Bergen, Norway, 1349

Kjell watched the stranger fall to ash, watched his clothes crumple empty to the ground, and he understood nothing. None of this was real. Everything—the stranger, his mother’s death, the pain in his wrist—was but a fever dream, a delirium. That was the only explanation. He tried to move, to rise, but he was weak and weighted by despair.

The pain in his gut bloomed, a dark flower, and spread like a poison to his limbs, his head. He writhed and cried out for hours upon hours.

It was the smell that woke him, the smell of death, like nothing he had ever experienced. The smell, the sounds, the feeling of his clothing on his body, all familiar yet not. His wrist no longer pained him. He examined it to find no wound.

He must have slept and in that sleep, he must have dreamed the stranger, his mother’s death, even the sunrise.

The day had passed. It was night now, and the room was cold. The fire had long since gone out. But the cold was merely a fact, not a discomfort. His teeth did not chatter; his limbs did not tremble. He raised his hand and stared at his fingers, feeling as if he had never seen them before. The small hairs on his forearm were a wonder, the shape of his nails inexplicably fascinating, the sinew and muscle beneath his skin a symphony of movement. It took some time for him to remember to think of anything else.

He rolled to his side and pushed up to a sitting position. His family was all around him, but they were gone. Dead. His father, his sisters, his brother, his—

His mother lay where the stranger had left her, her throat torn open.

No dream. It was real. The stranger had been real.

Kjell’s heart broke, shattered, and he yelled and railed even as he knew it wouldn’t bring her back.

He knew not how long he remained in that room. He brushed his sisters’ hair. He hugged his brother’s lifeless body in his arms. He wept tears of blood. The sun rose again and he hissed at the agony it caused, though little enough filtered through the animal skins that covered the windows. He crawled to his father’s bed and yanked off the blanket and spent the day hiding beneath it while the sun found small ways to poke through and burn him.

It had burned the stranger to ash.

He would be wary of the sun.

Then it was night once more, cool soothing night and he was hungry, a strange hunger that could not be satisfied by food. In fact, the pickled fish and cheese and bread he tried to consume made him sick. And still, the hunger persisted, gnawing at him. It was not merely a growl or a twist in his belly. The hunger consumed him, lacing every breath, every movement of his limbs. He felt hollow, anxious, his skin too tight, his bones aching and empty.

He set fire to his childhood home, burning the bodies of his family, his heart heavy. The smell of smoke, the heat of the flames, they were as they had always been and yet they were new and foreign. Everything was different. Everything was familiar but not, as if he had never before smelled fire, never before watched tongues of fire dance and writhe. The fire burned down to ash and as he sensed the coming dawn clawing at his skin, he wrapped himself in furs and tunneled under the ash to wait out the sun.

He walked that night. In the morning, he felt dawn’s approach, felt it on his skin and in his soul, an itch that grew into a burning sting that grew into a blazing pain. And that with only the first hint dusting the horizon. That day he hid in a farmhouse with the bodies of the dead. It was everywhere, the plague. It killed all those it touched.

He found food and, ravenous, he again stuffed salted fish into his mouth, chewed, swallowed. The taste was vile. The fish refused to remain in his belly. And he thought of the stranger hunched over his mother’s throat, of the sounds of slurping and guzzling. And he knew.

This all-consuming, mindless hunger would not be slaked by fish or meat or bread. He huddled in the house as the sunlight reached across the floor toward him, and he thought of walking to greet it as the stranger had.

He thought it, but he did not do it.

He walked on, hiding from the sun each day, knowing that he must find a way to feed, horrified by what he knew he must do in order to survive.

On the fifth night, he could barely walk, so consuming was his hunger. It clawed at his insides and made his thoughts veer from reason. He was near mindless, dragging one foot before the next, searching, searching. And then a scent carried on the wind, the scent of ambrosia, so rich and delicious he almost wept. He followed the smell, dizzy with hunger until he came upon a man huddled beneath layers of warm fur, a small fire burning before him.

The man glanced up as Kjell stepped from the trees toward the flames. He looked weary and spent, and there was blood on his temple and on his cheek. Kjell stared at the blood, lured in a way he had never been before, not by food or drink or even a woman. This was something else entirely.

“Come no closer,” the man said. “I am sick. It is plague.” He turned his head and coughed until blood stained the ground. Kjell trembled where he stood, fighting a vicious battle within himself. “I will likely be dead by morning,” the man continued. “Stay back unless you wish the same for yourself.”

Kjell swallowed. He would kill this man in a moment. He would take his blood and his life. He should at least know his first victim’s name. Beastly hunger roaring inside him, and he forced himself to fight against it, to ask, “What is your name?”

The man frowned and said, “Thayne. Killian Thayne.”

And then Kjell was upon him, tearing open his throat with his teeth, drinking his fill, taking the life of Killian Thayne, hating himself for it even as he licked at every last drop, the taste more wondrous than anything he had ever known, and he acknowledged that he would do it again and again, that he would feed, that he would live.

He was not the boy he had been. He was reborn that night as the life of his prey slipped away.

Days later, when he reached the harbor, he boarded a ship to England under the name of the first man whose life he had stolen. He was Kjell no longer; he was Killian Thayne.