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vampire!azzi x vampire hunter!paige. men & minors dni.

wc: 14.9k

synopsis: at sixteen, azzi fudd is brutally murdered, and at sixteen paige is consumed with grief. eleven years later, paige is reborn through vengeance and finds that azzi has come back from the dead.

cw: vampire/human dynamics, childhood friends to enemies (kind of) to lovers, religious imagery & biblical references, grief as a love language, vampire hunters in a modern age, blood drinking, family trauma, violence & gore, paige vs not playing about azzi in any universe, body horror, choosing your long time lesbianism over your entire bloodline lmao, non-linear narrative, love as the ultimate religion, hurt/comfort, implied substance abuse, angst with a happy ending.

notes: i had so much fun with this, even though it took me a while to find the root of it. i hope you enjoy this as much as i did, and i love you. let me know what you think. x

everyone had a marker, a signal that they would either go old or young. azzi knew she was not meant for a full life, even before the onset of the end.

there had always been a feeling, a deep unease that had found her body in infancy and then spidered through her blood until she was nothing more than a prophetess of her own death.

for weeks before it happened, azzi could smell it. the air had gone dulcet and thick, a mangled memory of gardenias left to rot in the swelter of summer heat. every swell of her lungs came in sugar-burnt, almost like candied lilies left too long unattended, sweet to the point of sickness. it stained her, caked on and under her tongue like a pill half taken, found itself a place to nest in the dark spill of her curls. it was worse at night, an inescapable signal to some terrible departure.

she’d been feeling watched for months now, pursued by a crawling sensation between her shoulder blades, the sense of eyes tracking her movement regardless of circumstance. azzi was never alone, always a lamb: across parking lots, through school hallways, in the humid haze of her bathroom post-shower. there was always something in the mirror, something under the bed, someone against the window.

it was slowly, methodically, driving her insane.

she hadn’t dared speak of it, at least to no one other than her small leather-bound diary she kept soft between her stomach and mattress in the dead of night. she’d scribble madly, freezing at every creak of the floorboards, diamond ‘5’ pendant spinning fraily along its dainty silver chain.

it had been a gift for azzi’s thirteenth, the jersey number of the one person she usually told everything to.

paige bueckers.

paige, with her skin like snow stretched over a pool of hot blood. paige with her golden hair and golden throat and legs with no end. paige, who had chosen azzi when they were younger, who chose her always, even now with her erratic behavior and trembling in the dark. paige, whom azzi was terrified of telling about this persistence of feeling. paige, whom she loved in a way that went without articulation because there was no language—dead or alive—that could ever articulate azzi’s adoration.

paige, who went pink and soft and flaky under the sun, like a cherry danish. paige, who knew azzi like the back of her hand. paige with her odd, suffocating family. paige, with her vast talent and her future wide and undefined, like saltwater spread blue against the horizon.

azzi’s best friend.

so, she said nothing of how she felt, let it maroon her further and further from those she loved until she reached sixteen, and therefore, the end.

the day had begun with a spread of dark, heavy clouds that threatened rain but never released it. it was windy, cooler than any end of august had a right to be, but azzi had blamed it on the turbulent spirit of minnesota. the midwest was always unsure of itself, always confused with its twist of seasons and flat, blank body that could swallow you if you didn’t know your own.

this land knew a predator’s urge, and its earth would always signal the hunt.

that morning, as azzi left her house, she could feel the spirit of the soil. it hungered without restriction, its pulse beating in the way the undergrowth seemed to lean inward as she slipped free of her childhood home, creating corridors where there should’ve been a straight, even path. the tracks only led deeper when she needed to find her way out.

the shortcut to practice had never felt this long; the trees had never seemed this malignant. here, the bark wept dark sap like infected wounds, and the branches grew at abnormal angles, reaching out to grasp one another across the path, forming a canopy so dense that late afternoon felt already like twilight.

the forest’s floor was carpeted with leaves that seemed never to decay. they just accumulated in thick, wet layers that muffled sound and released a putrid, treacly breath with every step.

no insects hummed. no birds called. the flora seemed to curve desperately away from certain spots, firm in their avoidance and forming clearings where the earth was too dark, too rich, as if it had been fed.

the toe of azzi’s sneakers caught on roots that she wasn’t sure had been there yesterday. but maybe—maybe they had always been here, in the way her death had always been there. shadowy, slippery, suddenly so present. maybe she just never walked this way alone, in the dark, with fury still rooted warm and immovable behind her ribs, seeded from a rough argument the evening before with paige.

it had been over the phone and over something stupid, but important enough to derail her in the way most things did when you were only sixteen. it had held enough weight to discourage azzi from riding with paige to practice, to choose this laborious walk through these woods over that hot press of limb to limb in the back of the car with her favorite person since grade school.

absentmindedly, azzi touched her pendant as it spun fraily in the breeze, stilling its spin on its noose of thin, silver chain.

yes, something was wrong.

she touched it again, and in between the space of her fingers’ upward reach and her foot’s snapping of a stick, azzi fudd was forever severed from her humanity. slaughtered and gone in less than a second.

she never felt the full impact, only the soft brush of something behind her, and then a scarlet explosion of pain behind her eyelids. it was oddly near a migraine, an utterly destabilizing burst of agony that rendered her blind and without an axis of balance.

somewhere in the haze, a laugh—low, close, and lazy—split the silence.

“shh,” it said. “it’s only beginning.”

she began to fall, and in the white-hot hush that followed, azzi floated. her mind was clearer than it had ever been. she felt young, uncoupled from her body, as if her bones had been stripped bare to show the pale of them. a beginning again.

she could begin again.

and somewhere in that strange space between going and gone, she thought of the last time she had felt this warm:

she and paige, young and close, eleven and twelve, pressed together on court, gazing out across the ballroom, eyes sharp with judgment, watching players glide across lacquered floors. she and paige, twelve and thirteen, flushed with the noise of adolescence, always grazing, always watching, with no name for the wanting. she and paige, fourteen and fifteen, azzi’s ankle shattering and her team flying on without her, teeth shining in the frost as they headed to nationals. the roses paige made her mother buy, pink like brain matter, that weaved a web of comfort in the cocoon of her room.

paige’s mouth had hovered over the thin bones, eyes pressed tightly as if she was praying for the pain to be hers and only hers, suffering never to touch azzi.

she remembered now. and to think azzi had been cross with her before all this.

time folded inward. maybe her mother was reaching for her. she thought she could hear her name, spoken oddly—stiltedly—by someone else. maybe—

maybe the only real thing was the way her heart opened like a tulip smashed and stayed that way.

azzi landed hard, back in her body, air sharp and damp, her limbs splayed like a chalk outline. her curls pooled dark and dense underneath her head, a nimbus of blood stuck between matting and clotting. she lay in the middle of that forest floor, paralyzed in a hug of earth made rougher by the littering of wood and stone.

for a moment, she thought she was still falling. her breath came thin and reedy, snagging with every exhale on the peak of her throat. she coughed up chunks of soil and blood, body folding incorrectly, poured back into herself too quickly, chest cracking open for air like a coffin lid forced apart. she could feel the split of every vein, this new line drawn along her neck by a stranger’s intentional violence.

pain fluttered through her in fragments, butterflies of brutality: a violin string snapped, a shoulder struck stone, ribs pulled wide to make room for something that wasn’t quite her. the world blurred, waterlogged, sound and color smeared against glass. beneath her spine and skull, the earth still hummed, low and endless, a horrible droning hymn that asked her to forget the shape of her body. her old body.

time stilled; silence expanded and seemed to collect along her thighs and stomach. it was then she realized she was not alone. someone? something? leaned close, patient, waiting.

azzi glanced up, eyes jerking from side to side with panic as she realized someone was standing over her. she couldn’t focus on them. all her mind could conjure was recognition that it was a silhouette. from there, it fractured into a fantasy, told her that this was a face she may have once known.

her father. no. her grandmother. no. both at once. now, a stranger.

there was warmth dripping past her collarbones, and she understood its origin point was a product of the shadow above her. teeth, white and pointed. a prayer whispered: you’re beautiful, you know that?

azzi tried to scream. the void above her laughed, then settled into an answering smile that was sharp enough to sting. again, that smell. so sick and soft and confectionery.

she wanted to breathe it in forever.

they kept grinning, the line widening and blurring madly through her skewed vision. she could focus on nothing except the ache in her jaw. red beat against her brow.

red teeth, red mouth, red rebirth.

the creature bent, cool mouth meeting her skin, kissing their infection into her, and azzi’s life split open for a second time, a paper cut widening into forever. she screamed audibly this time, a high, haunting howl that amplified itself over and over until it covered her from bone to blood.

