Chapter 2 The Awakening

She gasped, grabbing the edge of the bar. The bottle she'd been holding slipped from her fingers and shattered on the floor. Crystal shards and vodka spread across the polished wood.

"Rachel?" Suzy's voice sounded distant, underwater. "Rachel, what's wrong?"

The pain intensified. It felt like something was breaking open inside her skull. Her vision blurred, doubled, then suddenly sharpened with impossible clarity. She could see every dust mote in the air.

Smell every individual person in the room, sweat and perfume and something underneath, something primal and wild.

Hear conversations from fifty feet away as clearly as if people were whispering in her ear.

"I-" She tried to speak, but her voice came out wrong. Deeper. Rough.

Her hands were shaking. No. Not shaking. Changing.

She watched in horror as her fingernails lengthened, sharpened, darkened to black points. The skin of her hands rippled like something was moving underneath.

"Oh God." Rachel stumbled backward, knocking into a table. Glasses crashed to the floor. "Oh God, what's happening?"

"Rachel!" Suzy grabbed her shoulders.

"Talk to me! Should I call 911?"

But Rachel couldn't answer. The pain was spreading, down her spine, through her chest, into her bones. It felt like her skeleton was trying to tear itself out of her body and rebuild itself into something else.

She opened her mouth to scream and tasted blood.

Her blood.

The scent of it hit her like a physical force, and suddenly she was starving. Not hungry, starving. A desperate, clawing need that made everything else disappear except the pulse points of every person in the room. She could see them, glowing beneath the skin. Could hear hearts beating. Could smell the life pumping through veins.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no-"

The lights exploded.

Every bulb in The Crimson Moon burst simultaneously in a shower of sparks and glass. Someone screamed. In the sudden darkness, Rachel could see perfectly-better than perfectly.

Everything was sharp and clear and edged in colors that shouldn't exist.

And that's when she saw her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

Her eyes were glowing. Not reflecting light-actually glowing from within. One gold, one crimson, one violet. Three different colors swirling like oil on water.

"What the fuck," she breathed.

The window behind her exploded inward.

Glass rained down as something massive crashed through from the street outside. Rachel spun, her new predator vision tracking the movement with inhuman precision.

A man crouched in the wreckage. Except he wasn't quite a man anymore. His face was twisted, wrong, with too-long fangs and eyes that had gone completely black. His skin was gray, papery, stretched too tight over bones that jutted at wrong angles.

The thing that resembles a man lifted its head and looked directly at her.

Then it smiled with a mouth full of broken glass teeth.

"Hybrid," it hissed, and the word sounded like worship and hunger and madness all twisted together. "Mine. MINE!"

It launched itself at her with impossible speed.

Rachel didn't think. Didn't have time to think. Her body moved on pure instinct, diving sideways as the creature's claws raked through the space where her head had been a second before. She hit the ground hard, rolled, came up in a crouch she'd never learned and didn't know how she did it.

The thing landed where she'd been standing and immediately spun to track her. Its movements were jerky, broken, like a puppet with tangled strings. But it was fast. So impossibly fast.

"Rachel, RUN!" Suzy screamed from somewhere in the chaos.

The creature lunged again. This time Rachel wasn't fast enough. Claws caught her shoulder, tearing through fabric and skin. Blood welled hot and immediate. She screamed-

And then there was someone else there.

A blur of motion, a snarl that shook the walls, and suddenly the creature was being ripped away from her. Rachel hit the ground again, gasping, clutching her bleeding shoulder.

Through her color-saturated vision, she watched as Rowan Blackwood, her boss's boss, the man she'd been crushing on from a safe distance for two years, lifted the twisted vampire-thing by its throat with one hand.

His eyes had gone completely gold. Bright, burning, inhuman gold. And when he smiled, she saw fangs.

"Bad idea," Rowan said, his voice a rumble that resonated in her chest, "attacking what's mine."

Then he tore the thing's head off with his bare hands.

The body hit the floor with a wet, final sound. Rowan dropped the head beside it and turned to look at Rachel.

She couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Blood dripped from her shoulder. Her hands were still tipped with black claws. Her eyes still glowed with three impossible colors. And Rowan Blackwood was walking toward her with glowing gold eyes and murder on his hands, looking at her like he'd been waiting his entire life for this exact moment.

He crouched in front of her, close enough that she could smell him-whiskey and pine and something wild that made her want to press closer even as every survival instinct screamed to run.

"Happy birthday, beautiful," he said softly, and God help her, he was smiling. That cocky, dangerous smile that she'd only ever seen from across crowded rooms. Up close, it was devastating. "Welcome to the real world."

He reached out one bloodstained hand.

And despite everything; the pain, the fear, the impossible changes rippling through her body, the dead thing on the floor, the chaos erupting around them, Rachel found herself reaching back.

Their fingers touched.

Power exploded between them like lightning, and the last thing Rachel saw before darkness swallowed her was Rowan's gold eyes widening in shock.

Then nothing.