The College of The Undead
The College of The Undead
ACT ONE
CHAPTER ONE — Old Town Blues
CHAPTER TWO — History With the World’s Most Interesting Professor
CHAPTER THREE — The Party
CHAPTER FOUR — Chemicals and Cons*
CHAPTER FIVE — Mourning at the Mocha Latte
CHAPTER SIX — The Suite on the Thirteenth Floor
CHAPTER SEVEN — Ferventia alba
CHAPTER Eight — The Flower and the Falling Light
CHAPTER Nine — Hunger in the Moonlight
ACT TWO
CHAPTER Ten — The Wrong Side of Town
CHAPTER ELEVEN — Vampires and Protocols
CHAPTER TWELVE — The Economics of Desire
CHAPTER Thirteen — Blue Light and Black Jazz
*I just rewrote chapter four with a different ending. I also need to rewrite large sections of the book to flow/make sense.
CHAPTER ONE — Old Town Blues
Believe me or not, this is my story.
It begins on a night so bitterly cold the wind felt like it could sandpaper skin right off bone. Montalia always looked half-dead in winter, but that night the whole town felt frozen in place—every streetlight haloed by drifting snow, every storefront shuttered, every passing car a ghost smearing light across the frost. I drove with the heat maxed out, the windshield still fogging, struggling to keep my eyes open. I’d worked back-to-back shifts at Wright’s Widgets again, and my vision blurred in that way where everything smears into vague shapes.
Wright’s Widgets isn’t glamorous. It’s a squat brick building with windows that haven’t been clean since the Reagan administration. We make components for military vehicles—little up-and-down button assemblies designed to withstand sandstorms, artillery recoil, and incompetent soldiers. My dad calls it “honest work,” but he doesn’t have to stand eight hours hunched over a conveyor belt listening to the machines scream like strained metal animals.
My supervisor, a man whose personality is indistinguishable from a rusty nail, hovered at the end of my table counting parts as if catching me in a mistake would give meaning to his life.
“You piece of shit,” he said without looking up, “there’s two thousand nine hundred and forty-two parts here, not two thousand nine hundred and forty-three. I trust you to know how to count. If you can’t, maybe you need glasses?”
He slapped the clipboard on the table so hard the plastic cracked. I didn’t argue. Not worth it. People like him don’t want explanations; they want targets. I’d spent all night sorting parts, checking tolerances, making sure the drill holes weren’t off by a hair. Actual quality control. Not the mindless “count and pack” the rest of the line does. But no one at Wright’s Widgets praises diligence. They praise speed.
When the shift ended, I drove home through the snowstorm, headlights carving shallow tunnels in the dark. I parked, trudged up the icy steps of our overstuffed house, and collapsed onto the couch—just for a minute, I told myself. Just to breathe.
I woke to daylight stabbing through the blinds and the muffled chaos of my siblings arguing over cereal. My phone buzzed in my pocket. An email from my manager. Subject line: Call me ASAP.
I already knew what it meant.
The email was written in that passive-aggressive corporate dialect where no one uses the word “fired,” just a string of euphemisms meant to avoid admitting responsibility.
"I couldn’t get ahold of you by phone last night. Do not show up at your job tomorrow. Wright’s Widgets reported that you wandered off and took an hour to count a supply that should take a normal person five to ten minutes. We’ll discuss your status at a later date."
My status. Right.
People like that are terrified of conflict. They don’t say, “You’re fired,” because that would mean committing to the sentence. They say, “Don’t come in,” and leave the rest hanging in the air like a noose.
I scrolled down, expecting more bureaucratic poison, but instead I saw a different message entirely.
"Due to your impressive academic performance, you’ve been accepted into Roseberg College for the Liberal Arts at White Pine University."
For a second, I thought I’d hallucinated it. I blinked at the screen. Read it again.
Accepted.
Me.
To that school.
Roseberg was one of those places you heard rumors about growing up—full of genius rich kids and professors who wrote books thicker than the Bibles in motel drawers. A school where people actually cared about ideas instead of just clocking hours on a shift they hated.
I sat up slowly, heartbeat hammering, rereading the lines as if they might vanish if I breathed too hard. I checked the date. Checked the sender. Checked everything except my own disbelief.
“Colt?” My mom’s voice came down the hall. “Can you help me get your sister ready? I’m running late.”
I stared at the email. My hands were shaking.
I wasn’t allowed to hope—not really. Hope had always been something for wealthier people, people who didn’t have younger siblings counting on them, people whose parents didn’t depend on their paychecks to keep the lights on. But something cracked open in me in that moment, something I hadn’t felt since middle school before the world flattened me into the shape it wanted.
I walked into the kitchen holding the phone like it was radioactive.
“Mom,” I said. “I got accepted… into Roseberg.”
She froze, a box of cereal in one hand, a look of stunned pride blooming behind her exhaustion. For the first time in months, the kitchen felt brighter.
My dad came home an hour later, hearing the news in wordless pieces from my siblings. He hugged me hard—one of those rib-cracking hugs that fathers give sons on rare, important occasions. But behind his smile, I saw the worried flicker in his eyes—the mental calculation of what losing my paycheck would mean.
I understood. I’d been doing the same math in my head since the email arrived.
Still, I couldn’t turn it down. Not this chance. Not when everything in my life was telling me run while you still can.
That night, after everyone fell asleep, I lay awake listening to the radiator hiss. Snow fell in soft sheets outside the window, blanketing the familiar world of Montalia. The dim yellow streetlights glowed through the darkness, and for the first time, the town looked smaller than it ever had—like something I was finally outgrowing.
I didn’t know it then, but this was the last night Montalia would feel ordinary.
The last night anything would make sense.
The last night before I stepped into a world that would twist reality around me and swallow the life I knew whole.
Believe me or not, this is where it began.
CHAPTER TWO — History With the World’s Most Interesting Professor
Roseburg College of History and Architecture was the kind of building that made you feel underdressed just by walking past it. Classical neo-Roman gothic—towering arches, stained-glass windows depicting scenes I definitely hadn’t seen in any Bible, and stone gargoyles perched along the rafters like the school’s personal jury. The place looked like it had swallowed a cathedral and decided to become a university afterward.
Inside, the main auditorium was already packed. Every seat filled, every aisle taken. The air buzzed with that first-week nervous energy where everyone pretends to be smarter and more confident than they are. I squeezed into a spot near the middle, clutching my notebook like it could protect me from whatever academic gauntlet was about to hit.
A short, stout professor with wild gray hair shuffled onto the stage, carrying a single leather-bound tome the size of a medieval murder weapon. He cleared his throat, and when he spoke, his voice rolled out in a clipped Mid-Atlantic New England accent—polished yet vaguely archaic, like a radio host from the 1930s who’d been cryogenically frozen and accidentally revived to teach college freshmen.
“Welcome, students,” he said. “This semester, you will require precisely one piece of academic material: my book, The Ascension to Power in the Medieval Era.”
He held it up, almost reverently.
“You may purchase it in the college bookstore, though previous editions are wholly applicable. Feel free to borrow a copy from a student who survived last semester. Or,” he added with a mischievous glint, “engage in independent research. I encourage it. Your midterm will reflect the depth of your intellectual bravery.”
A few students laughed; most didn’t. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to.
He set the massive book on the podium with a sound like a coffin lid slamming shut.
“This text is professional, rigorous, and—by the standards of this institution—relatively light reading. A modest twelve hundred pages.” He paused meaningfully. “In my day, you would never have skated by with so little.”
I glanced around. Half the class looked like they wanted to transfer immediately.
The professor paced the stage, hands clasped behind his back.
“Let us begin with something simple,” he said. “A question. What is the world’s first kingdom?”
Hands shot up, including one from a young woman in the front row. He pointed to her.
“Well,” she began, “that depends on how you define the word kingdom. Would something like the Israelites during the patriarchal era count? They moved around often, but—”
The professor cut her off gently, though not unkindly.
“You did not answer my question,” he said. “You gave contingencies. Useful contingencies, mind you. But contingencies all the same.”
He proceeded to list possible contenders—Sumerian city-states, early Egyptian dynasties, Nubian polities predating Abrahamic traditions, scattered Mesopotamian lineages older than recorded theology. He rattled them off with ease, as if he had personally visited each one.
He ended with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“You see, the answer depends on definitions, but definitions themselves are shaped by power. And power,” he tapped the book, “is the true subject of history.”
He closed the tome with a soft thud.
“For next class,” he said, “read chapter one. There will be an essay—yes, an essay, not a multiple-guess quiz. I expect analysis, not regurgitation. There is no single correct answer, but incorrect answers… do exist.”
He peered out over the room.
“For example: one may say, ‘I did not like the Germans in World War Two because they were communist.’ That is an unfactual opinion.”
A ripple of confused laughter passed through the hall.
“Class dismissed.”
Students bolted for the exits, desperate to escape before he assigned them a second textbook written in hieroglyphs. I sat for a moment, staring at the enormous stained-glass windows filtering pale morning light through scenes of wars and coronations I didn’t recognize. The professor’s presence lingered in the air. Heavy. Ancient. Like he’d taught this lecture for longer than the building had stood.
I didn’t know it then, but this was the first sign that Roseburg’s greatest secrets weren’t hidden in the library stacks or faculty archives.
They were standing right in front of us, wearing tweed jackets and speaking like time hadn’t touched them in decades.
CHAPTER THREE — The Party
Classes had barely let out when a guy whose name I didn’t catch walked up beside me, slapping a hand on my shoulder like we’d known each other since preschool.
“Dude, you going to the Bleaker Street party tonight?”
I blinked. “Bleaker Street?”
“Yeah, the bar and inn three blocks down. Biggest mixer of the semester. You have to show. Everyone goes.” He grinned like that meant something. “Start time’s whenever. Don’t be a stranger.”
He vanished into the crowd before I could respond.
I shrugged it off. I had reading to do.
Back in my dorm, I cracked open the professor’s thousand-page opus, The Ascension to Power in the Medieval Era. It was… incredible. Dense, obsessive, and written with the kind of authority that made you wonder whether the professor had actually lived through half the events he described. I fell down the rabbit hole until the words started blurring together.
When I finally checked the time, my phone read 9:02 PM.
My stomach growled. My brain throbbed. And, against my better judgment, I decided: fine. I’d check out the party. Just for a bit.
