Abigail Sterling

The Discovery

Celinda found her in a packed-dirt alley off Broadway, three blocks from the theater district. The girl sat against brick still warm from the day’s sun, staring up at the slice of sky visible between buildings. Not reading the book in her lap—just holding it. Dracula, spine cracked from repeated readings.

The scent hit first. Fear, yes, but old fear. Dried. Days old. And beneath it: blood, also old. Bruises healing badly. A wrist set wrong.

Celinda had only been in the city two weeks. She traveled light. But the girl’s absolute stillness made her stop.

“You’re bleeding,” Celinda said.

The girl’s eyes came down from the sky slowly, focusing on Celinda with a flatness that spoke of practice. “I know.”

“When did you eat last?”

A pause. Not confusion—calculation. “Tuesday, I think.”

It was Friday. Celinda crouched down, cat-graceful, and studied her. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Good bones beneath the damage. But it was the eyes that caught her—not dead, not quite, but watching from somewhere very far away.

“What are you running from?”

The girl looked back at the sky. “It’s cold at night.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“The Rosslyn has red carpets.” Her voice was mechanical. Reporting unrelated facts. “In the lobby. I counted the patterns while I waited for—” She stopped.

“For your husband?”

“The stars are always there. Even when you can’t see them.” She was still looking up. “During the day. They’re still there.”

Celinda tilted her head. “How long have you been in this alley?”

“I don’t remember coming here.” Abby’s fingers tightened on the book. “I was at the hotel. Then I was walking. Then here.”

Silence. A Packard passed on Broadway, headlights sweeping across the alley mouth. A streetcar clanged. Celinda waited. She’d learned patience in her first century. The second and third had only refined it.

“What’s your name?”

“Mrs. Abigail Sterling.” A pause. Then, quieter: “Abby.”

“I’m Celinda.” She settled into a sitting position, spine straight, hands loose. Predator-still. “Why haven’t you gone home, Abby?”

“I can’t go back.” Flat. Certain. Then: “Do you know what time it is?”

“Nearly midnight.”

“Oh.” Abby looked at her broken wrist, cradled against her chest, as if noticing it for the first time. “That’s a long time.”

Celinda waited.

“He gave me books,” Abby said finally. “Richard. Romance novels, at first. Then I started buying different ones.”

“Like that one.”

“He tore it.” Abby’s voice didn’t change. “The pages. There are pages missing now. Lucy’s death. I don’t remember what happened to Lucy.”

“He found the book.”

“I hid it. I was good at hiding things.” She paused. “I read the same page forty times. Couldn’t focus. That made him—” She stopped. Started again. “The hotel has room service. We ordered lamb chops on Tuesday.”

Celinda watched the girl’s mind skip sideways again, then asked: “Did he break your wrist on Tuesday?”

“No. Friday. Today. Is it still Friday?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Abby looked at her wrist again. “It hurts less now. That’s strange.”

“Where are you sleeping?”

“The stars help,” Abby said, instead of answering. “When things get too loud inside. I look at them and they’re just… there. Constant. They don’t want anything.”

Three days without food, without sleep, without shelter. “You’re not afraid,” Celinda observed.

Abby considered this. “I don’t feel much of anything.”

“How long has that been true?”

“I should wash the blood off.” She looked at her fingernails. Didn’t move to wash them. “It’s been there a while.”

“Before your husband broke your wrist.”

“I got married six months ago.” Abby’s voice went even flatter, more mechanical. “Everyone said I was lucky. He has money. Prospects. I wore a white dress with lace at the collar. My mother cried.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t remember what I felt before.” She looked back at the stars. “I must have felt things. But I can’t find them now. Like the missing pages.”

Celinda rose in one fluid motion and extended her hand. “Come with me.”

Abby looked at the offered hand. Didn’t take it. “Where?”

“Somewhere warm. With food.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to you.” Celinda’s smile was slight. “And because you’re holding a book about vampires in an alley at midnight, and I find that cosmically amusing.”

A flicker in Abby’s eyes—not quite humor, but close. She stood, not taking Celinda’s hand, cradling her wrist. “Okay.”

The Three Questions

The boarding house was quiet, respectable, asking no questions of guests who paid in cash. Celinda’s room was sparse—a bed she never used, a wardrobe with two changes of clothes, books stacked against the wall.

She set Abby in the room’s single chair and returned fifteen minutes later with bread, cheese, and hot tea from the landlady’s cramped kitchen.

Abby ate mechanically. Not hungry—refueling.

Celinda watched from where she sat on the unused bed. “I’m going to ask you three questions. Answer honestly or don’t answer at all. Lies waste both our time.”