“help me,” she shrieked. “paige!”

paige, who’d driven this route a hundred times to pick her up from practice. paige, who would be driving past right now, windows down, probably still upset with her, but always the first to start feeling guilt when they fought.

the wrong answer: no one's coming, little bird. you’re just like me.

another bite down. azzi wailed.

“paige!”

hunger folded into blessing, then back again. she could no longer speak. it was nothing but an endless slur of suffering, her hips twitching and bucking beneath her as she was twisted into something new.

the transformation began in earnest then, as if it had been waiting for refusal.

her spine arched impossibly, vertebrae popping like knuckles as her bones began to eat and regurgitate themselves. the sound was wet and wrong: cartilage tearing, marrow remolding itself to accommodate this parasitic spill. azzi’s ribcage cracked outward, white fingers jutting out from her chest to welcome better lungs. lungs that would no longer need the same rhythm as before.

but it was her mouth that ravaged the most. her teeth—that white stretch that had spread beatifically for school photos, that had smiled at paige a thousand times, that had bitten her lip into slits when she was wracked by nerves—began to loosen in her gums. she could taste metal as they shifted, roots pulling free with tender, bilious pops.

her incisors fell first, dropping onto her tongue like lozenges, and she almost choked on them before her body lurched to the side and forced their deposit into the bloodied silt by her side, where they looked small and useless. two new rows pushed up and out through her gums, sharp and predatory and relentless, tearing her gums into a pink pulp that began to mend itself moments after—top and bottom.

the pain was exquisite, like her jaw was being reconstructed by a sculptor’s hands, forcefully perfected from the inside out. her senses expanded, extended, exploded. suddenly, she could hear heartbeats thundering from miles off, could smell every bit of animal flesh that had passed through these woods in the last week, could see every detail of her sire's face with perfect, terrible clarity even in the darkness.

urine trickled down her inner thigh, but azzi could not find the space to feel humiliated.

a leg kicked out as her neck snapped back, all of her veins straining for escape. she was unsure if she was still sobbing, but she knew that it mattered not. it was like this for days, maybe years.

in truth, it only took under twelve hours for her body to mangle itself under the mutation of the bite. and then finally, it was done. by the full bloom of the early morning, azzi had grown back.

she lay there, body aching inside and out, her mouth full of new teeth that felt foreign against her tongue. then there was movement. she could smell it before she saw the source, copper-sweet, trembling. her head snapped sharply to the side, the angle unnatural.

there, drinking languidly, was a herd of deer.

she tracked them, vision warped and spun upside down. the hunger swelled hot and impossible in her chest as she watched. it was a voice of flame, a ceaseless plea. azzi crawled, turning her body until it felt right again, until she could walk.

it took one glide to cross the forest, and eight bites until she was finished. her jaw stretched long and wide, fitting easily over the first neck and cutting through the last without protest. in the distance, she could hear a car engine—paige's car?—growing fainter as it drove away from her.

azzi knew on a level that she was whole but wrong. she was so hungry. and still—she touched her neck.

her necklace was gone.

oh no.

oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.

the forest settled around her, satisfied with the outcome of this chase. it had needed this offering to its diseased heart; it had needed something new to bury beneath roots that had grown fat on similar violence.

azzi stumbled backward, spinning in a loose circle, trying to retrace, to find at least the pendant, to salvage something. as she shakily twisted away from the carcasses of her meal, she felt her foot sink into the wet grasp of a puddle. she looked down and found her eyes dark, lit from within with a crimson light like a feline’s.

a vibration began to travel the length of her throat. her mouth fell open before she could stop it, and from its depth came a long and arduous scream. she could not look away from herself, could not stop her shriek of terror at the sight of her own face.

oh, god, she thought, looking down at the crimson of her palms, the bit of neck beneath her nails. oh, god. oh, god. oh, god.

paige is going to kill me.

ACT I. LAMENTATION.

in the aftermath of the disappearance, paige could not go a single hour without intervention. they had to sedate her.

at first, she was fine. she could handle “missing.” missing meant that there was a chance azzi could be found, could be located, and returned to her. she dreamed vividly of it from the moment the diagnosis was delivered to the case, illustrations of a rescue that soured quickly into a nightmare.

azzi with her skin colored cinnamon, the way it wept pear and iris after she drizzled her pulse points with perfumed oil. azzi, with her stomach hot against paige’s back. azzi, with her mouth like a rose, darkened and drained into a lush, dried pink. azzi, with her forehead against the nape of paige’s neck in the locker room shower, body shaking so that everyone else would see her grief instead, because she knew that paige hated crying in front of other people. azzi, whose early-bought christmas gifts were shoved underneath the chest of paige’s queen-sized bed, because who else would paige give them to?

but dead? presumed dead?

the words hit first like a slow poison, seeping through her consciousness until they reached something vital and began to corrode it. when they settled, it hit like a gunshot. paige jerked in place, bile rising in her throat, coming hot and fast against her back molars, then landing acidic on her tongue. the police station was suddenly nothing more than a place of altered physics.

the lights hummed, fluorescent, their frequency making her teeth ache in place, a tilt coming to her brain and seizing it. the air was thicker than before, and paige could feel the drag and drop of her lungs as her body worked overtime to keep her from imploding with grief.

she felt the passage of time in a way she hadn’t before, minutes moving over her arms and legs with stuttering rhythm like a film reel catching on its sprockets. detective desmond’s mouth was moving, yes, forming sounds, but her mind refused to interpret them as language.

paige could not learn these words, know these words.

blood spatter, evidence, remains.

azzi did not remain anywhere. she was whole and scared and waiting for her. she was waiting for paige. why didn’t they all understand that? it all floated past her, debris from a strike she couldn't quite comprehend.

“i’m sorry?” she asked, and everyone turned to her as if she were forgettable despite being so bright and blonde in this beige clinical space.

her hands began to tremble, and she watched them idly as if they belonged to someone else. such delicate things, these fingers that had braided azzi's hair into two neat plaits on game days and mapped the spread of her veins across her shoulder on the bus home. these fingers that had smeared their oils across the hummingbird flutter of azzi’s pulse, forcing her to calm down when she was possessed by an anxiety attack that would’ve taken out someone weaker. these fingers on this hand that had once clutched azzi’s now missing hand within it, bringing it up and spreading it wide so that paige’s chapped lips could scrape across the sweaty palm.

the detective watched her for a moment, then spoke again. "we're updating the case’s status to presumed homicide."

a tremor began to spread from paige’s hands to her arms, then deeper, until her entire skeleton felt unstable. she was aware, with the peculiar clarity that comes with shock, that something fundamental in her architecture was collapsing. not her body—her body continued to sway and sit in the plastic chair, continued to breathe and blink and maintain the pretense of being a living person—but the thing inside her that had been paige bueckers was folding inward like a dying star.

“no.”

her mother turned to her then, but paige ignored her.

“no?” an officer echoed.

"no,” paige agreed. she shifted in place, blue eyes unblinking and suddenly so hard to close. “you're not looking hard enough." her voice cracked here, veered high and desperate before she regrouped. "not one of you is looking hard enough. she's sixteen. sixteen-year-old girls don’t just disappear in a town like this."

“ms. bueckers, we understand this is difficult, but—”

“no,” she said again, but this time it fell from her mouth as a sob rather than a statement. “no, you don't understand," she told them, and her voice sounded far away, as if it were coming from the bottom of a well. "she's not gone. i would know if she were gone."

but even as she spoke, she could feel the knowledge creeping in through the cracks in her denial. azzi, who had been the other half of every conversation paige had ever had with herself. azzi, whose absence left a silence so profound it had its own gravity, its own terrible presence.