The cobblestone street leading to Bleaker felt like a leftover from a deleted timeline—worn stones, old lamps burning gas-colored light, the faint smell of snow and cigarette ash. The Bleaker Street Bar & Inn announced itself with a bright neon sign, glowing art deco letters flickering in electric pink and gold. Two jocks were muscling a keg through the side door, shouting over each other as if the keg could hear them.
Inside was another world entirely.
A 1920s-style bar—dark wood, brass fixtures, velvet curtains—collided violently with raunchy 2000s pop and a handful of current chart-toppers blasting through hidden speakers. The air smelled like cologne, spiced wine, cherry cigars, and something metallic underneath. Everyone wore suits or evening gowns like they’d been summoned to a costume ball and taken it a little too seriously.
A man in a crisp white suit—handsome in a way that felt curated—approached immediately.
“First time here?” he asked smoothly.
I nodded.
“Allow me to welcome you with a drink.”
“I don’t drink,” I said. “Religious reasons.”
(They weren’t.)
He smiled without offense. “Then a non-alcoholic Saryon’s Red. It tastes like wine, not grape soda. You’ll like it.”
He didn’t wait for a yes. Just gestured to the bartender, who poured something deep crimson into a tall glass. I took a cautious sip. He was right—it didn’t taste fake. It tasted… expensive. And old.
A stage in the corner hosted a tall Black man in suspenders, singing 50 Cent like an early 1900s blues musician—slow, soulful, every lyric dragging across the room like smoke. Couples danced in sync beneath dim lamps, moving with perfectly choreographed swing steps as if they’d practiced for months.
It would have been romantic, in a surreal way, if I hadn’t felt so out of place.
I turned to leave and nearly walked into a wall disguised as a woman. She was at least six foot four, elegant and terrifying in a black satin dress.
“You’re cute,” she purred. “Want to go upstairs?”
She did not ask my name.
I did not ask hers.
“Oh—uh—I should probably get going,” I muttered.
She rolled her eyes dramatically and drifted off toward a cluster of men with the confident stride of someone who rarely heard “no.”
My stomach churned. Either I’d drunk something, or the Saryon’s Red wasn’t as alcohol-free as advertised. My head spun—lights too bright, music too loud. I stumbled outside into the cold alley and immediately puked behind a dumpster.
Wonderful. First party of the year, and I was baptizing the trash cans.
That’s when I heard it:
laughter. Male. Drunk. Mean.
“Hey, I bet she’s not expecting us,” one of them said.
My head snapped up.
Three frat bros swaggered down the alley, already circling someone. A red-haired woman walking alone, pretending not to notice them.
Rosaline.
The same woman from the party last night.
Tall. Pale. Moving too slowly, as if inviting trouble.
My stomach twisted.
I shoved my hand deep into my jacket pocket, shaping my fingers to imitate the outline of a gun.
“Is there a problem?” I said.
The words came out steadier than I felt.
The men froze. Looked at my hand. Looked at my face. None of them were sober enough to assess the probability that I was bluffing.
“You’d best be going if you know what’s good for you,” the tallest muttered.
I stared until their bravado cracked and they stumbled away, cursing under their breath.
Rosaline had already slipped off into the darkness—quick, quiet, and curiously disappointed. As if I’d ruined something she’d wanted to happen.
I didn’t chase her. I didn’t say anything. I just walked out of the alley and let the cold night swallow me.
The next morning, I woke with the worst hangover of my life despite not remembering drinking anything but faux wine.
On my desk was an envelope of thick cream paper, sealed with wax.
Inside, in perfect cursive:
Meet us at 4th 3rd Street, behind Saint Luke’s Church. Tonight. Midnight.
My hangover throbbed harder.
Whatever was happening in this town, I was already too deep to pretend I hadn’t noticed.
CHAPTER FOUR — Chemicals and Cons
The bus ride across campus felt unnecessarily long, but the Computer Science Lab was on the far east end of Roseburg’s sprawl—a whole different architectural ecosystem from the stone Gothic halls I’d gotten used to. Glass walls, steel beams, thermostats set permanently to meat-locker temperature. When I stepped off the bus, frost filmed my breath instantly.
Outside the lab, a dozen students in hoodies clustered by the double doors. One of them waved me over.
“You here for the programming club?” he asked.
I nodded, trying to look more confident than I felt. “Yeah.”
He grinned and held the door for me.
Inside, rows of computers glowed in the dim light, screensaver swirls lighting up the room like a digital aurora. The group settled into a semicircle. I pulled out my laptop like it was a rare animal I didn’t fully trust.
The club leader—a lanky senior with a ponytail and spectacles that kept sliding down his nose—launched into the meeting.
“Alright! Today we’re setting up development environments: Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS editors, and basic automation tools.” He clapped his hands. “By the end of the semester, you’ll be overworked enough to understand why debugging is the ninth circle of hell.”
We installed packages, talked about front-end versus back-end architecture, and why starting your first game project with an RPG was “a declaration of insanity.”
It was weirdly comforting: a room full of people building imaginary worlds while I was still struggling to understand the real one.
As everyone packed up, the nerdy guy with glasses approached me directly.
“You’re Colt?”
“…Yeah?”
He shoved a padded envelope into my hands with zero ceremony.
“Good. They need this delivered immediately. Chemistry lab. South side of campus. Route Six bus line.” He adjusted his glasses. “Couriers don’t ask questions. They deliver.”
I blinked. “Couriers?”
But he was already walking away, waving over his shoulder.
I boarded Route Six anyway, envelope tucked into my jacket.
It took exactly three stops before I realized I was being followed.
Two of the frat guys from the alley stood at the back of the bus—hoods up, eyes locked on me with the glassy aggression of men who think they have something to prove. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe they’d seen me get on.
But when I pulled the cord early and hopped onto Route Twelve…
they followed.
When I slipped off near the math department…
they followed.
My pulse hammered. I ducked into a restroom, praying it wasn’t packed.
Seconds later, the two idiots barged in, laughing.
I grabbed a mop bucket full of gray water and tipped it across the tile just as they charged.
Both instantly wiped out, legs flying, arms windmilling, crashing into the sinks like drunken bowling pins.
“HEY—WHAT THE—!”
“Sorry!” I called over my shoulder. “Floor’s wet!”
I bolted out the side door, looped behind a row of bare winter trees, and didn’t stop running until the only sound behind me was wind.
I pulled off my hoodie, shoved it into my backpack, and threw on my Roseburg ball cap. A new silhouette, a new student.
Perfect.
The Chemistry Building loomed ahead, a concrete brutalist block with narrow windows that looked more like arrow slits than anything meant for light. The halls smelled like acetone, dust, and something faintly sweet.
I rounded the corner into the lab, out of breath, and nearly collided with a very tall, very slender man wearing rubber gloves and a lab coat so precisely fitted it looked custom-tailored.
“Greetings,” he said calmly. “Ah. You’re the courier.”
No confusion. No hesitation.
I wasn’t a visitor. I was expected.
I handed him the padded envelope.
“I trust you handled it carefully,” he said, already donning protective goggles.
He opened the package with meticulous care, revealing a vial of shimmering purple liquid. Under the fluorescent lights it pulsed faintly, as if alive. He withdrew a syringe, tapped the smallest droplet into a glass beaker.
The liquid hissed like escaping steam.
“Excellent,” he murmured. “This is precisely the compound requested.”
He slipped off his gloves and reached into his pocket, drawing out a battered Nokia flip phone that seemed wildly out of place in a lab full of modern equipment.
He dialed.
A deep, scrambled voice answered.
Their conversation sounded like coded nonsense—forks, plates, spoons, quantities, shipments—spoken in the tone of two old men discussing antiques rather than chemicals.
He ended the call and turned back to me.
“You’re cleared,” he said. “Report to Finch.
Your courier work begins immediately.”
“Courier work?” I repeated weakly.
He smiled in a way that made my skin crawl.
“Yes. You’ve already completed your first delivery. Don’t be late for the next.”
I stepped back into the hallway, envelope gone, heart pounding.
My phone buzzed.
Nice work.
More soon.
I wasn’t doing data processing.
I wasn’t joining a club.
I wasn’t even working a campus job.
I had just become a courier for something dangerThat was it. No instructions. No signature.
Just confirmation.
ous enough to require codes, secrecy, and men willing to follow me across campus.
And somewhere in this labyrinth of buildings and old stone towers…
someone named Finch was waiting.
CHAPTER FIVE — Mourning at the Mocha Latte
Thursday came too fast.
My first history class had been on Tuesday, and I still hadn’t fully recovered from the professor’s 1,200-page “light reading assignment.” The lecture hall was half-awake when I walked in, clutching my essay on the Crusades. My handwriting looked like it had been produced by someone falling asleep mid-sentence. I wasn’t proud of it.
After class, as everyone filtered out, someone called my name.
“Colt Thomas?”
I turned.
Rosaline stood beside the lectern, arms folded loosely, radiant in that effortless way only people who never ran out of sleep or time could manage. She wore a casual dress—nothing flashy, nothing loud, but somehow it looked expensive anyway. Even her watch gleamed like it had been carved out of the concept of money instead of metal.
“I’m Rosaline,” she said. “I’m the teaching assistant for this course.”
My throat went dry. “Oh—uh. Hi.”
She tilted her head the slightest degree, studying me like a problem set.
“You look like you didn’t sleep,” she noted.
“I didn’t,” I admitted. “I was working on the essay.”
A faint, almost amused smile tugged her lips. “Your argument was… unconventional. I’ve never heard anyone claim that was the root cause of the Crusades.”
“Unconventional good or unconventional bad?”
“Unconventional interesting,” she said. “But your prose suggests someone who wrote it in the middle of an existential collapse.”
That was accurate.
She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear. “Are you free tonight?”
My brain stalled. “Free?”
“For coffee,” she clarified, though her tone implied she didn’t ask people things twice. “I usually stop at Mocha Latte after evening lab work. Cookies after ten are half price. Meet me there?”
I should’ve said yes immediately. Instead, I panicked internally for three seconds, then nodded.
“Yeah. I’ll be there.”
I needed a gift. Something that didn’t scream try-hard. Something thoughtful.
