I could end him then and there. Clean and simple.
Drive the blade home, tell the Guild the “haunting” was just a leech nesting in a derelict house, collect whatever thin praise they passed out to bored men on dull mornings.
Maybe they’d even stop whispering about me for a week. Maybe someone would clap me on the shoulder and call me back in. But my hand wouldn’t move.
The knife hilt sat cold and foreign in my palm, heavier than it had been a second ago. My pulse thudded so loud I could feel it all the way up into my jaw.
Simon looked small, smaller than he’d seemed from the doorway, like the light could blow him away. He was clutching his arm where my blade had nicked him in the scuffle, fingers white around torn fabric.
He looked at me like he was already making peace with the blade. Like he’d rehearsed his last words and folded them into a polite ending. Maybe he’d accepted it.
The part of me that’d been a good man, whisperedDon’t.I despised that whisper the way you despise pain, because it was true and because I wanted, more than anything, to ignore it.
So I did the only loud, stupid thing that made sense in the moment. I snarled, turned on my heel, and smashed my fist into the nearest wall hard enough to rattle the plaster.
Pain bloomed up my arm, hot and bright, a clean, welcome hurt. It grounded me. It reminded me I was still a man who could break things and be broken in turn.
“Dammit,” I muttered, more to myself than to him.
When I looked back, Simon hadn’t moved. He simply watched me, wide-eyed, jaw working as if he’d been caught between relief and terror.
He pressed his injured arm to his ribs like it might stop whatever dark thing inside him was leaking out.
The light from the hole in the roof skated across the pale planes of his face and made him look like he was sculpted from moonlight and bad decisions.
For a ridiculous, infuriating heartbeat I was struck not by his danger but by how he looked vulnerable. By the way the angle of his neck revealed the pale line of a vein, by the soft tremor in his mouth.
I could have laughed at myself if the world hadn’t been full of things to kill.
Instead I swallowed, the taste of adrenaline and old whiskey foul on my tongue, and stepped forward, knife still hanging useless in my hand. The hunter part of me told me to steady my grip, to finish the job.
The human part, told me to lower my blade.
3
SIMON
He didn’t movefor a long time after punching the wall.
The sound had rung through the house, shaking plaster from the ceiling and scattering dust like gray snow. I should’ve taken that chance to bolt.
To slip through the half-broken window, vanish into the woods, and put as much distance between me and him as possible. But I didn’t move either. Maybe it was shock or maybe it was stupidity.
Or maybe it was the fact that the man standing a few feet away from me, knuckles bleeding, eyes dark with something halfway between fury and grief, didn’t feel like the kind of monster my sire had warned me about.
Except he was worse.
He was a hunter, and I knew what that meant.
I could smell it on him beneath the whiskey and sweat. The faint metallic tang of silver, the sharp bite of gun oil and iron. His knife glinted in the faint light like a promise.
Even though he looked drunk, even though his shoulders sagged and his stance wasn’t steady, he was still dangerous. Hunters were always dangerous. My sire had made that clear.
I’d only known him a few days before he left. I hadn’t even caught his name. One night he’d dragged me out of an alley behind the clinic where I worked, his eyes feral and his hands cold.
The next thing I knew, my neck was burning, the world tilting. Then darkness. Then hunger.
When I woke up, everything hurt. My heart beat too fast, my throat burned, and the world was too much. I could hear rats under the floorboards, feel the hum of the city like electricity beneath my skin.
