For three days, Daniella awaited nightfall with growing horror, along with all those with her. Every time the lights went off, twenty girls disappeared. 

With water being dispensed only once a day and hunger gnawing a hole through her stomach, she was quite surprised they weren't weaker and less alert. Despite her discomfort, she wasn't about to die of dehydration and hunger, or at least it didn't feel that way.

Silly thoughts kept jumping into her head, like whether her father would remember to feed her goldfish. Would her sister move into her room now? She never paid Doreen that twenty she still owed her. 

Maybe she was delirious.

Would someone save her? Were they even looking for her? Would they arrive in time? 

Such thoughts brought silent tears that would dry and, since she could not wipe them, left her face stiff, salty, and sore.

***

The lights turned on the next morning, and there were only forty girls left. Her panic echoed in the eyes of the remaining women, but also resignation.

With her interest in detective stories, logic told her that she had been missing longer than thirty-six hours. Her parents and the police probably thought her dead, and she had a feeling there would be no ransom request.

***

When the lights darkened that evening, the hollow feeling in her gut warned her she would be next. She sat stiffly upright, waiting, not daring to move or fall asleep. Concentrating on the pain in her limbs and the cold floor distracted her while keeping her mind busy staved off full-scale panic.

But thinking of home unsettled her, and all other things had lost their meaning. She was too young to die, she'd barely lived, and she would do anything to go home. 

***

Daniella jerked awake in a room half-lit by a bulb in a cabinet, tied to a metal hospital bed, covered by a sheet. The way it lay directly against her skin told her she was naked, and she had no idea how she got there.

A drip with four bags of fluid stood directly beside the bed. The IV leads led under the sheets and to a burning spot in her arm where the fluid entered her veins in a steady stream, and it was not a comfortable feeling.

Overheated, despite the fact that the hairs on her arm stood upright from the chill in the room, perspiration trickled down her brow and itched as it got to her hairline. The rest of her body was clammy, and the odd hollowness to her stomach might be starvation.

Nausea backed up in her throat, and her breathing labored a little while her heart beat against her ribs in slow, painful blows as panic swept through her. 

The monitor responded to her anxiety and emitted low-frequency warning beeps, but nobody came. The camera in the corner whirred toward her, settled on the monitor, then returned to her body.

Daniella sensed their eyes on her, but her breathing became more labored until her lungs seemed to close up. She choked, cried out, and thrashed, but to no avail. 

Black spots danced before her eyes, and darkness threatened to swallow her. Why was dying so painful? She slipped past the murkiness into a world of shadows and shapes. Was this the other side of death? Beyond life?

Muffled voices and sharp, unexpected sounds disturbed the grayness surrounding her, and sometimes she saw glimpses of the room she had been in, but it shifted in and out of focus, gloomy and quiet. 

Disappointment filled her; this was not the afterlife she had foreseen--neither heaven nor damnation, but perhaps purgatory. 

A blinding flash of white-hot pain abruptly tore the veil asunder, ripping through her chest and spreading through her body as if someone burned her alive, yet the flames were inside, not out. Mouth open wide, an animal scream rent the air, and although dying had hurt, coming back to life was hell.

She screamed until her voice gave out, but the agony persisted, growing in intensity until she could bear it no longer. Fully awake and aware, she was still in the same hospital room, but this time the lights were on. Coherent thought eluded her as pain. 

Something hot trickled from her, and the bed warmed under her.

When would it stop?! 

Her body tried to bow itself through the bed, and she never imagined such suffering; neither could she understand how she withstood it. Muscles clenching with enough force to lift her from the bed one moment that only allowed her back to touch the blankets again the next before tensing again while her mind remained unnaturally lucid.

It ended as abruptly as it began, leaving her shaky, sore, and breathing heavily with her heart pounding fit to burst through her chest. The wet bed was not comfortable, but she was just glad it was over. 

***

The bags were empty, and now she could tell that one had been filled with blood, two looked like saline, and the last had an irradiated bluish tint.

She blinked at the monitor as it beeped again. Why now, after all the action? Her eyes blurred as she tried to make sense of the reading, blinking, and blinking again as darkness swept over her, but she wasn't entirely unconscious as the door opened, and someone entered. She was somehow floating above her body in the bed, looking down on the room. 

"So what do you think?" A man asked, and his blond colleague's cruel smile turned wicked as she rubbed Daniella's naked calf almost affectionately. 

"This one will do just fine. She's a fighter, and the seeding took very well. She should be almost perfect when the change is done."

The man glanced at her and nodded, not smiling, dark anger turning his cold, handsome, perfect face stark. 

"This one better make it; this was a shitty batch. Mendelssohn f*cked up with the seeding. A hundred specimens and only twenty made it through the initial change.

"He guaranteed a sixty percent success rate and had control of twenty batches. Twenty years and twenty million dollars invested into his project, and this happens on his first incoming batch." The man hit the bed's rail with his closed fit, and the metal bent under the mild blow.

Was she high, or was this really happening?  How can you have an out-of-body experience and not be dying?

"Dunkirk has Procter Sims, and their first batch only delivered twenty-nine," the woman said, and he slapped her hard. 

"Don't ever mention that piss-ant before me," Fangs slipped from their sockets, and now Daniella was sure she had to be dreaming as he controlled himself. 

The teeth retracted. 

"That's nine more than we have now. What exactly do you aim to tell your master if more of these don't make it to the final phase?" He asked quietly and maliciously. 

The woman had not reacted much to his blow, but his words awakened fear in her eyes. 

"They won't die," she said firmly, and he smirked evilly, something in his gaze telling Daniella that he thought the woman inferior to himself. 

"You better hope not," he said and swept out of the room with the woman following in his wake.

***

Daniella popped back into her body and opened her eyes. What the heck just happened? They had intended to sedate her, but that didn't exactly work out as planned. 

Only twenty of them still lived, including her. One thousand nine hundred more women would end up in that waiting room, and this was some sick experiment. How had she worked out that math in her head without her phone? She didn't even doubt what she had seen or heard.

They were here; his cologne and her perfume lingered. Not to mention that she could still hear their voices, even though they were halfway down the corridor. 

Change? Change how or into what? Those fangs had not been human or the glow of his eyes. And something about his face had changed too, reminding her of movies she watched growing up, even though her mother forbid it. But vampires were not real, and she didn't want to consider anything else. 

And there was no denying that she was not herself. She could read the fine print on the saline bag without her glasses. Sedatives no longer worked on her. And she still heard them discussing medicines and adjustments to her "regimen," even though she had to strain to make out the words. 

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