Roseberg had a ridge trail behind the east dorms — a steep climb, but nothing I couldn’t handle. My mom always said our ancestors must have been mountain goats the way the men in our family were built. I started hiking upward, boots crunching against frost, the air sharp with pine and cold.
Halfway up, I saw it.
A white orchid.
Growing alone on a ledge.
Fragile. Rare. Out of place.
I didn’t know orchids were common in this region — because they weren’t.
I didn’t know they were used to refine glamour — because I wasn’t supposed to.
I only knew it looked important.
I knelt, picked it carefully, and carried it down the hill like it was contraband.
Mocha Latte smelled like burnt sugar, cocoa powder, and warm exhaustion. The place was packed with late-night studiers, professors grading papers, and the occasional jazz playlist humming like background static.
Rosaline walked in five minutes after me.
She didn’t so much enter a room as rearrange it around her.
Her dress made the whole café look underdressed. Her watch caught the light — a sleek, silent machine more expensive than a Rolex, though it didn’t resemble any brand I’d ever seen. She looked rested, composed, aware of every movement around her.
I looked like a man who had lost a fight with sleep and came in second.
She sat across from me, folding her hands neatly. “You brought something?”
I swallowed and offered the orchid. “I found this on the ridge. Thought it was… I don’t know. Cool.”
She froze.
Just for a second.
Barely perceptible.
But something shifted behind her eyes — not surprise, but something closer to recognition. Or alarm.
Then she smiled, perfect and effortless again.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It reminded me of you,” I said before thinking.
Her expression twitched — not flattered, exactly, but caught off-guard.
No one had compared her to something delicate before.
She recovered quickly. “Thank you.”
The barista brought cookies and coffee. Rosaline stirred hers with slow, precise motions, watching the spoon spin.
“So,” I said, trying to sound casual, “Physics and psychology?”
“And music theory,” she added. “Both master’s degrees are finalized. I’m finishing a doctorate now.”
I blinked. “Isn’t that… a lot?”
“It keeps me occupied.” She shrugged lightly. “Besides, growing up in a big house wasn’t nearly as glamorous as people think. Our home was… large. Empty. Lots of chores the maid refused to do properly. I had to learn discipline early.”
I tried to picture chores in a mansion.
My chores were dishes, laundry, and occasionally unclogging the sink.
Hers probably involved polishing heirlooms worth more than my childhood home.
“But you’re proud of your degrees?” I asked.
She nodded. “Very.”
Her posture softened for the first time.
“Not many things in my childhood were mine,” she said quietly. “My work is.”
I didn’t know why, but that landed hard.
We talked for another hour. She analyzed everything I said — not in a judging way, but like I was a theorem she couldn’t solve. She asked about my family. My classes. My essay. My insomnia.
And when we finally stepped out into the cold night, she said:
“Thank you for the orchid, Colt.”
The way she said my name made something in my chest tighten.
She didn’t touch me. Didn’t hug me. Didn’t ask for another date.
She simply walked away, radiant and composed, leaving me standing there holding an empty coffee cup and wondering why the hell my heart was pounding like I’d just sprinted uphill again.
I didn’t know it then, but the orchid wasn’t just a gift.
It was the first thread tying me to a world I wasn’t ready to see.
CHAPTER SIX — The Suite on the Thirteenth Floor
By Friday night, I had completed three courier tasks. Each one stranger than the last. Each one “just documents,” though delivered in envelopes thick enough to stop bullets. I didn’t ask questions. Couriers didn’t.
Around midnight my phone buzzed with another message:
Bleaker Street.
Deliver to Finch.
Avoid delays.
The envelope felt wrong this time—lightweight, filled with nothing but text sheets.
It made no sense. If the computer science lab had documents… why not send an email?
But questions were above my pay grade.
Or whatever my pay grade actually was.
Bleaker Street Bar was quieter at 1 a.m., the decadent energy replaced by a low, warm glow. I walked past empty tables and velvet curtains to the back, where music drifted through a cracked-open door.
Not normal bar music.
Classical.
Violent.
Precise.
Played at a level no human wrists should be capable of.
I pushed the door fully open.
Finch sat at a grand piano in his immaculate white suit, fingers blurring across the keys. He played one of the hardest piano pieces known to man like he composed it himself.
He struck the final chord—something dissonant and triumphant—and turned to me.
“You’re late by forty seconds,” he said pleasantly.
“I—caught the bus,” I replied.
“Yes,” he said, waving me forward. “I know.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes.
I handed him the envelope. Finch opened it immediately, sifting through the sheets as though the pages themselves whispered to him. Some contained machine code—long columns of numbers. Others were covered in an unfamiliar script: looping, angular, almost hieroglyphic.
“What… language is that?” I asked.
Finch looked up with mild amusement. “Not one they teach here.”
He shuffled the pages back into the envelope, tapped it once against his palm, and set it aside.
“So,” he said lightly, “tell me how you handled the little… problem on the buses earlier this week.”
My stomach tightened. “I didn’t think anyone knew—”
Finch’s laughter was soft, almost human. “Colt, I knew before you did. The moment you boarded Route Six, you were under observation.”
“That sounds illegal.”
“That sounds accurate,” he corrected.
He rose from the piano, straightening his sleeves with ritual precision.
“The situation has been dealt with. Permanently. You won’t see those men again.”
A cold weight settled in my gut. I didn’t ask what dealt with meant.
Finch gestured to the envelope. “Effective immediately, I’m your supervisor. Courier work will continue, but compensation will be… more appropriate.”
He handed me a check.
My brain misfired.
Not hundreds.
Not even thousands.
Numbers with too many zeros for anything legal or sane.
“For a delivery?” I whispered.
“For loyalty,” Finch said.
Then, as an afterthought: “You’ll stay upstairs tonight. Suite thirteen-fifty-two.”
“Thirteenth floor?”
“This building has thirteen floors,” he said, tone suggesting that only fools believed otherwise.
He pressed a gold card into my hand. It had raised ridges and dots instead of a magnetic stripe, nothing like a standard hotel keycard.
“Rest, Colt. You’ve earned it.”
The staircase spiraled down, then up again through a hall that shouldn’t have existed based on the building’s exterior. When I reached Room 352, the gold card flipped the lock.
Inside:
A king-sized bed draped in sheets softer than anything I’d ever touched.
A chandelier with crystal arms, antique and humming faintly like distant electricity.
Bookshelves lined with physics, calculus, chemistry, and history texts.
A carpet with a design I thought was decorative… until I stepped closer.
Beneath the fibers, barely visible, was a glowing circle.
Lines.
Symbols.
Ruins that pulsed like slow breathing.
I froze.
Blink.
The glow vanished.
Dream, I told myself.
Just exhaustion.
A trick of the light.
I collapsed onto the bed and let it swallow me whole.
When I woke, sunlight streamed through the window.
Two and a half days had passed dreamless within minutes.
Not hours.
Days.
My body felt weightless.
My vision sharp.
My head clear in a way I had never experienced.
Thoughts that normally felt tangled and sluggish now moved with impossible precision.
Equations I’d never studied arranged themselves neatly in my mind.
Chemical processes mapped themselves automatically.
Historical dates and patterns surfaced like memories instead of facts I’d barely skimmed.
It made no sense.
It felt like cheating at being alive.
Monday morning, I walked into the chemistry lab for my next required experiment. Two students were already there, struggling through the protocol.
Before they could explain what they were doing, my hands were already moving.
“We split the tasks,” I said. “Everyone weighs the metals. Everyone mixes the reagents. Nobody waits for anyone.”
It was an assembly line.
Efficient.
Perfectly choreographed.
The experiment was done in half the time.
They stared at me like I’d ascended.
Maybe I had.
Or maybe something in that room on the thirteenth floor had rewired me.
Either way, I didn’t feel like Colt Thomas anymore.
And part of me wondered if that was the point.
CHAPTER SEVEN — Ferventia alba
Monday afternoon’s chemistry lab should’ve been uneventful. We were halfway through a unit on transition metal reactions, something I shouldn’t have been able to perform as confidently as I now did. My hands moved precisely, cleanly, like they’d memorized procedures my brain had only seen once.
When the experiment ended, the grad-student professor—Dr. Wade, thirty-something, chronically exhausted, lab coat permanently wrinkled—stopped me before I could leave.
“Thomas,” he said. “Stay behind a moment.”
My stomach tightened. Usually only two things got said after those words: “You failed” or “You cheated.”
But Dr. Wade’s face wasn’t angry. It was curious.
The rest of the class filtered out. Glass doors swung shut. The hum of fume hoods softened into the kind of silence that felt intentional.
He walked to the far wall and flipped a switch I’d never noticed.
A section of cabinetry slid sideways with a mechanical groan, revealing a narrow staircase spiraling downward.
Dr. Wade looked back at me once.
“Come on,” he said.
The air grew warmer as we descended, tinged with something sweet and metallic. At the bottom was a room so clean it felt surgical. Stainless steel counters, containment units, sealed bins. A row of machines that looked half pharmaceutical, half alchemical. And at the center…
A glass tank containing several blossoms.
Not orchids.
Not anything I recognized.
Petals like bone-white paper, veins that shimmered faintly when the fluorescent lights flickered.
The same flower I picked for Rosaline.
But wrong.
Bigger.
Stranger.
Cultivated.
Dr. Wade gestured to it with the ease of someone discussing a routine ingredient.
“That,” he said, “is Ferventia alba. Locally? Very rare. Naturally occurring in only a handful of places. But here—” he tapped the tank—“carefully grown.”
My mouth felt dry. “What do you… use it for?”
He opened a containment drawer and withdrew a vial of purple-gold liquid. It swirled as if stirred by something alive.
“This,” he said quietly, “is glamour.”
My heart stuttered. “The same glamour people… talk about? Rumors and urban legends?”
“Rumors,” he said, “are what happens when people don’t understand a market.”
He handed me a pair of gloves. I put them on automatically.
“Glamour is the most valuable substance known to man. Priceless, if priced honestly. Fortune, influence, eloquence, reputation, persuasion, confidence — all of it becomes easier. Not guaranteed.” He wagged the vial. “But easier. If you have the capacity, glamour sharpens it. If you don’t, no amount will save you.”
“So you can’t use it to do something impossible.”
