The house had looked normal from the street: southwest stucco with decorative block walls and desert landscaping that said suburban retiree rather than supernatural sanctuary. No gothic towers, no wrought iron gates, no obvious signs that something unnatural lived behind those beige walls. Just another Sierra Vista property where people minded their own business and kept their yards manageable in a climate that killed weaker plants. From the street her new senses had already been pulling the place apart, the tick of a cooling engine somewhere down the block, a sprinkler running on a timer two yards over against every water restriction the county published, the resinous green of creosote that had drunk last week’s rain and the older mineral dust of a valley that had been desert long before anyone thought to build retirement homes on it, all of it ordinary, all of it suburban, none of it preparing her for what waited on the other side of the door.

But the moment Rocket had crossed the threshold, her supernatural senses had gone haywire.

The air felt wrong: heavy, consecrated, ancient, the way a church felt ancient when you walked into one that had been collecting prayer for four hundred years. Consecrated. Like walking into a church except the sanctity didn’t come from priests or rituals or official blessings, none of the institutional paperwork that an Archbishop’s stamp could have applied to it. This was older. Earned through suffering instead of declared through authority, accumulated the way mineral deposits accumulated, the way a cave grew its own walls one slow drip at a time over a span of years no living human had been around to witness. The scent hit next: myrrh and copal incense mixing with lingering coffee and something metallic underneath that made her demon retreat with instinctive recognition, the small old certainty that whatever ran her now had been here before in some other body and had not been welcome the last time either.

Blood. Old blood. Fresh blood. Decades of blood soaked into walls and floors and the very foundation of this place.

Fuck. How many people died here? Why does it smell like church and grave had a baby?

Every wall displayed crucifixes: not the decorative kind that suburban Catholics hung for aesthetics, but the serious ones. Heavy wood, detailed corpus figures, positioned at heights that suggested they were meant for actual prayer rather than interior design. Faded portraits of saints stared down with painted eyes that tracked movement. San Martín de Porres. La Virgen de Guadalupe. Santa Muerte holding her scales and scythe like promises instead of threats.

The living room furniture had looked comfortable: overstuffed sofa, mismatched armchairs arranged for conversation. Three girls sat there, vampires all of them, their supernatural stillness marking them as predators despite their youth.

One looked about eighteen, Indigenous features with warm brown skin and long dark hair, wearing earth-toned clothing and bone jewelry. Her presence carried a solemn grace, like she was bearing weight that didn’t belong to her.

Another appeared eighteen, Mexican with deep brown eyes that seemed older than her face. Simple clothing, no pretense, quiet dignity earned through survival rather than performance.

Sisters. Maybe. If I don’t fuck this up.

The third looked around the same age: electric blue bob catching lamplight, black western shirt with pearl snaps tied at her waist, dark jeans, and brown cowboy boots that added height. She looked like she was trying to blend into Arizona border culture and failing in exactly the right ways, that electric blue hair screaming against the western aesthetic. Her sapphire eyes held something sharp and calculating that the deliberate costume couldn’t quite hide.

Abuela had led them down a hallway lined with family photographs behind glass: decades of desert life captured in graduations and quinceañeras and wedding portraits and funeral programs tucked into frames like pressed flowers. Visual evidence that this woman had been part of this community long enough to watch generations bloom and wither and return to dust.

She was at all of these. Watched them grow up. Watched them die. How does that not make you insane?

Bisbee had peeled off toward the living room. Before he did, he’d caught Rocket’s eye with that steady look she’d learned to rely on.

“You got this, kid,” he said. “I’ll be right down the hall if you need me.”

Leaving her room to make space for her own choice.

Twenty feet. He’s twenty feet away. I can hear them. They can hear me. It’s fine. I’m fine.

She wasn’t fine.

From deeper in the house, voices. Female. Young. Then sudden movement: footsteps converging, excited greetings, warmth that said family instead of performance.

“Bisbee!” The first voice carried genuine joy, no performance in it.

“I missed you.” Quieter, more tender. The kind of vulnerability that only came from safety.

Wait. She... he’s mine. He found me. I don’t... fuck, why does that make my chest tight?

“Finally! Someone interesting...” Honey-smooth accent, playful edge cutting through the moment.

“Girls.” Bisbee’s voice, that dry warning tone that conveyed affection all the same. “Give the kid some space to breathe first, yeah?”

Laughter. Easy. Comfortable. The sound of people who’d earned the right to tease each other.

The voices from the living room carried clearly enough for vampire hearing: genuine affection, questions about Bisbee, curiosity about the new girl. But Bisbee’s responses stayed low, deliberate. His responses stayed low and deliberate, protecting her story as his responsibility to keep.

He’s not telling them. Not gossiping. Keeping his mouth shut because... because that’s who he is. They don’t know yet. Don’t know about trafficking or desert or what I did. But they will. Eventually. What if they hate me when they find out?

Abuela turned those dark, ancient eyes on Rocket. “The kitchen is where we discuss important things. Where family begins. Come, mija.”

Rocket inhaled a breath she didn’t need, squaring her shoulders with false confidence that had gotten her through countless dangerous situations.

The kitchen came into view, the small bordering room every house in every Latina grandmother’s life had ever had, the room where the real conversations happened after the living room had been emptied of the men. Small wooden table beneath a window overlooking a backyard garden where desert plants grew in careful rows, agave and prickly pear and a row of small clay pots holding the herbs every curandera in northern Sonora had grown for the last hundred years. Coffee pot still warm on the counter, brewed for ghosts the same way Bisbee brewed it for ghosts, every old vampire in this part of the country apparently keeping the same private ritual against the same accumulated dead. A crucifix above the sink where someone would wash dishes while contemplating spiritual requirements, hung at exactly the height a tired woman with her hands in soapy water could glance up at without lifting her chin. Candles burning on a small shelf that held bread and flowers and carved figures, the bread already going stale because the bread was for the saints not for the household, the flowers already wilting because the flowers were the offering not the decoration, the carved figures faded with the polish of decades of fingertips.

The kitchen felt like the center of something sacred: not Catholicism exactly, but nurturing that required backbone.

But it was Abuela who commanded the space.

She moved like time itself: deliberate, unhurried, impossible to ignore. Her body belonged to a seventy-eight-year-old woman: small, slightly hunched, bones like weathered mesquite beneath loose skin. Silver hair pinned into a tight bun. Simple clothing: long dark skirt, worn cardigan, a shawl that smelled faintly of mothballs and prayer.

But her eyes.

Dark. Ancient. Holding the stillness of someone who’d counted every grain of sand between here and the border, who’d buried more people than she’d birthed, who’d survived long enough to understand that mercy and judgment weren’t opposites: they were the same thing viewed from different angles of faith, the same single object turning slowly in the same single light, named differently depending on which side of the suffering you happened to be standing on when the light caught it.

She didn’t look like someone who could reduce trained killers to ash with a glance.

She looked like someone who wouldn’t need to.

Abuela gestured to a chair. “Sit.”

Rocket sat, hyperaware of everything. Exit routes. Weapon possibilities. The way sound carried through this house: conversation in the living room too low to make out clearly now, but the tone readable. Warmth. Safety. The easy comfort that came from people who’d known each other long enough to stop performing.

That could be me. If she decides I’m worth keeping. If I can figure out how to be part of something without destroying it.

The older woman moved to the counter, poured coffee into two cups with practiced efficiency, then brought them to the table along with a small ceramic bowl that held something dark and viscous.

She set the bowl in front of Rocket. The scent hit immediately: blood. Spiced. Heated.

“If you are hungry, I have goat blood, heated and spiced with cinnamon, and a touch of honey,” Abuela offered.

Is she offering food? Testing control? Seeing if I’ll take it?

“I’ve never, I mean, can we add things to blood? Like spices?”

“Sí, mija. Blood takes spices well: cinnamon for warmth, cloves for strength, honey to soften the copper.” Abuela’s voice carried the practical wisdom of someone who’d spent decades making sustenance bearable. “Goat blood is gamey, stronger than beef or pork. The spices help mask that. Animal blood lacks the strength of human, but prepared with care, it sustains without requiring you to harm my neighbors or compromise your conscience.”

She gestured to the bowl.

“You do not have to drink now if you are not ready. But know that you will learn to feed without killing. To take from those who can afford to give. To manage your hunger instead of being ruled by it.”

Rocket nodded slowly, processing. The idea of feeding without killing, of spices making blood bearable: it was so far from her week of desperate survival it felt almost alien.

“You’ve been feeding on humans,” Abuela said as she settled into her chair. A statement, not a question. “Living blood. Fresh kills.”

Fuck. She knows. Of course she knows. Bisbee told her everything. The contractors. Robert. All of it.

Rocket’s shoulders tensed, but she made herself look up, meeting those ancient eyes. “I didn’t have a choice. I was starving. I didn’t know...”

“Peace, mija.” Abuela raised one weathered hand. “I know you are new to this. I’ve had many newborn vampires in this house. I was once new too. I understand. I’m not judging. I’m witnessing. There’s a difference.” She folded her hands on the table, patient and immovable as stone. “Now. Before we go further, before you enter this house as anything more than guest, there are things we must discuss. Questions I must ask. This is how we determine if sanctuary is possible.”

From somewhere deeper in the house, Rocket heard the low murmur of Bisbee’s voice. Other voices responding. Female. Young. The girls she’d seen.

They’re in there together. Family. I can hear them laughing. And I’m in here trying to prove I’m not too broken to keep. What if I can’t do this? What if I say the wrong thing and she decides I’m too broken, too dangerous, too,

“Rocket.” Abuela’s voice broke through the spiral. Gentle but firm. “Look at me, not at the door. What happens here, now, between you and me: this is what matters. The rest comes after.”

Rocket forced her attention back to the ancient vampire across the table. To the dark eyes that held decades and the hands that looked fragile but had probably buried more people than Rocket would ever meet.

“Now,” Abuela said. “Let us begin.”

And Rocket understood, with sudden cold clarity, that whatever happened in this kitchen would determine everything.

Whether she found sanctuary or just another kind of cage.

Whether Abuela was safety or just a prettier version of Señor Morales.

Whether she could finally stop running, or if she’d be running forever.

Please. Por favor, Dios. Let this be real. Let this be the place. Let me survive long enough to find out.

Silence held between them. Not uncomfortable exactly, but weighted. Like the air before a thunderstorm when the desert holds its breath waiting for rain that might not come.

Abuela’s hands folded around rosary beads, clicking softly. Those dark eyes studied Rocket with attention that felt like being read from the inside out.

Then she spoke.

“Mija.” Her voice carried that soft weight that made the candles on the shelf behind her seem to flicker in response. “This sanctuary and those within it operate under Covenant. Do you understand what that means?”

“Covenant.” Rocket tested the word. “Isn’t that just... a promise?”

“No, mija. A promise can be broken with apology.” Abuela’s voice stayed quiet but iron-hard. “A Covenant is witnessed before God. It breaks those who abandon it.”

Breaks you. Not breaks the promise, breaks the person. Like Señor Morales breaking me. Except this time I’d be doing it to myself by leaving. Fuck. That’s... that’s permanent.

“And if I can’t...” Her voice came out quieter than intended. “If I mess up? If I’m too broken to...”

“Mija, listen to me.” Abuela’s voice carried absolute certainty. “Mistakes do not break covenant. Failure does not break covenant. Brokenness does not break covenant.”

She moved closer across the table, making sure Rocket heard every word.

“What breaks you?” Her voice stayed gentle but implacable. “Your own soul, mija. When you abandon those you swore to protect, when you choose comfortable silence over witnessing pain, when you betray the trust given: it carves something from inside you that cannot grow back.”

She paused, letting that settle.

“This is not punishment I inflict. It is consequence written into the fabric of covenant itself. Like breaking a bone, I do not break it by naming the fracture. You break it by falling.”

Her fingers traced the rosary beads.

“Can it heal? Sí. Through return, through confession, through restoration of what was broken. But like bone, it heals differently. Stronger perhaps, but never the same. The scar remains. The memory of fracture remains.”

She leaned forward slightly.

“I do not ask for perfection, mija. I ask for commitment. You will fail. You will stumble. You will say wrong things, make poor choices, hurt your sisters without meaning to. This is being human, or as human as we dead can manage.”

“But abandonment?” Her voice dropped. “Choosing to walk away when staying becomes difficult? Is deciding your comfort more important than their pain? That is what breaks covenant. And it will break you in the breaking.”

“That’s... that’s a lot to carry.”

“Sí. But our existence, our immortality, requires that weight.” Abuela’s voice stayed patient. “What we do not only affects us today, but centuries forward. I have walked this earth as vampire for nearly forty years, and I am still young. I know of two vampires near here who have existed over three hundred years. What we choose today, we carry forever. There is no escape through death. No forgetting. Only living with what we have become.”

“Mierda.” The word slipped out. “You’re asking me to... for centuries...”

“I am asking you to do your best. Not for me, but for yourself.”

Abuela’s hands folded around her rosary beads, clicking softly.

“Now. Before we form this covenant, there are questions I must ask. This is how we assess if family is possible.” She paused, making sure Rocket understood. “These will not be easy to answer. But they must be answered.”

Rocket’s throat went tight. “Okay.”

“Mija.” Abuela’s voice dropped to that confessional tone. “Before you enter this sanctuary, you must speak what was done to your body in that house with the yellow walls.”

The world tilted sideways.

Fuck. Fuck. She knew. She already knew. Bisbee told her. But she wants me to say it. Out loud. Make it real instead of just nightmares and blank spaces and...

“Do not be angry with Bisbee for telling me: he felt it was relevant to the safety of this house. He will tell no one else, and neither will I. I ask not for my knowledge...” Abuela’s voice stayed gentle but implacable as stone. “But because the unspoken defilement festers in the soul like infection in the flesh. What did the men do to you there?”

Rocket’s throat closed. Her hands gripped the edge of the table hard enough that wood creaked under supernatural strength. Every defensive instinct screamed at her to deflect, joke, manipulate her way out of this conversation the way she’d learned to survive every adult who’d tried to make her vulnerable.

But this felt different. Not the invasive questions designed to make helpers feel useful. Not performance where the right answer got you approval.

This felt like confession. Like standing at the edge of something that would either catch her or let her fall, and the only way to find out which was to jump.

“I don’t...” Her voice came out rough. Broken. “I don’t remember. Not... not all of it. Pieces. Fragments. But not... not enough to say what happened. Just that it did. That they... that I...”

She stopped, jaw clenching against the tide of shame and rage and grief that threatened to drown her if she let it.

Laughter carried from the living room. Bright. Unguarded. The sound of people who felt safe enough to be happy.

They don’t know what I am. What was done to me. How broken I am inside. If they knew, they wouldn’t laugh like that. They’d look at me the way everyone looks at damaged goods: like I’m contaminated. Ruined.

“The body remembers what the mind refuses to carry.” The words landed with certainty that allowed no argument. “Your flesh knows what your thoughts have locked away.”

“He told you.” Her voice barely made it past her throat. “About... what my body does.” Couldn’t look up. Couldn’t meet those ancient eyes.

Abuela was quiet for a moment, considering.

“Flesh often misbehaves. It is not your fault. When the memories surface, and they will, mija, they always do, will you speak them aloud to me or to your sisters? Or will you let them rot inside you like poison that spreads through the blood?”

The question hung in the air like incense smoke.

She made herself look up into those ancient eyes. To see the certainty there: not that she could remember now, but that when the memories came back, she’d have a choice. Carry them alone in darkness, or bring them into light where they could be witnessed instead of just endured.

“I’ll tell you.” The words scraped out like broken glass. “When they come back. When I remember. I’ll, I’ll tell you. Or one of the girls. Someone. I won’t, I won’t keep it locked inside like some jodido secret that makes me sicker.”

She paused, vulnerability cracking through defensive walls built from sarcasm and rage.

“But I can’t promise when. Or how much. Just that... that I’ll try. To not carry it alone.”

Abuela nodded once, no judgment visible in her expression. Just acknowledgment.

“Está bien. The vow is enough.” Her voice softened but maintained that priestly authority. “We do not demand what the soul cannot yet bear to remember. But understand: the covenant includes this burden. When the memories return, you bring them into the light. You do not carry them alone in darkness.”

She drew her weight forward, rosary beads clicking.

“This is the first law of family, mija. We witness each other’s pain. We do not pretend it doesn’t exist. We do not leave our sisters to bleed in silence while we maintain easy comfortable ignorance.”

First law. She’s making rules. Boundaries. The kind that say what family actually means instead of just performing it. And she’s not demanding I remember now, just that when I do, I don’t hide it like shame that needs to stay secret.

The kitchen felt smaller suddenly. More intimate. Like the space itself was listening to covenant being formed through questions and promises and the terrifying act of trusting that maybe, possibly, someone would witness her pain without turning away.

Abuela sat back in her chair, hands still folded around those beads.

“Now.” Her voice maintained that confessional tone that made the air feel heavier. “The blood you carry in your veins. Whose is it?”

The second question hit different than the first. About violence she’d chosen. Actions she’d taken. People she’d killed to survive.

Robert. The contractors. All of them. She wants names. Wants me to confess like I’m some kind of...

“The man at the gas station,” Abuela continued, her tone staying level. Priestly. “The ones you eliminated in the desert. Others you have taken since crawling from your grave.” She paused, letting the weight settle. “Are there deaths on your hands that cry out from the ground like Abel’s blood, or did you only take what was necessary for survival?”

Rocket’s jaw clenched. Her hands were still gripping the table edge, knuckles white with tension that had nowhere else to go.

“I don’t know all their names.” The admission felt like failure. Like she should have at least cared enough to learn who she was killing before she drained them. “The guy at the Chevron; Robert. His name was Robert. He tried to help me even though I must have looked like hell, and I...”

Her voice cracked.

“I fed on him. I was starving, so hungry. Couldn’t stop. Didn’t know how. The demon just... it wanted, and I couldn’t...” She stopped, forcing herself to continue through the shame. “He died. I killed him. Inadvertently, that doesn’t bring him back.”

Abuela nodded once. Just acknowledgment. No absolution offered.

“And the others?” Her voice gentle but steadfast. “The men in the desert.”

Rocket’s throat went tight. Different kind of confession. Different kind of guilt.

“Coyotes. Contractors. The men who...” She couldn’t finish that sentence. Started again. “They were hunting me. They were trying to bring me back to the Sinaloa pipeline. I killed five of them. Maybe six. Maybe more. I don’t...”

Does it matter? Dead is dead. Whether I drained them first or the fire finished them, they’re still gone because of me.

“Did you hunt them?” Abuela asked. “Or did they hunt you?”

“They hunted me first.” The words came out defensive. Aggressive. “I was just trying to survive. They were tracking me, had guns, were going to drag me back to...”

“Mija.” Abuela’s voice cut through the overwhelming emotions. “I did not ask to justify. I asked which is true. Did you hunt them, or did they hunt you?”

Rocket forced herself to breathe. To think past the defensive rage.

“They hunted me. I killed them when they found me. Told them to stop. Let one go to tell the others to stop. They kept after me. I planned. Set traps. Waited for them to come close enough that I could...” She stopped. “I wanted them dead. Not just to survive. I wanted them to pay for what they did. For what they were going to keep doing to other girls if I didn’t stop them.”

“So, you became their judge. Their executioner.”

The words landed like stones.

“Yes.”

“Speak their names if you remember them. Speak how they died. This is confession, mija: cleansing, not punishment. The weight you name aloud becomes weight we can help you carry.”

Rocket swallowed hard. “Robert.” She forced herself to say it clearly. “Robert at the Chevron station. I drained him. Couldn’t stop. He died trying to help me.”

Her hands trembled slightly.

“The contractors, I don’t know their names. She paused. “I’m not sorry they’re dead. I’m sorry I had to kill them. That survival meant... that I had to become someone who could do that.”

“Anyone else?” Abuela asked.

Rocket shook her head. “No. Just them. Robert and the contractors. That’s... that’s all the blood I’m carrying.”

“Está bien.” Abuela nodded slowly. “You carry the weight of many deaths. One innocent taken by accident, some enemies eliminated by necessity. This is what you bring to my table.”

She reached across and placed her weathered hand over Rocket’s where it still gripped the table edge.

“Robert’s death was tragedy born of ignorance, not malice. The contractors’ deaths were justice for those who would enslave. Neither damns you, mija. But both must be carried with honesty. You do not pretend Robert didn’t matter because his death was accidental. You do not celebrate the contractors’ deaths because they deserved what came to them.”

Her grip tightened slightly.

“You remember them. You let their deaths mean something. And you choose to use the strength their blood gave you to protect others instead of only yourself. This is how we transform guilt into purpose.”

She’s not saying I’m forgiven. Not saying it’s okay. She’s saying: what? That I can carry it without it destroying me? That their deaths can mean something if I make them mean something?

The weight in Rocket’s chest didn’t disappear, but it shifted somehow. Like Abuela’s words had redistributed the burden so it didn’t all press down on one point of failure.

“Now.” Abuela withdrew her hand and sat back, rosary beads clicking as she shifted position. “The final question, and the most important.”

She paused, making sure Rocket was paying full attention.

“If you enter this covenant, you become my daughter. Daughter, not guest, not student.” Her voice carried absolute certainty. “Hija mía.”

She let that settle in the silence.

“That means your shame becomes my shame before God and this community. Your enemies become my enemies, and I will face them with fire and faith. Your blood becomes my blood, and your battles become battles I must fight alongside you.”

The kitchen felt suspended in time, the small electric hum of the refrigerator and the faint settling of a desert house at three in the morning all sliding aside to make room for a quiet Rocket had not heard since the last time her mother had blessed the dinner table on Christmas Eve. Even the clock stopped ticking, or seemed to, the way clocks always seemed to stop ticking inside the small protected pockets the world occasionally consented to grant to the devastated.

“You are asking me to take on a girl who has been violated, trafficked, transformed into what the Church calls abomination, and who carries blood guilt from her survival.” Abuela’s eyes never left Rocket’s face. “You are asking me to call all of that ‘daughter’ and defend it as holy before a world that would see you destroyed.”

Her voice dropped lower, still carrying that authority.

“Do you understand what you are asking me to carry, mija? Do you understand that this covenant is family, not shelter for a season until one of us returns to dust? That I am taking your defilement onto my own soul when I call you mine?”

The question hit like a physical blow because it reframed everything. Rocket had been thinking about what she needed, what she was asking for, whether she was worthy of belonging. But Abuela was asking something different.

Do you understand what this costs me?

Fuck. I’ve been so focused on whether she’ll accept me that I didn’t think about... about what it means for her. She takes on everything I carry. My enemies. My blood guilt. She will defend me to her community when they find out what I am.

“I...” Her voice caught in her throat. “I don’t know if I do. Understand, I mean.”

She forced herself to keep going even though vulnerability felt like stripping naked in front of a stranger.

“I know what I’m asking for. Family. The possibility of belonging. Someone to witness my pain and not run away.” Her hands finally released the table edge, fingers trembling slightly. “But I don’t know what that costs you. Not really. I’ve never...”

She stopped, jaw working.

“I’ve never had anyone willing to carry my shit before. Everyone who was supposed to protect me either used me or threw me away when I got too damaged to be convenient.” Her voice cracked. “So, no. I don’t understand what you’re offering to bear. But I want to. I want to be worth it.”

The admission left her feeling stripped raw: exposed in a different way, the terrifying vulnerability of wanting something she’d never been allowed to have.

Abuela’s expression softened, with something that looked like recognition.

“Then let me tell you what it means, niña, so you can choose with knowledge instead of only hope.”

She drew closer, candlelight casting shadows across her weathered face.

“When I call you daughter, your enemies become mine. Coyote: the one who trafficked you. Whoever turned you and buried you, she becomes my enemy. If he comes for you, he comes through me. And I have walked this desert for over a century, child. I have blessed the dying and buried the faithless. I will not let him reclaim what he discarded.”

Her voice dropped to that whispered-confession tone.

“Your shame becomes my shame. When this community learns that I harbor a girl who was trafficked, who killed to survive, who carries the blood of innocents and enemies alike, they will judge me for it. Some will call me foolish for taking such risk. Others will question my judgment. A few may turn away entirely.”

She paused.

“Your battles become my battles. The trauma that surfaces, the memories that return, the demon that demands feeding: these are no longer yours alone. I will stand with you when you face them. I will hold you when you break. I will fight alongside you when you must fight. And I will bury you with honor if you fall, so that even in death, you know you were loved.”

Holy fuck. She’s actually: she means it. Every word. This isn’t some conditional offer with hidden strings. She’s literally explaining exactly what she’s promising to carry for me. And it’s: it’s so much. Too much. How can anyone...

“This is covenant, mija. Not just for you, for all who are here.” Abuela’s hands folded around those rosary beads like they were the only thing anchoring her to the earth. “Not a contract. Not shelter that ends when I become inconvenient.”

She held Rocket’s gaze with eyes that had witnessed too much and loved anyway.

“Family. Until the desert claims us or God does. Until there is nothing left but ash and memory and the knowledge that we chose each other when the world said we shouldn’t.”

It crashed over Rocket like a wave. Not crushing; overwhelming in its generosity. In its absolute refusal to make love conditional on her being less broken, less dangerous, less damaged than she actually was.

“I...” Her voice broke completely. “I don’t know how to be worth that. Worth what you’re offering to carry. I’m so fucked up, Abuela. I don’t remember half of what happened to me. I killed an innocent man because I couldn’t control my hunger. I’ve got abilities I barely understand and a demon inside me that wants to drink the world dry.”

She was crying now, not tears, blood, and the dry heaving sobs of someone whose body remembered how to grieve.

“What if I fuck it up? What if I hurt one of the girls or bring the Sinaloa down on all of you or... or if I’m so broken that I can’t ever be fixed enough to justify what you’re sacrificing?”

Abuela stood then, moving around the table with that deliberate grace that made time itself seem to slow down. She placed her weathered hands on either side of Rocket’s face, tilting her head up so their eyes met.

“Mija.” The word carried more weight than any theological argument. “You do not earn family. You do not become worthy of love. You simply... are loved. And then you learn to carry that love without breaking under its weight.”

Her thumbs brushed across Rocket’s cheeks where tears would have been if vampires could cry them.

“I am not asking you to be fixed or whole. I am asking you to let me love you while you are broken, so that perhaps, someday, you will believe you deserve to be loved when you are healed.”

Oh. Oh fuck. She’s not... she doesn’t want me to be different. She wants to love me while I’m like this. While I’m damaged and dangerous and barely holding it together. And then maybe... maybe eventually... I’ll believe I’m worth loving even when I’m not a disaster anymore.

“Okay.” The word came out as a whisper. “Okay. I, I want that. I want to be your daughter. To let you carry my shit even though it’s heavy and gross and probably going to make your life harder. I want...”

She stopped, then forced herself to finish.

“I want to belong somewhere. To someone. To you and the girls and this kitchen and this weird-ass house where everything’s sacred, wrong, and terrifying at the same time.”

Abuela smiled then: the first genuine expression of joy Rocket had seen from her. It transformed her lined face into something almost beatific.

“As you do for us, we will do for you. That is family. We all help carry the heavy load.” The words carried covenant, promise, absolute certainty, the kind of certainty that did not announce itself or argue for itself, that simply stood inside the kitchen the way a load-bearing wall stood inside a house and dared anyone present to suggest the roof had been holding itself up without it. “Welcome home.”

She pulled Rocket into an embrace that should have felt awkward: vampire hugging vampire, neither of them warm, both of them technically dead, the small mechanical impossibility of two corpses agreeing to hold each other in a kitchen at three in the morning. But it felt more real than any human touch Rocket had experienced while alive, more real than any of the small careful contacts she had measured out for boys who needed to be measured, more real than the wrong contacts that had been measured out on her body by men who had not measured anything except their own hunger.

Abuela smelled like mothballs and prayer and old coffee and myrrh incense. Her body felt small and fragile, but her grip was strong. Like desert mesquite that looked delicate but could survive anything.

This is real. This is actually happening. She’s not going to change her mind tomorrow. She’s not waiting for me to fuck up so she can justify throwing me away. She chose me. Broken, damaged, blood-guilty me. And she’s not going to leave.

They stood like that, covenant sealed through embrace rather than words. The kitchen bore witness: candles flickering, saints staring down from their portraits, rosary beads clicking softly against the table where Abuela had set them down.

Conversation from the living room had gone quiet, the careful collective hush of three other people who had been through this same kitchen on three other previous nights, three other vampires who had stood where Rocket was now standing and who knew, the way Catholics knew when the priest was lifting the Host, that the right thing to do was to fall silent and let the sacrament finish. Like everyone in the house knew something sacred was happening and didn’t want to intrude.

Finally, Abuela pulled back but kept her hands on Rocket’s shoulders.

“Now.” Her voice carried that soft authority again. “You will drink the blood I have prepared. Because family feeds each other, not to earn your place. And then we will go see your sisters, who have been very patient waiting to meet you.”

She gestured to the ceramic bowl of spiced blood on the table.

“You will learn to hunt properly. To take from those who will not be permanently harmed by it. To master your hunger instead of allowing it to rule you.” Her eyes held Rocket’s with that priestly certainty. “But tonight, you will drink what I offer and trust that I know what you need better than the demon does.”

She’s teaching me. Right now. First lesson: accept what’s offered even if it’s not what I think I want. Trust that she understands this better than I do. That family means letting someone else decide what’s good for you sometimes.

Rocket reached for the bowl. The blood was still warm, the spices making it smell almost like mulled wine or some kind of holiday drink instead of the raw copper scent of human blood.

She brought it to her lips and drank, the slow ceremonial pull of a person taking communion who had not taken communion since childhood and was no longer sure she had the standing to take it now.

It tasted different. Unsettling, foreign, like food from a culture she didn’t understand yet, the cinnamon and clove and honey arriving in a sequence the demon could not anticipate because the demon had never been offered anything that had been intentionally prepared for it before, the demon had only ever been offered terrified blood taken straight from the carotid of someone who did not know what was happening to them. The demon stirred with vague dissatisfaction: this wasn’t what it wanted, not the living warmth of human blood taken directly from the source, but it didn’t rage or demand or try to seize control.

It settled. Reluctantly. Like a child accepting vegetables when they’d wanted candy.

It works. Imperfect, but close enough. I can feel it: sustenance without guilt. Strength without having to kill someone. Maybe this is... maybe this is how I learn to be strong without being a monster.

She finished the bowl and set it down carefully.

Abuela nodded once, satisfied. “Bueno. Now you have tasted what covenant provides. Sustenance that does not require you to sin against your neighbors. Strength that comes from family instead of predation.”

She stood, collecting the cups and bowl with that ritualistic care.

“Come. Your sisters are waiting. And they have been very curious about the girl who found Bisbee and survived what should have killed her.”

The girls. Right. The ones who’ll either become family or just more people who know too much about what I am. Except... except Abuela called me daughter. Made covenant. So, they’re not strangers anymore. They’re... sisters? Fuck, that’s weird. I’ve never had sisters before.

Rocket followed Abuela toward the living room, anxiety and hope warring in her chest with equal intensity.

Conversation carried from down the hall. Bisbee’s low rumble. Other voices: female, young, carrying that same edge of hunger masked by practiced humanity.

Her sisters, waiting to meet her. The hallway ran the length of the house toward the lamplight of the living room, family photographs tracking her the whole way behind their glass, the smell of myrrh and old coffee and the cold still presence of the others growing stronger with every step, the whole sleeping street outside holding its ordinary suburban silence around this one lit house where the dead had decided to keep each other.

Rocket squared her shoulders, the way her grandfather had squared his shoulders the one time she had ever seen him do it, before he walked out of his own kitchen to face something she had not been told about and never been told about since, and stepped through the doorway into whatever came next.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

Rocket woke up after sunset to the smell of coffee brewing.

For half a second her mind supplied the yellow walls and Disney Princess sheets, Carlos in the doorway with that smile that meant another lesson. Then reality snapped back. Bisbee’s guest room. Clean sheets. Locked door. Safe.

First night waking without that raw, exposed sensation.

Bisbee was up first, didn’t try to disturb her, just... started his routine with military efficiency. Some habits die hard when you’re dead.

Is this what normal feels like? Waking up and the first thought isn’t escape routes or threat assessment? Just... coffee smell and darkness ensured with blackout curtains?

She lay there testing the feeling, one careful toe in the bathwater before she committed the whole body, the way a person who had been hurt enough by surfaces tested every new surface that promised to be safe. No nightmares. No frenzy. No hunters. Just the sunset and the fact of surviving another day, which was a sentence she had not allowed herself to think clearly since the police shootout that took her parents and which now rose in her chest like a small old animal that had finally found a place warm enough to come out of hiding.

Coffee smell deepened. Bisbee’s ritual: brewing for ghosts fifty years buried.

She ran fingers through tangled hair, still in yesterday’s flannel. Survival instinct: stay dressed, stay ready. The lock clicked open.

Bisbee stood in the kitchen exactly like he had the night before. Pouring coffee into a mug. Not drinking it. Just holding it while he stared out the window at the canyon walls catching the last dim light, the high stone faces taking what was left of the day and turning it into the small private sunset that mountain towns got, the one the lowlanders down on the highway never saw because the canyon kept it for itself.

“Morning,” he said without turning around. “Or evening. Whatever we’re calling sunset these days.”

“Evening.” She leaned against the doorframe.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“I’ll manage.” She wasn’t ready to hunt yet. “I guess I’ve been using it a lot slower now that things aren’t... crazy.”

“Coffee’s fresh if you want the smell. Won’t stay down if you drink it, but the aroma’s still good.”

She crossed to the counter, picked up the pot. Let the smell hit her. Rich and dark and completely wrong for a body that didn’t process anything except blood. But the scent carried memories. Her mother’s kitchen in Managua. Mornings before school. Before everything went to shit. The kitchen gave her senses more than she had asked it for, the element ticking inside the coffee maker, the propane sigh of a pilot light somewhere behind the stove, the canyon air sliding in under the back door carrying creosote and cold stone and the iron of the mine tailings the whole town was built on top of, every smell arriving sharp-edged and separate now where a living nose would have blurred them into morning.

“We should talk about tonight,” Bisbee said.

And there it was. The thing she’d been avoiding since she woke up.

“Sierra Vista.” Not a question.

“Sierra Vista.” He turned to face her. “Abuela’s expecting us.”

She set the pot down. Her hands wanted to shake.

“I don’t want to go. I know we agreed to it, but let me stay one more night. Please?”

Bisbee was quiet for a moment. “I know you’re scared. And I get wanting to delay. But this band-aid isn’t going to get any easier to rip off.”

“But I just got here. Just one night. And after everything that happened: the bathroom thing, the whole...” She gestured vaguely. “Shouldn’t I get more time before you pawn me off on strangers?”

“Is that what you think I’m doing? Pawning you off?”

“No, maybe... I dunno. Look, papi, I trust you.” The words came out flat. Simple. But her eyes: she looked up at him through her lashes. Hopeful. The look that always worked on boys. “You know that, right? I trust you.”

Bisbee’s expression went flat. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“The ‘papi’ thing. The performance. We’re past that, Rocket.”

“Fine. But... just don’t... get rid of me like I’m some cochinada.”

“You’re not.” Bisbee pulled out a chair. Sat. “Now sit down and tell me what this is really about.”

Rocket sat. Wrapped her arms around herself. Started to speak, stopped. Started again.

