Title: Fury Moon
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: 86
Characters: Focused on Kosame, but also features the rest of the ensemble cast.
Setting: The canon events reframed in a supernatural AU.
Rating: PG.
Length: 5,561 words.
Summary: In the wilderness at the edge of Death Valley, Kosame has an encounter that changes everything.
Notes: Also written for the “Weird West” prompt in the 2021 spook_me ficathon, as well as the prompts of “Werewolves” at genprompt_bingo, and “Moonstruck” at smallfandomflsh.
The title of this story is a shortening of the name of one of Kosame’s sword skills, “Fury Eternal Wary Moon”.



By night, the wilderness of the American West was more dark and empty than any other place Kosame had ever seen.

After a quiet conversation with Appare, the samurai found it difficult to get back to sleep. A faint residue of distress still lingered from his nightmare, and the unexpected chill of the night bordered on unpleasant. He tried counting the stars that dusted the endless sky, but that did nothing to lull him. For a long time he could only lie awake, feeling vaguely small and vulnerable in the wilds of such a vast land, missing Fumi and his father.

…Until sometime in the deepest depths of the night, when he had to concede that the call of nature was creeping in to make him more uncomfortable than anything else.

Reluctantly he shuffled to his feet. He glanced to his swords, carefully set aside close at hand; but he and his fellow racers were unquestionably the only human beings within miles. Hototo had even confirmed there were none of the native wild dogs called coyote in the vicinity. With that assurance of safety, Kosame let his swords lie, and moved off into the trees to do his business.

Although Xialian was surely asleep, the very presence of a woman filled the modest young man with self-consciousness, compelling him to put much more distance than necessary between the camp and his privy. He walked until he was far into the darkness beneath the trees, able to see only a distant hazy glow of firelight through the undergrowth.

When something snarled behind him, he knew that straying so far and leaving his swords behind had both been terrible mistakes.

Kosame barely had time to turn, to raise his arms defensively, before the blacker shadow that detached itself from the darkness was on top of him. He hit the ground on his back, kicking and shoving against the heavy weight that had him pinned. It growled again, and he felt a sudden powerful pressure clamp down on his left arm above the wrist, followed by a pull that seemed determined to wrench his arm from its socket.

He must have cried out, but he never heard his own voice.

There were shouts from the camp, footsteps crashing through the underbrush. Kosame’s arm was suddenly released as the creature turned and melted back into the night. Lantern light flashed across his eyes, illuminating a glimpse of blond hair, and a rifle shot exploded like a cannon from uncomfortably close beside him; Al had fired his gun at the retreating beast.

Then Appare was there, pulling Kosame to his feet with surprising strength for such a rail of a young man. Helping him stumble back to the warm safety of the circle of firelight. Looking into his face and talking at him with an urgent expression, although the samurai couldn’t quite hear the words through the pounding of blood in his ears.

“Are you okay?” penetrated at last through the fog.

Behind Appare, Xialian and Hototo were now crowding around, while Al emerged from the brush and set the rifle aside with a grim shake of his head.

Kosame blinked, drew a breath, and realized dully that he felt a throb in his left forearm. He looked down to see ugly ragged holes in his skin, and rust-red streaks that had spilled from them—smearing on his fingers and dripping a trail all the way from the woods to the camp.

The red spattered across green leaves brought memories welling up in a rush, and Kosame reeled as the colors turned black in his vision.

At least he had no more worries about getting back to sleep that night.



The next dream Kosame had was a strange one. The dark forest again, but this time from a different and distorted perspective. Hearing every slight rustle of a leaf, smelling the earth and the vegetation and even the small animals that fled into the night before him. Following the trail of one such scent, salivating in anticipation as he drew close enough to taste the very fear of his prey…

He started awake to find the first glimmer of gray light softening the blackness beyond the camp.