“Correct. You cannot dunk a basketball if you cannot jump; you cannot seduce if you cannot speak; you cannot rule if you cannot think.” He gave me a pointed glance. “It doesn’t create talent. It clarifies it.”
“And… you’re expanding production?”
He smiled, small and wolfish. “A market this lucrative must always expand. There is demand from clients of… considerable reputation. Politicians. Academics. Investors. Certain families. We need people who can assist with precision.”
He turned to me fully.
“And after your extraordinary performance today, Finch believes you may be one of them.”
Finch.
The name landed like a stone.
I swallowed. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“We synthesize glamour here in three phases,” Dr. Wade said, walking to a machine humming quietly. “Petal extraction. Catalyst integration. Distillation into usable serum.” He placed a hand on the tank. “The flower is fragile. The product even more so.”
“So why me?”
He looked at me not with suspicion — but evaluation.
“Because the process requires steadiness, speed, and the ability to follow orders. Traits you demonstrated during your lab session. And because Finch spoke highly of your… resourcefulness.”
The air in the room felt heavy. Too warm.
I exhaled slowly. “What happens if someone mishandles the product?”
Dr. Wade didn’t blink.
“The value of the ingredient is high. The value of the customers is higher. A single compromised batch could cost us resources, reputation, balance.” He lowered his voice. “We cannot afford mistakes.”
Another beat.
“Or weak links.”
I nodded without saying anything.
Dr. Wade handed me another pair of gloves, thicker this time. “Let’s begin with observation. You will not touch glamour today. You will watch.”
The white flowers pulsed faintly beneath the lights, breath-like.
Alive in a way they shouldn’t be.
The same species I’d picked for Rosaline… except that one had not glowed.
Unless I hadn’t looked closely enough.
My chest tightened.
“Thomas,” Dr. Wade said, pulling me back to the present, “if you work here, you work in silence. With precision. With loyalty.”
My gloved hands trembled slightly.
“I can do that,” I said.
I didn’t know if it was true.
But the room smelled like sweet metal and destiny, and the world outside felt suddenly very, very far away.
CHAPTER Eight — The Flower and the Falling Light
The first thing I did when I got paid was wire my family money.
Not suspicious money. Not “life-changing” money. Just enough to take pressure off the bills I knew were piling up at home. A moderate transfer—substantial, but not flashy. Something they could believe came from a campus job.
It felt good. Clean.
Like maybe I wasn’t turning into someone else entirely.
I was still thinking about it when Rosaline texted.
“Walk with me today?”
No fancy language. No cutesiness. Just five words that landed like a meteor in my chest.
The park sat at the western edge of campus, where the old forest met the steep ridgeline. Winter in Montalia had always meant frostbite winds and gray skies, but today the air was unseasonably warm—soft, almost springlike. Sunlight hung in a pale haze across the path.
Rosaline walked ahead of me, long strides effortless, posture perfect. She wasn’t dressed for cold or heat; she was dressed like weather simply adjusted around her.
“Come on,” she said without looking back. “There’s something I want to show you.”
We climbed the trail until the forest thickened. She stepped off the path, crouched beside a patch of underbrush, and plucked a single pale leaf off a plant I recognized instantly.
Ferventia.
The same flower I’d picked for her.
The same species growing in Finch’s subterranean lab.
She held the leaf out to me.
“Taste it.”
I blinked. “Is that… safe?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Colt. You survived drinking Saryon’s Red. I think you’ll manage a leaf.”
I hesitated only a second before putting it on my tongue.
Warmth spread instantly across my palate—subtle, soft, not euphoric but kind.
Like a memory of joy rather than joy itself.
Rosaline watched closely.
“Unrefined, it only gives a brief lift,” she said. “But when processed—concentrated—it becomes glamour. Something far more potent.”
My pulse quickened. “So that night… at Bleaker… when I felt—”
“It had no effect on you,” she said simply. “Which was impressive.”
She said it without flattery, without hidden meaning. As if stating a clinical fact.
I swallowed the last of the taste.
It lingered, faint like the afterglow of realizing something too late.
We kept climbing until we reached the ridge. The view stretched across the valley, but it didn’t look like Montalia. The light here felt wrong—warmer, richer, painted with colors I’d never seen during winter. The air didn’t bite. It embraced.
Sunset spilled pink-gold fire across the sky.
I reached into my coat pocket.
“I, uh… got you something.”
Her attention sharpened. “Colt—”
I held out the necklace.
A massive gemstone—deep crimson, glowing faintly in the dying light.
A stone so perfect it could’ve been carved from frozen blood.
Rosaline froze completely.
“This is…” Her voice thinned. “This is a Bloodstar Ruby. There are only two stones this size in existence.”
She touched it with trembling fingers, like it might burn her.
“Where,” she whispered, “did you get this?”
I had no good answer.
Just the truth:
“I wanted to give you something worthy of you.”
Her breath hitched—an involuntary sound she clearly hadn’t meant to make.
The sun dipped.
The last light framed her hair in a halo of burning copper.
She looked ancient. And young. And impossible.
She stepped closer.
We kissed.
Slow at first, then hungrier. She pressed against me, cold and warm and terrifying and beautiful. The world narrowed to the taste of her lips, the fading sunlight, the pulse thundering in my ears.
The forest held its breath.
The sun flashes it’s gone.
CHAPTER Nine — Hunger in the Moonlight
I woke to moonlight.
Silver beams spilled through bare branches onto the ridge where we lay tangled in blankets and discarded clothes. The world was silent except for Rosaline’s steady breathing beside me.
She sat up abruptly.
“It’s been… too long,” she murmured. “I can feel it. I need to feed.”
I blinked sleep from my eyes. “Feed?”
She didn’t answer. She reached for the Ferventia flower beside her—one I hadn’t noticed growing out of the rock. She bit its stem sharply.
Then she turned toward me.
“I won’t take much,” she warned.
Before I could speak, her lips brushed the inside of my arm.
A quick pressure.
A precise puncture.
Barely more than a sting.
Warmth drained from the point of contact, but only a small amount. She pulled away immediately, looking steadier but mournful.
“You taste human,” she said softly. “And… something else.”
My voice shook. “Rosaline… what are you?”
The wind rustled faintly.
She clasped her knees to her chest.
“This village is cursed,” she said. “Anchored outside of space and time. The vampires who lived here centuries ago should have died with the rest of our kind. But this place shelters us… imprisons us… sustains us.”
She touched the Ferventia bloom with reverence.
“We cannot feed without the flower. Without it, we die. We starve. We unravel.”
“And the glamour?” I asked.
“It allows us to survive in this half-reality. It keeps the boundaries intact. It shapes perception. It is the only reason we still walk.”
I exhaled, heart pounding. “So vampires were hunted to extinction. Everywhere except—”
“Except here,” she said.
Her eyes met mine—ancient and aching and afraid.
“And now you’re trapped in it with us.”
CHAPTER Ten — The Wrong Side of Town
Montalia’s streets always looked different after sunset—like the real town slipped away and something older stepped in to replace it. Colt and Rosaline walked downhill toward the bus stop, the night warm against the early winter air.
They were almost at the corner when a man stepped out from behind the laundromat. Tall. Lean. Weathered face. Expensive coat. The kind of posture that said “ex-military” or “someone who didn’t mind burying bodies if the job demanded it.”
He stared straight at Rosaline.
“Well, well,” he said, voice gravelly. “Look what wandered into the wrong side of town.”
Colt froze.
Rosaline’s eyes narrowed.
The man smirked. “Get lost. Both of you. You don’t belong here.”
Colt opened his mouth—and instantly regretted it.
“Sir, we don’t want any—”
The man jabbed a finger at Rosaline, cutting Colt off.
“I was killing your kind,” he growled, “when you were still an itch in your father’s pants.”
Colt blinked. “Your… kind?”
Rosaline’s body went rigid. The change was instant, primal, like all oxygen had been sucked out of the air. Her pupils narrowed into inhuman pinpoints.
The man’s grin didn’t falter.
He knew exactly what he’d done.
“Easy,” Colt said, stepping between them.
Too late.
Rosaline blurred forward—faster than human, faster than logic. She slammed the man into the concrete wall so hard the bricks cracked. His hand snapped down to his coat, pulling a silver-lined blade in a single fluid motion.
He swung.
She caught his wrist mid-arc.
And squeezed.
The blade clattered onto the sidewalk.
He tried a second weapon—silver-coated knuckles.
She knocked them away effortlessly.
“Rosaline!” Colt shouted.
She didn’t hear him. Or she didn’t care. She struck him once—an open-handed blow that lifted him off his feet and threw him across the alley. He hit the dumpsters with a sickening metallic thud.
He spat blood, wiped his mouth, and laughed—laughed—like this was a friendly spar.
“You really are stronger,” he rasped. “Someone’s been drinking—”
Rosaline lunged again, fangs bared, eyes glowing with feral hunger.
Colt grabbed her wrist with both hands.
“STOP!”
For a moment she didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
Didn’t blink.
Then she exhaled a shuddering breath and stepped back, trembling with adrenaline and hunger and something darker Colt couldn’t name.
The man slumped against the dumpster, dazed but alive.
“He’ll be fine,” Rosaline muttered, pulling Colt away. “That stubborn bastard has been picking fights since before radios were invented.”
Colt stared. “Who was that?”
“A hunter,” she said. “Old. Experienced. Very annoying.”
“And you beat him.”
She wiped blood off her knuckles, irritated. “Because of you.”
That hung in the air between them like a live wire.
“Because of my… blood?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN — Vampires and Protocols
They returned to the Bleaker Street Tavern in tense silence. The lobby lighting glowed faintly gold, casting long shadows across the velvet carpet.
Finch waited at the bar with a glass of something dark and expensive. He looked Rosaline over, then Colt, then sighed like they had spilled wine on a priceless rug.
“Well,” Finch said, “that was… loud.”
Rosaline crossed her arms. “He started it.”
“He always starts it,” Finch replied. “And now I get to file a report about it. Do you have any idea—any idea at all—how much paperwork this caused?”
Paperwork.
For a vampire street brawl.
Colt blinked. Finch continued before either of them could speak.
“This is the point in employment,” Finch said, gesturing with his glass, “where you”—he pointed at Colt—“begin costing me more headaches than you generate profit.”
Colt swallowed. “Then why pay me so much?”