“His name was Señor Morales.” A breath went out of her, one she didn’t need. “Mateo’s father. Mateo era mi plato de segunda mesa. Not my first choice. Just the boy I kept close in case everything went to shit.”

Bisbee stayed quiet. Listening.

“My parents died. Crossfire between policía and some gang members. Wrong place, wrong time.” The words came easier than she expected. Like she’d rehearsed them. “Three days later I had no apartment, no family was willing to help, and about two weeks before I’d be on the streets.”

“My aunt, la bruja, said I was old enough to work. Old enough to deal with my own jodida problems.” She laughed without humor. “Her son used to put his hands down my pants when I was younger. I told. He got sent to other family. She chose him over me then, too.”

“So, I went to Mateo’s house.” She stared into the coffee. “Late at night. Threw rocks at his window. Played the desperate girl card. Asked if I could hide in his room. Just until I figured something out.”

“Let me guess,” Bisbee said. “His father caught you.”

“Yeah.” Bitter laugh. “Caught me standing too close to his son near midnight, asking for help I had no right to ask for. He saw right through me. Saw I was trying to manipulate Mateo into sheltering me. Maybe sleep with me. Make it impossible for them to throw me out once I was pregnant or attached or whatever.”

She paused.

“I wasn’t a puta, not really. But I was desperate enough to act like one.”

“He saw me for what I was. He knew I was a threat. Knew what I had planned. Couldn’t have a girl like me anywhere near his son. Said I needed to disappear before I ruined everything.”

Bisbee nodded slowly. A silent encouragement to Keep going.

“But then he said he could help me.” The words tasted like ash. “Said he had business associates. People who moved cargo north. Who needed young, pretty workers without family asking questions. He made it sound like opportunity. Like I’d be grateful.”

Bisbee’s expression went very still. “He sold you.”

“Yeah, he sold me.” Simple. Factual. “Called his cartel contacts while I walked away with my tail tucked, disgusted with my own desperation. Told me to be ready at dawn. That his associates would pick me up. That I’d work off the debt for transportation and papers and housing.”

“I thanked him,” she said, voice dropping to almost a whisper. “Thanked him for the opportunity. For not calling the police. For giving me an opportunity at a better life in America.”

Bisbee went still. His jaw tight. Hands flat on the table.

“Next morning I met the truck. Week later I was in the safe house with yellow walls and these childish Disney Princess sheets. I don’t remember much of what happened. Next thing I know, I’m crawling out of my own grave.”

She looked up at Bisbee. Held his gaze.

“So yeah. Last person I trusted who said he’d help me? Sold me to the fucking cartel for profit. Sent me straight into hell. And now you’re asking me to trust that Abuela’s different. That she’s not just a prettier version of the same transaction.”

He stayed quiet. When he spoke, his voice was careful. Measured.

“You’re right.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You’re right to be scared. Right to see the pattern. Right to question whether this is another handoff that ends badly.” He leaned forward. “Señor Morales fucked you over. Used your desperation against you. Profited from your pain. And there’s no guarantee that won’t happen again.”

Wait. He’s agreeing with me? Not telling me I’m being paranoid or that I need to trust more or any of the bullshit adults usually say when you point out they’re asking too much?

“But here’s what I can tell you,” Bisbee continued. “I’ve known Abuela for twenty years. She’s taken in more abandoned vampire kids than anyone in the Southwest. Fed them, housed them, kept them alive when the rest of our world wanted them dead for existing. And in twenty years, I’ve never seen her sell anyone. Never seen her use them. Never seen her do anything except protect kids who had nowhere else to go.”

“Twenty years is a long time to run a con.”

“It is.” He didn’t argue. “But it’s also a long time to maintain a lie. And I’ve seen what she does when Elders come sniffing around her girls. I’ve seen her tell ancient vampires with real power to fuck off and die when they suggested her kids might be useful assets.”

She protects them. Like actually protects them. Not collects them for later use.

“I can’t promise you absolute safety,” Bisbee said. “I can’t promise Abuela’s girls will like you or that you’ll fit in or that everything will work perfectly. What I can promise is that if it doesn’t work, if you get there and something feels wrong, you come back here. No questions. No judgment. Door stays open.”

“But you can’t keep me here long-term.”

“No.” Honest. Direct. “This town’s got one vampire’s worth of feeding territory. We’d both starve or turn it into a crime scene inside a month. You need what Abuela offers: community, education, people who understand what you’re going through.”

Rocket stared into the coffee mug. Steam had stopped rising. Going cold like Bisbee’s nightly ritual.

“What if I get there and can’t leave?” The question came out smaller than she intended. “What if it looks safe but isn’t?”

“Then you fight your way out and come back here.” Simple. Certain. “You survived a week in the desert fighting the cartel. You can sure as hell handle escaping one old woman’s house if it comes to that.”

She almost smiled. Almost.

“I’m not asking you to trust them,” Bisbee continued. “I’m asking you to trust my judgment. Trust that I wouldn’t send you somewhere dangerous. Trust that if I’m wrong, you’ve got the skills to survive long enough to get out.”

Trust his judgment. Trust that he’s trying to help instead of hurt. That’s all.

“And if Abuela turns out to be another Señor Morales?”

“Then I’ll help you burn her house down.” No hesitation. No diplomacy. Just flat certainty. “But she won’t be. Because she’s spent decades proving who she is, and she is someone who protects kids nobody else wants.”

She tested the logic. Looked for holes.

“Okay.” Quiet. Tentative. “Okay. I’ll go. I’ll meet her. I’ll try.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

She rose. Set the mug in the sink. Turned to face him.

“But if this goes wrong, if she’s not what you think she is, I’m coming back here and you’re making me more coffee I can’t drink while I figure out plan C.”

“Deal.” Bisbee stood too. “Now get ready. We leave in twenty minutes. And Rocket?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For trusting my judgment even when your survival instincts are screaming that trusting anyone is stupid.”

Trusting anyone IS stupid. That’s how she got trafficked. But not trusting means staying alone forever. Means never having family or safety or anything except survival. And I’m so fucking tired of just surviving.

“Don’t make me regret it,” she said.

“I’ll do my best.”

Twenty minutes later, the Harley sat in the pre-dawn dark, engine ticking as it cooled from Bisbee’s prep work. Rocket stood next to it wearing borrowed clothes that still smelled like detergent and safety, and tried very hard not to think about yellow walls and Disney Princesses and men who promised help while planning how to profit from her pain.

This was different.

It had to be.

Because if it wasn’t, she’d already used up all her fight getting this far, and she didn’t have another escape left in her.

Bisbee swung his leg over the bike, settled into worn leather with the ease of decades. Kicked the engine to life with the small practiced motion of a man who had kicked this same engine to life ten thousand times before. The rumble echoed off canyon walls, mechanical heartbeat in the desert silence, the only heartbeat anywhere in this small mining valley tonight, since neither of the two riders preparing to ride out had a heartbeat of their own to contribute.

“Helmet’s in the saddlebag,” he said. “And hold on tight: these mountain roads don’t forgive inattention.”

Rocket pulled on the helmet, the borrowed weight of it foreign on her head, the smell of someone else’s sweat and sunscreen still living inside its foam padding from a thousand previous rides. Climbed on behind him. Her arms circled his waist automatically. Survival instinct. The leather jacket was worn soft from years of desert rides, broken in by decades of wind and sun and someone’s body heat negotiating with the same square footage of cowhide for longer than she had been alive. Motor oil and sage and that dry Arizona smell that clung to everything, arid and unapologetic about it.

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Just lean the way I lean.”

“This is a big one.”

Bisbee’s voice stayed flat. “Rocket.”

“What? I’m talking about the motorcycle.” Pause. “Obviously.”

“Uh-huh. Hold on.”

“How fast are we talking?”

“Fast enough that being undead matters if we crash.” Dark amusement in his voice. “But I’ve been riding these roads since before you were born. Vampire reflexes make it interesting instead of suicidal.”

The Harley lurched forward, that hard pull at the small of the back that every motorcycle gave you the first time you sat on one and were not the one driving it, the world rearranging itself around the new shape of your travel without consulting your stomach about it. Bisbee didn’t ease into speed. He opened the throttle and let the bike scream, and the canyon walls picked the scream up and threw it back at them in pieces, every echo a fraction behind the original, every fraction reminding her that the canyon had been built to hold sound the way a bowl held water.

¡Ay Dios, mierda!...

The town fell away behind them. The headlight peeled the road out of the dark a few yards at a time, mining terraces stacked up the canyon walls on either side in benches a century of dynamite had cut and then abandoned, the pale scars of the tailings glowing faintly under the stars where nothing had agreed to grow back, the whole ruined geometry of the old workings sliding past at the edge of the beam and gone again before her eye could finish reading it. Switchback turns carved through old mining terraces. Bisbee’s headlight cut through darkness so complete it made the desert killing ground look civilized. No light pollution. No ambient glow. Just stars overhead and the immediate pool of visibility created by the motorcycle’s beam.

And speed.

So much speed.

The bike leaned into curves at angles that should’ve scraped metal against asphalt, a lean that turned the bike into a held breath at thirty degrees off true, an angle her mortal body would have refused and her vampire body simply received like a temperature reading. Bisbee took them with casual precision. No hesitation. No fear. Just muscle memory and supernatural reflexes and the absolute certainty of someone who’d been riding these roads for fifty years.

Already dead already dead we’re already dead what’s the worst that happens we get deader?

She tightened her grip. Wind tore at her clothes. Engine vibration ran through her bones. Alive in a way she hadn’t felt since crawling out of that grave.

Fast. Reckless. Free.

Nothing to lose because they’d already lost everything that mattered.

By the time they reached Highway 90, Bisbee had the throttle wide open. Conversation became impossible. Wind and engine noise drowned everything else. Out past the cone of the headlight the San Pedro valley opened flat and enormous on both sides of the highway, grassland and creosote running off toward mountains she could feel more than see, low black masses that held the last warmth of the day in their stone and breathed it back at her enhanced skin as the bike tore through the gap between them, the whole basin lying under a cold wash of stars indifferent to the two dead things crossing it at ninety miles an hour.

Speed and darkness and painted lines flashing past in the rhythm that highway lines flashed past at speed, fast enough that they stopped being individual lines and became one long line, fast enough that the eye gave up on counting and the body started keeping time to them instead.

Rocket stopped thinking about the speed.

Started thinking about what came after.

Normal vampires. Travel between safe places. Make connections. That’s what he said. Normal. I can be normal. I can...

But the thought twisted. Brought anxiety flooding back.

What if I don’t fit? What if they see it? See how broken I am? My body doing impossible things? They’ll know. They’ll see I’m worse. Más jodida than actual survivors because even death can’t fix what...

The bike hit a straight stretch. Bisbee opened it up even more.

Faster.

The wind screamed. The world blurred.

Stop. Stop thinking. Just ride. Just hold on. Don’t...

But fear had teeth now. She sank deeper the closer they got.

Don’t bail. Don’t make him turn around. You agreed. You said you’d try. Don’t be a coward. Don’t...

Every mile closer to Sierra Vista felt like running toward a cliff edge.

Twenty years. Remember. Decades. That’s evidence. Real evidence. Abuela protects kids. She doesn’t sell them. Doesn’t use them. Twenty years of not being Señor Morales. That matters. That’s real. Believe that.

But what if...

No. Stop. Trust his judgment. Not them. Just his judgment. He wouldn’t send me somewhere dangerous. He wouldn’t lie. Gave me the out. Door stays open. I can leave. Can fight my way out if it goes wrong.

The bike roared through darkness.

Survived the desert. Survived Carlos. Survived contractors with guns. I can survive meeting some girls. Just meeting them. Just trying. That’s all. Just try.

Her grip on Bisbee tightened.

It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. You can do this. You’ve done worse. So much worse. This is just people. Just vampires like me. Bisbee says they’ll understand. Believe him. Believe that. Trust him.

The fear didn’t disappear.

It kept circling. She was clawing for equilibrium. It demanded attention she tried to drown in speed and engine noise.

Don’t panic. Don’t run. You’re not trapped. Just trying. Door stays open. You can leave. You can leave. Remember that. You can...

The desert landscape rushed by in peripheral darkness, the same desert that had been holding her for a week now without ever quite explaining why, the same flat empty stretch that had been keeping her grave and her hunters and her bullet wound and her first feeding all in the same square miles of caliche. Familiar and alien at once. The same vast indifference that had nearly killed her, the same vast indifference that had buried her and let her crawl out and let her drink and let her burrow and let her hide, the desert as a great unsigned contract she had not understood she was inside until she was already inside it. But out here, traveling at highway speeds with someone who knew where they were going, the emptiness felt different.

Almost peaceful.

If she could just stop her thoughts from spiraling.

Breathe. You don’t need to but breathe anyway. In. Out. Like Bisbee showed you. Like he said. In. Out. You can do this. You can...

Eighteen minutes later they were decelerating through Sierra Vista’s suburban streets. Hospital. Gas stations. Residential neighborhoods that screamed middle-class normalcy.

Her eyes cut to the cross streets, marking exits she hadn’t meant to look for.

Too close. Too real. Still time to tell him to turn around. Still time to: no. No. You promised. You already promised. Don’t.

“Almost there,” Bisbee called back as they turned onto Desert Shadows Drive.

Mierda mierda mierda...

The street curved through an established neighborhood where mature mesquite trees provided actual shade, trees somebody had planted forty years ago and watered through forty desert summers and stayed around long enough to see grow big enough to mean something. Houses that looked permanent. Rooted. A place where people stayed, where the same family answered the same door for thirty Christmases in a row, where children grew up and came back and brought their own children to the same kitchen, a permanence she had seen in other people’s lives and assumed she would never live inside.

Normal people. Functional families. And I’m about to walk in there broken and wrong and they’ll see it they’ll see how fucked up I am they’ll...

The address matched a single-story ranch house, a mass-built southwest property thrown up in the eighties by a developer who had stamped the same blueprint onto a thousand other lots between Phoenix and El Paso. Beige stucco. Red tile roof. Her senses sorted the place while she was still swinging her leg off the bike, old candle wax and dried herbs worked into the stucco itself, the faint sweet rot of fruit left out as an offering somewhere around the back, the tick of a swamp cooler cycling down on the roof, and under all of it the cold mineral stillness of other vampires, more than one, awake and waiting somewhere inside. Desert landscaping, gravel and saguaro and the small rosette agaves that suburban water restrictions allowed. Motion sensors activated as they pulled into the driveway, the small porch lights coming on like the house had been waiting up for them.

Last chance. Last chance to run. Could jump off the bike. Could disappear into the desert. Could...

No.

No. You promised. You try. That’s all. Just try.

Rocket slid off the motorcycle and pulled off the helmet. Immediately self-conscious about her appearance after the wind and ride.

Something else registered. Uncomfortable awareness. Wetness that had no business being there.

Mierda. Not now. Fuck. They’ll see. They’ll know how broken I am.

She pushed the thought away. Focused on the house. On Abuela waiting. On anything except her body doing impossible things again.

Normal. It looks so fucking normal. Functional families. She wanted to talk instead of fight. Maybe safety is possible. Maybe. Por favor, Dios, let it be possible.

“She knows we’re coming?” Suddenly aware that showing up at someone’s house in the small hours of the night might not qualify as appropriate social behavior.

“Called her while you were in the shower yesterday.” Bisbee shut off the bike. “She’s expecting us.” Pause. “Fair warning; Abuela’s got strong opinions about damn near everything. But she’s also kept more vampire kids alive than anyone I know. Her opinions tend to be worth hearing.”

More vampire kids. Kept alive. Not sold. Not used. Kept alive. Remember that. Believe that.

The front door opened before they’d finished walking up the pathway, opened on a timing that meant the woman inside had been listening for the bike since the first switchback off the highway. The threshold itself had been keeping a list of who would and would not be allowed across it tonight.

An elderly woman stood in the doorway. Her presence filled it despite her size, the way a small candle filled a small room when the rest of the house had been turned off.

Rocket’s supernatural senses identified her immediately. Vampire. The stillness. Room-temperature skin. Predatory awareness masked by grandmotherly concern.

But there was something else.

Something that spoke of age and accumulated power and the kind of authority that came from decades of making life-and-death decisions and living with the consequences.

Just being.

Like the desert. Like time. Like something that existed before her and would exist after.

She’s not Señor Morales. She’s not pretending. Not calculating profit. She’s... actually glad I’m here?

“Mija,” Abuela said, her voice carrying warmth that felt too generous for a stranger, the kind of warmth Rocket had not heard in any voice since her own mother had been alive and would not have believed she was hearing again from a woman she had never met. “I was wondering when you would find your way to us.”

Not surprised. Not evaluating. Not calculating risk.

Glad to see her.

She called me mija. Like I’m already family. Like I belong here before I’ve even...

“Abuela, this is Rocket,” Bisbee said with matter-of-fact formality. “Rocket, this is Abuela. She runs this sanctuary. Might actually be able to help you figure out what comes next.”

Rocket froze.

Impulses warred in her chest.

The urge to perform: smile pretty, say the right things, manipulate her way to safety the way she’d learned with every adult who held power over her.

Versus something newer. Harder.

The growing awareness that manipulation wouldn’t work here. That Abuela would see through it the way Bisbee had seen through her desert bravado. That maybe, possibly, she didn’t need to perform because these people weren’t looking for a show.

Don’t try the tricks. Don’t weaponize the pretty. Don’t perform survival. Just... be honest. Be Rocket. See what happens. Please let it work. Please.

Abuela recognized the internal conflict. Stepped back and gestured them both inside without waiting for a response.

“Come in, come in.” Her accent carried traces of border Spanish mixed with decades of American English. Authority and maternal care occupying the same space. “Bisbee, the girls are in the living room. They have been anxious to see you again. Go visit with them while I speak with Rocket.”

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

When I set out to write this series, I intended to tell the truth.

Sex trafficking does not wait for its victims to reach legal age. Anti-trafficking researchers and advocacy organizations consistently identify early adolescence as the primary window during which girls are first commercially sexually exploited in the United States. Reliable statistics on the true average age do not exist, in part because the children most deeply embedded in these networks are the least visible to researchers and law enforcement alike. What is documented: minors are disproportionately represented among identified trafficking victims, and the McCain Institute’s six-year analysis of sex traffickers of minors confirms that the overwhelming majority of victims are children, trafficked well before any legal threshold of adulthood. These are not edge cases. This is the operational reality of the pipeline that runs through the borderlands where these books are set.

I am not speaking theoretically. In 1989, I attended a high school in inner-city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The average age of a high school freshman is 14 to 15 years old. I personally witnessed freshman girls who were pregnant, many of them already mothers, about to deliver their second child. This was not trafficking. These were choices made by children who had learned, in the way that children in desperate circumstances learn things, that the welfare system could be gamed by having children of their own. From the small sample of people I personally knew, this was not accidental. They understood what they were doing and why: children trying to cement a consistent future income from the government. Fourteen and fifteen years old, already on their second pregnancy. That was Milwaukee in 1989, before the internet, before cartel pipelines reached into American neighborhoods the way they do now. I knew what I was writing about before I wrote a word of it.

Underage sex is a reality. Not being able to depict it as the horror it is in fiction is a dishonest denial of that reality. I bring this up not because I have any desire to write exploitative content. Far from it. The goal was never shock value or titillation. The goal was to show the wound clearly enough that the reader cannot look away. But the inability to present it as horror, to let it land with the full weight it deserves, squelches a conversation that desperately needs to happen. We cannot treat a thing with the seriousness it requires if we are not allowed to show what it is.

In my first draft of these stories, the Levantadas were 13 to 16 years old. That was already a concession. My first draft did not even reach the bottom of the range the statistics describe. What you are reading now is a second concession, made on top of the first, that gutted me to make. The characters are depicted as eighteen at the time of their embrace. That number was forced on the story by the only context in which it can exist publicly. No publisher will touch it. No platform will host it. The literature world, for all its claims about bearing witness to darkness, draws a firm line at the truth of when this darkness actually begins.

The ages on the page are the novocaine. The true weight of what trafficking does, and when it does it, sits just beneath what I was permitted to write.

To the girls this story is about: I am sorry. I was not able to tell your story the way it deserved to be told. I was not able to stand on my principles when the platform drew its line. I compromised the integrity that your reality desperately deserved.

However, in order to tell your story at all, in order for it to exist in a world that would rather turn a blind eye than face the truth in full, this gutting of the horror is what was required. The alternative was silence. And silence has never saved anyone.

You deserved better than what the world would allow me to give you.

- E.L. Frederick

Sources:

1. McCain Institute: A Six-Year Analysis of Sex Traffickers of Minors

2. BYU Ballard Brief: Sex Trafficking of Youth in the United States

3. Guardian Group: Sex Trafficking Statistics

The shower ran hotter than anything Naida had experienced since her embrace, steam rising in clouds that fogged the small mirror and wrapped around her like something that remembered warmth. She stood under the cascade for long seconds, letting water hammer against skin that registered temperature without pain, watching desert grime and dried blood swirl down the drain in dark spirals.

This is what safe feels like. Forgot that was even possible.

The bathroom was military-neat. Clean towels folded with geometric precision. Single bar of soap, worn smooth. Everything functional, nothing decorative. The space belonged to someone who’d learned to live with essentials and found comfort in simplicity. Her sharpened senses pulled the room apart as they pulled apart everything now, cataloguing the cheap pine soap and the iron tang of well water and the faint chlorine ghost of a town supply mixed in somewhere upstream, the fine canyon dust that worked its way under every door in this country, and the clean cotton of towels washed so many years in the same unscented detergent that the fabric had forgotten it ever smelled like anything else.

She started with her hair, working cheap shampoo through tangles that had accumulated a week of survival. The water running off her shoulders carried dirt and blood and the physical residue of everything she’d done to stay alive since clawing out of that grave.

Then her hands moved lower, washing arms and torso with automatic efficiency, and that’s when the wrongness hit.

Her fingers brushed the small black letters on her inner left wrist: CDS. Cartel de Sinaloa. Property marker. Ownership brand. The three letters were not even particularly large or particularly elaborate, just the small economical signature of an organization that had been doing this paperwork for so long it had stopped bothering to make the paperwork beautiful, the way a slaughterhouse did not need to make its tags pretty for the cattle to read.

Three little letters that say I belong to monsters. That I am just inventory.

The tattoo pulsed against pale vampire skin like it had its own heartbeat, and suddenly Naida wasn’t standing in Bisbee’s clean bathroom anymore. She was back on the Disney Princess sheets with hands that weren’t hers touching places that made her want to crawl out of her own skin. Then back in the truck with Carlos calling her noviecita...

Her palms burned. Heat welled up from somewhere deep inside, crawling up her forearms like fire trying to find oxygen. The shower water hissed against her skin, steam thickening, but she didn’t notice. Didn’t register the wrongness.

She was back in a dozen cramped spaces where grown men had treated her like she existed for their convenience, where resistance meant elimination and she had learned to smile through it, where they taught her exactly what merchandise was expected to endure.

The heat faded as quickly as it came, buried beneath the flood of remembered violation.

“Muy bien, mija. You’re learning. The pretty ones always learn fastest.”

The memories crashed through her like flash floods through desert arroyos: brutal, unstoppable, carrying everything she’d been repressing since the embrace.

The taste of chili-coated candies afterward, sweet and burning, trying to scrub bitterness from her mouth. Fluids leaking down her thighs that weren’t hers while someone praised her cooperation. Bruises shaped like fingerprints on places no one would see. The hollow ache of homesickness mixed with betrayal when she realized no rescue was coming. Her own voice saying “Ay, Papi” when inside she was screaming.

“Noviecita, you’ll learn. They all learn. The ones who don’t learn don’t make the crossing.”

Naida’s legs gave out.

She collapsed to the shower floor, eighteen years old and naked and sobbing as months of suppressed horror flooded through defenses that had finally found a place safe enough to crumble. Hot water kept falling, washing away bloody tears she hadn’t allowed herself to shed, carrying crimson traces of grief down the drain with desert dirt and grave soil.

They broke me. Broke me down like livestock getting processed for market. And I let them because dying in a ditch seemed worse. Just another dead girl, anonymous in the desert, food for vultures. And now I can’t even cry right. It’s all just stolen blood. Robert’s blood.

She wrapped arms around her knees and let the breakdown consume her completely, the dam she had been holding up since the moment Señor Morales picked up his phone in his quiet courtyard finally giving way to the water it had been built to hold. Every violation. Every casual degradation. Every moment when they’d used her like property and she’d learned to perform because survival required it, all of it now arriving at once in the small humid box of Bisbee’s bathroom, none of it interested in waiting in line, all of it competing for her attention the way a crowded marketplace competed for a tourist’s money.

The water ran over her until temperature dropped degree by degree, the heater struggling to keep up against the small body that had no warmth of its own to contribute to the contract, against the small body that had been pulling heat off every surface it touched since the night it climbed out of the dirt. When the shaking finally passed, when her vampire physiology reasserted enough control to function, when whatever it was that ran her instead of a heart had finished its private negotiations with whatever had just happened, Naida forced herself to stand on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, on the borrowed scaffolding of a body that had been hers for eighteen years and was now being used by something that signed the same name to all the same paperwork.

The memory fog began to return as she finished washing mechanically. Rinsed hair. Turned off water. Reached for a towel.

Avoided looking at the mirror.

But her eyes caught the tattoo again as she dried her arms. CDS. Still there. Still marked. Still carrying their claim even though they were ash and bone in the desert.

Something shifted in her chest.

No. No more. Belonged. Past fucking tense. They marked me like livestock, but they’re dead now. I killed them. I’m not property anymore. I’m not inventory. I’m the monster they created, and jodido nobody owns me. Not the Coyotes, not Sinaloa, not anyone. This mark doesn’t mean shit anymore.

Bisbee had left clean clothes outside the bathroom door while she’d been breaking down: flannel shirt that looked like it would hang loose on her small frame, jeans that appeared like they would need a belt, socks too big but soft. Everything smelled like laundry detergent and something indefinably masculine: not cologne, just the scent of someone who lived alone and kept his space clean through habit.

The towel stopped moving.

Warmth between her legs. Slick. She froze, hand on the towel.

Verga.

She pressed her fingers to her sternum. No pulse. Nothing moving from anywhere to anywhere. Dead women did not flush. Dead women’s bodies did not do what her body was currently doing.

I wasn’t doing anything. I was washing my hair.

She hadn’t been running the play. No pitch, no angle, no eye contact calibrated for effect. She’d been having an actual breakdown, as far from performance as she’d been since Managua, and her conditioning had apparently decided that a man being decent to her - clean clothes, no demands, treated her like something worth an honest answer - was the precise input required to fire subroutines she hadn’t summoned.

It hadn’t asked.

It never asked.

And Bisbee said this doesn’t work. Vampires don’t. Dead from the waist down, full stop.

Color was returning where there shouldn’t be any. Warmth accumulating without a source. Her nervous system overriding the physics of what she was through sheer force of repetition.

So either he lied. Or I’m the specific one broken enough to make a corpse do this.

Both answers were bad. If he’d lied, he’d given her the biology speech to shut something down she hadn’t even been running - assessed her and declined before she’d made an offer. She could have handled a rejection she’d earned. She hadn’t been working him. She’d been bleeding on his shower floor. And he’d still said no.

To me. Specifically. Even though it apparently can work.

The flush spread, and she hated it for spreading.

She grabbed the clothes. Did not put them on.

Bisbee was exactly where she’d left him, seated in his worn leather recliner with coffee cooling on the side table. He looked up when she appeared in the doorway: froze when he saw her.

“Kid, what the...”

“You said this didn’t work.” She gestured at herself, at the evidence her body had just provided. “So, what the fuck is this?”

His eyes went to her face first, then dropped involuntarily when she gestured at herself. What he saw drained the color from his face. Flushed skin on a body that had no blood to flush it. The specific evidence of arousal visible where arousal had no biological mechanism to come from. Warmth and color and physical response where there should have been nothing but cold dead tissue. Physical evidence of something that should have been flatly impossible.

“Jesus Christ, kid.” His voice came out quiet, horrified. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

“But it IS.” Naida’s voice shook with anger and vindication. “So, you lied. You said vampires can’t...”

“We can’t.” Bisbee stood, movements careful, deliberate. “I was turned in 1974. Dead from the waist down ever since. Every vampire I know. Not one exception. And none of the other girls can do what you just did.” Turned his back to her, giving her privacy she wasn’t asking for. “For the love of God. Get dressed, Naida. Please.”

“No. I don’t believe you.” She stayed in the doorway, defiant. “Not until you explain what the fuck is so wrong with me that you’d rather lie about biology than...”

“There’s nothing wrong with YOU.” He cut her off, voice harder now, still facing away. “Under different circumstances. Both of us not dead. You not so God-damned young. Yeah, I would have. And I do miss it.” He paused. “But whatever that response was you just walked out here with? That’s not you making a choice. That’s something somebody else built, running without you. I know the difference. I’m not that guy.”

The admission hung between them. Naida stood frozen in the doorway, anger draining into confusion.

He... would have? If circumstances were different? So, it’s not that I’m repulsive, it’s just...

“But what you’re showing me right now?” Bisbee continued, still not turning. “That’s not your body working normally. That’s conditioning so profound it defeats the undead biology. Your body forcing stolen blood to flow where there shouldn’t be any, because that’s how you survived.”

“You don’t know that.” Smaller than she meant it, and defensive. “Maybe I’m just different. Maybe...”

“Naida, I’ve known vampires for seventy years. Including other young women who went through hell before they were turned. None of them have that happen. Because what you’re doing isn’t supposed to be fuckin’ possible.”

The room held still. Naida could feel the physical evidence of her body’s response cooling on her skin. She’d been through worse men for worse reasons. The nakedness wasn’t the problem. It was the specimen feeling. Something being examined, categorized, labeled.

Other girls who went through hell. But none as broken as me. None damaged enough to make their corpse mimic life just from feeling safe. What the fuck did they do to me that even death can’t erase it?

“Get dressed, kid.” Bisbee’s voice came out quieter now, almost gentle. “Please.”

This time she didn’t argue. Pulled on the borrowed clothes with mechanical efficiency, fingers shaking slightly. The flannel shirt hung loose, jeans needed the belt pulled tight. She looked like a kid playing dress-up in adult clothes.

Bisbee waited until he heard the rustle of fabric before turning back around. His expression was carefully neutral, but something in his eyes looked... sad. Tired.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yeah.” It scraped on the way up, rougher than she meant. “Thanks for the answers. And for the clothes.”

“No problem.” He gestured to the couch. “You hungry?”

The question triggered automatic defensive responses before she remembered vampire hunger wasn’t something Bisbee could address with conventional hospitality.

“I’ll handle that later,” she said, settling onto the couch across from him with movements still too careful, too aware of escape routes. “Not really in the mood to hunt right now.”

Silence settled between them, heavy with what had just occurred.

He said I was damaged. That my body’s so broken it can override death itself. That none of the other girls, whoever they are, can do what I just did. So, what does that make me? More fucked up than trafficking victims who became vampires? How is that even possible?

“Can I ask you something?” The words were out before she’d decided to speak them.

“Shoot.”

Naida took a breath she didn’t need. “Earlier. When you said there were other young women. Who went through similar experiences before they were turned.” She forced herself to meet his gaze. “Are they... the family you mentioned? The ones in Sierra Vista?”

“Some of them. Blondie in particular had quite the adventure on her way from Colombia. Copal and Marigold didn’t tell me much. And besides, it’s really not my place...”

He trailed off, leaving the implication clear. Their stories were theirs to tell, not his.

Blondie. Colombia. Trafficking route, probably. Like me but different. And even she doesn’t... her body doesn’t do what mine just did. So, I’m worse. More broken than girls who survived the same shit.

“But none of them...” Naida gestured vaguely at herself, unable to finish the sentence. “Their bodies don’t...?”

“No.” Flat, the way he said it. Certain. “What you’re experiencing is unique. And that should tell you something about how deep the damage goes.”

The words landed like stones. Naida wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold despite the borrowed flannel and the desert heat still radiating through the walls.

Unique. Special. The most fucked-up girl in a house full of trafficking survivors. That’s my claim to fame now.

“What does that make me?”

Bisbee was quiet, considering the question with the same deliberate attention he gave everything else.

“Honestly? I don’t know yet.” He bent forward, hands locked between his knees. “What I do know is that you survived something that broke you in ways most people, most vampires, couldn’t survive. Your body’s doing impossible things because of how thoroughly they rewired you. That’s not weakness, kid. That’s your system adapting to survive conditions that should’ve destroyed you completely.”

Adapting. Like it’s a feature instead of a bug. Like being so broken I override death is somehow... what? Impressive?

“But it also means you’ve got a long road ahead,” he continued. “Learning to recognize when you’re responding from trauma instead of choice. Figuring out who you are when you’re not performing survival. Finding out what’s actually you versus what got programmed into you.”

Long road. Great. Like I haven’t already walked far enough.

She stared at him. The math running and not resolving.

“There are things that work.” Her voice came out flat. “That don’t need that.”

Bisbee set the coffee cup down on the side table with careful precision. Turned to face her.

“No.”

He said no. Men don’t say no. That’s not - men don’t say no. That’s the one thing that’s always true. You offer, they want. He said no twice. I don’t have a third move.

She stared at him long enough for the silence to get heavy.

Then she gestured at herself. The same gesture she’d made in the doorway.

“This.” The word landed stripped of everything. “This is the only currency I have. The only thing that has any - any damn value since I left home. And you won’t take it.”

He drew a breath in through his nose. Let it out slow. Both hands settled flat on his knees.

“So how am I supposed to stay. How do I convince you to keep me.” The anger was gone. What was underneath it was worse. “What do you want from me.”

“That’s not currency here, kid.”

That doesn’t mean anything. Everything is currency somewhere. He just isn’t telling me the rate.

“Then what is. Men always want something. Just name it.”

His eyes stayed on her. His expression didn’t change.

“Nothing. You stay because I said stay. That’s it.”

That’s not how anything works. That has never been how anything works.

I just found a place I could fall apart. I’m already being moved. I don’t want to lose this place. I don’t want to go back to sleeping burrowed in the ground.

“If you’re just passing me down the road...” Level, the way she said it. Quiet. “I’ll put out, I’ll clean. Whatever you want.”

She looked at him. Blood tears at the corners of her eyes, her face still.

“I’ll be good.”

Bisbee was quiet. He picked up the cold coffee, held it, set it back down.

“You’re already good, kid.” He met her eyes. “And Sierra Vista isn’t a hand-off. You go there, you have sisters. If it doesn’t work out, you come back here. This doesn’t go away because you met them.”

He’s saying that now. They always say something now. And then the road changes and the something turns into something else and you wake up somewhere new with new rules you didn’t get to read first.

“How do I know that.”

“Because I just told you.” Said like it was simple. Like his word was a thing that held.

“Men say lots of things. Doesn’t mean they mean it.” Level. Tired underneath. “A comfortable lie to get me cooperative - that’s been my life since Managua.”

Bisbee sat with it.

“You already offered everything you have. I said no.” He held her eyes. “What am I lying to get.”

“I don’t know, you won’t tell me what you want.”

He looked at the cold coffee on the side table.

“Someone to brew coffee with.” He said it like it was the whole answer. “Fifty years from now. Still there.”

That’s - that’s not a thing men say. I don’t have a category for that. He told me something true. Didn’t ask for anything back.

