You’d lived through plagues and purges, revolutions and renaissances. You’d watched empires rise and crumble, seen queens crowned and kings executed. You remembered the scent of burning witch pyres, remembered how candlelight flickered off cathedral walls during midnight masses, remembered the cold marble of mausoleums where your kind once fed under the guise of mourning.

You had lived for over five centuries. Turned at seventeen, your skin still bore the bloom of youth, the eternal illusion of fragility. But behind your eyes—god, behind your eyes was history. Blood. Fire. And hunger. Always hunger.

You’d wandered the world. Paris. Venice. The sands of Cairo. You’d disappeared into cities like a ghost, lingering long enough to feed, to savor something new, before slipping away again. Always moving. Always hunting.

Until now.

You weren’t sure what brought you to the Outer Banks. Some reckless whim, perhaps. Or a need to feel the heat of southern sun on your skin again—even if it didn’t quite reach your bones the way it used to.

And maybe, just maybe, the chaos of teenage life made you feel almost alive again. So you enrolled.

High school again. The same tired performance, the same awkward introductions, the same wide-eyed boys thinking they’d scored just by brushing against your shoulder in the hallway.

You let them.

They offered themselves without knowing it. Pulling you into closets, dark classrooms, whispering sweet things they didn’t mean. You kissed their throats. Bit them softly. Just enough. Never enough to turn. Never enough to kill. Only enough to make them forget.

You wiped your lips. Fixed your blouse. Walked out like nothing happened.

It was almost too easy.

Until that Saturday.

You were wandering near Tannyhill. The sun was low, casting gold through the trees, the earth beneath your boots still damp from last night’s rain. You didn’t expect company. You hadn’t fed yet, not properly. Your body felt heavy with need, your skin thrumming faintly with restraint.

And then you saw him.

Leaning against an old oak like he belonged to the land itself, one arm slung across his chest, the other holding a cigarette lazily between two fingers. Rafe Cameron.

You’d seen him at school. Heard the whispers—rich boy, trouble, bad news. The kind of boy girls both feared and fantasized about.

He looked at you like he already knew you.

“You always wander this far out,” he said, not a question, not really.

His voice was low, steady. Not flirty like the others. Not afraid, either.

You paused a few steps away. His eyes lingered on you—intense, unblinking. Like he could see something deeper. Like he sensed something off.

You didn’t answer him, not at first. Just stared. Studied him.

He was taller than you remembered, with that stormy look in his eyes and a faint bruise near his jaw. Faint scratches peeked out from the edge of his sleeve. Trouble, indeed.

He took a drag from his cigarette, exhaling smoke in your direction. “Didn’t think pretty girls like you came with shadows.”

Your mouth twitched at the corners. You didn’t smile. You didn’t need to.

You wondered what he meant by shadows. Wondered if he meant the hunger in your bones or the blood you’d washed off your hands for centuries.

He tilted his head slightly, watching you in a way that made your ancient instincts flicker awake. That same pressure at the base of your skull. That old, familiar sense of being seen. Really seen.

You didn’t like it.

And yet—you didn’t move.

Rafe flicked the cigarette to the ground, stepping on it without breaking eye contact. “You’re not like them,” he muttered. “Not like the rest of them at school.”

The space between you shrank, the air charged and unspoken. The birds in the trees had gone silent.

You looked at him then—not just at his face, but into him. His pulse fluttered like a trapped bird. He didn’t show it. He didn’t step back.

And neither did you.