Finch smiled—slow, amused, ancient.
“Money isn’t the issue, Colt. I’m wealthy enough to buy this entire district twice before breakfast.” He set his drink down with a soft clink. “The problem is time. Time and headaches.”
Rosaline muttered, “You’re welcome.”
Finch rolled his eyes heavenward. “I’ll smooth things over with the hunter. Again. Remind him that mutual extermination benefits no one. The ledger will balance.”
He looked at Colt.
“You two,” Finch said sharply, “go home. Before something else decides to challenge her.”
Rosaline tugged Colt toward the stairs.
He didn’t resist.
And as they ascended, Colt realized two things at once:
She had been terrifying.
And she had been protecting him.
That made him feel safer.
And far more afraid.
CHAPTER TWELVE — The Economics of Desire
Economics met in a building that looked like a repurposed insurance office: rectangular, fluorescent, beige. No gargoyles. No stained glass. Not a shred of gothic. Just long slanted desks and a faint smell of old carpet cleaner. Compared to the history department’s cathedral theatrics, this place felt aggressively normal.
It made everything that happened inside feel sharper.
Professor Aldwin Mercer walked in without ceremony. Tall, gray suit, wire-rim glasses, posture straight enough to be uncomfortable. He carried nothing except a mug of black coffee and the aura of a man who had already calculated the lifetime earnings of every person in the room.
He didn’t take attendance. He didn’t introduce himself.
He just spoke.
“People,” he began, “always make the choice that brings them the most happiness—given their preferences and their constraints. Not the choice you or I think is best for them.”
He paced slowly across the front of the room.
“If one man lives in a mansion, eats terribly, works himself into an early heart attack, and calls that happiness—it is happiness for him. And if another man lives in a cardboard box, gorges himself whenever he can, drinks with strangers, and insists he’s freer than kings—that, too, is happiness. Imposing our ideals onto them is neither moral nor rational.”
Pens stopped moving. No one breathed too loudly. Mercer had the kind of voice that turned even absurd examples into doctrine.
He lifted his coffee. “We operate under certain assumptions about diminishing marginal utility. Cheeseburger number one is bliss. Cheeseburger number two is comfort. Cheeseburger number three is regret.” A ripple of laughter passed through the room, thin and uneasy. “But note—cheeseburger number one always has value. If you don’t eat it now, you can wait. You can trade it. You can give it away. Choice increases value.”
He tapped a piece of chalk against the board.
“But not all choices remain choices.”
A student raised their hand—dark hair, nervous voice. “Professor, how does addiction fit into that model? Doesn’t addiction distort demand?”
Mercer nodded once. “Addiction reshapes the demand curve entirely. What was optional becomes compulsory. What used to increase happiness now merely prevents misery. The user becomes trapped in a preference structure they did not consciously choose.”
Something cold crawled across my ribs.
Bleaker Street flashed across my mind: the neon sign, the art-deco glow, the dancers swirling with impossible precision, the musicians playing like they were siphoning sound from the bones of the earth.
The wine that wasn’t wine.
The “non-alcoholic” drink that left me vomiting behind a dumpster.
The smooth-talkers who always had the right line.
The laughter that hit like warm smoke.
Mercer kept talking.
“Scarcity also shapes behavior. When something is rare, people compete. When something is unique, people obsess.” He paused, letting the room settle into the implication. “Rarity generates its own form of gravity—pulling everything toward itself, even at great cost.”
I swallowed hard.
The Bloodstar ruby.
The two known stones that size.
The flower on the mountainside glowing faintly in Rosaline’s hand.
Mercer faced us again.
“Finally: time preference. The longer it’s been since you’ve had something, the better it feels. The best cup of coffee,” he raised his mug, “is always the morning one. Not because the coffee changes—but because you do.”
He lowered the mug. His eyes landed on me for a split second—clinical, assessing.
“Human desire,” he said, “is rarely rational. It spikes. It resets. It craves. It punishes. It forgives. And anything that artificially manipulates those curves…” He tapped the lectern lightly. “…is dangerous.”
The chalkboard behind him remained empty. He wrote nothing down.
He didn’t need to.
The bell rang. Students filed out, buzzing softly about exams and readings. I gathered my notebook without really seeing it.
In the hallway, someone’s earbuds leaked jazz—human jazz. Imperfect, slightly off-beat, with a trumpet that squeaked on the high notes.
Bleaker Street’s musicians never squeaked.
They never missed.
Their timing had been flawless, supernatural, predatory in its precision.
Their dancers spun like choreography was encoded in their bones.
Their smiles were too confident.
Their wine was too warm.
Their charm too sharp.
Bleacher Street wasn’t nightlife.
It wasn’t a bar.
It wasn’t talent.
It was an economic system.
A trap engineered to optimize human desire.
Mercer’s entire lecture condensed into a single building with a neon sign.
People always choose what maximizes their happiness curve.
Glamour rewrites the curve so the only local maximum is Bleaker Street itself.
Finch wasn’t a club owner.
He was a market regulator.
A supplier.
An economist of addiction.
And I—whether I admitted it or not—was becoming part of the supply chain.
I stood there in the hallway, surrounded by students laughing about cheeseburgers, and felt the ground tilt under me.
Economics wasn’t abstract.
It wasn’t theoretical.
It was happening to me.
And I realized, with a sudden, sickening clarity, that everything Finch and Rosaline had shown me so far… was only the first lesson.
CHAPTER Thirteen — Blue Light and Black Jazz (Revised)
By the time I left the chemistry basement, it was after ten and my brain felt like it had been scrubbed with steel wool. Finch’s rules meant my phone had been on Do Not Disturb the whole time—no texts, no calls, no distractions while handling anything that could melt skin or explode.
When I switched DND off, one message slid in.
Rosaline:
Come to Bleaker. Tonight.
No punctuation. No follow-up. Just that.
Outside, the sky was ink. New moon. No stars. The streetlights flickered in weak halos, and the air had that weird too-warm heaviness Montalia sometimes got at night, like the town was exhaling something it shouldn’t.
Bleaker Street Tavern glowed ahead, neon blue humming quietly against the brick. Not the gaudy pink-and-gold chaos of the first party—just a deep, steady blue, like the color of a bruise.
Inside, the place had changed again.
The frat crowd was gone. No kegs, no shouting, no jocks trying to impress anyone. Instead, a three-piece jazz band on the small stage: trumpet, upright bass, piano. They played something slow and smoky that sounded like it had been written in 1925 and never recorded. The melody curled through the room like cigarette smoke.
Rosaline waited near the edge of the dance floor.
The blue light turned her dress into a moving shadow. Her hair still burned red underneath it somehow, like the color refused to obey the rules of physics. When she saw me, her expression loosened, something like relief flickering across her face.
“You made it,” she said.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, trying not to sound breathless.
We didn’t bother with small talk. She stepped in, I stepped closer, and then we were kissing under the neon. Her mouth was cool at first, then warmer. The trumpet climbed; the bass thumped; the piano ran a quiet commentary beneath it all.
She pulled me onto the floor and we moved together, not quite dancing, not quite just swaying. I didn’t know the steps, but my body seemed to anyway. Maybe it was glamour. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was both.
“You’re getting better at this,” she murmured against my ear.
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
We spun once, twice. Her watch flashed in the blue light. Her pulse under my fingers was slow but strong, like a drum heard through a wall.
When the song ended, she caught my hand.
“Come upstairs,” she said.
The upstairs suite was dim—only a few lamps on, curtains drawn, the city shut out. A decanter of the tavern’s elixir sat on a silver tray, thick and dark in the glass like someone had melted a gemstone.
Rosaline poured a small amount into a crystal tumbler and took a measured sip. Her shoulders relaxed; the edge in her eyes softened.
“Helps smooth the static,” she said.
I picked up the decanter, curious, and raised it to my nose.
It smelled wrong. Sweet and metallic, but under that, something sharp I couldn’t name. The scent made my tongue feel too big in my mouth. My stomach lurched.
I set it down.
“Not your thing?” she asked.
“Think I’ve had enough experimental substances for one week,” I said.
She laughed, quiet and genuinely amused, and then she crossed the room and kissed me again. Harder this time.
The rest blurred.
We found the bed by instinct more than sight. Hands, breath, the slide of fabric, the heat of skin in the low light. She moved like she’d done this a thousand times; I moved like I’d never do it again if I didn’t get it right now.
“You’re beautiful,” I said before I could stop myself.
“So are you,” she replied, and for once it didn’t sound like a line. It sounded like an observation.
Her lips brushed my neck. My shoulder. My wrist.
“Just a little,” she whispered.
I didn’t pull away.
The bite was quick—a sharp sting on the inside of my arm, more pressure than pain. A pull. A rush. Then she stopped, barely a mouthful taken, as careful as someone sampling a rare vintage.
Her pupils blew wide. “God. Your blood…”
She kissed me before she finished the sentence.
Her mouth tasted like the elixir and something copper-bright beneath it. I kissed her back harder, desperate not to think about what any of it meant. Somewhere in the tangle of motion and heat, I felt the faint scrape of her teeth against my lip, the smallest break of skin.
I tasted her.
Just a smear. Just a drop.
Fire crawled across my tongue.
For a second I thought it was panic. Or adrenaline. Or satisfaction. But it spread too fast, a chemical bloom racing down my throat, through my chest, into my veins.
The room tilted.
“Ros—” I managed.
She pulled back. Her face changed.
“Colt,” she said very carefully, “did you swallow any of my blood?”
“I—” My voice came out wrong. Too low, too rough. “I don’t—maybe. From—”
She swore in a language I didn’t know.
“You weren’t supposed to,” she said. “Not yet. Not like this.”
Heat punched through me, followed by a wave of cold that nearly knocked me sideways. Every sound in the room—the hum of the lights, the creak of the bed, the distant clink of glasses from the bar below—blew up to ten times louder. I could hear my own heartbeat like a drum inside my skull.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“You’re… reacting,” she said. “It might pass. It might not.”
Very comforting.
The ceiling seemed too close and too far at the same time. The light hurt. The dark hurt. My skin felt both too tight and not there at all. I couldn’t tell if I was shivering or burning up.
Rosaline pulled the blankets over us, guiding me down, curling her body around mine like she could shield me from whatever was tearing through my bloodstream.
