The festival's flames lit Janab's pale face. The dancing lights cast twisted shadows across the concrete walls and wet asphalt, creating a ballet of fleeting silhouettes.
She lifted her gaze toward the cathedral's great clock, trying to confirm that the hands were still moving. Though the mechanism functioned with precision, time itself seemed distorted, stretching the atmosphere between the real and the unreal.
Isaiah had believed that if they ever crossed paths again without the protection of the beings of Light, he would drain every drop of life from her mortal body. Yet the young woman's dark eyes, veiled by confusion, showed no fear—only a deep desolation that stirred his curiosity.
During their first encounter, he had erased her memories, but her mind still struggled to recognize him. It was not surprising; crossing paths with a child of the night always left scars on the human soul. Even so, the hollow brightness in her stare revealed a desire for extinction that made him pause.Had her encounter with Simei shattered her to that extent?He considered it briefly: whatever the cause, that emptiness made her utterly vulnerable.
—So you keep living only because death feels foreign to you, —he whispered, his voice like spiked silk sliding across her skin.
Janab felt the whisper against her skin, a touch that sent confusion and clumsy reactions through every part of her being. The cold breath brushed her like a caress she could not reject, paralyzing her with bewilderment.
Amid the dancing flames, the porcelain-skinned figure drew her gaze, hypnotizing her as his hand extended toward her—slowly, as if the fire parted in reverence before him.
He was a murmur within the chaos of the festival and at the same time an overwhelming presence in the shadows. His pale fingers reached with an unearthly grace, demanding her touch with the subtlety of a trap. A perfect seduction from which no broken spirit could escape.
—Someone who runs and waits at the same time. You don't have to leave if you're not yet capable of returning.
His words, delicate and enveloping, carried authority. They coaxed, invited, and revealed the human misery that pushed her far from any form of purification.
Isaiah waited. He rarely delved into the emotions of his victims, but he understood their defenses—distant echoes of his own lost humanity.
—I'll help you escape from everything you're trying to run from.
Janab surrendered to the spell of the forbidden promise. Her trembling hand rose, shaken by an offer that dismantled her rationality.
The icy touch of his fingers was one final warning. Her muscles flinched at the immortal cold, but she gave in, offering herself to the shadows. Isaiah pulled her toward a downfall with no return—to a place where no one could see her or hear her ever again.
Soon she found herself walking through streets wrapped in thick fog, where the echoes of the festival drifted far behind them, distorted like funeral hymns for the life she had just left.
—You shouldn't be so trusting. The night is full of demons, —he said, a bitter irony in his voice— You could meet death at any moment.
Janab's lips curved slightly, almost like an unconscious smile."What is a demon? I don't need such absurd words to describe them."
Her vulnerability pleased him more than she realized. In her reproachable innocence, she believed that an eternal life on the run was preferable to a certain death. The thought irritated him: he hated being compared to humans in her mind.
—'Absurd words to describe them… to describe them' —he repeated, his voice sharpened like a blade— I am not a creation of your mind. Have you truly not realized that?
Isaiah shattered his own spell, releasing Janab's numbed awareness. Suddenly she woke to the cutting cold, the ominous silence of the empty streets, and the darkness that now tasted like horror. He had not put much effort into keeping her subdued; even now he sighed, annoyed by her fragility.
—You can't move unless I allow it, —his velvety, familiar voice coursed through her veins. Janab understood then that these deserted streets were no dream, and that the man before her was not a ghost—but something far more real and far more dangerous.
Isaiah's tall figure, his hair dark as a moonless night, his face drawn in perfect, unforgettable lines, revealed a harsh truth. His presence was winter itself, and suddenly the image of his pale hands stained with blood etched itself into her mind like a premonition.
Before the instinct to flee could send a command to her legs, Isaiah closed in on her. He enveloped her in the shadow cast by his body, and the cold flooded everything. Her fragile body collapsed, losing consciousness completely before she could even scream.
Janab's vital signs fluttered in his arms. Her human warmth felt strange in that moment, in that place.
Unlike pure-blood immortals, vampires transformed by the poisonous bite bore a more animal hunger for flesh. They required only occasional sacrifices, and there was an unwritten rule in the White Castle congregation forbidding them from taking lives beyond what was needed to feed—stretching their existence on the narrow edge of mortality.
But Janab… she was not under Caprissia's protection. She was a lost soul in a game she didn't understand.And Isaiah had just claimed her.