He gestured vaguely at the bathroom door behind her. “But Jesus Christ, kid. You came charging out of there ready to tear my head off for lying to you. Didn’t even stop to get dressed first. Just went off like a rocket: zero to fury in half a second.”

Because I thought you were full of shit. Still kind of do.

Bisbee leaned back, something almost like approval crossing his features. “That’s what I see when I look at you. Not some broken victim. Someone who moves fast, fights hard, doesn’t let anyone feed her bullshit. High speed, low drag.”

He paused, then nodded to himself.

“So, fuck it. Naida’s dead. Rocket... that’s your name now, I’m calling you Rocket.”

Rocket. That sounds... right.

“Rocket,” she repeated, testing the word.

“Rocket,” Bisbee confirmed. “Fast, unpredictable, dangerous when cornered. But the thing about rockets? They’re not designed to be pretty or seductive; which you are, don’t misunderstand. But they’re designed to have momentum. To break through barriers. To get where they’re going even when the trajectory looks impossible.”

The name settled around her like clothing that actually fit, replacing the performance identities she’d worn like masks, the schoolyard Naida who had learned to be desirable to boys and the courtyard Naida who had learned to be sympathetic to mothers and the truck-bed Naida who had learned to be quiet to men, all of those constructions falling away in the worn leather living room of an old man who had decided to call her something that meant momentum instead of merchandise.

“I like it,” she said. “I’m keeping it.”

“Good. Because that’s the real you when you’re not using survival strategies for dangerous men. You’re Rocket, and you’re sitting in my living room wearing my clothes because you’re figuring out what comes next.”

His eyes hadn’t left her face once while he spoke. She’d spent a year mapping the specific ways men chose not to meet your eyes when they talked to you. This was none of those.

He sees me as a person. Someone worth protecting. When did that start being... weird? Alien?

Bisbee picked up his coffee cup again, took a deliberate non-sip, just breathing in the cold aroma like it was some kind of meditation.

“Can you actually drink that? I didn’t think we could...”

“We can’t. Swallow it and it comes back up pretty quick, usually violently.” He stared into the cup. “But I still make it. Every night, same routine. Brew a pot, pour the mugs, let them go cold.”

“Why?”

“Vietnam, we’d brew coffee every morning before patrols. Shit instant crap from C-rations, but it was ours. We’d pass the canteen around, bitch about the heat, make stupid jokes.” His voice went quieter. “Most of those guys didn’t make it home. Those that did? Agent Orange got ‘em. Cancer. Lung disease. Turns out the jungle kept burning them long after they left the AO, the war crawling out of their cells one mutation at a time, paid out in slow installments to widows who never got to know which battle the bill had come from.”

He set the cup down carefully.

“Been dead longer than they were alive at this point. So, I brew coffee for people who’ve been gone seventy years. Just add to the list of ghosts in this place. Keep the ritual going even though there’s nobody left to share it with.” He paused. “That’s the sad part of immortality, kid. Everyone dies. You just... don’t.”

Fifty years of making coffee for lost friends. Coffee with the reaper. Everyone he knew before is dead or dying and he’s still here, still going through the motions. Is that what I’ve got to look forward to? Centuries of watching everyone I care about turn to dust?

She glanced around the room, half-expecting to see an ofrenda tucked in a corner somewhere. Candles, photos, maybe some marigolds. But there was nothing. Just clean, military-neat minimalism.

“No altar?” The question slipped out before she could stop it.

Bisbee looked up, confused. “What?”

“For your friends. Día de los Muertos. You’re keeping them alive with the coffee, but...” She gestured vaguely. “Where are the pictures? The candles?”

His expression shifted: an expression between surprise and pain. “Never thought of it that way. But no. No pictures. Too many faces I’ve outlived. Too... hard. Not my love language.”

He raised his coffee cup toward Rocket in mock toast. “Here’s to you, Ed, and all the pieces of you we couldn’t find.”

The casual brutality of it made her blink.

Did he just, Yeah. He did. Jesus Christ.

Bisbee took his non-sip, set the cup down. “So, what does come next?” Like he hadn’t just toasted a dead friend blown to pieces fifty years ago

Rocket stared for a second, processing the emotional whiplash. “Uh... these girls you’ve been talking about... Blondie, and the others.”

“Yeah?”

“You said they aren’t as fucked up as I am. What if they don’t want me? What if I’m too damaged, too dangerous, too whatever?”

Bisbee’s expression softened slightly. “Kid, you just survived trafficking, some sort of sexual training, transformation, and God knows what else while maintaining enough humanity to accept help when offered. If that doesn’t qualify you for a place with other survivors, I don’t know what would.”

Rocket flinched at “sexual training” like he’d slapped her. The clinical term cut deeper than any crude description would have. Made it sound like a skill set instead of damage.

I’m the one who stormed out there naked and made him look. Made it a whole fucking thing. And now I’m embarrassed he’s acknowledging it? Jesus, I’m a mess.

“I didn’t...” She started, then stopped. What was there to say? He’d already explained it was trauma conditioning. Already told her it wasn’t normal. “I don’t remember.”

“I understand.” His voice carried no judgment. Just flat acknowledgment. “I have plenty of memory holes of my own from ‘Nam. Not remembering doesn’t make you less deserving of a place with people who understand.”

Other survivors. Not victims. Survivors who became more.

“And if it doesn’t work out,” he continued, “you’ve got a place here until you figure out what does work. No expiration date. Sometimes family is people who see you at your worst and decide you’re worth protecting anyway.”

Family. The word hit different now.

“Okay,” Rocket said. “Tomorrow night. I’ll meet them. I’ll meet your family.”

“Our family,” Bisbee said. “If you’re staying, if you’re part of this, then they’re your family too.”

The word our caught somewhere in her sternum. Not yours, not a place being offered like a transaction, with fine print she’d learn about later. Ours. She turned it over the way you turned over something you didn’t want to drop.

Our family. When did I stop believing that was possible?

“Get some rest,” Bisbee said, standing. “Dawn’s still a few hours away, but you look like you could use downtime. Guest room’s ready when you are.”

“Bisbee?” Rocket called as he headed toward the kitchen.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For seeing me instead of just what happened to me. For giving me a name instead of letting me stay broken.”

He paused in the doorway, something almost paternal crossing his weathered features.

“Like I said, kid. Enough monsters already. We don’t need to make more.”

The guest room was exactly what Bisbee had promised: clean sheets, blackout curtains, a lock that engaged with solid mechanical certainty. Rocket tested the door twice, confirmed the lock held, then settled onto the narrow bed without any intention of actual rest. The room gave up its history to her in the dark as every room did now, the dried oil of a sewing machine that had not run in decades, cardboard boxes gone soft with canyon damp stacked in the closet, the cooled iron of a radiator that predated the swamp cooler bolted to the roof, and beneath the floorboards the long slow exhalation of the mountain itself, rock that had held the same patient cold since before the town above it had a name.

Safe room. Guest room. Like I’m visiting family instead of hiding from everything that wants me dead or owned.

She lay in darkness for what felt like hours, hyperaware of every sound in Bisbee’s small house. The hum of the refrigerator. The tick of settling wood. The distant rumble of late-night traffic on the highway cutting through the canyon. Her amplified hearing laid the canyon out past the walls in widening rings, the compressor and the ticking wood giving way to a dog working a fence line three streets down, then the highway’s distant hydraulic sigh where the grade dropped toward the San Pedro, then the wind combing the open terraces of the old pit, and past all of it the enormous patient silence of country that did not care whether she slept. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. The kind of ambient noise that belonged to a world where people slept without keeping one eye open for threats.

He’s kind. He’s grumpy. But he’s not trying to kill me. I can work with that.

Safe. Actually safe. I can rest without monitoring threats, without planning escapes. When do I start believing that? When did I forget what that felt like?

Dawn pressure began building in her consciousness as sunrise approached. Her last coherent thought was gratitude for protective darkness, for locked doors and borrowed clothes and the possibility of family waiting beyond tomorrow’s sunset.

For someone who had given her a name with nothing attached to it: no debt, no conditions, no version of herself she had to maintain to keep it.

For the first time since her embrace, in the small guest room of an old soldier she had known for less than a single rotation of the earth, behind a door that locked and would stay locked until she chose otherwise, Rocket slept without nightmares.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

Creosote, woven through the canyon air the way it had been woven through every breath she had drawn since the night she clawed out of the ground, that dry bitter signature of the only plant on this side of the border that bothered to smell like anything at all. Old copper from the mines, mineral and metallic and slow, leaching up out of the earth from a hundred years of human appetite already cooled. Desert dust, thin and cold and tasting of distance.

And underneath: gun oil and something else. Something cold. Dead.

Naida stopped mid-stride on Tombstone Canyon Road.

Another predator.

Six nights since the grave. Nearly a week of learning the difference between stumbling through streets scared and moving with purpose. She’d been doing the second one, working her way through Bisbee like someone who understood how territory worked now.

Garfield Park materialized ahead through the dark, sodium-lit and wrong, carrying the same wrongness as every American park she had ever passed, deliberately public and accidentally desolate at this hour, a carved-out civic emptiness that filled itself with whatever the night decided to send into it. Playground equipment, picnic tables, rusted metal shit Gen X probably broke bones on and received third-degree burns from the heat of the cruel southwest sun, all of it sitting under that orange wash like an exhibit nobody had remembered to take down. Sodium lights turned everything orange and wrong, and her new eyes broke the wash apart into its component frequencies like a prism, every color the lamps had stolen from the spectrum sitting accusingly outside the cone of light.

A figure sat on a bench near the south edge.

Waiting.

Not casual waiting. Waiting for something specific.

Or someone.

Well, shit. This is either really good timing or really bad judgment.

She approached through the mesquite and palo verde scattered around the park’s edge. No heartbeat. No breathing. No body heat her new senses could pick up.

Just stillness. Patient. Like something that didn’t need to move anymore.

Details resolved as she got closer: male, gaunt, weathered like the desert had been chewing on him for decades. Tattoos covered his arms: prison ink, military maybe, or biker shit. All three probably. Crude cross tattooed on his throat. His hands rested on his knees, casual but ready. Like he knew exactly what those hands could do when needed.

But the way he sat confirmed everything. No fidgeting. No little adjustments. No unconscious movement at all, none of the small accumulated tics a living body produced as the by-product of being alive, the breath cycle and the heart cycle and the thousand smaller cycles that made every human shape on a bench look like a thing in motion even when it was holding still.

Vampire stillness. That supernatural patience of something operating on different principles now, the patience of stone, the patience of water that had decided the canyon would yield in its own time, the patience of a thing that had stopped competing with the clock because the clock no longer applied to it.

He looked up. Desert-pale eyes met hers, cut straight through the bullshit.

“You’re the one from Safeway,” he said. Voice like gravel, matter-of-fact. “Watched me put down that blood-rabid kid.”

Not a question.

Her shoulders tensed. Same armor that had kept her functional through trafficking, through the desert, through everything. But underneath the automatic wariness: something else. First vampire she’d encountered who been able to talk to her, instead of just being some kind of blood obsessed mindless zombie.

“You’re good with a rifle,” she said. Crouched near the monkey bars instead of claiming space on his bench. Distance said caution, not fear. “Headshot. Not spray and pray.”

“Had practice.” Two words. That was it.

Okay, so he’s not immediately trying to kill me. Progress, I guess.

“Can’t spray in town,” he added. “Collateral damage. Waste not, want not.”

Her muscles locked. Miguel’s dad had said that. Right before selling her.

She stepped back. Put more distance between them.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“No.” Too quick. Too defensive. She forced herself to breathe. “Just that phrase. Last jodido hijueputa who said that to me sold me to the Coyotes.”

There. Let’s see what you do with that.

He paused, then nodded. “Fair enough.” Didn’t push. Didn’t ask.

The fact that he didn’t press made her more nervous, not less.

“Bisbee,” he said. “The town, and what folks call me anymore.”

“Naida.” It came out automatic, though using it as her name felt weird.

“So. Safeway,” Bisbee said, changing the subject.

“Yeah, I was watching. Trying to figure out qué vergas is happening to me.”

He didn’t answer right away. Just studied her without making it feel like a threat.

“How fresh are you?”

“Crawled out of a hole with a note, about a week ago.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

Bisbee scanned the residential streets beyond the playground. “Can’t talk here. Too many ears. You want answers, we do this somewhere private.”

Every survival instinct she had screamed don’t follow strange men to isolated locations. Those same instincts had told her to trust Miguel.

Different situation. This one just saved a woman from getting torn apart. If he wanted me dead, he would’ve shot me at Safeway like the boy.

“Your place?”

“Unless you got somewhere better.”

The Lavender Pit had concealment but not comfort. Definitely not conversation-friendly.

“Lead the way. But I stay ten feet back, and my hands stay free.”

Approval crossed his face, or close enough. “Smart girl. Let’s go.”

Bisbee’s streets were fucked, the kind of fucked that came from a hundred years of mining money trying to outpace gravity and losing in slow installments. Houses clung to hillsides at impossible angles, connected by staircases that doubled back on themselves like the town had been drawn by someone who hated walking, every porch a little stage built out over a drop, every back yard a slope that ended in someone else’s roof. Everything built up instead of out, defying gravity through pure stubbornness. Naida’s grandmother used to say a man defied his fate exactly like this, when he did not have the dignity to lie down and take what was coming for him.

She could see more here than in Managua: vertical terrain gave sightlines up and down the canyon. But none of it made sense. Streets that ran parallel suddenly crossed three blocks later. Houses stacked on top of each other like they’d been thrown against the mountainside and stuck where they landed.

First heavy rain and half this shit would wash downhill. How does anything stay up here? And why isn’t that giant crater a lake? Back home, craters filled with water. Here? Just... dry.

Back in Managua, streets ran predictable. Flat. You could orient by the lake, the volcanoes. Here? No idea which direction anything was.

Naida kept her promised distance. Her enhanced senses tracked Bisbee while monitoring everything else: porch lights, TV screens flickering blue through windows, someone’s music too loud for a weeknight. Normal human sounds that used to mean safety. Now just witnesses. Complications. Potential problems.

The canyon held heat differently than open desert: wood smoke from a fireplace somewhere up the hill, a cooking smell from the one house still lit, the mineral seep of old mine workings rising through cracked asphalt. Her senses filed it all without being asked.

“You always this paranoid, or just when strange men offer help?” Bisbee didn’t turn around. Pace unhurried but purposeful.

“I don’t trust anybody anymore, cerote.” Her voice came out flat. Hard. “Last time I did, I ended up cargo.”

“Fair point.” He paused at an intersection, checked both directions. “But staying scared forever ain’t much of a life either.”

“Better than no life at all.”

“Is it, though?” He kept walking. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“Jodido pendejo, I just crawled out of the ground a week ago. Ask me about life quality in, in... how old are you anyway?”

“Real years or since it happened years?”

“Real”

“Eighty-five.”

“Fine, ask me in like, fifty years.”

They passed a house where people were fighting in Spanish. Raised voices, slamming doors.

“No podemos seguir así, we’re already five people in a two-bedroom...”

“¡Es mi hermana! ¿Qué quieres que haga, dejarla en la calle con los niños?”

“I’m not saying that, but we can’t afford...”

“Then we figure it out! ¡Familia es familia!”

Money problems. Space problems. Border-crossing relatives needing shelter, grim arithmetic that ran every household she had ever known on either side of any border, the calculus of how many bodies could fit in how many beds and still leave food for breakfast. The same stress that came from trying to help when you barely had enough yourself, the stress she had been the cause of in someone else’s house once and never wanted to be again, although here in this Bisbee yard the noise of the argument carried something her own family had not bothered to carry, the unmistakable sound of people who were arguing because they intended to find a yes inside the no.

Her aunt’s voice echoed in memory: Old enough to figure it out.

These people were fighting about how to make room. Not whether to try.

Must be nice.

She held back bitter tears of Robert’s blood she couldn’t afford to shed. Her hands had stopped moving without her permission, fingers curled against her palms, pressing into nothing. She forced them open. Changed the subject.

“How long you been doing this?” she asked.

“What, walking?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. Helping. Rounding up strays.”

Silence for several steps. “Fifteen years, give or take. Since I figured out I couldn’t just watch kids stumble around until they died or turned feral.”

“And before that?”

“Minded my own business. Pretended other people’s problems weren’t mine.” He turned down a darker street, older houses carved from the mountainside. “Worked real well until it didn’t.”

“What changed?”

“Found a kid about your age trying to eat his own arm. So, blood-starved he couldn’t think straight. Whoever turned him dumped him in the desert and skipped out.”

Her stomach twisted. “What happened to him?”

“What do you think?” No emotion in his voice, but his shoulders carried something the voice was not allowed to, the small constant load of a man who had been keeping a list inside himself for a very long time and had never asked anyone else to help him hold it. “Too far gone by the time I found him. Put him down like a rabid animal. You saw... Safeway.”

She’d closed the distance without realizing. Five feet behind now instead of ten. Part of her brain had decided someone who felt guilt about necessary violence might be worth the risk.

“That’s fucked up,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Not supposed to work that way. Whoever ‘birthed’ you is supposed to take care of you. Train you up, teach you. More and more of us just get dumped by deadbeats any more.”

He stopped in front of a small adobe house. Looked like it had been built in the fifties and maintained just enough to avoid falling down. Small porch, two windows, door that used to be blue.

“This is me.”

Isolated. Neighbors dark. Street dead-ended into the hillside fifty yards past his driveway in that abrupt mountain-town way that turned a residential road into a wall without warning, the kind of dead end that meant either the prospectors had stopped pushing in this direction or the rock had finally said no. Good for privacy, shit for escape routes, and her old habits filed both readings simultaneously, a week of being hunted having made the reflex automatic.

“Cozy,” she said.

“Running water. Electricity.” Bisbee fished keys from his jacket. “Thick walls. Good for privacy.”

That last part made her step backward, toward the street.

“Relax, kid. Privacy for conversations about things that’d get us both killed if the wrong people overheard.” He unlocked the door but didn’t open it. Studied her defensive posture. “Last chance. Once you’re inside, you’re committed to hearing the whole story.”

“Fine.” She glanced at the dead-end street, then back at him. “I need to know what you know. But I keep my way out clear.”

Figure out what he wants for it. They always do.

“Wouldn’t expect anything else.”

Functional. Not fancy. Worn leather couch, bookshelves with actual books, their spines worn soft from thirty years of reading he had actually done instead of performed, thick adobe walls that did not so much keep the desert out as let it pass through on their own slow timetable. The air inside held its own layered record for her sharpened senses to read: cold ash banked in a woodstove that had not been lit since the last cold snap, gun oil and solvent worked into a rag somewhere out of sight, old paper and older leather, the mineral breath of the mountain coming up through a floor poured straight onto bedrock, and under all of it the flat odorless gap where a living body’s warmth and salt and breath should have announced themselves and simply did not. He gestured to the couch, settled into an armchair with clear sightlines to the front door and hallway, the geometry of someone who had walked into too many rooms in too many countries to ever again sit anywhere except where he could see the exits.

“So,” he said. “Questions.”

“The kid at Safeway.” She perched on the couch edge, muscles ready to bolt. “What was he exactly?”

“Wight. What happens when someone gets turned but doesn’t have the ability to adapt. Demon takes over completely. Like a fire in a building, structural members giving up one by one until the roof finally remembers it wanted to fall down all along. Nothing human left. Just appetite and territorial rage, an animal worse than any animal because no animal had ever needed to perform being human first.”

“How long before someone like you puts them down?”

“Depends how smart they hunt. Smart ones stick to wildlife, transients. Can go weeks, or even months. Stupid ones...” He gestured toward town and Safeway. “Three nights of sloppy kills.”

She’d spent about a week hunting down Coyote search teams. Some planned. Some desperate. The bullet hole in her shirt proved not all of it went smooth.

“What makes the difference? Between what I am and what he was?”

He studied her with the still-water attention of someone who had spent decades learning the difference between a fledgling who was going to make it and one who was already past saving.

“Hard to say. Some people handle it better. Mental resilience, coping mechanisms, circumstances. But mostly: whether you can accept what you’ve become without letting the demon convince you that’s all you are.”

“The demon?”

“Yeah, that angry little asshole voice in your head. Always wanting to kill and eat.”

She nodded slowly.

“You’ll need to figure out when to listen, when to ignore. It’ll tell you it’s all wise and shit, but it’s just your lizard brain trying to bully you around.”

Ignore him.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“About the demon?”

“No, the bullet hole in your shirt. Looks like a nine-millimeter.”

“Uh... Coyotes.”

“You part of that fire near the monument?”

Images flashed. She screamed when she had to. Fire. Red foam on her hands.

Fire? No. That wasn’t me.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Weird. You smell like wildfire, chemical retardant, and bad decisions.”

He studied her. Long enough to make it uncomfortable.

“Fire department found accelerant patterns that didn’t make sense. Bodies burned hotter than gasoline should manage. No signs of accelerant.”

She shrugged, having no answer for that.

“Okay.” He let it drop. For now.

He exhaled. A long breath he may not have realized he’d been holding. Dead lungs, older habits.

“You’ve been tracking me.” Not a question. “Since Safeway.”

“Keeping an eye. New vampire in my territory, no sire, handling herself better than most fledges. Raises questions.”

Territory. The word hit different in this mouth than it had in any of the other mouths that had used it on her, in the trucks and at the safe house and in the desert. Here it was a shape with edges she could stand inside instead of a label fastened to her collar, and the difference between those two things was the difference between being placed and being known.

“Your territory? Like, officially?”

Amusement flickered. “Nothing official. But I’ve been handling supernatural problems around here for what seems like forever. Local vamps check in when passing through. Keeps misunderstandings down.”

Decades of experience. The gulf between her time undead and whatever he was felt massive, a quiet that opened under the conversation, the silent drop of a mineshaft under a town that had forgotten where the workings ran. He had been doing this since before her parents had been born, since before her grandmother had been born, sitting through every kind of fledgling problem the desert had handed him and walking out of every kind of sunrise that should have caught him by now. She had been doing this for a week. The math of that arrived in her chest before her brain caught up, a small humiliation she chose to swallow instead of perform around.

“And I’m a problem that needs handling?”

“Jury’s out. You’re not leaving bodies where humans find them. Not drawing federal attention. Not turning Wight despite zero guidance. She makes promises. But you’re clearly running from something. Coyotes I assume, since you mentioned them. Problems follow people who don’t address them.”

“Nobody left to follow. I think.”

“Don’t think. Know.”

“So,” she said desperate to change the subject. “What kind of guidance are you offering?”

“Depends what you need. Basic physiology, politics, how to feed without attracting attention. Most fledges get that from their creator.”

Red lips. Soft seductive voice. Teeth like needles. A woman who smiled before biting, who turned transformation into performance art. Memories came wrapped in fog, fragmented.

“She didn’t abandon me. Created me for something specific.”

“Kid, you woke up in a grave with a note. That’s textbook abandonment.”

Oh. Shit.

She stared at him, blankly. She had no answer for that.

He nodded. Didn’t push.

“There’s others around here who might help,” he said after a moment. “If you’re interested in community instead of going solo.”

Community. I never had that even when I was alive. Is it even possible now?

“What kind of others?”

“Woman I know in Sierra Vista. Abuela. Runs a sanctuary for vampire kids who got abandoned or escaped bad situations. Lot more popping up lately.”

Right. Because sanctuaries worked out so well before. Miguel’s dad had a “sanctuary” too. Look how that ended.

“A sanctuary.” Her voice came out dismissive. “For vampires.”

“Kids like you. All about eighteen, all turned in the last six months or so. None of it voluntary.” Bisbee shrugged, ignoring her tone. “Abuela gives them structure. Teaches control. Helps them figure out how to exist without becoming monsters.”

Something harder crossed his face. “Don’t mistake kindness for weakness, though. She’s got rules. Enforces them like Old Testament scripture. Had to stake a kid...” Bisbee paused. “Malik, in the desert recently when he wouldn’t stop hunting locals. He only survived that long because Marigold and Copal were too traumatized to do it themselves.” He shrugged. “Abuela believes dawn handles problems talking can’t fix.”

“The ones there now?” He continued. “Trafficking victims. Abuse survivors. Kids targeted by predators. But they got transformed into a thing that could fight back.”

A whole group of kids like me. Who understand.

“She just takes them in?”

“Asks plenty of questions. Not to shame. Just trying to understand what help someone needs, what structure works.”

“You work with her?”

“Sometimes. Situations that need handling. New arrivals with adjustment problems. I do tactical, she does nurturing. Works out.” He added, “I’m not exactly equipped for nurturing or daughters.”

Tactical. She weeds out the ones too far gone. But protection for vulnerable fledglings learning to survive while processing trauma.

“You think I’d fit?”

He studied her like a tool he hadn’t been the one to make, weighing what it could do without bothering himself with where it had come from.

“Well... you haven’t tried to bite me. That’s a good start.” A short, dry sound came up out of his chest, more cough than laugh, and it pulled a grin out of her. “But seriously, you’re functional without guidance. Strategic thinking, not just hunger response. Control your Demon instead of letting it control you. Questions first, assumptions last.” He paused. “More self-awareness than most fledglings manage in a year, let alone a week.”

I guess I’m not a total dumpster fire. Nice of someone to see it.

“What would I need to do? To meet them.”

Here it comes... the cost. He’s going to want something. Everyone does. Plata, favores, lo que sea. Nobody helps for free.

“Nothing complicated. Show up. Be honest. Don’t try to dominate or manipulate. Abuela’s got good instincts: she’ll know quick whether you fit or cause problems.”

Too simple. A week of survival tests, and now just: show up and be honest? This has to be a jodido trap.

When’s the last time someone asked me to be honest without using it against me?

“Where’s Sierra Vista?”

“I’ll take you tomorrow night. Easier if I introduce you proper. Abuela appreciates courtesy. Kids are more comfortable with new arrivals when there’s context.”

Tomorrow night. Close enough to commit. Long enough for him to take payment.

“What should I know? About the group dynamics. Personalities I should watch for?”

“They’re survivors. Different kinds of shit. Each got their own story.” Bisbee’s voice stayed flat. “Not my place to tell, like I’m some neighborhood gossip. They want you to know, they’ll tell you. They’re smart about protecting themselves, but willing to trust when someone proves they’re not a threat. Expect questions. Don’t expect judgment. They understand complicated.”

“Any rules?”

“Don’t feed on anyone under their protection. Don’t bring outside problems without disclosure. Don’t manipulate or dominate. Beyond that: common sense, respect boundaries.”

“I think I can live with that.”

She paused, letting the silence drag.

“Alright. So, tomorrow night. What is this going to cost me? I don’t have anything.... If I need to be the puta...”

“What?”

“Payment. Nobody gives out this kind of help for free. I’ve spent the last... Dios mío, I don’t even know how long, being treated like merchandise. It’s ok. I get it. I’m only valuable for my... para coger. Para acostarme.”

“Fucking hell.” He stepped back, put distance between them. Hands visible, non-threatening. “That what you think this is?”

Neither of them spoke.

“Look, I’m gonna say this once.” His voice came out flat, hard. “Sex is for the living. Once we became this, that plumbing doesn’t work anymore. No amount of Viagra is going to fix that dysfunction. But even if it did?” He paused. “I didn’t fuck the baby-sans in ‘Nam when they were desperate. Sure, as hell not starting now.”

She stared at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

Not interested. No me interesa. First time anyone’s ever said that. So, if he doesn’t want... then why the fuck is he helping me? What else do I even have?

“I don’t.... I don’t have anything else!”

“I’m not charging. This is help. It’s free. No charge.” Bisbee paused. “Look kid, I get it. You’ve been through hell. You got sucker-punched by life. Betrayed and sold like cattle.” His voice carried flat recognition. Someone who’d heard this story too many times. “Trust doesn’t come easy anymore. I don’t blame you. If it were me, teenage girl, I’d feel the same.” He paused. “Totally up to you, Naida. Stay here, shower, get cleaned up. Or go find your spot for the day. No pressure.”

¿Gratis? What the fuck is free? I don’t... I don’t understand.

“You offer me a shower, hot water...”

Nothing filled the space between them, just the small sounds of the small adobe house settling around them, the refrigerator’s compressor cycling on in the kitchen, the wind outside finding the loose corner of an evaporative cooler somewhere on the roof and worrying at it, the same restless worrying the wind gave everything in this country. She didn’t know what to do with this. Nowhere to file it. No box it fit into, no shape in any of the rooms her mind had built for storing what men wanted that matched the shape of a man who had said he didn’t want anything.

“Fine.” The word came slow, dragged out of a pause she held too long, her voice tight, uncertain despite the edge. “I’ll stay. Use your shower. You can watch. If you want.” The offer came out smaller than she meant. She was searching for patterns, for some way to understand. Men always want something. “I don’t mind.”

Let me be useful. Let me earn this. Please don’t just... help. I need to pay for it somehow.

“No.” Flat. Final. Not angry. Sad, maybe. Like he’d seen this before and it still hurt to see again. “Kid, I’m not gonna watch you shower. This isn’t some kind of ‘Fifty Shades of Pasty Undead’. I’m not that guy.”

He paused. Revulsion crossed his face.

“Seriously, kid. I’m not gonna try anything. I’m not wired that way anymore. Been dead since long before you were born. This help’s free. Nothing to earn.”

She didn’t have words for it. Stood there, every instinct screaming this was wrong, had to be a trap, but...

“Fine.” Voice barely audible.

There’s always a price. Always. I just can’t see it yet.

“Won’t be a problem.” His voice stayed steady. Not offended, not angry. Just clear. “You got nothing to worry about from me. Not like that. Not ever.”

She nodded. First voluntary step toward vampire community. Toward possibility of belonging somewhere that didn’t require constant vigilance or the small daily lies she had spent her life perfecting.

“Can I ask you something?” She caught him as he stood to leave. Every movement economical. Someone who’d learned not to waste.

“Shoot.”

“Why help me? You could’ve eliminated me as a problem. Saved yourself complications.”

Bisbee paused. Considered the question with same deliberate attention he gave tactical assessments.

“Because there’s enough monsters in the world already.” He set the words down between them and left them there, a hand of cards he had held for fifty years and was done holding. “No point creating more when you can help create a different path instead.”

She nodded slowly. His tone said he’d seen both sides firsthand.

“Shower’s back there.” He pointed toward the rear of the small adobe with the same economical gesture he used for everything, a hand schooled by a lifetime of giving directions in places where bullets came through walls and no one wasted a movement on style. “Let me check if I got anything clean you can wear after.”

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

The ground released her at sunset, soil cascading from her hair and clothes as consciousness returned like a switch being thrown.

Naida clawed her way up through caliche that moved like water, emerging into desert twilight with her senses screaming information she couldn’t fully process. The empty lot. Chain-link fence. Scattered vegetation. Bisbee’s outskirts stretching away in both directions under the first stars.

She pulled herself onto solid ground, dirt falling from her clothes in streams. Her hands were...

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

The damage was catastrophic. Multiple layers of dried blood, some brown and ancient-looking from days ago, some still dark and relatively fresh. Her shirt was more hole than fabric, shredded from three days of desert survival and combat. Scorch marks painted black patterns across the cloth where fire had singed but not quite ignited. A bullet hole torn through the shoulder, the fabric around it stiff with old blood even though the wound beneath had healed.

Ash and caliche crusted everything, mixing with blood stains in patterns that painted a story of sustained violence across multiple days. This wasn’t evidence of a single incident. Three distinct layers of violence written into the fabric itself, each stratum a different night she’d survived.

I look like I fought a war. Fuck, I look like I lost a war.

Fresh blood, Robert’s blood, though she couldn’t let herself examine that thought too closely, coated her from chin to waist, the newest layer on top of everything else. Her hands were the worst, crusted dark under her fingernails, staining every crease and line of her palms like evidence that would never wash completely clean.

Someone had been murdered. Robert. The man at the Chevron who’d tried to help.

She remembered it clearly. Too clearly. Fluorescent lights. Silver Challenger. His concerned face turning toward her asking if she needed help. The way his blood had tasted like salvation after days of starvation.

I killed him. Drained him completely. And I’d do it again if I had to.

She should have felt worse about it. But compared to everything else, the fire, Carlos burning, the memories she was actively trying not to examine, Robert’s death felt almost clean. Necessary. Survival.

Have to clean up. Can’t walk around like this. People will see. People will know.

But know what? The thought fragmented before it could complete.

She stumbled away from the burrow site, heading deeper into Bisbee’s sparse outskirts where houses gave way to empty lots and industrial remnants. The sunset painted everything in colors that would have been beautiful if she could process anything beyond the immediate demands of survival.

Her body felt wrong. Not weak. The opposite, actually. Stronger than she’d ever felt, every sense operating at impossible clarity. But wrong nonetheless. Like she’d traded something essential for this predatory efficiency, this supernatural awareness that mapped the world in ways human perception never could.

The hunger was gone. Her stomach turned when she tried to examine the cost.

Can’t go there. Not now. Just keep moving. Find somewhere to clean up. Figure out what comes next.

But what came next? She had no plan beyond immediate survival, no goal except avoiding forces hunting a blood-covered teenager in the desert dark.

A gas station appeared ahead, different from the one she’d... from before. She veered away automatically, some instinct warning her that returning to any kind of commercial surveillance was dangerous in her current state. The blood evidence alone would trigger responses she couldn’t handle.

Instead, she followed residential streets that wound through Bisbee’s outer edges, moving through pools of streetlight and shadow with increasing confidence in her ability to avoid detection. Her enhanced senses rendered the world in perfect detail, sound, scent, every small movement of nocturnal life in cooling desert air.

Behind her, somewhere in the darkness, evidence remained of what she’d done. A body. A crime scene. Questions that would eventually draw attention from law enforcement and probably others, people who specialized in things that normal police wouldn’t understand.

But that was future problem. Right now, she needed to deal with the blood.

A park materialized, small, barely maintained, with a bathroom structure decades past its prime. The door hung slightly ajar, and no lights showed through the gap.

She slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind her with a screech of warped metal that she winced at in the desert quiet. The bathroom was a single room barely large enough to turn around in, block walls painted the specific shade of institutional green that seemed to exist only in spaces where no one was meant to linger, rest stops, drunk tanks, the room off the kitchen in the safe house, places designed for function and not a single thing else. A single bulb hung dead overhead. A hand-painted sign above the toilet said NO DUMPING TRASH, the paint cracked and water-stained to near-illegibility. The sink ran cold regardless of which handle she turned, and the soap dispenser produced a thin pink slurry that smelled like artificial roses and industrial solvent mixed in roughly equal measure.

The mirror showed her what she’d avoided, a girl drenched in violence, dried blood painting a predator where the victim had been.

Dios mío, is this what I look like now?

She ran the water until it achieved something resembling temperature, then began the brutal process of washing away evidence. The blood came off slowly, reluctantly, her torn crop top and shredded jeans taking forever to rinse clean under the weak stream.

Can’t throw these away. Only clothes I have. Just get them clean enough not to scream “murder.”

She wrung out the fabric as best she could, putting the damp clothes back on. Better to look like a drowned homeless teenager than leave evidence in a park trash can where someone might find it.

When she emerged from the bathroom, the night felt different. Less threatening. More like territory she could navigate if she stayed careful, stayed smart, stayed ahead of whatever consequences were building behind her.

