Aiden counted his thirty-seventh coin when the automatic door to the convenience store made a malfunctioning click. The damp night air rushed in wrapped in the smell of rust, causing the hairs on the back of his neck to suddenly stand up.
'Welcome to Light ....' His greeting caught in his throat.
The man in the long black trench coat was staring at the date display behind the cash register, his pale fingers lingering for a moment on the words 1st November. Aiden noticed that he wore three oddly shaped rings on his left hand-silver bands engraved with inverted crosses that glowed greenish-grey in the cool light.
'Two packs of Camel cigarettes.' The sound was like sandpaper rubbing against glass.
As Aiden turned to retrieve the cigarettes from the top shelf, the cooler suddenly buzzed harshly. He swore his afterglow caught a glimpse of the hem of the man's trench coat glinting with a metallic chill, but turned back only to see the other man playing with a commemorative NBA lighter on the shelf.
'That totals $14.50.' Aiden pointed the scanning gun at the barcode and suddenly noticed the display was pulsing wildly. As the man handed over the twenty-dollar note, he smelled an eerie aroma similar to rotting flesh soaked in pure rosewater.
The entire shop was plunged into darkness the moment the cash register popped.
Aiden's pupils suddenly contracted into vertical lines, which was even more amazing than his night vision from last week when he was locked in a freezer at the warehouse. He clearly saw the corners of the man's mouth tearing down to the base of his ears, exposing fangs that were dripping fluorescent green goo.
'An unawakened pup indeed.' The vampire's vocal cords emitted a high-frequency tremor as glass bottles exploded one after the other on the shelves.
Aiden knocked over the hot dog machine and tumbled backwards, splashing hot oil into the air to form a brief barrier. The soles of his sneakers scraped sparks on the ground, and his nostrils suddenly caught seven different scents of blood - the strongest coming from the three scratches that had somehow appeared on his own right arm.
The vampire transformed into a black mist and weaved through the shelves as Aiden lunged for the fire axe on his nascent instincts. As the sharp claws were about to penetrate his back, the electronic clock on the wall suddenly jumped to 00:00.
As the moonlight pierced the clouds, Aiden heard his bones crunch like taut strings. The swinging axe blade eerily refracted a silver aura, severing the vampire's right arm at the root. Rancid black blood splattered in the Kanto soup pot, and a twisted wolf's head totem emerged from the rising steam.
'The Silver Moon Brotherhood actually marked their prey in advance ...' The vampire limbs turned into bats and fled in all directions, his last voice echoing through the cold storage room, 'Tell your master that Lord Mashsara has awakened.'
The alarm sounded belatedly at that moment. Aiden gasped as he knelt amidst the mess and found a text message from his sister from this morning pressed under the till - 'Brother, the doctor says I need a third blood transfusion.' His trembling fingers flicked across the screen, and a silver-blue droplet of blood swirled across the words 'blood type O'.
Aiden was staring at his reflection in the cooler as the sirens came closer and further away. His irises still had the dark red glow of a lunar eclipse, and the edge of the full moon was streaked with blood in the cloudless night sky outside the window.
The police car's overhead lights tinted the convenience store window a sickly blue, and as Aiden wrapped a bandage around his bleeding right arm, he noticed that the medical gauze was dissolving. The silvery-blue substance surging under the skin looked like living mercury, translating the sound of the police officer's footsteps into patches of light bouncing off his retinas.
'There's a chemical spill at the scene?' The policewoman's sidearm remained trained on Aiden's back, 'Keep both hands visible.'
Aiden's retinas suddenly burned as the forensics officer raised the UV light to scan the blood. The spilled black blood showed up as a spiderweb-like structure under the violet light, and beads of his own blood were eerily coalescing into a string-moon pattern in the cracks of the shelves.
'The boy needs first aid.' The paramedic froze as he lifted the bandage on his arm - three bone-deep scratches were knitting muscle fibres at a rate visible to the naked eye.
