The night after he woke, he washed the blood from his mouth in the creek.
Cold water bit his lips and carried away the last red thread that clung to him. He watched it unspool across the current and vanish, as if the world were eager to forget. But water did not clean the inside of him. The new heart in his chest did not calm, it only learned to beat softer—patient as a hunter's footfall.
He followed the creek down through black alder and sleeping willow until the trees parted and fields opened like bare palms to the moon. Wheat stubble shone with a pale sheen, and beyond it perched a village no larger than a fist. Mud walls. Thatch roofs. A palisade made from an uneven line of sharpened poles, more wish than defense. A single tower rose over it—a chapel bell on rotten beams, its tongue still.
Light breathed in patchwork from windows. Chimneys drew thin script into the night.
He stood where the field ended and the road began and listened.
He heard the cupboard door in a one-room house open, the soft click of pottery—someone reaching for a bowl. He heard a man's tooth worrying at a seed husk. He heard a child mutter in dreams, the dry cough of a woman, the sluggish weight of a pig turning in straw. Beneath it all, the river of blood: a hundred small currents moving in their sleep. If he closed his eyes, the village became a map of pulses. He could walk it with nothing but the rhythm of their lives.
Hunger rose like a tide.
He could leap the palisade and be done. He could rip a hole in the night and drink until the moon drowned.
But the deer had taught him he could feed without thought. The man had taught him he could kill without meaning. Now the weight of meaning pressed his shoulders down. If he was nothing but the hunger, then he had died in that shallow pit and left only a mouth behind.
He stepped onto the road.
At the gate he found a wheelbarrow turned on its side, a crooked crucifix hammered into the wood above, and a clay dish crusted with salt. A shadow of superstition. He reached up to the cross, expecting heat—pain—anything at all. His fingertips met old splinter. Nothing burned. The salt made his tongue ache with want but not with fear.
"Old lies," he murmured, and pushed through the gate.
The fog of the creek had followed him, rolled ahead, and settled in the alleys. It latched to his ankles and softened his tread. Dogs lifted their heads and stared. One whined, too confused to choose bark or silence. He bared his teeth. The dog turned its face to the wall and shivered.
A shape moved at the corner of the lane where the chapel's shadow fell. The shape resolved into a man with a staff and earnest frown—threadbare cloak, lantern swinging, rope belt. A monk or the nearest village imitation of one.
"Halt there," the man called, trying to thread courage through sleepy breath. "If you travel at this hour you'll find nothing but bad company."
He stepped into the lantern's smear of light.
"Then perhaps I have found it," Akuma said, and tried a smile.
It took him a heartbeat to remember how to spread his lips without baring fangs. Another heartbeat to lower his gaze a degree and soften his shoulders. He imagined being small again. Not the wolf in a man's skin, but the man disguised as a lamb.
The monk's eyes cleared; the fear loosened its root. He peered at Akuma's face, at the clean jaw and river-wet hair. "You look half drowned," he said. "From where do you come?"
"From the wrong side of death," Akuma almost answered. He swallowed the truth until it tasted like an ordinary lie. "From upstream. I slipped on the ford. I did not want to wake your village with pounding on a gate, but the fog took the road and kept the water."
The monk tutted and lifted his lantern higher, as if light might dry a stranger. "A traveler is a risk. A stranger is a blessing. Which one are you?"
"Whichever buys me a roof for the night."
The monk weighed that and decided he liked its humility. He nodded. "I am Brother Elias. We have little. But an empty pew meets every back with charity." He glanced at the sky with a reflexive flinch, then back at Akuma. "You may sleep beneath the chapel roof. The Lord keeps watch."
Akuma tilted his head. "Does He?"
Elias blinked, as if the question were a draft under the door. "He does," he said, and the conviction steadied him. "Come."
They crossed the square together. The lantern's halo trembled over cobble slick with dew. Akuma walked half a step behind, close enough to catch the neat clip of Elias's heartbeat. It tapped like a spoon against thin glass. So fragile. So near.