Bisbee’s streets wound through the darkness ahead, carrying her deeper into town where buildings clustered closer together and streetlights painted everything in sodium amber. She moved through pools of light and shadow, her enhanced senses cataloging this small Arizona town.

Somewhere ahead, lights blazed against the darkness. Not residential. Something commercial. Open late.

Her feet carried her toward it automatically, some combination of instinct and aimless wandering leading her deeper into whatever came next.

The Safeway Food parking lot stretched like a sodium-lit ocean under the desert night, its asphalt surface painted in harsh amber that leached color from everything it touched. Fluorescent store lights blazed behind plate glass windows, but out here in the vastness of painted lines and empty spaces, the towering light poles created pools of artificial day separated by gulfs of shadow.

A handful of vehicles sat scattered across the expanse like abandoned islands, a tired Corolla near the pharmacy entrance, a pickup truck with contractor equipment parked far from the building, a minivan with car seats visible through tinted windows. The kind of sparse population that belonged to the small hours when most of Bisbee slept and only shift workers, insomniacs, and creatures that preferred darkness moved through the world.

Naida found herself drawn toward it without conscious decision, crossing the highway’s shoulder through a strip of pale scrubby desert where creosote and drought-killed grass gave way to the asphalt edge of the lot, the ground still radiating stored heat through the thin soles of her shoes. The western perimeter offered concealment where the lot hadn’t bothered with landscaping, a commercial dumpster the color of dried rust, positioned at an angle that blocked sightlines from the pharmacy entrance, a concrete pillar rising from a planter box that had given up on its contents and filled itself with sand and cigarette butts and a crushed Baja Blast can that caught what little wind there was and skittered against the concrete in a thin metallic rattle.

She settled into the shadow behind the dumpster, back to the wall, and watched. The sodium light from the nearest pole sat maybe forty feet out, painting everything in that particular amber that made blood look black and faces look like they belonged in old photographs. The Safeway’s automatic doors were visible from here, the plate glass beyond them blazing with the clean indifferent fluorescence of a place that existed to serve people who still had ordinary problems, groceries, pharmacy pickups, whatever people bought at this hour in a small Arizona town that didn’t know what crouched at its edge in the dark.

The automatic doors exhaled their rattling mechanical sigh as a woman emerged, her scrubs identifying her as medical personnel ending another long shift. Mid-thirties, exhaustion written in the set of her shoulders and the careful way she navigated her overloaded cart across uneven pavement.

Something moved at the edge of Naida’s vision. A flicker in the darkness beyond the light poles, pale and wrong.

¿What the mierda es esto?

The boy stumbled into the amber glow, and every instinct Naida possessed started screaming warnings.

He couldn’t have been more than twelve, his clothes torn and stained with substances that looked black under the sodium light. But it was his movement that registered as fundamentally wrong, jerky, erratic, like a marionette operated by someone who’d never seen human locomotion.

His head snapped toward the woman with mechanical precision, and even from this distance, Naida could see his eyes reflecting light like polished glass.

No. No, that’s not... he’s not...

The boy’s mouth opened, revealing teeth that caught the light wrong.

Then he moved.

Not running. Something beyond running, something that covered forty feet of asphalt in a blur that made Naida’s enhanced vision struggle to track the motion. Supernatural speed without control, predatory focus without consciousness behind it.

The woman barely had time to register shock before fangs tore into her throat with savage efficiency.

No, no, no, not here, not like this.

Naida found herself halfway out of concealment before conscious thought caught up, some instinct screaming that she needed to stop this, needed to prevent...

The crack of the rifle shot split the desert air and echoed through the canyon.

To Naida’s enhanced vision, the glowing projectile streaked across the parking lot like a falling star, incandescent tracery bright against the sodium-lit darkness. The round impacted the boy’s skull with surgical precision, and he exploded into ash and screaming, his form disintegrating in flames that consumed vampire tissue with supernatural efficiency.

The woman collapsed, wounded but breathing, as her attacker simply ceased to exist in a cloud of dissolution and fire.

Naida’s enhanced vision followed the tracery path backward through the night air, tracing the bullet’s trajectory to its source. Somewhere up the mountain, north of the Safeway, the muzzle flash afterglow had already faded, but the trajectory painted the approximate firing position with perfect clarity.

Professional. Clinical. Efficient.

Is that how I looked?

The thought struck her with physical force, remembering her own fumbling desperation at the gas station, the way hunger had overridden every survival instinct until nothing remained except feeding frenzy.

It wasn’t a memory of something she might become. It was Robert. The Chevron had been this, exactly this, the same blacked-out blur, the same nothing behind the eyes, the same teeth finding a throat because the throat was warm and close and the hunger had stopped asking permission. The boy on the asphalt hadn’t done a single thing she hadn’t done two nights running. The only difference she could find between his ash and her own two feet was that no one had been up on a mountain over the Chevron with a rifle and a steady hand. He died because someone was watching. She lived because the lot was empty. Not control. Not because she was stronger or further along than him, whatever she’d been telling herself. Geography. A man on a hill who happened to be pointed somewhere else.

They could have put me down. They might have even been right if they had.

She could still be ash scattered across some anonymous parking lot, just another mistake cleaned up by whoever was maintaining order in this shadow world. The realization settled into her bones like ice water. She wasn’t an apex predator. She was barely controlled disaster, one bad night away from the same fate as the boy who’d just been eliminated with clinical precision.

The woman rose on shaking legs, terror, and shock written in every movement as she abandoned her groceries and fled toward her car. Engine starting. Tires squealing. The sound of someone’s entire worldview shattering in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Naida forced herself to retreat deeper into shadow, survival arithmetic immediate and simple, distance, now, before whoever had taken that shot decided to investigate further. Professional snipers didn’t work alone. There would be cleanup crews, evidence collection, protocols for dealing with situations that officially didn’t exist.

She moved through the darkness with increasing urgency, putting blocks between herself and the Safeway parking lot, leaving behind evidence of a world she was only beginning to understand.

Behind her, sirens were already building in the distance, emergency services responding to reports of gunshots and screams that would never make sense in any police report.

And somewhere up the mountain, a sniper was probably already relocating, mission accomplished, another threat neutralized before it could spread.

That could have been me. That should have been me.

But it wasn’t. She’d fed and retained enough consciousness to burrow before dawn. Had avoided becoming whatever that boy had been, mindless, feral, operating on nothing but hunger and predatory instinct.

For now.

The question was how long she could maintain that control, and what would happen when hunger returned with the same existential crisis that had driven her to drain Robert completely.

She kept walking into Bisbee’s darkness, terrified and alive in ways that defied every natural law she’d once believed governed existence.

The night stretched ahead with questions she had no answers for, and behind her, the consequences of her transformation continued accumulating in ways she couldn’t predict or control.

But she was still herself. Still Naida, still capable of being horrified by what she’d witnessed, still something more than reflex and appetite.

Not yet reduced to whatever he’d been.

Highway 92 curved northwest from the Safeway, winding through desert that felt less hostile now that she was fed. Sirens were fading behind her. Distance and darkness providing cover she desperately needed.

Don’t go there. Keep moving.

Robert’s blood had done its job. She was stronger, faster, her senses strung razor-tight, the dark neighborhood mapped in her skull with no gaps. But the cost of that strength followed her through Bisbee’s sparse outskirts persistent as shadow.

She remembered his face turning toward her under the fluorescent lights. “You okay, sweetheart?” Like she was someone worth saving, two minutes before she drained him dry.

Dios. Stop. Can’t think about that. Think about the kid instead.

The feral boy at the Safeway. That’s what happened when you didn’t feed in time. Pure instinct, no consciousness left. Just hunger with fangs until someone put you down. She’d watched him explode into ash and flame, professional marksmanship ending the threat cleanly.

She looked at her hands. The blood was old now, dark under her nails, dried into the creases of her palm. She’d been on her knees in it. And then she’d stood up.

That had to mean something.

The Lavender Pit opened up ahead, a massive scar in the earth where they’d torn copper from the mountain for decades. Terraced walls dropping down in geometric steps, creating a spiral descent into darkness that went deep enough to hide damn near anything.

Three concrete structures sat near the rim. Cylindrical buildings maybe thirty feet tall, industrial relics from when the mine was active. They looked like oversized grain silos, built solid and abandoned to weather and time.

Good place to think. Away from people. Away from heartbeats.

The easternmost building offered the best angle, positioned to block sightlines from both highway and residential areas. She circled it twice, enhanced senses cataloging details. No recent human scent. No surveillance. Walls intact despite years of neglect.

The entrance had a padlock. She grabbed the chain and yanked. Metal snapped with a sharp crack that echoed once before dying in the desert silence.

Inside, the circular space held its own particular silence, the kind that wasn’t the absence of sound so much as the presence of containment, the concrete walls rising thirty feet to a rusted conical roof that had pulled away from the structure in places, leaving gaps where the desert sky showed through in thin slivers, where stars were visible if she tilted her head at exactly the right angle, where the wind moved through at a pitch just below hearing and made the whole structure feel like something half-alive and breathing. The floor was covered in drifted sand and dried vegetation that had blown in through those same gaps over years, maybe decades, building up in the corners and against the curved walls in smooth dunes that smelled of old rain and mineral dust and the small animal bones scattered where scavengers had dragged things in to eat in the dark. The walls themselves were rough aggregate, poured in another era, their surface a map of cracks and mineral staining and old graffiti in Spanish that had faded to ghost-marks she could barely read even with her enhanced vision. Underneath all of it, solid concrete foundation, bone-cold against her palms when she pressed them flat, so far removed from living earth that her instinct for soil and caliche found nothing to hold.

She settled onto the floor, back against the wall, and let her body stop moving for the first time since sunset.

Okay. So, what the fuck am I now?

Her hands looked normal in the moonlight coming through high windows. Same scars from childhood, same basic shape. Blood had crusted under her fingernails despite the bathroom cleaning, evidence that soap and water couldn’t completely erase. Robert’s life staining the creases of her palms like permanent reminder of what she’d done.

Vampire.

The word surfaced with the scent-memory of cheap receipt paper, gunpowder, blood on someone’s fingers. A note she’d read... when? After clawing out of the grave. Someone had told her what she was. Written it down.

Fucking vampire.

The label felt ridiculous even as it fit perfectly. She drank blood. Couldn’t face sunlight without burrowing underground. Had fangs that extended when she got hungry. Enhanced senses that worked in near-total darkness. Strength that let her snap chains without effort, crush a man against a car hard enough to dent the door panel. She’d heard the metal buckle even through the roaring in her ears.

What else would you call that?

Memory flashed; Robert’s neck tearing under her teeth, copper flooding her mouth, the desperate relief of finally feeding after days of starvation. Messy and graceless and necessary. His heartbeat slowing under her hands, his struggling going weak, then stopping entirely.

His eyes had been open when she’d pulled away. Unseeing. The life that animated them consumed and digested and made part of her.

He was going to help me, and I killed him for it.

The thought should have horrified her more. But sitting here in concrete shelter with her hunger satisfied and her body safe, the horror felt distant. Intellectual. Like knowing murder was wrong without actually feeling guilty about this specific murder.

He’d been food. Just not wrapped and presented at the butcher’s counter at Mercado Oriental.

Take the warm one. Feed. Now.

It tried to take hold, guilt, self-recrimination, the full accounting she owed herself, tried to crush her under the force of it. But her mind kept sliding away from full examination, kept finding tactical observations where the emotional ones should have been.

She’d fed. Stayed conscious enough to burrow before dawn. Retained enough of herself to feel horror afterward, which meant she hadn’t crossed completely into what that feral kid had been.

The distinction felt important even if she couldn’t articulate why.

I’m still me. Still Naida. Just... different now.

Vampiric strength and speed. Blood where food had been. Sun meant death, darkness meant home, not because it was safer, but because it felt right in her bones.

She’d killed someone who tried to help her and couldn’t make herself care enough. Survival first. Feelings later. Maybe never.

She pressed her palms against the concrete floor, testing the connection her burrowing ability required. Nothing. The material felt dead, too processed, too far removed from living earth. Her instinct for soil and caliche had no purchase on manufactured stone.

Jodido. Probably has to be real dirt.

Frustration flared, and with it came sensation, warmth building in her chest, spreading down her arms toward her hands. For just a second the air shimmered with heat distortion, like asphalt on summer afternoons.

Then it was gone.

Qué vergas was that?

She stared at her hands, but they looked normal again. No heat, no shimmer, nothing except the dried blood under her nails and the fading memory of warmth that had felt wrong. Impossible.

Didn’t happen. Adrenaline from the Safeway or some shit. Doesn’t matter.

She went underground when daylight got close. However the fuck that worked. Dissolving into soil when dawn got too close, emerging at sunset. Her body knew how even if her brain couldn’t explain it.

Focus on what matters. Survival.

The silence in the circular space felt heavy but not oppressive. Outside, Bisbee continued its small-town existence, people sleeping in houses she could hear if she focused, cars occasionally passing on distant highways, desert life adapting to human proximity.

None of them knew what was sheltering in this abandoned mine structure. What had fed and killed and burrowed its way through the past few days.

They’d put me down if they knew. Just like that kid.

Professional marksmanship, cold precision, threat eliminated before it could take anyone else. She’d watched it happen from concealment, had traced the bullet’s trajectory back to approximate firing position through enhanced vision that made dark look like twilight.

Someone with resources and training was hunting vampires who lost control.

I can’t lose control. Can’t go feral like that. Have to stay... me. Whatever that means now. However hungry I get.

But Robert’s feeding had pushed her so close to that edge. Time had skipped, reality fragmenting as hunger overrode everything else. She’d crossed twenty feet without awareness of movement, had torn into his throat before conscious thought could interfere.

The difference between her and that feral kid might be nothing except luck and timing.

Next time I get that hungry, what happens? Do I stay conscious enough to feed and burrow? Or do I go feral like that kid, just teeth and nothing, until someone lights me up?

No answer presented itself. Just the concrete walls and desert silence and the growing recognition that she was navigating a world with rules she didn’t understand and consequences that ended in ash and flame.

She needed information. Needed to figure out if other vampires existed who weren’t feral disasters waiting for cleanup crews.

The note that had directed her toward Tucson remained her only guidance, elegant handwriting on blood-stained paper, instructions from whoever had transformed her. They had known what she would become. Had planned for it, maybe.

If they made me like this on purpose... why?

Questions without answers, stacking up like debts she couldn’t pay. But questions that demanded eventual resolution if she was going to survive longer than that kid at the Safeway.

Dawn was still hours away. She could feel its absence like negative pressure, her vampire instincts monitoring the horizon even from inside concrete shelter. Time enough to rest. To let her body process Robert’s blood and her mind compartmentalize what she’d done into boxes that wouldn’t interfere with survival.

Time enough to accept that Naida-the-victim was dead, had died in that desert grave even if what was left had been walking around for days afterward.

She was something new now. It needed a different framework. Different rules. Different relationship with darkness and blood and the predatory instincts that had kept her alive.

I’m not prey anymore. Haven’t been since I woke up with fangs.

The knowledge sat down and stayed. She’d been cargo before, valuable enough to transport, disposable enough to discard. Men had looked at her and seen something to use, to exploit, to consume for their benefit.

Now she was the one doing the consuming.

Robert’s blood coating her hands proved that. The way she’d drained him without hesitation, without mercy, just hunger, and relief when it was done. Just days ago she’d been cargo. Now she was the thing that cargo feared.

She was predator now, whether she wanted to be or not. The question was whether she could be predator without losing herself completely to the hunger that had nearly turned her into mindless feeding machine.

I came back. That matters. I fed and came back and stayed ME.

She clung to that distinction the only solid thing. Consciousness after feeding. Horror at what she’d done. Those were the markers that mattered, proof she was still herself and not just reflex and appetite and ash.

Not yet.

Concrete walls held her in circular shelter while desert wind whispered through gaps in the old structure. Above, stars wheeled through sky that held no promise of sunrise, just the patient certainty that darkness would eventually give way to lethal radiation that would reduce her to ash if she stayed exposed.

But for now, she was safe. Fed. Sheltered. Still herself despite everything that had happened.

Questioning what she was becoming, which had to count for something.

She settled deeper against the wall, letting her enhanced senses monitor the world while her consciousness drifted in the space between active thought and vampiric rest. Not quite sleep. Her body didn’t seem to need that anymore. But a meditative state, awareness dimmed but functional, processing trauma and transformation in the background while surface attention tracked for threats.

Tomorrow she would emerge from this sanctuary with acceptance where there had been denial. Would begin figuring out how to survive as a predator, how to navigate this shadow world without losing herself to feral hunger.

But for now, surrounded by concrete and silence and the vast empty darkness of abandoned copper mine, she let herself simply exist. No performance, no calculation, no desperate scramble for survival.

Just her, and the night, and a slow certainty, moving forward meant embracing what she’d become and letting the rest of it go.

I’m vampire. I kill to survive. And I’m still me despite all of that.

The admission carried weight that settled like foundation beneath her. She wasn’t Naida-the-victim anymore, though she wasn’t sure yet what she was instead. Something that belonged in darkness. Something still figuring out what that meant.

Outside, she could hear Bisbee sleeping. Breathing in houses. Unaware of what crouched in the ruins above the pit. And high above, patient stars watched over desert and town and the small dramas of transformation that played out beneath their ancient light.

Dawn would come eventually, as it always did.

But she would be underground before it arrived, safe in earth’s embrace, carried through daylight hours in vampiric dormancy that defied death as thoroughly as her existence defied nature.

For now, that was enough.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

The caliche released her and she didn’t remember burrowing in.

Naida pushed up through twelve feet of earth that shouldn’t have moved like water but did, emerging into desert night with her head full of static.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

She had a massive headache, and thinking hurt.

Something happened. Something with, No. Don’t.

Her legs folded and she caught herself on hands that sank into something that wasn’t just dirt. The texture was wrong. Sticky where her palms pressed into it. Chemical. Her palms came away coated in residue that gleamed dark under the moonlight.

The world swam at the edges, colors bleeding wrong, sounds arriving delayed like her brain was buffering like a YouTube video. Starving. Dying. The words kept circling.

She focused on her palms, on what coated them.

Okay what the fuck. Ground’s all... foamy? Pink shit everywhere. No wait, red. Pink again? Mierda, am I seeing things?

Her palms were coated in it. The chemical smell made her gag, a reflex she couldn’t stop even when breathing was optional. Wrong. Everything about this was wrong. The whole area around her emergence point looked like someone had carpet-bombed the desert with Pepto-Bismol and napalm. Thick where it had pooled. Wet in some places. Crusted in others.

Paint? No, smells like chemicals. That retardant stuff they drop on fires?

The implication clawed toward consciousness. Her brain slammed it back down before the thought could complete, sliding away from the connection like oil on water.

The desert around her looked bombed. Not metaphorically. Actually bombed. Great swaths of creosote flattened and blackened. The caliche itself scorched in patterns that radiated outward from... somewhere she wasn’t looking at. Tire tracks carved deep into earth that should’ve been too hard for that kind of impression. The geometric precision of heavy equipment. Military equipment maybe.

What... where am I? Was I running? Why can’t I remember...

Pink residue everywhere. Coating the burned creosote in a dried, cracking skin. Pooled in tire ruts. Splattered across rocks in patterns that said it came from above. Dropped from aircraft. Carpet bombing with...

¿Qué mierda es esto?

The smell hit her harder as she stood. Brimstone. Burned creosote thick enough to taste. Aviation fuel. Something that looked like the chemical that planes drop on... fires? Is that what this is? The pink shit they use when things burn out of control?

But why would planes come here? What was burning? When did...

The thought fragmented. Her brain refusing to track it further.

She’d seen news footage before. Wildfires in California. Forests burning. Planes dropping red slurry to stop the spread. But that was... massive fires. Acres burning. Not... whatever happened here in the middle of nowhere desert.

Unless something really fucking bad happened. Something that needed planes and military response and hazmat procedures and...

No. Don’t think about it. Can’t think about it.

This didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.

She turned in a slow circle, vision contracting. The devastation extended maybe sixty yards in every direction from a center point she wasn’t looking at. Couldn’t look at. Her body physically recoiling when her eyes tried to track toward the epicenter of whatever had happened here.

Yellow hazmat tape fluttered from a creosote bush twenty feet away. The kind with official warnings. DANGER. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

They were here. Emergency response. Fire department. Probably military too. Probably evacuated the whole area. Probably investigated for...

Her brain shut down the thought.

I go underground. That’s my thing. Burrow into caliche and hide from the sun. That’s what I do. That’s all I do. Nothing else.

But the pink retardant coating her hands said different. The scorch patterns said different. The tire tracks and hazmat tape and the smell of aviation fuel said very fucking different.

Voices carried on the wind from somewhere east. Male. Authoritative. The register of uniforms and protocols, someone who’d already decided she was a problem.

“, burn pattern doesn’t match anything natural...”

“, need samples from the origin point before...”

“, calling in arson investigation at first light...”

The words filtered through her compromised awareness like white noise. Fire investigators. Military, maybe, the kind called in when a thing had no civilian shape. Government. The kind of attention that meant questions she couldn’t answer and scrutiny she couldn’t afford.

Move. Have to move. Can’t be here when they come back.

Her body responded before conscious decision, stumbling away from the voices, away from the evidence, away from the center point her eyes refused to see. Northeast. Just go northeast. Away from whatever happened. Away from questions.

The trembling got worse with each step. Not cold. Not fear exactly. A metabolic storm made her muscles fire wrong, her coordination slipping as if her nervous system were fractured.

FEED FEED FEED FEED FEED

The hunger wasn’t normal hunger. Wasn’t even vampire hunger like she’d felt before. This was cellular. Every fiber of her body screaming in a frequency that bypassed thought entirely.

Her stomach cramped even though she had no digestion. Her veins felt like they were collapsing inward. The trembling intensified until her whole frame shook with micro-convulsions that made walking feel like operating a broken puppet.

Okay. Priorities. Blood first. Then shelter before dawn. That’s it. That’s the plan. Don’t think about anything else.

She pushed herself faster despite the coordination issues, despite how the world kept swimming at the edges, despite how her enhanced senses kept misfiring, sounds arriving before or after the things that made them, scents mapping to wrong locations, her night vision flickering like a dying bulb.

The desert looks different. Wrong angles. Shadows falling in directions that don’t make sense. Or maybe my eyes aren’t working right. The world had a haze like staring through gas fumes.

She tried to focus. Her knees buckled after three steps. Her palms hit the ground, trembling like she’d been electrocuted.

Fuck.

Last thing I remember is...

Nothing. Static. A wall of nothing where my memory should be.

Great. Amnesia. That’s completely fine. Vampires get amnesia. Normal vampire night.

She stared at her palms in the moonlight. Still coated with pink residue.

My hands are clean. That seems important somehow.

What was I expecting? Evidence of something. But they’re just hands. Shaking. Pale. Clean underneath the retardant.

The smell hit her senses again on a shift in the wind. Brimstone and burned creosote and something else, and the scent made her stomach lurch even though she didn’t have normal digestion anymore. Chemical. Wrong in a way her body knew before her mind would. The scent of...

Don’t look. Don’t go back. Forward. Just go forward.

She didn’t know why she thought that. But her body was already moving northeast, stumbling over terrain her feet knew by instinct even though her brain was three seconds behind processing each step.

She stumbled over a rock she should’ve seen, caught herself on a creosote bush that stabbed thorns into her palm. The pain felt distant. The hunger was the only solid thing.

Blood-starved. That’s what this is. I fed recently, I remember feeding, but now it’s gone. Burned through. Used up.

Used up on what?

Don’t think about it.

Maybe I was running from someone. That would explain why I’m starving. Explain why my body feels like it burned through a week’s worth of energy in... however long. Hours? Minutes? Can’t remember.

Probably the Coyotes. They’ve been hunting me for days now. Must’ve pushed me hard, made me use too much energy burrowing or running or...

Or something.

The Coyotes. Days of running. Tactical gear, night vision, no sleep. Three nights straight. That explains it. Exhaustion. Blood-starvation. Stress. Normal stuff.

That’s all this is. Exhaustion. Blood-starvation. The stress of being hunted.

Her foot caught and she went down hard, hands hitting caliche that was still warm from the day’s heat. She stayed there for a moment, on hands and knees, going through the motions of breathing, trying to make her brain work right.

Still alive. Still refusing to die in the dirt.

Get up. Have to get up. Dawn’s coming.

The dawn pressure was building, still below the horizon but pressing against her supernatural awareness. Maybe an hour before the light came. Maybe less. Maybe more. Her internal clock was fucked, couldn’t tell anymore.

She pushed herself up. Kept walking.

The terrain started showing signs of human presence. Graded roads in the distance. The geometric patterns of property lines carved into wilderness. Lights on the horizon that meant civilization, meant people, meant blood.

The hunger intensified at the thought. The controlled predator awareness she’d been learning was gone. Just desperate. Frantic. The demon inside her consciousness wasn’t calculating anymore. It was demanding.

FEED NOW OR DIE.

Her vision tunneled slightly. The haze got worse. She couldn’t tell if she was walking straight or veering, couldn’t track distance properly, couldn’t...

Focus. Just focus on the lights. Get to the lights. Find someone alone. Feed. Then find shelter before sunrise.

Simple plan. I can do simple.

But her body knew something her mind wouldn’t touch. The trembling got worse. Her hands tingled with heat that made no sense, made her look down at her palms again.

Why am I looking at my hands again? What am I expecting to see? I burrow. That’s what I do. Superhero fast and strong. I’m not... I’m not... Some kind of Xiuhtecuhtli.

The thought dissolved.

Survived five months of being cargo. Survived waking up dead. Survived whatever the hell happened back there. Still moving. That’s the job.

Walking is safer than thinking.

Back there in the desert night, she’d left something. Evidence of something. But her mind slid away from it like oil on water, couldn’t get traction, couldn’t examine what...

Movement. Her enhanced hearing caught it before conscious thought did. Footsteps. A human gait, heavy and unhurried. Male. Moving through brush about two hundred yards south.

Coyote? Hiker? Doesn’t matter.

Her body crouched automatically, predator instincts cutting through the fog.

I can hunt. That’s simple. That’s survival.

But the footsteps moved away, fading into the distance. Not hunting her. Just passing through.

She relaxed slightly. Kept moving northeast.

Tonight something happened. Something bad.

But I can’t remember what.

Don’t want to remember what.

Exhaustion. Blood-starvation. Days of being hunted. Normal stuff. I’ve already accepted what I have to. That’s enough.

Not thinking about fire or screaming or...

No.

She stumbled again. Caught herself. Kept walking because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant remembering and remembering meant...

Don’t. Just don’t. Get blood. Get underground. Deal with everything else later.

Later when my head is clear. Later when I’m not dying. Later when the static clears and I can think straight.

The smell of rotten eggs and burned creosote followed her no matter which way the wind shifted. The heat in her hands refused to fade. The gap in her memory sat there, and she set it aside, and it sat there again.

Not if I want to stay functional. Not if I want to survive.

She pushed the voice down. Focused on the lights. On the hunger. On the simple immediate needs that didn’t require examining the impossible.

The desert stretched ahead of her, marked by creosote and palo verde. But now the landscape felt changed. Like the desert had recalibrated around her in ways she couldn’t read.

Probably just the blood-starvation. Probably just exhaustion. Probably.

She kept walking. The lights got closer. Dawn pressure built behind her eyes. And somewhere in the darkness behind her, evidence smoldered. She didn’t look back.

But I’m not looking back. Can’t look back. Forward is all that matters. Blood. Shelter. Survival. The rest could wait for a later that might never come.

The terrain shifted under her feet from wild desert to the marginal spaces where civilization tried to take root. Fence posts and dirt roads threading between them, someone’s land, someone’s boundary, claimed even out here.

Naida’s coordination was degrading further. She caught herself listing left, overcorrected, nearly walked into a barbed wire fence she should’ve seen from twenty feet away. Her body lagged three steps behind her brain’s commands; visual information arrived fragmented and incomplete.

Fuck I’m not going to make it. Too far. Too weak. Can’t...

A new sensation cut through the haze, something that bypassed her body entirely.

She stopped. Tried to focus her vision on the horizon.

Lights. Big lights. Softer than the yellow-white of street lamps, warmer than the harsh security floods. Illumination that seemed to pulse with its own rhythm against the night sky.

Her body recoiled before her brain caught up.

The revulsion hit like physical nausea, deeper than fear. Cellular. A rejection so profound it felt like the thing she’d become was trying to rip itself free to escape whatever was generating that light.

WRONG. SACRED. DANGEROUS.

She veered away automatically, her stumbling path taking a hard turn east. Whatever that light was, her body wanted nothing to do with it. Needed to separate herself and...

Her enhanced vision focused through the haze. Made out shapes. A massive structure rising from the foothills. A cross. Stone, enormous, arms outstretched against the hillside, crowned with illumination that made her stomach turn.

The cross. Had to be. One of those roadside monuments or... bigger. Much bigger. Lit up visible for kilometers around.

The revulsion intensified. Her skin crawled like insects were burrowing underneath. Heat flashed through her palms, not fire, not yet, just warning tingles that said danger, danger, stay away. Her fangs extended involuntarily. The headache spiked into migraine territory.

The headache hit with jackhammer force. Why does that make me want to vomit? It’s just a cross. Just lights. People are religious, so what? Doesn’t mean...

Her body rejected the rationalization. The thing she’d become knew better. Sacred ground. Consecrated space. The opposite of everything she was now. Like matter touching antimatter. The way a vampire holds a crucifix. Her very existence screamed wrongness in proximity to that illuminated figure.

RUN. FLEE. IT BURNS IT BURNS GET AWAY.

So now I know what crosses are for. Apparently me. That’s useful information.

Her legs made the decision for her, east, fast, the cross shrinking behind her with every stumbling stride. She ran despite having no energy for it, pushing through the starvation because that cross required distance she couldn’t afford to close.

The movement triggered something. A fragment of memory trying to surface.

Candles. Safe house. Prayers in languages I didn’t understand. Crosses on the walls making my skin...

No. That didn’t happen. That was someone else’s memory. Some other girl’s experience. Not mine.

She kept running. Kilometers blurred past in darkness that felt both too fast and too slow. Her legs moved on autopilot while her brain lagged three seconds behind. Pavement. Dirt. More pavement. Fences jumped. Cattle guards crossed. Desert scrub tearing at her clothes.

Her vision went black for a second. Two seconds. She was still running but couldn’t see, just muscle memory and supernatural instinct keeping her from face-planting. When her sight returned she’d covered another hundred meters without conscious awareness.

Sound cut out entirely for thirty seconds. Just her footfalls vibrating through her skeleton in absolute silence. Then it slammed back, every cricket, every wind gust, overwhelming. Her brain couldn’t filter anymore.

The shrine’s glow finally disappeared behind hills and distance, but her body kept pushing east anyway.

How long have I been running? Minutes? Hours? Can’t tell. It was all fragments.

The terrain changed under her feet. More roads. More lights ahead, clustered where the town thickened. Different lights. Harsh and commercial, nothing like that warm sacred wrongness.

The fragment dissolved before it could achieve clarity. Better that way. Safer.

Dawn pressure continued building.

Maybe an hour, maybe more, maybe less. I need to feed and find shelter. Can do that. Have to do that. No other choice.

Her feet found pavement. Easier walking. Her coordination was shot enough that the flat surface actually helped. She listed less. Stumbled less. Made better time even though everything still swam at the edges.

The hunger was becoming everything now. The demon had stopped making demands. It had become her. Just hunger. Pure. Absolute. Rational thought burned away.

I need blood. Need it now. Need it more than I needed anything in my life including air when I was buried, including water in the desert, including abuela’s tres leches cake when I was eight years old and the world still made sense.

The comparison felt wrong. Like she was mixing things that shouldn’t be mixed. But her brain was too fucked to figure out why.

Almost there. Find someone alone. Feed fast. No witnesses. Clean kill.

The words felt mechanical. Instructions her body would follow even if her mind couldn’t quite hold onto why. Survival autopilot running the body while her mind lagged behind.

Movement in her peripheral vision. She spun, nearly fell, caught herself on a road sign that cut her palm. The sign indicated Bisbee - City Limits. The words like the pain registered delayed, like the signals were taking the long way through her nervous system.

The space was empty. Shadows moving in the wind. Creosote branches reaching toward nothing.

She was seeing things now. The haze of starvation trying to take over.

The Chevron station glowed like salvation half a mile ahead.

Get blood. Get underground. The rest later.

The mantra kept her moving. Kept her focused on immediate survival, away from the gaps in her memory, the smell of brimstone still faint on the wind, the heat that flashed through her palms when she thought too hard about...

About what?

Couldn’t remember.

Didn’t want to remember.

The gas station lights were close now. She could see the illuminated price signs. The glow of the convenience store windows. One vehicle at the pumps. Silver. The light caught the fluorescent tubes.

Blood. Shelter. Survive.

Simple.

Three words. Whatever happened back there required aircraft and fire suppressant. Three words is manageable.

She could do simple.

The Chevron station was right there now. Beacon of late-night capitalism in a desert full of nothing. One car. One person. One heartbeat she could almost hear from here.

YES. ALONE. PERFECT.

Her pace increased even though it made her coordination worse. Desperate urgency erased caution. She needed blood before dawn and before her rational thought collapsed entirely and she just became hunger with fangs.

The dirt road met pavement. Harder surface. Louder footsteps. She moved quieter, or tried to, but her body wasn’t following instructions anymore.

Almost there. Just a little further. Blood and shelter and survival. The rest could burn.

The thought triggered another flash of heat through her palms. She looked down, expecting... what? Fire? That was insane. She didn’t have fire. She burrowed. That was her thing.

Still clean. Just hands. Pale, pink residue coating them but underneath, clean.

She kept walking toward the lights while her mind continued constructing desperate alternatives to truths she couldn’t acknowledge. While her body moved on autopilot through starvation that should have killed her. The desert behind her held evidence her consciousness refused to examine, while dawn approached with lethal certainty.

There’s only ahead. Blood. Temporary safety. The fragile fiction that I’m still just a vampire learning to hunt. Not admitting what I did or what I became or what horrors my mind is actively re-repressing for the sake of functional survival.

The Chevron station materialized in harsh fluorescent detail. Empty parking lot except for the silver Challenger. One man at the pumps. Alone under the hard fluorescent wash. Vulnerable. Unaware.

Her enhanced hearing locked onto his heartbeat even through the haze of starvation. Steady. Calm. The rhythm of someone who’d never been prey.

Perfect.

Her fangs extended fully. The hunger took over.

Her awareness collapsed to a single point, the heartbeat thrumming beneath skin thirty yards away. Consequence and morality dissolved beneath the roar of need that transcended appetite. Feed or cease to exist as anything recognizable. Feed or become unrecognizable.

NOW NOW NOW FEED FEED FEED! FEED OR DIE!

She was moving before conscious thought could interfere, vampire speed closing the distance in a blur that her fragmented awareness couldn’t track. The fluorescent lights strobed overhead. The desert air tasted like copper and desperation.

The man’s face turned toward her, confusion replacing casual disinterest, his mouth forming words that echoed from underwater.

“Hey there,” he called out, voice gentle with paternal worry. “You okay, sweetheart? You need help or...”

Time lurched. Reality skipped.

She wasn’t standing twenty feet away anymore. She was pressed against him, and her teeth were in his neck, and warm copper flooded her mouth like the answer to a question she’d never known how to ask.

