The rain was pouring all around him. This was not the usual downpour. It was crashing.
It came down like a torrent from the heavens, not in drops but in sheets, as if the sky itself had ruptured and now spilled its fury upon the earth. Each impact was violent, pounding his coat and skull with such brutal force that it sent him lurching sideways, barely able to stay upright.
The cold seeped through every layer, numbing his skin, sinking into his bones like fingers of frost. The roar of water on the cobblestones was deafening, an endless hammering that drowned out all else. It filled his ears, smothered his thoughts. He tried to keep his eyes open, but water slashed across his face, blinding him in an instant. Every breath was a struggle, like inhaling glass.
He staggered forward, aimless, flailing through the storm like a man adrift at sea. He didn't know where he was, only that he needed away. Not just from the rain. From it.
Something was following him.
No—hunting him.
He pressed a trembling hand to his brow, shielding his eyes as best he could, and through the curtain of rain, he glimpsed a distant glow—a golden flicker, soft and inviting. A fire. A house. Sanctuary.
His chest clenched with sudden hope. He leaned into the wind, pushing himself toward the light—
And then agony bloomed across the back of his neck.
Claws. Hot and cruel, raked across his flesh.
He screamed—a raw, animal sound swallowed by the storm—and stumbled, warm blood mixing with the icy downpour. His vision reeled, and for a heartbeat, the world tilted. Lightning tore the sky apart—and in that strobe of white fire, he saw it.
A silhouette. Hulking, winged, inhuman. Suspended in the air above him like death made flesh. A demon, airborne and silent, with eyes that burned like coals and teeth like daggers.
It had found him.
He tried to run, but his legs betrayed him. The slick stones gave way beneath his feet and he crashed forward, face-first into the freezing street. The impact jarred his bones. Pain roared through his limbs as he rolled onto his back, gasping for breath.
Then the shriek came—high, unholy, a sound that pierced the veil of the rain and tore into his soul. Even deafened by the storm, he heard it. Felt it in his chest. In his teeth. In his mind.
This was it.
He didn't scream again. He didn't run. There was no fight left in him. Just the pounding of his heart—a thunderous, useless rhythm.
This is the end, he thought, numb, unmoving.
The demon dropped from the sky like a blade, fangs gleaming, and sank them into his throat.
And then—
Nothing.
Just blackness. Suffocating blackness.
Jerry gasped, his eyes snapping open in the suffocating blackness of the coffin. There was nothing to see, of course—only the crushing dark—but still he stared into it, wide-eyed and motionless. His breath came ragged and shallow, more reflex than necessity. He didn't need to breathe. But fear had a way of awakening old instincts.
And he was afraid.
No—he was terrified.
It had been lifetimes since he had felt anything that resembled fear. The emotion was foreign now, a relic of his human past, long buried and deliberately forgotten. Yet here it was again, trembling through his limbs, clawing at his composure. His fingers twitched against the coffin's satin lining. He shifted, restless and unsure.
The dream still clung to him, cold and wet as a shroud.
He had seen a man—a lone figure lost in a storm, battered by the wind and chased by something unseen. Jerry had been behind his eyes, feeling what he felt, stumbling through the deluge with panic in his chest. But the man hadn't been him, not really. That man had something Jerry had not possessed in centuries.
A heartbeat.
He had heard it pounding in the dream—frantic, visceral, alive. And he'd felt it too: the muscle hammering against bone, the blood racing hot through veins. It was overwhelming, unbearable. Terrifying. That pulse had once belonged to him.
It wasn't just a nightmare. It was a memory.
The night of his turning.
Jerry had very little recollection of his human life. He got bits and pieces sometimes, but that part of him had been wiped clean, scrubbed away by the same cruel mercy that gave him immortality. He'd simply awoken one night to find himself reborn as something else. Dead, but not dead. A creature that fed on life to sustain its un-life.
A monster.
He didn't think of himself that way—not usually. Without memories of morality, without human context, he existed outside the old binaries of good and evil. He was who he was. Vampire Jerry was the only Jerry he had ever known.
But lying there in the dark, that flicker of the past disturbed him. It made him wonder. Had he deserved this fate? Or had he once been a good man? A husband? A father? A brother? Would his past self be repulsed, sneering at what he'd become? Or would he be sad… pity him, for all he'd lost?
He searched the fog of his mind for another piece, another shred of the man he'd been—but the darkness yielded nothing.
It always yielded nothing.
With a quiet exhale, he let the memories slip away again, dissolving back into the abyss where they belonged. The past had no place in eternity. And if he dwelled too long, it might unravel him.
Instead, his thoughts shifted—inevitably, maddeningly—to Jillian Vale.
She had come to him the night before, sharp-witted and defiant, cloaked in her sarcasm and secrets. She annoyed him with ease. She challenged him, pushed back against his aloof superiority, refused to flinch even when she should have. And somehow—he found it irresistible.
There was something magnetic about her. Not just her confidence or her sharp tongue, but something deeper. Something dangerous.
Physically, she was stunning—her hair, lush dark waves… her eyes, big and green and expressive… her lips that curved just so. He had noticed everything. Of course he had.
The way she had come into his house, sat on his couch, was speaking to him of her own free will. The open cushion beside her, beckoning— where he wished to be. The memory of her there—her arms crossed, challenging him with that raised brow and cocky grin—had left a mark in his mind that he had no desire to remove.
And then there was her blood.
He had caught its scent last night. Only briefly. But it was... off. Different. Not in a repellent way. Just different. Subtle, like a note in a song that didn't belong and yet made the whole thing more haunting. The blood didn't carry the same scent as the others he'd fed on. It intrigued him. It made his hunger... complicated.
There were too many questions surrounding her, and Jerry wasn't sure if he wanted answers or if he just wanted more of her. More conversation. More tension. More of the pull between predator and prey—except the lines between the two were blurring.
He closed his eyes again and tried to still his thoughts. It was still daylight, and though his kind did not sleep the same manner as humans did, the rest was necessary. Jillian had said she'd return tonight, and he didn't plan to miss it.
Because despite himself, despite the centuries of control and composure, Jerry found that he was eager to see her again. A mere human, a meal, a plaything—was toying with him, though she may not know it.
And that frightened him more than any dream.