Story:

But—

In the memory fragments of Bill Ebonhart—the mortal man whose body and legacy he had somehow inherited—there was a girl. A girl called "Peach," with this same face, these same eyes, this same stubborn fire.

A girl who had carried an important role in Bill's life—one of its handful of true, weight-bearing threads. The memory was not his, and yet it sat inside him, warm and persistent, an ember that refused to die in a corpse.

Maybe it was that ember's influence. Maybe it was nothing more than a collector's whim dressed as sentiment. But Vampire Lord Bel looked at the helpless miko's face, and decided—the way he decided everything, absolutely and without appeal—not to kill this one.

She would be kept.

She would be turned. Made his vampire spawn—a permanent flower slave, bound to his will by the oldest contract his blood knew, serving him in his eternal empire for as long as the stars lasted.

Her fire, preserved forever. Her blade, turned in his hand forever. A trophy that the shrine's own slayer, remade as his creature, would outlive the shrine itself by hundred years.

The miko's eyes widened—understanding arriving one horrified heartbeat before the act.

"Bel!... no—NO—"

Bel opened his mouth.

And it was not a man's mouth any longer. The jaw unhinged wide, wider, ancient and wrong, and from it descended the fangs of the first vampire—long, curved, gleaming like polished obsidian, sharp enough to part soul from body, ready to make the contract.

Above the broken shrine, under a drowned red sky, the Vampire Lord's face descended toward the exposed throat of Yamato Shrine's last hope— —and his fangs plunged down.