Eight Months Earlier
The city's botanical garden was soaked in golden hour.
Late-afternoon sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, turning the lawn into a carpet of gold and long shadows. The air was cool, carrying that sweet spring scent that promises new beginnings.
Kara lay on the grass, her head resting in Alice's lap.
She was laughing at something silly — a light, careless sound that made Alice's dead heart vibrate in sympathy.
"You know…" Kara said, looking up at Alice's face. "Sometimes I think we're in one of those old movies. Where everything is too beautiful to be real."
Alice brushed Kara's hair, pushing aside a strand the wind stubbornly kept tossing into her eyes.
"Life is better than movies, Kara. In films, the screen fades to black. Here… we still have tomorrow."
The wind picked up, carrying a sudden chill. Kara shivered slightly in her thin T-shirt.
Without a word, Alice slipped off the coat she was wearing.
That coat.
Heavy red wool. Bright. The same one she'd worn the day they met. The coat that made her stand out in Princeton's gray crowds.
Alice draped it over Kara.
The red wrapped around the human, shielding her from the cold.
Kara clutched the lapels, breathing in Alice's scent soaked into the fabric.
"So now I'm the girl in the red coat," Kara teased with a smile.
"It looks better on you," Alice replied seriously.
Kara lifted a hand and touched Alice's face.
Her brown eyes turned solemn, deep.
"Promise me something?"
"Anything."
"Promise that no matter what happens… we'll always take care of each other. That you won't try to carry the world alone."
Alice took Kara's hand and kissed her warm fingers.
"I promise. I'm your bodyguard, your shadow, and your love. As long as I exist, nothing will hurt you."
Satisfied, Kara smiled and closed her eyes, drifting to sleep in the vampire's lap, wrapped in the warmth of red wool beneath a sun that felt eternal.
PRESENT
The memory dissolved like smoke, carried away by the icy wind at the top of the skyscraper.
The garden's golden light was replaced by the bluish darkness of the city before dawn.
Kara's warmth was replaced by the cold of emptiness.
Alice stood at the edge of the building.
She no longer wore student clothes.
She wore black — leather, tactical.
War armor.
But in her hands, she held something that didn't belong to this new reality.
The red coat.
She had retrieved it from the wreckage of the car on the Romanian highway.
It was smeared with mud and torn along one sleeve.
Dark stains marred it — Kara's dried blood.
Alice ran her thumb over the rough fabric.
That coat had been the beacon that drew Kara in.
It had been the shield that warmed her in the garden.
It had been a promise of protection.
And now — it was a shroud.
She raised the cloth to her face and inhaled deeply.
Kara's scent was still there, faint, fighting against the stench of rain and death.
The promise echoed in her mind, mocking:
As long as I exist, nothing will hurt you.
Alice clenched the fabric, feeling Dracula's blood boil beneath her skin, demanding she drop it — forget the pain and embrace only power.
She refused.
She needed the pain.
Pain was the only thing love had left behind.
She folded the coat carefully, with almost religious reverence, and placed it inside a waterproof backpack she'd left on the rooftop.
She would never wear it again.
The Alice who wore red — the Alice who believed in poetry and promises — was dead.
But she would carry the weight.
Alice stared at the horizon, where the city's lights were beginning to go dark one by one.
Her eyes burned an absolute crimson, not a trace of brown remaining.
"I'll take care of you, Kara," she whispered to the wind, her voice stripped of humanity. "I'll take care of your memory. By washing it with the blood of every last one of them."
Alice turned her back on the dawn and leapt into the shadows — leaving innocence behind,
carrying only vengeance and the ghost of a red coat.