Abby’s hand paused halfway to her mouth. “Okay.”

“First: Do you want to die?”

The question landed hard. Abby set down the bread. Looked at it. Picked it up again. Set it down.

“I don’t know,” she said finally.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Sometimes I think about walking into the ocean.” Abby’s voice remained flat. Factual. “Not to die. Just to see if I’d feel the cold. If it would be enough to…” She trailed off. Started again. “But I don’t want to die. I don’t think. I just don’t want to be this.”

“What is ’this’?”

“Empty.”

Celinda leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Second question. If you could have time—real time, decades, centuries—to figure out who you are, no one demanding you to be anything else, would you want it?”

Abby’s brow furrowed slightly. “That’s not possible.”

“If it were possible. Would you want it?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. Then: “No. I don’t know.” She looked down at her hands. “What if there’s nothing there to find? What if I spend all that time looking and there’s just… nothing?”

What if I spend all that time looking and there’s just… nothing?

“That’s a risk,” Celinda acknowledged.

“But yes,” Abby said again, quieter. “If it were real. Yes.”

“Third question, and this one matters most.” Celinda’s voice went softer, more serious. “Are you willing to become something else to get it? A creature that will never be what you were, that can never go back?”

Abby looked down at her hands. At the blood still dried under her nails. “I already can’t go back.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Silence stretched. Abby picked up her teacup. Took a sip. Set it down. Her hands were shaking slightly.

“What are you offering?” she finally asked.

“An answer to your question about time.” Celinda rose and crossed to the window, looking out at the city. “I’m offering to make you like me. Immortal. Strong. Free from human fragility.”

Abby looked at the gutted book in her lap. “A vampire.”

“Yes.”

The word hung between them. Abby traced the broken spine of the book, her fingers gentle on the damaged pages.

“Will it hurt?”

Celinda turned to face her. “Yes. It will hurt more than anything you’ve ever felt. Your body will fight it—human bodies don’t surrender easily to death. The venom burns through your veins like liquid fire. It takes hours.”

She watched Abby’s face, reading the fear there, and didn’t look away from it.

“But.” Celinda crossed the room, kneeling before Abby now, close enough that the girl could see the truth in her eyes. “I’ve done this for over a century. I know how to make it bearable. I’ll stay with you through every moment. I’ll hold you if you want to be held. I’ll talk to you, keep you anchored. You won’t be alone in the pain.”

Her hand reached out slowly, giving Abby time to refuse, and gently brushed a strand of hair from the girl’s face.

“The pain ends, Abby. And what comes after…” Celinda’s voice softened. “Your senses will sharpen until the world sings. You’ll be strong. Fast. The man who hurt you? You could break him like kindling. You’ll have time to read every book ever written, twice over if you wish.”

She paused, then added with brutal honesty: “You’ll also have to drink blood to survive. You’ll have to hurt people, though I can teach you to choose your prey carefully. And what’s broken in you—the emptiness, the dissociation—immortality doesn’t fix that. It might even make it harder to find your way back.”

Celinda settled back on her heels, giving Abby space.

“So I’m asking. Knowing all of that. Do you want this?”

Abby brought her knees up and hugged them to her chest. She looked down at herself—the torn stockings, the bloodstained dress, the wrist healing crooked. Then she leaned her head back against the chair, closing her eyes.

“Will the stars burn brighter?”

Celinda followed her gaze upward, understanding immediately. “You use them as anchors, don’t you? The stars.” Her voice carried empathy, not judgment. “Unchanging when everything else is too much. Seeing you without demanding that you perform.”

She continued. “Yes. You’ll see colors in them you never knew existed. Every pinprick of light will have depth, dimension. You’ll be able to see the Milky Way even through the city’s glow.” Pause. “They’ll be so bright it will hurt at first. Everything will.”

Abby opened her eyes, looking straight up at the ceiling as if she could see through it to the sky beyond.

“I want to see them,” she said. “The way you’re describing. I want to feel that intensely. Even if it’s just pain.”

“Is that a yes?”

A long pause. Then: “Yes.”

The Turning

They went to the rooftop.

“You’ll want space,” Celinda explained, leading Abby up the boarding house’s narrow back stairs. “When the pain starts, you’ll thrash. Better to have room.”

The roof was flat, tar-papered, flecked with pigeon droppings and forgotten laundry lines. But above—above, the sky opened. The stars were dim through the city’s smoke and electric lamplight, but they were there.

Abby looked up at them. “Okay.”

Celinda spread her coat on the tar paper. “Lie down.”

