Emily woke up choking on a death rattle.

She was lying somewhere cold and earthy, gazing back at the moon above her, its face latticed with rustling tree branches.

She tried to breathe, and could barely turn her head to the side to hack past a mouthful of blood. A fog enveloped her brain, making it hard to think. Why was there blood in her mouth? Where was she?

She wasn't supposed to be here. Emily knew that.

Emily rolled onto her side, wincing at what felt like branches and rocks shifting below and jabbing at her. Sitting upright made her vision swim, followed by what felt like a fist tightening around her throat before nausea overcame her. She retched, blood spilling to the soil, and then gathered her bearings. Surprisingly, she felt better after the nausea–shaky, but more alert.

Afraid of what she was going to find, Emily nevertheless looked down at herself. Blood stained the entire front of her white blouse, and it was too dry to have come from her fit of sickness.

"Wha–" Emily croaked. Her mouth and throat were a desert, the taste of blood (her own?) was overwhelming, and she was so thirsty.

Scrambling around in the soil, which Emily absently noted was likely not the site of an attack, as there was not that much blood, she managed to get her hands on her purse and some of the contents that had spilled from it.

"Shit." She held in her hands the broken remains of her phone and an empty wallet. Emily knew what that meant. If she had been murdered, it would have made identifying her that much more difficult, giving her would-be murderer more time to cover his tracks and kill again.

—

Emily stumbled into her apartment. She knew she should have done anything else–gone to the police, or a hospital, or phoned her colleagues–but the situation was still too strange for her to make sense of. What was she supposed to say? That she'd been murdered, then got up and walked for help?

It was unreal.

The prior events were still not coming entirely to recollection. There had been a man, larger than her but not by much, but his size belied his strength–and then a burning pain originating from her throat and she couldn't breathe, she was drowning, the pain was everywhere it hurt she couldn't breathe she couldn't–

Emily slumped against the wall and clutched at her throat. Her fingers found the wound there, ragged and still wet.

Holding onto the wall for support, Emily hobbled toward her bedroom where she crashed onto the bed.

—

She woke up and for a moment hoped that it had been a nightmare, but while Emily could have excused the pounding headache and terrible taste and feel in her mouth to a hangover, the sight of her bloodstained clothes and hands was decidedly not typical upon waking up from a night of drinking too much.

Alright, Emily decided, she quickly needed to find out what was going on. One did not presumably get murdered and then get up the next . . . Emily extended an arm and felt for her alarm clock, which she raised to eye-level and groaned at the ten o'clock PM sign. It couldn't be the same night, she had still been out by then. Had she really slept for at least most of a day?

Snorting and putting a hand to her mouth as her lips quirked upward into a traitorous smile, Emily sat up and let the alarm clock fall at her side. She could probably allow herself the beauty rest, considering she had been dead!

Dead. Wow.

Emily didn't feel dead.

But she was tired. She eased herself back into repose and was asleep almost instantly.

—

It was morning when Emily next woke up. The sunlight coming through her windows was like a hammer beating down on her eyes, closed as they were, and Emily hissed, rolled out of bed and onto her feet, and left for the bathroom. Before she did anything else, she wanted a shower.

She was quick to shed her clothes and dump them unceremoniously on the floor as she went–there was certainly no salvaging them–before taking a very long, hot shower with a lot of scrubbing involved, her utility bill be damned. By the time Emily stepped out she felt a bit more human, and after toweling off she made her way toward her sink and mirror with trepidation over what she would see.

Good news: she wasn't a zombie. At least, Emily was pretty sure. No green or sickly skin, no dead eyes, and the thought of eating brains was gross.

Bad news: there was a scar curling around her throat. While it was no longer the open wound of last night, the scar was a striking red against the pale skin of her neck. Emily's mouth dropped in disbelief, for one just did not heal that fast, and then spooked at the sight in the mirror.

Fangs. Actual, honest-to-goodness fangs. At first, they did not appear much different from her usual canine teeth, just sharper, until a strange reflex went off in what felt like her gums and the fangs promptly elongated into ones along the likes only an apex predator would have.

Emily poked the tip of one of them with her finger, wincing as the light pressure drew blood. They didn't just look sharper, then. She sucked at the cut and then paused. Her finger still in her mouth, she stared at herself in the mirror, transfixed by the image there.

The blood tasted . . . good. Still like blood, but there was an appetizing quality to its flavor that she couldn't reconcile with past recollections of tasting blood.

Fangs plus liking blood? Emily snatched her hand away from her face to clutch at the bathroom counter, lips parted into a rictus as tremors racked her bowed form.

