Most vampires crave silence. Stillness. The hours between midnight and dawn are when even the city holds its breath.
But tonight, the quiet is wrong. Weighted.
I walk with my hands in my pockets and my head low, but the air keeps pulling at me, like it knows my name. Like it's saying it.
Not August.
The other name. Lucian.
The one no one alive remembers. The one I buried under a battlefield three hundred years ago with a blade in my hand and blood on my mouth.
I shake the thought loose.
The boy was right, something is stirring beneath the city. Not just whispers now. Not just fragments. Movement. Intent. A shift in the pulse of things.
I haven't felt it this clearly since the days of the Hollow War. When monsters fought for thrones no one could sit on.
And Evelyn, god , Evelyn is the fulcrum. She doesn't know it, but the storm is already turning around her.
I can't stay near her.
I won't watch another life burn.
By the time I reach the bookstore again, the sun is minutes from rising. It's bleeding edge already bruises the horizon.
I slip inside using the back entrance. The place is closed, but I have a key.
Technically, it isn't mine. I borrowed it from Evelyn's coat pocket two nights ago and made a copy before she noticed it was gone.
I returned it the next day. She never said a word.
Inside, the store is dark and still, except for the tick of the old clock above the register. I take a breath and walk the aisles like they're church pews, brushing my fingers against spines that smell like dust, ink, and age.
The air here carries something heavier than old paper and leather. It hums with secrets folded into margins, hidden beneath fading ink. These books aren't just repositories of stories, they're vessels of memory.
Some volumes are so ancient, their leather bindings crackle under touch, as if protesting after centuries of silence. The scent of mildew and ink swirls with something faintly metallic, a trace of magic, or perhaps something lost to time.
I pause before a shelf lined with vellum-bound tomes, their titles embossed in scripts I cannot read. Dead languages, yes, but the words pulse faintly, like veins beneath fragile skin. My fingers hover over one, hesitant, before I draw it out. The pages are brittle, the ink faded, yet the moment I open it, the faintest glow traces the edges of the text. Arcane symbols twist and shimmer like caught starlight.
Further down, a small wooden box sits half-hidden behind a row of thick volumes. I kneel to lift it, careful not to disturb the dust settled like a layer of forgotten time. Inside lies a delicate assortment of objects, a cracked obsidian shard, a faded map, and a folded letter sealed with wax stamped by a crest long extinct. Each artifact carries weight, an echo of lives intertwined with shadows.
The deeper I move into the back room, the more the walls seem to close in. A whisper of movement stirs, perhaps a trick of the light, or something else watching. My pulse slows, my senses heighten. This place is more than a sanctuary for words. It's a vault for something older. A place where the past breathes just beneath the surface.
One shelf catches my eye, cluttered with journals and scrapbooks, pages filled with sketches, coded notes, and fragments of a language no one remembers speaking aloud anymore. Each entry feels like a thread in a tapestry too vast to unravel in a single lifetime. Some pages are stained with faded blood, others with tears or wax drippings from candles burned during long nights of research.
I pull a heavy leather-bound book, its spine cracked but stubbornly intact. The title, embossed in gold, reads "Codex of Forgotten Names." The first page holds a name scrawled in hurried handwriting, Kaelthas. The name that drags my soul under every night.
The silence grows thick, pressing around me like the weight of history itself. I close the book gently and replace it. Somewhere beneath the floorboards, a faint pulse vibrates through the wood. My fingers trace the seams in the floor, finding the subtle outlines of a trapdoor. Masked by glamour, but not well enough to fool me. Someone powerful masked it, but their strength was fading. Or fractured.
The library isn't just a refuge for knowledge. It's a cage. And something inside it dreams.
I'm not here to see her.
I'm here to look.
There's something about this place. Something more than charm and nostalgia. I feel it in the floorboards, in the bindings of the books Evelyn never sells.
I find the back room unlocked.
The first time I stepped inside, I didn't pay attention. But now I do.
The shelves here are different. Older. Half the titles are in dead languages. One book glows faintly when I touch it.
Another hums.
There's something warded under the floor.
And the faint scent of blood.
Not fresh.
Old. Deep. Buried.
I crouch and run my hand over the seams in the floor. They're faint, but they're there. A trapdoor. Masked by glamour, but not well enough to fool me. Someone powerful masked it, but their strength was fading.
Or fractured.
I should leave.
But instead, I press my palm to the floor and listen.
For a moment, all I hear is silence.
Then,
A heartbeat.
Slow. Distant.
But steady.
Something is alive down there.
And it's dreaming.
I don't speak to Evelyn for two days.
Not because I don't want to. Because if I do, I'll stay.
And if I stay, I'll be part of whatever's coming.
I'll fall back into a story I buried in fire. I'll choose her, like I did last time. And I'm not sure I can survive watching her die again.
If she is the same soul. If this is a cycle I've failed to break.
But fate has its own timing.
On the third night, she finds me.
I'm standing beneath the rain-slick canopy of the opera house ruins, watching bats cut through fog like shards of night. She walks up behind me, quiet as the wind.
"You've been avoiding me," she says.
I don't turn. "I've been busy."
"You're a terrible liar."
"I never said I wasn't."
She steps beside me, umbrella in one hand, eyes on the broken archways that used to hold music.
"There's something wrong with me," she says, just like that. No buildup. No filter.
She exhales, the breath fogging between us. "I've always felt a little... off. Like my life was too quiet, too safe. And I thought maybe that was a blessing. But lately, " she shakes her head, her grip tightening on the umbrella, "lately it feels like something is missing. Like I'm waking up in the wrong life."
I say nothing. Her words are too familiar.
Evelyn keeps her eyes on the ruins ahead. "My mom used to say I had one foot in another world. I thought she was being poetic. But I think she knew. Or sensed something. There were nights she'd sit by my bed when I was a kid, saying prayers in a language I didn't recognize. I thought they were stories. Now I'm not so sure."
She falls quiet for a beat, then adds, "After she died, everything went... flat. My uncle tried. But we never really talked about her. Or what she believed. It was like he was trying to erase that part of her. Of me."
Her voice wavers for the first time. "I used to dream about her. Every night. And then one day, the dreams just stopped. Like she was gone gone. Like even her ghost couldn't reach me."
She finally looks at me, searching. "And then I met you. And it was like the part of me I'd buried started clawing its way up again."
I feel the words before I speak them. Heavy. Dangerous. "That part of you was never dead."
Evelyn swallows. "I'm afraid of what I'll find if I keep digging."
"You should be."
She flinches at the honesty, but doesn't look away.
My throat tightens.
"I don't know how to explain it," she goes on, "but ever since I met you, it's been getting worse. The dreams. The voices. The sense that there's something under my life, like a second skin I never knew I had."
She looks at me now. Really looks.
"Do you know what's happening to me?"
I realize I have a choice.
I can lie. Pretend I don't know. Walk away and let her fall into this without me.
Or I can do what I never did last time.
Tell her the truth before it's too late.
I meet her eyes.
And I say:
"Yes."