"i need to go look for her," she said, standing with the careful precision of someone walking on ice. "i will. there are places you haven't searched."

she went dizzy, and there was her mother's hand on her arm, a shackle that sent a wave of relief through the other adults in the room. but paige was bueckers’ blood, and her bloodline and its determination would never die. she twisted out from under her mother’s grasp and lurched forward.

“paige—” her mother began, but paige heeded nothing. she clutched at her head, suddenly swollen with pain, swollen with misery.

“they’re giving up on her! you’re all just giving up on her!”

with the accusation loosened and tossed into the fray, something inside of paige snapped. the sound that came out of her throat was neither a scream nor a sob, simply noise. a terrible, malevolent, animalic call made when one is caught in a trap. raw and primal and endless.

a chair scraped against the floor as she lunged forward, hands slamming against the detective's chest hard enough to send her backward with a shocked cry. her mother was fully on her then, pinning her daughter’s arms to her sides and kicking her feet out from underneath her so that she was felled like a skyscraper under the nose of a plane.

paige fought against the grip, nails raking against a desk's surface as she teetered, leaving white scratches in the fake wood grain. the room spun, her vision tunneling down to pinpricks of light. she couldn't breathe. her lungs felt crushed, compressed, like an anvil had caved her chest in with one fell swoop.

it took three men to get her into the back of her mother’s car.

the drive home was a coffin of silence broken only by the click of her mother’s rosary beads and punctuated by a series of static images. traffic lights bled their green-red-yellow switch into the rain on the windshield. her father’s knuckles were bone-white on the wheel. paige pressed her forehead to the glass until her breath fogged it over, whispering to herself—half-prayer, half-denial—she’s not dead. she’s not dead.

the familiar streets of their neighborhood transformed into hostile terrain: each darkened yard, each closed garage, a possible tomb.

was azzi a body hidden in a neighbor’s trash can? buried beneath a flowerbed, flesh rotting and maggotted under a family of white hyacinths? a squirrel shoving seed after seed into the hollows of her skull? would the soil give her away, the change in ph altering the petals, produce an oddity in color? reveal the truth years from now?

when they pulled into the driveway, the house lights were glowing, too warm and domestic with no sensitivity to the apocalypse hemorrhaging paige inside her chest. she stepped out of the car, moving toward the backyard with the single-minded purpose of the sleepwalking.

she would find azzi. she would bring her home.

these had become not just intentions but physical laws, as immutable as gravity.

"paige, you need to rest."

"no," she said, and it was as if she knew no other answer. "you’re all giving up on her. i am not giving up on her."

she tried to push forward, past her mother—who had moved far more quickly than paige thought her capable of—but her body betrayed her. her legs were suddenly unsteady, her hands shaking so violently she couldn't properly grip the delicate bone of her mother’s elbow to force her to the side. when her mother again blocked her path, paige found herself violently external, beating against the obstacle with the methodical persistence of waves against rocks.

"get out of my fucking way. she's waiting for me," she said, each word accompanied by a blow that set bruise after bruise into the woman who had heaved her into this world. "she's scared and she's waiting and everyone's giving up, but i won't. i won't give up on her."

it was useless, and they both knew it, and so they stood there for minutes more as paige struck every soft part of this body in front of her, every single wound-worthy sliver she found. it was only when she went to strike her mother’s face that her mother struck her first, sending her reeling backward and into the open arms of her father, who refused to let her go.

they guided her upstairs, her limbs writhing as she screamed, and eventually paige allowed it because walking had become difficult. after all, the floor seemed to tilt and sway beneath her feet. it wasn't until she heard the lock click that she understood what had happened.

she scrambled to her knees, crawled, pressed her palms against the door, and spoke to the wood in a voice that sounded reasonable, almost conversational.

"please open the door. i need to find her." silence. "she's alone out there. she's alone, and she needs me."

more silence, broken only by the sound of her mother weeping on the other side.

paige threw reason aside.

“open the door, mom. open the fucking door.” she was shrieking now, beating her fists purple and bloody. “open the fucking door! you can’t keep me in here. open it! open it!”

her throat tore with the effort. paige slid down until she was sitting on the floor, back against the door, throwing her shoulders into the wood in the hopes that it would give. it didn’t.

she pressed her cheek against the wood, listening to the silence on the other side until her own breath became unbearable. then she turned, slow as a feral thing, and crawled across the room. the window latch gave under her hands.

paige dropped into the yard barefoot, knees splattering with mud. she didn’t remember taking her shoes off, but she didn’t mind. she’d move quicker this way, and what she needed most was time. the night was dismal and cruel, overtaken by a sudden drop in temperature. somewhere in the dark, she expected azzi’s laugh, azzi’s voice, azzi’s arms. there was nothing.

paige moved on hands and knees at first, then stood, stumbling, letting her mind and body guide her. there was only one direction: into the woods.

she had told them about the shortcut. the hidden path azzi had shared with paige, with a sly smile, pulling her by the wrist and laughing when the branches snapped across her arms. even riddled by grief, paige’s muscles remembered where to duck, where to push aside a burst of firs, where the path would curve abnormally in the dark, lead her toward a clearing.

the trees closed in, dense and unforgiving. branches scraped her face, dirt wedging underneath her nails as paige worked her way in with unhinged determination. the deeper she went, the quieter it became, until even her breathing felt like trespass. she was nearing prayer when she broke through a hanging of dry, thin branches and into the clearing.

the silence roared, and she carefully gazed around, shoving traces of blonde hair away from her face. she could not allow anything to distract her from clues.

and then she saw it.

at first, it was only a glint, a shard of light that paige thought she was hallucinating, so unnaturally beautiful against the dull, wet earth. but when she crouched, knees pressing into the soil, fingers trembling in the dark, she knew at once it was not an illusion. it was nauseatingly real. the chain was halved, clasp broken. the small diamante “5” that had swung from it lay crooked on the forest floor, spattered scarlet-brown across the face where blood had dried into its grooves.

azzi’s pendant. azzi’s promise. paige’s jersey number, pressed into silver, worn against azzi’s chest every day since paige had gifted it to her.

she had never taken it off.

not for sleep. not for showers. not for anything.

paige sank to her knees, the caps hitting the rot-soft dirt, her fists carving furrows into the leaves. the clearing swam before her, and she gagged dryly on nothing, oxygen suddenly cloying and scented with gardenia. once she noticed the odor, it reared in its full repugnance, until it felt ground into the marrow of her teeth.

the pendant bit into her palm, sharp and merciless, and she understood in one obliterating rush: azzi was gone.

gone in a way that left no answer behind. gone in a way that meant paige could not follow.

paige felt her mouth unanchor, but what left was not speech. she could only scream until her throat seemed to rupture with the strength, her pain so encapsulating that she could see nothing before or after it.

she was nothing more than a confession of anguish; a low, animal keen.

paige drew her knees to her chest and began to rock, a motion that seemed to originate somewhere deeper than conscious thought. her hands found her throat, fingers tracing the hollow where azzi used to rest her chin when they watched films late into the night together. she fell into sobbing, into soft hiccups in the flat of the woods with the fat of her cheeks pressed hard into the errant sticks, leaving imprints across the blotch of her skin.

by the time her father found her, flashlight beam jittering across the trees, she was catatonic on her side in the dirt, breath thin and reedy, body trembling as though a possession had taken hold of her.

he said nothing, only lifted her, her arms flailing about before giving way to dead weight. it was like this that he carried her back through the black mouth of the trees. the house loomed into view, windows staring, her siblings black silhouettes pressed anxiously to the curtained glass.

paige did not remember the walk upstairs. only the familiar shut of her bedroom door, the lock catching, the sound of her mother’s prayer beads clattering against the banister as she whispered on the other side. that was the last sound of the world before misery rose to meet her cheek.

there was no halting of salt, no way to stop the leagues of tears that threatened to permanently sour her cheeks. paige could only fold herself into one of a million oversized hoodies owned by her, meant to be stolen by azzi, and vanish into bed. she tightened her arms around herself and curled into a blistering, wet ball of agony, holding her body closer, stiller, fighting against memory and the realization that this would be the rest of her life.