“Sleep,” she said. “Just sleep.”
“I don’t think I—”
“Colt.” Her voice cut through everything else. “Trust me.”
I closed my eyes.
The world dissolved in pulses of sound and color. Heartbeats—mine, hers, people somewhere downstairs. Footsteps thudding through the floorboards. The slow surge of liquid in pipes. The city’s breathing.
Somewhere in all that, I slipped under.
When I woke, the room was dim and washed in gray. My clothes were scattered on the floor. My head felt… clear. Too clear. Like someone had taken my brain apart, scrubbed every crevice, and put it back together without telling me where they’d moved all the furniture.
Rosaline sat on the edge of the bed, already dressed, watching me with an expression halfway between relief and dread.
“How long was I out?” I croaked.
“Not long,” she said. “A few hours.”
My throat burned. My stomach ached with a hollow, gnawing pain that wasn’t quite hunger. Or maybe it was. Just not the kind I was used to.
I could hear things I shouldn’t. Voices downstairs, blurred by walls but still intelligible. The jazz band tuning. Ice clinking into a glass three rooms away. A car passing outside, each rotation of its tires distinct.
I sat up too fast and the world sharpened painfully.
“Easy,” she said, steadying me with a hand on my shoulder. Her touch was cool. Almost soothing. Almost.
“What did you do to me?” I asked.
Her jaw tightened. “We shared too much. You’re… beginning. Slowly. You’re not fully turned. Not yet.”
“Beginning what?”
“You know what,” she said softly.
The word I didn’t want landed anyway. Vampire.
I laughed once, harsh and stupid. “I don’t feel stronger.”
“You won’t,” she said. “Not at first. You’ll feel weaker. Wrong. Hungry for the wrong things.”
Like on cue, the guard’s voice boomed down the hallway, muffled through the door.
“Alright, lovebirds,” he called. “Check-out time.”
Rosaline stood, straightened her dress. I scrambled for my clothes, hands clumsy, body buzzing with the urge to move and the equal urge to curl up and never move again.
The door opened without a knock.
The security guard filled the frame, just like before—six feet, built like a wall, neck thicker than my thigh. He glanced at us with bored amusement.
“I don’t care what you kids do,” he said. “You’re consenting adults. But it’s time to get back to class.”
“It’s Saturday,” I muttered, pulling my shirt on.
He shrugged. “You don’t gotta go home, but you can’t stay here. House rules.”
I looked up at him—and almost staggered.
I could hear his heartbeat. A steady, heavy thump beneath the muscle. I could smell the salt on his skin, the iron in his blood, the faint trace of whatever he’d had for breakfast. My mouth flooded with saliva so suddenly I had to clench my teeth to keep from baring them.
Rosaline’s fingers closed around my wrist, hard.
“We were just leaving,” she said quickly.
The guard stepped aside. “Don’t make me come back up here.”
We slipped past him into the hallway. My legs felt shaky, not from embarrassment, but from the effort of not turning around and sinking my teeth into the first living thing within reach.
When we reached the stairs, I finally spoke.
“Rosaline,” I whispered, “why doesn’t the elixir work on me?”
She didn’t look at me. “Because you’re not like the others anymore.”
“Glamour doesn’t touch me,” I said slowly. “But everything else does.”
“Yes.”
We descended toward the bar, the music swelling up to meet us, the blue light waiting below.
For the first time since I’d arrived at Roseberg, I understood that whatever line I’d been walking between their world and mine?
I’d just stepped over it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN — The High and the Hunger
I told myself I was fine.
That’s the lie everyone tells right before they become something else.
Morning in Montalia came in the same washed-out gray as always, like the sky couldn’t be bothered to fully render. Bleaker Street was quiet when I slipped out of the building—no swing dancers, no curated laughter, no velvet-suited men selling immortality with a smile. Just brick and slush and the kind of cold that made your teeth feel too big for your mouth.
But my senses didn’t care about the weather. Everything was loud.
The city’s plumbing hissed behind the walls. A bus three blocks away sighed as it braked. Somewhere, a student’s headphones leaked tinny music that I could identify down to the file compression artifacts. And under it all, threaded through the air like a constant drum—
Heartbeats.
Mine, frantic. Hers, steady. Everyone’s, everywhere.
Rosaline walked beside me with her hands in her coat pockets like we were a normal couple on a normal morning after a normal night. The fact that her eyes kept flicking toward my throat like it was an unsolved math problem didn’t help the illusion.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“I’m cold,” I lied.
She stopped at the edge of campus, under a lamppost that buzzed like it had been awake too long. Her face held that careful calm she wore when she was trying not to show fear.
“Listen to me,” she said. “The first hunger isn’t about blood. Not really. It’s about relief. Your body thinks it’s dying. It thinks it’s starving. It will offer you solutions you shouldn’t take.”
“My body’s offering me a solution every time somebody walks past,” I muttered, and then immediately hated how true it sounded.
Her mouth tightened.
“Do not go near Finch,” she said. “Do not go near Wade’s lab. Do not drink anything from Bleaker. And for the love of God, Colt—do not experiment.”
I almost laughed. Almost.
I’d spent my entire life experimenting. I’d experimented with sleep deprivation and overtime. With doing everything right and still getting punished for it. With believing that if I was careful enough, the world would be fair.
The world had responded by making me a courier for a vampire market and turning my bloodstream into a ticking clock.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t.”
Rosaline searched my face like she was looking for the truth underneath the words.
“Promise?” she asked.
I nodded. “Promise.”
Then she kissed me—fast, almost desperate—and vanished into the student crowd.
I stood there for a full minute, listening to the campus breathe.
And the hunger listened back.
It didn’t feel like my old hunger. Not like hunger for food, or attention, or belonging. This was hollow and sharp, like my bones had been scooped out and replaced with a craving that kept scraping against the inside of me.
I made it through half a lecture in the economics building before my pen snapped in my hand.
Mercer spoke about addiction again—about demand curves and compulsion—and all I could think was: I am the curve.
I left early. Told myself I was going to my dorm. Told myself I was going to sleep.
Instead, my feet carried me somewhere else.
Down the brutalist hallways. Past the chemistry labs. Past the doors that students believed led to storage closets and old equipment.
Down the stairwell Dr. Wade had shown me.
The air warmed as I descended, sweet and metallic and familiar. My mouth flooded with saliva like my body was preparing itself for something shameful.
The hidden lab glowed under sterile lights. The containment tanks lined the walls like aquariums for angels. In the center: Ferventia alba blooms, bone-white and faintly pulsing, veins shimmering as if they had their own private heartbeat.
I stood in front of the tank and stared.
Rosaline’s warning echoed faintly in my skull.
Do not experiment.
But my body didn’t care about warnings.
My body was a city on fire, and this place smelled like water.
On the counter sat a tray of vials, sealed and labeled. Glamour. Distilled. Ready.
My hands moved before my morals caught up. I unscrewed one vial. The liquid inside swirled, purple-gold, alive in a way chemistry shouldn’t be.
I lifted it to my nose.
It didn’t smell like a drug. It smelled like the memory of being confident. Like the warmth of a room where people wanted you there. Like the first time you realized you might actually escape the life you were born into.
I should have put it down.
Instead, I drank.
It hit fast—not like alcohol, not like caffeine. It hit like the world suddenly agreed with me.
The lab sharpened. The lights warmed. My thoughts aligned like magnets clicking into place. Fear didn’t disappear, exactly—it just reorganized itself into something useful.
Then my hunger snapped into a new shape.
Blood.
Not metaphorical. Not poetic. Not “hunger in the moonlight.”
I heard it in the building above me: students laughing in the hallway, lungs drawing air, hearts pumping warm iron through arteries. The sound was unbearable. A choir I wasn’t invited to.
My throat burned. My gums ached. I pressed my tongue against my teeth and felt the faintest edge that hadn’t been there yesterday.
Fangs.
I stared at myself in the reflection of the stainless steel counter. My eyes looked the same. My face looked the same.
But my pupils were too wide. My skin looked like it had been stretched a fraction too tight over my skull.
And when I swallowed, it didn’t soothe anything. It only made my hunger more precise.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs.
I turned, vial still in my hand.
Dr. Wade stepped into the lab like he’d been waiting for this moment.
He looked at my face, my posture, the way I was breathing—and smiled.
“Ah,” he said softly. “There it is.”
I tried to speak. My voice came out rough.
“You—” I managed. “You’re turning people.”
Wade didn’t deny it. Didn’t even pretend.
He walked closer, hands clasped behind his back, calm as a man watching a predictable experiment run its course.
“Turning is such an ugly word,” he said. “It implies violence. Force. We aren’t forcing anyone, Colt.”
He nodded at the vial.
“You came here,” he said. “You drank. You chose relief.”
My stomach twisted, partly from guilt, partly from the agony of hearing the pulse in his neck.
“You said it clarifies talent,” I hissed.
“It does,” Wade replied. “It also clarifies hunger. And obedience.”
I took a step back, palms slick.
“Finch knows,” I said.
Wade’s smile widened.
“Finch built this,” he said, like that explained everything. “And you—dear boy—you were never just a courier. You were a test case. A variable.”
My body leaned forward without my permission. My teeth ached. The glamour in my veins made every option feel possible—and every moral feel distant.
Wade watched my struggle with the clinical fascination of someone who had mistaken cruelty for curiosity.
“Rosaline made you messy,” he said. “Emotion. Attachment. Romance. Such human complications.”
He tilted his head.
“But you can still be useful.”
I clenched my fists hard enough to hurt.
“No,” I said, voice shaking. “I’m not your variable.”
Wade shrugged, almost bored.
“You’ll come back,” he said. “Everyone comes back. The market always wins. That’s the point of a market.”
Then he stepped aside, gesturing toward the stairs.
“Go,” he said. “Before you do something that requires… cleanup.”
I didn’t wait for my conscience to argue. I ran.
Up the stairs. Into the cold air. Away from the scent of the flowers.
The glamour buzzed under my skin like static.
And the hunger followed me like a shadow that didn’t care about sunlight.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN — The Price of an Exception
Rosaline found me behind the library, crouched in the snow like an animal trying not to be seen.
My hands were pressed against my mouth. Not because I was crying.
Because I didn’t trust my teeth.
