Streetlight glare burned white across Eli's knuckles as he drove his fist into the vampire's jaw.
The bloodsucker laughed as he spun with the hit, trench coat flaring, boots skidding across wet asphalt. "Hunters in the city again," he drawled, as if they were trading gossip in a bar instead of blows. "Every few years you crawl back out of whatever hole they bury you in. This time, little saints, it's your last trip."
Eli shook out his hand, flexing sore fingers. "You guys really should unionize," he said. "Get a new script. 'Last trip,' 'last hunt,' 'last breath'—it's all very… rerun." He stepped back just in time as the vampire lunged, slashing at his throat. Eli caught the wrist, twisted, and drove a knee up into the creature's ribs. "Tell you what. You survive the night, I'll help you punch it up."
The girl at the vampire's side—pale, lips dark with someone else's blood—watched them with a mix of fascination and hunger. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "He's right," she chimed in, cheerful and cruel. "You do say that a lot."
The vampire snarled at her. "Shut up and watch how a lineage ends."
Across the street, Hunter's blade shrieked as it met steel and bone.
The third vampire he faced was broader than the others, shoulders like a battering ram under his tattered suit, eyes glowing a deep, feverish red. Hunter pivoted under a wild swing, the impact of that heavy arm brushing his shoulder hard enough to numb it. He responded with a clean, economical cut across the vampire's side, not deep enough to end him—on purpose.
"Question," Hunter said, voice level despite his ragged breath. "You mentioned other hunters in the city. Where?"
The vampire bared bloody teeth and came in hard, fists flying in heavy, hooking blows. Hunter blocked, absorbed, and deflected them, each contact a jarring thud up his arms. "You think you're in a position to interrogate me?" the creature hissed. "You don't understand whose nest you've walked into."
Hunter ducked a punch, driving his shoulder into the vampire's chest, forcing him back toward a row of parked cars. "I understand enough. Names. Numbers. How many came before us, how many you think are dying tonight."
"Enough to decorate the trees," the vampire spat. "Enough that your guild will finally stop sending lambs to—"
The rest was lost as Hunter slammed him into a car, the metal groaning under the impact. "Details," Hunter said, the calm in his voice more violent than a shout. "Because if there are others here, that means someone broke quarantine. That means someone's desperate. Why?"
For the first time, the vampire's gaze flickered—not with fear, but calculation.
Back in the center of the street, headlights swept past, momentarily flaring out the world in harsh white. Eli used the distraction, driving an elbow into his opponent's throat, forcing him back toward the brick wall of a shuttered pharmacy. "Come on," Eli said. "You wanted a last trip? Let's talk about your travel plans."
The first vampire—the one who had taken Maya hours earlier—watched from the fringe of the chaos, half-hidden in the alley's mouth.
His eyes tracked the movements: Eli's rhythm, Hunter's precision, the girl's predatory swaying. His expression was one of almost scholarly interest. When the girl shifted her attention fully to Eli, eager to join the fray, he murmured something low in her ear. She nodded, eager to impress, and rushed at Eli, fangs bared.
For a heartbeat, all attention swung to the sudden two-on-one.
In that thin slice of distraction, the first vampire simply… wasn't there anymore.
No dramatic flourish. No flapping cloak. One moment he leaned against crumbling brick, amused; the next the shadows along the wall deepened, folded, and he was gone as if the alley had swallowed him back into its throat.
Hunter didn't notice. Eli barely registered that the watching presence had vanished. There was only the fight: blades, fists, snarls, the wet tang of blood on the air.
Far from that knot of violence, behind a locked boutique door, Brandon's lungs were finally starting to slow.
The shop had gone silent after the last echo of footsteps on the sidewalk died away. Dust motes drifted in the pale, artificial light. Maya stood with her back against a rack of sequined dresses, arms wrapped tight around herself, breathing shallow and fast.
When Brandon finally slid the bolt and eased the door open, the first thing he saw was the light.
The street outside was not fully dark, but it was trying to be. One by one, lamps were winking out, the city's timed system beginning its slow descent into night. The remaining lights seemed too far apart, little islands in a thickening sea of shadow.
"Okay," Brandon said, more for himself than for her. "We move fast. We stay in the light. We don't stop."
Maya nodded, swallowing. Her eyes looked too big in her face.
They stepped out together, and the air outside felt colder than it should have. The kind of cold that didn't come from temperature, but from absence—like someone had opened a window in the world and let all the warmth slip out.
