You know those books you've read or movies you’ve seen about vampires and werewolves? Yeah, they’re all true. Mostly.

See, there’s a whole grab bag of vampire flavors out there, each with their own quirks. Some bite down and it’s lights out forever. Others need just a little scratch to get things rolling. And, oh yeah, same goes for werewolves - or therianthropy, if you’re fancy. Some people even carry these lovely little monster strains like hidden apps, just waiting for the right trigger. It’s like a genetic time bomb that goes, “Surprise! You’re a creature of the night.”

How do I know all this? Well, because I’m one of them. Cue the drum roll.

My name’s Declan Mor, and I’m a vampire. But, hey, I’m the cool kind. I can walk in daylight with nothing more than a slight sensitivity. That’s right - my future’s so bright, I’ve got to wear shades. Add in the fact that I know an angel or two and have a demon buddy, and you might be thinking I’m some kind of supernatural socialite. Don’t judge. The demons aren’t all bad; they just get terrible PR. But that’s another story - a long one.

By day, I’m a freelance investigator. By night… yeah, still an investigator. The kind that gets mixed up in supernatural messes more often than not. I’d like to think of myself as a problem-solver, though let’s be honest - I’m usually just solving my own problems. Trouble finds me like a stray dog finding an open meat truck. Case in point? My latest gig.

I’m currently sitting, okay - hiding - in a warehouse in the middle of the desert, the kind of place halfway between LA and Vegas that doesn’t even show up on Google Maps. My client had hired me to find a missing artifact - some high-stakes, witchy-woo kind of relic. Supposedly, it had the magical ability to open portals to other worlds. You know, just your average MacGuffin item.

Turns out, though, the “artifact” was actually a kid. A girl with the kind of power supernatural baddies would throw elbows to get ahold of. She looked about eight or nine, and just as confused as I was about the whole thing. Naturally, being the dashing hero, I tried to get her out of there. That’s when things got weird.

First, a portal opened smack in the middle of the room, and out crawled… well, I’m not sure there’s a Hallmark card for this one. Imagine oily, tentacled blobs trying their very best to look human, but ending up looking like bad cosplay on a discount budget. Like they were trying their best to fit in with what they had to work with. They failed.

And boy did they stink! Ever had 3-day-old bad sushi? They stank like rotten fish left out in the sun, and their idea of polite conversation was apparently smacking you with an appendage that looked suspiciously like a tentacle but moved like it had opinions of its own.

Great. So here I am, holding off Cthulhu’s second cousins with a girl I’d barely had a chance to meet.

The warehouse was dim, but vampire perks meant I could see just fine - echolocation for the undead. Unfortunately, knowing where the blobs were didn’t help with their lovely aroma. Rotting seaweed meets burned tires - I almost missed the usual Vegas smell of hot garbage.

Ever notice how vampires, werewolves, and all the other creatures of the night fought with all the grace of a blindfolded gorilla? They didn’t bother with technique - it was just brute strength, speed, maybe a bit of fang or claw, and wham, job done. Every vampire flick and superhero movie got it right. Take Superman, for example - sure, he could punch through walls, but the guy had zero form. That’s why Batman would clean his clock in a straight-up fight if he had just a little Kryptonite to even the odds. All that power, zero finesse.

Which is exactly why I trained. Hard. If I was going to be a vampire, I wasn’t about to be just another thug with fangs; I was going to be a ninja. Or at least something close. Shadowy strikes, silent takedowns - the kind of thing that made creatures of the night sleep a little lighter. My teacher, though, didn’t exactly scream “deadly assassin.” He was a 6'2", pot-bellied guy who always looked like he was on the verge of smiling, which was… disarming, to say the least. But he was probably the deadliest fighter I’d ever met. The type you don’t see on TV, not teaching out of some studio in the big city, and definitely not posing for selfies with students. Nope, he was up in the boonies, teaching out of a cabin in the woods, because, as he put it, “the city’s got too many distractions.”

I’d found him online, actually. He fancied himself a writer and had documented his entire martial arts system in a blog that was basically the combat Bible. Apparently, martial arts were just his way of “keeping in shape.” And here’s the kicker - it didn’t matter how much faster or stronger I was; he could wipe the floor with me any day. When I managed to land a kick on him once, he took it as a challenge and proceeded to demonstrate - very thoroughly - that it had been a fluke and would never, ever happen again.

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But I digress. Back to my current predicament: me, bleeding out in the corner of some abandoned warehouse, valiantly trying to protect a kid from a group of angry, eldritch horror wannabes. I was halfway through an escape plan when the world went sideways. The wall - yes, the entire wall - came crashing down on my already battered body. Good thing I was there to take one for the team and keep it from squashing the kid.

Yay, me.