the realization came not as a sudden blow but as a slow, inexorable understanding: she would never hear the catch of azzi’s breath again. never know the shiver of her body against hers after a dip into the massive, black lake behind her house. there would be nothing.

no more companionship, but this: half of her always gone and worm-eaten. half of her would always be suspended in heartbreak.

the nightmares came, brutish and barbaric, and paige never realized she was screaming until her mother woke her, clutching a hand hard and hot around her mouth and jaw, voice low and urgent as she tried to get her daughter to look at her.

hours passed. perhaps months. time had become elastic, meaningless. when the doctor came with his needle and his promises of an empty, easy sleep, paige watched the sedative enter her bloodstream with the detached interest of someone observing a scientific experiment.

as consciousness dissolved around the edges, she wondered if they had enough to finance this kind of life forever. if her parents would be able to keep paige comatose for the entire span of her life, if it would then fall to her siblings to keep her lucid enough to shit and eat and sob until she injured her throat and was tortured into silence.

when the doctor’s visits slowed and eventually stopped, paige took it upon herself to continue her treatments. pill after pill, sleep after dreamless sleep. a perfect, vast grief that required nothing from her except for her to stay underneath it. her body shrank with its mutilations from hunger, her legs too thin, and her collarbones protruding. her face was nothing but angles, sharp lines drawn together to form the rough etching of a human face.

there was nothing before azzi, and there would be nothing after.

if we don't do something, her father told her mother, this town will suffer another girl.

if we give her something to hunt, she will never stop hunting, her mother answered. she will never stop killing. everyone will have wronged her. everyone will have been the one who killed that girl.

if we don't give her something to kill, her father said, his shadow blanketing the strain of his daughter’s bones through her back, she's going to kill herself.

they were both right.

SEPTEMBER.

OCTOBER.

NOVEMBER.

DECEMBER.

JANUARY.

ACT II. HOLY WORK.

it began with her father sitting on the edge of her bed, the mattress dipping under his weight as paige lay curled on her side, staring—for yet another day—at nothing.

she hadn't moved in months, pale hands clutched tightly into bloodless fists, azzi’s pendant as close to her chest as she could get without swallowing it whole. her blue eyes were too light and too blank, pupils dilated by the gentle tend of self-administered morphine. there was a slight rim of blood dried at the corner of her mouth, a remnant of a particularly bad nightmare this week that she’d only woken from when she’d bitten a hole through her cheek.

she hadn’t spoken since the clearing. the room smelled stale and of an unwashed body, but paige could not find it in her to care. everything in this space was collecting dust, including her own life. grease caked over what was left of her dye, her roots coming in with a dark, steady blue under the platinum’s full surrender.

“hey, sweetheart,” her dad murmured. “how are we doing?”

nothing. paige’s lashes twitched, flickering up then down before falling back into stillness. her father sighed, then shifted in place.

“i know it’s hard, baby, to do anything other than sit here and sink into what you’re feeling. there’s nothing—you can’t—this is unimaginable for anyone, let alone a seventeen-year-old. but you can’t just sit here and waste your life, sweetheart. your potential. you know she would’ve hated that.”

as expected, that procured a stronger reaction. this time, paige’s entire body jerked in place, her fingers twitching free from their curl angrily. it was good to see her briefly free from that horrible, constant rigor of sorrow.

“i know i didn’t know azzi like you did, but i know that. she loved you,” he said quietly, voice careful as a body’s weight on ice. "and she was a good girl, paige, so good to you. what happened to her was so deeply undeserved."

paige's eyes didn't move from their position on the wall, but something in her breathing changed. shallower. more fragile.

“i want to—i want to tell you what happened to her. what really happened to her."

“i know what happened to her.”

the creak of his daughter’s voice almost sent robert to his knees, and he pressed his palms to his thighs with great strength, his eyes welling with tears of relief. he turned away, gathering himself. in the silence, paige continued.

“we fought the night before about something i don’t even remember. it was so fucking stupid, but i kept pushing. so, she told me she wasn’t going to ride with me to practice the next day, and i told her she could do whatever the fuck she wanted.”

“baby—”

“i hurt her feelings, dad, ‘cause we never curse at each other, but i did that day. ‘nd she walked herself to practice and got fucking murdered. my best friend was murdered, taken from me, and it’s all my fault.”

the words seemed to stick to her throat at first, but then they slithered free, and with them came a terrible dry heave of anguish that shook paige from head to toe. her father came closer, sliding a hand down her back and quieting her as she sobbed into the stiff material of her pillowcase for the thousandth time since azzi’s slaughter.

"even if that were true, even if it had been a coincidence, that is not your fault, paige. god, this is not and never will be your fault. no one blames you, sweetheart, and you cannot blame yourself. the guilt will do nothing but eat you alive.” paige shook beneath his hand, small and childlike and heedless. “there was nothing you could’ve done to change the outcome, paige. this was always what was going to happen, the devil’s weavings.”

nothing. he continued.

“when i found you that night, you kept mumbling about a smell in the clearing. i didn’t—i couldn’t focus on anything but you, so i didn’t heed it in the moment. but you were so adamant that you could smell something rotting. ‘something’s wrong, ’ you said, over and over.” he paused, hands folded between his knees. “so, i went back, and it was still there. this sickening sweet rot; it almost made me sick. you couldn't place it, but i could. i knew what it was."

maybe there was something in the way his voice shuddered or the crack that came on the last phrase, but whatever it was was enough for paige to roll half-heartedly, eyes less dead than before. her father watched her for a long moment, then started to speak again.

“that smell? it's what they leave behind when they feed. when they drain someone completely.”

her father’s face twisted, his disgust full-bodied, his mouth captured in a snarl. a sound escaped paige then, more curious than pained. her fingers tightened around the pendant until her knuckles went white as snow.

“there are things in these woods, paige. there always has been. since the sins of adam and eve in that garden. they must hunt; their nature demands it. it’s why azzi is gone, why the police couldn't find her.” his voice hardened. "they wouldn’t begin to know where to start, or how, and that's why our family exists. our lineage. we are the world’s last home, god-given to stop them from taking anyone else.”

silence stretched between them, thick and expectant. finally, paige's voice came, barely above a whisper.

“what are they?”

her father studied her face, searching for something. readiness, or perhaps the beginning strings of the calling he knew she would soon heed. whatever he found must have satisfied him, because he stood slowly and moved to her desk, pulling a leather-bound journal from beneath a stack of her untouched schoolwork, its spine cracking under the sheer volume of pages and artifacts within.

paige wondered how long ago he had placed it there.

“everything we know,” he answered, placing the tome in her lap. the leather was worn smooth by generations of hands, the pages yellowed and dense with careful blue script. “four hundred years of family knowledge. names, weaknesses, hunting grounds. how to track them, how to kill them, how to make sure they stay dead.”

paige's fingers traced the cover, feeling the weight of it. “how long have we been doing this?”

“since the first of our blood set foot on this land. we keep it clean.” his hand found her cheek, thumb circling firmly but gently against its hollowness. “it's what we are, paige. what we were made for. the work chose us long before we chose it.”

“do i have to do this?”

his thumb slowed, then stopped. he cupped her chin and forced her to meet his gaze, eyes as dark as a burial.

she knew whatever came next in the conversation would shift something fundamental in the architecture of her grief. where there was only shapeless anguish, there would be purpose. terrible and sickly and sharp-edged, but purpose nonetheless.

“you will.”

she took to the work like an infection to a wound.

three days after her father had reasoned through her depressive spiral, paige pulled herself from bed with a great effort for the first time in months and found her father in the basement with her mother, idly cleaning the length of a silver-tipped crossbolt.

after a lengthy, weighted silence, she finally spoke.

“show me.”

next to her father, her brothers grinned.

her training began not a week later, and her father had expected resistance, even disgust. this was how most initiates reacted, recoiling when shown their first leech corpse, black blood pooling thick as motor oil around the bolts’s body.

but no, not paige.

instead, she studied the entry wound with the objectivity of a coroner, fingers tracing the char marks where blessed silver had met undead flesh. she gazed down at the leech, wondering if the pain it had felt measured anywhere close to the amount azzi must’ve endured before it all finally stopped.

