Okay so first let me quickly apologize. Shortly after the last update to this fic... well I won't go into it but 'worst 13 months of my life' come rather close.

Only now has my muse for this fic even begun returning.

So if there are parts of this chapter that seem just not up to my usual scratch please forgive me. Usually I don't ask such things but this time I will. It was just that bad of a year.

Anyway, hopefully I will continue writing and get this story DUNZO. Enjoy everyone!

It felt like we were about to launch ourselves over the trenches. The silence was like smoke within our lungs and yet no one would make a sound. Even me, with all my newly heightened senses and powers, felt that ancient, deep-seated piece of humanity called fear turning my limbs to stone. The only light was that of the Quick Stop, once again casting its ethereal, striking light into the blanketing darkness of the night.

A liminal place. A place where reality bent and curved, where the world suddenly made much less sense. A place where you could get two churros for five bucks.

I looked to the side for only a moment to check on my sister for what had to have been the hundredth time that night. There was her stun-gun sitting on her hip and where one might have strapped a knife to their leg, she instead had a cold metal stake. She had also grabbed a thick leather jacket and put on her steel toe capped boots.

I knew she could defend herself, but even so, I felt crushingly responsible for my little sister as she prepared for the fight of her, and my, life. In a way, it showed how much she actually cared for me. She was willing to walk out there and fight a bloodthirsty creature of the night to save me from my own curse. On the other hand, however, I was her big brother and no big brother ever willingly let their little sister go into a fight.

It would just add to the long list of regrets I would have if she was ever seriously hurt.

Zim on the other hand... eh. I could give or take. Not that I wanted him to die but he had proved himself more than capable on many occasions to the point where I knew I could focus my caution on Gaz. He had dressed himself in a red hoody with an irken logo on the front and a pair of black pants and boots. It was odd how Zim had slowly, and perhaps with some major reluctance, adopted human fashions. I suspected it was mostly because his old clothes didn't fit, though it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that he simply wished to wear something that didn't remind him of his old station.

He had taken no weapons with him, again insisting that he was fine so long as he had his PAK with him. I didn't argue. I had seen the legs of his PAK stab through solid steel and blast holes in the sides of buildings. What I was truly concerned about was that he wasn't taking this seriously enough. His irken arrogance had never left him and back in the day it was often the only reason I had succeed against him. Though I had to admit he had listened intently when I had run through exactly what a vampire was.

I wasn't sure if it was out of his own sense of scientific interest or if he was simply figuring how he could use the knowledge for his own, weapon-making ends.

We had taken my car of course. Gaz would never allow us to take her car, being that should we get a scratch on it we'd all end up staked from her fury and that Zim's voot cruiser, which he had put up quite the fight for, wouldn't fit all three of us. Hell, it barely fit Zim these days and I always got a good laugh out of seeing the alien stuff himself and the ever obnoxious Gir into the front seat.

"I wonder why she works there." Gaz's voice was small, so small it almost didn't break the surface of the hush that drowned us.

"Pfft, isn't it obvious stink-beast? It's a well-chosen hunting ground." Zim spoke in a voice louder than hers, so much so that I almost shushed him though I knew it would be stupid to do so. Even with ears that could hear the rats run through the sewer under us I doubted she could hear us out in a car parked on the far end of the lot. Not with the humming of the Quick Stop's fluorescent lights and the ever-grinding slushy machine to mask us.

"She feeds on blood, correct? Well," And he leaned forward from the back-middle seat as he explained, pointing to the shop with a sharp claw finger. "Working nights in an open shop in a crime-ridden area. Plenty of filthy humans walk in an out of that place until her shift ends. Plenty of opportunity to slip out and feed. She can choose her food in plain sight of the pray. It's almost genius." He nodded to himself and leaned back. "I appreciate the subtly."

"You couldn't appreciate subtly if it hit you around your dumb antennae." I grumbled at him, more irritated at this begrudgingly correct observation than anything else. What he had missed however was that she would also know the area like the back of her hand and probably had done so for years. If our first plan failed, she would have the upper hand in seconds and we would be royally screwed.

Before the silence could settle again I took a deep breath and simply asked, "Are we ready, then?"

