The lock clicked three times.
A fourth, for good measure.
Riley stepped into the dark, flicked on the light, and closed the door behind her with the kind of care that came from years of not assuming safety.
Her apartment wasn't cozy. It was fortified.
Steel bars on the windows. Reinforced door. No curtains, no mirrors. One flickering fluorescent light above the kitchen. Weapons mounted across the walls like a private museum of violence—knives, crossbows, old stakes, a shotgun with a silver-wire stock.
A line of salt ran along the front of the door.
She slipped out of her coat, peeled off the blood-streaked shirt beneath it, and dropped both into a metal tub marked BURN. The gash on her shoulder had clotted, but the skin around it was raw. She didn't flinch as she cleaned it—just hissed once through her teeth and moved on.
Then she crossed to the far end of the room, flipped open a desk drawer, and pulled out a thick, leather-bound folder marked UNFILED.
She sat.
Spread the file open.
The alley kill from tonight was the third in as many weeks.
All unofficial. All unconfirmed. And all buried.
Each report had the same red flags: mutilation, partial turning, no fang signature. She laid the photos side by side—three corpses, three districts, same dead eyes, same open mouths twisted around something that wasn't hunger. It was pain.
Her fingers tapped the edge of the folder.
The vial was next. She pulled it from her inner coat pocket—wrapped in cloth, sealed in rubber. The dark liquid inside had congealed slightly, like it was thickening into glue.
Riley slid it into a small, capsule-sized canister. Labeled it.
Then she opened a hidden panel behind the refrigerator and fed the canister into a pneumatic tube marked CROW//NEST—a private courier system used by hunters, smugglers, and a few alchemists too weird to work topside.
She hit SEND.
The tube whooshed, sucked the canister into the wall, and disappeared into the city's veins.
Someone out there would analyze it.
Someone smarter than her.
She leaned back in the chair. Ran a hand through her damp hair. Closed her eyes.
And remembered—
A basement. A girl with sunken eyes and black blood on her lips. A scream she hadn't forgotten. A name she'd buried.
Her eyes opened again.
Something was coming back.
And it wanted a second chance.
The church had been condemned fifteen years ago. Officially.
Lucien stood outside under the flickering amber of a broken streetlamp, collar turned up against the wind, staring up at the crumbling gothic facade. A stained-glass arch, mostly shattered, still clung to the upper window like a jagged wound. The old sign read CHRIST REDEEMS—but someone had scratched out redeems and scrawled REGRETS in charcoal-black script.
He exhaled.
Didn't need to breathe, but sometimes you had to do it anyway.
He pushed open the rotting door.
The inside smelled like old hymn books, mold, and dry stone—the kind of cold that settled behind your teeth. The nave was empty, pews broken or gone. Dust lay thick over everything. But a stairwell near the altar led downward, into the basement where the real congregation met.
Lucien took the steps slowly, hands in his pockets.
The air grew warmer. Damp. Close.
And then he heard voices.
"…and I didn't even want to bite him," one voice said—young, frantic. "I was just so hungry. He bled so fast. I—I tried to stop, but—"
A muffled sob.
Lucien reached the bottom step and paused in the dark.
There were maybe a dozen of them, gathered in a loose ring of folding chairs beneath the buzz of cheap fluorescent bulbs. A circle of addicts. Vampires, all of them—some new, some cracked, a few ancient-looking. A whiteboard at the front read: You are not your thirst.
At the center sat Rook.
He looked like a preacher who'd seen hell and hadn't come back whole. Long grey coat, bare feet, bald head with a constellation of old scars across his scalp. His eyes were pale and deeply kind in a way that made you want to confess things. Or run.
He hadn't noticed Lucien yet.
Lucien stayed in the shadows. Listening.
"…it was like I knew it was bad," the young vamp was saying. "It didn't even taste right. It was sweet, and then I couldn't stop shaking. I blacked out. Woke up three days later, covered in claw marks."
Another vampire muttered, "Same batch I got, I bet. Stuff's dirty."
Lucien's fists clenched inside his pockets.
Rook raised a hand. "We've talked about this. You don't take anything you didn't bleed yourself. No bottles. No bags. No street vials."
"But it's everywhere now," someone else said. "Cheap. Easy. And it makes you feel like god."
Lucien exhaled through his teeth.
That wasn't just blood anymore.
That was synthetic.
And worse—it had changed.
The last of the group filtered out, murmuring goodbyes, pulling on hooded sweatshirts, adjusting sunglasses despite the midnight hour. A few glanced at Lucien in the shadows on their way up the stairs. None lingered.
When the room emptied, Rook looked up.
"I was wondering how long you were going to skulk like a bat with social anxiety," he said, his voice a dry rasp—more desert than gravel.
Lucien stepped forward, shrugging off the wall. "Didn't want to interrupt your sermon."
"You never did before." Rook leaned back in his chair, crossing his bare feet on the cracked linoleum. "You just bled all over the floor and made it my problem."
Lucien smiled faintly. "You always did like to mop up after monsters."
"You're not a monster," Rook said. "You're worse. You're clever."
They stared at each other for a long moment. Not quite friends. Not quite anything else.
Then Rook gestured. "Sit. Talk. Or are you just here to remind me how much older I look every time you visit?"
Lucien sank into a chair. The metal creaked under him.
