The kiss tasted like winter. Mira pressed her fingertips against her lips, feeling the phantom cold of the woman’s mouth against hers.

She had been investigating the fourth disappearance that month. Young women, all from the same neighborhood, all last seen near places of old worship. The police called it coincidence. Mira knew better. She had been tracking patterns for three years, ever since her sister had become one of the disappeared.

The woman had been standing in the shadow of a stone angel, her skin pale enough to glow in the moonlight. She had called out to Mira by name, and when Mira had turned, the woman had smiled with teeth that were just slightly too sharp.

Then the woman had kissed her, fast and fierce, and pulled away with blood on her lips.

I am dying, she had whispered. The Queen is dead, and without her, we all fade. But you—I have seen your face in the old records. You are the one we have been waiting for.

That had been three days ago. Now Mira sat in her apartment, curtains drawn against the afternoon sun she could no longer tolerate, and felt the hunger building inside her like a storm finding its center.

She understood now. The woman had been dying—the final death of her kind—and in her last moments she had passed something to Mira. A gift, or a curse, or perhaps both. Mira’s blood had changed in ways she was still discovering, and with each change came new hungers that her old human instincts couldn’t satisfy.

She wanted blood. Not much—not yet—but the desire was growing stronger with each hour, and she knew that soon she would need to make a choice.

The woman had said there were others. Others who had received the same gift in the same way, the same fatal last kiss from a dying vampire who had chosen to pass on her nature rather than let it die with her.

Mira pulled out her notebook and began to make a list. If she was right, if the old queen had truly died and her court was scattering, there could be dozens of new vampires stumbling through the city right now, all of them hungry, all of them confused.

The police wouldn’t help. They would call it a cult, or a pandemic, or mass hysteria. They would never understand what was really happening until it was too late.

Mira closed her notebook and looked at her reflection in the dark window. Her eyes had changed too—they were darker now, deeper, with flecks of something that looked almost like dried blood. She didn’t look like a victim anymore. She looked like something else entirely. Something that was learning to hunt.