To my surprise, there was no bravado from Zim, nor any cocksure, half-hearted shrug of acceptance from Gaz. The gravity of the situation was almost palpable.

"An irken warrior is always prepared for battle." Zim finally announced, thumping a curled fist onto his chest in what I suspected was more of a self-reassurance than any actual show of loyalty to his old empire.

"Let's kill this bitch." Gaz spoke up with a voice like wrought iron. She did not look to me but I could see in her eyes the memory of what I had almost done to her. The monster of blood frenzy and primeval horror that had attacked her. The thing that had worn the skin of her brother as it attempted to murder her in joyous predatory glee.

She knew with full clarity, perhaps more than myself, exactly what kind of creature waited for us.

And yet it wasn't until I finally opened the car door that any of us actually began moving.

As before I could feel everything around me to an almost unreal degree. The wind blowing through grass, the night birds flitting between branches. It felt as though I had been a caged animal and now finally I was emerging back into my natural habitat. It was shameful to admit, and I did not do it out loud, that I knew I would miss this level of sensation. It would be as if showing a blind man, a fantastic piece of art only to once again gash his eyes to darkness.

"Alright guys, get to your positions, I'm going in." My voice was as steady as I could make it. If I had a heartbeat I was sure it'd be picking up right now and yet as I faced death my heart stayed dead and unmoving. In a strange way it almost boosted my confidence. To not feel the anxiety of battle hammering in your chest took away from the terror of the moment and gave me some kind of warrior confidence.

Like a ghost, however, I could feel the wolf within me stir. It knew this was where it was birthed, it knew the hunting ground of its sire. I could almost feel its hesitation pulling at my limbs.

Gaz and Zim moved to either side of the store's entrance as silently and as quickly as they could without exposing themselves to the lights of the Quick Stop as if they were avoiding the half-lidded eyes of some great stone guardian. The Quick Stop almost seemed alive in its own strange, unearthly manner, like a servant carefully hiding its deadly mistress behind a façade of unhealthy convince store food.

The plan was a simple one. I would go in and lure her outside where Gaz would stun her, as we knew that for sure seemed to work on the walking undead, and Zim would pin her to the floor using his PAK. Then I would stake her and we'd all be in the Winchester toasting our victory by midnight.

Easy. Simple.

I had calculated there was a sixty percent chance we were all going to die.

With one last momentary check of my belongings I finally moved forward, hands gripped tight on my backpack's straps and my coat swishing out behind me. While in Zim's labs I had taken the time to have the sleeves repaired. If I was going into battle I was taking my trusty trench coat with me.

I wasn't sure if I needed to breathe anymore but one big gulp certainly helped as I stepped to the Quick Stop doors. They opened as they would for anyone, and yet as I crossed the threshold I felt as though I had just stepped into a bear trap with steel jaws quickly closing in around me.

There was no one there. Nothing seemed out of place. The blood I expected to see stained to the floor was gone, as was the flour I had thrown the other night. And yet somewhere, buried under the scent of industrial strength bleaching agents and cleaning products was the faintest scent of iron and copper. A smell that set my teeth on edge and my fingers curling. It was almost remarkable that there had ever been a fight in here at all and coldly I wondered just how many people had been murdered within these walls.

She wasn't at the counter. That didn't concern me, she hadn't been the first time either. And yet I was sure she was here. Whether it was some new, inner vampiric sixth sense or simple intuition I knew she was here, somewhere, probably in the back, sorting stock. I had worked enough retail to know that was the go-to time waster when trying to work through a long and boring shift.

By the time I approached the counter, however, I could hear something I knew no human would notice. Footsteps in the back, almost impossible to pick up on above the irritating hum of burning mercury dust within the lights above me and the grinding of old metal on metal as the slushy machine churned its half-frozen contents.

I knocked on the countertop and waited for fate to unfold.

She appeared only a second later and looked just as I remembered her. Curved hips, tanned Latino skin, onyx black hair pulled back to a ponytail and eyes like stained blood. I was almost a little surprised at how beautiful she remained, as I had, for some reason, half expected the allure to wear off now that I had become something like her. It seemed Maria was not pretty just because she was a vampire casting some spell of glamour over men. But it was more than just her looks, I knew it, though I couldn't quite place it.

