Chapter 2 Kit
KIT
By the time the order came through, hand-delivered by some messenger who couldn’t even look me in the eye, I was halfway through sobering up.
The message was simple. “Investigate reports of unusual activity at the old Ashford property, outskirts of town. Possible haunting.”
Haunting. Right. The Guild didn’t believe in ghosts. None of us did. Spirits weren’t our jurisdiction. But apparently, sending a washed-up hunter to chase creaky pipes was cheaper than firing him outright.
So I went. It was midnight when I reached the place. The Ashford house loomed at the end of a weed-choked drive.
It was three stories of sagging timber and boarded windows, roof half collapsed on one side.
“Haunted,” my ass. The only thing likely to kill anyone here was tetanus.
I stood by the rusted gate for a minute, staring at the silhouette against the clouds. Part of me wanted to turn around, head back to The Black Dog, and finish what I’d started with that bottle.
No one would know. No one cared.
But another part, the stubborn, stupid sliver that still remembered what pride felt like, said no. If the Guild wanted a report, I’d give them one.
They could shove their ghosts, but I wasn’t going to hand them an excuse to brand me useless. I pushed the gate open. It shrieked like a dying thing.
The path up to the front door was more mud than stone, and the air smelled of rot and wet wood. When I stepped onto the porch, one of the boards gave a groan deep enough to echo. I snorted.
“Yeah, definitely haunted,” I muttered.
Inside, the house greeted me with the stale breath of dust and neglect. The entryway was a graveyard of broken furniture, wallpaper hanging in tatters.
My boots left prints in the gray film covering the floor. Somewhere in the dark, a rat scurried.
“Boo,” I said flatly, and my voice bounced back from the walls.
If I’d been sober, maybe I’d have been more cautious. But after enough whiskey, even the supernatural starts to lose its teeth.
I dragged out my hunting knife, the familiar weight of it settling into my hand. The metal caught what little light seeped through the cracks in the boards, flashing dull silver.
Still sharp and still mine.
I swept the beam of my flashlight across the hall, half expecting to see some idiot kid trying to film a ghost video. Nothing but debris. I sighed.
“Easy pay, easy write-up,” I told myself. “Haunted by bad plumbing and raccoons.”
The stairs groaned under my weight as I started up. Halfway to the landing, a crash sounded from above. It was a sharp, splintering noise that sliced through the silence.
Instant sobering. I sent the Guild an update, telling them there might be some possible supernatural activity and that I’ll update them soon.
Then I tightened my hand on the knife. Adrenaline burned away the last traces of alcohol, and for the first time all evening, I felt alive again. Something moved up there. Something real.
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.
That was the thing about vampires. They were predators, but they didn’t always need fangs to draw blood. Sometimes, all it took was looking at you like that. Like they saw you.
My fingers tightened on the knife hilt.
Then I saw the empty glass bottles scattered around him, smeared with blood. His hands were stained with it, shaking. He looked more ghost than predator.
And for the briefest, stupidest heartbeat, I thought of Declan.
Declan, pale and snarling in that forest, Donovan standing between us, saying he loved him. Saying it like the world wasn’t about to fall apart around us.
The same fear in this vampire’s eyes. The same fragile, human terror. Something inside me snapped. I lunged.
He gasped, stumbling backward, knocking over one of the bottles. It shattered, blood splattering dark against the floorboards. I slashed for his throat. The cut was clean, quick, efficient.
The motion was muscle memory, drilled into me by years of training.
But he was faster than he looked. He twisted aside, the blade slicing air where his neck had been. His shoulder hit the wall with a thud, eyes wide.
“Wait. Please—”
I didn’t wait. I went for him again.
Anger roared through me, hot and bitter. Every ounce of humiliation, every sneer from the Guild, every night I’d drowned in liquor instead of sleep.
All of it focused into the swing of my knife. I wasn’t just killing a vampire. I was killing every reminder of what I’d lost. He ducked low, my knife grazing his arm.
He hissed, pain flashing across his face. Then, instead of fighting back, he retreated. The vampire raised his hands, backing toward the corner.
“I don’t want trouble,” he said, voice shaking. “Please.”
That voice. It wasn’t monstrous. It wasn’t even threatening. It was scared. I hesitated, just a breath, just enough time for the silence to rush in around us.
He was panting, clutching his arm where dark and sluggish blood welled from the cut. His chest heaved. He looked extremely weak, it was laughable.
“You’re a vampire,” I said, the words harsh and breathless. “You shouldn’t even bleed like that.”
“I’m not…” He winced. “I mean, I am, but not like—”
“Not like what?” I snapped.
His throat worked. “Not like the ones you hunt.”
I laughed, ugly and hollow. “You think that line’s new? I’ve heard it a hundred times before.”
“It’s the truth.” His voice cracked. “I haven’t hurt anyone. I feed on animals. Please. I’m not your enemy.”
The knife trembled in my hand. I wanted to laugh again, to sneer, to drive the blade home and end this pathetic conversation. That’s what the Guild had taught me.
Don’t listen. Don’t hesitate. Hesitation gets you killed.
But the problem was, I had hesitated once, when Donovan said those words in the forest. I love him, Kit. And I’d lost everything.
Now here I was again, knife in hand, staring at another vampire with the same damned look in his eyes. I took a step closer, just one. He flinched, pressing back against the wall.
“Name,” I said.
His lips parted. “Simon.”
Simon. The name didn’t fit. It was too plain, too human. Maybe that was the point. It sat in the room between us like a dare, a thumbtack I couldn’t pull out.
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, whispered Don’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.