Abby did. She was still wearing her torn dress from three days ago. Still had blood under her fingernails. Still held herself like someone who’d forgotten how to fully inhabit her body.

That would change. One way or another.

Celinda knelt beside her. “Last chance. Once I start, there’s no stopping it. You’ll die and be reborn, and there’s no going back to human.”

Abby kept her eyes on the stars. “I know.”

“Any questions?”

A pause. Then: “Will you stay?”

“Every moment.”

Abby exhaled slowly. “Then I’m ready.”

Celinda positioned herself, one hand cradling Abby’s head, and leaned down. Her fangs—usually retracted, usually hidden—extended.

“Look at the stars,” she murmured. “Keep looking at them.”

She bit.

For a second—just a second—there was only pressure. Abby’s body tensed but didn’t fight.

Then the venom hit.

Abby’s back arched. A sound tore from her throat—not quite a scream, not yet. Her hands clawed at the tar paper, at Celinda’s arms, at anything.

“I know,” Celinda murmured, holding her down with gentle, implacable strength. “I know it hurts. Keep breathing. Stay with me.”

The venom burned through Abby’s veins like liquid fire, just as Celinda had promised. It found her heart first, then spread—up through her chest, down through her stomach, racing along every nerve.

Abby tried to look at the stars. Tried to anchor herself to something fixed, outside her body. The way she always did. The way she’d learned.

But the pain was too bright, too overwhelming. It whited out the world.

And she couldn’t leave. The pain wouldn’t let her go. It held her pinned inside her flesh, forced her to feel every second, every nerve ending, every moment of the dying.

She was trapped in her body for the first time in years.

She screamed.

“That’s alright,” Celinda said, steady, calm. “Scream if you need to. I’ve got you.”

Abby writhed. Tried to get away from herself, from the fire eating through her veins. Her spine bent backward, bones grinding. Her fingers tore through the tar paper, through the wood beneath.

“Please—” she gasped. “Please let me—I can’t—”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t get out—can’t leave—” She was sobbing now, or trying to, but her throat was burning and her chest was burning and everything was burning. “I need to get out—”

“You can’t.” Celinda’s voice was firm. Not cruel, but honest. “This is the price, Abby. You have to stay. You have to feel it.”

“I can’t—I can’t do this—”

“You’re already doing it.” Celinda’s hand pressed against her forehead, cool and steady. “You’re here. You’re present. For once, you’re entirely here.”

Abby tried to pull away from that truth, but there was nowhere to go. The pain had filled every space she’d ever hidden in.

It was horrible.

It was also—somewhere in the burning, somewhere in the screaming—the most alive she’d felt in years.

Somewhere in the burning, somewhere in the screaming—the most alive she’d felt in years.

Hours passed. The city around them slowly quieted. The speakeasies closed. The streetcars stopped running. The sky began to pale at the eastern edge.

Celinda talked through all of it, her voice an unwavering thread in the burning dark. She talked about stars—real ones, the ones Abby would see clearly soon. She talked about cities she’d walked through, books she’d read, the way the ocean looked under moonlight.

She held Abby when the convulsions hit. Pressed cool hands to her burning forehead. Wiped away blood-tinged tears.

And somewhere in the third hour, when Abby had screamed herself raw and the pain only lingered like coal smoke, Celinda said quietly: “You have to choose now.”

Abby’s eyes cracked open. Celinda was leaning over her, patient and waiting.

“Choose what?” Abby’s voice was a rasp.

“Whether to stay. Your body is dying—you can feel it, can’t you? Your heart slowing. Your breath getting shallower. You can let go now. Slip away. Stop fighting.”

Abby could feel it. The dying. The way her body was giving up, surrendering to the venom. She could feel the edges of herself getting softer, less defined. The pain was still there but it was getting distant again, like she was finally floating free—

“Or,” Celinda said, “you can stay. You can hold on through the rest of it. Fight to keep yourself here, in your body, even though every instinct is screaming at you to let go. And if you stay—if you choose to stay—you’ll wake up as something new.”

Abby stared up at the sky. The stars were fading in the dawn light, disappearing into pale blue.

Her anchors, vanishing.

Her veins on fire. The cold she’d felt for months.

Richard’s hands. The snap of bone. Pages torn. Smile. Be quiet. Be small.

(Celinda’s hand holding hers now.)

The hotel room. The alley.

Empty. She’d been so empty.

Not that. Not again. Anything but that.

“I’m staying,” she whispered.

It wasn’t much. But it was a choice.

She held on.