Then she smiled at me and it clicked.

She was the bitch wolf stalking through snow, she was the silken movements of a shark through darkest ocean, she was the coiling snake at the cot of a sleeping child.

She was beautiful because she was an apex predator. God, I have weird taste in women.

"Dib Membrane. I thought you'd show up sooner or later." She chuckled a little and leaned forward on the countertop and act that would have accentuated her cleavage if her entire torso wasn't devoured by the terrible green and brown striped work shirt she wore. Her scent washed over my heightened senses and she smelled of chill winds swaying flowers on Colombian mountains.

I shrugged, trying to keep my cool. Before I felt confident facing battle and yet now my inner demon was on edge. Somehow, I knew it was because it faced its sire, its natural superior. It knew it faced a creature older and far more dangerous than itself. The creeping knowledge of such a thing didn't exactly fill me with confidence.

"Yeah, well, you know you kind of dropped me into this and didn't even leave your number. I mean, how else was I supposed to contact you?"

"That was kind of the point," Maria explained, that sly smile still on her lips where, in blink and you'll miss it moments, I caught sight of her fangs. "Consider it a test. You passed by the way. Congratulations, you survived your first day of immortality."

She straightened up slowly and looked me straight in the eyes. Once again, I felt as though I was naked before her, like she was clawing through my very soul. However, this time something different happened. This time she didn't manage to reach so deeply. The beast that stalked my veins growled somewhere within my mind, raising its fur and standing its ground.

Her smile widened. "You've adapted quickly. Good. Sometimes the change can be too much for some. I've turned others before and lost them to the blood thirst." She cocked her head just slightly as she added, "They had to be put down."

Her words stunned me. Put down. Like some kind of rabid dog. Like their lives had no value to her, despite them being the very people she had turned. Had she been prepared to do the same to me? It was a bucket of cold water to the face as I remembered sharply that she was not human and probably hadn't been for a long time. She was a killer, a drinker of blood, a shadow in the night and teeth at the unwitting throats of the innocent.

And yet she was here. Standing before me. A woman in an ill-fitting shirt and a smile that would make any man daydream. The contrast was striking and maddening and refused to reconcile within my own mind.

I remembered Gaz and Zim were still waiting outside. I remembered my mission.

"We should take a walk." I announced, turning my eyes from her and looking around, acting as though I was still unsure of what had happened to me. Hopefully she bought it.

I considered myself a good actor. I didn't use to be but years of deceiving, lying and tricking Zim into various attempts to trap him, or at least talk my way out of trouble, had drilled into me all the ways to successfully get a lie across. Layering it with a degree of truth was usually the first step.

"I mean, I have a lot of questions, you know?" I offered her a slight shrug and a small smile which I swept away quickly as I looked aside again. "Not a whole lot of this is adding up, and I thought I was an expert on this kind of thing." I looked back to her suddenly and leaned forward placing my hands flat on the counter, "I mean I haven't had any urge to count anything obsessively, do you have to do that? And I was in my bed when I woke up so I think I don't have to sleep in a coffin and what about going into houses without an invite though I think I can do that because I walked in this shop but this shop is a shop so-"

"Está bien, está bien, para!" She held up her hands suddenly then placed them onto her hips. "You really do talk a lot, hombre."

"Yeah, I've been told." I replied with a sheepish smile and raised a hand to the back of my head. I could feel the hair raise on the back of neck as I desperately fought to keep my composure. The more time I spent with her the more I could almost smell the danger radiating off her. I wondered if she could feel it too, the strange sense of tension between two beings molded as perfect hunters. Certainly, I caught a moment of hesitation from her, as if she was considering whether it was safe to leave her post and walk with a fellow vampire into the night's shadow.

However, she nodded, and I breathed out a sigh of relief, quickly masking it with, "Sorry, I promise not to try and ask too much. This is all just a little new to me."

"It's not that, hombre." Maria announced as she began walking around the countertop. "I have to write this off as a break, which means locking the shop. I'm still on the clock you know."