"clean shot," she said, voice flat as winter water. "through the third rib?"

“fourth," her father corrected, and he felt slightly ill at how readily she absorbed the lesson, how easily she nodded.

he was unsure if she had what it took, if she would be able to execute past the clear grief he saw still stained over her. but the concern was quickly reconciled.

her first hunt was in february. paige could feel her father’s eyes on her like concrete held to a belly in order to drown. she focused on nothing but the placement of her hands on her rifle, handled the stock like it was bone, loaded shells one after the other—a robotic, calcified angel.

she wasn’t meant to kill so soon, so quickly, but a fledgling had torn through a chicken yard seven miles out and left the snow in ribbons. the family had been called to slaughter.

paige followed her father and brothers into the trees, crossbow slung across her back, pistol heavy on her thigh. her lungs heaved with effort as they waded through snowbanks almost as tall as she was, the black and grey speckled fur along her coat collar feeling far too ornamental for their cause.

the fledgling was waiting for their arrival, skin stretched too thinly, veins like black rivulets under the flesh, ears twitching with every crunch of human feet. its teeth still red with feed.

they’re hardest to put down, her father had warned, all hunger and no discipline. sometimes the bite doesn’t take for them, making them nothing more than animal instinct. we try to make it quick for them, being so new and ruined.

paige wasn’t interested in the business of making it quick for any of them.

the fledgling stank of marrow and wet soil. it stumbled out of the treeline, the sun nothing but a thin crimson line across the horizon, body jerking like a marionette. it was clearly mutated by a bite untaken, its veins highly swollen and distended under the eyes and ribs. as soon as it registered them, it shrieked, mouth gaping and leaking long strings of yellowed spit that steamed in the cold.

her father began to raise his gun, her mother too, but paige stilled them with the smallest tilt of her hand.

she did not raise her weapon. closer and closer it came.

she let it come.

snow broke under its feet as it closed the space, thundering across the distance, a smear of hunger and speed. its breath hit her cheek, rank and animal, and still she stood—shoulders low, knife hidden against her thigh. her brothers swore, one tried to shove forward, but their father’s hand gripped his collar like an iron yoke.

she let it come. she let it come. she—

she waited until its fingers brushed the fabric of her coat, moved only when it lunged, when its fingers curled for her throat. then, with no more emotion than if she were folding laundry, the blade came up smooth, inevitable, parting the chest in one deep, single pull. the fledgling screamed, but paige did not flinch.

she stepped inside its collapse, carving upward through the sternum, twisting once to split the bone. its heart was blackened meat. she cut until it stopped. there was nothing, not even when its unnatural blood sprayed hot across her face. she did not blink.

her face was clean of expression. clean of rage, clean of relief, clean of rapture. when the body went still at her boots, she only wiped the blade once on its thigh and looked past her brother, past her father, at nothing at all.

and there, in the quiet afterward, as her family’s shock polluted the air, paige heard it for the first time. low and tender, pressed against her ear like a secret.

“good girl.”

her voice. azzi.

azziazziazzi.

paige swayed in place, begging for it to sound again. she needed it to come again. her fingers spasmed on the hilt of her blade. she nearly sobbed, but the sound caught sharp in her throat, forcing itself down until her chest ached with it.

there were no new words.

the silence after was worse than the killing.

“she waited,” ryan whispered hoarsely, as if naming a sin. “we don’t—she waited until—”

“she knows what she’s doing, son,” their father cut in, though his eyes never left her. watching her as if she were a stranger in his daughter’s skin. “we all have our technique.”

paige only stood, knife steady in her grip, blood drying down her jaw. she said nothing. but her ears rang with azzi’s phantom voice, soft and close, speaking to her alone. she met her father’s gaze head-on, then her mother's.

bueckers’ blood was one thing, but paige was entirely another. this was a new split of the genetics, a heralding of a new chapter of the dynasty.

she held her hand out, and in her palm was placed a small crystal catheter. paige inserted it into the corpse, then slowly fed a shallow stream of holy water into the tube. as the water met the body, it began to smoke.

the others turned their faces away, coughing against the stench. paige did not.

she closed her eyes and breathed in it.

this was baptism.

[1] gardenia. — purity, refinement, innocence, harmony, and gentleness.

an omen of the holy undone. if its scent gathers thick in the air without source, beware: the leech has nested here. the blossom is the devil’s perfume, cloying, deceptive, covering rot.

use as a signal between brethren to mark where the unclean have passed. a warning and a promise: to cleanse, to cut, to return the ground to god.

paige was inducted after that.

the tattoo came after her second kill.

she’d tracked the leech for three days through the bitter forests outside duluth, following the trail of exsanguinated deer it left like breadcrumbs. when she finally cornered it in an abandoned grain elevator, the thing had looked both old and young, still clinging to the ripped remains of a flapper dress, its skin perfect save for the mark of its bite.

paige put two bolts through its neck before it could speak.

that night, in a minneapolis tattoo parlor that smelled strongly of antiseptic and hand-rolled cigarettes, she had the numbers etched behind her left ear: 11.11.02. neat and tight, black ink that would never fade. the needle’s buzz reminded her of flies on carrion, but she sat still as stone until it was finished.

my girl, the voice crooned. paige smiled in the seat.

so brave for me.

for azzi. always for azzi.

the arsenal became her scripture. crossbows disassembled and reassembled until her fingers moved like prayer beads. springs, triggers, bowstring—all mapped into the body’s litany, a ritual she could perform blind. her hands, once soft with tragedy, grew callused and scarred, bearing stigmata in the shape of grip tape and holy metal.

blessed silver burned her palms the first dozen times she loaded stock. after that, her skin adapted, thickened to its kiss. just another small death in service of the larger work.

her father taught her to mix the compounds: garlic distilled into a caustic liquor, holy water boiled down to acid, sanctified by three priests until it hissed like the devil’s serpentry itself. the first time, the fumes made her retch, a confection of chemical burn that left her eyes streaming, her sinuses weeping. by winter, she could bottle it bare-handed, face pale and serene, breath steady, as if tending medicine instead of the seeds of assassination.

“you’re getting good at this,” ryan said once, watching her strip a rifle down to its bones.

paige did not look up. she could taste his envy coming hard, peaky and crowded at the back of her throat.

“have to be.”

yes, the voice whispered. for me.

the years folded into ritual. morning prayers at breakfast. weapons oiled at noon. patrol routes memorized like a catechism. paige learned to read the signs:

an absence of birdsong would follow wherever a leeche nested.

wildflowers would wither in perfect spheres around their feasting grounds.

they usually went after deer, rabbits, and foxes. anything larger signified the existence of a coven.

she studied their undoings with scholarly devotion: the angle of a clean beheading, the burn of silver, the verses that kept them bound just long enough for a killing strike.

by twenty-seven, she had become something her younger self would not have recognized. lean muscle strung tight over a body that had forgotten the definition of affection. hair freshly flaxen, pulled back severely in a plait that ran to the middle of her back, never to come undone. hands steady and aim true.

her brethren christened her blessed, said she moved through nests like an archangel, leaving only ash and silence.

paige heard a different call in the quiet after slaughter, when blood steamed on her skin.

mine, azzi murmured. my girl. my avenging light.

she was the sword in her family’s hand, the answer to their calling. reborn and baptized in black blood and righteous fire.

she was exactly what they had made her to be.

my angel, azzi said.

seraphim.

ACT III. REVELATOR.

spring was coming in, and with it, more leeching.

the field bled itself empty as twilight settled fat and purple over the grass. paige watched herds of wildlife flock back to their shelters, knowing a few would be picked off by the morning.

she scraped a thick patch of intestine from her dagger, the organs caked into unholy abnormality, patiently scouring the treeline while ryan first checked the number of bolts left in his quiver, then his phone. their most recent hunt had been clean. efficient. another nest purged from the earth like a rotten tooth pulled whole.

"fuck me, bro," ryan swore, voice low and irate. " dad’s saying we didn't get all of them. that another clan confirmed there may still be one or two left from the nest."

paige closed her eyes and pressed two fingers to the center of her brow, the beginning threads of headache webbing along her temples. “you have got to be fucking kidding me. are you serious?”

ryan nodded, eyes dim. “dead.”

