Bloodsick by Adam Cesare: An Excerpt
ONE
Yesterday’s blood was still moist on the thing’s lips as it pulled itself up toward the night.
Digging was slow, difficult work, but its nails had grown while it slept . . .
Its hands were like spades. Fingers like knives. It stopped.
There was no more dirt now.
But it hadn’t surfaced, wasn’t aboveground. There was an impediment. A barrier.
The thing did not need to breathe, but it could still respire, to scent prey.
It used the tip of a long fingernail to unclog the crypt dirt from one nostril.
The rock barrier smelled of tar. But the thing wouldn’t be waylaid. It was hungry.
So it began to punch and claw at the impediment.
knuckles and sharp fingernails chipped.
How thick was the sheer stone above it?
The thing kept working. And as its muscles began to tire, to give out . . . it broke through.
Shivering with exertion, it pulled itself onto the dewy, glistening vastness of tar rock.
Standing, weak and confused, it peered at the horizon, toward the distant hilltops. Only. No. There were no hilltops. At least, not any it could see, its view blocked by trees and structures that hadn’t been there yesterday.
Strange.
The roofs and treetops didn’t glow with sunrise. Not, yet. But the thing could smell the approaching warmth. This was not even, this was morn. It would be dawn soon.
The thing coughed, then licked its lips with a parchment‑dry tongue.
Its confusion deepened.
No blood. There was nothing beside dirt clinging to those split and cracked lips. No sustenance.
Yesterday’s blood was gone.
It grunted in its confusion and pain. It realized something.
This was not a typical waking on a typical dusk. This was not a
night’s slumber.
The human blood on the thing’s lips had dried three centuries hence.
Dream blood had been on its lips upon waking. The blood of a long rest. A waking in the hopes that human life had returned to the world above, voles and rainworms no longer sustaining the thing in the ground.
It blinked, dry eyes wrinkled and hazy. It stared down at its hands.
There were flecks of yellow paint under its nails. It was a shade that did not occur in nature, and the paint glowed with a bewitched luminosity.
Curious.
Below the fingernails, the thing did not recognize its own body. Battered knuckles attached to bare, wasted arms, bones seeming to have grown, elongated while it was underground. Clothes all but disinte-grated, eaten away by years in the moist ground. Exposed, it felt nei-therthe cold nor any shame at its nakedness, just a detached disgust at its age and malnourishment. Flesh like the curdled skin floating atop a bucket of day‑old cream. Taut, desiccated sinew and jellied veins underneath.
The hunger that gnawed at its scarified chest, the hunger that com-pelled it to the surface wasn’t simply a craving.
The hunger was an imperative.
The thing took one uneasy step, then another.
Three hundred years may have passed without a meal, but it would not last a single day and night more.
If it did not eat, it would die. A final death.
And it wasn’t ready for that.
So the thing walked the ebon road in the predawn darkness, following the sound of strange music.
Jamie Scally liked this part of the weekend.
The cleanup. Sunday morning, after everyone had left.
He could play the music he wanted to hear. The stuff nobody liked. The weird shit with the static and slow baselines, or the old shit with redneck lyrics and steel guitars. He could rattle the garage’s speakers without having to worry about blowback from his guests. Or one of his drunk friends hijacking the Bluetooth to play “What’s Left of the Flag” for a third time.
It wasn’t cleanup as much as it was the after‑party. Jamie’s own music, and he didn’t have to stop drinking if he didn’t want to.
Circling the pong table, he tossed empties into a plastic draw-string bag.
And the cans that weren’t empty? He drank those so that they wouldn’t slosh around and start the garbage bag leaking.
What? They were a few months into the school year. It was the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving. His tolerance was high as hell.
Once the pong table was clear, Jamie tied a knot in the bag and considered what to do next. Maybe he should sweep. The weather had been cold and wet all week. The concrete floor of the garage was caked with dried snowmelt and dead leaves.
The garage door rattled.
It did that when the wind gusted just right down their street, made the half‑inch gap under the door whistle.
Jamie coughed, inhaled. There was a smell.