“Good, you’re finally awake.” Appare’s haphazard countenance suddenly loomed over him in the firelight, peering into his face as if he was a faulty engine part. “Hurry and get up. It’s almost time to go.”

With that the inventor turned matter-of-factly to breaking camp, leaving Kosame to struggle with a groggy befuddlement.

Had he only dreamed the entire attack last night, after all? …No, the bandage wrapped around his arm was evidence that it had really happened. He sat up and ran his fingers over the gauze, flexing the muscles in his forearm slightly, only to note with surprise that there was almost no pain. Perhaps the wound had not been so bad as he thought… but the memory alone was enough to repel him from any ideas of unwrapping it to take another look.

“That was a nasty bite you got,” Appare remarked with uncanny timing, although he did not turn from the supply bundle he was repacking. “Luckily it missed any arteries, and Xialian cleaned it with some antiseptic wild herbs Hototo gave her, so we shouldn’t have to worry about infection. Just try to rest it, and it oughta be fine until we get to the next town. …Al stayed on guard the rest of the night, but the animal never showed up again.”

Xialian’s voice rang clearly across the camp from somewhere over by her vehicle. “Oh, stop acting so casual, Appare. You nearly had a panic attack when Kosame collapsed—and you’ve been sitting there awake all night at his side yourself.” She came around the side of the Lotus and approached Kosame, studying him with gentle concern. “Seriously, you gave us all a scare. Are you really alright?”

“I… think so?” he murmured, a part of his mind trying hazily to process the idea that Appare been concerned about him. His fingertips anxiously rubbed the bandage once more as he forced a wan smile. “This really doesn’t even hurt, so I suppose it was more of a shock than anything. The animal must have been just as startled as I was.”

The girl frowned. “You should still have it looked at when we get to Ely. Animal bites are nothing to take lightly.”

Murmuring a halfhearted agreement, Kosame rose gingerly and went in search of water to soothe his dry throat. …To leave him so parched and rasping, he really must have let out a terrible scream the night before.

Along the way he passed Al, who was coming up from the water’s edge with freshly filled canteens. The Frenchman’s smile of relief at seeing him faded into an unsettlingly amused smirk.

“A samurai who faints at the sight of blood?” he teased slyly. “I never would have thought such a thing could be.”

Kosame felt an uncharacteristic flare of temper, but he quickly restrained it, looking away from Al somewhat irritably. “I was surprised, that’s all.”

“Do not worry, my friend. I am sure your secret is quite safe with all of us,” Al said glibly, and continued on his way—leaving Kosame to stand scowling after him, feeling quietly rankled and shaken.



The group arrived in Ely just in time to confront the architect of their detour—and to learn that he was not in fact Gil the Butcher, but that he and his mouthpiece were really just a pair of far less famous outlaws. After gleefully sabotaging the departure of these “Bad Brothers”, Appare threw himself into repairing the car, which left Kosame idle for the rest of the afternoon.

His first act was to eat a hefty lunch at a local café. Even granting that the breakfast before their predawn departure had been rather hasty and meager, the samurai felt inordinately voracious. Surely though, it helped his appetite that the café’s food seemed to be the richest and most flavorful he had ever tasted… especially the meat. By the time he was finished, the bare bones of two ribeye steaks were the only remaining testament to his feast.

Finally sated, he bought two more bagged lunches for his teammates and wandered back toward the racers’ staging area. Appare wolfed down the offered food without thanks, as usual; Hototo was more appreciative, but ate almost as quickly. Within a few minutes Appare was absorbed in his work on the car yet again, with Hototo’s assistance.

Heaving a rueful sigh, Kosame retreated to sit under an inviting shade tree a stone’s throw away. He wasn’t needed now. The best help he could have offered was to hand up whatever tools Appare asked for, and Hototo was already quite happily serving that role. …It was fascinating how a boy raised in a culture without machines had taken so eagerly to watching and learning from Appare’s engineering.

Still, for the moment, it made Kosame feel like quite the fifth wheel.

