AUTHOR'S NOTE: For the sake of storyline, I'm going to mitigate the newborn-ness of Benjamin a little bit here. I'm still going to try to keep him as close to canon as possible, emotional, out of control, but I'm going to let him keep a lot of his personality. I just feel like we're barely getting to know him, right? Don't want to lose him now :). Also: thank you so much for the feedback. I love love you guys.

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It was all blackness. I don't think I was unconscious anymore. It wasn't that calm, flat black of unconsciousness, it was a vivid, angry black, like being inside of a thing that's eaten you. I knew that if I was unconscious, I wouldn't be in this much pain.

I had no idea what the hell was happening to me.

This was the first time I could remember having real, coherent thoughts in—I don't know. Days. I remembered the pain, and I remembered—crazy things. I don't know. Crazy thoughts, wild ideas, feeling my body changing, distorting and hardening like death or chrysalis. I felt the moment when my hard stopped beating.

Eventually my vision came back into focus. It hardly mattered, because all I could see was the ceiling anyway—or maybe the rest of the room if I turned my head to the side. I didn't think of it. I was too busy dying.

I was sure that was what was happening. I couldn't think of any other ending from all this pain, surely this was too much pain for me to come out the other side alive. It was something to do with Lord Amun biting me, some kind of—reaction. Something had happened because he bit me, and it was killing me. But the pain kept going and I kept not dying, I kept being alive enough to see and scream, and surely if I'd died, it would have stopped hurting. I don't think I'd stolen enough things to go to Hell.

I almost didn't notice when the pain started going away. I had just gotten used to it—not that it wasn't bothering me anymore, far from it, but you can get used to anything. Your brain can trick you into thinking that it's normal so that you can try to deal. The pain didn't go away all at once—it sort of slid out of me gradually, dialing down one notch at a time.

I finally realized that I wasn't screaming anymore. That was what eventually tipped me off, because I had been screaming, I'd been screaming for days straight. I wasn't really much of a screamer. I'd never screamed when I'd broken bones, I wasn't afraid of heights or water or really much at all except for snakes, I guess, and I didn't scream about them. I was definitely more of a yeller—but when you were dying? When you were dying, you screamed. That was just what happened.

It struck me that it was very quiet in the room all of a sudden, and then it occurred to me it was because I was quiet. And then I realized that I was quiet because I wasn't in pain anymore. I wasn't in pain at all.

I immediately had this great idea that maybe I should sit up. I tried. I ran into heavy belted restraints a few inches up, the kind they use on dangerous prisoners or international spies. I tried to sit up again, but with no success, so instead I just laid back on the bed and kind of kicked my feet ineffectually.

"Hey," I yelled. My throat was raw and burning, the way it feels when you have strep throat or a bad cold. Only times a thousand. "Hey!" I was sure it was just from screaming so much, but there was something weird about the way my throat felt, heated and desert-dry. Anyway, it wasn't going to stop me from yelling. I was in a strange room, I was strapped to a bed, and for some reason I couldn't remember what had happened to me. Actually I couldn't remember anything at all. This was not going to work for me. "HEY!"

"Hey," someone cut in, sardonic, annoyed. "I'm right here. Shut up."

The voice was familiar, but—not familiar. If that made any sense. What I mean is that I knew I'd heard it before, because that voice was literally my only clear memory at the moment. He was the guy who had picked me up. After Lord Amun had bitten me and I'd fallen all the ground and all that, there had been that guy who'd picked me up and carried me to this room, and this was him. I remembered that voice.

I turned my head and saw him standing up from a chair in the corner, walking over to the side of my bed. "Um," I said. "Hey."

"Do you know any other words?" he asked, the corner of his mouth pulling down. On first sight, my general impression of him was brown—leather and leathered skin, brown fingerless gloves, light brown hair that looked like it had been cut with kitchen shears. The kind of guy who looked like he was annoyed to be pulled away from riding horses and shooting outlaws, who wanted to get back to the important buisiness of striding through saloon doors. "I'm just glad you're awake now, I swear I've never seen anyone take this long."

"Who are you?" I asked. I had about seven hundred questions, and the problem was I couldn't ask them all at once. They were all shoved and stacked up against each other like clowns in a tiny car, and when I opened my mouth, this was the one that happened to pop out.

"Marek," he said shortly, and went to work on my restraints. "I'm letting you u now. You're not going to try anything."

"Hate to lose the element of surprise," I said, "but I think I probably am."

"No you're not," he countered firmly. "I already saw it and you're not going to try anything. Anyway, I would hope you're not that stupid."

"What do you mean you saw—?" The question got halfway out and then got shoved out of the way by another question, significantly more important than the minor quirks of obviously crazy people. "Listen, what happened to me?"

He unbuckled the last restraint and I sat up slowly, carefully, with the vague idea that someone might try to stop me. Nobody stopped me, and I didn't make a break for it. Even though I normally would have. Really weird that he'd known that.

"What happened to you?" he repeated in same ironic tone, his voice permenantly lodged somewhere between boredom and sarcasm. "Well. Hmm. What's the best way to explain this? Benjamin, you seem to have gotten yourself killed."

