Chapter Five: Shadowing

The city woke without me, and I followed it only because she did.

When the sun fell low enough to loose me from stone, I found her by scent, by sound, by the way her pulse seemed to write itself into the air wherever she walked. I told myself it was vigil, debt, guardianship. It was hunger with a leash, and the leash was her indifference.

She left the house in a coat too light for the wind. I tracked the rhythm of her boots down the block, from roofline to fire escape to wire. The city was an animal I did not know how to ride—its lungs were engines, its heartbeat the stutter of signals running through invisible veins.

I had once known the shape of the world by hoofbeats, by bells, by the toll of iron on stone. Now it sang in strange tongues: brakes whining, doors sighing open by themselves, voices disembodied through little glowing talismans clutched to mortal ears.

The tall rods along the street flickered with caged lightning. I thought them beacons, warnings, until I saw how mortals ignored them, treating the steady blaze as if it were sky itself. Metal beasts thundered past with glowing eyes. I could not decide if they were constructs or creatures enslaved. Their hides reflected the lamps in passing, like armor polished to a mirror.

She passed into a place I did not know—glass door opening as if by ghost-hand, a warm den lit like an altar. I crouched on the overhang, uncertain if it was temple, market, or tavern. Mortals stood in line as though they waited to confess, some with coins, some with slips of paper, some with little glowing rectangles that approved or denied them.

The smell climbed to me: scorched beans, sweet milk, a tang of cinnamon. They drank from cups that were neither chalices nor tankards, pale vessels marked with sigils. I could not tell if this was worship or intoxication, only that they treated it with devotion. She met another woman there—the one whose voice I’d heard through her walls. The friend greeted her with a smile and an embrace and said a name. Nyssa.

The sound of it nearly unmade me. A handle I was not meant to hold. Nyssa. The hiss of it belonged in my mouth, a serpent coiled on my tongue. The syllables tasted like iron, as if spoken through the veil of a vow I had not agreed to make.

Her friend said it again, brighter this time: “Nyssa!”

Nyssa's laughter followed, shaking her shoulders. Worse than blood, that laugh. Worse than thirst. It was a pulse I could not drink. It told me someone else made her heart stumble and I was not permitted even to speak of it.

They touched hands over the table. I hated the friend for earning that small, unguarded contact. I hated her for stealing a sound I had waited centuries to hear. I hated more that the hatred felt like proof I had already broken something in myself just by watching.

When she leaned forward in conversation, light caught in her hair, and I felt the wound of beauty like it had been hidden from me all those years in the dark. Her lashes trembled when she smiled. Her mouth curved without needing permission. My chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with thirst, and I resented it. Regret came with it—regret that I could see her, regret that I could not look away. Falling is not a choice when the ground has already decided to rise and meet you.

After, she shopped. Another place I did not know. The doors opened without hands; I nearly dropped from the awning when they sighed apart like a living thing. Inside, endless rows of fruit gleamed under false suns. Mortals pushed wheeled baskets as if dragging livestock, stopping before shelves stacked with endless, uniform offerings. Their glowing rectangles sang at intervals, tiny chimes and vibrations, as though spirits were trying to claw out of them.

She selected apples, testing them in her palm. The gesture was obscenely intimate: weighing, discarding, choosing. I imagined being chosen. I imagined being discarded. Hunger chewed holes in the thought until it tasted like jealousy.

A man reached to get past her, and the careless back of his hand grazed her hip. The gesture was apology-shaped and nothing. She let it be nothing. I swallowed an animal sound that had been waiting at the base of my throat since I woke.

Every aisle she walked was a scripture written for my torment. The gleam of her cheek when she turned into the light. The flex of her fingers when she tucked a stray strand of hair back under her scarf. The stubborn line of her shoulders when she reached too high for something she wanted and refused to ask for help. I catalogued her as though she were the world itself, reborn and handed to me in pieces.

She walked home with a bag clutched against her hip, humming. Always humming. She didn’t know that every note mapped itself against my ribs, pulling lines tight until they sang. The scarf she wore shifted and let me glimpse the faint edge of the bandage at her throat. She bore my mark like an afterthought, as if it were not the axis of everything. I wanted to tear the street apart for failing to notice it.

By the time she reached her door, my jaw ached from grinding restraint. I reminded myself of thresholds, of vows, of debts. She locked herself in and left me outside, exactly where I had promised to remain. I should have gone. I should have let the night own me elsewhere. Instead, I took my place on the roof and listened to her life through walls too thin to protect either of us.

