The blood provided a miracle. A dark, terrible, life-giving miracle. It chased away the weakness, silenced the gnawing hunger, and painted a faint, healthy flush back onto Frankie’s ghostly pale cheeks. It gave her strength. It gave her an… almost human feeling.

  And that feeling proved the most dangerous of all.

  Because it gave her an idea. A stupid, reckless, incredibly human idea.

  “I’m not pulling out of the competition,” she announced.

  She delivered the line to Ted and Dee Dee the next morning as they sat in her dim, curtain-drawn bedroom. The annual Norchester Bay surf competition fell on that weekend. Her name appeared on the roster. It had for months. To everyone else in town, she remained the returning champ, the girl to beat.

  To the two people in this room, she represented a monster-in-training who had just chugged a stolen bag of O-negative.

  Ted, trying to scrub a tiny, dried bloodstain off his jeans, looked up at her as if she had just announced a flight to the moon.

  “Absolutely not,” he said, his voice flat. “Are you insane? Frankie, the sun. The crowds. The… everything.”

  “I have to,” she insisted, her voice tight with a desperate, stubborn energy absent for weeks. “If I hide in this room for one more day, I’ll lose my mind. Surfing is the last part of me left. The real me. I can’t let this… thing… take it away. I won’t.”

  “She’s right,” Dee Dee said softly, surprising them both. She sat on the floor, sketching a kraken over and over in a notepad. “You can’t let the monster win, Frankie. You have to fight it. You have to surf.”

  “By sitting in direct sunlight for five hours?” Ted shot back, standing up. “Dee Dee, this isn’t one of your stories! This is real! The light hurts her.”

  “I’ll wear sunblock,” Frankie said.

  “What SPF do they make for vampires these days? A million?”

  The day of the preliminary heats dawned bright and mercilessly sunny. The sky formed a vast, cloudless, piercing blue expanse. For the old Frankie, a perfect day. For the new Frankie, a threat.

  *****

  The preparation became a grotesque ritual. She stood in her bathroom, stripped down to her red bikini, and began applying the sunblock. Not the normal, coconut-scented lotion she used to use. This was a thick, white, zinc-oxide-based paste that came in a tube. SPF 100+. The highest they could find.

  The application mimicked embalming.

  She slathered the greasy, chalky paste over every exposed inch of her skin. Thick and suffocating, it clogged her pores, refusing to rub in. When done, she looked like a ghost. A mime. A clown. A stark, unnatural layer of white hid her naturally tanned skin. A mask. A fragile shield against her newest and most hated enemy.

  When she walked onto the beach, the assault began. The sun, reflecting off the white sand and the glittering water, struck her like a physical blow. A million tiny needles of light stabbed at her through her sunglasses, each one a burning ember. The heat registered as a searing, angry thing, a suffocating blanket pressing in on her. Her skin, even under its thick, white armor, prickled and stung, as if a thousand tiny insects crawled beneath the surface.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She wanted to run. To retreat to the safety of her dark, cool tomb of a bedroom.

  But then the waves came into view. Clean and glassy, they peeled off the sandbar in perfect, rhythmic sets. And the surfer inside her, the girl who had lived and breathed this salt-laced air her whole life, took a deep breath.

  She could do this. She had to.

  Paddling out was agony. The glare off the water blinded her. But then, something amazing happened.

  As she cleared the break and sat up on her board, waiting for her heat to begin, the chaos of her senses shifted. The roar of the surf, the chatter of the crowd on the beach, the announcements from the loudspeakers—it all resolved itself into a symphony of distinct, individual sounds.

  She could hear the unique, whispering hiss of each wave as it formed far out at sea. She could feel the subtle shift in the water beneath her board, the deep, powerful pull of the currents. Her senses, an instrument of torture on land, became a powerful asset in the ocean.

  Her heat began, a familiar internal burn that intensified with each beat of her pulse. She paddled last for a wave, the scent of salt and sun-baked wax filling her nostrils. She let the other surfers scramble, their shouts echoing across the water. She waited, the spray of the ocean cool against her skin. She listened, the rhythmic roar of the waves a constant hum in her ears. And then she heard it—a deep, powerful thrum under the water, a vibration that resonated through the board and into her bones. The one. A wave with a strong, beating heart.

  She turned her board and paddled. Three strokes. That’s all it took. The strength that flooded her veins from the stolen blood remained. She stood on her feet and dropped the face of the wave before the other girls were even halfway there.

  And then the curse truly took over.

  Her balance became not something she had to think about; an innate, absolute fact. Her reflexes were no longer human; the lightning-fast, synaptic firings of a predator. She no longer had to guess the wave's next move. She knew. She sensed its intentions in the water, in the air.

  But the power remained raw. Untamed. An unbroken wild horse..

  She moved with clumsiness. She put too much force into her turns, her board gouging a deep, angry track in the water. She generated too much speed, flying across the face of the wave like a skipping stone, almost out of control.

  On her second wave, a perfect, peeling right-hander, it happened. She flew, faster than she had ever moved on a board. Another surfer, a girl from a rival town, paddled back out, directly in her path. The old Frankie would have had plenty of time to adjust, to smoothly carve around her.

  The new Frankie almost killed her.

  She saw the girl, and her instincts screamed obstacle. She tried to turn, but the raw, explosive power in her legs made the board swerve with impossible, violent quickness. Not a graceful turn. A glitch. A violation of physics. She missed the other surfer by inches, her board sending a massive, angry spray of water directly into the girl’s shocked face.

  Frankie pulled out of the wave, her heart hammering. The other surfer stared at her, her expression a mixture of terror and pure rage. From the beach, a low murmur rippled through the crowd. They had seen it too. It had looked reckless. Dangerous. Unnatural.

  From the sand, Damon Rudd watched, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed in deep, quiet concern. He did not watch like the other spectators. He watched like an expert. He saw the impossible speed. The jerky, unnatural correction. He saw a power beautifully, dangerously, terrifyingly uncontrolled.

  Frankie paddled back out, her face burning with shame under its white mask of sunblock. She finished her heat, her movements more cautious now, more restrained. She still put together a high-scoring run, cruising her heat and advancing to the next round.

  But as she rode her final wave back to the shore, the victory seemed hollow. Alien.

  She had not surfed. Not really.

  She had just been a passenger.

  A passenger in a body of learning how to hunt.