He lifted his eyes from the monk's throat and looked instead at the chapel door, where a crown of iron nails studded a plank like stars hammered into wood. Elias fumbled with the latch and pushed them into a small nave—two rows of benches, a crooked altar, a painted Madonna with a flaking blue robe. Beeswax and stale incense muddled the air. The floorboards creaked as if trying to speak.
"You may lie there," Elias said, pointing to a bench near the back. "And there's a water jar. I'll fetch a blanket from the rectory. The night has teeth."
"So do some travelers," Akuma said before he could stop himself.
Elias glanced back, puzzled. Akuma smoothed the remark with another smile. "Forgive me. Cold makes me witless."
"Cold does that." Elias set the lantern on the altar and lit two candles from its flame. Their light cracked the shadows but could not drive them out. "We'll speak in the morning. I rise with the bell."
Akuma felt the words "I cannot" rise to his tongue, but folded them back down. He nodded. "Sleep, Brother."
When the monk left, the chapel door sighed shut and the room held its breath. Akuma sat, then lay upon the bench, hands folded across his ribs in a posture borrowed from funerals. The candles made shallow lakes of light. He tried to feel what he had felt before the grave—bone ache, fever rash, love for warmth. Nothing answered. Only the steady roll of other people's blood through the walls, like the ocean in a shell.
He stared at the painted Madonna until her eyes flickered in the candle's draft, and he realized he had not blinked for a long time.
"I will not be only hunger," he whispered to the wood. "Not only teeth."
The chapel gave him no reply. But the door did. It opened again on a triangle of night, and a figure in the wedge of cold. A girl, barefoot and carrying a clay bowl in two hands.
She froze when she saw him, and the bowl knocked lightly against the doorframe. Milk lapped the rim.
"Brother Elias said," she managed, "you were wet. I brought this to warm you. If you don't want it, you can pour it to the dog."
He sat up. Her hair was dark and braided back. Her heartbeat was quick and neat, like a sparrow's flight. She had a scar on her knuckle where a goat had bit her or a knife had slipped. He knew these things as quickly as he knew the shape of her face.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Mira."
"Thank you, Mira."
He took the bowl. The milk was warm—he could feel the heat against his palm though his skin no longer told him truthfully what warmth meant. He lifted it and let it touch his lips. His tongue recoiled. It was not blood. But he forced himself to swallow, and the liquid made a thin white line down the hunger's throat. It did not satisfy. It insulted.
"You're not from here," she said, recovering a measure of courage once the milk left her hands. "We don't get travelers. The road goes nowhere. Unless you don't plan to stay."
"I don't plan," he said, surprising himself with honesty. "Not well."
Her mouth quirked. "My mother says not planning is for kings and fools."
"Which am I?"
She weighed him, as Elias had, with simpler tools. "Fool," she said. "Kings don't come wet to the chapel."
"Wise mother."
"Dead," she said, and shrugged so he would not have to answer. "Good night."
He watched her leave and felt the slow recoil of hunger when a living thing moves farther away. He set the bowl by the altar and lay back down, and after a while he learned how to pretend to sleep. He closed his eyes and let his chest rise and fall. He counted heartbeats through the wall until dawn bled toward the windows.
And there pain woke.
The first blade of light touched the sill and the air between it and his face turned knife-sharp. It cut his skin without crossing it. Smoke licked his cheeks. He rolled from the bench and crawled beneath it, mouth bared in a soundless snarl. The sun moved like a patient hunter's arrow across the floor. Where its shaft reached, the boards sizzled faintly, like fat in a pan. He clamped his teeth together and waited. It felt like being salted alive.
Elias opened the door to a hiss of light and almost dropped the bell rope at the smell. Akuma forced his face into the shadow and tried to make a voice from the ash in his throat.
"I am ill," he said. "Light… pains me."
Elias stared. Alarm sparked; compassion smothered it. "You can stay," he said quickly. "Until evening. Some fevers leave eyes sore. But—" He hesitated. "It is safer if you don't go out until dusk."
Akuma gave the bench leg a grateful touch as if it were a priest's hand. "Safer for all."