Useless. That was what he always seemed to be, in the moments when it counted. He couldn’t help Appare fix the machine, or draw the sword he had trained all his life to wield—or even stay conscious after getting a flesh wound from some errant wild animal. Despite his protestations about being a leader, he was hardly doing anything more than being pulled by the others like a dead weight. He’d contributed nothing that they couldn’t have done without him, and with his injury, he only became one more thing to worry about.

His gaze slid bitterly toward the bandage on his arm, followed by his fingers.

As little as it hurt, it couldn’t be the savage tearing wound he thought he had glimpsed in the firelight. Surely nothing worth nursing along so delicately, causing his friends to fuss over him further.

With bated breath he unwrapped the gauze, exposing layers progressively more stained with scarlet—until the last one fell away to reveal nothing more than a faint red crescent of healing flesh.

Kosame’s heart skipped a beat as he ran his fingers over the mark. This was not what a merely hours-old wound should look like. His strong and youthful body had always healed well from everyday cuts and scrapes, but this…

He looked down at the bandage with its soaked-through blotches of red, and his insides squirmed. There was no mistaking the blood. The look of it—or the smell of it.

Blood…

The samurai gasped and curled into himself, breathing hard as his heart began to race. On the surface this was yet another of his familiar and hated panic attacks, struggling against black tendrils of fear that slithered over him and tried to drag him down into the abyss of his memories, but at the same time…

There were red tendrils now too, and they were the smell of the blood, sharper than it had any right to be. Where the black paralyzed his body, the red crawled into his brain and made him want to run, to lash out, to do… something that brain and body could not quite reconcile between them. The conflict within his being was almost physically painful.

It was decided at last, at least to some degree, in the red tendrils’ favor—as Kosame jerked to his feet, his right hand clawing for the sword at his side. Its blade was an inch out of the scabbard before he could wrestle the fight-or-flight feelings down, forcing himself to be still.

Breathe.

Kosame drew a slow breath. And then another. He smelled the air, the fresh untainted green of the tree and the grass around him; he almost felt as if he could smell the very sunlight. His senses were alive and brimming, capturing the details of his surroundings with a clarity he couldn’t remember experiencing before. No doubt it was an effect of his nerves being so on edge.

Somehow though, the smell of green was… calming. He inhaled it deeply, feeling his rigid muscles begin to relax in spite of himself.

It’s okay.

There was nothing here to be so mystified about. The wound had bled inordinately, but it simply wasn’t as bad as it had looked the night before, and it was healing quickly—and that was a good thing. He was perfectly well, and he could start to apply himself to doing better for his friends.

Starting with overcoming the fear of drawing his sword.

Kosame practiced his swordsmanship for the remainder of the layover in Ely. The moves were as familiar as breathing; but for the first time, he let himself imagine a human foe in the path of his blades. With each slash and thrust, the black tendrils of memory clung and slowed him, but he fought them even as he was fighting phantom enemies. The mental and physical effort was tremendous… but gradually, the grip of the black tendrils grew weaker, and his swords swung faster.

He knew this was still a far cry from truly facing a flesh-and-blood opponent, but at least it was a start.



A day later, Kosame stood on a dusty street in a near-deserted ruin of a town, facing a gang of Gil’s Snakes who had murdered several racers and now held his friends at gunpoint.

He tried to remain calm, to be the voice of reason, even as something new and unfamiliar ignited inside him. The black tendrils were there as always, dragging at his limbs and whispering of his weakness, but they were withering in the heat of the alien feeling that burned like a fire in his chest.

That feeling was rage. He was not shaking with fear, but with fury at those who dared to threaten the people he cared about… and when the melee broke and he saw his friends fall, the rage consumed everything he had ever known to be himself.

