The artifact was colder than anything had a right to be in the humid Kyoto lab. My fingertips stuck to it for half a heartbeat before I forced them to move again.
The headlamp carved a white cone across the stone. Ancient kanji spiraled inward, tightening toward a center that drank the light instead of bouncing it back.
"Ryan, call it a night," Dr. Tanaka called from the vault doorway. "It's past midnight."
I didn't answer. My index finger was already tracing the innermost ring.
The stone pulsed.
One hard, deliberate beat against my palm. Cold flipped to furnace-hot. The kanji lit up a sick, radioactive green.
"Tanaka, you seeing—"
The world turned inside out.
Floor vanished. Gravity flipped. My stomach tried to crawl out through my throat as color and darkness smeared together. Sterile lab air became wet rot and pine needles.
I hit dirt.
Face-first.
Grass—real, wild grass—scraped my cheek. I came up spitting soil, lungs on fire.
The vault was gone. Tanaka was gone. The artifact was gone.
I knelt in a clearing ringed by trees so thick three men couldn't link arms around them. Moonlight leaked through the canopy in broken silver shards. The air tasted too clean, too sharp—no trace of city, no exhaust, no light pollution.
Phone: no bars, no GPS. Time still 12:47 a.m.
"Hello?" My voice cracked like a kid's.
Nothing answered. Not even insects.
Snap.
A branch behind me.
I spun.
Something shuffled out of the dark. Not human. Not animal.
It stepped into moonlight.
Skin hung in gray rags off bone. One eye socket empty, the other a clouded marble fixed on me. Jaw unhinged, black tongue lolling over splintered teeth.
I backed up a step. "No."
It lunged.
Too fast for something that dead.
I threw myself sideways. Dead fingers raked my jacket, ice bleeding through the fabric.
I ran.
Branches whipped my face. Roots clawed at my boots. Behind me the thing kept coming—shuffling one second, sprinting the next, like a broken film reel.
I burst through brush and skidded to the edge of a ravine. Caught a trunk just before I pitched over.
It stepped out of the trees. Head cocked at a angle no spine should allow. Chest cavity torn open, ribs gleaming through dry jerky flesh.
Still moving.
I had nowhere left.
Back against bark, ravine at my heels. The thing raised one clawed hand, wet chuckle bubbling in its throat.
Then my stomach cramped.
Not fear. Not hunger.
Something hotter. Deeper.
A furnace ignited behind my ribs. Heat flooded my veins like I'd swallowed molten metal.
My vision sharpened.
I looked at the creature and—for one nauseating heartbeat—didn't see a corpse.
I saw meat.
The thought made me gag even as my mouth flooded with saliva.
It hesitated, head tilting the other way, confused.
The hunger screamed.
My hands shook. Under the skin of my forearm, faint green light pulsed once, matching the artifact's glow.
The thing reached for my throat.
I heard myself think, clear as a bell:
Eat it.
And something inside me answered:
Yes.