When did I... how did I...

The man made sounds that weren’t quite words, weren’t quite screams. His hands pushed weakly; she was stronger now, impossibly stronger, and his resistance crumbled like paper in a hurricane. She crushed him against the Challenger, the door handle digging into his spine. The blood flooding her mouth was all that mattered, the overwhelming relief of finally, finally feeding.

She drank desperately and clumsily, blood spilling down her chin, running between her fingers. Messy. Graceless. Desperate as drowning. She bit too hard, tore where she should have pierced, and still the relief that flooded through her was so intense it felt like salvation.

MORE. MORE. DRAIN IT ALL. TAKE EVERYTHING.

The demon drove her actions with single-minded purpose that bypassed every human consideration. Robert. The name floated up from somewhere, maybe his wallet, maybe the credit card scattered on the concrete. He became nothing more than a container for the sustenance she required. His struggling beneath her hands was just mechanical resistance to be overcome, his weakening heartbeat just a countdown to completion.

When the struggling stopped, when the pulse beneath her teeth faltered and ceased, when the warm flow became a trickle and then nothing, awareness snapped back like a rubber band released at maximum tension.

The gas pump auto-shutoff clicked with mechanical finality.

She found herself kneeling in cooling blood, staring down at what had once been a man who’d tried to help a lost girl and received death as payment.

His eyes were open and unseeing. The life that had animated them was gone, consumed, digested, made part of her. Gray hair matted with blood. His reading glasses sat askew on a face finished with sunrises. The silver Challenger’s keys still clutched in fingers that would never turn another ignition.

I killed him. Dios mío! I fucking killed him.

She scrambled backward, hands shaking, blood painting her palms and forearms like war paint. The man, Robert, according to his wallet scattered on the concrete, lay broken and still beneath the pitiless fluorescent lights. Somewhere in the distance, a security camera’s red light blinked with patient electronic witness to murder that defied every category of human crime.

“Fuck,” she whispered to the corpse, to the desert, to any deity keeping score. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Tears of blood traced dark paths down her cheeks, hot and useless and mocking. She knelt beside the spreading pool, trying to understand what she’d become, and failing.

I killed him. I jodido killed him. He was trying to help, and I...

The knowledge sat in her like caliche. Cold. Wrong weight. Robert had a daughter somewhere. Maybe grandkids. People who’d wonder why he never came home. She’d stolen all of that. Erased a human life for five minutes of desperate feeding.

The Chevron’s gasoline smell rose through the copper reek of blood, clean and ordinary and wrong. She’d missed it during the feeding. The hunger had narrowed everything to heartbeat and heat and nothing else. She could smell it now.

He called me sweetheart. Like I was someone worth saving. And I...

Every man wanted something. That was the rule, the one truth that had outlasted the trucks and the safe house and the grave, and it had always meant the same thing. Watch what they ask for, count what it costs, because help is the most expensive thing a man hands you. Robert had asked for nothing. He had pulled up to a gas pump, seen a girl bleeding out of the dark, and his only instinct had been to ask if she was okay. No angle. No price. The one man in her whole life who wanted nothing from her, and she had made him pay everything anyway.

The rule didn’t break tonight. That’s what I can’t get out of my head. It held. Help cost him everything, same as it always costs everything. I just wasn’t the one paying this time. I was the bill.

That was the shape of what she was now. Not the girl the price got charged to. The charge itself, walking, looking for the next open hand.

Dawn pressure slammed into her awareness like a physical blow.

The feeding had taken minutes. How many? Couldn’t tell, time was fucked. But the eastern horizon was already showing the first hint of color that meant lethal radiation approaching. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe less. Her supernatural instincts screamed warnings that bypassed conscious thought entirely.

Move. Have to move. Get underground or die for real.

Robert gets to be dead. I don’t. Not yet.

She lurched to her feet, blood-slick hands leaving prints on the Challenger’s door as she pushed herself up. Robert’s body sprawled beneath the fluorescent assault, already cooling. Evidence. Crime scene. Questions that would draw attention she couldn’t afford.

But dawn was coming and nothing else mattered.

Her feet carried her away from the Chevron, stumbling through sparse streets where scattered houses thinned into vacant land and creeping desert. Blood cooling on her hands, on her face, on her clothes. The taste of copper still coating her throat.

Behind her, the security camera continued its patient vigil. Seven minutes of footage. She didn’t look back.

But she couldn’t think about that. Could only think about finding earth, finding depth, finding darkness before the sun found her.

The thing inside her, sated now, no longer screaming, guided her movements with the same instinctive certainty that had driven the feeding. She moved. She dug. She burrowed. Didn’t think about any of it.

An empty lot appeared ahead, bordered by rusted chain-link and scattered with desert vegetation that had never been fully cleared. Caliche and decomposed granite, ground that gave under her hands. Deep enough. Safe enough.

She found herself digging, hands tearing through earth that yielded with wrong ease. Twelve feet. Fifteen. The caliche welcoming her like a womb, her grave, the only sanctuary that mattered when daylight approached with lethal certainty.

The dawn pressure intensified, building behind the eastern ridgeline. Minutes now. Maybe seconds.

She dove into the hole she’d created, pulling earth over herself with desperate urgency. Soil cascading across her blood-stained clothes, covering the evidence of what she’d done, burying the horror along with her body. Deeper. Darker. Until the weight of caliche pressed against her from all sides and the distant promise of sunrise couldn’t reach her.

Her last conscious thought before darkness claimed her was fragmented, incomplete, already dissolving at the edges as her mind began burying what it couldn’t process:

Robert’s dead but I’m still here I’m still me I didn’t lose myself completely I fed in time I’m still...

The earth closed over her and awareness dissolved into darkness, memory, and horror buried together.

There was a machinery to it, older than she was, older than the thing in the desert that had made her. The body knew how to put itself in the ground before the sun came. The mind knew the same trick. It had done this before, in the trucks, in the yellow room, taking the parts of a night that would not let her keep moving and packing dirt over them grain by grain until the surface went quiet and a girl could stand up in the morning and not scream. It was doing it now. Whatever had happened out there under the aircraft and the fire suppressant, whatever name had crossed the radio, whatever she had finally let herself know for the length of one burning night, the mind carried it down into the dark and pulled the caliche over it, and by the time the sun set again there would be only static where it had been. Not gone. Buried. The same as everything else she had survived by not remembering.

It took everything except the memory of Robert’s blood and the knowledge that she’d do it again if she had to.

If she got hungry enough.

If survival demanded it.

The caliche held her in darkness while above, the sun rose and painted the desert in colors that would have reduced her to ash and memory if she’d been caught in its light. But she was safe now, buried deep, fed and sheltered and protected by instincts she refused to acknowledge but couldn’t deny.

She slept the sleep of the dead in earth that had learned to welcome what she was.

And when she woke at sunset, she would remember just enough to function and forget just enough to survive the knowledge of what she’d become.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

The earth released her at sunset like a grave spitting out something it couldn’t digest. Naida pushed through twelve feet of caliche that flowed around her body, emerging into desert darkness with her senses already screaming warnings across enhanced perception that painted the tactical situation in perfect clarity.

Six heartbeats. Professional spacing and weapons discipline.

And one voice that made her hands start burning before her brain could catch up to what her body already knew.

“Noviecita, I know you’re out there.”

The endearment cut through survival instincts like a blade finding scar tissue. Her enhanced hearing mapped the perimeter, six men positioned around her limestone shelter. Coyotes operating with capture parameters because their merchandise still had value if properly recovered.

But all of that knowledge dissolved beneath the psychological impact of that single word spoken in that particular voice. Noviecita. Little girlfriend. He had said it so many times, in that safe house, in that bed, that her body had filed the word under the same heading as his hands, and it answered the word now the way he had trained it to. That was the obscene engineering of him. He had made his voice foreplay, wired the low patient register and the pet name and the gentleness laid over the threat straight to the response, so the cold part of her could only step back and watch the warm part go to work the instant he started talking. It had done this both times his voice reached her the night before. It did it now, with him close enough to smell.

And tonight there was the other heat alongside it, the one with no name yet, waking low in her palms and twined so tight to the first that she could not have said where the wanting stopped and the burning began. The same buried place fed them both. His voice was already foreplay. Her body just didn’t know yet that the climax it was building toward this time would be his.

No. Fuck no. Not him. Anyone but him.

“Come out, mija. We’re not here to harm you. We just want to talk, like old times.”

The tactical radio chatter had stopped completely, replaced by the intimate tone of someone who believed he understood exactly what kind of psychological pressure would make his target cooperate. Carlos had come personally because this wasn’t business anymore. It was about reclaiming what belonged to him. His best student. His noviecita. The one who got away.

But Carlos Mendoza had never factored vampire abilities into his recovery calculations.

Yellow wall. That’s all. Just yellow concrete at eye level.

The fragment hit her like a slap and disappeared just as fast, leaving her disoriented against the limestone ridge. Her hands burned hotter, heat spreading up her wrists without any conscious decision to make it happen.

“I know you’re scared, mija. I know you’re confused. That’s what happens when merchandise gets lost in the desert. But Carlos is here now. Carlos will take care of everything, just like before.”

Carlos. Just like they said. He, he taught me...

She couldn’t finish the thought. Her brain wouldn’t let her get close to those weeks, wouldn’t let her examine what happened in the safe house with the cheerful yellow walls and the Disney princess blankets. That happened to someone else. Some other girl. Not Naida.

The heat in her hands intensified.

“You killed some good men, noviecita. Men with families. Men who were just doing their jobs, trying to bring you home safe. But I understand. You’re acting out, defying me. But you have my attention now.”

His voice carried the same patient condescension she remembered from before. The same tone he’d used while explaining why submission was her only choice, why cooperation was survival, why learning to please customers was the difference between comfortable captivity and systematic destruction.

“Remember our special times together, mija? How patient I was with you? How gentle?”

Disney princesses. Faded stickers on the window. The girl, face down on the mattress, had counted them, screaming, trying to make it to one hundred because if she counted high enough maybe it would stop.

Wait. Those are the same stickers she counted when...

The fragment broke apart and Naida pressed harder against the limestone, breath coming fast even though she didn’t need to breathe anymore. The burn in her palms was building toward something she couldn’t name, couldn’t control, spreading like her blood was evaporating from the inside.

Kill him. Burn him. Make him scream like he made you.

“I brought your favorite candy, noviecita. Those little Mexican lollipops with chili powder you used to love. Remember? You’d ask so prettily when you wanted something sweet. ‘Por favor, Papi.’ You had such good manners when you tried.”

Chili powder. The taste hit my mouth like a memory made physical, except it wasn’t just chili powder, there was something else mixed in, something...

No. Don’t think about that. That happened to some other girl. Not her. Not Naida.

“I know you remember, mija. I can hear it in your breathing. You’re thinking about our time together, aren’t you? About all the lessons I taught you?”

Disinfectant smell mixed with sweat. The girl’s arm pinned down against the bed, his weight on her, no movement no matter how hard she tried. Fullness and pain and burning, and she had stared at cartoon princesses, screaming, biting, counting, counting.

That’s my arm. Those are my hands trying to push away...

No, no no that wasn’t me that was the merchandise that was the girl they were training I wasn’t there I left I...

Fire erupted from her palms in a sudden burst that scorched the limestone and sent waves of heat rolling through the desert air. The manifestation lasted only seconds before guttering out, but it left her shaking and weak and terrified because she didn’t know how to make it happen and didn’t know how to stop.

“There it is.” Carlos’s voice carried satisfaction rather than fear. “I knew you had something special in you, noviecita. That’s why I took such personal interest in your development. You were always meant for greatness.”

The radio crackled with nervous chatter from his team, but Carlos shut them down with a single word. Professional Coyote adjusting his recovery strategy based on new intelligence about the asset’s capabilities. He’d spent weeks educating her and applying correction procedures. Some little fire trick of hers wasn’t going to make him forfeit months of psychological conditioning.

“You think you’re dangerous now, mija? You think a few tricks make you something other than what you are?” His voice hardened slightly, losing some of the false gentleness. “I taught you what you are. I taught you your purpose. And I can help you remember if you’ve forgotten those lessons.”

He taught me. No. He taught the girl. The one on the mattress. Not me.

“You learned to be so grateful, noviecita. Remember? ‘Gracias, Papi’ after every lesson. You had such a sweet voice when you thanked me properly.”

Chili lollipop taste mixed with something else, something bitter, snot-like, hot, and wrong. His voice from above, “good girl,” and the girl saying “gracias, Papi” because that was what earned candy, what made lessons end, and she had been trying not to gag, trying to swallow.

I said that. My voice. I tasted that. I swallowed...

The heat in her palms exploded into full flame, supernatural fire pouring from her palms in waves that made the previous burst feel like a match compared to a furnace. Heat waves distorted the air as fire streamed through her fingers, responding to psychological triggers in ways that bypassed conscious control entirely.

“That’s it, mija. Let it out. Show Papi what you’ve learned. Show me how strong you’ve become.”

Show him? I can’t even stop it. The flames just keep coming and the memories won’t stop, his hands, fuck they’re all slamming together faster and I can’t...

“I was so proud of you, noviecita. My best student. You understood exactly what merchandise was supposed to do, how cargo was supposed to behave. You were special.”

Yellow walls. Disney princesses. Disinfectant, fullness, pain, burning. The bitter snot-like flavor mixed with mango and chili powder. His hands on her hips. His voice explaining her value. The girl on that bed had looked up at him, red-rimmed eyes, disheveled hair, saying gracias Papi with that empty defeated voice, trying to be good, trying to earn the candy, trying to make it stop.

That girl looks like me. That girl has my hair, my hands, my...

“You were my best student, noviecita. You understood exactly what you were for.”

And it all slammed together in perfect high-definition clarity.

Not the girl on the mattress.

Not merchandise being trained.

Not some dissociated victim I watched from safety.

ME.

It had been her body. Screaming, thrashing, biting the pillow until her teeth bled. Leaking fluids running down her thighs in thick globs.

Her mouth had said gracias Papi. Her throat had swallowed mango chili lollipop mixed with bitter wrongness while he explained her market value.

That was ME...

Her scream tore through the desert night as heat exploded from her palms, a dam breaking, every moment of dissociated trauma claiming her body all at once. The burning wound that was always hers finally recognized, and it poured out of her in waves of supernatural fire that turned the desert night into a furnace.

Fire roared through the creosote in torrents, streams of flame that incinerated everything within thirty feet. The manifestation transcended anything remotely human, power channeled through eighteen-year-old recognition into devastation that transformed the limestone ridge into an inferno visible from kilometers away.

Her scream cut through the roar of supernatural flames, not the helpless sound Carlos remembered from the safe house, but the sound of someone who had finally said it out loud.

That happened to ME. Not to merchandise. Not to some dissociated other girl. To ME. To Naida. My body. My rape. The violation he taught me to thank him for.

Oh fuck I can’t stop the fire. I can’t stop burning I can’t...

Carlos’s tactical radio crackled with panic as his men watched their target transform from escaped merchandise into something that belonged in nightmares. Professional Coyotes trained in human trafficking and border security had no protocols for dealing with teenage girls who manifested supernatural abilities.

“Base, we need extraction! ¡Ya! Repeat, requesting immediate...”

“Cállense! Hold positions!” Carlos’s voice carried absolute authority over radio channels. “It’s just pyrotechnics, phosphorus she picked up from the dead contractors. She’s still just a girl who needs to remember my training.”

But his voice had lost some of its confidence, and Naida could smell fear mixing with the smoke and burning creosote. He was approaching with the measured stride of someone who’d never failed to bring escaped girls back to productive service, but his heartbeat was faster now, his breathing shallow.

The fire continued pouring from her hands as she moved toward his voice, supernatural abilities feeding on the recognition she could no longer deny. Each step forward meant admitting more, admitting the weeks of systematic rape, admitting the psychological conditioning, admitting whose body he’d used and broken and trained for commercial exploitation. Hers.

“Noviecita, that’s enough. You’ve had your tantrum. Time to come home with Papi. Time to remember that you belong to me.”

I belong to him? Like I’m still merchandise. Like recognizing what he did to me doesn’t change the power dynamic.

But it did change things. She wasn’t dissociating anymore. She was present in her body, her body that had been violated and trained and broken, her body that was burning from the inside out, her body that was pouring supernatural fire across the desert because she’d finally admitted what happened to her.

“I remember everything.” The words cut through flame-roar with supernatural clarity. “I remember the yellow walls. I remember the Disney princess blankets. I remember how you taught me to say gracias, Papi after every fucking lesson.”

The profanity felt deliberate now, not defensive armor but psychological warfare against someone who’d taught her that good girls didn’t use bad words unless they were being punished for other infractions.

“I remember the lollipops. I remember the taste of chili powder and mango mixed with...” She couldn’t finish. Couldn’t say it out loud. But the fire intensified, feeding on the memory she’d finally claimed as her own.

Carlos raised his rifle, but the weapon’s metal components were already warping from supernatural heat. He recovered into a firing stance and squeezed the trigger anyway, the way a man holds onto a script when the room has stopped following it.

“You’re sick, noviecita. This is, this is desert madness. Come with Papi. Let me help you remember who you really...”

“I remember who I really am!” Fire poured from her hands in torrents. “I’m the girl you raped for three weeks! I’m the merchandise you trained! I’m Naida and you made me say I was grateful while you, while you...”

The flames roared higher as recognition completed, as every dissociative barrier collapsed beneath her admitted truth.

That was ME. My body. My rape. My violation. MINE.

She was moving with vampire speed now, launching herself through walls of her own fire toward the voice that had whispered instructions about submission in safe house darkness. The flames followed her trajectory, turning the desert into a furnace.

The impact sent them both tumbling across superheated limestone, her supernatural strength overwhelming his tactical training as fire spilled from her hands without conscious direction. Carlos’s rifle clattered away into darkness while his radio crackled with increasingly desperate extraction requests from team members who’d watched their operation transform from routine recovery into supernatural warfare.

“Noviecita, stop! You don’t understand what you’re doing! I was protecting you! Training you! Preparing you for...”

“¡Me violaste, cabrón!” The words tore out of her with the fire, half-Spanish, half-English. “You RAPED me and then made me thank you for it! You raped me and gave me candy! You raped me and called it TRAINING!”

Saying it out loud, admitting it, claiming it, owning it, made the fire explode with renewed intensity. Heat poured from her in waves that melted metal and turned limestone to slag, supernatural abilities feeding on finally-acknowledged trauma until fire became physical manifestation of every violation she’d dissociated from.

Carlos’s screams rose against the roar of the flames as fire reached every piece of exposed flesh. But Naida couldn’t stop, couldn’t control it, because the fire came from THAT place, her fire, her body weaponizing what they’d done to her.

And the body he had built answered the only way he had ever taught it to. It did not care that the cues had inverted, that the screaming was his now, the helplessness his now. The wiring he had soldered into her ran the same program it always ran when he was the one making those sounds happen, and it ran it at his writhing, at the wet ruin of his voice coming apart in the heat, and carried her over an edge she had not chosen and could not stop any more than she could stop the fire it was twinned to. She felt it from the cold place she watched everything from, felt her dead body finish on his screams the way he had trained it to finish, and understood with flat clarity that this was the last thing he would ever take from her, and that he was taking it while he burned.

Even now. Even killing you. The thing you made still works. That’s the last lesson, isn’t it. That’s what I carry out of here instead of you.

I’m burning him and I’m burning me and I can’t pull it back I can’t STOP...

Fire consumed everything in its reach, his tactical gear, his radio equipment, his flesh. His screams lasted longer than they should have, professional Coyote learning exactly what kind of education his best student had internalized during her time in the grave.

And through it all, Naida felt herself weakening. The fire wasn’t just consuming Carlos, it was consuming her blood reserves at a frightening rate, draining strength with every wave of supernatural flame. Her body was burning itself out from the inside, using her as fuel for destruction she couldn’t control.

When the screaming finally stopped, nothing remained of Carlos Mendoza except ash scattered across glass that had once been limestone and sand. The desert wind picked up his remains and distributed them across thorny wasteland while Naida collapsed to her knees in the center of devastation that extended in perfect circles around her position.

Weak. Spent. Hollow.

The fire guttered out, leaving her shaking in the sudden darkness. Her hands were clean, no blood, no burns, but she felt violated all over again because the fire had come from THAT place. The place where they’d raped her. The wound they’d carved into her soul.

She’d killed him by admitting what he’d done to her. By finally claiming her own violation. By recognizing that it was her body on that mattress, her voice saying gracias Papi, her mouth tasting chili powder and bitter wrongness.

That was me. That happened to me. I can’t pretend it happened to someone else anymore. I can’t dissociate from my own rape.

The fire made me admit it. And admitting it meant experiencing it all over again.

In the distance, extraction helicopters approached, but they were arriving to collect bodies rather than cargo. The radio chatter had stopped. The hunting operation had collapsed into emergency evacuation as merchandise demonstrated capabilities that exceeded all operational parameters.

Naida tried to stand and nearly fell. Her blood reserves were devastated, burned away in the inferno she couldn’t control. She’d fed well before sunset, two solid kills, full strength, but the fire had consumed it all in minutes. Left her weak and spent and barely able to move.

The helicopters’ searchlights swept across the desert, painting the scene of Carlos’s death in harsh white light. Glass craters. Ash patterns. And one teenage girl kneeling in the center of destruction, too weak to run, too devastated to care.

She’d won. Carlos was dead. The man who’d raped her was nothing more than ash in the wind.

But victory tasted like violation because she’d had to claim her own rape to manifest the fire. Had to admit it happened to her. Had to stop dissociating and own the truth.

That was MY body. MY violation. MY trauma.

And using that wound as a weapon meant reopening it, living through every minute of it again while the fire poured out.

I killed him but I can’t ever do that again. I can’t. Even if it saves my life I can’t feel that again I CAN’T...

The helicopters were getting closer. She needed to move, needed to burrow, needed to get underground before they arrived with fresh tactical teams and heavier weapons.

But she could barely stand. The fire had taken everything, her blood, her strength, her psychological defenses. Left her shaking in the desert darkness while Carlos’s ash blew away on the wind.

She crawled toward the arroyo system on hands and knees, too weak to walk, too devastated to process what had just happened. The helicopters’ searchlights swept closer, but the caliche would hide her if she could just reach it before they did.

The earth swallowed her whole twelve feet down.

Her last coherent thought before day-sleep took her was already fragmenting at the edges, her mind beginning to construct protective distance from memories too terrible to carry:

Maybe it didn’t happen like that. Maybe I imagined the worst parts. Maybe...

The caliche closed over her and consciousness fled, taking the fire’s clarity with it.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

The radio crackled with increasingly desperate coordination as the contractors tried to make sense of the silence where Lobo-Seis’s voice should have been, the kind of silence that turned trained operators back into the boys they had been before someone taught them protocol, the kind of silence that ate confidence the way the desert ate water. Naida pressed herself against the boulder’s shadow, blood from Lobo-Seis’s feeding still warm on her chin where the night air had not yet stolen the heat from it, the iron taste of him still folded under her tongue like a coin she hadn’t decided whether to spend or save, and listened to professional hunters realize their tactical situation had deteriorated beyond recovery parameters.

“Lobo-Seis, report status. Lobo-Seis, acknowledge.”

They’re scared now. Good. They should be.

“Command, this is Lima-Three. Lobo-Seis is not responding on any frequency. Last known position was sector nine, grid four-seven-alpha. Permission to investigate requested.”

“Negative, Lima-Three. Maintain your current position. All units switch to defensive posture and await backup protocols.”

Chase them. Kill them all before they scatter.

The urgency made sense for once. If the Coyotes bunched up together, she’d have to go through all of them at once. But spread out like this? She could eliminate them one by one.

Her enhanced hearing tracked four heartbeats across the desert, fast but steady, trying to hold formation. They’d positioned themselves to cover each other, which would have worked great against another human.

Too bad she wasn’t human anymore.

They were operating on outdated intelligence.

“Lima-Four, I’ve got movement in the arroyo system. Something’s... Christ, did you see that?”

“See what?” his partner asked.

“Target just fucking vanished into solid rock. One second she’s there, next second the stone swallows her like water.”

“Impossible. Check your NVGs, you’re seeing ghosts.”

The radio frequencies erupted with overlapping transmissions as trained skepticism collided with witnessed impossibility. Naida smiled against the darkness, tasting copper and vindication in equal measure. Let them understand what they were hunting. Let the fear season their blood before she took it.

Cabrones finally seeing what I can do. Still think I’m cargo? Still think you can process me like merchandise?

She pressed both palms against the limestone and sank into the stone, letting it swallow her whole. The earth closed around her like a grave, warm and dark and safe. She couldn’t move while merged, the caliche held her in place twelve feet down, but sound still reached her. Boot strikes passed directly overhead. Radio chatter drifted through the rock as they coordinated their search pattern, never realizing their target was buried right beneath them.

The organization was escalating. More resources, better equipment. Helicopter rotors approached from the south, louder every minute, their sound cutting through the desert wind that had been pushing palo verde branches against each other all night.

They had stopped treating this like routine cargo recovery. It was a supernatural crisis now.

She waited until Lima-Three’s footsteps moved past, then emerged thirty yards behind his position. He never heard her rise from the desert floor. The contractor crouched behind a natural fortification of stacked limestone, attention focused outward on expected threat vectors, radio pressed against his ear as he coordinated with teammates scattered across the killing ground.

He was looking the wrong direction entirely.

“Command, we need immediate extraction. Target demonstrates capabilities that exceed...”

Naida’s hand closed over his mouth with crushing force, vampire strength rendering every drill obsolete before he could complete the transmission. His rifle clattered against stone as she dragged him backward into the shadows, vampire speed making his desperate struggles feel like slow-motion theater performed underwater.

Why waste it?

Don’t need it. Lobo-Seis topped me off. But... why leave good blood lying around?

His neck broke with a wet crack that sent his body twitching.

Not like Lobo-Seis. No rage this time. Just... work.

Clean. Efficient. Professional.

And she watched herself do it from the cold half-step back she lived behind now, the place she’d run the whole desert from, narrating her own hands like a girl describing a dream that belonged to someone else. The eighteen-year-old who used to keep this body would have thrown up. The thing wearing it took inventory.

This is the part that’s supposed to feel like something. It feels like restocking.

Maybe that was allowed. Maybe you didn’t get to have opinions about the only thing still keeping you on your feet. But she’d seen what the men became when killing was the last thing that answered when they called, the coyotes who’d quit pretending the cargo was anything but a way to spend an afternoon. Power with nothing behind it but appetite. Hers had somewhere to point. A sunset, and a man inside it. That was the whole difference, and she meant to keep it.

Her fangs extended as she lowered herself to his throat, but this was deliberate refueling, not the desperate consumption from Lobo-Seis: sipping from the corpse with controlled efficiency. The blood carried residual heat and the chemical signature of adrenaline, and she took only what the moment offered.

Smart hunting means not passing up easy calories. Desert survival 101.

When she pulled away after perhaps thirty seconds, the body retained most of its blood. She had spent minutes on it. The long stretches were what got hunters killed.

Three targets remained. She could eliminate them all if she moved efficiently, but any delay or complication would leave survivors to report her capabilities to leadership that would deploy countermeasures accordingly.

Rápido, pendeja. Hunt fast or let them escape to tell Carlos exactly what his merchandise became.

“Lima-Three, respond. Lima-Four, do you have visual on Lima-Three’s position?”

“Negative, Command. Last transmission cut off mid-sentence. Something’s wrong.”

The radio frequencies carried sounds of professional discipline cracking under supernatural pressure. These weren’t cartel foot soldiers; these were military contractors trained to hunt humans. Vampires who could vanish into stone didn’t exist in their playbook.

Fear made prey stupid. Naida intended to exploit that.

She located Lima-Four by dead-still listening. His heart was racing, panic bleeding through his radio voice. The contractor had abandoned his defensive position and was moving through creosote toward higher ground, looking for a better vantage point.

He’d forgotten she didn’t attack from expected directions.

Naida emerged from the caliche directly beneath his path, rising from the desert floor as he passed overhead. Her hand closed around his ankle with supernatural strength, yanking him off balance before he could process where the attack came from. He hit the ground hard, rifle skittering away across loose stone while she dragged him into the arroyo with inhuman speed that made his struggles futile.

“Target acquired! Target has...”

She crushed his radio with her free hand, plastic and electronics shattering like paper. The contractor went for his sidearm fast, training kicking in despite the chaos, but vampire reflexes made human speed look like slow motion.

Naida caught his wrist mid-draw and twisted, bone separating from socket with wet precision. His scream was raw agony. Every remaining hunter would hear exactly where he was: and what was happening to him.

Take it.

All that burrowing and fighting burned calories.

Yeah, yeah, fine. I’m getting hungry anyway.

Naida’s fangs found his throat with practiced efficiency. She fed with controlled purpose, measured sips, refueling and nothing more. The taste exploded across her tongue, and she maintained enough discipline to stop while she still wanted more.

Take what I need. Leave the rest. Professional hunting, not massacre.

Kill more when not starving.

When she pulled away, Lima-Four’s corpse still had plenty of blood left. Wasteful by some standards, but she’d rather save time for hunting than spend it draining corpses dry.

The feeding topped off what the night’s work had burned. She wasn’t desperate anymore, wasn’t running on fumes. The difference showed: her hands steady, her thinking clear, her speed smooth and unhurried.

Desperation made hunters sloppy. Confidence made them deadly.

“All remaining units, consolidated defensive position at rally point alpha. Repeat, fall back to rally point alpha for coordinated extraction. Target has eliminated at least three operators and demonstrates supernatural capabilities. This is now a withdrawal under contact situation.”

Running. Good. Makes the hunting easier when prey abandons defensive positions.

She’d fed twice tonight, quick refueling not desperate gorging, and the difference was obvious. Her speed felt smoother, burrowing came easier, her head stayed clear, hunger quiet for once.

This was what it felt like to hunt at full strength. That was new.

Two more. Kill them both. Make them understand.

The voice inside wanted them all dead, not because she was starving, but because they’d dared to hunt her.

Two heartbeats converged toward the rally point. The last two contractors were falling back together, covering each other as they moved. Smart tactics against a human opponent.

She wasn’t human.

Naida tracked them by sound alone: fast heartbeats, controlled breathing. She could close the distance in seconds, take them both out before they reached the rally point where extraction helicopters waited.

But dawn was coming. The sky was getting lighter, that pre-sunrise gray that meant she had minutes, maybe less. Her body knew what sunlight meant: total annihilation, ash, and nothing left behind.

Time’s running out. Kill them both or let them go and burrow before the sun turns me into fucking charcoal.

The tactical mathematics shifted as helicopter rotors grew louder from the south, close now, immediate mechanical thunder that put extraction minutes away. If she pursued the remaining targets, she might complete the elimination before dawn forced her underground. Or she might get caught in the open when sunrise arrived, trading tactical victory for true death.

Kill them anyway. Complete the hunt. Leave no witnesses.

But the math didn’t work. Dawn was coming, and chasing two retreating targets across open desert meant risking exposure when the sun rose. She’d fed well tonight, Lima-Three and Lima-Four keeping her strong, and the smart choice was saving that strength for tomorrow night’s fight with Carlos, banking it for when it counted.

She turned away from the retreating heartbeats and moved through the creosote toward the arroyo system where softer caliche would welcome her body during daylight dormancy. The brittlebush along the bank had gone silver in the pre-dawn gray, every branch motionless now that the wind had died. The decision left a bitter taste, an incomplete victory, but survival meant choosing which battles to fight.

Four dead contractors. Two survivors to report to Carlos Mendoza.

“Command, this is Lima-Two. We’ve reached rally point alpha. Everyone else is gone, Lobo-Seis included. It’s just us. Request immediate extraction before we join them.”

“Roger, Lima-Two. Extraction inbound, ETA three minutes. Hold position and maintain defensive perimeter.”

Let them run. Let them tell Carlos exactly what I became while buried in the desert he chose for disposal.

She pressed against the arroyo bank and let the earth swallow her whole, caliche flowing around her body like warm honey as she sank deeper, every grain rearranging itself around her shape as if it had been waiting for someone to figure out the trick of it, as if the desert had carried this option in its inventory for centuries while no one bothered to ask. It still felt weird as hell, the way swimming through gravel ought to feel and somehow didn’t, how the dirt knew her now like the boulder shadows knew her, like the smell of creosote knew her after two nights of running through it. But she was getting used to it. The rock would keep her safe from the sun, and that was a sentence she had never expected to think in any version of her life, the desert and the dawn for once on the same side of her, no longer stacked against her with the rest of the world.

The last thing she heard before everything went dark was the radio chatter.

“Command, this is Extraction-One. We’re collecting Lima-Two and Lima-Seven. What’s our next deployment protocol?”

The answer came in Spanish, a voice the contractors hadn’t heard before. Quieter than the jefe’s. Colder. A man who stood close enough to Don Carlos to speak in his place.

“Ya no es asunto de ustedes. Regresen a base y no toquen nada.” A pause. “El patrón baja al atardecer. La quiere viva, entera, y la quiere para él solo. Lo demás no les incumbe.”

Carlos. He came himself this time. Good. Saves me the trouble of hunting him down in Nogales.

That was the cold part talking, the part that had run the whole night from a half-step behind her own eyes. The rest of her heard la quiere para él solo and went to work without consulting her, the way it had the first time his voice crossed the radio tonight, and would every time his voice found her from now on, reliable as the dawn currently packing her into the ground. Twelve feet of caliche held her arms at her sides and her knees where they’d folded and would not give her back so much as an inch to flinch with. So the heat had nowhere to go. It climbed through a corpse that could not shift, could not clench, could not even close itself against the having of it, and stayed, and waited, as she was about to wait, the two of them shut in the same dark together for the length of a desert day.

He is not here. He is a dead man’s radio and a sunset away and not here, and my own body did not get the memo.

The smell came up as it always did, the one her mind had bricked over and her body had kept the key to. Mango and chili powder, gone sharp and wrong. And behind it, because there was always something behind it, a wall painted a cheerful yellow she knew was there without looking. The first time, it had ambushed her. Now she knew its name before it arrived, and it arrived anyway, on schedule, indifferent to being recognized.

She had spent her whole mortal life learning the shape of the thing without the words for it. Boys did her homework for a kiss on the cheek. The coyote’s son drove her north for a debt she never agreed to owe. Carlos had handed her a better life and then itemized it. Every kindness was an invoice with the total left blank until you’d already taken delivery, and the lesson was so deep in her now that her dead flesh footed the bill before her mind could read the line.

That’s the whole trick of him. He never took anything. He gave, and gave, and made the giving the debt.

Personal handling. She knew exactly what it meant, knew it in the part of her that obeyed, the part her mind had no say over. Her brain had walled off the specifics of those weeks. Her body had kept every page, and it was reading her one now, here, in the grave, where she could not get up and walk away from it.

He still thinks he owns this. And the piece of me I’ll burn to ash before I say it out loud is the piece that hasn’t finished disagreeing.

Tomorrow night he’d find out some students learned too well. Come nightfall, the body that answered to him would answer to her, and whatever was banked in the dark behind that bricked-over smell, whatever had no name yet and ran hot, she’d let him be the one to find out she’d stopped keeping it locked.