She didn’t ask questions at first. She just knelt beside me, her coat pooling around her like black water, and placed two fingers under my chin.
“Look at me,” she said.
I did.
Her eyes widened the smallest amount when she saw mine.
“How much?” she asked.
“One vial,” I whispered. “I— I needed it to stop feeling like I was dying.”
Rosaline closed her eyes, pain flashing across her face.
“That wasn’t supply,” she said. “That was bait.”
“I know,” I said, voice raw. “Wade told me. Finch built the whole thing. Turning people. Making a market out of conversion.”
I expected her to defend them. To rationalize it the way Finch did. To say we have to survive.
Instead, she exhaled like someone finally admitting a truth they’d carried too long.
“I tried to believe it was only survival,” she said. “That we were… contained. That the flower was a brace holding the town together.”
She looked away toward the campus buildings, the students, the normal life that now sounded like a buffet.
“But Finch isn’t maintaining balance,” she said quietly. “He’s scaling.”
My throat burned.
“What happens to me?” I asked.
Rosaline’s gaze returned to my face, sharp and honest.
“You’re in the threshold,” she said. “Not fully turned. Not fully human. But the more you take—glamour, elixir, blood—the faster the change locks in.”
My stomach dropped.
“So if I stop—”
“You slow it,” she said. “Maybe you reverse some of it. Maybe you don’t.”
She swallowed.
“But Finch won’t let you stop.”
The words hung in the air like ice.
“How do you know?” I asked.
Rosaline’s expression tightened.
“Because you’re rare,” she said. “Glamour doesn’t charm you the way it charms others. It can sharpen you—but it can’t leash you.”
She touched my wrist, gentle, anchoring.
“You’re an exception,” she said. “And Finch doesn’t tolerate exceptions.”
I let out a laugh that sounded like a sob.
“Great,” I muttered. “I’ve always wanted to be special.”
Rosaline’s mouth twitched, almost a smile, then vanished.
“We have two options,” she said. “We run.”
“We can’t leave Montalia,” I said. “You told me. The town doesn’t…”
“Doesn’t let you,” she finished.
She stood.
“Then we do the other option,” she said.
“What’s that?”
Her eyes were bright in a way that made my skin prickle.
“We burn the roots,” she said. “We destroy the flower. The refinery. The decanters. The whole supply chain.”
My hunger snarled at the idea of destroying what my body wanted most.
My mind—too clear from that single vial—recognized the truth.
If the supply died, the market died.
And if the market died…
“What happens to the town?” I asked.
Rosaline’s voice was quieter.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I know what happens if we don’t.”
A shadow moved at the edge of the trees.
A man stepped out from behind the snow-dusted shrubs—the hunter from the alley, the one with the old eyes and the posture of someone who had fought in eras without cameras.
He stared at Rosaline, then at me, and his mouth curled into something like disgust.
“Lovely,” he muttered. “Now there’s two of you.”
Rosaline moved in front of me instinctively.
“Don’t,” she warned him.
The hunter raised his hands, palms out.
“I’m not here to fight,” he said. “I’m here because Finch is getting sloppy.”
I blinked. “You work for him?”
The hunter snorted.
“I work for reality,” he said. “And reality’s tired of Montalia acting like a stage set for monsters.”
He looked at my face, my posture, my breathing—and his expression shifted.
“Ah,” he said. “He’s tasted it.”
Rosaline’s jaw clenched.
The hunter stepped closer, voice low.
“The flower doesn’t just feed your kind,” he said to Rosaline. “It makes more of you. It always has. That’s what it was bred for.”
Rosaline’s gaze flickered—hurt, furious.
“You knew,” she hissed.
“I suspected,” the hunter corrected. “I confirmed when Finch started importing students like they were cattle.”
He pointed toward Bleaker Street, where neon glowed faintly through the trees.
“You want out?” he said. “You don’t kill Finch. He’ll just come back. Markets always do.”
His eyes narrowed.
“You kill the product,” he said. “You starve the machine.”
Rosaline looked at me.
I looked at her.
My heart pounded, loud enough to drown out the campus for a second.
“Okay,” I said, voice shaking. “Tell us how.”
The hunter’s smile was thin and joyless.
“Tonight,” he said. “While they’re celebrating. Monsters love parties.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN — Protocols and a Sentence
Bleaker Street was blue again that night, the neon humming like a bruise that wouldn’t heal.
Inside, the tavern had been rearranged into something between a courtroom and a cathedral. Chairs lined the walls. Candles burned in glass holders that didn’t flicker. The air smelled sweet and metallic under the perfume and wine, like someone had spilled copper beneath the velvet.
Finch stood at the front in his immaculate white suit, hands folded neatly, expression theatrical in the way only someone very old could afford.
Rosaline and I were ushered in by two men who didn’t look like bouncers anymore. They looked like attendants at an execution.
The hunter stayed in the shadows near the back, invisible unless you knew what to listen for.
Finch’s gaze slid over me with polite interest, then landed on Rosaline with something colder.
“Rosaline,” he said, voice smooth. “You’ve been… busy.”
Rosaline’s posture didn’t change.
“You summoned me,” she said. “So speak.”
A ripple moved through the room—other vampires, other faces. Some familiar from the party. Some older, calmer, watching with the detachment of people who had seen centuries of drama and were bored of all of it.
Finch lifted a hand.
“Protocol exists for a reason,” he said. “We are guests in this town’s illusion. We are maintained by order.”
He turned his head slightly, addressing the room.
“Rosaline has violated protocol,” he announced. “She fed without authorization. She initiated a conversion without consent. She has created an unpredictable variable.”
His eyes returned to me.
“Colt Thomas,” Finch said gently, as if speaking to a child. “Do you understand what she’s done to you?”
My mouth went dry.
Rosaline’s fingers brushed mine—subtle, grounding.
I spoke anyway.
“I understand what you have done,” I said.
The room quieted. Not shocked—curious.
Finch smiled.
“Oh?” he asked. “Tell me.”
“You’re turning students,” I said, voice shaking but loud. “You’re using Ferventia alba to convert people. Glamour is the bait. The flower is the engine.”
Some of the faces in the room twitched—tiny shifts, tiny tells.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
Finch’s smile didn’t move.
“My dear boy,” he said, “you’re speaking like someone who has recently taken a great deal of glamour.”
I flinched.
Finch stepped forward, voice still calm.
“Conversion is a… crude term,” he said. “We offer transcendence. We offer survival. We offer an end to mediocrity.”
He spread his hands.
“Look at you,” he said softly. “You came from a life of cold factories and small-town inevitability. Now you can hear music in the walls. You can think faster than your professors. You can see the world as it truly is.”
His eyes narrowed, affectionate and predatory.
“Would you really choose to go back?” he asked.
My hunger surged at the sound of heartbeats around me.
My mind flared with the memory of my mom’s tired hands, my siblings’ cereal fights, the radiator hissing in our overstuffed house.
The life that had been hard but real.
“Yes,” I said. “I would.”
The room murmured. Finch’s expression sharpened, just slightly.
“And this,” Finch said, turning back to the gathered vampires, “is precisely why Rosaline is dangerous.”
He gestured toward her like she was a stain.
“She attached to a human,” he said. “She compromised the supply chain. She created a subject that resists charm and refuses gratitude.”
Rosaline’s jaw clenched.
“You’re afraid,” she said quietly.
Finch laughed once.
“I’m practical,” he corrected.
He lifted his hand again.
“By protocol,” he said, “Rosaline is sentenced.”
The room held its breath.
Finch’s voice was almost bored when he spoke the words.
“Rosaline will be put to death,” he said. “At dawn. Publicly. For the preservation of order.”
Rosaline didn’t flinch.
But her fingers tightened around mine.
I felt her fear like a pulse through skin.
Finch looked at me.
“And you,” he said, pleasant again, “will return to your work. Wade will stabilize you. You will learn gratitude.”
I took a step forward.
“No,” I said.
Finch’s smile faded.
“You misunderstand your bargaining position,” he said softly.
Rosaline leaned close to my ear, voice barely audible.
“Now,” she whispered.
The hunter moved first—silent, fast, a shadow slipping between the attendants.
He threw something small—metallic—across the floor.
A sharp crack.
The lights flickered.
For half a second, the room’s perfect illusion stuttered. The velvet seemed too thin. The chandeliers too sharp. The faces in the crowd too hungry.
Rosaline yanked my hand.
We ran.
Behind us, Finch’s voice cut through the chaos—no longer theatrical.
“Stop them,” he snapped, and the room erupted into motion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN — The Basement Garden
We didn’t run toward the exits.
We ran toward the roots.
Down a side corridor behind the bar. Past a locked door Rosaline opened with a gesture and a whisper I couldn’t hear over my own pounding heartbeat.
Down stairs that smelled like flowers and blood.
The hidden cultivation room opened in front of us like a shrine.
Tanks of Ferventia alba lined the walls, glowing faintly, the blooms pulsing as if they were breathing. Machines hummed softly, distilling the petals into vials and decanters, converting biology into addiction.
My hunger screamed at the sight of it.
Rosaline moved fast, grabbing a tray of vials and smashing them against the floor. Glass shattered. Purple-gold liquid splashed across the tiles like spilled sunset.
The scent hit me like a punch.
My body lurched forward.
Rosaline caught my shoulders hard.
“Colt!” she snapped. “Don’t you dare.”
I shook, teeth aching, vision tunneling toward the bloom tanks.
The hunter appeared behind us, already working, ripping open a storage cabinet.
“Silver dust,” he barked. “Salt. UV lamps. Anything that denatures it. Hurry.”
Rosaline grabbed a container labeled with chemical symbols. “This?”
“Acid,” I said, brain clicking into gear. “Too messy. We need something that kills the plant and ruins the extract without flooding the room.”
Rosaline stared at me.
“You can think?” she asked.
“I can think,” I rasped, then swallowed hard. “I just can’t stop wanting.”
The hunter shoved a bag into my hands—coarse white salt.
“Old trick,” he said. “Ruin the soil. Burn the roots.”
Rosaline’s hands flew over the control panel of the tanks.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Opening them,” she said. “They can’t be sealed in glass when we kill them.”
She slammed a switch.
Alarms chirped. A hiss of releasing pressure. The tanks opened with a mechanical groan, and warm air poured out like breath.
The scent was overwhelming.
