I made it to school with three minutes to spare, which should have been impossible. My apartment is a twenty-minute walk from campus, and I'd left late. Somewhere between the front door and the main gate, I had started running, and I hadn't stopped until I saw the building. I wasn't even out of breath.
That was the first wrong thing.
The second was the noise.
Every footstep in the hallway thundered. Every whisper, every zipper, every pen clicking against a desk felt like it was happening inside my skull. Lockers slammed like gunshots. Someone laughed three corridors away and I could hear exactly what they were laughing at.
And people were staring. Not the usual glance-and-look-away. They stared the way you stare at something you can't explain.
I kept my head down and pulled my hoodie tighter, which only made it worse. The sleeves strained around my arms. Yesterday that hoodie had hung off me like a tent.
"David?"
Marcus stopped dead in front of my locker, his backpack sliding off one shoulder. We had been friends since our first week, mostly because we were the only two people who laughed at the same terrible jokes. He looked at me the way you look at a stranger who happens to have your friend's name.
"Dude," he said slowly. "What happened to you?"
"Gym," I said.
"You hate the gym."
"I started going."
"Yesterday?" He circled me once, squinting. "You were—" He waved a hand vaguely at my whole body. "You were a noodle yesterday. Now you look like you're about to model for a statue."
"Thanks, I think."
"That wasn't a compliment. That was a concern." He lowered his voice. "Your eyes look weird, too."
I turned to my locker so he wouldn't see my face. "It's the lighting."
Behind him, a girl dropped her textbook. It hit the floor with a crack, and I flinched. She bent to pick it up and hissed through her teeth. A corner of the page had sliced across her fingertip.
A single drop of blood fell onto the tiles.
The whole hallway went silent.
Or maybe it was only silent for me. All I could hear was that one drop, small and bright, and all I could feel was a deep, awful ache spreading through my gums. My mouth flooded. My heart slowed, actually slowed, as if everything in me had gone still, waiting.
Look away.
I couldn't.
The smell reached me next. Warm. Metallic. Sweet in a way I had no right to know. It curled through the air and wrapped around my thoughts until I couldn't remember who I was, or why anyone would want to be anywhere except right next to that smell—
"David."
Marcus's hand clamped on my shoulder. I jerked away so hard that my elbow dented the locker door.
"Okay," Marcus said, backing up a step. "Okay. You're scaring me."
"I'm sorry. I need the bathroom."
I didn't wait for an answer. I walked, because running would have been too obvious, and I kept my breath shallow so I wouldn't smell anything at all. Every head turned as I passed.
The boys' bathroom was empty. I gripped the edge of the sink, and the porcelain creaked under my hands.
I let go and stared at the mirror.
"Calm down," I told the stranger in it. "You're just stressed. You didn't sleep. You're—"
I opened my mouth to say more, and I saw my teeth.
My canines were wrong. Longer. Sharper. They pressed against my lower lip like they belonged there. I touched one with my fingertip and it split my skin. A bead of blood welled up.
Before I could stop myself, I licked it away.
The taste hit me like a flood: heat, iron, something ancient underneath, as if my own blood was remembering something I had forgotten. My knees nearly gave out. I gripped the sink again, and this time the porcelain cracked clean down the middle.
I stared at the crack. Then at my hands. Then at my eyes.
They were gold. Not hazel, not brown. Gold, with a thin red ring around the pupil, glowing faintly in the dim light.
"No," I whispered. "No, no, no. This isn't real."
It is.
The voice didn't come from the mirror. It came from inside my head, quiet and unhurried, a voice I had heard before. Fragments of last night's dream returned all at once: the darkness, the faint footsteps, someone calling my name.
David.
I clapped both hands over my ears, which did nothing.
You are awake.
"Who are you?" I said aloud, my voice shaking. "What did you do to me?"
Silence. Then, almost gentle, like the smile of someone who had waited a very long time:
I did nothing. I only called. You answered.
And it was gone. The bathroom was only a bathroom again, with a cracked sink, a dripping tap, and a boy in the mirror who didn't look like a boy anymore.
I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the bell to ring. Long enough for the hunger to settle from a scream into a low, patient hum. I splashed water on my face, pulled my hood up, and pushed open the door.
Marcus was waiting in the hallway.
"I told Mr. Hale you were sick," he said. He didn't look scared anymore. He looked worried, which was worse. "Are you?"
"I don't know," I admitted. It was the only honest thing I'd said all day.
"Whatever it is, you're not doing it alone, okay?"
I nodded, because I couldn't trust my voice. If he knew, if anyone knew...
First period was history. I took the seat in the back corner, as far from everyone as the room allowed, and tried to focus on Mr. Hale's voice. It was impossible. I could hear every heartbeat in the room, thirty of them, slightly out of rhythm, like thirty clocks that had never been wound together. The girl in front of me tapped her pen. Her pulse jumped every time Mr. Hale glanced her way. I wanted to stop listening. I couldn't find the switch.
Marcus slid into the seat beside me and leaned close. "Can I ask you something weird?"
"Weirder than this morning?"
"You texted me last night." He held his phone low under the desk. "Around two a.m."
My stomach turned. "I don't remember that."
"It's just one line." He tilted the screen toward me.
Don't look at the moon.
Time stamp: 2:07 a.m. Sent from my number.
"I thought you were joking," Marcus whispered. "Then I saw the news this morning. Everyone's calling it a blood moon. Red, like, actually red. People are saying there's no eclipse due for months."
The pen in my hand snapped in half. Black ink spread across my palm.
The blurry image in my memory sharpened for half a second: a red disc hanging impossibly large over rooftops, and something moving in front of it. Then it slipped away, leaving only a headache and the taste of copper.
"It's nothing," I lied again. "I must have been sleep-texting."
Marcus didn't believe me. But he let it go.
When class finally ended, I needed air. Marcus followed me toward the courtyard. Sunlight spilled across the stone steps, bright and white and ordinary. I stepped into it.
My skin burned.
Not badly. Not yet. It felt like standing too close to an oven, a warning tingle racing up my forearms. I stepped back into the shade and watched the faint red marks fade from my wrists.
Sunlight. Of course.
"You good?" Marcus asked.
"Yeah." I stayed in the shadow of the doorway. "Just hot."
That was when I noticed the man.
He stood at the far end of the courtyard, perfectly still, while students flowed around him like water around a stone. Tall. A dark coat, far too heavy for the warm morning. Pale hair swept back from a face I couldn't make out from that distance. He wasn't looking at the crowd. He wasn't looking at anything else.
He was looking at me.
And as our eyes met across forty yards of noise and sunlight, he did something that sent ice down my spine.
He smiled, just slightly, and bowed.
Then a group of students walked between us, and when they passed, the courtyard was empty where he had stood.
"David?" Marcus said. "What are you looking at?"
I couldn't answer. My gums ached. My heart was beating slowly, steadily, and for the first time in my life I understood that it didn't have to beat at all.
In my head, the voice returned, quieter than before, almost fond:
Welcome home, Progenitor.