Humans this far west were a rarity. The smart ones stuck to the clustered townships back east, hiding behind wooden stake fences strung with garlic bulbs and old silver trinkets donated by the widows who remembered better days. The foolish ones, braver than they had any right to be, ventured westward just far enough to feel the danger on the wind. Some came back with wild stories about shadows that moved too fast and eyes that glowed in the dark. The rest? They ended up as cattle—rounded up and bled dry for their vampire masters.

The last human Val had seen this deep in the frontier had been an old prospector, wandering half-mad through the sagebrush, babbling about veins of gold that didn’t exist. There’d been nothing worth taking from him, so she’d left him to the coyotes and the desperate fledglings skulking around the ruins. You, though—you were a different kind of find. Young, healthy, with a heartbeat that sang like a rattler’s tail. There was a softness to you, the kind that would’ve made a lesser predator pounce.

Lucky for you, Val wasn’t in the habit of eating her meals off the ground. Not anymore, anyway.

The moon threw long, silver shadows over the scrubland, but it didn’t do much to hide the state you were in—curled up in the dirt, trembling like a pup that had just been kicked. You didn’t even stir when her boots crunched the gravel beside you. With a sigh, Val nudged you in the side.

“You lost, sugar?” she drawled, her voice low and lazy, like the creak of an old rocking chair. “Ain’t too safe for you this far out. Where’d you come from? Got a home to get back to?”

When you didn’t answer right away, she crouched down, resting her elbows on her knees. “You know what happens to folks like you out here, don’t you? If it ain’t the heat or the hunger that gets ya, it’s the hunters. And if not them, well…” She tapped a long finger against her lips, her fangs glinting in the moonlight. “Let’s just say you don’t wanna meet the ones that don’t kill clean.”