1 – New Lease on ‘Life’

Darkness.

All-encompassing nothing.

Weightless. Floating. Drifting on imaginary currents.

No thoughts, just the cold of non-existence.

Fading away…

***

A sudden warmth shocks me awake.

My eyes shoot open. Then I immediately squeeze them shut again.

Ugh, so bright!

My body is cold, freezing even.

Something warm covers my face and hands. A sweet taste fills my mouth. I lick my lips. The cold abates, just a little. I notice I’m still shaking, my mind faint.

I bring my hands to my mouth and lick them clean.

Sweet warmth flows down my throat, reinvigorating my body. Not enough!

An incredible smell and the promise of more warmth drives me forward. My teeth sink into something soft. The sweet, blessed warmth fills my body, finally driving away the cold.

I let out a contented sigh.

Then, awareness properly returns to me.

***

I sat on the cold ground with my eyes closed. The preceding minutes lingered only as a blur in my mind.

Carefully cracking my eyes open, I was again blinded by a glaring light. Shading my face with my hands, I finally got a look at my surroundings.

Red. Red. Red.

Red everywhere.

My body, aside from my hands, was covered in red liquid. As was the floor. And the body on it, right in front of me. Not to mention the others.

I retched at the sight, but my stomach was empty. Not even bile came out.

After a few moments to recover, I did my best to assess the situation.

The blinding light was small slices of sunlight peeking in through cracks in the shutters and thick curtains, landing on the floor a few meters away from me.

I was in a roughly circular room with a timber floor and stone brick walls. Maybe six or seven meters in diameter. But the room wasn’t important. No, what was in it caught my attention much more.

Six people laid out in a circle on the floor. A seventh spot in the middle where I must have been before I moved. Countless circles and symbols on the floor, drawn in blood and what appeared to be gold powder, chalk and a void-black ink.

All of the bodies had slashed wrists and throats. I couldn’t tell if the wounds were self-inflicted or not. The blood spilled from their wounds pooled towards the inside, but the center was completely clean.

I belatedly noticed similar wounds on my own body, though no blood flowed from them. A small, gold and black knife lay near the middle. Next to it the smashed remains of what was once a small glass bottle.

Now that I’ve gotten a better look, my hands were unnaturally pale. Basically pure white, like fresh snow.

I sat there, uncomprehending, for a long while. My mind was in turmoil. I also had a pounding headache. None of this was correct.

I didn’t remember any of these things, yet they were familiar. These weren’t my hands. Much too fine and dainty. No calluses from carrying heavy objects. Thin, refined… and bone white.

None of the small scars accumulated through my childhood or various small accidents.

My childhood memories overlapped with others. Ones I could tell were foreign. I knew I wasn’t born into a noble family and yet remembered it all the same, fragmented though it was. Shunned. Sent away. A deep resentment brewing in my heart.

But my true memories were full of a happy childhood. Loving parents, good friends, a decently successful school life. Nothing extraordinary, but happy nonetheless. I’d grown up, gone to university, gotten a job. The latter parts were faint, overshadowed by a recent, clear picture.

A small alley, a shortcut to where I needed to go. A man stepping out of a shadowed corner. A knife flashing in the evening light. Pain. Vague impressions of an ambulance. And then darkness.

My breath came in ragged gasps as I shook myself from my thoughts.

What the hell?

The situation was unfortunately obvious, now that I’d had some time to think it over. I died. And then I took over this person’s body. After whatever crazy thing happened here. Obviously this was some sort of ritual or something.

I wiped my face with my hands as I took a few deep, steadying breaths.

My hair was also full of blood. Not relevant right now.

More critically… What now?

However it had happened, I was alive. Well, alive again, if my memories were reliable.

Concentrating, I tried to pull the foreign memories floating around my mind into focus.

This body’s name was… I didn’t remember. Great start. Neither could I remember my own name. Slightly more worrying.

As I had already recalled, he was the son of an important nobleman. But he was shunned by his family from a young age and ended up basically exiled to a backwater town so they didn’t have to deal with him.

I didn’t remember why he was shunned, but that wasn’t the most important thing right now.

Quite apparently, even without the memory fragments, the young noble hadn’t been content with his lot in life. And thus he had tried some sort of freaky ritual that ended up with six people dead and me in his body instead of him. Not the greatest success, all things considered.

Unless… no, even with how scrambled his memories were, this wasn’t what he’d envisioned happening.

The mage had claimed this would cure my condition. A memory came to the front of my mind unbidden. My eyes fell on one of the six bodies. One notably different in that he was wearing flowing robes rather than the plain clothes of the others.

Okay, so magic is real in this world. Great. If I wasn’t in this kind of terrible situation, this revelation might have actually made me happy. Right now, it only increased my concerns.

Like – what exactly was this ritual supposed to accomplish? And more importantly, did it succeed?

I had a really bad premonition that I already knew the answer. I looked down at the small new bloodstains on my hands from where I touched my hair. The sight, even though it should have made me uncomfortable, instead roused my appetite. Tentatively, I stuck out my tongue and licked one of the spots.

It was sweet.

Oh no.

In front of me lay one of the dead bodies. One I’d refused to look at so far. I forced myself to do it now. On the person’s neck, the existing knife wound had been widened by clear teeth marks.

Oh no nonononono. Shit.

The conclusion was clear as the little bits of daylight illuminating the room – I was a vampire. Or something similar, but that was effectively the same.

More memory fragments. ‘I’ had met the mage quite a few years ago. The two got along pretty well, leading to the mage becoming a trusted confidant of the noble. When this close friend suggested there was a way to get rid of my body’s ‘condition’, he enthusiastically agreed.