Rocket - Chapter 1
Naida - US/Mexico Border
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