In the deep dark forest, you lie alone. You can't remember what happened but you feel different. You feel a thirst for blood. "Is there anyone there?" Someone said. You glide toward them and drink their blood.

You come to with the feel of wind at your exposed skin, lashes of icy air streaming across your neck and arms. The first thing that hits you is pain. It shoots through you, from the tips of your fingers to the very fabric of your skin, the thin, stretching blood vessels across your neck muscles. The shaking comes over you in waves, and only when you recover do you realise where you are: your eyes adjust to the gloom just slightly, and feeling floods you all in one terrible second. The thick, metallic liquid flooding your skull and coating your teeth. The pain in your neck, throbbing. The wet earth soaking through your jeans. The feel of something soft in your hands, something once warm going cold.

You blink.

It is another human. Male. His hair hangs over his face in a greasy, soft black mass, and his shirt is going damp in your hands, between the mud and the blood leaking from the gash at his neck. he is dead: you are sure of it. He stares upwards, the stars reflecting off the glassy surface of his corneas. Your hands begin to shake, and not from the cold. You let go, and the man’s head lolls to one side, a dark ribbon of blood sliding from the corner of his mouth into the mud.

What did I do?

But you already know. Your tongue finds the sharp points where your canines used to be, and the answer arrives like a punch. Your heart isn’t pounding. You press two trembling fingers to your wrist, then your throat, and find only stillness.

The memory comes in fragments.

A figure standing over you, pale as bone in the moonlight. Cold fingers tilting your chin. The pain of teeth sinking into your throat, the slow, awful draining of warmth from your body. You remember the stars spinning, your own voice begging, and then nothing, a silence so complete it felt like drowning.

Then the thirst. Waking to it, clawing at you from the inside.

You stare at your red-stained hands, and a terrible truth settles over you.

You are a monster now.