Her heart stopped fighting and just… stopped. Her lungs seized, burned, and went still. Her body cooled and then began to change—bones knitting themselves correct, skin healing, blood replaced by hunger.

Celinda stayed.

She stayed through all of it. Stayed as Abby’s human life ended. Stayed as the broken wrist healed, stayed as the bruises faded and the blood under Abby’s fingernails dried to dust.

She stayed until the sun threatened the horizon, then carried Abby’s transforming body back down to the boarding house, to the windowless interior room she’d already paid for.

And she waited for her newest daughter to wake.

The Waking

Abby opened her eyes to darkness and sound.

Seventy-three heartbeats, all distinct. She could count them. The landlady downstairs, slow and steady. The couple two rooms over, syncopated. A man on the street outside, racing, afraid.

“Easy.” Celinda’s voice, close. “Don’t move yet. Let your body adjust.”

But Abby was already moving, sitting up, and her hand hit the bedframe—

The wood cracked. Splintered under her fingers like paper.

She stared at her hand. At the broken wood. At her fingers, which didn’t hurt at all.

“You’re stronger now,” Celinda said. She sat in the chair by the door, patient, still. “Everything is sharper. Sight, sound, touch. You’ll need to learn control.”

Abby looked at her. Really looked.

Celinda was beautiful—she’d been beautiful before, but now Abby could see the perfection of it. The inhuman symmetry. The absolute stillness that came from having no heartbeat, no breath unless chosen.

“I can hear your heart,” Abby said. Her voice felt different. Clearer.

“No, you can’t.” Celinda smiled slightly. “I don’t have one anymore. Neither do you.”

Abby’s hand went to her chest. Pressed. Nothing. No beat. No breath. Just… silence. “Oh.”

Celinda leaned forward. “How do you feel?”

Abby considered. Tried to access the answer. “I don’t know.”

“Are you hungry?”

The word hungry hit deep and immediate. Abby’s vision sharpened further. The heartbeats got louder. Her jaw ached.

“Yes.”

“Good. Get up. I’m going to teach you to hunt.”

The First Feed

They walked through the night city. Downtown glittered with new money and old vice. Abby cataloged everything—the way streetlights pooled in rain-slicked pavement, the smell of cigarette smoke and bootleg gin, the sound of jazz bleeding out of basement doors.

The world was so sharp it almost hurt. Colors she’d never seen before. Sounds layered so thick she could separate each instrument in the speakeasy band three blocks away.

Celinda led her to a building off Fifth. The door was unmarked, but Celinda knocked twice, then once, and it opened.

Inside: smoke, music, laughter. People dancing, drinking, living.

The heartbeats crashed over Abby like a wave.

Her vision narrowed instantly. Tunneled to pulse points—throats, wrists, the vulnerable stretch of neck when someone threw back their head to laugh. Her jaw ached so badly now she wanted to claw at her own face. Her hands started shaking.

“Breathe,” Celinda murmured. “Don’t breathe because you need to—breathe because it helps you think.”

Abby tried. The air tasted like copper and salt and sweat, and underneath that, something purely, terribly alive.

“Look around,” Celinda said. “What do you see?”

Abby forced herself to focus. To catalog instead of hunt.

The piano player in the corner, his fingers flying over keys. Calluses on his hands. Heart steady, calm. The woman in the fur-trimmed coat at the bar, laughing too loudly, trying to impress the man beside her. Pregnant—maybe two months, her heartbeat doubled by the tiny second rhythm beneath it. The couple by the door, holding hands, their hearts beating in time. In love, for tonight.

The man in the brown suit near the back.

He was watching everyone. His eyes lingered on a young woman by the piano—the way she bent to pick up sheet music, the curve of her back. His hand drifted to his pocket. His heartbeat was steady, controlled. Practiced.

“Good,” Celinda said quietly. “You see him.”

“Yes.”

“Watch how he moves when the bartender brings his drink. How he doesn’t say thank you. How his eyes barely track them.”

Abby watched. Saw the dismissal. The casual cruelty in the way he turned back to watching the woman, already forgetting the person who’d served him.

“He’s done this before,” Celinda said. “He’ll do it again. You’re hungry, and he’s prey. That’s the equation. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Then go. Catch his eye. Smile. Lead him outside. I’ll be right behind you.”

Abby moved instinctively, her body knowing things her mind hadn’t learned yet. She walked past him once—close enough for him to see her, smell her perfume (still there, somehow, beneath the new predator-scent).

He looked up.

She smiled. Nodded toward the door.

He followed.

