The trail was a wound in the world.
Ezra moved through the sleeping city like a shadow pulled along a taut, invisible wire. The corrupted Essence,the Stain,wasn't a scent or a sound, but a psychic disturbance. It felt like walking through cobwebs that vibrated with a silent, dissonant hum. It grated against his refined senses, a vulgar graffiti sprayed across the subtle tapestry of human emotional resonance.
He passed a late-night bakery, its windows fogged with the warmth of rising dough. The baker, a stout man flour-dusted to his elbows, was humming an old folk tune, his aura a simple, yeasty contentment. Normally, Ezra might have paused to appreciate the wholesome flavor. Now, the pure emotion felt painfully fragile against the backdrop of the Stain he pursued. It was a candle flame in a vast, polluted dark.
The trail led him out of the picturesque mews and into the Warehouse District. Here, the emotional landscape changed. The dominant flavors were fatigue, the low-grade anxiety of precarious employment, and the occasional sharp spike of drunken bravado or despair leaking from tucked-away bars. The Stain cut through it all, a scar of absolute emotional nullity.
It ended at the river.
Or rather, at the black, lapping water under the rusted iron girders of the Grafton Bridge. The Stain didn't stop at the bank; it simply… ceased, as if the perpetrator had stepped off the edge of the world.
Ezra stood on the damp concrete, the river's cold breath lifting the edges of his coat. He closed his eyes, extending his senses not outward, but downward, into the psychic impression left behind. It was a risk,touching the Stain directly could contaminate his own essence, could leave a psychic burn. But he needed to know.
He dipped a tendril of his awareness into the residue.
Cold. Not the cold of winter, but the cold of absence. A sucking, greedy void. Then, flashes: not memories, but their inverted silhouettes. A wedding ring feeling heavy and foreign on a finger stripped of love. The taste of a favorite meal, ash on the tongue of joy. A child's laughter heard as a meaningless, irritating noise. It was a chronicle of theft. The Hollowing hadn't been a single, violent act, but a systematic, cruel savoring. The Variant had fed on every positive emotion linked to those core memories, sucking the meaning dry until only the empty husks remained, rattling in the mind of the victim.
And there, beneath the nullity, was a faint, familiar note. A psychic timbre he almost recognized. It was buried deep, like a voice heard from the bottom of a well. Before he could place it, a sharper, more immediate sensation jolted him back to the present.
Fresh Stain. New, and close.
His eyes snapped open. It was coming from upstream, near the old brick sugar refinery that had been converted into expensive, echoey lofts. The corruption on the air was acrid, active. The Hollowing was happening now.
Ezra moved. He became a streak of darkness between the pools of sickly yellow streetlight, his physical speed a mere extension of his will. The ethical calculus was simple and horrific: he had to stop it, or at least interrupt it. Direct confrontation with another Variant was forbidden, a cardinal rule of their solitary existence. But witnessing a Hollowing and doing nothing? That was a different kind of damnation.
The source was a ground-floor loft with a large industrial window. Through it, he saw a scene staged like a perverse domestic tableau.
A man in a tailored suit,architect or banker, Ezra guessed,was on his knees. He wasn't restrained, but his posture was one of utter collapse. Before him stood the Variant.
Ezra 's breath caught. He had expected a monster, some twisted visage. This was worse.
The Variant looked… ordinary. A woman, perhaps in her late twenties, dressed in simple, dark jeans and a sweater. Her brown hair was pulled back in a messy bun. She held the kneeling man's face gently in her hands, her thumbs stroking his temples as a lover might. Her eyes were closed in an expression of deep, sensual concentration. From her, the psychic straw was not a delicate filament, but a thick, pulsing conduit. It wasn't sipping overflow; it was a root, drilling deep into the man's psychic core, pulling up everything.
