They say you can't love the undead. They say once they turn, it's over—emotion dies, memory rots, and everything human is erased. She was fire—fierce, fast, and bright. She saved me more times than I can count. But I couldn't save her. It happened in a field of bones. A dozen undead crawling out from the dirt like nightmares made flesh. She took the bite for me. One moment, she was human. She was something else. I should've ended it then. Begged, even—while her fingers shook and her jaw clenched against the hunger. Her eyes were still hers. "Don't," she whispered. "Not yet." Ifyou'renoton*,you'reviewingacopy. She didn't attack me. We moved at night. Slept in shifts. I fed her small doses of the suppressant we stole from a dead medic. It didn't cure her, but it slowed the decay—kept her lucid. Kept her… Rae. And we learned to live between pulses of the sickness. Moments where she was more flame than corpse. She'd laugh when it rained. She still called me "idiot" when I forgot to boil water. And once, in an abandoned theater, she kissed me—rough and desperate and confused. "I'm not dead yet," she said. Some days were worse. Tremble with hunger that no human food could satisfy. But even in the worst of it, she never hurt me. One night, I fell asleep too deep. Woke up to find her sitting beside me, blood on her lips. "I fed on a deer," she said, shaking. "It didn't feel right. But it wasn't you." That was the night I knew. She wasn't just surviving. Rae was becoming something new. Something in between. Unkillable. Untamed. Unbreakable. Her love didn't die. It adapted. The others wouldn't understand. We tried joining a survivor camp once. They saw her eyes, her twitching hands. They tried to burn her. I burned the camp instead. Legends in the ruins. They call us "the beast and the boy." Say we're cursed lovers, haunting the wasteland. Maybe this isn't love. Maybe it's obsession, or madness. But when she looks at me—with those half-rotted, still-burning eyes—and says my name like it's sacred… I don't care what they call it. She saved me before she died. And somehow, she's still saving me.