At 2:17 a.m., Detective Adrian Cross stepped into an apartment containing three dead bodies and no blood.He stopped just beyond the doorway.The smell hit him first.Cold air. Expensive perfume. Disinfectant.And something faintly metallic beneath them all.Adrian pulled on his gloves and looked at the bodies.One man lay beside the dining table, his mouth hanging open. A woman rested against the kitchen counter, her fingers curled around an overturned glass. The third victim, a younger man in an expensive gray suit, sat slumped against the wall with his eyes fixed on the ceiling.All three were unnaturally pale.Their clothes were clean.Their throats showed small puncture wounds.But there was no blood on the floor, no stains on the furniture, and no obvious evidence that anyone had attempted to clean the apartment.It was as if someone had removed every drop of blood from their bodies without spilling a single one.Behind Adrian, a uniformed officer shifted uneasily."Never seen a

The first thing Adrian Cross felt was cold.Not the cold of rain-soaked concrete or the biting air of an underground parking garage.This cold came from inside his body.It crept through his chest, spread into his arms, and settled beneath his skin like ice.He tried to breathe.Nothing happened.His mouth opened, but his lungs refused to cooperate. Panic surged through him as he struggled against the darkness swallowing his vision.Then he heard a voice."He's still alive."Another voice answered."That's impossible. The bullet entered the chest. We should have lost him before the transport arrived.""Check again."Something pressed against Adrian's neck.He couldn't move. He couldn't open his eyes. Yet every word reached him with frightening clarity.A heartbeat thudded somewhere nearby.Then another.Then several more.They overlapped until the sounds became an unbearable rhythm inside his skull."His pulse is disappearing.""Prepare the stabilizer.""Doctor, we don't have enough t

The scream lasted less than three seconds.Adrian Cross heard every one of them.It began as a sharp cry beyond the observation glass, followed by the crash of something metallic and a hurried series of footsteps. Then came a sound that made the hairs on Adrian's arms rise.A heartbeat.Fast. Irregular. Frightened.It was followed by another heartbeat, slower and steadier, moving away from the room.Then the first heartbeat disappeared beneath the noise of the alarms.Adrian stared through the glass.“What happened out there?”Dr. Elias Ward didn't answer. He stood before the medical console, rapidly tapping commands into the touchscreen.The monitor beside Adrian continued to display the abnormal blood reading. The data had frozen halfway through its analysis, leaving several lines of numbers beneath the familiar classification.BLOODLINE ZERO — AWAKENING CONFIRMED.A second message flashed beneath it.ANOMALOUS RESPONSE DETECTED.Then the screen went black.The emergency shutters de