The scent cut through the stale beer stink, the whiskey dribble,
the spilled orange juice from the girls who insisted on mixers.
It smelled like . . . sex?
Jamie pulled his shirt away from his body and sniffed. No. That perfumed sweat and chlorine smell wasn’t coming from him. He and Penny had been clawing at each other last night, right on that couch over there, but they hadn’t gone any further than that.
Squinting into the dimness of the carless two‑car garage, Jamie hunted for the source of the smell.
It wouldn’t be the first time somebody’d had sex in here.
Guests had done it on the musty couches. Couches they might have thought twice about, since Jamie and his buddies had hauled them outof the trash. More courteous guys had thrown down jackets so girls felt more comfortable doing it under his dad’s workbench. Some had done it leaning against the bike racks.
It made Jamie kind of proud that his garage could provide that service. Couples getting it on when they were sure nobody was looking, when things had gotten sloppy and it was time for the rest of the party-goers to nod out or sing along.
Damn.
Tonight’s cleanup, this after‑party, would take an unpleasant turn if Jamie had to dustpan‑up a used condom. Or mop, if no condom had been used. He thought about how his friends whispered to each other in Health class, even the virgins, complaining how you couldn’t feel anything.
The playlist switched tracks to an old song, outlaw country stuff that wouldn’t fly if his friends were still here, not at a high school party. Not if there were girls.
The wind stopped pressing at the door. Jamie sniffed the air again. No.
Maybe it wasn’t sex. But there was a smell.
And the scent was intensifying by the second.
To hell with sweeping. The garage needed to be aired out. Really what it needed was a deep cleaning. But an air‑out was all Jamie could manage, half drunk and fully exhausted.
He set down the bag, cans and bottles tinging and clanging against concrete
as he crossed to the front of the garage and the opener.
He reached out for the button and . . . No.
He pulled his hand back.
Jamie couldn’t let his drunk‑self get his sober‑self in trouble. The garage door made a lot of noise.
And he still had his music playing pretty loud.
Jamie’s parents were cool, but at a certain point they were going to get tired of hearing complaints from their neighbors. And Jesus could their closest neighbor, Betty‑Anne Murphy, complain.
Not that his parents were the type of parents to say “you’re grounded,” or that Jamie was the type of kid who’d obey, but if he made his mom and dad angry enough, they’d stop buying the beer. Even if they bought it all with Jamie’s own money, money he earned at his job, moneyhe collected from his friends when the party was big enough.
Eh. Screw Betty‑Anne Murphy.
So what if a few bottles ended up on the Murphys’ lawn on Sunday mornings?
Or if Betty‑Anne had to hear a few extra curse words from the kids smoking outside the garage? Or even the odd racial slur?
Not from Jamie or his friends being dicks on purpose, of course, but because sometimes they like to play some Tyler or Kanye or ODB.
And sometimes sing along.
A couple drinks in, how could you not?
“I hear you kids! You can’t be saying that word!”
Save it, Betty-Anne. Your husband’s said worse. And he’s a cop.
Jamie checked his phone. His vision swam a bit, and he needed to pee, the half‑cans all starting to hit. His guts gurgled. Drinking all night and eating nothing but stale donuts for dinner. He needed to do more than pee.
The phone screen said it was ten minutes to six.
Time to wake up, you old bitch.
He hit the button, and the garage door began to crawl upward. Overhead, the chain clattered and gears groaned,
cool late‑November air immediately drying the sweat on Jamie’s neck, chilling the beer on his shirt, as the music echoed out into the dark of the neighborhood.
Merle Haggard singing a good morning to Massachusetts. A dark morning, the sun down and the streetlights still on. It was so dark this time of year.
Jamie’s stomach rumbled. Good thing he didn’t have work today. He could sit on the toilet for the next two hours, let things sort them-selves out, scroll on his phone while his legs fell asleep, and . . .
And suddenly there was someone standing in the garage with Jamie.
He whirled.
“You should turn the music down,” Megan said. “Jesus, Meg. I almost shit my pants.”
No exaggeration, he almost had.
His sister stood in the doorway in a nightshirt.
She’d walked down from the house, her vape in hand, fuzzy boots with no socks and no pants.
