He Comes When The Air Dies

Nicole’s day began like any other.

Morning sunlight filtered through the blinds of her small apartment, casting soft stripes of gold across the floor. She stretched lazily, silencing her phone’s gentle alarm before it could disturb the quiet. The routine was familiar—comforting. The steady rhythm of her life was a balm against the uncertainty that had followed her since graduation.

The bookstore had taken her in like an old friend. In the low hum of pages turning and the comforting scent of ink and paper, she found stability. Here, she wasn’t exceptional—just another person shelved between the fiction and nonfiction. And that, in its own way, felt like safety.

After a quick shower, she dressed in her usual faded sweater and jeans—the kind of clothes that asked for nothing and expected nothing in return. Her hair, still damp, was swept into a loose ponytail, a few strands framing her face. She caught her reflection in the hallway mirror. Familiar. Unremarkable. She was used to seeing herself this way—plain, quiet, forgettable.

But to anyone else, she wasn’t so easy to overlook.

Her features were soft and delicate, like something conjured in a dream. Pale skin over a heart-shaped face, with eyes that held a strange, shifting depth—vivid green, threaded with blue when she was troubled. Her lashes were long and dark, casting shadows that made her gaze seem distant, unknowable.

There was a softness to her lips, the kind that made her smiles feel like secrets. Her voice, when she spoke, had a hush to it, like pages turning in the dark. Her hair fell in silken waves down her back, catching the light when she moved. She didn’t see it, but her presence had a pull—subtle, magnetic. The kind of beauty that crept up on you.

Still, Nicole thought of herself as ordinary.

The morning passed in a quiet haze. With a cup of coffee cradled in her hands, she stood at her kitchen table, idly scrolling the news on her phone. Most of the headlines blurred together—celebrity drama, political noise, the usual chaos of the world outside.

Then one headline made her thumb freeze.

Unsolved Murders Linked to Elusive Killer, ‘Vane’

She didn’t open the article. Just stared at the name for a heartbeat too long before swiping it away.

Her thoughts flickered back to the hushed conversation from the day before—the whispers about Colonel Street, about wounds too precise to be coincidence.

Vane.

The name still felt out of place in her quiet world. Like it had wandered in from a movie script and gotten lost among the bookshelves. But it wasn’t just the name. It was the silence beneath it. The unnatural stillness in the story.

She remembered something now. Something said in passing by an old customer, face half-lost in shadow, fingers trembling over a poetry book:

“If the air changes—if it suddenly dies—don’t move. That’s when he comes. They call him Vane.”

She hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Just another ghost story traded between half-mad old men and thrill-chasing teens.

But the name had stuck.

Vane.

He wasn’t like other killers. He didn’t storm in. Didn’t scream.

He drifted.

The air changed, and then someone was gone.

Some said he didn’t walk—he glided, like a shadow released from a body.

Others said he didn’t kill out of rage or revenge—but out of a cold, almost sacred compulsion.

And always—always—he used a knife.

Not because it was clean, but because it was personal. Because he wanted you close enough to feel him breathing.

Nicole shook the thought off. It’s just news, she told herself. Just one more name stitched into the fraying quilt of a dying world. There’s always something to be afraid of out there.

But in here—in her apartment, in the bookstore—she was safe.

At least, that’s what she believed.

She rinsed her cup, set it in the sink, and moved to the front window. The street below was still. Morning traffic had passed, leaving only the occasional cyclist or dog walker. Nothing unusual. Nothing wrong.

Still, she paused a moment longer than usual, scanning the sidewalk.

She didn’t see the man standing motionless across the street, half-shrouded in the long shadow of a bus stop sign.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t blink.

Just watched her.

And when she finally turned away, the light caught the edge of something beneath his coat.

Steel, faint and pale—

a knife.