The man's face was a slack mask. Tears streamed down his cheeks, but they were empty of feeling,the last physical vestiges of an emotion already consumed. His aura, once a complex blend of ambition, stress, pride, and love (Ezra could see the faint, fading echo of a family photo on the desk), was being systematically unraveled. The colors,violet of aspiration, green of envy, rose of affection,were being siphoned away, leaving behind a spreading gray wash.
Ezra acted without conscious thought. He focused his own will, a weapon he rarely used, and pushed.
It wasn't an attack, but a shove,a violent burst of raw psychic energy aimed at the connection between them.
The woman-Variant staggered back as if struck physically. The thick conduit snapped, recoiling into her with a psychic backlash that made the windowpane vibrate. Her eyes flew open. They were not the eyes of a monster, but human eyes, wide with shock, then narrowing into slits of fury. In that moment, Ezra saw it. Beneath the fury, a flicker of the same hollow coldness she inflicted. And that buried note in her psychic signature flared, now clear and unmistakable.
Hannah .
The name surfaced from the silt of his long memory. A fledgling. Turned during the London Blitz, a girl who had fed on the rampant, collective fear before he'd lost track of her. She'd been sensitive, almost poetic in her feeding. That had been eighty years ago.
"You," she hissed, the word carrying across the distance, sharp in his mind as much as in his ears. Her voice was the same, yet corroded. "The old ghost. The careful one."
The man on the floor slumped sideways, unconscious but not Hollowed. Not completely. The process had been arrested, though Ezra could see the gray stain had spread far. He might recover fragments, but his emotional life would be like a painting left in the rain,blurred and faded forever.
"Hannah ," Ezra said, stepping closer to the window. His voice was low, carrying the weight of decades. "This is an abomination."
"Abomination?" she laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "It's efficiency. It's strength. Sipping from the froth while they drown in feeling… it's the abomination, Ezra . We were made to rule this feed, not to graze at its edges like frightened sheep."
She took a step toward the window, and he saw the changes now. Her ordinary face was a mask over a terrifying vitality. She was bloated with stolen Essence, vibrating with a power that was crude, overwhelming, and deeply unstable. She was a gourmand who had gorged until she was sick, and now craved only more intense flavors to feel anything at all.
"You've broken the First Law," he said, the words a judgment.
"I've transcended it," she spat. "And you won't stop me. Your morals make you weak. I can taste your hunger from here, Ezra . It's a thin, pathetic thing. You're a ghost living on crumbs."
She was right. The power radiating from her dwarfed his own carefully maintained reserves. A direct conflict would be suicide. But he wasn't here to fight her to the death. He was here to bear witness.
"I know your signature now, Hannah ," he said, holding her gaze. "I know your Stain. Every Hollowing you perform, I will find. I will see it. And others will, too. You think you're the only one who has grown tired of the shadows?"
A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. The Variant world was secretive, but it had its own networks, its own gossamer-thin lines of communication. A monster like her could not remain hidden forever.
"Then I'll be long gone," she said, her confidence returning, laced with spite. "This city is just a starting point. There are billions of them, Ezra . Billions of walking, feeling banquets. And I have an eternity to dine."
With a last, contemptuous glance at the moaning man on the floor, she turned and melted into the shadows at the back of the loft, moving with a speed that mirrored his own.
Ezra did not follow. He looked at the victim, his heart a cold stone in his chest. He had saved the man from total annihilation, but what life had he preserved? A half-life, emotionally maimed.
He pulled out a burner phone from his coat,a modern tool for an ancient creature,and dialed emergency services, giving the address in a distorted voice before crushing the device in his hand.
As the first distant wail of a siren pierced the night, Ezra turned from the window. The hunt was no longer a matter of tracking a trail. It was a war. And he, the careful ghost, the connoisseur of crumbs, was hopelessly outmatched.
He looked toward the city's glowing heart, a banquet of emotion he could no longer bring himself to touch. Not with Hannah ' Stain polluting the air. His own hunger began to gnaw again, sharper now, edged with a new, terrifying flavor.
The flavor of dread.