Megan used to attend his parties. Hell, she was six years older than him.
They used to be her parties. She’d passed the torch to Jamie when the time was right, once enough of her friends had moved away.
Well, that was the official reason Megan stopped partying. But Jamie knew that the real reason was that too many of her friends had died.
The friends who hadn’t gotten jobs, or at least jobs with healthcare. The townie friends. His townie sister. She’d stopped coming down to the parties. For her, the fun wasn’t fun anymore.
But Megan still liked to visit the garage, in the off hours. Way late at night or early in the morning, surveying the damage,
watching Jamie clean puke before retreating to her basement bedroom and smoking her-self back to sleep. Vaping, actually.
“I’m serious,” Meg said. “It’s too loud. Turn it down.”
She shivered, then pointed through the side window toward the Murphys’ house, toward Betty‑Anne. “One day she’ll stop going to Mom and Dad. She’ll toss a fuckin’ IRA bomb in here, burn you and your little dirtbag friends to death. The real Irish don’t mess around.”
“Maybe one day she will. If that happened, would you miss me?” Jamie asked, smiling.
“Mom would be sad.”
Meg was probably right, and he should turn the music down. But if Betty‑Anne hadn’t fought back when Meg was a teenager, the parties just as big, the music just as loud, then she probably—
“Can we help you?” Meg said, voice raised over the music.
It took Jamie a sluggish beer burp moment to realize his sister wasn’t talking to him.
She was staring beyond where Jamie stood. Out the garage door. Into the dark.
If Meg looked cold, in her nightshirt and pink boots and no pants, then the bum must have been freezing.
The homeless man stood at the base of the driveway, a stabilizing hand on the passenger side door of Dad’s truck.
He was tall. Freakishly tall. Or maybe he only seemed that way because of the early hour and how skinny he was.
Jamie could see his ribs.
And the curve of his knobbed knees.
The guy wasn’t naked, but he might as well have been. His clothes were so tattered they were barely threads, one pantleg completely miss-ing at the waist.
In the streetlight gloom, the man looked like a black and white photo. A picture of malnourishment and poverty from another country and another time. A war maybe. Or a great famine. What Betty‑Anne Murphy’s ancestors must have looked like, back in Ireland.
And the pathetic prick had his grimy hand on Dad’s truck.
Jamie fumbled for his phone, hit pause on the music so he could be heard.
“Hey, pal. You’re smudging it,” Jamie said.
Without steel guitar, the air around them was now too quiet. Jamie could hear the roil of his own intestines.
“James,” Megan said, her voice timid. Which wasn’t like his sister.
She never called him James. She wasn’t timid.
In response, the bum took a step toward them, long legs wobbling, scratching the truck with something . . .
His grody‑ass nails, so long they looked like they hadn’t been clipped in a decade.
“Hey! You want your ass kicked?” Jamie said. It’d been a while since he’d been in a fight. It would feel good. The weather was nice. He’d cool down, the exercise would sober him—
“Jamie, this guy’s not okay,” his sister said. “Close the door.”
Jamie looked to the garage door button. He could hear the junkie-shuffle of the guy’s feet.
His bare feet.
It was thirty‑something degrees out, and the guy wasn’t wearing shoes.
“Jamie, look at him,” Megan said.
He was getting closer. Almost to the end of the driveway now. His toenails nearly as long as his fingernails, edging over into the light from thegarage.
And, weirdly, Jamie could smell the scent of sex again.
The smell hadn’t been something in the garage that needed airing out. The scent was coming from the bum himself, had wafted off the man and seeped into the garage from all the way down the street. How was that possible?
The stink was radiating off him. Not B.O. and cheap wine. Not Narcan and smeared shit. But the pleasant dampness and exertion of sex . .. pheromones and spit and Katie Thomas’s lip gloss and the salt of sweat.
The slick on Bobby Tombs’s fingers, when they were still in middle school and Bobby ran into the cafeteria, excited to tell them all about what Jessica Mathers had let him do.