She cooked. Another ritual I barely recognized. The smell—garlic, oil, bread—made me think of centuries when kitchens were fire pits and hunger was honest. Now fire hid in metal boxes that hissed like serpents and cooled like stone. She sang, soft, while water ran from a pipe that gave endlessly as though bribed. She spoke on the glowing shard again, her laugh bruising me anew. I could not tell if she spoke to the friend or to the glowing rectangle itself, as if it had answered her with a spirit’s voice.

After, she bathed—the sound of water cascading over her body made the pipes sing. I had known rivers, fountains, basins filled by hand, but never this endless conjuring from a metal throat. Steam curled against the windows until the glass fogged, and I imagined it clinging to her skin. The steady rush was like rain obeying her alone, and it unsettled me that mortals had harnessed storms to wash themselves. When she emerged, she carried the faint scent of soap and warmth, padding into her bedroom with a towel twisted at her throat.

She sat with the glowing rectangle in her hand, its light painting her face strange colors as she scrolled through it. I thought it a scrying mirror, a cursed stone, some pact with the unseen. Words bloomed and died across its surface, symbols I could not read, as though spirits whispered in runes only she could understand.

Her eyes caught on them, expression shifting—sometimes amused, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes a shadowed frown—while the glow bathed her features in sorcery I did not trust. Her expression shifted—sometimes amused, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes a shadowed frown—before she set it aside and pulled the covers back. Then she went quiet.

Too quiet.

Sheets shifted. Breath shortened. A small, smothered sound curled out and set my fangs on edge. Not pain. Not fear. The cadence of pleasure. The scrape of her own hand against her own body.

I froze, every vein lit with memory: the taste of her blood, the heat of her palm on my jaw, the way the sun had almost found me when she leaned close. She was giving herself to herself, and it made me ravenous. It made me furious. Who had planted this hunger in her? Who had lit it? The friend at the café? The man at the market? A memory? Or was it me, and I would never know, and that ignorance was the real wound?

I dropped from the roofline to her window, silent as thought. The glass rippled the room into water. I pressed my forehead to it, my hands braced on either side. Behind it, her body moved, unseen but not unfelt. Every sound lanced straight into me. I wanted to see her, wanted the angle, the shape of her hand, the arch of her back. I wanted to know what rhythm she set, what thoughts she chased into the dark. Every gasp was a theft I both adored and despised.

She whispered something—words lost to the dark—but Theron was not among them. I hated that. I hated that she had not given me the power of my name in that moment. A part of me almost wished I had yielded it to her when she asked—so that if it was me she touched herself to, she might have had a name to moan into the dark, a weapon to make me hers as surely as she was already mine. And still I loved her for keeping it, because the keeping meant she knew it mattered.

Through the seam of the frame her scent leaked: salt, sweat, and that faint copper ghost of my mark. My body went hard with it, cock aching, fangs cutting my own tongue as if trying to remind me whose hunger this was supposed to be. I gripped the sill until the wood splintered under my hands. A pane trembled with the pressure of my need, and for one irrational second, I wanted to shatter it, to let glass and law break together.

The old law stood like a wall in my throat: I could not enter unless she invited me. For the first time, I was grateful for it. The leash saved her from me. Saved me from myself.

Because if she whispered the word—if she asked—I would be inside already, dragging her hand away so I could be the one to make her sing. I would ruin her for anyone else. I would give her no choice but to burn only for me.

And I hated that she hadn’t asked.

My teeth rattled with the force of restraint. I loved that she burned. I hated that she burned without me. I hated most that her body trusted her own hand before it trusted mine. And still, gods help me, I loved her for it. Loved the sight of her abandon. Loved the proof that she carried fire in her flesh.

When the sound broke at last—the sharp gasp, the shuddering cry she tried to bury in the sheets—I heard her finish. It tore through me like sunlight breaching stone, searing and holy, and I bit my tongue until blood filled my mouth just to keep from answering it with a roar of my own.

After she finally stilled, the silence pressed hard against my ears, as punishing as the coffin had ever been. Her breathing slowed, tender with aftermath, and I pictured her lips parted, eyes heavy, thighs trembling from what she had taken for herself. The sight was imaginary, but I believed it more fiercely than the faces I had once known before I was buried.

I leaned back into the night, every muscle singing with denial, and told myself this was payment. This, too, was part of the debt.

And regret—regret had already threaded itself through me like another hunger. Because what I felt was more than thirst, more than possession. When she smiled, the day looked less cruel. When she hummed, the silence inside me lost its edge. When she whispered to herself in the dark, I wanted to be what she whispered. I was falling, and the fall had no bottom.

I was learning the shape of love the same way I had learned silence: by letting it cut me open and calling the wound devotion.

And now I had a name to put to it. Nyssa. Her name was the sharpest cut of all.

Though I had carried mine for more than eight centuries, I had never heard it spoken with such weight in my own mind. Theron.