Kosame moved like an animal, his blades flashing in the golden sunset light. His eyes hardly even noticed the blood he spilled, but the smell of it filled his brain; and the red tendrils fed on it, almost seeming to make him stronger in turn. For a few moments there was no fear, no pity, but only the desire to tear those who had earned his wrath to pieces—with his swords only because he could not do it with his bare hands.

When it was over, and the haze finally cleared, he stood panting in the midst of a circle of dead bodies.

I did this…

A part of him—the old Kosame—felt an urge to drop his swords and be violently sick. Instead he only closed his eyes, breathed again the scent of blood, and quietly slid the blades back into their scabbards.

He looked up at his friends, who had regrouped and drawn back against the wall of the saloon. They were staring at him… and if only for a moment, he saw fear in their eyes.

The skill to deal death had always been there. They’d seen glimpses and hints enough to know that. However, the will to unleash that skill so savagely was something they had never expected of him.

It was Appare who finally broke the silence, striding forward with a glib remark about Kosame being late. Of course. For him, the necessity of killing the hostile parties to protect allies would only be logical, after all. His example eased the tension, or at least forced the others to pretend that it had, and they approached Kosame to offer thanks for saving their lives.

Even so, he knew nothing was ever going to be the same after that.



When Kosame was shot by the man who proved to be the true Gil the Butcher, every doctor in the hospital said he should have died.

He almost did, true enough. His friends spent an anxious night’s vigil, waiting for word of him as he lay unconscious; but he did wake up. And he knew that under the bandages on his torso, the stitched-up hole in his gut was healing faster than anyone could have dreamed.

Kosame didn’t know what was happening to him.

Perhaps that should have frightened him: inviting the banished black tendrils to crawl back, to tie him down to that hospital bed until the doctors could discover what was wrong with him. However, he simply had no time for fear now. Sofia was in Gil’s clutches—and she had to be saved.

Before the doctors could notice or question his swift recovery, Kosame took leave of the hospital without permission, and found his friends as they plotted a mission to rescue Sofia. The red tendrils were swarming around the burning ache of his wound, hungering for the retribution his old self had always preached against.

Hungering for blood… and this time, only Gil’s would do.



The raid on Gil’s ghost-town lair was carried out in darkness, just after sunset. A multi-pronged running firefight led the racers at last to the ruined church where Gil was holed up—curled around Sofia like a serpent where she was tied to a support column. At the moment they burst in, his mouth was poised over her pale throat, baring long white fangs like an animal.

At the intrusion of her would-be rescuers, he looked up slowly, with inhuman eyes that glowed a burning scarlet.

“You’re interrupting my dinner…”

In a blink he was across the room to meet them head-on. Even Kosame, with his senses running hotter than he once could ever have imagined, found it almost impossible to follow the outlaw’s movements.

Almost, but not quite—as Kosame’s sword met Gil’s pistol with a clang, sending it clattering dully across the floor.

With Gil disarmed, the others tried to rush him as a group. It was a mistake; he dodged their strikes with that lightning speed, and his monstrous strength easily hurled back each one who got within range. Hovering at the fringe of the brawl, Kosame hissed in frustration as the tangle of bodies prevented him from making another lunge himself.

…Until Appare tried to fire one of his nets. Gil merely seized it, using it to pull the inventor closer, and a savage fist to the gut sent Appare reeling backward.

Before his best friend had even hit the floor, Kosame was beside Gil, his speed somehow almost a match for that monster. One of the samurai’s blades slid between Gil’s ribs, while the other drove through his chest, not an inch from where his heart should have been.

Yet Gil did not fall.

The impaled outlaw recoiled by several paces, his manic fanged smile disappearing for the first time since the racers entered. Breathing hard, he grasped the handles of the swords and pulled them out of his body, to toss them away like mere toys. His head slowly tilted to one side, studying Kosame with a new fascination, just as a bright shaft of light spilled across the floor from the broken stained-glass windows.

And as the light of the rising moon fell over Kosame, something broke inside of him.