The smell of Penny’s neck as Jamie tore at the clasps of her bra, never able to undo it on the first go. The words he spoke to her, as his hands fumbled. That he loved her. Which was true, but didn’t mean he hadn’t felt the same way with girlfriends before.
The taste of Bobby Tombs’s mouth, an after‑party two years ago that neither Bobby nor Jamie talked about. Why Bobby didn’t come to the garage anymore.
“Here,” Meg said. His sister was no longer at the side door but standing beside Jamie. He’d zoned out, hadn’t heard the pad of her fuzzy boots.
Meg slapped the button, and the garage door began to roll on its track.
The bum shuffled forward.
Together, Jamie and Megan took a step back into the garage.
When it was clear the bum wasn’t going to make it to them, that his bare, diseased legs were too slow,
Megan flipped the guy off and blew aplume of white strawberry vape in his direction.
“Bye,” she said as the bottom of the aluminum door passed in front of the man’s eyes.
Dark eyes. Not pitiful puppy dog eyes, like the guys outside the bus station that “just need a dollar twenty‑five to afford a ticket into Boston.”
The eyes didn’t react, didn’t crease against the fruity velvet smoke. They were animal eyes. Hungry eyes.
And then the door, about a foot above the ground, stopped.
There was a whine—an engine under strain and a belt about to throw.
Against the white aluminum, Jamie could see the man’s finger-nails. Black and brown, chitinous and chipped, holding the door in place.Nails that were fungal‑infected but still smelled like . . .
“Get out of here. We’re calling the cops,” Meg yelled at the door.
Could Megan smell it too? Her nose didn’t wrinkle. She didn’t say anything about it. But her mind might have been elsewhere.
Then Megan Scally did something she hadn’t done, ever. She put her arm down across Jamie’s chest like a seatbelt and pushed him back. Itwas something Mom used to do when Jamie was little, backing him away from a crosswalk before the traffic light had turned.
The garage door’s motor had stopped whining, gears and belt chain still.
They were all still.
The man hadn’t fled; he remained on the other side of the door. Jamie could see his fingernails. His toenails and ankles, under the gap.
And then the garage door began to rise.
The bum didn’t put a second hand under the door to help him pull. He didn’t need to. He was stronger than he looked, could lift the door with one hand.
Before Jamie could even track what was happening, the man was inside, leaving dents in the aluminum.
Nail marks.
Nails that smelled like . . .
There was no time to threaten to call the cops again. No time to form words.
Because the tall man was biting Jamie Scally.
The emaciated, dirty man lifted Jamie like he was a doll and latched on to his neck.
Jamie’s skin broke with a crack, like the pop of a pressur-ized can, the psst of a bottle cap.
There was a slurping sound and the softness of a tongue as Jamie bucked. The man’s dry lips struggled to form a seal. His arms were so strong, fingernails in Jamie’s back like needles, chipping against the bones of his ribs and spine.
Jamie could feel the blood pump out of his neck, accelerated by the suction, but the rush of liquid wasn’t enough for the man.
The man reared back, teeth tearing. Jamie felt the tendons of his neck and shoulders pluck like guitar strings. Watched his own blood fly away from him in bright red spurts that seemed to darken in the air, oxidizing.
Megan hadn’t run. She was standing there beside him. Jamie’s feet were off the ground, dangling.
Meg was screaming, an intense, dismayed sound that still wasn’t loud enough to drown out the swallowing in Jamie’s ear as the man threw him down, the two of them slipping backward over the pong table, cups and balls skittering across concrete.
Flashes then, as the sharpness of the pain began to set in, all the memories that the smell of sex had dredged up and more playing out in hismind’s eye. Every pornographic image Jamie had ever seen. Espe-cially the ones that’d made him queasy, pictures and videos he’d been exposed to way too young because Brendan Kent was the first of their friends to get a phone with unblocked internet and had showed them all atrecess.
It was like all that sex was poison. Even if it was poison that tasted sweet, like how dogs will drink antifreeze. And the man was pouring that poison into Jamie’s wounds, injecting him with it. The good and the bad. The release and the shame. Penny, who Jamie might love enough to marry,
depending on what they decided for college, and Bobby Tombs, who didn’t come to the garage anymore, both tasting the same, like blood.
