... incomplete? Diluted? And darkness clinging to the edges of his presence like smoke stains on glass.

Her nose reached across the water without asking, sour blood and fermentation, the turning half-finished and still working in him. Not dead-clean like her. Not ancient like Ah Puch. Something stuck between.

Not mortal. Vampire. But different than the Death God. Weaker? Stained? Fuck, I've been undead for six hours. How would I know what normal is?

She stayed kneeling, topless, reading him while he read her, mutual threat assessment across the width of the river. Staying bare was deliberate. A man deciding where to aim his eyes was a man spending attention he could not spend on anything else, and the longer he spent it there, the more of the exchange belonged to her.

"You're like me. Dead. But you're different than the last pendejo." She kept her voice level. "What are you?"

"Fragile. Half-Turned." Pause. "Didn't take, chica."

Fragile? Half-Turned? So there's... levels? Types? Fuck, I don't know anything.

"And I'm what, the full version?"

"Yeah. Full vamp. But new. Still smell like life. Blood. Bad choices."

"Story of my fuckin' life. Unlife. Whatever the fuck this is."

She shifted her shoulders while she scrubbed, the old move, made her chest move with it, the one that always put a man's eyes where she wanted them and handed her the exchange. His eyes didn't drop. Stayed on her face.

"Nice tits."

"Thanks."

"Won't work. Dani plays that game better than you, puta."

Tits and fangs. Seventy percent of the time, it works every time. Guess this is the other thirty.

Men do not keep their eyes on my face. The ones who can are the ones I have never once been able to steer, and those are the only ones who ever truly scared me. File him there.

"So, you aren't here for the show." She went back to scrubbing blood off her arms, matter-of-fact. "What are you here for?"

"Your kinda chill for a fledge."

"Been that kind of night. Woke up wrapped in foil like a TV dinner, completely naked, getting eye-fucked by some ancient desert cryptid with an ego problem. Then made a meal out of the coyote who brought me here. So yeah, forgive the lack of terror. You're like... third scariest thing tonight. Of course."

He studied her for a moment. "How old are you?"

"Old enough to know meeting men in the dark never ends well. Except now maybe I'm the problem."

"You seem dangerously aware for someone as young as you look."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Means most kids your age come back rabid. Feral. Attack anything with a pulse. Goats, dogs, people."

"World never gave me an opening to break down. Why start now."

She wrung the crop top out, water and diluted blood spattering on rocks. "If I knew how, believe me, that kind of mindless bliss sounds better than dragging my baggage around."

"Baggage?" He glanced at the foil shroud crumpled on the bank. "All I see is the emergency blanket."

"What? You don't see the shipping container of emotional bullshit dragging behind me?"

He's keeping me talking. Professional. Waiting to see what I'll reveal or if I'll drop my guard. Joke's on him, I don't have a guard to drop. Just exhaustion and teeth.

Cactus dropped into a squat, balanced on his toes, getting closer to her eye level. Or getting ready to pounce.

"Did you catch your vamp daddy's name?"

"Who, Papi?" She wrung the crop top one more time. "Called himself Ah Puch. Real chatty for a supposed bat-faced death god. Had a whole 'I've gifted you with immortality' speech prepared. Just another pendejo using me like a discardable sex toy. Why, you keeping a list?"

"Ah Puch." He rolled the name around. "Means nothing to me. Death god, though..." A pause. "Elder?"

"Fuck if I know. I'm just fledged, right? He smelled like old books, death, and copper."

"You always this mouthy?"

"Only when I'm awake."

"This Ah Puch isn't an Elder then." Statement, not question. "You're still around to tell about it."

"Elder than what? Those Jesus salesmen?"

"Old vampires. Powerful ones. The kind who'd rip your head off for talking back."

"Great. Add that to the list of things I should've known six hours ago."

She pulled the crop top back over her head. The wet, ruined fabric clung to her skin, cold and clammy as dead hands.

Fuck, that's disgusting. Still better than wearing his blood.

"So, Papi. Show's over. Unless you're throwing money, I'm leaving."

"Can't let you do that."

She stopped. Didn't turn around fully, but stopped.

There it is. All that conversation was just sizing me up before the kill. Of course. Why would this night be any different?

"Might want to take that up with the last cabrón who tried."

"Not my choice. Bishop says we have to eliminate all you Claudias."

"Name isn't Claudia, and who the fuck is Bishop?"

"Claudia's what we call fledges. Young. Abandoned. No training." Pause. "Bishop runs this territory. Old. Pirate old. Don't like loose ends."

Pirate old. So, we're talking what, three hundred years? Four hundred? And she's hunting girls like me for sport. Or pest control. Probably pest control. I'm a fucking cockroach that needs stepping on.

"Well, I haven't figured this whole vampire thing out yet. You have experience over me. But, Papi, I survived my father, and arranged for the coyotes to get me here. So, what I lack in knowledge, I make up for in raw bitchiness. You sure you want to play this game?"