Sudden pain flared within the depths of his body, forcing a choked gasp from his lungs. He was dimly aware of his comrades closing around him, calling his name, perhaps believing his stitches had burst—but this pain was not from the healing wound. It was the red tendrils, igniting at last into a conflagration that filled his entire being.

He uttered a snarl as his body arched violently of its own volition, bones and joints cracking almost as sharply as gunshots. Falling forward into a crouch that was nothing natural to human anatomy, he saw his hands braced beneath him; he saw his fingers twisting and lengthening, his nails curving into impossibly sharp talons that dug furrows in the floorboards.

Over the frightened exclamations of Kosame’s friends, Gil’s incredulous laughter rang through the defiled sanctuary.

“You brought a werewolf to the party…”

Kosame only half-heard the unfamiliar English word. His awareness was compressing into nothing but pain and blind fury, even as his body bulked with new muscles that added multiple inches to every measurement. His skin burned where dark wiry hair erupted in spreading patches, and his jaws began to stretch around a mouthful of sharpening teeth that made Gil’s own fangs look miniscule.

“…If I’d only known, I would have used a silver bullet to put you down when I had the chance.”

Gil stepped forward, and the last thing Kosame knew was hurling himself at the outlaw monster: maddened not only by a primal agony, but by a vengeful rage that carried with it one final trace of almost-human will.

Kill… Kill to save my friends…

To defend my pack.



“Kosame, please wake up!”

The voice penetrated distantly through a thick blanket of numbness in his brain. Knowing instinctively that to emerge from this dark warm place meant facing something terrible, he tried to retreat into its depths of ignorant bliss; but then a hand was frantically shaking his shoulder, dragging him unwillingly back to the world.

With a groan of protest, Kosame opened his eyes to an offensively bright morning light. The first thing he saw was Appare’s china-doll face leaning over him—this time filled with painfully open anxiousness.

And speaking of pain…

Kosame hurt all over. It felt as if every training session in his life had caught up with his muscles all at once. On top of that, he had an inferno of a headache. Even his teeth ached dully, and there was a taste of rust in his mouth.

…No. Not rust at all.

As disjointed memories flooded his mind in a rush, he jerked halfway up from where he lay—only to be stilled by Appare’s surprisingly firm hand on his chest. “Easy, Kosame!”

Tremors slid through the samurai’s nerves as he stared into the blackness of his recollections. The few fragments that came after the church were more sensation than memory: the chill of night, branches tearing at his limbs as he ran, the scent of darkness he had followed until the thing he chased finally turned and fought again.

Pain. Rage. Bloodlust.

Impulsively he looked down at his hands. Although streaked with dirt and dried blood, they were once more his own, and not the brutal claws of whatever monster he had become the night before… but the difference he’d felt growing in him since that night in Death Valley was even stronger now, and he knew that wasn’t going away. New sensitivity to smells and sounds and movements; new instincts, new urges to respond to those stimuli, all jittering restlessly underneath his consciousness. Even if he looked like himself again, he still felt more animal than human.

The red tendrils had become fully a part of him, woven inextricably throughout his body—and even his mind.

Drawing a breath that was all too rich with information about his surroundings, he looked beyond himself. They were outdoors in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, a place where the flat terrain of scrub brush met the fringes of a woodland. Xialian, Hototo, and Al were gathered a few steps behind Appare, looking on anxiously… but where were Sofia and Seth and the two pairs of outlaws who had joined the battle against Gil?

The thought that he might have hurt any of them made him fling himself upright, despite Appare’s halfhearted effort to quiet him. “Where are the others?”

“Just calm down. Everyone’s okay. Seth and Chase got a little banged up, so Tristan took them back to Denver to see a doctor. Al sent Sofia with them too. Dylan and TJ… They’re out looking for Gil.” Appare’s expression darkened. “We know you must have fought with him again, after you chased him out of the church. Nothing human could’ve survived losing as much blood as we found—but they’re certain he did. And after what we saw last night… I believe them.”

