He’s not paid enough for this. He’s guarding a top-secret facility on the back of beyond, storing who knows what for a government he knows better than to ask questions of when a child shows up.

In the middle of nowhere.

She steps right out of thin air.

She’s blonde, pretty as a picture, like the one he has of a daughter in his back pocket. She glances toward him, blue-green eyes almost glowing in the darkness. She raises an eyebrow at his gun.

His hand shakes. He can’t shoot a child. “Now, get out of here, girl. This is no place for you to be,” he says calmly, as if it is his own little girl where she should never ever be. It’s the middle of a warzone.

The girl laughs at him, eyes glowing white as an unnatural red mist drifts forward from her body.

Self-preservation flares. Panicking, he shoots the gun.

In a moment too fast to follow, too slow to miss, the red becomes another girl just as the first disappears. She’s pale, pale white from crown to foot, naked and dancing as the bullets strike her.

She dances like she’s made of blood.

The bullets hit her and her skin spatters with dark red. Her hair and skin turn slowly brown from the edges—the tips of her hair, the tips of her finger, as the color works inward.

As he stares in horror.

She turns red and is still spinning as the bullets of his companions strike her. She spins and she laughs and she turns red as blood as the very air around her starts to darken into the same color.

She drinks it in and stops spinning.

“Blood,” she whispers. “My name is Blood.”

She reaches out her hand, and he runs.