The caliche sealed over her, dense and lightless, while the sky above brightened and mattered not at all. She’d fed twice tonight, clean and controlled, and she could feel the difference. Strong. Clear-headed. Ready. Tomorrow night Carlos would come. She’d be waiting at full strength, ready for him this time. The smart choice was resting now, letting her body process the blood while she slept, so when sunset came she’d be exactly what he never expected. Apex predator. Not merchandise.

Her last thought before darkness took her was fire. Not anger-fire or revenge-fire, but something else, something with its own pulse and its own appetite, banked the way a coal banks under ash through a long cold night, waiting in the space where her worst memories lived because that was where it had always lived, fed by whatever she would not yet look at directly. It waited there still, and the space was bigger than she wanted to admit, lined with cheerful yellow walls she could feel without seeing, walls that her mind would not open the door to but that the fire knew its way around without needing her permission.

Carlos wanted to handle her personally.

Fine. Let him try.

The desert swallowed her whole. The sun rose over terrain marked by four corpses and the retreat of two survivors who’d have to explain the impossible to their bosses.

In twelve hours the specialist would arrive. He’d learn what his merchandise had become.

And somewhere deep in the caliche, buried twelve feet down where no equipment could find her, the desert closing over her with the slow inevitability of tide returning to a stone it had carved a thousand times before, where no helicopter sensor could parse the difference between her body and the limestone matrix it slept inside, Naida’s body waited for sunset, dreamless and heavy, the long mineral patience of the earth lending itself to an eighteen-year-old corpse that had finally found a bed nothing alive could pry her out of.

Carlos had taught her plenty during those weeks. Tomorrow night, she’d show him how well his lessons had stuck.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

The stolen radio whispered promises through Naida’s earbud as she pressed against the rocky outcropping twenty feet above the desert floor. Below, flashlight beams swept through creosote and palo verde while professional voices crackled through intercepted communications.

“Sector seven clear. Moving to eight.”

“Copy.”

A different voice cut onto the net then, and it wasn’t tactical. Slower. Unhurried, the voice of a man who didn’t run the grid himself because other men ran it for him.

“La quieren viva. Viva y entera.” A pause, and the contempt cut through even thinned by the cheap speaker. “Y si otro pendejo se deja matar por una chamaca, ni se molesten en mandar el cuerpo. Don Carlos no paga por cadáveres. El que la dañe responde conmigo.”

Carlos.

His name on the radio made her stomach clench. Carlos Mendoza. Still hunting her. Still claiming ownership.

Her body answered before she could stop it, and the worst part was that she felt it answer from somewhere outside the answering, the same cold half-step back she watched everything from now. Heat climbed her face. Stolen blood went where blood had no business going in a corpse, and her breath came short and fast though she had nothing left to breathe for, and when she tried to press her thighs together they drifted apart instead, slow, certain, like her body had filed the request and declined it.

No. Stop. This is not... fuck, not now...

The memories stayed locked where her mind had buried them, but her body had kept its own copy. Diesel and stale smoke. Mango and chili powder gone sharp and wrong. The patient voice telling her how grateful she should be for the lessons.

She could feel the damp in her jeans, and that was the part she could not get past: she was dead, and her dead body had produced it anyway, on cue, at the sound of him, because somewhere under the vampire and under the grave the training ran straight to the root of her. Not his anymore. Not hers either. A foundation poured before she had any say in the house. And the cold part of her stood over it and watched the warm part obey a man she would burn to ash if she could reach him, and could not find the switch that shut it off.

Jodido cabrón still thinks he owns me. And my fucking body agrees with him.

Rip it out of him.

Yeah yeah, el demonio. He’s already on the list.

And they want me alive. Some jefe just put his own men on notice, don’t damage the merchandise. Not protection. A price tag. They have to be careful with me. I don’t have to be careful with them.

Last night’s body count reached five full teams. Her hearing traced heartbeats from hundreds of yards away. Speed turned their formations into slow-motion theater. Burrowing into stone offered perfect concealment.

Two nights in, the desert had stopped being a place she was crossing and become a thing she lived inside of, every dry wash and limestone shelf and creosote stand laid into her head like rooms in a house she had always owned, the heartbeats of the men hunting her hung across that map like lamps left burning in far windows, and she moved through all of it without deciding to, the way water moves through ground it has spent ten thousand years learning.

“Base, aquí Lobo-Seis. Tenemos un problema en el sector nueve. Estuvo aquí, huellas frescas, vegetación pisada, y luego nada. No hay salida, no hay rastro.”

“¿Cómo que nada, Lobo-Seis?” the base answered.

“Desapareció, jefe. Las huellas llegan a la roca y se acaban. O tiene entrenamiento serio o no sabemos de qué es capaz. Las dos cosas, seguro.”

Estúpidos. Guns don’t work on dead girls.

The radio’s battery indicator flickered once, twice, then died.

The silence hit like a sledgehammer. No more position updates, tactical chatter, enemy communications, nothing. The constant stream that had maintained her three-step advantage throughout the night simply vanished.

¡No, no, jodido cosa!

Panic fluttered beneath her ribs as she pressed the power button repeatedly, tapped the battery compartment, adjusted the antenna. The device remained cold and lifeless.

She needed that intelligence. Without intercepted communications, she was operating blind against coordinated opposition with night vision, thermal imaging, and radios that actually worked.

Maybe different frequency. Check battery connections. Find alternate channel.

Drop the box. Listen.

Cállate, el demonio. I’ve got this.

Wood splintered somewhere below.

Naida froze, fingers still fumbling with the dead radio, her entire consciousness locked on the technological failure. The sharp crack of breaking wood barely penetrated her fixated attention.

Additional movement whispered through brush. Closer. Tactical boots on loose stone, controlled breathing, fabric brushing against thorny vegetation.

¡Qué pendeja!

The realization crystallized a heartbeat too late.

Naida shoved the useless radio into her jacket. Pressed both palms flat against limestone.

Cold. Grained. Dust on her palms.

The stone recognized her. She could feel the familiar give beginning, solid matter learning to part around her, the way the rock would cool and close and accept her weight if she let it. Her mind was still half on the dead radio. That was the mistake.

Thirty feet below and slightly left, a figure in desert camouflage emerged from behind a boulder, assault rifle raised. Professional posture, textbook sight alignment, trigger finger positioned with disciplined precision.

He’d been waiting. Watching her known hiding location while she’d been absorbed in technological troubleshooting.

Their eyes met.

For one frozen heartbeat, predator and hunter stared at each other. Naida watched recognition flicker across the man’s weathered face, not just target identification, but genuine comprehension. A teenage girl dissolving into solid rock.

She saw him make the split-second calculation: immediate engagement versus tactical extraction. The rifle barrel tracked toward her position with mechanical precision.

Hijo de puta actually found me.

The muzzle flash lit up the canyon.

“¡Ah, fuck! ¡Jodido cabrón! Fucking, ¡Ay, Dios!”

Agony exploded across her left shoulder as the round tore through flesh, impact force spinning her halfway around and disrupting her attempt to dissolve into stone. The bullet slammed her back against limestone while blood immediately soaked through her jacket.

She’d been half-dissolved when it hit. Stone already accepting her hands, her weight. The impact knocked her back into solid flesh like a trapdoor closing. Her own blood. That was a new smell: copper and cold mineral and something darker underneath, the reek of her dead blood spending itself too fast, the healing burning through reserves she couldn’t spare to close what the round had torn open. She hadn’t smelled her own blood before. She’d been moving too fast to bleed.

The wound burned through more than skin; it cauterized her newfound sense of power. Her senses snapped tight in response: the creosote smell sharpened to something medicinal and dry, the distant radio chatter pressed closer, the temperature differential between cool night air and the wet heat of the wound registering with an exactness that was almost clinical. Injury, apparently, was a kind of focus. Two nights of flawless execution had constructed a sense of untouchable superiority. The bullet proved otherwise, punching through like she was normal flesh vulnerable to conventional violence. For two nights she had moved through this country like a rumor of herself, untouchable, the men and their rifles and their training reduced to slow soft theater, and somewhere in all of it she had let herself forget the first thing the grave should have taught her, that she was not a god out here but a dead girl with advantages, that the same earth that swallowed her and the same speed that saved her did precisely nothing about a piece of lead moving faster than her certainty, and the hole in her shoulder was the desert writing that down in a place she could not help but read.

Jodido pendeja, got so caught up in the radio bullshit I forgot how to be what I am. Thinking like prey instead of predator.

Worse than the trauma was the metabolic catastrophe. She could feel precious blood reserves rushing toward the wound site, resources that had required controlled killing now burning away in desperate attempts to rebuild what the round had demolished. Healing triggered ravenous hunger that made her stomach clench and her sight snap into lethal precision.

“La tengo. Sector nueve, cuadrícula cuatro-siete-alfa. Herida pero se mueve. Necesito apoyo para sacarla, ¡ya!”

We’ll see about that, cabrón.

Naida pushed away from the limestone face, shoulder screaming as she forced movement through damaged muscle. The wound burned with intensity that transcended physical damage, but she couldn’t process the psychological violation right now.

Move, pendeja. You’re blown, you’re bleeding, and they know exactly where you are.

She pressed her right hand against the bleeding shoulder, fingers coming away slick with her own cold blood, already the temperature of the desert it dripped into. Something stirred under the pain and rage, hungry and attentive.

Hurt. Make pay. Feed

¿Want to play hunter and prey? Fine. Let’s see how good you are when you become the hunted.

Naida looked down at the Coyote who’d shot her, still transmitting updates while scanning for additional targets.

Hunt. Kill. Drain.

Her shoulder screamed. Her teeth ached. The instinct pressed: retreating after being wounded would establish dangerous precedent, teaching these humans that injuring her created opportunities instead of consequences.

...fine. El demonio called it. Good for el demonio.

She could feel something settle in her gut. Smug.

Make them understand what follows

The shoulder wound sealed itself, burning through blood to repair damage that would have required surgery and months of recovery for humans. Pain dissolved as predator reflexes engaged, enhanced perception rendering the landscape in perfect detail.

She’d thought she was angry before, the two cold methodical nights of it, killing the men who wouldn’t take the hint. The bullet hadn’t added to that. It had cleared it, the way a slap clears a fogged head, until what was left was simple and very sharp. She wasn’t angrier. She was decided.

A la verga todos estos hijueputas. Time to stop playing victim. Time to be the monster.

Naida launched herself from the rocky ledge, twenty feet of vertical drop becoming controlled descent that positioned her directly behind the reporting Coyote before his transmission finished. Enhanced reflexes made his trained response seem slow and clumsy.

He started to pivot, started to raise his weapon, started to call warning. Professional reactions that might have preserved his life against human opponents.

She slammed into him with full weight, driving him face-first into the dirt. His radio tumbled away, transmission cutting off mid-syllable as she pinned him down with one hand between his shoulder blades.

“Me disparaste. SHOT. ME. ¿Estás loco, hijo de puta?”

Ten kills last night. Zero feeding.

She’d been managing it through motion. The hunt kept hunger useful, pointed at something that mattered. Stop moving and it became something else. She’d felt it building for hours, coiled tight behind the radio intercepts and the tactical positioning and the killing that didn’t count as feeding. Then the bullet hit. The leash slipped.

The wound burning through what little reserves she had left. Her hands had been shaking before he shot her, teeth aching, every thought she had narrowing to a single starving point.

“You take my blood, cabrón? I take all of yours.”

Time to put some fuel in the tank.

Her fangs extended with violent urgency, tearing through gums that had kept them hidden. She didn’t lower herself carefully to his throat like some fucking movie vampire. She fell on him like a starving animal, teeth punching through carotid artery with zero finesse.

Feed.

Hot blood flooded her mouth in arterial pulses that matched his dying heartbeat. The taste exploded across her senses: copper and salt and fear and the particular chemical signature of a man who’d realized too late that he was prey. She swallowed convulsively, gulping down life itself.

Jodido cabrón. Thought I was merchandise. Thought I was cargo.

She bit deeper, tearing flesh instead of sealing the wound cleanly. Rage overrode the instinct for neat feeding. Let him feel it. Let him understand what happened when you treated people like inventory.

His body jerked weakly beneath her as she drained him, hands scrabbling at her shoulders with diminishing strength. She grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the ground, never breaking the seal between her mouth and his torn throat.

The wound in her shoulder began healing properly now, tissue knitting itself back together with supernatural efficiency fueled by fresh blood. The hunger just... stopped.

But she didn’t stop feeding.

She kept drinking past the point of necessity, past the point where his heart stopped beating and arterial pressure dropped to nothing. Kept tearing at the ruined throat until she was sucking on dead flesh, trying to extract every last drop from cooling meat.

When she finally pulled away, blood covered her face. Chin. Jacket. Hands.

Lobo-Seis stared up at nothing with glassy eyes, his neck a ruined mess that would make identification difficult. She’d fed like a fucking animal: no control, no finesse, no mercy.

She removed the battery from Lobo-Seis’s radio with blood-slick fingers and replaced the dead one in her stolen radio. It crackled to life.

Más. There are more of them out there.

Her enhanced hearing picked up distant voices calling for Lobo-Seis’s status report, communications growing increasingly urgent as their teammate’s radio went permanently silent.

Let them all come. Time for the real hunting to begin.

Naida dragged her hand across her bloody mouth. Five more out there, spread across terrain she knew better than they ever would, each of them carrying weapons that could hurt her and not one that could end her.

She hadn’t decided anything. It was more like something correcting itself, a misalignment she’d been compensating for since the grave finally clicking into place, the way a dislocated shoulder slots back when the body gets tired of holding a position it was never built to hold. Two nights she’d run the same diagnostic her mortal body had run for eighteen years, the one that asked what the people watching would think and what the people in charge would accept. It had nothing left to optimize for. The people watching were dead. The people in charge had sent the man who used to own her. She reached back for the quieter girl with the quieter problems, and there was no one there to reach.

They reminded me what I am. Time I remind them.

The radio guided her toward the next heartbeat, toward men who knew something had gone wrong and had no idea how completely. The wounded girl who’d spent two nights hiding was done hiding. Tonight the desert would find out what escaped cargo turned into when it stopped running.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

Sunset woke her.

The earth let her go the way a tide returns a swimmer it has temporarily decided to keep, dirt flowing around her like she was swimming up through it instead of buried, every grain politely rearranging itself out of her path with a patience nothing alive had ever shown her. Naida broke surface in the wash between two ridges, shaking off soil that smoothed itself back to normal behind her, the desert closing the door of her day-bed without leaving any sign of which door it had been or who had used it. No trace she’d been there at all, no scent line, no settled disturbance for thermal optics to find at first light, the country itself complicit now in the small cold business of hiding her from people who still thought of her as recoverable.

One night since the grave. The second night of this new existence, and the desert already felt more like home than anywhere she’d lived before.

But tonight something was different. The wind carried smells that made her freeze: gun oil, the chemical stink of tactical gear, and underneath it all, men. Lots of them. Men who’d been hunting too long in the desert heat.

Mierda. Time to figure out who’s actually running this shit show. They didn’t listen when I told them to leave me be. Time to make it too expensive to continue.

The stars were so bright they hurt to look at, each one sharp enough to cut. Every sound layered itself in her ears like she was wearing headphones with the volume cranked, wind through branches, something small scuttling over rocks, an owl hunting in the distance.

And woven through it all: radio static. Boots on stone. The click of weapons being checked by nervous fingers.

They’d brought reinforcements.

She smelled them before she saw them: sweat and Chemical Blue cologne. That truck stop shit one of the coyotes had worn during the journey north, like it could cover the stink of unwashed bodies and violation. And equipment that had no business in the desert.

Shit. How many this time? And how do I fight actual soldiers or whatever?

She was eighteen and way out of her depth, but something hungry and patient whispered that she’d been underestimated before. That worked out pretty well for her last time.

Naida checked her stolen gear with hands that still shook when she wasn’t concentrating. Combat boots from last night’s kill, a size too big and loose at the heel. Tactical knife. Small radio with earbud, frequency still active.

Of all the coyotes in the world, I had to kill someone with feet larger than my father’s.

They were talking. Broadcasting their positions like they’d never considered their target might be listening.

“Alpha team, report status on grid seven-seven.”

“Grid seven-seven clear. Moving to seven-eight. Motion sensors negative.”

“Copy,” Command acknowledged. “Bravo team, what’s your twenty?”

“Bravo at checkpoint delta. No contact.”

Grid patterns and checkpoints... they think I’m just some random escaped prisoner or whatever. They have no idea what they’re dealing with.

The smile that crossed her face wasn’t the practiced one she’d learned in the trucks. Sharper. More honest. The kind that showed teeth.

She listened to the radio paint pictures of their operation. Six teams, two men each, sweeping north from the border. Someone on high ground running command. Professional setup. Competent execution.

Wrong species, pendejos.

Pick them off one by one. Make them afraid.

The voice felt familiar now, like a friend giving advice. For once what it wanted matched what she wanted: make them pay for thinking she was still cargo to collect.

The landscape rolled out in front of her in shades of silver and black, moonlight showing details human eyes would miss. Rocky outcroppings, narrow washes carved by flash floods, thorny bushes casting shadows that welcomed her.

She could smell everything: javelinas that had passed through sometime ago, coyotes marking territory near water, the chemical traces of equipment that didn’t belong.

Okay, so I can hear them, smell them, and they have no clue where I am. Plus I’ve got this thing amplifying what already worked fine when I was human. These pendejos are so screwed.

She was trying to convince herself more than anything. Not confidence, not even close. Desperate hope that she had enough advantages to survive men with guns and training.

Naida moved southeast toward Bravo team’s coordinates, her vampire senses mapping terrain ahead. Every step landed on earth that recognized her now, not quite liquid like during the underground thing, but responsive. Quieter than it should be.

The desert helped her hunt. The ground muffled her footfalls, the bushes released bitter-sweet smell to hide her scent, the rocks whispered under her boots like settling bones instead of crunching.

It had taken her two nights to understand that the desert was not neutral about her, that the same country which had spent a year trying to kill her on the way north, the heat and the thirst and the men, had changed its mind the moment she stopped being something that could die of any of it, and now it moved its shadows and hushed its ground and bent its scrub around her the way a house goes quiet for someone who has finally learned where every loose board lies.

Twenty minutes of careful movement brought her to a boulder field. The first target appeared against the stars, silhouetted like he was posing for her. His partner hung back fifty meters: too far to take both at once, close enough that isolated kills were possible.

Perfect. Time to see what happens when I do this on purpose instead of by accident.

She knew the work. She’d known it since she was twelve, since the cousin taught her that a boy would hand over anything for a girl who looked at him the right way, and maybe hate himself for it after. He’d meant to break her. He’d built her a trade instead.

So she set up the way she’d been set up a hundred times, except this time she chose the room. Right approach angle, so the partner fifty meters back couldn’t see. Close to the ridge for the sightline. Far enough from the rally point that no one would reach him in time.

Last night I killed two because I had to. Tonight I kill as many as it takes to make this operation cost more than I’m worth. Simple economics, pendejos.

She arranged herself between two stones and let the moonlight do what moonlight did, finding her throat, the torn shirt, the skin that caught light wrong now, brighter than living skin should. Vulnerability and the suggestion of more. Men who’d spent weeks moving girls through this desert would read both without being told.

Then she reached for the heat.

It came the way it had come once for Mateo in a courtyard what felt like a hundred years ago, except there was something under it now she hadn’t found the bottom of, something that moved through the air like a smell and answered the instant she decided to spend it. It felt like breathing out, but the breath had weight. A hand she’d grown without noticing, reaching across the dark to press soft against the parts of a man already prone to listening. She watched it leave her from half a step behind her own eyes, clinical, mapping the pulse in his throat while the rest of her went soft and lost and grateful.

She could not tell where the conditioning ended and the new thing began. Both used the same body. Both ran without asking. She’d stopped expecting an answer.

His approach faltered. His breathing changed. The trained sweep of his weapon dropped a few degrees, his eyes catching on her instead of the terrain.

“Jesus.” He’d stopped moving. “What the fuck?”

The radio crackled. “Ramirez, what’s your status?”

“I... there’s something up here. Someone.”

“Armed?”

He moved closer, the weapon lowering as the thing she pushed at him overrode the thing they’d trained into him. “Negative. Looks like... looks like the target. Young female. Injured, maybe.”

Come on, pendejo. Two more steps.

She stepped into the light and gave him the shape she’d been built to give, shoulders curling small, chin down, the torn shirt sliding off one shoulder like it was the breeze and not her own hand that had loosened it. When she spoke it came breathy and broke in the right place.

“Please... are you here to help me? I’ve been lost for days...”

True enough. She’d been lost since the trucks. The cold part of her set the words down like bait and watched him take the hook; the warm part meant every syllable; she’d long since stopped trying to pull the two apart.

“Easy, chica.” He came closer, the radio forgotten in his hand. “I’m here to help. What’s your name?”

His heartbeat climbed. The smell of his sweat shifted where the wanting started to outrun the training. Carotid right there, a finger’s width under the skin, jumping.

“Naida,” she whispered, and let something real leak through, because the real thing was the best lure she had. “I don’t know how long. Days. I’m so scared. And hungry.”

You have no idea what kind of hungry.

“Hungry?” He was close now. Close enough that she watched him decide she was a gift. “When’s the last time you ate?”

“I can’t remember.” She closed the last of the distance herself, exactly as the choreography wanted it, leaving him the half-step so he’d believe he was the one crossing it. “Everything’s confused. There were trucks. Men who hurt me. Then dark.”

He reached for her shoulder, fingers trembling. “It’s okay now. You’re safe. We’ll take care of you.”

Safe. Take care of you. I know exactly which care you mean, cabrón. They all say the soft words first.

His hand was still on her shoulder. She let it stay, and let her own hands drift to the waist of her stolen jeans. She didn’t take them off. Didn’t even touch the button. Just the zip, dragged down slow, the denim parting a few inches over her hip, a shadow of an invitation, deniable enough that he could tell himself later he’d never asked.

Her hands had done it on their own. The cold part of her watched them do it and felt nothing, the way you feel nothing watching your own reflection lift a glass.

Then one of those hands went to him, found the hard heat of him through the fatigues, and closed.

He flinched.

It was the cold. Her hand was the temperature of the ground she’d slept in, of the dead thing she’d become, and it closed over the one part of him running hottest, and his body understood before his mind did, the small animal recoil of flesh meeting something it should never have touched. For half a second the fog cleared, and something behind his eyes started to ask the right question. Then her grip shifted, and the wanting closed back over the question like water over a dropped stone. He pushed into the cold anyway. Whatever was wrong with her hand, it wasn’t wrong enough to make him give up what the hand was holding.

And there it was, the whole game, the same as it always went. A dead girl’s cold hand wrapped around a fistful of him, and his complete, undivided attention. The rifle, the body armor, the radio still calling his name, the partner fifty meters back, the whole professional machine he’d walked into the desert with, all of it gone somewhere very far away. There was the hand, and what it held, and nothing else in the world worth a single thought.

There you are, cabrón. Got you by the only thing that was ever really running you. Now you’ll tell me anything I want.

“So tell me.” Her voice was almost nothing, the hand not moving. “Who sends men into the desert to die over one girl?”

“I... we can’t.” The words came slow, swimming up through fog. “Orders.”

“Whose orders?” She didn’t care about the answer. She cared that his mouth was still working and his hands were not.

“Carlos Mendoza,” he managed, voice thick. “Runs this whole corridor. Personal interest in your recovery. You’re expensive, cost him too much already.”

The name hit like a fist to the stomach. For a half-second she was back in concrete walls painted cheerful yellow, the sharp-sweet burn of Lucas lollipop chili powder on her tongue trying to scrub away the bitter residue Carlos had left in her mouth, his soft voice praising her for being such a good student...

No. Not going there. Not now.

She shoved the memory fragment down hard, hands suddenly shaking for reasons that had nothing to do with cold or the kill ahead.

The scared girl went out of her all at once, like a light cut. He felt it go, and felt the cold hand close, harder than any girl’s hand had a right to, harder than he had a prayer of pulling out of. The softness gone from her face, the dead strength arriving in its place, both in the same half second.

“What the fuck,” he got out, “are you?”

Hungry. Drink him. Drain him to the rind. Take back what the night cost.

The true answer. The smart one. She gave him neither. She gave him the knife.

It went into his throat before he finished the question, vampire coordination setting the blade exactly right, supernatural strength making it nothing. He folded without a sound, the question still open on his face, and dropped to the caliche at her feet.

She looked down at him and spat it after him, low, for no one but the dead.

“Not cargo anymore.”

His feet were a normal man’s size. She crouched, pulled his boots, and swapped them for the oversized pair she’d been sliding in all night, leaving the big ones beside him. The new ones held her heel when she flexed. Small mercy, and she took it.

Blood poured from the wound in warm streams that her vampire senses found intoxicating. The metallic sweetness called to her like chocolate when she was pequeña, like salvation when she was dying. Her teeth ached with frustrated hunger.

Feed. Now.

Not now. Can’t lose focus with another one coming. Need to stay tactical.

Take what is yours.

Cállate. I can’t think with you screaming about every drop I don’t drink. First threat, then hunger. Priorities.

The second scout approached with weapon ready, concerned by his partner’s silence. Professional caution couldn’t protect him from supernatural speed that made human reflexes obsolete, but her attack lacked smooth efficiency.

She came out of shadow fast enough to seem like teleportation, but the strike felt clumsy, enhanced strength compensating for inexperience rather than skill. His collarbone shattered under vampire force she couldn’t quite control, sending him down hard with weapon clattering across limestone.

He keyed his radio frantically with his injured arm, the damage serious but not fatal yet.

“Command, this is Bravo! Under attack! Target...”

She crushed his windpipe, ending transmission before vital information reached other teams. But radio chatter suggested someone had heard enough to know Bravo was in trouble.

Good. Let them be afraid. Maybe if they’re scared enough, they’ll just... leave me alone.

Radio chatter exploded across frequencies as remaining teams responded:

“All units, converge on Bravo’s last known!”

“Command, request immediate backup and medical!” another voice shouted.

“What the fuck did she do to Ramirez?”

Hunt them all.

But Naida was already seeking underground concealment, vampire instincts recognizing withdrawal over continued engagement. The earth welcomed her body with liquid cooperation, flowing soil that embraced her descent while maintaining structure above.

From underground, she listened to search teams sweeping the kill site with methodical thoroughness. They maintained visual contact, established overlapping coverage, communicated constantly.

“Jesus Christ.” The voice had gone very quiet. “Look at Ramirez’s throat. What kind of knife work is that?”

“Professional. Precise. This isn’t some scared trafficking victim.”

“Command, we need extraction and complete operational review.”

If they only knew I have no idea what I’m doing. I got lucky. Hell I’m just making it up as I go.

Hours passed before search teams moved beyond her position. She emerged silently, leaving no trace, enhanced senses painting detailed pictures of terrain where five teams now tried to establish perimeter around space where their quarry might hide.

Wrong strategy. She wasn’t hiding; she was hunting, and the hunger was hunting her. One team after another came apart in the dark, and every man she left in the caliche without drinking pulled the ache another notch tighter, until it had stopped being something she could set down between kills and started shaking her hands when she wasn’t watching them.

Feed.

Just a little longer. Finish the job, then I can...

Now. Take it.

The fourth kill almost broke her. She stood over the body, blood pooling around boots, teeth fully extended, hands trembling with need rather than nerves. It took everything she had to pull away, to keep moving, to maintain tactical focus when every instinct screamed feed feed FEED.

Mierda. Don’t know how much longer I can... fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

By dawn’s approach, she’d eliminated five of six teams through tactics that felt less like natural evolution and more like barely controlled desperation. The surviving team had barricaded themselves on high ground, radio transmissions painting pictures of soldiers encountering threats beyond briefing parameters.

“Command, we need immediate reinforcement and mission review. Target demonstrates capabilities exceeding briefing. Requesting withdrawal to base camp for strategic reassessment.”

The reply didn’t come from their command. It came in Spanish, and whatever patience the voice had started the night with was long gone.

“¿Retirada?” The word came out strangled. “¿Cinco equipos? ¿Cinco putos equipos contra una sola escuincla y me hablan de retirada? ¿Dónde chingados los entrenaron? ¿Hicieron la cartilla los sábados y ya se creen soldados?” The voice climbed, cracking. “Don Carlos pagó por profesionales y me mandaron payasos. Tráiganme la mercancía viva, o el próximo cuerpo que deje esa arena va a ser de ustedes. ¿Quedó claro, pendejos?”

Somebody up the chain is losing his shit. Five teams, one little girl, and now he’s screaming about whether these pendejos were ever real soldiers at all. They want me alive, and they’re scared of what I’m costing them. Good. Let him scream.

They’re starting to understand I’m not what they thought.

From underground she listened to the helicopters come for the survivors and the bodies, and to the chatter that promised the next operation would be bigger, better armed, built for whatever she was. Ten kills. A name. Their whole grid in pieces. And none of it touched the hunger, which had stayed quiet through the killing only because the killing was a slow way of putting it off, and was done being quiet.

Carlos Mendoza. Time to pay you a visit, cabrón. Time to show you exactly what your merchandise became.

Dawn took her down into the caliche, stronger than she’d risen the night before, more at home in the desert that wanted her, and more afraid of what the strength was costing. The organization that used to own her was about to learn that some cargo bites back.

But first she needed blood. Soon. Before it stopped asking and started taking control.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

Three hours after leaving the contractor’s body in the rocks, Naida was starting to understand what “hunted” actually meant.

The first hour had been easy. Almost fun. The scattered search teams were disorganized, their radio chatter full of confusion and fear. She’d listened to them stumble through the desert darkness while she moved north, staying ahead of their clumsy sweep patterns.

The second hour, things changed.

New voices on the radio. Calm. Professional. Coordinates delivered with military precision instead of panicked updates. She’d crouched behind a limestone outcropping and listened to the transition happen in real-time.

“All units, this is Command Actual. New search protocols in effect. Grid pattern Sierra-Seven through Echo-Nine. Thermal sensors deployed. Maintain radio discipline.”

English clipped into military cadence, but the accent underneath it was the same border Spanish she’d heard for weeks in the safe houses. Not soldiers, then. The cartel’s real ones, the ex-military muscle they kept for problems that mattered.

Mierda. They sent the serious ones.

She’d moved faster after that, using her enhanced speed to put distance between herself and the tightening net. But the desert that had felt like an ally during her first night was starting to betray her. Every ridge she climbed revealed more flashlight beams in the distance. Every arroyo she followed eventually forced her back toward areas where radio chatter suggested teams were positioned.

They weren’t chasing her anymore. They were herding her.

The third hour brought a new problem that made the search teams feel almost secondary.

Dawn.

The pressure started as a whisper behind her eyes. Easy to ignore while she focused on evading the grid search closing in from the south. But it built steadily, inexorably, the way the air went hollow and metallic in the hour before a Sonoran summer storm broke open over the city of her childhood, that same wrongness in the bones now, except this storm was the sun itself coming up over the ridge to find her. Her body knew what was coming even if her conscious mind wanted to deny the reality, every cell of dead flesh tuning itself to a clock she hadn’t started and couldn’t stop, the dirt in her grave and the dirt under her boots and the dirt she had not yet learned was hers all whispering the same warning at different frequencies.

She had maybe ninety minutes. Maybe less.

Need to find shelter. Real shelter. Not just shadow.

But there was nothing out here. Open desert in every direction, no cover deep enough to outlast the sunrise, and the grid search pushing her north into increasingly bad terrain. The country up here gave her nothing she could use, a washboard of bajada and creosote running to an eastern horizon that had already begun to bruise from black toward the first sick gray of the thing that would kill her, every wash too shallow to swallow a body and every ridge too bare to put one behind, the kind of ground that had been quietly killing people who tried to cross it for a hundred years and would not care in the slightest whether she was still breathing when the sun finally reached her.

The radio crackled with updates that painted a picture of professional competence she couldn’t match. Six teams, two men each, moving in coordinated patterns. Command element on high ground with overwatch. Motion sensors covering likely escape routes.

They’d learned from the first night’s disaster. Adapted. Escalated.

She was running out of space to run and time to run in.

The arroyo appeared like salvation, deep enough for concealment, winding enough to break line of sight, positioned just outside the search grid’s current focus. She dropped into it with relief that lasted exactly as long as it took for her enhanced hearing to pick up boots crunching across caliche above her.

Multiple teams. They converged.

Jodido. They were waiting for me to do exactly this.

The arroyo cut through the desert like a scar carved by flash floods and forgotten violence, its walls offering shelter from the sweep that had been tightening around her. Naida crouched against the crumbling bank, her slightly-too-large stolen combat boots finding purchase on loose shale that threatened to announce her location with every micro-adjustment of weight. The approaching dawn pressed against her consciousness like a migraine made of light she couldn’t yet see.

“Sector siete despejado. Avanzando al ocho.”

They were working the grid in order, sector by sector, and they were one number from hers.

“Copiado. Los térmicos marcan en los arroyos, pero nada se mueve. Será jabalí.”

The thermal was lighting up on something in the washes, and the man reading it already didn’t buy it. Pigs, he figured. Warm-blooded little javelina rooting through the dark, not her.

She went still.

The sensors hunted warmth, and she didn’t have any. Dead, cold as the caliche under her hands, she threw nothing at all. A blank where a body should be.

“Recibido. Péinenlo a la vista.”

They were giving up on the machines and falling back to their own eyes.

Naida’s enhanced hearing picked up details that should have been impossible: the slight wheeze in one searcher’s breathing that suggested a longtime smoker, the metallic click of safety mechanisms being engaged and disengaged by nervous fingers, the subtle shift in radio frequency that meant they were coordinating with command elements she couldn’t see. Information flooded her senses: precise, unbidden, useful, and she was already running inventory on what she was working with.

Verga. These aren’t random cartel soldiers anymore. Better gear, better tactics. Instead of leaving me alone they upgraded. Not the message I wanted them to get.

The Sinaloa Coyotes were hunting her with the same efficiency they’d used to transport her across this border as cargo. She’d already turned the tables; she just hadn’t told them yet. The sun was the new problem, and that one required a different solution.

Verga verga fuck. The note said stay out of the sun. No caves. No buildings. Nowhere to hide from the sun. I’m going to die. Again. Fuck!

Every sound was too loud. Her heartbeat... no, wait, not hers. Someone else’s heartbeat. Above her.

Shadow wouldn’t be enough. The sun would find her.

Boots crunching loose shale. Someone was about to jump down.

Flashlights in seconds.

Verga. I’m fucked. Completely fucked.

Someone jumped down. Boots hit hard, loose shale skittering.

The Coyote’s flashlight swept right, then left. Settled on her.

“¡La tengo! ¡Sector ocho, la tengo!”

Mierda mierda mierda...

He was already moving, rifle coming up.

Her body answered before she chose it. Her hands caught the hem of her stolen shirt and dragged it up, baring her chest to the flashlight beam. The oldest distraction there was, drilled into her by the coyotes until it ran without her, the one that always worked on men who came expecting cargo. She watched herself do it from somewhere behind her own eyes, clinical, already counting what it bought: the half-beat where his eyes dropped, where the rifle wavered, where some animal reflex older than his training dragged his attention exactly where she needed it gone.

Let las chiches do what they’re good at. Men lose their minds over a nice pair. Buys me the time I need.

Half a second. That was the whole gift.

She was faster.