“I don’t remember. Only terrible flashes… like a nightmare.” Kosame squeezed his eyes shut. “What’s happened to me?”

“Something I’ve only read about in Western stories. In Europe and here in America, there are myths about people who turn into wolves, especially when the moon is full—like it was last night. They call these creatures werewolves.” Appare exhaled a heavy breath. “These things aren’t supposed to be real… but now it’s obvious the animal that attacked you the other night was a werewolf. And because you were bitten by it…”

“I became one too,” Kosame breathed, feeling a cold wind blow through him that had nothing to do with the morning chill.

“…Yes.” The inventor shook his head with abrupt firmness, his flyaway mop of red hair falling into his eyes. “But no matter how fantastic it is, I can’t believe there’s anything supernatural about something so real. There has to be a scientific explanation. Being transmitted by a bite that way, it must be caused by some kind of virus, or…”

“In my country, it is said to be a curse,” Al observed darkly from behind Appare. “We call them rougarou… but as Appare says, they are thought to be only a fairytale.”

Hototo squirmed uneasily, and drew a deep breath.

“They’re more than just a story to my people. Our name for them is limmikin… and a small group of them lived among us in my village. We helped them, and kept them hidden from other tribes that would have killed them.”

Before anyone could properly respond to that bombshell of a statement, Dylan’s voice broke into the conversation. The outlaw came striding out of the woods, with TJ following more leisurely in his wake.

“An’ that right there’s your reason why Gil had his men destroy your village. Top of everything else, he’s been out to kill every werewolf he can find for a long time—and he doesn’t care who’s between him and them. Even monsters can’t kill each other without the right weapons, but bein’ so hard to die just means their fights over territory can go on for hundreds of years.”

Hototo’s eyes brimmed at the revelation of why his father and his home had been lost. Xialian murmured something soothing, gently rubbing his back to comfort him.

“But what is Gil?” Kosame asked, feeling bewildered and lost in a new reality where monsters walked among men. “He’s not… like me?”

“Nah, he’s a different kinda beast. A vampire: a dead’un that gets itself back up after it’s been buried, an’ stays this side of the grave by drinkin’ the blood of livin’ things.” Dylan scowled. “Gil likes ’em young ’n’ tender. If we hadn’t broke in on him the moment we did, he woulda drained Sofia dry… an’ before she died, odds are he woulda given her his own blood in turn to make her rise again like him.”

Al’s already fair face turned ashen pale, and he swore vehemently in French.

“How do you know so much about all this?” Xialian demanded of Dylan, crossing her arms over her chest. “What does an outlaw like you have to do with werewolves and vampires?”

Dylan turned to the girl with a guarded glance; but it was TJ who answered her, giving vent to a wry-sounding snort.

“Ain’t you guessed by now? Gil was one a’ the unbeatable Thousand-Seven… and so was we.”

Appare’s breath caught. The sound was small, but coming from the normally dispassionate young man of science, the shock it expressed was profound.

“You’re his kind,” he whispered. “You’re vampires too.”

“We ain’t all like him,” Dylan said quickly. “I may be an outlaw, ’cause there ain’t exactly a place for things like me in polite society—but one thing I don’t kill for is blood. It’s only cattle I get my feedin’ from. An’ while TJ here may be annoying as all hell, he plays by the same rules, I’ll give him that.”

His expression darkened. “Long time ago, lotta monsters thought just like Gil. Thought bein’ more powerful than humans gave ’em a right to take what they wanted… but the more humanity’s made machines, the more that power’s evened out. By this point, the world’s got so crowded that most of us just wanna keep what we are on the downlow, an’ get by how we can.” A small shrug. “Whatever it’s worth, I’d say that’s what the werewolf that bit Kosame was tryin’ to do, too. Livin’ out there alone on the edge of Death Valley means it was lookin’ not to get anyone hurt—but when you were unlucky enough to go bargin’ into its home, you scared it as much as it scared you.”