They hurried from pool to pool of streetlight, each stretch of darkness between them feeling longer than the last. Brandon's shoes slapped on the pavement; Maya's footsteps were a quicker, lighter patter just behind him. He could hear the tick of cooling engines, a distant siren, the muted bass of a car stereo somewhere far away.
Under all of it, something else.
That feeling.
It began the same way it had in the boutique, in the alley, every time something had been slightly wrong with the world. A pressure behind his eyes. A hum beneath his skin, like distant thunder he could feel in his bones before he heard it. The city's edges seemed to smudge, lines not quite where they should be.
He slowed without meaning to.
"Brandon?" Maya's voice was small. "Don't stop."
He blinked and looked ahead—and froze.
The street they had turned down opened like a wound in the city's geometry. Buildings fell away on either side, giving way to an iron fence and, beyond it, the dark swell of trees.
Central Woods.
He had seen it from bus windows and distant cross streets his whole life; a black-green blot in the city's heart, older than the concrete around it, older even than most of the roads. Up close, under the failing streetlights, it looked bigger. Hungrier.
The lamps along this stretch were flickering as if something were pressing fingers over their glass mouths.
Maya edged closer to him. "We're too far from home," she whispered. "This isn't—this isn't our way."
"I know," Brandon said. But his voice came out distracted, already half elsewhere.
His gaze was drawn past the fence, past the first rank of trees, into the deeper dark between trunks. There was something there. Not a shape, not exactly. More like a suggestion, a beckoning. The hum beneath his skin thickened, became a pull low in his chest. Like standing near an ocean he couldn't yet hear, knowing the waves were there just beyond the dunes.
The iron fence cast long, broken shadows onto the sidewalk. As Brandon stared through them, the world behind him stuttered.
"Evening, little candles."
The voice slid in from the side, lazy and pleased.
Brandon spun, pulling Maya with him.
The first vampire stood beneath a failing streetlight as if he'd risen up from its reflection on the wet asphalt. His smile was sharp and too wide, the kind of grin that meant the joke was entirely on someone else.
"Don't you love this part?" he said, spreading his arms like a host welcoming guests. "The chase. The city holding its breath. You running, thinking if you just move fast enough you can outrun the story that's already written."
Maya's fingers dug into Brandon's arm. Her eyes had locked on the vampire's face, then to the teeth, then to his hands—so casual at his sides, like he couldn't possibly be dangerous because he wasn't trying. Her breathing hitched.
"Stop," she whispered, though he hadn't moved yet. "Please."
The vampire tilted his head, considering her with almost affectionate curiosity. "Oh, but I do like the thrill of the hunt," he said. "You running. Me following. The screaming. The—"
His words rolled on, smooth and amused, but Brandon's attention had already turned.
Central Woods was at his back, and it felt as though the trees were leaning closer, listening.
The pull inside him intensified, like a hand closing around his ribcage from the inside and gently, insistently tugging him toward the darkness. The more the vampire spoke, the more the forest seemed to answer in silence. The air from the trees was cooler, damp with earth and leaf-rot and something older. It smelled like rain that hadn't fallen yet.
Brandon realized, with a strange, clear shock, that he wanted to step toward that feeling.
He looked at Maya.
Her face was pale, jaw trembling, eyes glossy but fiercely present. She looked like she was waiting for someone else to make a decision she didn't dare make herself.
He thought of the streets: open, exposed, lit less and less with each passing second, crawling with things like the man in front of them—things that knew the city better than he did. Things that had already found them once.
Behind them, the forest.
Wrong, his mind whispered. Dangerous. Every kid at school had a story about the woods. Every adult had a way of not talking about it. People went in and didn't come out, or came back different. But the fear that rose in him when he looked at the trees wasn't the same as the terror that tightened his throat when he met the vampire's gaze.
One felt like drowning. The other felt like jumping into deep water on purpose.
Brandon tightened his hand around Maya's. She looked up at him, her fear mirrored in the reflection of his own.
"We're not staying here," he said. His voice had steadied somehow, anchored on that quiet pressure in his chest. "Trust me."
"Brandon, where—"
He didn't give her time to finish.
He turned, yanked her hand, and ran straight for the fence.
The vampire's eyes widened, genuine surprise breaking his amused mask. "Oh?" he said, the word almost a laugh. "Bold."
Brandon didn't look back. The fence's iron bars blurred in front of him; the gate loomed slightly ajar, rust-blistered but unused. He slammed his shoulder against it, and it swung inward with a scream of old metal, opening onto the forest's edge.
For a heartbeat, the world narrowed to the threshold: city behind, woods ahead, a line between concrete and root.