“fuck!”

her brother laughed in disbelief, his body slacking with exhaustion. “i was really hoping we’d call it a night and head home.”

“me and you both,” paige muttered. she wiped her hands on the hem of her hoodie, a bulletproof vest tucked beneath to lend her full protection. her eyes tracked the shadows that began to pool thickly between the bushes. "i just don’t fucking get it. after almost a month of tracking? what could be left?"

“do they breed or some shit?” ryan asked, and paige shrugged.

“maybe they’re evolving.”

they both laughed, and the sound sent a fresh surge of pain pulsing through her skull. paige turned to the side as it crested, mind throbbing. her ambition for finding stragglers was less than substantial, and she was just about to suggest they head home regardless, when she promptly froze.

there, thirty feet away at the treeline's edge, stood a figure that unmade her entirely.

the body was familiar in ways that bypassed conscious thought: the slope of shoulders she had traced placidly in sleep, the curve of hips she had memorized in locker room glimpses, had wanted to press her lips to—thin and pink. the particular tilt of the head that signaled listening, always listening. but the flesh had been remade, stretched taut over an improved blueprint.

the silhouette wasn’t quite right. it was taller now, limbs elongated, skin uncomfortably luminous and golden-brown in the dying light as if some internal fire burned just beneath the surface.

naked. completely, devastatingly naked, and paige's mind stuttered over the sight. desire was latent, though that flickered treacherously and familiarly, but what emerged most urgently was the terrible intimacy of it. she could not dehumanize this any longer, could not remove herself from its monstrousness because it was well, it looked nothing but every inch of human.

there was no longer any doubt: this was a body she knew, had always known, now exposed and vulnerable in ways that made her chest fracture with fury.

blood painted abstract patterns across the familiar canvas, curving over the full soft meat of the breasts, suckling tenderly at the cold-hardened nipples. claw marks were scored deep into the left shoulder, still weeping crimson. a crossbow bolt jutted from the meat of her thigh, copper-tipped for prolonged torture, the flesh around it already beginning to spoil.

the work of other hunters, of another family; other righteous hands had marked this skin with their holy work.

but the eyes—christ, the eyes, her eyes, were what truly destroyed paige. burgundy and gleaming like coals, pupils slit for better vision in descending night and filled with such desperate, overwhelming relief that paige felt her knees threaten to buckle. those eyes held over a decade of anguish, of searching, of hoping against hope, and they were looking at her like salvation itself had finally arrived.

and paige could do nothing but disappoint.

the creature's—no. her mouth opened, and paige caught on the separation of those lips. god, those lips she had dreamed of kissing for years, now parting to reveal the white, malevolent glisten of lengthy canines. a sound escaped from over the tongue, barely audible. it might have been a call of paige's name, a pulse of memory.

behind her, her brother was speaking, his voice crescendoing with alarm, but it sounded distant. it was irrelevant. the world had narrowed to this: the impossible sight before her, this resurrection gripped in the jaws of an orange moon.

then the creature's—no. no.

her gaze dropped to paige's hands, to her crossbow, and the peek of silver. the holy water looped into her belt, the slight bulge of the vest underneath her sweatshirt. understanding dawned like a new morning, and that beautiful, terrible face crumpled with betrayal so pure it was almost sacred.

the next cry that tore from her throat was animal grief, raw and endless. she stumbled backward, movements suddenly graceless, no longer seeking, only prey-afraid.

"paige, get the fuck back!" ryan roared, desperate now in the face of death. but paige felt deathless. "that’s a fucking leech!"

she saw the word hit like a physical blow. the creature—no, azzi—flinched, features contorting with agony and rage and the death of faith in coming home, and for the smallest heartbeat paige could see what her family saw: predator, unholy thing, abomination requiring cleansing.

but then it fell away, and there was only what she could see: the way those perfect shoulders shook with sobs she’d recognize in the dark. the particular way that head turned when shame threatened to drown everything else. that cervine gaze creased with terror.

paige let her weapon fall. it clattered against the earth like teeth rocked by force in a jaw.

azzi’s wet eyes widened, confusion bleeding through the fright. hope, dangerous and desperate, began to rekindle in that strange gaze. for a moment, the two were suspended and connected, and then the second severed.

azzi sharply pivoted and, in a blur of motion, she was running, melting into the trees with a speed that defied every law of physics, leaving only the echo of decade-old sorrow and the mutated scent of gardenias in her wake. it was then that paige remembered language, how to speak. her mouth fell open, and she screamed after her,

“azzi!”

her body was moving before her mind could catch up, muscles coiling for pursuit, but ryan's hand clamped around her arm like a manacle.

“what the fuck—that thing could have killed you!”

something in his voice, the casual dismissal, the way he reduced her early life of mourning to a thing—it flipped a switch in paige's chest. the same cold precision that had made her legendary among their brethren, the calculated butcher her family had crafted, crystallized into perfect, self-protective wrath.

the knife was against his throat before he could blink. the vein is so full here, she thought.

“let it go."

ryan went very still, eyes wide, phone halfway to his ear. the blade pressed just deep enough to dimple skin, blessed silver singing against his pulse.

“paige—”

“i said. let. it. go.”

still, foolishly, he balked at the order. she pressed the blade in harder, blue eyes like flint.

“drop it.” her voice was winter water, flat and merciless. he seemed to get it then, and the phone clattered to the ground. "good. you're not calling anyone."

“what—why the fuck not?” ryan sputtered, and paige stepped back, running a hand raggedly through her hair. she clenched her eyes shut, desperate to center herself. eventually, she answered him.

“because i know her. knew her. i—” she breathed out carefully, an archaic squeeze settling around her throat. she suddenly felt ill, near retching, and her voice cracked on her next words. “that was azzi.”

silence. then,

“paige, she’s been dead for years,” her brother whispered, and there was something almost pleading in it. paige could understand. she felt unmoored enough as it was.

she covered her mouth with a hand, swallowing down the chunky slide of rising bile.

“they never confirmed that,” she said, and her brother sighed.

“look, whatever that thing might’ve appeared to be, it's not azzi anymore.”

at that, paige was up, madness surging with vigor, and her dagger renewed its position against his throat. it pressed deeper, and a thin line of blood welled against the steel. ryan's breath hitched.

“twenty-four hours,” paige said, and her tone held that same terrible certainty she'd used on dying leeches. “you and every member of our family are going to give me twenty-four hours.”

“for what exactly?”

she looked toward the treeline where azzi had vanished, where the sounds of crashing brush were growing fainter and fainter still. when she spoke again, her voice carried the weight of damnation, of a choice made and consequences accepted.

“call it closure.”

she’d said what she needed to, and with it, gained all that she had ever wanted: time.

azzi sprinted until her lungs burned, until the trees blurred into a lunatic smear of green and shadow, until the sound of paige's voice and its taunting echo—azzi!azzi!azzi!—faded into nothing but wind through heavy leaves.

only then did she allow herself to collapse against the rough bark of an aspen, chest heaving, the bolt in her thigh screaming with every movement. she pressed her palms against her eyes, attempting to repress the tears, the memory, the way anticipation had built itself to a height in her chest only to be felled by the sight of those golden crosses intersected at the apex of paige’s neck.

paige. her paige. her golden girl, armed and vengeful and—

stop.

she couldn't think about it, couldn't let herself shatter in this moment, not when she was bleeding and exposed and miles from proper shelter. survival first. always survival first. that's what the years had taught her.

eleven years, to be exact, of learning what she was by enduring a thousand small deaths.

the first months had been the worst of it, spent hiding in abandoned buildings and storm drains, the deep places where humans didn't venture. she'd been so sick those first weeks, her body rejecting everything—food, water, even air—as the bite pushed it to its peak. she had been rushed from sixteen to twenty-five in the span of hours, accelerated and then frozen at an age she still struggled to feel set in, even as the years passed.

she'd tried to eat, tried to be normal, tried to pretend that nothing had changed.

bread had turned to ash in her mouth. milk had made her vomit violently, white foam, and then eventually nothing at all, only the act of it. even the grace of water was robbed of her, its taste mangled into nothing but pennies and rot.