The police channel suddenly erupted into a piercing murmur, and everyone simultaneously pressed down on their headsets. Aiden heard some sort of canine low-frequency howl mixed in with the sound of electricity, which made his newborn molars begin to itch. Outside the glass doors, a convoy of twelve black Chevy Suburban's ran over the police line.
The Asian woman in the bulletproof suit flashed her FBI badge, her pearl studs glowing cobalt blue shimmering in the police lights.' Special Case Takeover Procedure Code-22,' she turned her tablet towards the sheriff, the electronic writ on the screen causing everyone's faces to plummet.
Aiden sniffed the scent of silver dust and white oak hidden under the leather seats as he was handcuffed into the modified compartment. The woman ripped open the hem of his shirt and used tweezers to pick up bloodstained shards of glass, 'Kappa-type converting enzyme activity level of 947, your fraternity's new recruit training is becoming more and more perfunctory.'
The overhead lights of the compartment suddenly switched to a moonlight colour spectrum, and Aiden's irises contracted uncontrollably. In the rearview mirror, the woman's shadow was twisting into a two-headed wolf form.' Welcome to the real world.' She tapped the freezer in the middle, 'Now choose: inject the inhibitor and be a normal monster, or drink this and join the full moon hunt at the end of the month.'
The two reagents in the cryobox glowed different colours, the left one azure like arctic ice, the right one scarlet like flowing lava. Aiden's canines pierced his lower lip, and he saw his dripping beads of blood hovering in the air, outlining the outline of his sister's hospital bed.
His phone suddenly vibrated, and his pupils trembled at the new message pushed by the hospital app - his sister's blood test bar clearly showed the RH-null type, a golden blood type with less than 50 cases in the world, and below it was marked with a blinding red warning: the blood sample showed phagocytosis of unknown cells.
Reflective signs of the highway swept past the windows, and at some point Aiden took in the details of the modifications to the vehicles in front and behind the convoy: the on-board radar antennae were bronze casts of Vitruvian figures, and there were miniature holy-salt catapults embedded in the spokes of the tyres.
'You've been spying on my family for a long time.' He gripped the scarlet reagent, the crystals suspended in the liquid blooming into snowflakes as they touched the warmth of his palm.
The woman laughed softly and pressed the window, the fishy air from the Chicago River filling the car. In the distance the lights of the Navy Pier Ferris wheel suddenly went out en masse, the outline of some sort of giant creature looming between the clouds.' It was your sister's special blood that was targeted first, rookie. By the way...' She suddenly whipped out her ceramic dagger to nail the interior of the compartment beside Aiden's ear, a blood-stained hospital wristband hanging from the hilt, 'The doctor who was on duty in the emergency department earlier is now lying in the third freezer in the morgue.'
The moment the seal on the reagent tube ruptured, Aiden heard a glacial cracking rumble down his spine. His shadow was expanding into the form of a werewolf with chains on his back on the car's monitor screen, while in reality his hands remained in human silhouette.
All the windows suddenly lowered their anti-silver coating as the convoy raced into the tunnel under Lake Michigan. The woman turned her tactical tablet towards Aiden, and on the screen was a real-time monitor of her sister's hospital room - the blood bag hanging from the IV stand was boiling, and countless vascular tentacles protruded from the shadows at the bottom of the bed.
'Welcome to the Order of the Silver Moon.' Her manicure scratched across the countdown on the tablet, 'You have 53 minutes to complete your first kill, or watch your sister become the bride of Maskala.'
The tunnel lights suddenly turned blood red as the screen of Aiden's shattered phone lit up with the message that the last text message had failed to send. A moment before he was completely animalistic, he saw what he had unconsciously typed out as a plea for help - it was the ancient Gnostic rune of Lune, meaning 'Blood Moon Pact', scratched out with a wolf's claw.