“Get away from him!” Megan screamed. She had an adjustable dumbbell in both hands, thirty pounds of weight dialed onto it. Jamie andhis friends would lift in here when they weren’t drinking. And some-times when they were.
Meg brought the dumbbell down on the tall man’s head, and the hit made a sound like the seat breaking out of old wicker furniture.
“Get away from my brother, you fuck!” she said, pulling back the dumbbell for another hit, the back of the man’s skull already concave.
Swing. Swing again, Jamie wanted to say but couldn’t. Keep swing-ing. His vocal cords weren’t responding; the man had shredded them.
“Jamie, hold—” Megan started to say, her words abruptly ended by a swipe of the man’s fingernails.
Megan’s speech curled into a gurgle before she fell.
Standing above them, the man grunted. He put a skinny hand up to feel the back of his crushed skull and frowned.
Jamie could see his teeth.
All the teeth were like razors, but two were sharper and longer than the rest.
Jamie reached for his sister, wanting to wipe closed the gash that had appeared across her face, starting above her left eye and running down to her chin. But on closer inspection, the wound was uncloseable.
He could see his sister’s teeth—not pointed—through her cheek.
As Jamie reached for Megan, the man took Jamie’s index finger in his mouth and bit down. He smiled at Jamie. The man was enjoying this. Hewas participating in these acts with a clarity that told Jamie he wasn’t a drug addict
or a schizo or anyone from down at the bus station.
And the back of the guy’s head . . . it was rising back up, paper mâché crumpled in reverse.
The man chewed Jamie’s finger for a moment, crushing bone, the stink of the tall man intensifying, the paleness of his body going slick with slime, seeming to sweat even though it was cold in here.
Then the man crouched over Megan, and the slurping began again. “Geth . . . geth . . .”
Get away from my sister, Jamie wanted to say, but the words were more a coughing clicking sound than anything else. His sister, who’d given him his first beer. Right here in this garage. His pretty sister with her pretty friends. His sister who should have finished school. Should have moved out of the house, gotten out of this town before something bad happened to her. Jamie’s beautiful townie sister.
Jamie couldn’t talk, but he could crawl a few feet so he could hold Megan’s hand as she died.
And Jamie died too, eventually. But not before getting one last whiff of that smell.
And this time it wasn’t a queasy smell at all. It wasn’t a poison.
He enjoyed it.
It was good and clean, like a fun night with Penny, her parents out of town, them lying in bed for an hour afterward, saying nice things to each other.
Above the three bodies—two human, one other—the motor reengaged and the garage door rolled closed,
blocking out the rising sun and sealing in the rest of their sounds
so they wouldn’t disturb Betty‑Anne Murphy.
Excerpted from BLOODSICK by Adam Cesare. Copyright © 2026. Available from Union Square & Co., an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Discover the Author
Follow the scent, feel the allure, and taste the blood in this thrilling and unforgettable vampire novel by the bestselling, award-winning author of Clown in a Cornfield.
“Deliciously smart and blissfully mean … an absolute blockbuster of a contemporary vampire novel. A page-turning, action-packed, bloody good time.” -Rachel Harrison, New York Times bestselling author of Play Nice and So Thirsty
A vampire awakens from a 300-year hibernation, bringing a plague of undeath to a working-class Massachusetts town. With the high school’s most notorious party house serving as ground zero for the infection, it isn’t long before the affliction spreads through the entire student body and beyond.
Ava, who’s hesitant to take the next step with her football star boyfriend, and Nick, Ava’s best friend who pines for more, must band together with an unlikely ally to fight a horde of their newly turned classmates. Bloodsick is a terrifying, character-driven novel where a hunger for blood mirrors the real-life body horror of being a hormonal American teenager.
Adam Cesare brings his signature wit and penchant for a bloody good time to this high-stakes action-packed vampire novel, sharpening the genre’s fangs in much the way he shepherded a new generation of slasher fans with his Clown in a Cornfield series.
Bloodsick is perfect for fans of The Lost Boys, Kalynn Bayron’s You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight, and the body horror of Andrew Joseph White.