Right. I'd thought of that one already, and it didn't make sense. "Sure," I said. "So this is heaven, is it? Stuck in some room with some random guy who doesn't ever give me a straight answer, can't remember anything, no idea what happened to me and God, my throat hurts! I'm hungry!"

I stopped, surprised. Where had that come from? What did my throat hurting have to do with me being hungry? When did I get so weird?

"I bet you are," he said dryly. "That's what I meant about being dead."

I threw my hands up in the air. "Look, you aren't making any sense. Not that I'm surprised."

Marek sat down on the bed and crossed his arms, looking tired already after five minutes with me. "Let me make this as easy as I can," he said. "…You're a vampire."

I blinked at him. And thought this over. And blinked again. "I'm sorry?"

"You heard me."

"I really hope I misunderstood," I hissed. "I was hoping you'd said something else, because you have to understand that I thought I was dying, I don't know what the hell happened to me, and you're making jokes?"

"You can't die," he said matter-of-factly. "You're immortal. It's one of the perks, but I don't know. Still not really worth it. I guess you take what you can get."

"I'm not a vampire! That's dumb!"

Marek reached over to the nightstand, pulled open the drawer, grabbed a gun out of it and shot me in the chest.

I only had a chance to turn a little and close my eyes, and for the second time in recent memory, I was pretty positive I was dead. But I felt the bullet hit me and I felt it bounce. I opened my eyes in time to see it clatter to the marble floor, if not entirely flattened then at least a little bit…bent. It hadn't killed me. I wasn't dead. Well, unless I believed Marek—it which case, maybe I was anyway. I couldn't believe I was even considering it, but—I'd just had a bullet bounce off me, for God's sake.

"Believe me now?" he said, the gun still pointed at my chest in case I said no.

I stuck my finger through the hole that the bullet had made in my shirt, and was almost surprised when I touched my own skin. It was cold—alarmingly cold, cold like a corpse or a block of ice. I jerked my back quickly and stared at my own hand, as if it might be somehow be to blame. Nothing weird or disturbing going on there, except—it did seem to be a little—pale. I couldn't remember exactly, but I was pretty sure my skin had been a different color before.

"Still don't believe me, do you?" Marek said, and held up a mirror in front of my face, just another thing plucked out of the nightstand. I was starting to think he had a whole line of proofs stacked up in that drawer, waiting for me to finally cave under the weight of the evidence. Guns to shoot me and not kill me, mirrors to show me a reflection that made me actually jump backwards in alarm.

I knew that wasn't right. I might have had a shaky idea of how much darker my skin was supposed to be, or how much less stunningly attractive I was before this moment, but I knew that my eyes were not supposed to be bright red. I knew that.

Listen. Greek people believe in vampires. We have one of the oldest vampire mythologies in the world, and we've sustained it for a hell of a long time—I was still being threatened to listen to my mother or the vrykolakas would get me when I was in grade school, it was in us to believe. It's just that we don't believe-in-them believe in them. Not after we turn twelve.

Turns out that some beliefs shouldn't be grown out of.

"You people turned me into a vampire?" was my reaction. "Are you kidding? Son of a bitch!"

"I didn't do it," Marek pointed out. "Blame Lord Amun. Jeez."

"So I'm a vampire, huh?" I said, rolling with the insane momentum of this whole idea. "I'm a vampire? Great. Fabulous. What can I do?"

"Sorry?"

"What can I do?" I demanded. "I'm going to assume that drinking blood is a given, what else have I got here? You said something about perks—can I turn into a bat? Can I punch through walls? What?"

"You're supernaturally strong," he informed me. "You probably could have broken straight through those restraints if you'd known, there's not a lot you can't break right now. And you're pretty much indestructible, nothing will be able to—"

"Indestructible," I said. "Okay. Awesome. I'm out of here."

"What?"

"If I am super strong," I clarified. I was standing, testing my legs to see if they'd hold me, if they were strong, and they felt strong—they felt oddly perfect. "And I'm indestructible—then you can't stop me."

He didn't seem to be overly concerned with stopping me. "You shouldn't leave," was all the resistance he offered. "You're not in control. You have no idea what you've just become, and you can't control it. You don't know what you're getting into."

"I don't care," I said, finding my jacket on the bedpost and pulling it on. "I'm leaving."

"All right," he said. "Come find me when you figure out that you're a monster—that should be, what? Around the fifteenth person you kill?"

"I'm not going to kill anyone," I protested instantly, but the way my throat flared up as I said it, and the thoughts of blood that had started spontaneously occurring to me—they were connecting in ways I didn't want them to. I didn't want him to be right.

But most of all, I wanted to be away from the people who'd killed me. I was strong, and when it all came down it—I trusted myself. I trusted my own hands and feet and I trusted my own mind. There just wasn't anybody else—I'd never leaned on anyone else, and I damn sure wasn't going to start now. Stupid vampires.

"Right," he drawled. "Sure you're not. See you in a few hours, kid."