Step two wasn’t about fighting. It was about finishing.

If a vampire is emotionally compromised but still in control, make it lust for blood. As a man driven by desire makes mistakes, so does a vampire driven by hunger. That is when it is most vulnerable.

Those were the words on the folded page in my pocket. I had read them enough times that they sat in my head clean and ready.

For Azure’s sake I had to kill Vince tonight or die in the attempt.

"Is that it?" I said.

He moved. No warning. Air. He came like air, not through it, as it, and my ears caught the displacement a half second before arrival and I trusted the instinct and threw the punch.

[ God-Hand Punch ]

I watched it happen in the specific slow motion that night mode produced. My fist arcing toward his face, the trajectory clean, the charge building behind it. His head tilted by a fraction, the punch grazing past his right ear, close enough that I felt the resistance of proximity. Then his hand was on my arm, moving up to my shoulder, and I lost him.

I was up and then I was down and the sequence between those two states was not something I could account for.

His boot came down on my left hand.

I heard the bones before I felt them. The sound of something structural giving way, compact and final. Then the pain arrived and I shouted, and the campus didn’t respond because these were predator hours and everybody with any sense had their lights off and their doors closed.

The boot moved to my left elbow.

That one was worse. The elbow has a different relationship to pain than the hand. My left arm stopped being something I could use and became something I was attached to and could not help.

He stepped onto my ribs. The impact rolled me across the ground, dust rising around me, and I felt the ribcage make decisions it had not been consulted about.

I lay in the dust and watched him walking toward me from a distance, unhurried, still in his human form, no pointed teeth, nothing that would tell a stranger what he was. He was killing me the way someone moves furniture. Patiently. Methodically.

He’s still in control, I thought, on the ground with one functioning hand. Still controlled. Still withholding the lust.

I looked at my left hand. Blood. Running freely from the broken skin where the bones had pushed through.

Nice, I thought.

He reached me. Stood over me. Let me struggle.

"A weak man doesn’t deserve to live," he said, his voice settling back toward calm. "You provoked death and thought you had an exit route."

He lifted me off the ground with one hand, my broken bones screaming at the movement, and I knew this was the part where he delivered the final line.

Except I had one more thing.

I forced my broken hand to move. It cost more than I had available but survival doesn’t negotiate about feelings. My fingers, slick with my own blood, found his face as he began to speak and pushed into his mouth.

I felt his tongue convulse, his throat work once in an involuntary swallow.

He dropped me like I’d burned him.

The page had been clear about this. A vampire who maintains a relationship with a human without biting them builds a suppressed hunger for that specific blood type.

Vince had kept Azure for years, using her ability, never biting her, never crossing that specific line. Perhaps decades without tasting human blood at all. The control he was so proud of was also a pressure valve that had been building.

One involuntary swallow of my charged blood cracked the dam.

"What have you done?" His voice broke from calm to something raw. He took a step back. "What did you do."

Not a question. A man discovering that a wall he built around himself has a crack in it.

I forced myself up onto my one good arm and watched him transform.

The human façade peeled away. Veins bulged and darkened like black worms crawling beneath his pale skin. His teeth lengthened into wicked, razor points. The eyes sank deeper, flooding with an ancient, starving blackness that had nothing to do with pupils.

"I’m going to kill you," he said, and this time the voice had layers again, the human one and the thing underneath it speaking simultaneously.

He came like wind. Hunger-driven now. Faster than before if that was possible.

I waited for him and hit him with my right hand, the only one that still worked, and discharged on contact.

He didn’t fly back. He dropped. Right next to me, close, which was exactly what I needed. I got my palm onto his neck before he could rise and discharged again.

The electricity was visible in the dark. Running through him in lines, his cold body conducting it differently from anything I had charged before, visible arcs jumping between his fingers, his jaw clenching and releasing, his body fighting a current it didn’t know how to process.

[Vampire—]

He stood up mid-discharge, carrying me with him, and drove us both through the air. I was still releasing charge into him as we moved, which meant I was both attacking him and being used as a projectile simultaneously, which was a new experience.

My back hit a tree. Hard enough that bark fell.

I was in a forest. He had moved us from School Central to somewhere with trees, his veins visible now on his neck and forearms, dark lines running beneath the pale skin. He was trying to speak and the words weren’t forming, the hunger and the charge and the fury all competing for control of his body.

I lay on the ground with leaves around me and looked up at him and laughed.

"You thought this was going to be easy," I said. "You don’t deserve Harmione. You don’t deserve Azure."

It was all I had left. No plan remaining. No step three on the page. Just the last punch, thrown because that was the only kind of person I knew how to be.

He came over me and flipped me onto my back so I could see him properly. He wanted me to see him when it ended.

His boot came down on my left leg. The bone went. Then the right leg.

Then my right shoulder, the collar cracking, and I shouted into the leaves and the dark.

He stepped back. Picked up a stick from the forest floor, heavy and pointed, and raised it above me. I looked at it.

The heart. He was going for the heart. And I had nothing left to stop him with.

[The user who marked you has found you.]

He drove the stick downward with all his monstrous strength.

A hand caught his shoulder from behind.