What else could those two things mean, but that she was somehow, against the natural world's logic, a vampire?

"I suppose I should be thankful that at least the folklore about mirrors isn't true," Emily mused aloud to herself as she matched the gaze of her reflection in the mirror. The words could came unbidden and rough against her throat.

Vampires. What the fuck. What the actual fuck.

Emily had known for most of her life that monsters were real. She confronted them on a regular basis and judged them for their evil actions, all while working to get into their minds and figure out what made them what they were. They were monsters, but they were comprehensible, capable of being rendered into cause-and-effect. Monsters were real, and they were human.

And now there were monsters that were not real, and she . . . she had joined their ranks?

After taking a deep breath, Emily held her breath for several moments before releasing it. She put a hand against the mirror and traced the contours of her face in it. Those dark eyes staring back at her appeared the same as every time she looked in a mirror.

Okay. So, vampires were real. And she was one of them. Did that make her a monster, though? Sure, blood was suddenly more appealing than the thought of food (and oh, Emily desperately hoped in that moment that vampires didn't also have an aversion to garlic like in the stories, because she didn't know if she could live without her favorite Italian dishes), and as a vampire she'd probably have to drink blood to survive. Ugh. But it wasn't like she was suddenly overcome with the desire to hunt down every person she came across and rip their throats out.

Well, Emily hadn't come across anybody since becoming a vampire, but she wasn't feeling homicidal out of nowhere, her thoughts still felt like her own. In any case, Emily couldn't see herself doing anything like what had been done to her. A ghost of that burning pain still had a grip on her nerves–it no longer hurt, but the sensation haunted her, reminding her of what transpired.

She was still herself, just a bit fangier than before. She could work with that.

—

The apartment was dimly lit with what sunshine got through the curtains. While experimentally putting a hand in a sunlit spot had not burned her, Emily could not deny the newfound sensitivity that her eyes had to light.

Without her phone (which reminded her, she still had to get a new phone, and wow was it weird to think about such a mundane thing when she'd been turned into a vampire), Emily resorted to booting up her laptop for an accurate take on the date and time. She couldn't repress the moan when she realized that she had to get ready for work, and was already running late.

Emily jotted down a quick note to herself to purchase a new phone and then, after a moment's hesitation, added blackout blinds and food(?) to make a list of things she needed.

While Emily really didn't want to drink blood, she was more averse to dying. Not to mention that her stomach felt like a chasm begging to be filled. She'd see if she could get away with animal blood before she resorted to drinking human blood.

Heck, it wasn't like she actually knew what was true about what had once been a fictional creature to her, and for all Emily knew, maybe she could just eat like a normal human and be fine with that.

—

Emily arrived at work in a foul mood. Besides the realization that she was a vampire, she now had to replace her cellphone, identification, and credit cards. Furthermore, she still hadn't gotten a grasp on the whole fangs thing, and they had a tendency to "spring" out on their own. Above all else, she hadn't even had time to grab a cup of coffee.

"Emily, hey, how was your weekend?" Reid asked as Emily entered the employee kitchen, where he was stirring packets of sugar into his own coffee. Emily grunted at him, not trusting herself to talk when she was fangy and not caffeinated, and began to pour herself a cup. Reid took her presence and silence as cue for him to start talking about some science-fiction novel he had read over the weekend, and how he thought that she might like it.

It really sucked to become a vampire when your colleagues were all profilers, Emily was beginning to realize as she took her first sip of coffee. It wasn't necessarily that Emily thought she was going to be discovered as a vampire, because really, who would pin any changes in her behavior on being turned into a creature that supposedly doesn't exist? But she was already resigned to the fact that they would notice things were off with her, and had strategized on the way over to the office how she would explain things should they have questions.

Just so long as her fangs didn't come out at an inconvenient time, Emily was certain that she could manage this.

But what would she do about the man, or rather vampire, who had changed her? There was a supernatural killer in the area and, as far as she knew, he was under the radar.

"Hey, Emily, did you hear me?" Reid's voice broke through Emily's thoughts, and she realized that she had been so caught up inside her own mind that she had stopped drinking her coffee and had missed everything Reid had said.

Emily touched her tongue to a canine tooth, found it normal length, and said, "I'm sorry, what?"

Reid gave her a look, a line appearing between his brows. "I said that Hotch wants everybody to gather for the presentation of a new case."

"Oh, right, thanks." She walked alongside Reid, coffee cooling in her hands and unease curdling her stomach, wondering if she really was ready to fool a bunch of profilers that nothing had changed with her.

Author's Note: Fixed the formatting from when I first uploaded this! I don't know how that mess happened, my apologies.