He went quiet. She watched the math behind his eyes run again, the professional threat-read recalculating, the set of his jaw shifting. Something that had been moving toward easy solve turned into a longer pause.

"Raw bitchiness won't stop a bullet." He touched the knife at his belt. "Or a blade, chica."

She glanced at the knife. "Only six inches, Papi?"

"You'll feel me."

He moved.

Fast. Blade up, closing the distance between them in two strides. Professional. Efficient. Committed.

Fuck. FUCK. He's actually,

"STOP."

The word came out heavy in her mouth, heavier than a word had any business being.

Cactus froze mid-stride. One foot planted, the other suspended. Knife raised. His face twisted, confusion, recognition, resistance, but his body wouldn't move.

"What the, " His voice strained. Fighting it.

It tasted like copper and iron in the back of her throat. Her hands went colder than dead skin should. Across from her Cactus shook, every tendon strung tight, fighting a body that had stopped answering him.

Holy shit. What is this. What am I doing. Keep going. Don't stop. MAKE HIM LEAVE.

"Sorry Papi, this has been educational. But if it's my survival over yours, then... RUN." The word landed with that same weight, each syllable pressing against reality. "Go south. Don't stop. Don't look back. RUN."

His body obeyed before his mind finished processing. The knife clattered on stone. His legs moved. He turned and ran, professional hunter reduced to prey fleeing from something his instincts recognized as apex predator.

She watched him disappear into the desert darkness, her senses tracking his flight until distance made the details blur.

Whatever had held him let go the moment he cleared her range. She felt it go slack. Her senses followed him anyway, heartbeat fading south, the sour fermentation smell thinning on the wind. Gone.

The knife. She bent down, grabbed it. Tactical blade, well-maintained.

Waste not, want not. He's not using it anymore.

Then her legs gave out.

She sat hard on the bridge planking, knife in one hand, the other braced against weathered wood. Her hands were shaking. Not from fear. From... whatever the fuck that was.

Well fuck, that was... new. What in the hell am I?

Dawn pressure built behind her eyes. In her bones. The sky was shifting from black to iron gray, and every instinct screamed. RUN. HIDE. NOW.

She forced herself to stand. Grabbed the foil shroud from the riverbank. Knife in one hand, shroud in the other, wet crop top clinging to dead skin.

She crossed the bridge, following the dirt access road toward the trailhead parking area. No cars. No people. Just predawn silence and that wrongness building in her chest, a scream with nowhere to go.

Then she saw it, a rust-brown entrance sign, the kind BLM posted for protected lands. The marker read "SAN PEDRO RIPARIAN NATIONAL CONSERVATION AREA" with the requisite disclaimers about permit requirements and use restrictions. The parking lot split into two sections, one for standard vehicles, another with rails and open space for horse trailers. The Chihuahuan savanna stretched open above, sky already lightening toward pale blue, wide and exposed and utterly indifferent to her existence. To the east, the cottonwood corridor was visible, a green line marking the river's passage, dark shapes in the pre-dawn.

BLM land. Means no development, no regular patrols at this hour, no one coming.

Then she saw it, small cinderblock building. Bathroom. Public restroom for hikers.

Fuck yes. Enclosed. Dark. Good enough.

She got closer and the smell hit her. Latrine. Hole-in-the-ground nastiness, decades of human waste baking in desert heat, chemical cleaner that had given up years ago. The kind of smell that would gag a maggot.

Of course. My first day shelter is a shit-pit. Tracks. It all fuckin' tracks.

But it was enclosed. It would block sunlight. And, she realized with grim humor, she didn't have to breathe.

Small mercies.

She pushed open the door marked "Women." Concrete floor, two stalls, steel-plate vent near the ceiling facing east. She closed the door and locked the deadbolt. The smell was weapons-grade awful, but her dead lungs didn't care. She wedged Cactus's knife in her waistband, dragged one of the stall doors shut, spread the foil shroud across the filthy floor like the world's saddest sleeping bag. Inside the vault toilet stall, complete darkness swallowed the space, a windowless refuge where no ray of dawn could penetrate. The isolation was absolute, miles of dead-hour dark with no one awake to hear it or stumble onto it. Just her and the dark and the chemical stench that meant safety.

Dawn light touched the horizon. The wrongness spiked.

She wrapped herself in the shroud completely, cocooning against the day, against sunlight, against discovery.

Made a professional hunter run. Killed my trafficker. Sheltering in a literal shithole. First night as vampire, complete success.

Day-sleep dragged her down like drowning in reverse. Her last thought before darkness took her. Cactus would report back. Tell his team. Tell this pirate Elder named Bishop.

They'd come for her.

But at least now they knew she could bite back.

The day passed in timeless void. No dreams. No awareness. Just the absolute absence that came with being a corpse animated by supernatural will, consciousness fled until darkness made existence safe again.