"Oh. Right." So she clearly wasn't intimidated by this fledgling vampire before her who knew next to nothing of what he had become, what his new body could really do. Part of me wanted to keep her here for just a moment longer, ask her about her experiences. I could only imagine what I could learn from her, what she had seen and done through her life.

Again, I broke myself out of such thoughts. The sooner I got this over with the better, the sooner I could be myself again. Plain old human Dib. God why was I feeling so torn up over this? I knew she was a monster, I had seen it with my own eyes, and yet as I followed at her side towards the Quick Stop exit I couldn't help but think of her as at least partly human. She clearly had things that annoyed her, things she must enjoy, things that she dreamt of and wished for.

Was I even right to kill her? Would it be saving the world from a monster or taking the life of a creature just as part of nature as any human on earth?

I forced myself to remember what I had done to Gaz. How it had been as if something as possessed me, thrown out my very soul and had turned me into something out of a nightmare. A creature bent on tearing my sister limb from literal limb and drinking her blood. My own little sister… and all without a shred of remorse. I couldn't live with any chance of that ever happening again.

I had to break the curse.

"Are you alright, chico?" Her voice snapped me out of my thoughts. I didn't realize we had reached the doors. Just outside were Gaz and Zim, waiting in the dark for the second she stepped out into the night.

"What? Oh, yeah, just… thinking." I looked to my hands for a moment and in a second of pure introspection I asked. "How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Live knowing you have to murder others to survive?"

The question had been there the whole time, since the very moment I had woken up that morning. The question that had strangled my throat every minute of this insane twenty-four hours in which I had died and continued to walk and think and feel.

To her credit, Maria seemed to consider the question as she held the store key in her hand, waiting just outside the range of the automatic door. Then, quite unexpectedly, she laughed. "I suppose I don't."

"You don't murder?"

"I don't live, Dib. We died, remember? I think we both died long ago, before we were even embraced." Her eyes flashed and like a shadow cast from candlelight I saw it. Her own inner monster. "Los muertos no tienen piedad por los vivos."

The dead have no mercy for the living.

I stepped outside first, allowing her to follow me and lock up. At this point, however, my mind was made up. Maria was not human. She was not someone I needed to protect, she wasn't an innocent soul that needed saving. She was a killer. A murderer. No, more than that, she had gone beyond those terms. This whole time I had been struggling against the beast I had allowed into my soul, a great blood hungry wolf whom I internally wrestled against.

Maria did not feel that struggle. She had already conquered her wolf and now it was she who wore its skin.

I was already off the pavement and into the parking lot before I realized she wasn't at my side. Stopping suddenly, I turned, forcing my eyes to her and not to give even a glance to Gaz and Zim who had hidden in the deep shadows each side of the shop. Maria was still inside. She was standing just in the doorway, just out of the reach of any attack.

I frowned at her and rather stupidly asked, "What?"

She didn't answer me. The look on her face was one of stone and yet somehow, I could see, framed in the unreal, almost fake light of the Quick Stop, that there was shock there. Perhaps even a sadness, if such a pitiless creature could feel such a thing.

"I don't think I should walk with you."

My stomach almost dropped out of me. "Why not?"

I knew the answer before she said it, Goddamnit I had been so stupid I-

"Did you really think you could jump me?" Her voice swam with the fury of a blade in mid-swing. "I could smell the woman the moment the door opened."

HUZZAR IT GOT FINISHED YAY. I was stuck for a while on this chapter because the original draft had them getting ready and armed and stuff and explaining to Zim what vampires were but then I remembered the wise words of Neil Gaiman. 'When you're stuck, kill your main character'. Then I remembered the slightly less wise but still good words of John Harper 'Don't fret, jump to the action, explain later'.

So I jumped. Dib is already technically dead after all.

Anyway there's a few references in here, one to Parks and Rec, another to Shawn of the Dead but it's a surprisingly sparse chapter for references. Probably a good thing if I'm getting back into the swing of things.

Also I'm very proud of my WHAM line with Maria there with it hopefully decent Spanish. Anyway, LATERS PEEPS! HOPEFULLY IN 2 WEEKS TIME YAY.