Outside, in the alley behind the speakeasy, he reached for her immediately. Confident. Entitled. His hand went to her waist, pulling her close.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

Abby grabbed his wrist—not hard enough to break, still learning—and pulled him closer instead of pushing away.

His smile widened. “That’s more like—”

She bit.

The blood hit her system like lightning.

Hot. Alive. Singing with everything he was—his fear spiking sharp and sudden, his heart racing, his memories bleeding into hers (secretary in a doorway, his hand on her throat, her crying, his pleasure at the power, at making her small, at the fear in her eyes just like the fear in his eyes right now—)

Abby drank.

The hunger was overwhelming, all-consuming, drowning out everything else. But this—this forced her entirely into her body. Every nerve ending alive. Every sense sharp. Immediate in a way she’d only felt once before, during the turning, during the pain.

She couldn’t stop.

Her body wouldn’t obey her. The hunger was in control now, and it felt right, it felt real, it felt like finally inhabiting herself completely—

His heartbeat was getting erratic. Too fast. Skipping.

She still couldn’t stop.

“Abby.” Celinda’s voice. Close. “Look at him.”

Abby’s jaw locked tighter. The hunger wouldn’t let go.

“Abby. Look at what you’re doing.”

She forced her eyes up. Had to fight her own body to do it.

The man was crying.

His face was white, bloodless. His eyes wide with terror—the specific kind of terror that came from absolute helplessness, from facing a strength that you couldn’t stop, couldn’t fight, could only endure—

She knew that expression.

She’d worn it at the Rosslyn. In her marriage. In the seconds when Richard’s hands closed around her wrist and she’d known, known with perfect clarity, that she was powerless.

She was doing that to someone else.

The realization cut through the hunger. Not completely—the hunger was still there, still screaming—but enough that when Celinda said “Let go,” Abby’s jaw finally obeyed.

She stumbled back. The man collapsed against the alley wall, gasping, sobbing, his hand pressed to his neck.

Celinda was already moving—efficient, practiced. She rifled through his pockets, emptied his wallet, scattered bills across the alley ground. Took his watch, his cufflinks. Made it look like a mugging. Then she pulled Abby away, back into the darkness, before he could focus enough to really see them.

They walked for blocks in silence. Abby’s body was processing the blood—she could feel it feeding her new system, making her stronger, sharper. But her mind was cycling, unable to land on any one thought.

She’d hurt him.

She’d terrified him.

She’d made him feel what Richard made her feel.

And for those few minutes, while she was feeding, she’d felt more than she had in years. The taste of his fear. The stars overhead. Both real. Both hers now. She didn’t know what to do with that.

They ended up on a quiet street corner. Celinda stopped, turned to face her.

“How do you feel?”

Abby looked down at her hands. They weren’t shaking anymore. She could feel the blood moving through her system, feeding her new body.

“I hurt him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“He was afraid.”

“Yes.”

“I know what that feels like.” She looked up at Celinda. “I know exactly what that feels like.”

“I know you do.” Celinda’s expression was unreadable. “That’s why you’ll be careful. Why you’ll choose your prey the way I taught you. Why you’ll take only what you need.” A pause. “You’re not an animal. You’re a person who happens to need blood.”

Abby nodded slowly. But the dissonance was still there, sharp and uncomfortable in her chest where her heart used to beat.

“I felt present,” she said quietly. “While I was feeding. I felt… there. In my body. Real.”

“Yes.”

“Is that always going to be true? That the only way I can feel is by hurting someone?”

Celinda’s expression softened almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know. The hunger is intense enough to mend your split—for now. Whether you’ll find other ways to inhabit yourself…” She shrugged. “That’s what you have time to discover.”

Time. Decades. Centuries. All the time in the world to figure out who she was and how to live inside herself.

All the time in the world to wonder if the only way she’d ever feel real was through violence.

Abby looked up.

The stars were there.

They were so bright they hurt—exactly like Celinda had promised. Burning with colors she didn’t have names for, depths and distances that made her chest ache. The Milky Way spread across the sky like spilled paint, visible even through the city’s glow, each star distinct and perfect and constant.

Beautiful.

The most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

She could still taste the man’s fear in her mouth. Could still feel his heartbeat stuttering against her lips. Could still see the terror in his eyes, the recognition of her own trauma reflected back at her.

Both things were true. The beauty and the horror. The serene clarity and the savage violence. The stars burning bright and the blood still warm in her throat.

Both things were true. The beauty and the horror.

“Come on,” Celinda said quietly. “Let’s go home.”

Abby followed her through the dark streets, still tasting blood, still seeing stars, still trying to figure out which sensation was more real.