Ferventia alba smelled like hope turned inside out.
My knees buckled.
Rosaline grabbed my jaw, forcing my face toward hers.
“Listen,” she said, fierce. “You love me?”
My throat tightened.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Then stay with me,” she said. “Not with that.”
Her eyes held mine—ancient and aching and real.
I forced my hands to move.
Salt flew in arcs, scattering over the bloom beds, sinking into the soil like a curse. The petals trembled. The veins dulled. The faint glow began to sputter.
The hunter overturned a rack of vials, smashing them. Rosaline ripped open the decanter cabinet and poured the elixir down the drain, watching it vanish like a century of lies.
Footsteps thundered above us.
“They’re coming,” the hunter snapped.
Rosaline’s face hardened.
“Then we finish fast,” she said.
She grabbed a metal rod and smashed the first bloom tank.
Glass exploded. Petals spilled.
I swung too—harder than I meant to—destroying a machine, wires sparking.
For a second, the room flickered again. The air felt thinner. Less enchanted. More ordinary.
As if the town’s illusion was held together by nothing but supply and ritual.
A door upstairs crashed open.
Voices shouted.
Finch’s voice, sharp as a blade:
“Do not let them destroy it!”
Rosaline grabbed my hand.
“Last one,” she said, pointing to the largest tank in the center—the one with the healthiest blooms, the brightest glow.
The source.
The engine.
We ran to it together.
I heard my own heartbeat.
I heard hers.
I heard Finch’s approaching footsteps and the choir of hunger behind him.
Rosaline lifted her foot and kicked the valve.
The tank hissed open, releasing a cloud of sweet metallic air that made every vampire above us howl.
My vision went white for a second.
But my hands didn’t stop.
I grabbed the bag of salt and dumped it into the tank like I was burying a body.
Rosaline took the rod and smashed the glass.
The blooms spilled onto the floor like torn paper.
The glow died.
Instantly.
The room’s warmth vanished, replaced by the honest cold of basement stone. The scent faded, as if someone had turned off a switch in reality.
Above us, the shouting faltered.
The footsteps stuttered.
Somewhere in the building, a lightbulb popped.
Rosaline stared at the dead flowers, chest heaving.
“We did it,” she whispered.
Then the whole town shuddered.
Not a quake—something deeper. Like a curtain being yanked down.
The air snapped.
The neon upstairs flickered from blue to a harsh, ordinary white.
And Montalia began to change.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN — Rustbelt Morning
Dawn didn’t arrive like a cinematic apocalypse.
It arrived like cheap fluorescent lighting.
We stumbled out of Bleaker Street into air that felt… normal. Cold in an honest way. Not theatrical. Not curated.
The street looked wrong.
Not haunted. Not enchanted.
Just… tired.
The neon sign above Bleaker Street Tavern buzzed once and went dark, leaving behind plain brick and a faded metal awning that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in ten years.
Cars passed on the main road—ordinary sedans, salt-stained, no longer ghost-smearing light across frost. A delivery truck rumbled by. A man in a work jacket cursed at a stuck tailgate.
No velvet. No art deco glamour. No dancers.
Just life.
Mediocre, stubborn life.
Rosaline stood beside me, staring at the world like she’d never seen it this way.
Her posture softened. Her shoulders dropped. Her eyes—still bright, still herself—lost the ancient sheen.
She blinked and swallowed.
“I can’t… feel it,” she whispered.
“The static?” I asked.
She nodded slowly.
“The town isn’t anchored,” she said, sounding almost amazed. “It’s… just a town.”
The hunter appeared behind us, breathing hard, looking older now—not because magic had worn off, but because the illusion had stopped flattering him.
He stared at Rosaline, then at me.
“It’s done,” he said. Not triumphant. Just tired.
Rosaline turned toward him.
“Are you going to kill me now?” she asked, voice flat.
The hunter studied her for a long moment.
Then he looked away.
“No,” he said. “You’re not worth the trouble anymore.”
Rosaline let out a shaky breath that sounded like relief and grief tangled together.
“What happens to Finch?” I asked.
The hunter’s mouth tightened.
“He’ll adapt,” he said. “Men like that always do. Without the product, he’s just… a rich bastard with a building.”
He glanced at the dead neon.
“And without the town’s illusion, he can’t keep pretending he’s a god.”
Rosaline’s gaze drifted toward campus.
White Pine University’s gothic buildings still stood—but the edges looked duller now. Less mythic. More like expensive architecture that would eventually need repairs and budget meetings.
“Roseberg will change,” Rosaline murmured.
“I think everything will,” I said.
My throat still burned. My hunger still existed—but it was quieter now, less precise, less screaming. Like a radio station losing signal.
Rosaline touched her neck, as if checking for a pulse she’d forgotten to notice.
“I feel…” she began, and stopped.
“Human?” I offered.
She huffed a soft, humorless laugh.
“Not yet,” she said. “But closer than I’ve been in a long time.”
We walked in silence for a while, down streets that looked like a hundred other rustbelt streets: closed storefronts, a diner with a cracked sign, a pawn shop, a bus stop with an ad for a community college nursing program.
Ordinary.
And, weirdly, safe.
When we reached the edge of campus, Rosaline stopped.
“I think,” she said slowly, “I’m going to stay.”
I blinked. “Stay?”
She nodded, gaze fixed on the university buildings.
“The degrees,” she said. “They’re… real now. Not trophies. Not distractions. Just work.”
She looked at me, and her expression softened into something painfully simple.
“I can finish,” she said. “A master’s in psychology. Like a normal person.”
I swallowed.
“And me?” I asked, though I already knew.
“You should go home,” she said gently. “You should see your family. You should sleep in your own bed. You should—”
“Be Colt again,” I finished.
Rosaline’s eyes glimmered.
“If you can,” she said.
I nodded. My chest ached like someone had scooped out something important and left the cavity open to cold air.
We stood there a long time, not touching, not leaving.
Finally, Rosaline stepped forward and kissed me—slow, careful, human in its gentleness.
“No more,” she whispered against my mouth. “No more blood. No more glamour. No more Finch.”
“No more,” I agreed.
We separated.
She turned toward campus, shoulders squared like a student heading to class.
I turned toward the bus stop, hands in my pockets, like a kid going back to a life that suddenly looked both smaller and infinitely more precious.
Montalia behind us settled into its mediocrity like a blanket.
And for the first time since I’d gotten accepted, since I’d puked behind a dumpster, since I’d tasted hope in a violet-gold vial—
The world felt real.
EPILOGUE — Separate Ways
I left Montalia on a bus that smelled like stale coffee and damp winter coats.
No one flirted with me. No one offered me wine that wasn’t wine. No one looked at my throat like I was a solution.
The highway stretched through gray fields and tired towns and billboards for cheap furniture. My phone buzzed once—a bank notification, my family’s rent payment clearing without a problem.
I stared out the window and tried to listen for heartbeats.
I could still hear them, faintly, if I focused.
But the craving had dulled. It was no longer a scream. It was a scar.
Back home, the radiator hissed the same way it always had. My siblings argued over cereal. My mom asked me if I wanted eggs. My dad hugged me too hard and pretended he wasn’t relieved I was still myself.
I slept.
Not perfectly. Not immediately. But deeper than I had in weeks.
Months later, I checked White Pine University’s website out of morbid curiosity.
Roseberg College of History and Architecture had been “restructured.” Budgets cut. Programs merged. The gothic theatrics didn’t vanish, but they became… branding instead of prophecy.
Bleaker Street Tavern reopened under new ownership as a “retro lounge.” Jazz nights on Fridays. No mention of glamour. No mention of protocols. Just nostalgia, watered down and sold honestly.
And Rosaline—
Rosaline was listed in a campus newsletter as a graduate student in psychology, working on a thesis about addiction, perception, and the way people mistake relief for love.
Her photo looked normal.
Still beautiful, still her.
But her eyes were younger.
I didn’t go back.
I didn’t call.
Some stories don’t end with a forever. They end with a choice you keep making every day.
I stayed home. I worked. I helped my family. I studied when I could.
Sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet and the winter wind rattled the blinds, I’d think of neon-blue light and black jazz. Of a flower that tasted like memory. Of a girl who had been ancient and terrified and brilliant, and who chose—briefly—to be human with me.
Then I’d swallow against the faint burn in my throat and remind myself:
The world is full of markets.
Not all of them deserve your hunger.
Epilogue — Rustbelt Morning
[I left Montalia on a bus that smelled like stale coffee and damp winter coats.
No one flirted with me. No one offered me wine that wasn’t wine. No one looked at my throat like I was a solution.
The highway stretched through gray fields and tired towns and billboards for cheap furniture. My phone buzzed once—a bank notification, my family’s rent payment clearing without a problem.
I stared out the window and tried to listen for heartbeats.
I could still hear them, faintly, if I focused.
But the craving had dulled. It was no longer a scream. It was a scar.
Back home, the radiator hissed the same way it always had. My siblings argued over cereal. My mom asked me if I wanted eggs. My dad hugged me too hard and pretended he wasn’t relieved I was still myself.
I slept.
Not perfectly. Not immediately. But deeper than I had in weeks.
Months later, I checked White Pine University’s website out of morbid curiosity.
Roseberg College of History and Architecture had been “restructured.” Budgets cut. Programs merged. The gothic theatrics didn’t vanish, but they became… branding instead of prophecy.
Bleaker Street Tavern reopened under new ownership as a “retro lounge.” Jazz nights on Fridays. No mention of glamour. No mention of protocols. Just nostalgia, watered down and sold honestly.
And Rosaline—
Rosaline was listed in a campus newsletter as a graduate student in psychology, working on a thesis about addiction, perception, and the way people mistake relief for love.
Her photo looked normal.
Still beautiful, still her.
But her eyes were younger.
I didn’t go back.
I didn’t call.
Some stories don’t end with a forever. They end with a choice you keep making every day.
I stayed home. I worked. I helped my family. I studied when I could.
Sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet and the winter wind rattled the blinds, I’d think of neon-blue light and black jazz. Of a flower that tasted like memory. Of a girl who had been ancient and terrified and brilliant, and who chose—briefly—to be human with me.
Then I’d swallow against the faint burn in my throat and remind myself:
The world is full of markets.
Not all of them deserve your hunger.