The smell of copper and ozone always meant a bad night in the emergency clinic.
I scrubbed the dried blood from my knuckles, staring into the cracked mirror of the staff restroom. As a trauma medic working the midnight shift in the city’s roughest district, I was used to stabs, gunshots, and broken bones. But tonight, the air felt heavy. Static crackled against my skin.
A violent crash rattled the front lobby.
"Natalie! Help me!"
My heart hammered against my ribs. I threw the door open and bolted down the hallway.
Sprawled across the linoleum floor was Selena. Her expensive designer jacket was torn to shreds, soaked through with deep, unnaturally dark blood. She was trembling violently, her pale skin covered in a cold, glistening sweat.
"Selena!" I dropped to my knees beside her, my medical instincts overriding my panic. "What happened? Who did this?"
"They... they tracked me," she gasped, her hands clutching her stomach. "The Crimson... Fang. Nat, it hurts. It burns."
I pulled her hands away and sliced through her shirt with my medical shears. My breath hitched. A jagged laceration tore across her abdomen. But it wasn't a normal blade wound. The edges of the flesh were blackened, smoking with a sickening, hissing hiss. Tiny, glowing silver flakes were embedded deep within the tissue.
Silver poisoning. The thought flashed through my mind, absurd and unscientific. But my eyes didn't lie. The metal was literally cooking her from the inside out.
"Hold on, stay with me," I ordered, grabbing a gurney and hoisting her onto it with frantic strength.
I wheeled her into the trauma bay, hooking her up to the monitors. Her heart rate was skyrocketing, then plunging dangerously. Normal saline wouldn't fix this. She was losing blood faster than her body could replicate it, and whatever toxin was in her veins was liquefying her organs.
"I need to type and cross your blood, Selena. Do you know your baseline?" I demanded, tearing open an IV start kit.
"No time," Selena choked out, her eyes rolling back. With a desperate, trembling effort, she reached into the hidden inner pocket of her ruined jacket. She pulled out a small, heavy glass cylinder. "Use... use this. Inject it. Please."
I stared at the object. It wasn't a standard medication. Inside the reinforced glass was a thick, crimson fluid that seemed to pulse with its own faint, terrifying luminescence. It looked like blood, but it vibrated with a terrifying vitality.
"Selena, I can't just inject an unknown substance into your central line! That's medical suicide!"
"If you don't..." Selena seized, her back arching off the table as a choked scream tore from her throat. The heart monitor flatlined into a continuous, deafening beep. "...I die. Trust me, Nat. Please."
Her hand fell limp. Her eyes closed.
"Dammit!"
My mind fractured into a million pieces. The monitor was screaming. Her pupils were dilated. She was clinically dead. Practical logic screamed at me to perform standard CPR, but a strange, primal pull in the center of my chest dragged my eyes back to the glowing vial. An inexplicable instinct—a voice that didn't feel like my own—told me to move.
I grabbed a large-bore syringe, drove the needle through the rubber stopper of the vial, and drew the glowing crimson fluid. It felt warm through the plastic syringe. Hot, even.
Finding her central line, I plunged the needle in and delivered the fluid directly into her bloodstream.
For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. The flatline beep continued to pierce the silence.
Then, Selena’s body violently convulsed.
The heart monitor suddenly shattered into a frantic, rhythmic pulsing. But it wasn't just Selena reacting.
A sudden, blinding heat exploded in my own chest. I gasped, stumbling backward against the medicine cart, clutching my throat. My veins felt like they were being pumped with liquid fire. The room spun. The scent of heavy rain, forest pine, and dark ash flooded my senses so powerfully I could almost taste it.
Before I could process the sudden agony in my own limbs, the heavy security doors of the clinic's front entrance didn't just open—they blew entirely off their hinges.
The metal doors slammed into the opposite wall with a deafening boom.
Two massive, imposing silhouettes stepped through the dust and into the blinding fluorescent lights of the hallway. They moved with a terrifying, predatory grace that made every human instinct in my body scream predator.
The man in the lead wore a pristine, tailored charcoal suit that contrasted sharply with the raw, lethal aura bleeding off him. His dark eyes locked onto me, cold and calculating.
Behind him stood his mirror image—a man with the same striking, dangerous face, but with wilder hair, a leather jacket, and eyes that gleamed with a feral, chaotic hunger.
"Where is she?" the man in the suit demanded. His voice was a deep, gravelly baritone that vibrated through the floorboards, hitting my chest like a physical blow.
My fire-laced blood roared in response to his voice.
I grabbed a silver-tipped syringe from the tray beside me, holding it out like a weapon as they advanced on the trauma bay. "Stay back! I've called the police!"
The man in the suit didn't blink. In the blink of an eye, he closed the distance between us. His hand shot out, his heavy, calloused fingers clamping tightly around my wrist.
The moment his skin touched mine, a literal spark ignited between us. A shockwave of raw energy blasted outward from our contact point.
The silver syringe flew out of my grip, launching across the room and embedding itself deeply into the drywall as if thrown by an invisible ghost.
The man froze, his dark eyes widening in sheer, utter disbelief as he stared at my hand, then into my eyes.
"What did you do?" he whispered, his grip tightening. "What are you?"