Next thing I knew, there was a whole lot of grunting and screaming going on outside, followed by a sharp, eerie silence. Just as I started wondering if I’d finally died for real this time, an explosion of dust and debris erupted as another section of the warehouse wall collapsed inward. Through the dust, I could just make out a massive, saber-toothed beast bearing down on me, fangs dripping and all. It crouched, ready to pounce - probably thinking I’d make a nice, juicy snack - and then it began to shift, body twisting and shrinking until there was a very attractive young woman standing in front of me, giving me the “Really?” look.

“Geez, Dark, you gotta stop calling me to pull your butt out of the fire. My pack mates would flip if they knew I was saving a bloodsucker on the regular.”

That’d be Charlie. She wasn’t exactly a werewolf - more of a… well, something different. Like me. A shifter with a flair for dramatic entrances. Together, we were basically the universe’s go-to pair for supernatural crisis management.

“Dark?” she called out, her voice echoing across the warehouse. “Declan, where are you?”

I managed a weak grunt, feeling the weight of what had to be half a ton of concrete pinning me to the cold floor.

I must’ve blacked out after that because when I came to, I was being dragged out from under the rubble - by what was left of my pants. Every jerk sent fire racing through my nerves, and just as I started wondering if I’d have any legs left, I sensed a large, cat-shaped blur at the edge of my awareness. My hero.

“Hey, sorry about that,” she muttered, a little sheepish. “Didn’t know you were, uh, under there.”

“Oh, you know, just half my body crushed by bricks,” I groaned, the words barely making it past my cracked lips.

“What’re you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” Charlie asked, giving me that “you’ve done it again” look. That was classic Charlie - or Jinx if you were in the friends' club. Did I mention she’s a shifter, like the kind out of legends? We’re a perfect pair of misfits. I’ll save our origin stories for later; right now, we just need to survive the night in one piece.

“A bunch of my ugly cousins are after me,” I replied, leaning heavily against the cold warehouse wall. “No clue why they’re so annoyed. All I did was interrupt their midnight snack - a lovely group of teenagers who thought a beach bonfire was a great idea. Next thing I know, I’m on the run, hiding out in the middle of nowhere, and these kaiju wannabes decided they didn’t like the cut of my jib.” I shrugged, or at least attempted a shrug. My shoulder gave me immediate feedback in the form of white-hot pain. “And, y’know, I was actually in the middle of a job when they showed up. But hey, fate’s got a twisted sense of humor.”

See, we don’t really know what we are - beyond, you know, freaks of nature. Besides being a vampire and a shifter, we’re… different. Unique. Special, maybe. For lack of a better term, we’re monster hunters. It’s sort of our thing. Vampires, wraiths, rogue necromancers - if it’s something that goes bump in the night, we handle it. We even put up a website. Who you gonna call? Us. Sure, we don’t have a catchy theme song yet, but I’m working on it.

Of course, like any self-respecting vampire, I’ve got to eat. Or, well, drink, technically. The thing is, regular human blood doesn’t really do it for me. It’s like they’re missing some key nutrient a growing vampire needs - kind of like most of the food in the U.S. I blame pollution and climate change. Anyway, I can still eat regular food, which is lucky. I love a good tofu salad - there’s this vegan joint off La Brea that’s incredible. Not that I’m a vegan or anything. Clearly. But there’s something about fresh veggies that beats cooked cow, hands down.

So, why now? Why is all this insanity happening to me now?

It’s a straightforward answer - but simple? Not a chance.

There’s something coming. A darkness of unimaginable horror, straight out of the abyss. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill creepy demon. No, this thing’s one of the primordial six - an elder god. I’m talking ancient, legendary, the kind whispered about by folks who knew better than to say its name out loud. Humanity has had legends about this thing for as long as we’ve had fire. They call it The Coming, the time when the dark ones rise to consume our world.

The signs are there if you know where to look. Or, in my case, if you happen to get blinded by a maniac vampire, which gives you a whole new perspective on the universe. I don’t just see the world differently now - I see the signs, read the omens. And what they’re telling me? It’s bad. Worse than bad.

Every case I take, every mystery I solve, it’s all leading to something big. Something I’d rather not see. The closer I get, the more I wish I’d never been put on this path in the first place. I didn’t ask for this gig, but if there’s any chance to stop it, it’s on me to try.

I don’t know when this thing is coming, but I can feel it. It’s close. And I have a sinking feeling that we’re not ready.

I winced as I shifted, the pain in my ribs and shoulder reminding me that I was due for a long session of post-misadventure recuperation if we ever made it out of this warehouse alive. Charlie glanced at me, eyebrow raised, probably waiting for an explanation. But my mind drifted back - before the monsters, before the kid, and before we were running for our lives in the middle of nowhere.