"There's a new body in the alley behind my bar," he said.
Rook's smile vanished. "Human?"
"Used to be."
"Turned?"
"No. Warped. Blood was wrong. Smelled… sweet. Chemical."
Rook closed his eyes. His shoulders tensed. "It's back."
"I thought it was gone," Lucien said.
"So did everyone with a survival instinct." Rook opened a drawer, pulled out a battered tin, and lit a hand-rolled cigarette. "I burned every sample I ever found. Tore down the labs. Killed the chemists. But now the shit's resurfacing—black market, street-grade, bootlegged. And it's worse than before."
Lucien leaned forward. "You think it's Juno?"
"I know it is. Who else would touch that poison? She's always been ambitious, but this…" He exhaled smoke. "This is suicide with style."
Lucien was quiet a moment.
Then: "I've been talking to someone."
Rook's eyes narrowed.
"Someone?"
Lucien hesitated.
Rook's voice dropped. "Please don't tell me it's a human. Or worse—"
"She's a hunter."
Rook stood so fast his chair slammed against the wall. "Are you insane?"
"She doesn't know—"
"She will."
Lucien rose too, slowly.
"I'm not planning to tell her."
"You don't have to. They always find out. And when they do?" Rook leaned in, close. "They don't care how kind you are. How long you've been clean. All they see is fangs and history."
Lucien didn't flinch. "She's different."
"They all are—right up until you're ash."
The room was dim except for the bluish glow of Riley's monitor and the occasional flicker from a candle in a red glass jar on the windowsill. Not for ambiance—for the smell. Blood and bleach lingered in the apartment, clinging to the edges of memory like fog.
She sat at the small metal desk in a tank top and sweatpants, her shoulder bandaged, a mug of lukewarm black coffee within reach. Her walls were covered in corkboard maps, red strings, crime scene photos, handwritten notes pinned in careful constellations.
Tonight, she wasn't just looking for a body.
She was looking for a pattern.
Three hours deep into combing digital archives, hunter-net message boards, and encrypted data leaks from hospital logs, Riley found it.
Case #R—0712CDistrict 3, mid-level sewer collapse. One body. Male. Partial vampiric traits. No turning bite. Covered up as "accidental chemical exposure." No follow-up.
Case #R—0699ADistrict 7. Underground rave. Girl collapsed, foaming black. Eyes bled out. Witnesses said she attacked three people before seizure. No autopsy. Body disappeared.
Case #R—0701EDistrict 11. Homeless shelter incident. Staff found one of the residents in a blood frenzy—biting at walls, hands torn. Police buried it as a "meth episode."
All within the last thirty days.
Different neighborhoods. Different targets. Same symptoms.
She leaned back in her chair, staring at the cluster of pins and photos.
This wasn't an accident. And it wasn't random.
It was a supply chain.
Something was being moved through the city—dosed into the vulnerable, the desperate, the unnoticed. Not clean turnings. Not vampire recruitment.
Testing.
Her jaw clenched.
She tapped into an old backdoor surveillance network—one the hunter syndicates had disavowed years ago. Grainy footage, city-wired cameras no one maintained. She scrubbed through two dozen feeds.
Then paused.
Frame 1: a figure in a long coat handing off something small in a back alley.Frame 2: the recipient convulsing. Dropping to his knees.Frame 3: same black blood, pouring from his eyes.
And just before the feed cut—
A tattoo. Just a glimpse. A black sun, inked into the wrist.
She'd seen that symbol once before.
On a girl named Juniper.
And Juniper had died screaming.
Lucien stepped out of the church just before dawn.
The sky over Eidolon was sick with color—dark blue fading to rust, clouds strung like torn fabric between rooftops. Streetlights buzzed uncertainly. The cold bit deeper this close to morning, and even the rats moved slower.
He tightened his coat against the wind and started walking.
No destination.
Just the growing weight of memory, of Rook's voice still echoing in his head.
"They always find out."
He'd wanted to argue. Wanted to believe Riley wasn't like the others—that she saw him differently, saw through the old stories. But she hadn't seen him at his worst. Not yet. And he wasn't sure what scared him more: that she would… or that she wouldn't.
Three districts away, Riley sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, sipping cold coffee, her eyes locked on her laptop screen.
The message had come through secure.
Encrypted, scrambled three times, bouncing off a network of dead drops and disposable servers. Only one person she trusted could interpret a sample like this—and even she was a little unhinged.
The subject line read: THIS IS BAD.
The email opened in plain black text on a white screen.
R—This isn't synthetic. Not entirely. The blood's been altered, yes—heavily.But what's in it now isn't just chemical.There are signs of active vampiric enzymes—reactive sequences usually dormant after turning.And something else. Not viral. Not bacterial. Alchemical.It doesn't just mimic the turn. It accelerates it.
You didn't kill a fledgling. You killed a lab experiment.
If you've seen more than one of these…Run.–C.
Riley stared at the screen.
Alchemical.
That meant black market. Old blood magic. The kind outlawed even by the vamps themselves.
Whatever was out there—it wasn't a weapon. It was a trial.
And someone was willing to let people die for the results.
She shut the laptop and stood.
The city outside was waking. Traffic beginning to stir. Neon signs flickering back to life.
She looked toward the bar—miles away, but suddenly too close.
And she wondered…
If Lucien Vale had ever heard of the Black Sun.