Black.
Silence.
Regret.
Hunger.
Sleep.
It was my litany. Small consolation.
I am undone. A relic. A wretched beast sealed beneath the earth, cursed to rot beneath God’s discarded stars.
Dramatics came easily to me. The theater of my ruin pleased me in a way that made me hate myself.
Then, after how much time I could not begin to guess at, light cut through the rest of it all. Not a distant star. Not a mercy. A precise, obtrusive brightness. It struck me like a blade.
Have the heavens opened? Has my torment at last come to its end?My first reaction was not prayer. It was a snarl contained in the deepest part of my mind.
A pull seized me, the persistent tug of a line threading through my ribs and knotting at my soul. It had intent, and held me with a stubbornness that felt familiar and unacceptable.
Something urged me upward. Energy hummed through my limbs, alien and vivid after so long in the void. A single thread had found me. It did not loosen. It did not falter.
I realized then that I had awakened—that someone had woken me. The realization was not one of joy. It was recognition of an injustice corrected only to begin anew.
My fingers twitched as if testing the world. Muscles contracted with almost comical reluctance. When I opened my eyes, I met a rawness of light I had not measured in three centuries. Everything around me blurred into formless shapes. Where the magic that sealed me in the coffin had been, that ever-persistent tug now coiled, searing through my bones and leaving me ragged with want.
Then a sound—ridiculous and utterly alive—cut through the void with language from a world I did not know. It should have made no difference. Yet, it did.
The voice said, “Cool, cool, love that for me. Latin in the murder cellar. Fucking classic. At least I’m going to die in a cardigan.”
The tone was light, female. Slurred enough to mark intoxication. Sharp enough to be human. Or a witch. I did not know the patterns of modern idiom, but I understood mockery. I cataloged it and returned it with all the courtesy of a man used to silence.
The witch mocks me now. Let her.
Shapes resolved into a female. Her face—pale, freckled perhaps—held astonishment and that peculiar delight people showed when surprised.
She was not what I expected.
Her brown hair tumbled in careless curls, as if it refused to obey. She wore yellow—bright and indecent—that dared the darkness to swallow her. Small lemons adorned her dress. The neckline square, her shoulders bare. A white cloak hung from her arms, pinned with a badge that read something I could not yet decipher. On her feet, heavy black boots, scuffed and practical.
Have the women of this age abandoned corsets entirely?
I cataloged details because the world required it. Her legs were bare, scandalously so, and I was both offended and fascinated by the sight. She clutched a glass bottle as though it were both courage and defense.
She was intoxicated and fierce, observing me as if I was a specimen she neither trusted nor meant harm.
Pain seared my chest. Not the phantom pains of old wounds. A terrible, precise hunger fanned from my core. I had not felt this for nearly four hundred years. It was not desire. Desire waspolite. This was directive. It tightened every fiber of me. My nakedness struck me then, but there was nothing to be done about it.
Her scent came next, an intrusion on my senses. Ripe plum. Blood-orange peel. Cinnamon. Salt. It mapped itself along my memory like a language I understood without studying. Warmth. Human warmth. The pulse at her throat sang a rhythm that called to something older than time itself.
The world narrowed to the sound of her pulse. Steady. Close. I focused on it, unable to do anything else. The urge to move forward, to feed, was instant and absolute.
Instinct pulled. Instinct demanded. It was only discipline, honed from centuries, that pulled me back. I had never given in to that hunger without purpose.
A small, sharp sound escaped the woman’s mouth. The syllables of her surprise meant nothing to me, but their cadence did. She repeated it until it became a chant:
“Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.”