Vampire speed carried her forward before he resolved the contradiction. She hit him low, claws raking across his tactical vest. The Kevlar held but the impact drove him backward into the arroyo wall hard enough to crack his helmet against limestone.

His radio squawked. “¡Lobo-Tres, reporta!”

She grabbed for his throat. He blocked, training overriding shock. His knee came up, caught her ribs. Pain exploded but didn’t slow her down. Dead bodies didn’t care about broken ribs.

They grappled. His superior weight and training versus her supernatural strength and desperation. He got an arm around her neck, trying for a chokehold. She didn’t need to breathe.

Her teeth found his forearm. Bit down hard enough to feel bone. He screamed and let go.

She threw him. Enhanced strength sent him flying into the opposite wall. He slumped, stunned but alive.

Stunned. Not dead. He’ll live. Neither guilt nor satisfaction. Arithmetic. He fought well. I fought better.

Movement above, his partner at the rim, already sliding down the bank.

Can’t fight them both. Can’t run. Dawn’s coming. Fuck fuck FUCK...

Her hands moved before her brain caught up. Clawing at the dirt beneath her boots. The earth felt different under her fingers: not just dirt, but something that might give way if she pushed hard enough.

Underground. Dig down. Let the earth take you.

“That’s not fucking possible,” she muttered, then froze as her words echoed off the arroyo walls.

Her hands were already clawing at the dirt anyway. The earth felt wrong under her fingers: too soft, almost liquid.

What the fuck. It’s moving. The dirt is actually moving.

Her claws (when had those happened?) sank deeper. The earth parted around her hands like water.

Don’t stop. Deeper.

“Sector ocho, tenemos algo en el arroyo norte. Vamos por confirmación visual.”

Seconds. She had seconds before they reached her. Minutes before dawn killed her.

The ground beneath her hands shifted. Became liquid. The earth opened.

“¿Qué carajo es esto?” But she was already sinking, the dirt flowing around her like water. Thick, heavy water that pulled her down instead of pushing her out. Boots hit the arroyo floor thirty feet away. Flashlight beams swept overhead.

She went deeper, and the earth swallowed her whole.

Absolute dark. Still air. The enormous quiet of solid ground, an immensity she felt the way you felt the depth of an ocean floor under a swimmer’s feet, layers of weight stacked above her in patient masonry that the surface world had never had the patience to learn, and the smell of it filling whatever it was she had instead of lungs now: iron and clay and something older, the dry mineral exhalation of stone that had never seen weather, never been cracked open, never had to explain itself to anything that breathed.

Pressure built in her ears like diving underwater. The world spun; she didn’t know which way was up anymore, couldn’t tell if she was sinking or falling sideways. Her body wanted to panic. Her body always wanted to panic.

Keep going.

She kept going.

Dirt pressed against her face, her chest, her legs. A kind of close pressure, like a held breath that wasn’t hers. The earth adjusting around her. Making room.

Dirt filled her mouth again, tasting like metal and stone, ancient and cold. She didn’t need to spit it out. She didn’t need anything down here that the surface had to offer.

Holy shit. I’m actually underground. I’m inside the fucking ground. I went into the ground. I am in the ground right now.

She could still hear them above: boots scraping, radios crackling, flashlights clicking on. But they were up there and she was down here and there was solid earth between them. The weight of it sat above her the same way you felt a ceiling in a dark room: just present, just there, not threatening.

The dirt made sounds. Tiny sounds. Minerals grinding together where the caliche shifted minutely under its own weight, a thousand small adjustments she would have called silence when she was alive, roots creaking through their slow ancient business of finding the tiny fractures in limestone and prising them apart year by year. And under all of it, the slow percussion of water moving somewhere far below through stone it had been carving for centuries before any pendejo with a flashlight thought he owned this desert. Things she hadn’t heard before because she’d never heard earth from the inside, the way you heard a house from inside its walls instead of from the street, intimate and rude and full of the building’s true business. She hadn’t known it had an inside that sounded like this, and the sound was patient in a way nothing on the surface had ever been patient with her.

Wait. Could she breathe down here?

She tried. Didn’t need to. Of course she didn’t need to. She hadn’t needed to breathe since she’d died. She’d just forgotten, because the surface kept acting like that still mattered.

Okay. That’s... that’s fucked up but useful.

The pressure behind her eyes faded. Dawn was coming but there was dirt between her and the sun now. Lots of dirt.

They can’t find me. The sun can’t reach me. I can hear everything they’re doing. This... this is... this is fuckin’ cool.

Boots moved across the ground above. Flashlights swept back and forth.

For the first time since clawing her way out of her own grave, she was safe. The word sat in her head without a threat attached to it.

She heard everything now. Not just boots and radios, but conversations.

Somewhere off to the east, the net came apart.

Not words at first. Cursing. A man’s voice climbing toward a register men didn’t reach unless something had gone very wrong.

“¡Jabalí! ¡Una manada, hay crías! ¡Quítenmelas, quítenmelas!”

The pigs. The fucking pigs.

“¿Dónde está el teniente?”

“¡En el suelo! ¡Lo agarraron en la pierna, no se puede parar!”

“Le dije que era jabalí.” A pause. Then, lower, half off the net: “Pinche teniente. Nunca escuchan.”

El teniente. Green idiot. Trusted the machine over the man who told him it was pigs, then went to claim the kill himself.

“¡Evac! ¡Saquen al teniente, ya!”

They brought the good gear and a boy to lead it. The desert took the boy first.

The net jumped, and a slower voice rode over the panic, the one that signed the checks.

“¿El teniente?” Pure disbelief, going cold. “¿Me están diciendo que mi teniente está en el suelo por unos pinches jabalíes?”

There he is. The money man just found out his golden boy got gored by pigs. Everybody’s about to have a very bad morning.

“...found Martinez unconscious. Bite wounds on his arm. Jesus Christ, what is she?”

“Command wants her alive if possible,” another voice cut in. “Authorized to use tranqs.”

“Tranqs? She threw him like he weighed nothing. We need bigger guns.”

Static. Then command: “Maintain protocol. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Sweep the arroyo north to the wash. She has to be somewhere.”

“She went into the ground, sir. There’s no footprints out. No tracks. Nothing.”

Silence on the radio. Longer than procedure called for.

“That’s not possible.”

“I know.”

The slow voice cut back in, and it had stopped being cold. Just angry now, the anger of a man who paid for results and was getting handed ghost stories.

“¿Se metió en la tierra? Nadie se mete en la tierra. ¿Qué se metieron ustedes? ¿Andan drogados en mi operación? Encuéntrenla, o el que me vuelva con cuentos de fantasmas se queda en ese desierto con ella.”

A different voice answered, and it was shaking. “Jefe, estoy tan sobrio como una monja en misa. Sé que no es posible. Pero se lo juro por la Virgen de Guadalupe, es lo que vi con mis propios ojos. La tierra se la tragó.”

Naida could imagine the man crossing himself as he said it.

“Guárdate a la Virgen para el domingo.” The contempt was back, fear riding under it now. “Aquí no manda la Virgencita. Aquí manda la Flaca, y a la Flaca no le rezas, le pagas. Encuéntrenmela, y yo le pago a ella que se la lleve.”

Now they’re arguing over whose saint gets to bury me. The boss wants to pay Holy Death herself to come take me. Cabrón, she already came. She’s the reason I’m down here. They came hunting a scared girl, and they’re starting to understand they found something else.

The earth pressed against her, warm and solid, holding her with the same weight that had crushed her hours ago in a different hole and meant something completely different now: not burial but containment, not silencing but sheltering, the whole mass of the Sonoran upper mantle in her favor for once instead of stacked against her. Like being hugged by the entire desert, except the desert had never hugged anyone. The desert killed people slowly and without comment. And the fact that it was holding her tonight meant something had changed about which side of the contract she was on.

She flexed her fingers experimentally. The dirt responded, flowing aside to give her room, then settling back. She could move down here. Actually move. Swim through solid ground.

Take it. All of it.

This changes everything. They can’t track me. Can’t follow. Can’t even know where I am. I could be under their feet right now and they’d have no idea. I could travel like this. Surface at night. Disappear before sunrise. They built a whole military operation to hunt me in this desert and I just... went under it.

Above, more boots arrived. More voices. Then a longer stretch of radio traffic she couldn’t fully make out, command elements conferring, someone reading coordinates, a voice that sounded like it was working very hard to stay calm. Dawn protocols. They were pulling back before sunrise.

Smart.

She listened to their footsteps recede. Eight men. Maybe ten. All of them walking away from the ground she was inside. Not one of them looking down.

They were leaving. They hadn’t found her.

They couldn’t find her. That was the thing. Actually unfindable, six feet under their boots, and they’d swept right past with their sensors and their grid patterns and their bigger guns.

The dirt around her felt different now. Not crushing anymore. Almost comfortable. Warm, even. The dawn pressure was completely gone.

Safe. She turned the word over and nothing moved behind it.

She’d never been safe. Not from the moment Señor Morales handed her off. Not from before that, if she was honest. There had always been something to outrun. The cousin first, when she was small, and then the long catalog after him, Morales with his promises and his price, the safe houses that stank of diesel and other girls’ fear, the trucks, the coyotes, the shallow grave, every one of them a thing that needed her moving so it could take its piece while she ran, and not one of them had ever let her stop long enough to learn what stillness even felt like.

There was nothing to outrun right now.

Exhaustion came down on her all at once.

Is this normal? Do vampires sleep underground? Mierda, I’m so tired...

Sleep pulled at her. Heavy.

Did whoever made me know this would happen? Did she dump me in the desert because she knew I could... burrow?

Maybe. Maybe not. Didn’t matter right now.

The darkness pressed in. Quiet and still and completely fine. The mineral sounds of the earth doing whatever earth did in the dark, with no one listening.

Except her, six feet down and finally, actually still.

She stopped fighting and let it take her.

The earth held.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

The taste of blood from her feeding still lingered on her tongue several hours later.

Naida crouched in the shadow of a wind-carved boulder formation, her back pressed against stone still radiating the day’s heat. The sun-warmed rock felt warm against her room-temperature skin as she tried to make sense of what she’d become. The desert ran to every horizon, indifferent and ancient and empty in a way Managua had never been empty: creosote and skeletal palo verde, scattered rock, pale moonwash that turned the whole landscape into the same silvered relief sketch as far as her new eyes could carry it, a country built for things that didn’t need to be seen and didn’t need to see anything pleasant in return. A CBP patrol road cut through the caliche two hundred meters north, tire tracks dried hard, the only line of human commerce within line of sight and not currently in use, the kind of road that existed because people were trying to cross and people were trying to stop them and the conflict was old enough now that the dirt had decided to remember it. She’d stopped running when her legs decided for her, finding the boulder gap the same way she’d navigated every dark place in the last year, by instinct and spite, the two faculties she’d kept current while everything else atrophied.

One man. One very dead man.

Yesterday she’d been cargo. Tonight she’d killed a man with her teeth. She hadn’t decided which one she was yet.

Her makeshift hiding spot was barely a gap between two massive stones, screened by skeletal ocotillo branches and brittlebush that scratched her arms every time she shifted. But the shadows here swallowed light completely, and the enclosed space felt inexplicably safe.

The thought surfaced in a voice she didn’t recognize as hers yet. Safe like a coffin.

The first kill had been the hardest, and the easiest. She’d used everything they’d taught her during the transport, every survival tactic beaten into her during months of captivity. The unnamed driver had thought he was getting grateful payment for his rescue services. Instead, he’d gotten her fangs in his throat and his blood down her gullet.

He was part of the machine that destroyed my life. They all were.

One dead coyote. Score one for a recently deceased; Cartel, zero.

The hunger had been satisfied by the feeding, but something gnawed at her now: the growing certainty that her old life would keep hunting her until she eliminated every last trace of it. The survivors who’d fled in panic would report back. There would be consequences.

I should have killed them all. Amateur mistake. I won’t make it again. Live and learn.

A distant rumble made her freeze. Engines again. Multiple vehicles moving slow and methodical across the caliche, but these sounded different. Heavier. More disciplined.

Here we go again. I learned, they didn’t.

Radio chatter drifted on the night wind, English and Spanish, clinical and controlled. None of the crude banter she remembered from the trafficking crews.

“Checking grid seven-seven per final GPS ping...”

“Roger that, Bravo team moving to investigate...”

They still think of me as property to be recovered. Well, putas, this cargo has fangs and now, I know how to use them.

Naida pressed herself deeper into the gap between stones, tension coiling in her chest wound past the point of release. These weren’t the same panicked pendejos who’d fled the grove. This was military-grade cleanup, complete with thermal imaging and tactical coordination.

The sound of approaching boots dropped her into the deep stillness of a body that no longer had a pulse to give her away. Two figures moving with precision up the slope toward her hiding spot, not the casual arrogance of traffickers, but the careful advance of trained operators who’d been briefed on what they were hunting.

“Thermal’s got nothing, but we believe she’s tucked between those rock formations, approximately thirty meters northeast. It’s either her or that fuckin’ ‘ghost cat’ we keep hearing about.”

Professional equipment. These guys aren’t fucking around.

“Movement confirmed.” The second man’s English was precise, educated, the Mexican accent riding underneath it. “Subject appears aware of our presence.”

Through the ocotillo screen, she could see them clearly now: tactical vests and equipment, night vision goggles. Military bearing. The kind of people who got called when the regular crew didn’t come home.

One of them spoke into his radio: “Command, this is Alpha team. We’ve located the target. Requesting permission to engage.”

They’d already found the grove. Seen what she’d left behind.

“Permission granted,” crackled back through the radio. “Remember, subject has demonstrated willingness to kill. Approach with caution.”

She almost laughed. They’d seen his torn throat, the corpse of the man drained of blood among the creosote bushes. They thought they knew exactly what they were dealing with, yet they’d come anyway.

Mistake.

Flashlight beams suddenly blazed through the ocotillo screen, but these weren’t the harsh LED searchlights she remembered. These were tactical lights, precise and focused, designed not to destroy night vision but to illuminate specific targets.

“We know you’re in there.” The American’s voice carried none of the false warmth she’d heard from the traffickers. This was business. “You’re safe with us. We just want to talk.”

Something in her answered before she chose it. The soft voice came up on its own, the grateful one she’d built for the rescue type, the men who needed to believe they were saving her, her chin already dropping into please, her weight already arranging itself into I’m so glad you came. It started the way breathing used to start, under the floor of the part of her that decided things. She felt it fire and watched it fire and could not tell where she stopped and the training started.

Then it stalled, because it had nowhere to go. The coyote in the grove had walked right up to her, the way a lone man with a flashlight believes the desert owes him something. These two stayed behind their lights, thirty meters back, a gun up and a briefing in their ears, handling her like a thing that bit. There was no one to hand the performance to. It hung in her half-built and useless, and the cold part underneath it curdled with disgust that the reflex had even come up, that even now, even dead, her body reached for the leash before it reached for the throat.

Stay hidden. Use it.

The voice had settled into familiarity, like a predator’s instinct whispering hunt tactics. These men weren’t here because they understood what she’d become. They were here because one of their colleagues was dead and they needed answers.

“We know what happened at the grove.” The Mexican let the words settle. “Did you know that Miguel Herrera had three daughters back home. They’ll never see their father again because of you.”

The words hit her through her chest. Three daughters. Little girls who would grow up without their father because she...

No. No, don’t think like that. He was going to...

“So?” The word came out sharper than she’d intended, defensive and raw. “So fucking what? You think I care about his kids?” But, even as she said it, her voice cracked slightly. She did care. She hated that she cared. “I saw what he did to the other girls. I saw them bleed when he was done. His daughters are better off.”

Silence from outside her shelter.

“Look,” the American said, his tone shifting to something almost gentle. “We know you’ve been through trauma. We were briefed on what happened during transport. We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to help.”

Help. The word made her stomach clench. She’d heard that before, right before hands reached for her in the dark, right before...

“Help?” Her voice rose, fury bleeding through the fear. “Like Miguel helped me? Like all of you fucking pendejos helped me?” She was talking too fast now, words tumbling out before she could stop them. “You know what Miguel did! You know what your precious fuckin’ father of the year did!”

“Easy.” The Mexican stopped where he was. “Nobody’s blaming you for defending yourself. But what you did... that’s not normal. People don’t just...”

“Don’t just what?” she interrupted, her voice climbing. “Fight back? Kill the pendejo who was raping them?”

The memory hit without warning: her fists pounding ineffectively against a man’s chest. Screaming at him to get off of her...

Breathe. It happened to the other girls. I saw it happen to them. Not me. I’m fine. I’m fine.

“Miguel wasn’t...” the American started.

“Bullshit!” The word exploded from her throat. “You think I don’t know what he was doing? That I don’t remember? It’s what they all jodido do!” Tears of blood started, black in the moonlight, sliding down her face. “Save the gaslighting.”

“No one thinks you’re stupid.” The Mexican kept his voice even. “But you’re confused. Traumatized. Whatever drugs they gave you...”

“Drugs?” She almost laughed, the sound bitter and broken. “You think I’m high? You think I am making this up? You think I am hallucinating? You think that’s why I can hear your heartbeat from here? Why I can smell your fear?”

Shit! Shut up, Naida, shut up. Your rage is making you reckless. You are saying too much.

“Listen.” The Mexican’s voice flattened into something almost reasonable. “We’re cleanup. Contract workers hired to figure out what happened and deal with the situation. We can get you help. Real help.”

“Contract workers?” That didn’t sound like the men who’d transported her. “Who the fuck are you people?”

“We handle recovery operations,” the American said. “When cargo goes missing, when situations get... complicated. We fix problems.”

Cargo. There was that word again.

“I’m not jodido cargo.” Her voice dropped to something dangerous. “Not anymore.”

“Of course not.” The Mexican’s free hand came up, palm out, a half-beat too fast. “You’re a person. A victim. And we want to help you.”

‘You’re a person.’ Yeah? Then why does it sound like you’re reading from a manual for handling livestock?

“You want to help?” Anger built in her chest, hungry and wild. “Then get the fuck away from me before I do to you what I did to el cabrón.”

“Down on the ground.” The patience went out of the American’s voice all at once. She heard him raising some kind of weapon. “Hands visible. We’re taking you in for evaluation.”

The command reached down through months of being ordered, controlled, violated. For a split-second, her body wanted to obey, trained by brutality to comply.

Then the hunger inside her snarled.

No. Never again.

She tried to burst through the ocotillo screen like she had in the grove, but these branches were thicker, more entangled. Instead of flowing through them, she caught her shoulder on a particularly nasty thorn and pitched sideways into the gap between rocks.

Pain exploded down her arm as the spine tore through fabric and skin, and she hit the stone wall with a grunt that was more surprise than injury. Blood welled from the scratch, dark against her skin in the moonlight.

Shit. I don’t know what I’m doing. Jodido embarrassing.

The contractors didn’t waste time on surprise. The Mexican’s tranq dart took her in the thigh before she’d fully regained her balance, the impact sharp and immediate.

“Ow, what the fuck?” There was something sticking out of her leg. She grabbed it, pulled it free, stared at it. What the hell was this?

“Sweet Jesus, that was enough to drop a horse. She should be unconscious,” the American said.

Why didn’t that...?

“Command,” the Mexican spoke into his radio, his professional calm fracturing. “Tranq was completely ineffective. Target should be unconscious. She’s not even wobbling.”

She held up the dart, turning it in the moonlight. “So this was supposed to knock me out?” She tossed it aside. “Didn’t work. I’ll give you a participation trophy for effort... “

The Mexican began loading a second dart, his movements cautious now. “Command, requesting authorization for heavier sedatives.”

“Negative,” was the response that returned through the radio. “Target needs to be coherent for questioning. Switch to restraint protocols.”

Restraints. I don’t like the sound of that.

Before either man could implement whatever those protocols involved, she moved, not with the clumsy desperation of her first attempt, but with newfound purpose. “Sorry cabrones, I’m not into S&M.”

The enhanced speed she’d discovered in the grove kicked in, making their reactions seem sluggish and predictable.

The Mexican’s second dart sailed wide as she twisted aside, the projectile striking stone and shattering harmlessly. She was between them before either could adjust, close enough to smell their trained fear curdling into raw animal panic.

How did I...

The American swung his weapon toward her face. Without thinking, she grabbed his wrist and squeezed.

The sound of bones breaking was like stepping on dry twigs. He screamed and dropped the tranq gun, his composure cracking completely.

Holy fuckin’ shit.

The strength that had felt natural in the grove still surprised her. She hadn’t even had to try.

“Jesus Christ!” The American cradled his shattered wrist against his chest. “She’s dusted! Has to be PCP! Command, we need immediate backup!”

The Mexican was backing away, speaking rapidly into his radio: “Target has confirmed abnormal strength levels. Requesting extraction and heavy countermeasures.”

But Naida was learning fast. She could see everything now: the way the American’s pupils dilated with pain and terror, the rapid pulse in the Mexican’s neck, the slight tremor in his hands as he tried to maintain distance while facing something outside his operational parameters.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” The American’s breath sawed in and out.

“What’s wrong with me? You pendejos were briefed... let me count the ways....”

She looked between them, trying to think of something threatening to say. Her mind raced through half-remembered movies, threats she’d heard in the trucks.

“My abuela used to say...” She paused, catching herself mid-bullshit. “ A la verga. Some days you’re the chupacabra, other days you’re the goat.” Her smile felt wrong on her face, too wide. “Today I’m the goat-sucker, and you’re the goat. Just like el cabrón.”

The Mexican’s hand moved toward his sidearm, a real gun this time, not a tranquilizer. “Command, she just threatened... Request immediate authorization for lethal force.”

“Negative! We need intel on what happened to Miguel. Capture alive for questioning. Lethal force only if necessary for operator safety.”

A different voice came onto the net then, unhurried, and the Mexican went still at the sound of it. Not their command. Higher, and on the other side of the line that separated the men who were paid from the men who did the paying.

“Viva y entera. Don Carlos no paga por mercancía dañada. El que la lastime me responde a mí.” A pause. “Y luego le responde a él.”

Don Carlos. The name hits something behind the wall in my head and I can’t see what just broke. Somebody up the chain wants me alive. Whole. Worth something even now, with a price still on me.

“Then send more people.” The Mexican’s voice climbed. “Because two of us aren’t going to be enough for this.”

Naida tilted her head, studying them with predatory interest. “How many people like me have you dealt with before?”

“People like you?” The American was still clutching his shattered wrist, jaw locked.

“People who fight back,” she clarified.

The contractors exchanged glances, uncertainty creeping into their tactical bearing. This wasn’t how their recovery operations usually went.

“Most trafficking victims are...” the Mexican paused, choosing his words carefully. “Compliant. Broken down. Submissive. You’re different.”

“Puta, sí I am.”

“You adapted too fast. Got violent too quickly. Most people in your situation are still in shock.”

“Maybe they didn’t have the right jodido motivation,” she suggested.

“And what’s yours?”

She thought about the shallow grave, the bloody note, the months of being treated like livestock. About hands on her body and the taste of blood when she’d finally fought back.

“Revenge.” Just the one word, set down flat.

The words hung like a promise and a threat. Both men took involuntary steps backward, their training warring with instinctive recognition of someone who’d crossed a line they couldn’t uncross.

“That’s...” the Mexican started, then stopped himself.

She tilted her head, waiting.

“That’s dangerous.” He didn’t take his eyes off her. “People motivated by revenge don’t stop until they’re dead or everyone else is.”

“No me digas.” Her voice dripped contempt. “And I’m already dead inside. Sucks to be you.”

She was moving before they could react, her enhanced reflexes making their trained responses seem comically slow. The Mexican was fumbling for his sidearm when her hand closed around his throat, lifting him clear off the ground with enhanced strength.

His feet kicked uselessly in the air as she held him at arm’s length, studying his face with cold curiosity.

The American was backing away, speaking urgently into his radio: “Command, we have lost control of the situation. This has gone all kinds of sideways. Request immediate backup.”

Lost control. Pendejo, you never had control.

“Where would your backup come from?”

“Nogales.” He clutched at her hand on his throat. “There’s a cleanup crew in Nogales. After what happened in March. More experienced with... unusual situations.”

Another border city, a cartel hub, more contractors, more people who believed they could handle her.

She released the Mexican, letting him drop to the ground where he gasped and clutched at his throat, holding her hand open in front of her face for a long uncertain second as if it had just done something she had not asked it to do, as if the easy mechanics of lifting a two-hundred-pound man off the ground by the windpipe still belonged to a body she was negotiating with rather than living inside, every joint and tendon answering questions she had not yet learned how to phrase. “Tell your bosses I’m done being merchandise. Tell the pendejos that Naida learned how to bite back.”

“You don’t understand,” the American said, cradling his broken wrist. “The organization doesn’t just forget about losses like this. They’ll send more people. Better people.”

“Let them,” she said, backing toward the deeper shadows. “I’ll kill every last one who comes for me. You know I can. El cabrón’s the proof.”

“We’re just contractors.” The Mexican took a half-step back. “Hired help. We don’t make policy.”

“Then make sure your employers get the message,” she said. “Naida is dead.” She paused. “And good riddance to her. You know? I crawled out of my own grave this evening... let me tell you. What came out of that grave isn’t interested in being anyone’s property.”

The American was speaking into his radio again: “Command, situation is completely FUBAR. Talking about revenge, recommend immediate escalation to Nogales command.”

“You know what else? I don’t think I need two of you to deliver a message.” She grabbed one of the contractors by the throat.

The sound of his neck breaking was quick and clean, a mercy she hadn’t intended, but her control was still developing. The body dropped like a puppet with cut strings.

The remaining contractor stared in horror at his dead partner.

“Now,” she said, her voice quiet and terrible. “Tell them what happens when they come for me.”

Naida melted back into the darkness, leaving one survivor to the radio and the reports, his voice already shaking through whatever debrief he was about to deliver to whatever bosses had thought their cleanup crew would be enough. Dawn was still hours away, she could feel it the way she felt the dead man’s blood still moving in her veins, a clock she couldn’t turn off, every cell in her new flesh adjusting to the count and reporting back to whatever new center had taken over the work her mortal body used to do without consulting her. The desert wind came up from the south, carrying Nogales the way the river carried what it had been told not to carry: exhaust, cooking fires, a city full of people who didn’t know what was coming, the diesel haze of a border town that had been bleeding cargo north for so long it had forgotten any of the cargo had names. She wasn’t sure she did either, she wasn’t sure what tonight had made her into and wasn’t sure she would recognize the answer if it came back tomorrow looking like a person she used to know. She just knew which direction to walk.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

Darkness.

Absolute suffocating black pressed against her face, not the soft dark behind closed eyes, but total, all-consuming. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. Grit filled her mouth. Dirt packed against her palate.

Dirt. There’s dirt in my mouth. Why is there...

She inhaled instead of expelling. Earth flooded her throat, her nose, packed tight against her soft palate. Her body convulsed, desperate to cough, to clear her airway, but there was nowhere for the air to go. No air to draw. Just more dirt.

CAN’T BREATHE. BREATHE. CAN’T.

Panic slammed into her. Her arms were pinned against her sides by walls that pressed in from every direction. Her legs bent at unnatural angles, folded into a space too small, too tight, too WRONG. She thrashed and gained maybe an inch before the earth stopped her cold.

Buried. She was buried.

No no no no NO...

The realization detonated what little control she had left. She clawed at the dirt above her head with fingers that scraped uselessly against packed earth. Her lungs should be screaming. Burning. Dying.

But they weren’t.

The thought cut through her panic like ice water. She was choking on dirt, couldn’t draw breath, should be suffocating, but she wasn’t dying. Shouldn’t she be dying? How long had she been down here? Seconds? Minutes? Long enough that her oxygen should be gone, that her vision should be going dark, that...

Wait. My vision IS dark. Because I’m underground. Not because I’m dying.

She stopped thrashing. Forced herself to stillness despite every instinct screaming at her to move, to escape, to GET OUT. Her chest wasn’t moving. No rise and fall, no desperate gasps. Just... stillness. The dirt should have been choking her to death. It wasn’t.

It wasn’t.

Why am I not dead?

The question opened a door in her mind she hadn’t known was there. In the hollow space, a hunger stirred, tasting the dirt and finding it wrong, insufficient, irrelevant.

Because she didn’t need to breathe.

The realization should have been impossible. Should have been terrifying in its own right. Instead, it flipped some switch in her brain, shutting down the human panic and replacing it with something colder. Sharper. An assessment: the dirt not a death sentence but an obstacle.

Her fingers, which moments before had been scraping uselessly at compacted earth, suddenly possessed strength that didn’t belong in an eighteen-year-old girl’s hands. Heat bloomed in her palms, not warmth she could feel from the outside, but something deeper: embers banked in her marrow.

She tore through the soil above her head. Methodical now. Deliberate. Handful after handful, each scoop bringing her closer to whatever waited above. The dirt was loose near the top: hasty work, a digger in a hurry.

Maybe they thought I was already dead.

Maybe they were right.

The first touch of night air against her dirt-caked face felt like salvation and violation in equal measure. She burst from the earth not gasping, though some part of her brain tried to remember that reflex, but tasting the air like a predator scenting prey.

Then her body remembered what her mind had forgotten: she’d been breathing dirt.

She pitched forward onto hands and knees, throat convulsing. The reflex was automatic, violent, her body trying to expel what shouldn’t be there. She gagged, choked, and finally vomited. Dirt mixed with blood mixed with the last meal she’d eaten as a human, beans, and rice from a gas station somewhere in Sonora, back when food meant anything besides memory. The taste was copper and rot and something that had been dead inside her too long.

She spat repeatedly, clearing her mouth of grave-soil and worse. Stringy saliva mixed with dark clots that might have been blood or earth or both. The physical purge did nothing for the wrongness thrumming under her skin, but at least she breathed again.

Yet she needed no breath.

The realization hit her again, sharper this time. Her lungs sat empty and still. She’d coughed without breathing, cleared her mouth through muscle memory alone. The body knew what to do. It just didn’t need to.

The stars overhead were too bright, too sharp, each point of light carving itself into her retinas with surgical precision. The world had been painted in colors that didn’t have names, shadows that moved with purpose, and air that carried stories from kilometers away. To the south, the border wall ran in both directions, a long black line in the dark, snaking across the high desert scrub. A pale caliche strip of CBP patrol road paralleled it on the US side, empty.

Sound slammed into her amplified hearing like artillery, an avalanche of detail her old human ears had never had the apparatus to receive, every layer of the night announcing itself simultaneously and demanding to be sorted: wind hissing through palo verde branches with the dry papery whisper of leaves that had no soft edges left, a kangaroo rat scratching fifty yards distant, the small frantic percussion of an animal that did not yet know there was a new thing in the desert and would not get the chance to learn, electrical lines humming their deadly song across the high desert as far north as her hearing reached and beyond, an industrial hymn that had been there her whole life without ever having found her ears before. Scents flooded her nostrils in overwhelming waves, layered the way paint was layered on an old door when you finally took the heat gun to it, every coat below the top one still preserved and now suddenly present at once: creosote bush and brittlebush sharp enough to taste, the metallic taste of iron in ancient volcanic rock that had not weathered in living memory, the lingering musk of javelinas that had passed through hours before her death and were still announcing themselves to a girl who was no longer the girl they had passed.

A desert wind picked up, carrying information she shouldn’t be able to process: the pull of the San Pedro drainage miles to the east, the dry arroyo cuts on the Mexico side still holding the scent of yesterday’s rain, the age of coyote tracks in the dust, the way moonlight reflected off mica deposits in the caliche hardpan. The breeze felt different against her skin now, data beyond temperature and pressure: survival encoded in the air itself.

Her lungs sat still in her chest, quiet as stones at the bottom of a well.

I’m dead.

Terror should have gripped her. Instead, it was the first thing that didn’t sound like complete bullshit in weeks. She was dead, and yet she was thinking, moving, feeling. Dead but not finished.

She sat up slowly, dirt cascading from her small frame like shed skin. Her clothes were ruined: crop top torn across one shoulder, jeans shredded at the knees, both stained with earth that clung to her like evidence. Her black hair, shoulder-length and matted with grave soil, hung around a face that looked too young for the hunger that gnawed at her insides.

She caught a glimpse of her hand in the starlight and froze. The warm brown skin that had marked her as daughter of Managua had drained to café con leche, still Latina, but bleached by death into shadow. Her fingers looked delicate now, almost porcelain, but she could feel the steel-cable strength coiled beneath the surface.

¿Qué me hicieron?

At the head of her crude grave, two sticks had been lashed together with a rubber band, forming a mockery of a cross. Beneath it, folded paper waited like a punchline to a joke she didn’t want to understand.

She plucked the note free with fingers that trembled, from restraint, not cold. The paper was cheap thermal receipt paper, already starting to fade at the edges. CVS, according to the header. Someone had bought Advil, energy drinks, and condoms three days ago.

But underneath the mundane receipt smells, her enhanced senses caught something else. Something that made her newly awakened vampire instincts prickle with recognition: the metallic sweetness of vampire blood, faint but unmistakable, as if whoever had handled this paper had done so with bloody fingers. And threaded through that, gunpowder. Recent. Still sharp enough to make her nostrils flare.

The back was covered in hasty ballpoint pen, pressed hard enough to tear through the flimsy paper in places.

Querida,

If you are reading this, you have passed the first examination. Interesting, isn’t it, how quickly your body learned what it needed to survive? Most never wake up. Most accept the soil as their final lesson. But you... you clawed through six feet of earth like it was tissue paper. That tells me everything I need to know about who you really are.

Examination.

An evaluation. Someone had been watching, measuring, deciding whether she was worth the trouble of turning her. The writer was right; she had torn through packed desert soil like it was cotton batting. But how did they know that? How did they know she would wake up at all?

The truth is simple: you died in that hole. Your mortal heart stopped beating, your human lungs stopped breathing, your old life ended completely. What emerged is far more valuable. You are vampire now, immortal, powerful, beyond the small concerns that once limited you.

Dead. The word should have sent her into denial or panic, but it felt like the first honest thing anyone had told her in weeks.

Vampire.

The movies had lied about everything else; why should this be different? But the evidence surrounded her: the grave, the note, the way every sense had been cranked to eleven.

The cost? You will feed on blood instead of food. You will walk in darkness instead of light. You will become a predator instead of prey. Doesn’t that sound like exactly what you’ve been preparing for your entire life?

Her mouth watered at the mention of blood. Her teeth ached. Hunger clawed at her gut, abandoning food, fixating on the pulse of living blood. It had nothing to do with appetite. Blood called to her the way chocolate once had when she was little, when Mami would bring home a single piece of dark Venezuelan chocolate and she’d smell it through the wrapper for hours before letting it melt on her tongue. This was deeper than that, and older. This was survival disguised as craving.

Yes. Know what you are. Not cargo. Not merchandise. Not their victim.

The words turned like a key in an unknown lock. How many times had she been the prey? How many hands, how many trucks, how many promises that turned into lies?

I buried you just across the border on the gringo’s soil. Consider it your birthright, this land belongs to you now as much as any living citizen. The wooden cross points toward Tucson, where opportunities wait for someone with your particular talents. Don’t let the authorities catch you. Don’t let the sunrise find you unprepared.

Birthright.

Birthright. The word landed different than the others had. Her gaze drifted to the horizon where golden light gathered against the deepening sky. Opportunities. Someone thought she had talents worth mentioning.

But most importantly, don’t waste this gift by pretending you’re still the girl who trusted the wrong people. That girl is dead. Good riddance.

