Chapter 1
Ikneltontheworn wooden boards of St.Mary’s parish, and felt nothing of the cold of the January night.My knees bore no impression of discomfort—though once, in my former life, such kneeling had set my joints to aching after but a few minutes’ prayer.Now I might have knelt there for hours, days even, and felt naught but the absence of feeling itself.This was my condition.This was what I had become.
My companions filled the pews in silent vigil.Desiderius maintained his soldier’s posture, fingers laced together as though in prayer even before the service began.Beside him, Ruth’s spine curved in that mortal slouch death had failed to correct, while Rebecca’s restless form never settled, her limbs in constant, subtle rebellion against stillness.We four composed a peculiar congregation.Our bodies drew no breath save by habit, expelling no fog of warmth into the frigid air.Father O’Malley’s breath, by contrast, rose in pale clouds as he moved before the altar, his aged lungs laboring against the winter’s bite.
Flames wavered atop their wicks, casting trembling shadows across the church’s stark walls.In the last year, I had come to find kinship with such shadows—not merely for their utility in hiding, but for their nature.Like me, they inhabited a liminal realm, belonging neither to darkness nor light, but suspended eternally between two states of being.
Father O’Malley made his way to the altar, each footfall betraying a frailty I hadn’t witnessed since autumn.The chalice wavered in his grip, his fingers seized by more than the common palsy of advancing years—something vital was ebbing from him.I could not help but notice the new concavity of his posture, the way his vestments draped like banners from a framework too diminished to support them properly.Candlelight carved cruel geography into his countenance, deepening the valleys beneath sunken eyes and accentuating the newfound barrenness of his once-full cheeks.
He began the Mass in Latin, his voice thin and wavering.“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”
I made the sign of the cross, as did the others.The gesture brought no pain as it used it—it was only when we touched the consecrated elements themselves that our affliction made itself known.
The Latin phrases flowed like a familiar river.For a year now, I had immersed myself in their rhythms, so different from the plain English services of my childhood.I remembered my mother’s gloved hand resting on mine as we sat together in our family’s regular pew, while my father’s resonant baritone led the congregation in hymns.Back then, salvation had seemed as straightforward as the straight-backed pews—the saved on one side of an invisible line, the fallen on the other.Now I knelt somewhere in the shadows between.
Father O’Malley’s voice fractured mid-prayer, the Latin word “recuperat” dissolving into a ragged cough that echoed through the empty church.He pressed a handkerchief to his lips, shoulders trembling with the effort to compose himself.Something within my hollow chest constricted at the sound.Though my heart lay still, I felt each of his struggles as if they were my own.These sacred words had become my sustenance over these months—not merely preserving this shell I inhabited, but nourishing whatever fragment of humanity still flickered within the darkness I had become.
The priest raised the host, his hands shaking such that the thin wafer nearly slipped from his grasp.“Hoc est enim corpus meum,” he intoned.This is my body.
I bowed my head, pressing my folded hands more tightly together.The anticipation built within me—a hunger, yes, but not the hunger that drove us to seek blood in the darkness.This was different.This was needful in ways I lacked words to express.
When Father O’Malley elevated the chalice, the wine within caught the candlelight and glowed deep crimson.“Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei.”This is the cup of my blood.
Something tightened in my throat.Desiderius’s jaw locked like a vise.Ruth’s knuckles blanched against dark wood as she gripped the pew.Rebecca stared at the chalice, her gaze unblinking, ravenous.The pain would come—we knew this—but so would that inexplicable magnetism drawing us toward the cup’s contents.We hungered not for the wine, but for its transformation, for that sacred alchemy that would turn common elements into divine sustenance, the only nourishment that could feed what remained of our souls.
As the final words of consecration faded into the church’s shadows, Father O’Malley’s trembling fingers lowered the chalice to the altar.Metal struck stone with a sharp, hollow note that echoed through the empty nave.His weathered hand splayed against the altar’s edge as he braced himself.I watched his shoulders sag beneath the weight of his vestments, certain that his frail frame would crumple before us like a paper saint.
For a moment, his body wavered like the candle flames.Then, vertebra by vertebra, he gathered himself upright and pivoted toward our congregation, his face a mask of determination beneath the strain.
“Corpus Christi,” he murmured as I approached the altar rail.
I opened my mouth.He placed the host upon my tongue.
The pain struck immediately and absolutely.Fire bloomed where the wafer touched, searing through my mouth and down my throat as I swallowed.I’d learned not to flinch, not to betray the agony that accompanied this most sacred act.The sensation was not unlike the burning I’d felt the first time I’d attempted to pray after my transformation.I’d learned to welcome this pain.It reminded me I was not beyond redemption.It proved that some part of me remained capable of touching the divine, even if that touch brought suffering.
And beneath the pain came something else—a sensation that wove through the agony like a golden thread through black velvet.Not warmth in the physical sense, but a presence that defied description.I would not presume to name it grace, yet what else could reach the empty chambers where my soul once resided?As I knelt there, the wafer dissolving on my tongue, those vacant spaces briefly filled.The monster receded.The weight of damnation lifted, if only for these precious moments at the rail.
I returned to my pew, my throat still burning, my chest filled with that strange dual sensation of torment and peace.
Desiderius approached next.He received the host with the same rigid formality he brought to all things, but I marked the tightening around his eyes, the briefest compression of his lips.Even he, with all his centuries and his cold conviction, felt the pain.
Ruth followed next.Her steps to the altar rail carried the hesitancy of the uninitiated—a woman who had once confessed to me, voice low and uncertain, that before her transformation she had never set foot in any house of worship.When Father O’Malley placed the host on her tongue, her entire frame tensed.A small, involuntary sound escaped her throat as she swallowed and stood before she made her unsteady way back to our pew.
Rebecca lunged toward the rail, her body a blur of motion that betrayed our inhuman nature.Her eyes burned with a ravenous gleam that made my dead heart clench—not the sacred yearning I knew, but something feral.When Father O’Malley placed the host on her outstretched tongue, her entire body convulsed.The wafer disappeared down her throat with desperate urgency, and when she lurched back toward our pew, her entire frame convulsed in waves that threatened to tear her apart.Blood-tinged tears escaped from beneath her lowered lashes, marking her pale face with thin scarlet ribbons.
Father O’Malley’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper for the final blessing.“Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus.”
“Amen,” we murmured in unison.
Somewhere, a draft stirred the candle flames, though my dead flesh registered no change in temperature.Incense saturated the air—frankincense and myrrh mingling with beeswax—the perfume of divinity that had become, for me, the fragrance of remembrance.
We did not leave immediately.None of us moved from our pews as Father O’Malley slowly, painfully, divested himself of his vestments and extinguished the altar candles.The shadows deepened.The church grew darker still until only a few votives remained flickering in their red glass holders.
I studied the worn prayer book in my hands, though I’d nearly memorized its contents.The pages were thin as onionskin, the words printed in archaic script.Some previous parishioner had marked certain passages with faded pencil—the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, the twenty-third Psalm.“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
My lips formed the psalm’s words, but my mind splintered in two directions—one reaching toward David’s fearlessness, the other sinking into as terror that I was beyond such comfort.I wanted to believe.I needed to believe.Yet the shadows I walked through were not merely around me but of me.I wondered occasionally if this ritual was merely postponing a damnation I’d been predestined to suffer.
Father O’Malley emerged from the vestry, his movements slow and labored.He’d changed into his simple black cassock.
