The tenement stands like a corpse in the fog — a crumbling carcass of brick and splintered timber, squeezed between soot-choked chimneys and factories that cough steam into a sickly London dawn. No lanterns burn behind its broken windows. No prayers echo through its hallways anymore. The only souls left are the ones that can't leave — the rats, the mold, the boy on the top floor who doesn't bother pretending he's alive.
His name, if you asked him before tonight, was nothing. The priests called him ratspawn, thief's bastard, urchin filth. He never corrected them. They never asked again after they bled him for his sins and tossed him back onto the street like rotting meat.
Tonight he's more than nothing. Tonight he's a question. A whisper. A promise in a rotting room lit by one dying candle.
Malachai Kael kneels shirtless on bare floorboards that have gone soft and black under decades of damp. His ribs push against skin stretched too thin. His knees are bruised and raw from crawling through back alleys and graveyards to find the scraps he needed for this rite — scraps nobody should ever find.
The circle beneath him is jagged and hungry — a rough sigil carved with a rust-bitten kitchen knife, the wood stained black where the blood dried too fast. Latin scrawled in broken lines curls round the old runes that don't belong to any church. Each word cuts the world open a little more.
Malachai breathes shallowly, as if too much air might snuff the flame. He sets the final piece — a candle stub stolen from the back pew of St. Agatha's — at the circle's edge. Its flame is a pale ghost, the only living thing left in the room besides the boy and the rats.
He drags the knife across his palm. Slow, deliberate, no flinch. The blade drags skin apart like parchment, and blood beads up in the gash, warm and dark. He tilts his hand, lets it drip into the carved grooves. He smears it in with the meat of his thumb, grinding the blood into the cracks until the sigil gleams slick and wet in the candlelight.
When it's done, he rocks back on his heels, resting bony elbows on bony knees. His eyes are half-lidded, mouth half-open in a lazy, hungry line. He looks bored — like he's waiting for someone to bring him tea that never comes.
The rats know before he does. They freeze in the walls, their tiny feet falling silent. The candle flame gutters once, twice — then steadies, even though the windows are closed, the wind dead. A hush settles in the room, thick as grave earth.
Then something breathes. Not air, but shadow — the dark sighs inward, folding over itself, gathering weight and shape behind the boy. The candle flickers in time with a heartbeat that isn't Malachai's.
A voice slides out of that heartbeat, slick as oil, soft as a blade at a throat.
> "Little lamb…" the thing says. Its whisper rustles the filthy blankets piled in the corner, brushes the grime crusted on the walls. "Little wolf. Both wearing the same ragged skin. Which will you be tonight?"
Kael's jaw ticks. He doesn't lift his head, doesn't turn to see the thing that is not yet a shape. His voice scrapes out low and hoarse, the Cockney drag curling round the syllables like a snarl someone forgot to sharpen.
> "Name."
A laugh — wet silk, iron bells, the hush of wings that were never feathers. The darkness behind the candle ripples like a pond catching a stone. A mouth opens where no face should be — a grin sewn from memories Malachai never owned.
> "Azazael," it murmurs. "Archangel once. Gatekeeper once. Now chained beneath the Fetid Pit, waiting for cracks in the mortar of your world. You opened one, little wolf. Why?"
Kael's eyelids droop heavier, as if sleep might come at any moment. He runs a thumb through the drying blood on his palm, smears it across his collarbone like he's wiping away a tear.
> "Power."
Azazael's laugh scrapes the nail from the inside of Malachai's skull. The candle shudders. The shadows lean closer — pressing cold against his bare shoulders, coiling round the curve of his spine like iron hooks.
> "You've no faith left to sell. No prayers left to barter. What makes you think power will spare you?"
Malachai sniffs, a quiet, bored sound. He lets his head roll on his neck, eyes flicking to the shifting thing at the edge of the circle — smoke in the shape of wings that never took flight.
> "World's filthy," he says. His Cockney rolls flat and blunt as a brick. "Full of rot. Priests can't clean it. Kings don't care. Someone's got t' pull the worms out."
Azazael's grin widens. Its shadow-mouth splits in three, six, nine — all smiling, all showing teeth that glisten like wet bone. The air reeks of hot iron and old parchment.
> "And when you're done?" the voice purrs. "When the worms are gone and the filth is bled dry, what will you be, little wolf?"
Kael's lips twitch. Almost a smile. Almost a confession.
> "Hollow."
Azazael's laughter blooms like rot in the walls. Plaster flakes drift from the ceiling. The rats skitter in terror behind the rotten beams.
> "Then say it. Bind it. Spill what's left."
Kael shifts forward, one palm pressed to the wet sigil. He can feel it drinking him, a tongue lapping at the cut in his skin, the warmth of his veins spilling into a cold that can never be warm again.
> "Take the soul," he murmurs. "Leave the bones. Make me the hook. Make me the blade."
The thing in the shadows leans closer. Its form leaks through the circle's edge, tendrils like chains dragging nails over the floorboards. Its whisper peels the candle flame sideways.
> "And when I come — when your bones are my door — will you stand aside?"
Malachai Kael lifts his head at last. His eyes are half-dead, half-hungry. Bored. Hollow. He shrugs — the smallest, laziest shrug a boy can make when he's already given up everything worth shrugging for.
> "Aye."
The sigil flares white — just once. The shadows scream without sound. The mark burns itself into Kael's chest, searing skin, blood, bone. His teeth clench, but he does not scream. He does not pray. He does not beg. He only breathes — slow, steam rolling from cracked lips, the smell of burnt flesh mixing with candle wax and mildew.
When the flame dies, the thing is gone. The boy remains — hunched over his circle, breath fogging the ruin of the room. In the corner, the rats emerge, watching him with glittering eyes.
Outside, the city coughs steam into a sky that hasn't seen a god in a hundred years.
Inside, Malachai Kael stands, pulls the battered coat over his bare shoulders, pockets the knife, snuffs the last whisper of light. He does not look back at the circle, or the walls, or the life that died in this room.
He steps into the hall — just another ghost in a city that no longer fears the dead.
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END OF CHAPTER ONE