You are far more interesting now.

Something tightened in her chest that she didn’t have a word for yet. The girl who had trusted a boy’s promises, who had believed hard enough in a better life to follow it across a border. That girl was in this hole. Actually in this actual dirt. Good riddance to her, and something that wasn’t quite grief and wasn’t quite relief and had no clean name, and she wasn’t going to find one tonight.

The signature was a single elegant symbol, a mark rather than a name: serpent coiled around a flowering vine.

Not interesting. Dangerous.

Yes. Yes, she was.

She looked toward the horizon, where amber light pooled against the belly of the sky. Civilization. Or at least the promise of it. The cross at her feet pointed in that direction, just as the note had promised.

Don’t get caught by the authorities.

She almost laughed. Border Patrol was the least of her problems now. What were they going to do, deport a dead girl? Send her back to a grave in Mexico?

I need to remember what she said: dawn shows no mercy to the unprepared.

That one carried more weight. Vampires burned in sunlight; that much even Hollywood had gotten right. She squinted up at the stars, trying to calculate how many hours of darkness she had left. Hours remained before daylight, but time felt different now. More precious. More finite, despite her supposed immortality.

She stood slowly, testing her new body’s capabilities. Everything felt sharper, more precise. Her muscles snapped to whatever she needed. Her senses pulled in more than any human should be able to process.

Take blood. Feed.

The hunger twisted in her stomach, demanding attention. Not just any blood; she could smell the difference now between the metallic tang of old dried blood and the sweet copper richness of what flowed warm in living veins. She needed to feed. Soon. But first, she needed to understand what had happened to her. How she’d ended up in this grave somewhere in the borderlands between Agua Prieta and Douglas, who had put her here, and why.

Necesito sangre. Dios mío, what’s wrong with me?

She patted down her ruined clothing, checking pockets she’d forgotten she had. In the small front pocket of her jeans, the useless one designed for chapstick or emergency change, her fingers found an object that hadn’t been there before...

A small black device, no bigger than a pack of gum. Plastic housing with a single LED that pulsed green every few seconds. GPS tracker.

The drug shipment.

The memory surfaced without warning, impressions, not clear images. Weight pressed against her body during the truck ride. Packages. Parcels taped to her torso beneath her clothes. She’d been carrying something across the border, valuable enough to monitor.

Other fragments tried to surface with it: rough hands, the taste of cheap tequila forced down her throat, tongues that...

No. No, damn it, no. Eso no pasó. That didn’t happen.

She slammed those memories back into the dark where they belonged, the way you slammed a door on a room you’d promised yourself you weren’t going to enter, the way you put a heavy thing on top of a thing that was trying to get out, the way you taught yourself, fast and young and without help, that some closets had locks because the things inside them needed locks. A fullness, a violation that made her clench her thighs together and fight back the urge to scrape at her own skin, an old animal response her body had built when her mind hadn’t been in the room to consult, and the body did not need her permission tonight either.

The sound reached her enhanced hearing before her conscious mind could process what it meant: engines. Multiple vehicles, moving fast across rough terrain. No headlights, but that didn’t matter anymore. She could see in the dark now, tracked movement by sound.

The wind shifted, bringing her their scent before they crested the ridge. Unwashed skin, old tobacco smoke, engine grease, and something darker: the sour-sweet smell of men who spent their lives trafficking human cargo. The desert wind carried their stink: metallic and rotten beneath cheap cologne and fear-sweat.

They were coming for her.

Coyotes. Pendejos.

The word tasted like fear and fury on her tongue. Human traffickers who had bought and sold her like livestock, who had done things to her that her mind refused to remember, who had apparently decided she was worth more dead than alive.

Wrong.

Whatever they thought they were coming to collect, drugs, money, a compliant victim, it was gone. She was something else now. A predator that tore through packed earth, that hungered for blood, that had clawed back from death.

The engine sounds were getting closer. Three vehicles, maybe four, approaching from the south. They would expect to find either a fresh grave or a terrified girl. They would find neither.

Naida rose from her own grave with desert soil still spilling from her torn clothes, and felt her lips curve into the first genuine smile since she’d woken up dead. A predator’s smile, nothing nice left in it, mercy long gone.

Let them come. Take them. All of them.

She was dead already. What was the worst they could do?

The LED on the GPS tracker pulsed green in her palm, a tiny mechanical heartbeat in the darkness. She considered throwing it away, leaving them to search empty desert while she disappeared into the night. But that would be running. Hiding.

She slipped the tracker back into her pocket and began walking toward the approaching vehicles. Her bare feet found purchase on rock and sand with supernatural sure-footedness, her body moving through the darkness as if it had been designed for hunting rather than hiding.

The first vehicle crested a small rise about a quarter mile away, its engine growling through the night air. No headlights, but she saw it clearly now: a battered pickup truck with reinforced bumpers and wire mesh over the windshield. Behind it, two more trucks spread out in a loose formation, flanking her position.

They knew where she was. They had always known where she was.

Good. No running. No hiding.

And I didn’t even have to phone Coyote Hut.

Naida started walking faster, her stride lengthening into a pace that wasn’t quite running but covered ground efficiently. The hunger in her stomach twisted tighter, sharpening into something close to anticipation.

She needed to feed. The ache had been building since she’d pulled herself out of the ground, and those trucks had blood in them.

The trucks were less than a hundred yards away now, engines throttling down as they approached the disturbed earth that marked her grave. She heard voices, Spanish, crude and casual, discussing her like she was livestock that had wandered off.

“La mercancía está aquí. El GPS no miente.”

“¿Está viva?” one of them asked.

“No importa. Tenemos lo que vinimos a buscar.”

Is she alive. One of them asked it; the other said it didn’t matter. They thought she was merchandise, and whether the merchandise still breathed was a line on an invoice, nothing more. Property to be collected and redistributed according to their business plan.

Wrong again.

Naida stepped out of the shadows just as the lead truck’s driver cut the engine. Three men climbed out, flashlights in hand, their movements casual and confident. They had done this before. Probably many times.

“¡Órale!” called the driver, a heavyset man with forearms like tree trunks. “La putita linda. Look who’s awake, chicos.”

The flashlight beams found her, pinning her in circles of harsh white light. She didn’t flinch, but neither did she advance. Instead, she let herself sway slightly, performing disorientation. One hand pressed against her throat, a gesture that could be read as vulnerability or an invitation to look. Her other arm wrapped around her torso, drawing attention to torn clothing while appearing protective.

The illumination revealed what they had come to collect: an eighteen-year-old girl in ruined clothes, standing alone in the desert night, covered in grave dirt. But instead of the defiance they might have expected, she seemed... lost. Fragile. Exactly what they were used to handling.

“¿Dónde estoy?” she called out, her voice carrying just the right note of confusion and fear. Where am I? She took a half-step backward, then forward again, as if each direction held equal danger. The movement was subtle, but it positioned her closer to a cluster of palo verde where the shadows deepened.

“Ven acá, mija,” the driver continued, his voice taking on the false kindness that predators used with prey. “Come here. We’re taking you somewhere safe.”

Naida cocked her head, studying them through eyes that turned the flashlight beams into cold mirrors. When she spoke, her voice was soft, conversational, and absolutely terrifying.

“Safe?” She let the word hang in the air like a blade. “From who?”

The men shared nervous glances, confidence draining from their casual postures. This wasn’t how their collections usually went. The merchandise was supposed to be frightened, compliant, grateful for rescue.

“From whatever chupacabra buried you out here, niña,” the driver said, taking a step forward. “Come on. We’ll get you cleaned up, get you fed. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Naida retrieved the GPS tracker from her pocket, its green LED pulsing, mechanical heartbeat, leash. Then she snapped it in half, its LED going dark permanently. She looked back at the men who had come to collect her like a lost package.

Safe? Seriously? You think I was ever safe with you hijueputas?

Zip ties cutting into her wrists. The driver’s voice: “Don’t worry, putita, we’ll take real good care of you...”

Hands reaching in darkness. Her own voice, younger: “Please, I’ll be good.”

Laughter. Cold, predatory laughter.

“Yes, you will, you’ll be real good.”

No. No. I don’t want to remember.

The fragments lasted only seconds before she slammed them back into the dark.

Never again. Nunca más.

The second man, younger with prison tattoos snaking up his forearms, stayed by the trucks. Smart. But the third one, older, with scars across his knuckles, took a few steps closer, close enough that she could read the hunger in his eyes. For power, not for blood like hers. For control. For the chance to break something smaller than himself.

I know that look. I’ve seen it before. You think I’m still cargo. You think I’m still broken.

The driver holstered his flashlight and started walking toward her, hands visible and empty, the classic approach for spooked prey. She’d seen this exact choreography before. Step one: appear non-threatening. Step two: get within grabbing distance. Step three: the mask comes off.

“It’s okay, niña. You’re safe now. We’re going to take care of you.”

Same words. Same tone. Same lie.

Naida let her breathing quicken, eyes darting between the men as if searching for escape routes. But she wasn’t planning escape; she was reading angles, distances, positioning. The driver was ten feet away now, moving with the false patience of a predator who thought his prey was trapped. The scarred man hung back but moved slightly to her left, cutting off what he thought was a retreat path. Standard pincer movement.

Come on. Just a little closer. Leave your friends behind.

“I remember some things,” she said, voice small and uncertain. She let it crack slightly on the word ‘remember,’ as if the memories were too much to bear. “There was a truck. And men who... who were mean to me.”

She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, the picture of traumatized innocence. But the gesture also drew attention to her torn crop top, to the way the fabric clung despite the dirt and damage. When she shifted her weight, it was subtle: a slight arch to her back, a cant to her hips that might appear as defensive positioning or invitation, depending on what the viewer wanted to see.

The driver’s pupils dilated. He was seeing what he wanted to see.

“Please tell me you’re here to help.” The question came with a small step forward, enough to catch the moonlight differently, to highlight rather than hide. Her hand moved to her throat, the gesture reading as nervous, but her fingers traced a line down to her collarbone before stopping.

They taught me this. They taught me how to make them want to get closer. How to make them think they’re getting something for their kindness.

And I’m so fucking good at it. That’s the worst part, but that I remember. Not the details, not their faces, not what they did. But this? The performance? That’s muscle memory now. My body knows what to do before my brain catches up, and I hate it. I hate that it works. I hate that it feels automatic. I hate that some part of me always knows exactly what predators want to see.

She knew his type. They’d made her learn the types early, because it mattered: not everyone needed the same performance. Get it wrong and you made things worse. Get it right and you stayed okay, stayed whole enough to make it to the next stop on whatever route you were on. There weren’t that many. Some wanted fear, needed to see it in your face, needed proof they scared you. Some wanted degradation, the louder the better. But this one was the rescue type. His version required that she seem to choose. He needed to believe it was a gift, not a toll. The offer had to look like it came from her.

You think you’re different. They all think they’re different.

She let her arms fall to her sides. Not all at once. That looked practiced, and he needed to believe he was coaxing this out of her. There was a specific pace to seeming to surrender. Too fast read desperate. Too slow read calculating. The right tempo fell somewhere between reluctant and yielding, and her body knew it. She’d done it enough times that the mechanics had gone unconscious, filed below thought, below language.

Her chin lifted. Eyes found his and held for two beats before dropping away, tentative trust, the performance of a girl deciding, against her better judgment, to let someone close. Her hand moved to the tear in the shirt’s shoulder seam, fingers resting against the torn edge. She’d stopped noticing damage a long time ago.

They called what comes next ‘the offer.’ Not a promise. The suggestion of a promise. Specific enough to make them lean forward. Deniable enough that you couldn’t be held to it. They drilled that into her. The difference mattered.

She pulled the torn edge down another inch. The shoulder seam gave the rest of the way, fabric dropping to just above her hip and leaving her side open to the night air. The torn front held. She angled toward the moonlight and let him see the geometry of it: what was covered, what wasn’t, what might not be for long.

Her breathing became shallow and unsteady, engineered, the specific pattern that made fabric pull tight, the shirt clinging where sweat had made it stick, her nipples sharp through the thin material in the exact display she knew they’d look for. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and held the raised-arm position fractionally too long, the gesture pulling his gaze from her face down her raised arm to the open line of her side.

“I don’t know who you are,” she said. Small voice, perfect register. Then softer, dropping to the specific pitch she’d been trained to produce: “But I want to.”

Let him interpret that. He will. They always do. He’ll build the whole fantasy out of those four words and it will be the one he wants, not the one I meant, and that gap is where I’m going to put him in the ground.

He didn’t move. Still two steps too far, weight rocking forward without committing.

He wants more certainty. Okay. I know what certainty looks like.

Her hand went to the single button still holding the front of the shirt together, the only one that had survived the night, and undid it. The gesture had stopped requiring a decision. It was just what the hand did next.

The shirt fell open. She kept her eyes on his face, not on herself. She didn’t need to look. She knew what was visible and what it cost to make it visible, and neither number was new information.

Finders fee. That’s what they called it. You get found, you pay. Sometimes you got to wherever you were going first. Sometimes you didn’t make it that far. The fee was the same either way. The only variable you could control was the timing, and even that wasn’t always true.

“I know how this works,” she said. Flat. Direct. Matter-of-fact, because she was matter-of-fact about it. She had stopped being anything other than matter-of-fact about it somewhere around week three. “You found me. I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand what that means.”

Part of me is doing this because if I give them what they want, they don’t hurt me. That part isn’t strategic. That part is just what I learned. Three months of learning it until it stopped feeling like a decision.

The other part is doing this because I need him two steps closer. And I can’t always tell which part is driving.

His breathing had changed. Shallower, faster, audible now with her enhanced hearing, a rhythm she recognized the way she recognized multiplication tables. His weight had shifted forward, body leading before the mind gave permission. She mapped the inventory from where she stood: pupils blown wide in the dark, flush moving up from his collar, hands hanging at his sides doing nothing purposeful. He was no longer watching for a flight risk. He was watching her waist, her side, the fabric.

I can hear his pulse. Not fear. I know that spike. This is the other one. The one they trained me to produce.

She let her lower lip catch on her teeth for a moment, not biting, just that small caught hesitation that read as working something through, deciding something she hadn’t finished deciding, and watched the flush spread up his throat to his jaw.

The driver’s expression had collapsed into what he probably told himself was compassion. It looked like anticipation. The specific arousal that came from power over something helpless that might, just might, be grateful enough to show it.

There it is. There’s the real you. You think I might be offering payment for rescue.

“Sí, mija. We’re here to help. Just come a little closer, and we’ll get you somewhere safe. Get you warm.”

He took another step forward, now only six feet away. The scarred man moved with him, maintaining the pincer formation, but he was focused on blocking her escape routes rather than watching her hands. Amateur mistake.

You’re not watching my hands. You’re not watching my feet. Just my tits, my hips, my mouth. Same as always.

She took one more step backward, deeper into the shadows where the desert darkness folded around her. The movement brought her to the perfect position: back against a large palo verde, seemingly cornered, but actually protected from behind while having clear striking distance to anyone who approached.

The driver followed, drawn by her apparent distress and his own predatory instincts. Just a few more feet, and he’d be away from his partners, away from the vehicles, away from the light. The scarred man followed too, but hung back slightly, close enough to help, far enough to avoid being grabbed if she tried to use the driver as a human shield.

You’ve thought this through. You’ve done this dance before. But you’re thinking like the wrong kind of predator.

Her enhanced hearing picked up the tattooed man’s voice from the trucks: “Órale, just grab her already. We don’t have all night.”

“Cállate,” the driver snapped back over his shoulder. “She’s scared. We do this right, she comes quiet. We do it wrong, she screams and runs and we’re chasing her through cactus for an hour.”

They’re arguing. Good. Distracted. And you’re worried about me screaming and running.

She let her lower lip tremble, made her voice break, not hard when the memories were so close to the surface. “I just want to go home. I want my papi.”

The word hung between them: innocent need and sexual promise, depending on what he wanted to hear. She knew which version he’d pick.

It was true. She did want to go home, wanted her mama, wanted to be the girl who worried about homework and boys and whether her crop top was too tight. But that girl was buried in a hole in the desert, and what had clawed out was something unnameable.

“I know, mija. I know.” His eyes traveled down her body and back up. “I can be your papi.” The driver moved close enough for her to taste the tequila fumes, catalog the burst capillaries mapping his nose, track the subtle tremor in his hands from whatever uppers were keeping him functional. “But you can’t go home yet. You need to come with us first. I’ll make you feel safe, feel good... Just for a little while.”

Just a little while. Until we’ve used you up completely.

This is wrong. I shouldn’t be this good at playing victim. Real victims don’t calculate angles and plan strikes. But I’m not a victim anymore, am I? I’m the thing that clawed out of a grave and can’t stop thinking about blood. That needs it. That needs them. So why does this performance feel more natural than anything else since I crawled out of that hole?

“I don’t want to get in another truck,” she said, genuine terror bleeding through her careful performance. She never wanted to be cargo again, never wanted to be something transported and traded and consumed.

“You don’t have to be scared,” the scarred man said, moving closer now that the driver had her engaged. “We’re the good guys, remember? We’re here to rescue you. Be a good girl and come to papi.”

Rescue. Right. And I’m sure you’ll want proper payment for your rescue services.

The two men were positioned perfectly now, close enough to grab, far enough from backup, isolated in the shadows where their deaths wouldn’t be witnessed. The tattooed man by the trucks was getting impatient, but he wasn’t moving. He was the smart one, the cautious one. He’d be last.

But first, she had to deal with the volunteers.

“I don’t know if I can trust anyone anymore,” she said, and the vulnerability in her voice was absolutely genuine. She didn’t trust anyone. But not for the reasons he thought.

“You can trust me,” he said, advancing. Near enough that his accelerating heartbeat betrayed exactly the trust he had in mind.

Take him. Now.

“Está bien,” Naida whispered, her first real smile since the dirt breaking across her face. “I trust you.”

Oh, I absolutely trust you, cerote, but not in the way you think.

She took the half-step forward.

He closed the rest of the distance himself, because that was how it worked, the victim coming partway, leaving just enough space that he believed he was choosing to cross the last inch. His arm went around her waist, and she registered the heat of him, the ambient warmth a living body throws off without thinking about it.

I forgot what warm felt like from the outside.

He kissed her.

She kissed back, like a woman consumed with hunger, which she was, just not the way the coyote expected.

Her hands found the back of his neck, the gesture of someone being pulled in. What it was: her fingers mapping the soft triangle below his left ear, carotid close to the surface, thin-skinned and available.

My body is running all the right signals. Specific muscle tension. Specific breathing. None of it requires a heartbeat, no circulation, nothing moving in my chest. What I am now hunts through seduction. The conditioning hunts through seduction. I cannot find the seam between them. Both arrived at the same time, built on the same foundation, doing the same thing. One is what I became. The other is what men decided to make me. I have no idea which one is running this right now.

There. Now.

He’s going to notice I’m the wrong temperature in about three more seconds.

He did. She felt it, the fraction of a second where his mouth stilled, the slight pull of someone whose body said wait before his brain supplied the better story. Girl’s been outside for hours. Half-dressed. Desert night. Of course she’s cold.

She watched him decide that and stay.

“You’re cold, mija.” His mouth moved to her ear. “Let me warm you up.”

“Sí,” she breathed. “Warm me up.”

He set that up. I just aimed it.

She didn’t give him another second.

Her grip locked. She drove his head sideways and bit into the side of his throat, not a warning, the artery itself, straight through to the source. Blood, warm and copper-sweet, immediate. The heat in her palms flared: banked coals, bone-deep.

His sound cut off as her hand came up, vampiric strength making the arithmetic simple. His eyes went wide and his hands came up clawing at her arm, no longer thinking about what he’d expected to find here, no longer thinking about anything except the thing he’d found instead.

His boots scraped against the caliche as she dragged him into the palo verde grove, thorns sealing around them. His hands dropped from his throat to hang uselessly at his sides. His knees buckled, and he collapsed forward against the palo verde, conscious but utterly helpless.

The other two men shouted in alarm, fumbling for their weapons, but she was already moving. She hauled the heavyset trafficker deeper into the darkness beyond their flashlight beams, her predatory strength folding his two-hundred-pound frame like paper.

Dark. Now. Take them.

Behind them, she heard the other Sinaloa Coyotes calling out, their flashlight beams sweeping frantically across the desert, but she was already beyond their reach, swallowed by shadows that parted for her like curtains.

The hunger arrived with mechanical precision, the way thirst arrives when you’ve run too long, not a question, just physics. The man’s pulse hammered against her fingertips, rapid, terrified, a countdown she understood without being taught.

Dios, I know what I am now. I know what I’ve become. Forgive me.

She fed anyway. The blood came warm and copper-thick, and the thing inside her that had been screaming since the moment she broke ground went quiet. Just quiet. Just fed. His fingers clawed at the dirt and then they stopped. She tracked his pulse down from terrified to absent the way you track a fever breaking, clinical, incremental, one number at a time.

She pulled back when the pulse was gone. His blood tasted like his life, ordinary, finite, used up, and nothing like she’d been promised by the ache in her jaw all night. It didn’t care. It had what it needed.

The man lay still at the base of the palo verde. She assessed: threat neutralized, position exposed, two more men somewhere in the dark. The part of her that was still eighteen tried to surface. She didn’t help it up.

Yes. Feed. Hunt. Live.

In the distance, she heard the surviving Coyotes shouting to each other, engines starting, vehicles pulling away. The cargo that had teeth. Let them tell it.

Naida wiped blood from her lips with her knuckles. Turned north toward Tucson. Her feet knew the direction before her brain made the decision: some new instinct already calculating distance, water sources, cover, feeding opportunities. She followed it. The desert ahead of her ran in waves of low scrub and pale caliche and dry washes that the moonlight rendered as a silver topographic map drawn for a reader she did not yet know how to be, every ridge announcing where the next ridge would lie, every dry channel showing her where water had once decided to travel and would decide to travel again the next time the sky broke open. And apparently something in her already knew how to start, something that had not been hers before the dirt and that was hers entirely now, walking her north on bare feet that found purchase as if the ground had been laid for them.

The hunt was just beginning.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios

The boyfriend’s house looked different at night. Naida had passed it dozens of times during the day. Walking to school, heading home with friends, those careful afternoon visits when his mother was there and everything felt safe and supervised. Now, standing on the cracked sidewalk with her backpack, three days of surviving packed into one bag, the two-story concrete structure felt like a fortress designed to keep her out, deliberate and weather-stained and obviously built by men who had decided what their family was and was not in the business of taking in. The generator at the pulpería two doors down was still running, that low diesel grind that had been the soundtrack of every Managua summer she’d been alive for, woven so deeply into the city’s nighttime breathing that she only noticed it now because she was standing still long enough to hear what she was about to walk into. Diesel smell, someone’s music bleeding through a closed window in that small distorted way music came through concrete walls in this neighborhood, the dog on the corner doing what it always did, oblivious as dogs got to be when they had owners and food and a corner of their own to defend.

She checked her phone. 10:14 PM. Late enough that the family would be home and settled, early enough that showing up wouldn’t scream emergency or look suspicious to neighbors. The mathematics of desperation: when did you stop being a girl asking for help and become a threat that needed handling?

Her parents had been dead for three days. Crossfire between police and pandilleros two blocks from the market where they’d gone to buy vegetables. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong city to believe you could live a normal life if you just kept your head down and worked hard. The funeral had been yesterday, cheap coffins, cheaper ceremony, extended family who’d shown up long enough to confirm they weren’t taking her in. Including the aunt whose son Naida had told her mother about, years ago. The touching. The locked bedroom door. His fingers invading her body. The things cousins weren’t supposed to do. The son who’d been quietly sent to live with family in León afterward.

“You’re seventeen,” her aunt had said. Not unkindly. “Old enough to work. Old enough to figure it out.”

Old enough to be someone else’s problem.

Naida had figured out plenty during those three days of frantic calls and closed doors. She’d figured out the apartment was already gone. The landlord had come by twice, measuring it with his eyes instead of his condolences. She’d figured out that relatives would drive two hours to stand at a cheap coffin but not twenty minutes to answer a phone. She’d figured out that seventeen-year-old orphans in Managua had three options, roughly, and two of them you didn’t survive.

But she’d also decided: boys were stupid.

The cousin had taught her that, years ago, in ways she still couldn’t think about directly, every attempt skidding past the actual memory. He’d taught her that men wanted things from girls, specific things, and that wanting made them weak and predictable. The boys at school had proved it was true, how easily they’d do her homework, buy her lunch, give her their jackets when she shivered theatrically, all for a smile and a kiss on the cheek and the carefully rationed possibility of more that she knew she would never actually allow.

Mateo had been one of the stupid ones. Sweet, eager Mateo with his nice smile and his modest house and his parents who both had actual jobs instead of scrambling for daily survival. She’d cultivated him carefully over the past year, just enough attention to keep him interested, just enough distance to keep him wanting more. Never anything that would get her labeled a puta by the other girls, never anything that would make his parents forbid him from seeing her.

Until tonight.

Tonight, she needed more than homework help.

She circled to the back of the house, where Mateo’s second-floor bedroom window faced the small concrete courtyard. Light still glowed behind the curtains. He was awake, probably on his phone like every other teenage boy alone in his room at night. She could hear faint audio through the closed window, female voices, exaggerated moans, the kind of sounds that made teenage boys think they understood what women wanted.

Naida picked up three small pebbles from the courtyard. Checked the neighboring windows, all dark. Threw the first pebble.

It clicked against the glass louder than she’d intended. She froze, listening for movement inside the house, but heard nothing except the distant sound of traffic and a dog barking two streets over.

She threw the second pebble. Then the third.

The curtain twitched. Mateo’s face appeared, confused and backlit by his phone. His eyes went wide when he recognized her. She watched him mouth her name silently before he disappeared from view.

Thirty seconds later, the back door opened carefully. Mateo emerged in pajama pants and a t-shirt, phone flashlight illuminating his nervous approach.

“Naida? ¿Qué estás haciendo aquí? It’s late...”

She stepped forward into the phone’s light, letting him see her properly. She’d calculated this carefully. No makeup because she didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard, hair loose because boys liked it down, her best jeans and a fitted shirt that showed she had curves without looking obvious. The backpack stayed hidden in the shadows.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, making her voice small and frightened. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

His expression shifted immediately from confusion to concern. Perfect. He was so stupid when you gave him a chance to be a hero.

“Your parents...” he started, then stopped, looking uncomfortable. “I heard. I’m so sorry. I wanted to come to the funeral, but my father said...”

“It doesn’t matter.” She moved closer, close enough that he’d smell her shampoo, close enough that he’d feel the heat of her body in the cool night air. She could feel him too, warmth coming off his skin, like he’d just been in bed, and filed it away as useful. “Mateo, I need help. I need somewhere to stay. Just for a little while, until I can figure things out.”

“Stay? Here?” His eyes darted back toward the house, anxiety replacing concern. “Naida, I don’t think my parents would...”

“They don’t have to know.” She let her hand brush against his arm, barely there, contact that promised more. “Just... maybe in your room? I can sleep on the floor. I won’t make noise. Your parents won’t even know I’m here.”

She watched him struggle with it, what he wanted pulling against what his father would do. If she pushed too hard, he’d panic. If she didn’t push enough, he’d find excuses.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, letting her voice crack slightly. Not fake tears, she didn’t need to perform that much, but genuine vulnerability wrapped in just enough sensuality to confuse his protective instincts with other, baser urges. “Everyone else said no. You’re the only one who...” She let the sentence trail off, looking up at him through her eyelashes in the way that had always made him fumble for words.

“I want to help,” he said, and she could hear the honesty in it mixed with the fear. “But my father, he’s very strict about girls. About reputation. If he found out...”

“He won’t.” She closed the remaining distance between them, her body almost touching his. She could feel him trembling. “Please, Mateo. Just tonight. I promise I’ll be good.”

The double meaning hung between them. She watched him process it, watched him try to decide if she meant what he hoped she meant.

She’d learned this dance young. Knew exactly how far to lean into the promise without making it explicit.

Mateo opened his mouth to respond.

“Mijo, ¿con quién estás hablando?”

They both froze. The voice came from inside the house, male and sharp with authority. Mateo’s father.

“Nobody, Papá! Just... checking something outside.”

But footsteps were already approaching; the back door swung wider and Mateo’s father stood there in undershirt and pants, his weathered face moving from confusion to recognition to something harder when he saw Naida standing close to his son in the middle of the night.

“Naida.” Not a question. A flat statement that carried judgment in every syllable. “What are you doing at my house this late at night?”

“Señor Morales, I...” She started with the vulnerable routine, but his expression stopped her cold. This was a grown man who’d seen every con Managua had to offer, not a boy she could work with practiced helplessness.

“Her parents died,” Mateo said, stepping between them. “She just needed...”

“I know about her parents.” Señor Morales stepped fully into the courtyard, and suddenly the space felt much smaller. “Tragic. But that doesn’t explain why she’s in my backyard at this hour, standing very close to my son, asking for God knows what.”

The way he said it, cold and knowing, made Naida’s stomach clench. He understood exactly what she’d been doing. Worse, he was assessing in a way she couldn’t handle.

She’d made a study of the different ways men looked at girls her age, an unwilling expertise built by every walk past every doorway and every bus stop in a city that had been quietly assessing her since she was nine years old. The hungry ones, the guilty ones, the ones who pretended not to look at all, the ones who looked and then made themselves look away and the ones who looked and then talked to themselves about what they had just looked at. None of them had ever flipped the mirror, none of them had ever set the small careful machinery of her face and posture and voice in front of her and named it for what it was while she was still standing inside it. Congratulations to Señor Morales: first man in Managua to look at a seventeen-year-old girl and see the hustler instead of the merchandise, and the worst part was the small clean precision of the recognition, the way it came without anger or even much disgust, the way a foreman might assess a tool that had wandered onto the wrong jobsite.

“I just needed help,” she said, abandoning the seduction and trying for honesty. “I have nowhere to go. No family willing to take me in. I thought maybe...”

“You thought you’d manipulate my son into hiding you in his bedroom.” Still flat. Still cold. “You thought a pretty face, empty promises, and some desperate circumstances would make a stupid boy do stupid things.”

“Papá, that’s not...”

“Go inside, Mateo.”

“But I...”

“Inside.“

Mateo looked at Naida with helpless apology, then fled back into the house. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving her alone in the courtyard with Señor Morales.

Naida considered running, but her backpack was still in the shadows and she had nowhere to run to anyway. Her heart was going, actually going, in a way it hadn’t even during the pebbles; she’d been too focused then. She made herself breathe through it. She waited, trying to read his expression, trying to figure out what came next.

“You’re seventeen years old,” he said finally. “Orphaned. No family support. No money. No prospects.” He paused. “In a week, maybe two, you’ll be living on the streets. You know what happens to pretty seventeen-year-old girls on the streets of Managua?”

She did. Everyone did. That’s why she was here.

“I was hoping...” she started.

“You were hoping my son would be stupid enough to shelter you. Maybe sleep with you. Get attached. Maybe even get you pregnant. Make it impossible for his family to throw you out once we discovered you.” His tone suggested he’d seen this exact play before. “But what you didn’t consider is that I can’t have a girl like you anywhere near my son.”

A girl like you. The words hit like a slap.

“I need to protect my family,” Señor Morales continued, almost conversationally. “My son has a future ahead of him. Good grades, maybe university if we can save enough. He doesn’t need a pretty distraction with tragic circumstances pulling him into poor decisions.”

“I understand,” Naida said. Another calculation, another zero. “I’ll go.”

She moved to collect her backpack, but his next words stopped her.

“However.” He pulled a phone from his pocket. “I might be able to help you.”

Something hooked behind her ribs. “Help me how?”

“I have... business associates. People who move cargo north, across borders. They sometimes need workers. Young, pretty workers who don’t have family asking questions.”

She waited for the catch. “What kind of work?”

“Does it matter?” He was already scrolling through his contacts. “You have no money, no family, no options. I’m offering you a chance at a better life. In America. Real opportunity.”

“But what would I be doing?”

“Service work. Hospitality. Entertainment.” He waved the questions away like annoying flies. “The details aren’t important. What matters is you’d be fed, housed, transported safely across three countries, and given real work instead of starving, o puteando, in Managua. Most girls would be grateful for such an opportunity.”

She could name every red flag if she let herself. The vagueness. The speed. The way he’d pivoted from throwing her out to offering salvation. But the alternative was sleeping in parks, selling her body, and hoping the gangs didn’t notice her, and that wasn’t really an alternative at all.

“It sounds... expensive,” she said. “I don’t have money for travel...”

“You work off the debt. Standard arrangement. My associates cover all costs upfront, transportation, papers, housing, and you work for them until the debt is cleared. Fair deal for everyone.”

“How long would that take?”

“Depends on how hard you work. How cooperative you are. How much you’re willing to do what’s necessary.” His smile stopped at his mouth. “But you seem like a smart girl. Resourceful. I’m sure you’ll find ways to be... valuable.”

The way he said valuable made her skin crawl, but what choice did she have? Stay in Managua with nothing? Sleep on streets where girls disappeared? At least in America there were laws, police who weren’t corrupt, opportunities for someone willing to work.

“And the work is legal?” she asked. “I won’t get deported?”

“My associates handle everything. They’ve been doing this for years. Very professional operation.” He was already typing on his phone. “Trust me, you’ll enjoy the work. It’s the kind of thing pretty girls like you are naturally good at.”

That phrase again, pretty girls like you. Like being pretty was both her only asset and her fundamental flaw. Like it explained everything about who she was and what she was worth.

But maybe he was right. Maybe being pretty was the only advantage she had left. She had learned that men wanted certain things from pretty girls. School boys had proved they’d pay for even the hint of getting those things. Maybe in America, where everything was better, she could use that advantage to build a real life instead of just surviving day to day.

“Okay,” she said. “When would I leave?”

“Tomorrow. Be ready at dawn. I’ll have someone pick you up.” He studied her for a moment, something almost pitying in his expression. “You should thank me, you know. Most men would have just called the police and let them deal with a trespasser. Or worse, let the streets deal with you.”

“Thank you, Señor Morales.” The words came automatically, years of forced politeness to adults who held power over her. “I really appreciate...”

“One more thing.” His voice dropped lower, harder. “I’m doing this to protect my son from a puta who tried to seduce her way into my house. Don’t mistake my business opportunity for kindness. You’re a problem that needs to disappear, and my associates pay well for pretty problems.” He smiled without warmth. “Waste not, want not.”

The words landed cold and clear. He was disposing of her. Profitably.

She almost admired the efficiency. Her own con had been a C-minus at best; his was professional grade. Respect where it was due, even when it was selling you.

But what else was there?

“Where should I meet them?” she asked, voice small.

He gave her an address, somewhere in the industrial district, early morning. Then he went back inside, leaving her alone with her backpack and the dark.

But at least she wouldn’t be sleeping in a park tonight.

At least she’d have a chance.

She killed her third question before it finished forming. Lullabies were for girls who could afford to sleep.

She shouldered her backpack and walked. The pavement held the day’s heat under her shoes; somewhere on the main road a bus went by too fast, its exhaust touching her face like a hand. The city was the city. It didn’t care what happened in one courtyard. She told herself America would be better, that the work would be fine, that she was smart and resourceful and pretty and those things would count for something somewhere. Or if they didn’t, she’d make them.

© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios