Chapter 1: The Night the World Changed

[Hi Everyone! please bare with me if I make some mistakes here and there with grammar, this is my first story and English is not my first language. Please share your opinions on how to improve the story and some mistakes. I'm open to suggestions😊Thank you so much for giving it a read, I hope you enjoy it😁]

The city was a beast of light and sound, its neon veins pulsing with the rhythm of a thousand lives. I moved through it like a shadow, unseen, untouched. The wind clawed at my coat, but I didn't feel it. Not really. I hadn't felt the cold—or anything—in over a hundred years.

Some nights, I wondered what it would be like to shiver again. To bleed. To die.

But I couldn't.

The streetlights flickered as I turned into an alley, their glow sputtering like dying stars. It was a shortcut. A habit. A mistake.

I felt him before I saw him. A presence in the dark, ancient and hungry. My fingers curled into fists inside my pockets. I knew his kind—the predators who lurked in the shadows, feeding on the fragile, the fleeting, the mortal.

His voice slithered through the silence, smooth and dangerous.

"You shouldn't walk alone at night."

I stopped. Slowly, I turned.

He leaned against the brick wall, half-shrouded in shadow. The dim orange light caught the sharp angles of his face, his cheekbones like blades. His eyes—black as the void between stars—glinted with something predatory.

I met his gaze and held it.

"Neither should you."

His smirk was slow, deliberate. "You're not afraid."

"No."

He pushed off the wall, moving toward me like a ripple in water—effortless, fluid, deadly. "Strange," he murmured, his voice low and velvety. "Most humans are."

I could hear it now—the hunger beneath his words, the ancient whisper of something that had walked the earth long before I had. A vampire.

I sighed. "Then you should know, I'm not most humans."

He was on me in an instant, too fast for mortal eyes to follow. His hand closed around my wrist, cold and unyielding. I let him. He was testing me, waiting for the flutter of a pulse, the rush of fear.

Instead, his expression shifted. Confusion flickered across his face, followed by something deeper.

His grip tightened. I could feel him searching for it—the life beneath my skin, the heartbeat he expected to find.

There was nothing.

His gaze snapped to mine, the hunger in his eyes replaced by something darker. "What are you?"

The question had followed me through lifetimes, whispered by men, monsters, and the dying. But this was the first time it had been asked by something that should have been able to end me.

I smiled, slow and hollow. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

For the first time in centuries, I had the upper hand.

And for the first time in his existence, a vampire was afraid.