It was a long day. He learned to creep from bench to bench as the sun's blade slid across the nave. He learned the smell of cooling wax and old wood. He learned how hunger changed when it could not walk—it became thought, and thought sharpened it like a whetstone.
He thought about Mira.
He thought about Elias, kneeling in the aisle to pray at midday, his pulse a long, calm rope in his neck. About the man from the night before whose name he had never known. About the deer. About himself.
By evening, the sun had climbed to the bell's iron and slid down the far wall; the light turned from knife to suture and closed itself, mercifully, at the edge of the door. Elias returned with a loaf that smelled of barley and ash. He set it with the remaining milk, and to hide how the bread repulsed him, Akuma tore a piece small enough for a child and chewed until the paste fell past his tongue.
"There is talk," Elias said, eyes on the Madonna as if speaking to her. "A man bled white in the woods, found at dawn. I told them a boar might do it. No one believed me."
"A boar with hands," Akuma said.
Elias looked at him then, properly. "If there is a hunter out there, he did not come through our gate."
Akuma considered saying I did. Considered saying I am. Instead he asked, "Who keeps your gate?"
"Headman Varo," Elias said, and something in his voice curdled slightly around the name.
"You dislike him."
"I forgive him," Elias corrected. "I fail at liking."
"What is he?"
"A man who uses fear to collect more than taxes," Elias said softly. "He takes a woman's goat and calls it a tithe. He takes a boy's hand when it reaches for a fallen apple and calls it law. He keeps three dogs and two grudges. The dogs stay near his door and the grudges he carries like saints' bones."
"Every village has a wolf," Akuma murmured, almost to himself. "Even before I came."
Elias's mouth tightened. "A wolf wears its teeth outside. Varo keeps his in his smile."
They ate their theatre of supper, and when the first spring of dusk touched the door lintel with its cool finger, Elias rose. "You can go now," he said. "If you're going." He hesitated, then added, "If you are not, come back before dawn. I'll leave the door unlatched."
Generosity. Or pity. Or both, braided.
Akuma stood. He did not thank the monk. The word snagged in his throat against the memory of fire on skin. He nodded and slipped into the lane, the air as gentle as a hand passing over buried coals. Night made him again.
He walked with his eyes open and his mouth closed and tasted the village as if it were a fruit. Little sweetness. Much bruise. He drifted past doorways like a rumor and came to the headman's house—broad, neat, boasting a fence taller than the chapel's fence and as useless. The three dogs lifted their heads, then whined and tucked their noses under their tails. He stepped over them.
Varo sat inside at a table spread for one. He counted coins with stained fingers; the clink sounded like small shackles. Beside him an iron cudgel leaned against the wall with the polish of practice. A girl's ribbon lay on the table, faded blue. Not Mira's. Another child. Another small looting.
Akuma stood in the doorway long enough to be seen. Varo's hand went to the cudgel. When he saw it was a man, not a ghost, his grip loosened into the theatrical ease of someone who likes to perform his courage.
"You. Stranger." He lifted his chin. "Did Elias fetch a beggar into my village without asking me?"
"I did not ask," Akuma said, and stepped inside.
Varo's eyes narrowed at the insolence, then widened at the face that carried it—a clean, grave face that did not belong to a thief. He liked beauty like other men liked wine: it loosened him. He sat back. "You've a look," he said. "Where are you from?"
"From hunger," Akuma said. "I have a toll to collect."
Varo grinned. "From me?" He pushed the coins into a heap. "All tolls come through my hands."
"That is why I came to your door."
The dogs whined again, though asleep. Varo's grin thinned. He reached for the cudgel; Akuma was already moving. He did not cross the space so much as remove it. One moment two men stood separated by a table, the next Varo's throat brushed Akuma's knuckles as if they were already old friends. The cudgel wobbled uselessly against the wall.
"Who—" Varo began, but the word gave him his neck. Akuma pressed two fingers to the pulse there, feeling the drum. He did not open his mouth. He did not show his teeth. He held the man the way a shepherd holds a lamb when he means to shear it—steadily, kindly, almost with affection—and watched Varo's eyes reflect himself back, dark and patient.