The moment the conversion van burst out of the underwater tunnel, Aiden's retinas were seared by the red light of the Bitcoin mine. A hive matrix of three hundred thousand graphics cards roared through the abandoned factory, cooling fans churning air laced with wolfsbane pollen.
'Welcome to Darknet Silk Road 4.0,' the Asian woman jabbed a neural link into Aiden's carotid artery, 'Your target for the first kill is calling for your sister's soul NFT at auction.'
A holographic projection unfolded in the centre of the mine, where Blood nobles wearing Venetian masks were bidding on three holy relics in cryptocurrency. Aiden's fangs grew uncontrollably as the auctioneer lifted the black velvet of the third lot - floating in the glass capsule was the translucent spirit of none other than his sister Emily, a glowing datachip embedded in her heart.
'Current bid: 327 bitcoins.' The auctioneer's mechanical prosthetic eye turned to the camera, 'Or the equivalent in virgin blood.'
Aiden's bestial forelimb slammed into the projection, but penetrated Leia's quantum computer terminal. The werewolf scientist in the white coat grabs a string of code from the data stream, 'They're using blockchain technology to bind the souls to the smart contract, a hard grab will only trigger the destruction protocol.'
The mine alarm suddenly goes off as the ventilation ducts crash a swarm of Blood drones. Leia throws in a Tesla coil modified into the shape of a wolf's claw, 'Thirty-seven seconds left on the moonlight charge!'
Aiden saw his reflection split into twelve remnants on the graphics card mirror as he leapt onto the miner's shelf. The first drone sprayed a holy water barrage, and he instinctively swung his claws to draw the Lune rune as the liquid nitrogen in the mining pool suddenly surged into a wall of ice.
'The Etheric address is the weak point!' Leia's hacking programme was breaching the auction firewall, 'Each drone corresponds to a crypto wallet!'
Aiden's pupils reflected the cascading stream of data, and as he pierced the third drone with his wolf claws, he suddenly understood that the throbbing hex codes were actually Cain's cursed psalms. The moment the roof of the mine exploded, real moonlight poured down, and the silver fur on his back stood up in an array of receiving antennae.
'Now!' Leia activated the EMP bomb.
Aiden plugged the Tesla coil into the mining pool, and the entire Bitcoin mine transformed into a giant capacitor. In a leaping arc of electricity, he saw the avatars of each Blood bidder shatter at the quantum level, while his sister's spirit body was being transcoded into packets of data in the dark currents of the deep web.
As the last bolt of electricity hit the auctioneer, the holographic projection switched to the scene of the Blood Wedding. Mashsara's skeletal throne was woven from a myriad of IV tubes, and Emily's spirit body was being injected with some sort of DNA-stranded virus.
'The deed is done.' The ancient Blood's voice overloaded the mines en masse, 'Come to Las Vegas and claim your dowry, little wolf cub.'
As the blast wave toppled the entire mine, Aiden found half a charred chip in the rubble. Leah's augmented reality glasses display a countdown to zero screen - and all the medical instruments suddenly start playing the Wizard of Oz episode 'Over the Rainbow' on the sister's hospital room monitor screen.
'It's an invitation to the Bloods' party.' The Asian woman kicked away the smoking remains of the server, 'They're deliberately leaking the coordinates so that their prey can walk into the slaughterhouse on their own.'
Blue blood oozed from Aiden's clenched clawed heart, the drops actually blossomed into roses made of data on the charred graphics card. As the FBI convoy restarted, the on-board AI suddenly warned in its sister's voice, 'Cain wavelength fluctuations detected at the Nevada border, recommend switching to ghost protocol.'
Crossing the Route 66 boundary marker, Aiden found his shadow beginning to resist the moonlight. In the rear-view mirror, the neon signs of Las Vegas were reorganising their spelling into ancient Hebrew - the place of Mashshara's awakening and the graveyard where the Silver Moon Brotherhood had been all but wiped out thirty years ago.