the hunger had been a living thing inside her and still was, clawing incessantly at her ribs, provoking urges she always misunderstood. azzi fought against it until she was nothing but bone and fevered skin, broken into collapse in an alley behind a diner and woken to find a stray dog bleeding out beneath her teeth.

that first taste of blood had been a revelation first, damnation second. the cravings quieted, her body had sung with strength—no longer diseased—and she'd had the vitality to sob over the small corpse until dawn broke peach and dire over the horizon.

vampyre. that's what she was now.

monster.

this was what her sire had made her that day in the woods, without ever asking azzi if she wanted to be.

she’d learned to hunt the way children learn to walk: clumsily, with many falls. rats at first, then pigeons, then larger prey when the hunger overpowered. she'd taught herself to be quick, to be quiet, to take only what she needed. never humans. that was the line she would not cross, no matter how the hunger screamed.

but animals weren't enough. not ever.

she grew thin and weak on rabbit blood and bird hearts, her body begging for richer, more decadent. something that pulsed with human warmth and feeling. the famine was never fully satisfied, only temporarily soothed, like putting paste and a bandage over a severed artery.

she'd tried to go home once, early on. had stood outside her parents' house in the dark, watching the tepid light of the kitchen windows radiate delicately at her, listening to the familiar sounds of dinner being prepared to the dull hum of television static. it requested her return; it knew this lost daughter.

her courage had swelled, and she’d stepped forward when she heard the door creak open, but when her mother slipped out to dispose of the trash, she'd taken one look at azzi and screamed.

the mirrors had shown her why. the crimson eyes, the too-sharp teeth, the way her skin seemed to glisten with eerie brilliance. she looked nightmarish, as if she had crawled from a grave, straight out of hell’s hands.

her mother's scream echoed in her head for months afterward, shrill and unforgiving. so unwanting.

so, azzi learned to infiltrate the spaces between, the corners where society didn't nor wanted to search. she began to understand this body, born of violation; she learned that certain smells made her teeth ache and her vision blur.

she'd learned to steal clothes from laundromats, to avoid any sort of reflection and the flash of cameras, to move through the world like a wraith. she'd learned that hunters existed—men and women and person alike—with their silver weaponry and homemade holy water. she’d learned not to underestimate their militarization, the precision of their movements through the woods, or the level of that same deadly purpose she'd seen in paige's stance tonight.

some had found her over the years.

most hadn't lived to regret it.

the first time she'd killed a hunter, she'd vomited for hours afterward. she’d seen the human first, the danger second. the time after that, she'd only cried. by the seventh, she felt nothing at all. just the mechanical efficiency of survival, the same cold calculation that kept her alive another day, another year.

she'd never let herself linger over her history during those years, especially her family. especially paige. it was unfathomably unbearable. better to bury that part of herself, to forget the young girl who used to spin basketballs on her fingertips and steal azzi's books from her hands when she wanted more attention.

but sometimes, in the deep quiet of winter nights, she'd touch her throat where her beloved pendant used to rest and try her best to remember what it felt like to be loved completely by another person.

and now—now paige was here. had been here, with ordnance and righteous purpose, looking at azzi like she was something to be studied, catalogued, and destroyed. the recognition in those arctic eyes had been worse than any wound.

recognition, and then belated horror.

then disgust, maybe pity. then an emotion too unreadable.

she could still hear the boy’s cry.

that’s a fucking leech!

the recollection of the slur made azzi tremble in place, and she pulled her hands away from her face to look down at herself, naked and bloody and monstrous.

this was what paige had seen. not the sixteen-year-old girl who used to hug her tightly after the loss of a game, but this thing. this predator.

leech.

her thigh pulsed with poison, and she knew she had to move, had to remove the copper. had to find shelter and treat the lesion before infection set. then it was an execution of another vanishing because her only solution was to disappear again, before the rest of the clan came looking.

azzi could not handle pursuit at the hands of the bueckers. she’d rather die. in some ways, to be killed at the hands of those who’d once loved her as is, was all that she wanted. a return home.

for just a moment longer, she let herself remember the sound of her name in paige's voice. let herself remember what it felt like to be seen, to be known, even if it was only as something to be destroyed.

then she pushed herself up from the tree’s base where she’d sunk and began to sprint again, deeper into the darkness where she belonged.

“i hear you, sometimes. your voice.”

paige cast out her voice as she followed azzi’s scent. maybe she was only out of her mind, but she felt that the odor was different, influenced by azzi’s preferred notes. the gardenia was there, yes, and the copper, too. but there was a hint of hedione through the dense undergrowth, pear and plum threaded within.

no answer, as expected. to survive this long in land like this requires never giving oneself up.

her boots were silent against the loam. she’d stripped herself of armor: vest discarded, weapons abandoned, reduced to nothing but a black sports bra underneath her thermal longsleeve and matching shorts that clung to her muddied thighs like a second skin.

the air nipped mercilessly at her exposed flesh, as if the very earth was protective over the woman she was attempting to find, but she needed to shed every marker of what she had become. it was a necessity.

she needed to be just paige.

the trail was not difficult in the slightest; it was easy enough to follow. branches shatttered and bloodied marked azzi's passage, moonlight rolling over a scatter of dark carmine droplets along the forest floor. far too much blood. the bolt was doing its work, spreading its poison through her system with methodical cruelty.

paige picked up her pace.

“it’s usually when i—when i kill,” she continued, stepping neatly over a fallen log. "in the quiet after. when the work is done and i'm cleaning my blade, you tell me i'm a good girl. that i'm your angel."

her throat tightened and she swallowed once, twice. it was a punishing act every time. "thought i was losing my mind. maybe i was. maybe i am."

the trail curved left, following the natural contours of the hillside. paige adjusted her direction, feeling the familiar weight of her butterfly knife against her thigh, its blade engraved. the only weapon she hadn't abandoned. old habits.

hunter’s instinct.

“my family thinks you're dead. we have this whole ceremony, you know? lighting candles every year on the anniversary. mom still cries." she ducked under a low branch, feeling bark scrape against her shoulder blade. the pain was welcome. "but i never believed it. couldn't. ‘cause you kept talking to me."

a sound ahead. paige's pulse quickened, her head snapping to the side. labored breathing, maybe. or just the wind’s breath through the foliage. regardless, she followed, her internal clock ticking. every second, she was losing time.

"the first time i heard you was after my first hunt. this fledgling had been killing chickens and livestock. got practically on top of me. i gutted it, and i was so angry, you know? all i could see was you and i just—i was brutal. when it went still, i heard you whisper ‘good girl’ so clearly i almost lost it, expected to see you standing there right next to me."

she was climbing now, following the slope of the hill where the trees grew sparse and moonlight filtered through in yellow streaks. the trail was more frequent here, fresher. azzi was slowing.

“but i knew i was full of shit ‘cause you hate blood, hate gore. you never could make it through a horror movie without hiding inside of me.”

paige heaved herself over an unexpected ledge with a grunt.

"dad thinks it's some kind of calling. divine inspiration or some shit. says the work chooses us, that it’s god speaking through us." paige laughed, a bitter sound, seared along the edge. "i believe in him and everything, always have, but that ain’t my calling. i know it's just you. it's always been you."

the stench of gardenias suddenly swelled, almost overwhelming in its cloying sweetness, strong enough to revive paige’s headache from earlier. her steps slowed, instincts warring with something deeper, more primitive. love, maybe. or recognition of something that had been carved out of her and was now impossibly close to being whole again.

but wasn’t it all the same?

“i've killed plenty of them, az. more than the years i’ve lived. all those lee—vampires, and every single time i hear your voice telling me i'm good, i'm brave, i'm yours." her voice cracked. "but i never felt good. i never felt brave. never felt like anything except made for you. i just felt empty.

movement ahead. a flash of bare brown skin against shaded earth.

