Most nights, I haunt the city like a shade, passing through its arteries unnoticed, touching nothing, disturbing no one. But tonight I feel tethered. Tied to something living.
Tied to her.
Evelyn.
Her name hums behind my teeth, soft and sharp at once. Like the first taste of winter air after a long sleep. It's dangerous, how quickly she's taken shape in my mind. I should have walked away.
But I didn't. And now she's in the bloodstream of my thoughts.
I haven't been back to the bookstore since that night. Three days. Long enough to raise questions I won't ask myself. Instead, I've returned to older habits. Watching. Listening. Feeding, when I must.
Not from humans. Not directly. I made that choice long ago, after the war. After the fire. After her.
No, not her. That was another life. Another name.
She had dark eyes and a cruel smile, the kind that made men forget where they were. I loved her in the way only monsters can, recklessly, without understanding. She was fire dressed as a woman, and I mistook the burn for warmth. Her name was Mireille. At least, that's what she called herself then. Names shifted in those days like windblown ash.
We were made near the same time, but she took to the thirst with a kind of hunger that frightened even our elders. She didn't just feed, she consumed. And I followed, too young, too foolish, too far gone to question it. She taught me how to live in the shadows. How to smile while drinking someone dry. How to survive when you feel nothing at all.
But there was always something missing. A hollow in her that no amount of blood could fill. I didn't see it then. I called it strength. Independence. But it was something worse. Something colder.
Eventually, she stopped looking at me like I was real. Like I was anything more than another possession in her long, unending night. And I, finally, saw her for what she was. Not a flame. A void.
When I left, I burned the place behind me. Not out of rage. Out of fear. Fear that I'd never crawl out from under her shadow unless I erased every piece of her I could touch.
But memory doesn't burn. It clings. Finds you in quiet hours. In laughter that echoes wrong. In eyes that remind you of the ones who watched you become a stranger to yourself.
I tell myself Evelyn isn't her. That the tilt of her head, the lilt in her voice, it's different. Gentler. Real.
But memory is a cruel mirror. And sometimes, I don't trust what I see.
Still, Evelyn doesn't carry that same cold hunger. There's something about her that resists the darkness, even when it presses in from all sides. And maybe that's what draws me. Maybe that's what scares me.
Because once before, I mistook fascination for fate.
And it nearly cost me everything.
The past is full of ghosts, and mine do not rest.
Tonight I walk the edge of the old quarter, near the river, where no tourists go. The stones here are slick with memory. This city is built on bones. Most cities are. But this one knows it. It hums with buried truths.
I pause near the crumbling remains of a cathedral that never made it past the second spire. They say it was cursed. More likely, it was abandoned when the blood stopped flowing.
There's something about ruins that comforts me. Maybe it's because they're honest. No façades. Just stone and silence and the slow breath of time.
The scent hits me before the sound.
Blood.
Fresh.
Not human.
Fox, maybe. Small. Wild. I follow the scent down an alley choked with ivy. The body lies near a dumpster, throat torn, eyes glassy.
A warning.
Not from a beast. From one of ours.
I crouch beside it, fingers brushing the cold fur.
There are rules, even for the cursed. Feeding from animals is a compromise. Messy, but quiet. But this wasn't about hunger. This was a message.
And I know who sent it.
He's waiting for me when I turn.
Same boy from the bookstore. Same cocky fire, but dimmer now. Bruises darken his cheek, and his eyes no longer burn with certainty.
"You followed me."
"I waited," he says. "You said one chance. I used it."
"And wasted it."
He flinches.
"I didn't touch her," he says quickly. "Didn't feed. Didn't even go near her."
I say nothing.
"I went north. Like you said. But I came back because there's something happening. Something wrong."
I narrow my eyes. "Explain."
"There's movement in the tunnels. Whispers. Names I haven't heard before. Names that scare the old ones. They're waking up."
I straighten slowly. "Who?"
"I don't know. Just fragments. The Gutter King. The Bleeding Choir. A name that sounded like thunder choking, Kael-something."
My body stills. Kaelthas.
That name hasn't crossed the lips of the living, or the dead, for a long, long time.
He sees the shift in my expression and steps back.
"You know something," he says.
I don't respond.
Because yes, I do.
Kaelthas was not a vampire.
He was something older. Something that drank vampires the way we drink men.
And he's supposed to be dead.
But some things don't stay buried.
They wait.
Kaelthas wasn't born of blood. Not like us. He was forged, called from the dark before the dark had names. When the old world still remembered its gods, and the earth could still bleed.
We used to argue about what he was. Not aloud, no one dared speak his name openly, but in whispers, in sanctums, over ash-filled maps. A fallen deity. A remnant. A hunger given form. No one ever agreed, and no one ever proved him wrong.
He didn't walk into cities like we did. He descended. Like fog through cracks, like rot through roots. Where he went, blood stopped singing. Vampires, elders, even, withered without a mark. Souls came undone at the edges. Whole lineages collapsed.
And yet he didn't rule. That was the strangest part. He didn't want thrones, didn't crave followers. Worship made him restless. He didn't move to be adored. He moved because something in him hungered, not for flesh, but for memory. For essence.
They say Kaelthas could speak your true name, the one you didn't even know, and unravel you from the inside out.
We thought we destroyed him.
It took an alliance of bloodlines that haven't spoken since. We offered a sacrifice. Magic. Fire. We burned whole cities to ash trying to trap him in a silence he could never crawl out of. And then... nothing.
Silence.
The kind that makes you question whether he was ever real.
The kind that lets your guard down.
The kind that makes you believe he's gone.
But I remember.
I remember the way the world shivered when he moved.
I remember the way even our kind begged for mercy, and were denied.
If Kaelthas is stirring, if even the echoes of his name are crawling out of shadow…
We are not ready.