“I thought so even when I believed it was only an animal,” Kosame said quietly. “I can’t blame it for obeying its instincts… because now I feel how powerful those instincts are myself.”

There was a brief, somber silence before Al glanced back at the two vampire outlaws, his eyes dark. “In any case, you did not find Gil.”

“Didn’t really expect to. With an angry werewolf on his tail, an’ no silver bullets in hand, there was nothin’ he could really do for now ’cept get outta Dodge.” Dylan eyed the stains of dried blood on Kosame’s torn and filthy clothes. “By the looks of it, least you gave him a damn good goin’-over when you caught up with him. I doubt he’ll wanna tangle with you again too soon. But he’s not gonna forget the way you showed him up and spoiled his fun, neither… and one a’ these days, you can bet he’ll be lookin’ for you.”

If it was possible, Kosame’s heart sank even lower.

“I can’t go back to Japan like this,” he realized brokenly, closing his eyes. “If it’s true that the full moon will change me into a monster again, I can’t put Fumi and my father in danger from myself… much less from Gil’s vengeance.”

A hand clutched his shoulder, gripping tightly. He opened his eyes to see Appare gazing at him intently.

“Listen to me, Kosame. We’re changing our plan. When we win this race, I’m using my share of the money to build a laboratory—and then I’ll study your condition until I find a way to cure it. No matter what it takes, I’m going to make you normal again, so you can go home to your family.”

“But you’re not a doctor,” pointed out the ever-practical Hototo.

“I can learn biology, the same way I learned engineering.” Appare’s eyes sparkled with the rare intensity that made Kosame believe he truly could do anything. “It’s my fault Kosame ended up here and went through all this in the first place. …I have to be the one to fix it.”

“You don’t,” Kosame said softly. “We’ve shared this journey, Appare. It isn’t your fault… but if it’s really in your heart to try, I’ll follow you.” He hesitated abruptly, glancing up at Dylan and TJ. “That is, if there’s some way to keep him safe from me when… when it happens again.”

“A cage with silver-coated bars’ll hold you on the full moon,” Dylan answered. “You could even manage by spendin’ the night in an empty well, or some other hole dug deep enough. That’s more’n likely how the kid’s people handled the doggos they had with ’em. As for the rest of the time, it takes some doin’ at first… but you can learn to control the change.” He considered briefly. “Tell you what. You idiots do win the race over me, I’ll stick around long enough to teach you what I know about your kind—and how to protect your pals from my kind too. Have we got a wager?”

“It’s a deal,” Kosame nodded, managing the merest trace of an appreciative smile. “Thank you, Dylan.”

“Y’all goin’ soft on a doggo now,” TJ chided his fellow vampire, but his tone of voice was entirely good-natured.

Dylan scowled. “Man deserves it just for takin’ Gil down a peg. That damn lunatic’s done more to risk exposin’ all our kind than any other one of us on the planet.”

“Then it’s settled,” Xialian declared fiercely. “We keep going. All of us—because if we don’t, Gil still wins.”

Al gave a sharp nod. “He will not take my ambitions from me, any more than he was able to take Sofia.”

“You already know what the stakes are for me,” said Appare, rising from Kosame’s side.

After a moment’s hesitation, the disheveled samurai gingerly sorted out his aching muscles, and rose to stand as well.

“I’m with you,” he agreed. “I’ll survive. I’ll learn to live as what I’ve become, without hurting anyone… and when Gil comes to find me, I’ll be ready for him.”

“We’ll be ready for him,” Appare corrected, with a pained but startlingly warm smile at his friend. “If what Dylan said is true, and machines can level the playing field between humans and monsters—then he picked the wrong team to mess with. And someday, we’re going to make him regret it.”

In that moment, surrounded by the resolve of his friends, Kosame had no more doubt that they would.

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2021 Jordanna Morgan