He crossed it.
Maya stumbled after him, nearly falling as her shoes slipped on the layer of decaying leaves. The air changed at once—cooler, thicker, alive with the scent of damp soil, moss, and something floral buried deep beneath the rot. Street sounds cut out almost completely, replaced by the distant drip of water and the flutter of wings high in the branches.
They didn't stop.
"Stay near the edge," Brandon gasped. The trees rose around them like columns in a ruined cathedral, trunks dark and slick with age. Through gaps in the foliage he could still see the smear of the streetlights, a pale echo of the world they'd left. "We keep the road in sight. We just… cut across. It's faster."
"Faster to what?" Maya's voice shook, but she matched his pace, feet crunching on sticks and old leaves. "We don't live anywhere near this side of the city."
"I know where it comes out," he said, with a certainty he hadn't known he possessed until the words were in the air. As soon as he said it, the hum inside him seemed to nod. "If we go straight—" he pointed, an instinct rising like an old memory "—we'll hit the neighborhoods near the river. Closer to your place. Closer to mine."
She stared at him as they ran. "How do you—"
"I just do."
Behind them, at the tree line, the vampire stopped dead.
He watched their silhouettes disappear between the trunks, his expression twisting through several emotions before settling on one that looked annoyingly like reluctance.
"The forest?" he muttered to himself. "Now that's new."
The wind stirred the edge branches, carrying out a low, rustling exhale, as if the woods were amused by his hesitation.
He stood there, just beyond the line where roots began to heave up the pavement, the toes of his polished shoes almost touching the first scatter of leaves. The dimming lamps made his face a study in planes of gold and black; for a second, something like genuine unease flickered in his eyes.
"Of all the holes in this rotten city," he said softly, "you had to choose that one."
He glanced back once at the empty street, as if expecting someone—or something—else to intervene. No one came. The quiet stretched.
"Fine," he sighed. "If you want to play in the dark, little candles…"
He stepped forward, and the forest took him.
The shadows inside the trees did not behave like city dark. They layered and twisted, swallowing the neat lines of his suit, tugging at the edges of his form. The smell of old growth wrapped around him, mixed with something sourer, older—like blood long since turned to iron in the soil.
He continued anyway, following the faint echoes of their steps, his smile returning in sharp, careful degrees.
Farther in, Brandon slowed just enough that Maya could catch her breath without collapsing. The ground dipped and rose unpredictably beneath their feet, roots like ribs pressing up through the earth. Every so often, he angled them to the right, keeping the ghostly glow of the road barely visible through the thinner patches of trees.
"We're not going home this way," Maya said finally, voice small. "We're… we're lost."
"No," Brandon said. The word surprised him by how certain it sounded. "We're not. We're just… not where we usually are."
She gave a humorless little huff. "That's the definition of lost."
"I know this forest connects," he said. He stopped, turned, and pointed into the deeper dark, away from the road entirely. A cold wind slid past his face as if in answer. "If we cut across there, we'll get closer to the river, like I said. It's… I can feel it. Like a map in my head, but not… not a normal one."
Maya stared into the direction he indicated. The trees there seemed denser, branches knitting into a dark canopy that the city's glow couldn't reach. The shadows between trunks felt heavy, as if they were watching.
"I don't want to go deeper," she whispered. "Brandon… people don't go into Central Woods. Not like this. Not at night."
He stepped closer and took her hands in both of his. His palms were cold and slightly clammy, but his grip was steady.
"I'm scared too," he said. He didn't try to deny it; the forest wouldn't let him lie that cleanly. "But staying near the edge keeps us next to streets where they are. Whatever else this place is… they hesitated to follow us. You saw that, right?"
Her gaze flicked back toward where the road should be, then to the dark behind him, then back to his face. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed.
"I trust you," she said, barely audible. "I don't trust this."
"Then trust me more," he said, gently. "Just for a little while longer. We move fast. We don't stop. We go straight. We come out closer to home. Okay?"
He squeezed her hands once, firm and warm. Some of the tension leaked from her shoulders, replaced by a brittle resolve.
"Okay," she said.
They turned together, away from the faint comfort of the roadside glow, and stepped deeper into the forest's waiting mouth.
High above, something shifted on a branch, eyes the color of old coins tracking their descent.
Far behind them, at the edge, another pair of eyes—red and hungry—pressed further into the dark, following the thread of their scent and the echo of their racing hearts.
The city's last streetlights blinked out, one by one, until Central Woods stood alone as a black shape against a starless sky, hiding inside it three small, moving lights of its own.