No, not as if. No. That’s wrong. I came back from a far place, no doubt.

Very goddamned far.

One minute, I was lost inside the darkness, inside my broken head.

Then I was sitting with my back to a wall.

Covered in mud.

Blood everywhere. On my hands, on my clothes, in my hair, in my mouth. I looked over at Ghost, and he was soaked with it, too. I had to look for a long time to assure myself he was breathing. Then he twitched and whined softly, the way he does when he’s dreaming of pain.

I turned and spat my mouth clear and kept spitting until the spit had no lingering traces of pink. My knuckles were torn, and I had aches in places I couldn’t connect with incidents that might have caused damage.

Blood smells like copper and tastes salty. It tastes wrong. I’ve walked through lakes of it since joining up with Church’s goddamned crusade, before enlisting in this endless damned war. Professionally, I was indifferent to the smell and the sight of it. Personally, though?

I’d never enjoyed spilling it, touching it, smelling it, or tasting it.

Until recently.

A shiver chopped its way through me.

I wondered if this was how vampires were born. Not from a bite or a curse but out of some maniacal need to assure oneself of complete domination over the enemy to the point where the blood in their veins is the wine of victory.

Was I becoming that kind of monster?

I was bathed in blood. I knew that I’d swallowed some—there was that nausea in the stomach you get from nosebleeds, when you swallow your own blood against your will. I’d swallowed it … why? I couldn’t remember. Was it an accident of being in physical line with the hydrostatic release of an artery I’d opened with bullet or blade? Or had I gone even deeper into the arms of the Darkness and actually drunk it? Was it some kind of ritual undertaken by my deepest need for revenge—to not only end the lives of my enemies but devour their essence and by doing so tie their damnation to my own?

I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to convince myself that there was still more of me in here than there was that new aspect. It was another round in a fight that’d begun in that basement lab in Croatia.