I climbed the remaining steps slow and quiet, breath held. The second-floor hallway stretched ahead, lined with doorways yawning open into shadow.
A faint draft stirred the curtains, sending dust motes swirling in the flashlight’s beam. Another sound, a shuffle, quick and soft, from the far end.
“Alright, Casper,” I muttered under my breath. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The first room I checked was empty except for a collapsed mattress and a nest of beer cans. Probably teenagers.
The next was worse. Graffiti scrawled across the walls in neon spray paint, crude jokes about demons and ghosts. I kicked an empty bottle, listening to it rattle away across the floorboards.
“Haunted house,” I said. “Sure. By idiots.”
But then I heard it again. A faint scrape, like a chair leg dragging across warped floorboards. Too deliberate to be the wind, too slow to be an animal. I stilled, listening.
The sound came from the last door at the end of the hall. This one was closed.
For a second, I wondered if I was imagining things. I’d been drinking enough that the edges of the world were still a little soft, sounds warping and echoing weirdly.
Maybe it was the whiskey whispering. Maybe I was hearing ghosts that weren’t there. But then it came again. A scrape, then silence.
My pulse picked up, sharp and heavy, thudding behind my ribs like it wanted out. I steadied my breathing, blade poised, every muscle pulling tight beneath my coat.
My boots made no sound on the warped boards as I crept closer, each step measured and slow.
The air felt colder here, sharper somehow, and beneath the thick smell of dust and mildew I caught something faint, metallic and coppery.
Blood. Fresh. That sobered me fast. My fingers curled tighter around the hilt of my knife.
I counted to three, muscles tense and ready, then shoved the door open hard enough to make it bang against the wall. The noise echoed through the house, a hollow crack that made my ears ring.
The room beyond was dim. Light slanted through a hole in the roof, painting the air in a slow-falling haze. Dust drifted through the beam like ash from some unseen fire.
There, crouched by the window, was a man. No. Not a man. He froze when the door slammed back, his head snapping toward me.
His eyes caught the light first. Silver-gray, unnaturally bright in the half-dark, like moonlight skimming over water. Too sharp and too aware.
For a second, I actually thought I was hallucinating. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. He just stared at me, like he wasn’t sure if I was real either.
His skin was pale enough that the shadows clung to him, outlining the sharp cut of his cheekbones and the hollow beneath his jaw. His hair was a soft, ashy blond.
It was too long, a little tangled, like he’d been dragging his hands through it for hours. His shirt was thin and frayed at the collar, hanging loose over narrow shoulders, sleeves torn at the cuffs.
He looked too thin for the weather, collarbone and veins a faint whisper beneath that translucent skin. Beautiful, in that fragile, breakable way the dead sometimes were. He looked young. Mid-twenties, maybe.
Human, if you ignored the stillness. The way he didn’t sway, didn’t blink, didn’t shift his weight even slightly. The unnatural pause between each breath, too long to be alive.
Yet something about him felt alive. The faintest flicker of movement. His fingers curling tight around the window ledge, his throat working like he was trying to swallow.
My first thought was that he didn’t belong here. My second was that I’d never seen anything or anyone so unfairly gorgeous in a place this ruined. For one breath, neither of us moved.
My body screamed to act. To finish it before he lunged, before he got the upper hand. But my mind… my mind snagged on the sight of him.
Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the whiskey. Or maybe it was something darker. Something that had been gnawing at me since that night in the forest.
Damn me, but if we’d met anywhere else, if he were human and if I weren’t half-drunk and half-broken, I would’ve hit him up without a second thought.
There was something magnetic about him, something that made the room seem smaller, the air too tight in my lungs. Not hunger, exactly. Not yet, but close.
He licked his lips, quick and nervous, and my gaze followed the motion before I could stop it. His mouth looked soft, wrong kind of distraction for a night like this.