"Listen," Akuma said. "Hear what you are."
Varo stilled. Beneath his skin, the river ran. The sound filled the room. The coins became stone. The ribbon became fog. There was only that wet rope beating time against his fingers.
"This is the toll," Akuma murmured, and took it.
He did not drink as he had drunk from the villager in the trees. He did not ravish. He managed himself. He let the blood come slow, as if tipping a cup, and while it came he watched Varo's face move through astonishment to fury to pleading to nothing. When it finished, he laid the headman gently on the table and put the ribbon in his hand.
He left the coins where they were.
Outside, the night felt cleaner.
He did not go far. He climbed the chapel's steps and sat under the eaves where shadow kept the last light from touching him. He listened as the village discovered what had happened. A dog found Varo and howled. Feet thudded. A woman screamed, not for the man himself—no one loved him that much—but at the hole power leaves when it is taken. A dozen guesses bloomed in the square like weeds. Bandits. A jealous husband. A curse. The monk's boar with hands.
Elias came at a jog, breath disciplined but shaken. He vanished into the headman's house. He came out again slower, face pale.
Akuma waited. He waited until Mira's ribbon-blue voice cut the air: "The dogs didn't bark. Dogs bark at strangers."
Silence weighed that observation, and found it too heavy. It fell through their theories and opened a different pit.
"Someone they knew," a woman said.
"Someone who can quiet dogs," a man answered.
"A witch," another offered, gratefully. "A witch did it."
Elias spoke then, not to quell them—he could not—but to guide the panic into a trough. "Stay within," he called. "Until morning. Lock your doors. Pray."
They drifted. Doors claimed bodies. Candles trembled into being behind shutters. The square emptied until Elias stood alone beneath the bell—then he looked up. His gaze brushed the eaves where Akuma sat. He did not see him. He felt him.
"Stranger," Elias said into the dark. "If you are there and if you hear me—go."
Akuma considered. He could go. He could never come back and let the village make a story that would outlive the truth. He could be a season, not a man.
He rose. The eave's shadow held him like a promise and let him down the steps without a whisper. He crossed to the square where Elias stood with shoulders squared against an enemy he would never name. Akuma stopped just outside the lantern's most honest light.
"I took a wolf," he said.
Elias flinched only a little. He looked over, saw the shape, and did not lift his lantern to bludgeon it with brightness. He kept it low, as one keeps a flame from wind. "Wolves eat because they must," he said. "Men choose."
"I chose," Akuma said. "The village will be safer for a time. That is not virtue. It is—" He searched for a word that fit his mouth. "—management."
Elias let out a ragged sound that might have been a laugh, if laughter had bones. "And when the safety ends?"
"Then another wolf comes," Akuma said. "Or I am hungry again."
The monk studied him a long heartbeat. "What are you?"
Akuma thought of the grave, the deer, the man, the milk. Of the sun cutting the floor like a blade. Of the ribbon that had once cinched a girl's hair and had tonight tied a dead man's hand to a story someone else would tell.
He touched the edge of the lantern's glow with his boot and felt it kiss him like a sting. "The first," he said.
Elias understood something in that answer and refused the rest. "Go," he repeated, voice soft and desperate. "Before I change from priest to coward and call a name that will bring men with hooks."
Akuma turned. He could feel Mira at a window, eyes bright, thinking about dogs and strangers and what makes one quiet. He could feel Varo cooling. He could feel his own hunger sitting in him like a moon at the bottom of a well.
He walked back to the creek.
On the bank he washed his hands again, though there was no blood on them. He stood until the sky's black softened to gray and the first cruel fingernail of sun reached up for him. He stepped back into the trees and let the forest have him until night would take him again.
As he went, a thought came and would not leave: if he could choose, then he could learn to choose well—or at least, less badly. Hunger would not teach him. Men would. They were a book of soft pages and loud margins. He would read them. He would learn which wolves deserved the toll and which lambs he must not touch. He would wear the wool until it fit like skin.
The world did not yet know his name.
But by dusk it would begin to whisper it, in the small space between fear and relief, where gratitude trembles with suspicion:
Akuma.