Dug Up - Nico Pontevecchio

When he wakes up, he can hear heartbeats.
Pulsing through the earth around him, faint but strong.
Heartbeats mean there’s blood.
Something deep inside him wakes up with a snarl.
Hungry. Food. 
He claws at the wood above him, feeling it splinter and tear under nails that seem sharper than he remembers.
But his memory is hazy and distant and almost nonexistent, buried under the blinding, all-consuming hunger. If he doesn’t feed it, and soon, he thinks it might turn on him like a starving animal and devour him whole.
He has to get out.
It’s easier than he expected. Some part of him is dimly aware that he was buried, that that should concern him, but there’s less earth overhead than it had felt like there should be. He can hear rasping scrapes that echo down into his coffin.
Someone is digging him up.
Diggers means humans.
Humans means blood.
There’s almost nothing between him and them anymore.
It takes one hard blow for the lid of the coffin to splinter. Handfuls of earth rain down on him, smelling of seeped oil and old leaves and the corpses it’s consumed over decades.
A cemetery.
Where else would he be buried?
He sits up sharply, avoiding the splinters of wood, and looks up into the night sky, stars almost nonexistent behind the hazy glow of city lights.
Two shadows block them out entirely.
And the heartbeats are so close and so loud and warm and alive and vulnerable.
He leaps, catching the one on his left in his grip, one hand wrapped around the throat, the other knocking the shovel from their hand in a single motion that sends it spinning off into the hedges yards away.
He leans in for the bite, but something stops him. The handle of another shovel under his jaw. Hands pulling it backward, pulling him away.
Away from his food. Away from his prey. 
No.
This is his.
He keeps one hand locked around his victim’s throat, their struggles lessening as their air dwindles. Weak. They need so much to survive. All we need is their blood.
He’s not sure what that voice is in his head, only that it’s almost a physical presence, roaring in his ears and drowning out any pleas from his victim or any shouts from whoever it is attempting to keep him back from them. Blocking out faces and features as subtly as the city lights confuse the stars and turn constellations into meaningless collections of a few of the brightest lights. 
He grabs the second shovel with his free hand and flings it after the first.
But once again, something stops him from leaning in for the killing bite.
An arm, warm and alive, fine hairs tickling against his skin, the blood pumping and racing beneath the flesh, so close and so warm.
Fine. He’s not picky.
His fangs close on the closer body, and warm coppery liquid gushes into his mouth.
He’s faintly aware his new victim is screaming, trying to pull away, but he won’t let go. He can’t. He swallows mouthfuls of blood, each one quieting the howling thing inside him a little more. This is what it wants. This is what he needs to give it.
And then the voice and its influence fade just enough for him to recognize the curly hair, the tawny freckled skin, on that arm. 
No. Ricky.
He stumbles back, fangs tearing free, leaving deep scored lines in his son’s flesh. On the ground, Vanessa is coughing, struggling to sit up, reaching for him with one hand as if she could pull him away from Ricky herself.
And both of them are screaming at him.
At the monster who took the place of a husband and father. That they helped dig up. That almost killed them both in return for it.
He turns away from them and follows the shovels into the hedge as a faint, chilling rain begins to fall. He claws at his own skin, runs his tongue over his fangs until it bleeds, listening as sirens blare and watching red and white lights flicker over the ground as an ambulance arrives, then departs screaming.
He knows hunters won’t be far behind.
Vanessa would most likely have told the paramedics that it was a wild animal. Even as vampires become more and more a part of the headlines and less and less shadows, people who know about their world still lie to protect them.
But Nico has been a part of that world too long to believe anyone is going to fall for that story. 
The Sunrisers monitor first responders’ radio calls.
An animal attack, at night, in a cemetery, no matter how far Ricky and Vanessa got from his grave, is going to set off every alarm bell.
Some part of him says going back to face them and get this over with would be the right thing to do.
But the other part, the howling voice that’s getting louder and louder as the hunger returns, wants to live. 
He didn’t feed it enough. It still wants. It still craves. He can’t shut it out, and the longer he waits, the longer it has to take over again, to turn him into nothing more than its slave. 
He snatches a plastic grocery sack that’s tangled itself in the hedge, slips back to the edge of his torn up, mangled grave, yawning into the night like an open wound itself, and fills the bag with earth. 
He knows this will last him a little more than a week. 
Enough time for the heat to die down. For round the clock watches on his gravesite to be reassigned to more pressing details.
And most importantly, he knows where there’s a poorly guarded blood bank. 
As long as he can keep the snarling thing inside him at bay long enough to get there, maybe, just maybe, he stands half a chance of surviving long enough to decide if this un-life is what he really wants. 
If not, he knows exactly where the Sunrisers will be.
After all, he used to be one of them.