"and now you're here, and you're real, and i—" paige came to a standstill, words running dry.

there, curled on her side in a small, lush clearing, was azzi. the copper bolt protruded from her thigh, a grotesque flower, a stark oddity against the flesh blackening and weeping around it. her breathing was a mere suggestion, shallow, labored; each exhale a small sound of pain.

in the moonlight, stripped of the otherworldly luminescence that had made her seem so mythic before, she looked achingly mortal. young. vulnerable. stripped to nothing but the girl who used to press against her on the bus ride home from away games, lashes fanned delicately as she drifted off in the crook of paige's neck.

"oh god," paige breathed, and the last eleven years collapsed into nothing. "oh, az. fuck."

she approached slowly, hands visible, the way she'd been trained to approach wounded animals. but this wasn't an animal. this wasn't even a monster. this was azzi, and she was hurt, and paige felt something fundamental fall away, something calcified and toxic and self-preserving. a tumor that had been inside her, eating away.

"hey," she said softly, kneeling just outside arm's reach. azzi tensed, and the stiff nature of her muscles exacerbated her pain. paige fought back the sob bubbling in her chest. "i can help. i have an antidote. standard issue because the new kids always manage to nick themselves during training."

she tried to smile, failed.

"classic drew move, actually. he’s just started his path. kid’s gone through three vials this month alone."

azzi's eyes opened—those impossible beseeching eyes—and fixed on her with an expression of pure fright.

"no," she whispered, trying to push herself upright and failing. "no, please."

the plea hit paige with the inertia of a car crash, condensed and unforeseen. no, please. as if paige were the beast here, as if mercy were a luxury azzi couldn't afford to hope for.

she had never once stopped to think if any of them had been afraid of her, if they felt anything at all. it had been easier, so much easier to believe the opposite.

"i'm not going to hurt you," paige finally said, and her voice came out strangled. "i swear. az, i would never hurt you."

but azzi was shaking her head, twitching in an awkward scramble to get away, tears streaming down her cheeks. "you don't understand. i'm not—i can't—"

"it's just me," paige said desperately, and her hands moved to the tight ash-blonde plait at the base of her skull. she tugged harshly, pulling at the elastic until it snapped and let her hair fall loose around her shoulders the way azzi had always liked it: soft, waved, and unguarded. "look at me, baby. look, it’s just me."

the pet name should’ve surprised them both, but it didn’t, because paige had always known what the basis of her self-condemnation had been.

azzi tried to crawl away, and the movement sent fresh blood seeping from the wound. the poison was spreading, turning her skin grey at the edges. then azzi’s strength gave out entirely, and she collapsed against the earth with a sound of defeat so complete it made paige's chest cave in.

"paige," azzi whispered, and there was surrender in it.

paige felt sick. she’d seen it all by now, but this was the most brutal yet. the realization that azzi was more terrified of her than she was of dying.

slowly, carefully, paige moved closer. when azzi didn't flinch away—couldn't, anymore—she reached out and cupped her face with trembling hands. the skin beneath her hands was fever-hot, slick with sweat and tears.

"shh, i've got you," paige whispered, and she maneuvered azzi's body with gentle precision, turning her so she could cradle her head in her lap. she shrugged out of her thermal top, leaving herself in just the sports bra, and draped the fabric over azzi's naked form. it wasn't much, but it was something. “c’mon. you’re okay.”

comfort. coverage. the illusion of safety.

they had probably confiscated her clothing to maximize her humiliation.

"please," azzi murmured, pleading again, but this time it sounded different. less like begging and more like prayer. "it hurts."

“i know, baby. i—.”

paige cut herself off. she had no idea if the antidote would work when administered directly. azzi was something different now.

her hands shook as she uncapped the vial, the liquid viscous and violet. she knew she didn’t have the time to argue, to explain, to soothe. not without further risking this moment between them. azzi’s life was already collapsing into fragments, her eyes dull and deader by the second.

so, she did what instinct demanded. she tipped the vial back and drank.

it burned. a metallic, acrid bite clawed down her throat and set her stomach alight. paige gagged once, twice, then forced herself to swallow it all. by the time her head cleared, she was already biting down on the pad of her palm, slicing herself open with the practiced snap of her knife. blood welled, hot and dark, pooling fast.

“azzi,” paige urged, voice steeled by determination. she slapped twice at azzi’s cheek, demanding her return. “you have to drink.”

azzi recoiled, as though the very offer was abhorrent. her lips pulled back, canines bared, but paige could see no hunger, only fear. “no, no. i can’t—”

“please.” paige forced her bleeding hand against azzi’s mouth, pressed it straight to the fang. “it’s me. it’s safe. you’ll live if you—just please.”

and something gave.

maybe it was azzi, maybe it was paige; perhaps it was the thread of time that finally eroded, disintegrating all at once. azzi’s lips parted further, hesitant, and then her mouth closed over the wound.

the world shifted.

agony lanced through paige as her blood was drawn, almost sending her reeling, but underneath the pain bloomed a terrible, incandescent sweetness. she felt herself unraveling into azzi, threads of memory pulled loose, rewoven.

the smell of wet reeds in childhood summers. the weight of palm atop palm, hand upon hand. the harsh chemical phantom of hairspray the night before team photos. azzi’s laugh was warm and dizzying across her knees as they lay for hours by the lake. loss, blinding and irredeemable, half of paige amputated without permission.

SEPTEMBER.

OCTOBER.

NOVEMBER.

DECEMBER.

JANUARY.

and in return, she saw it. azzi’s turning: the sharp invasion, the press of an unknown body against hers, the violation of teeth inserted into muscle, slashed across her soft brown neck. the horror of waking to a hunger she never asked for. the loneliness. her limbs, diseased. the way she held on to paige’s name by the vein while she starved, shivered, hid.

paige sobbed, half-choked and borderline delirious. she could feel azzi’s tears against her palm, warm as she fed.

the wound in azzi’s leg began to knit, the decay fading. her breathing steadied, ragged but stronger. and still she drank, her throat bobbing as she coaxed and sucked life from paige’s veins, her voice spilling silent and endless through the river of shared thought. for the first time in years, paige heard it again.

good girl. my girl.

she tilted her head back and sobbed aloud this time.

she heard it again! so grateful. so grateful.

angel, angel, angel.

eventually, paige’s grip on azzi’s jaw slackened, and in turn, azzi’s became iron.

she rolled from paige’s lap and what began as tentative sips blossomed into hunger, her mouth sealing tighter against paige’s palm as her nature was called to action, throat working in frantic swallows. paige’s vision blurred at the edges, her shoulders buckling.

“az—” her voice broke, dazed. “‘m a little dizzy. think that’s enough.”

it took both hands to pry azzi from her self-inflicted injury, wrenching her free with a wet gasp. azzi’s fangs slide free with a disturbing schleck. blood slicked down paige’s wrist, dripping into the dirt, but it wasn’t the bite that unsettled her. it was azzi’s face, flushed now, eyes wide with sudden clarity.

and horror.

“no.” azzi’s voice was raw, almost childlike in its shriek of regret. she recoiled as if paige’s very skin might burn her. “what have you done? you’re—you’re bleeding out, you’ll—”

paige laughed, unsteady and wild, shaking her head as if the sound could expel the fear from azzi’s voice alone. “don’t care. i don’t fucking care. you’re here. you’re alive. you didn’t leave me.”

“paige, i’ve hurt you!”

paige grinned, swaying in place, practically incoherent.

“you want me. that’s all that matters.”

azzi crawled back, trembling, clutching her neck as though to stop the taste from lingering. “you don’t understand. i said no humans, only—only hunters. those who were trying to kill me. what you’ve given me—i could’ve killed you! you should be terrified of me.”

“mmm, i’ve always been a lil’ terrified of you,” paige admitted, dragging herself closer despite the weakness flooding the length of her arms and legs. “‘s how i knew it was real when i saw you again.”

azzi froze, mouth agape with disbelief, staring at her.

paige reached out, brushing her bloody fingers against azzi’s cheek, smearing the crimson there like a tribal mark of belonging. her voice softened to something intimate, undeniable.

“worth it. always been worth it. should’ve told you.”

for a long moment, silence swallowed them. only the woods sang, thrumming with their olden language, cicadas humming their dirge.

then azzi shifted, slow, agonized. she pulled on paige’s shirt, which was large enough to cover her to the tops of her thighs, and then bent until she was helping paige upright, looping one arm carefully around her waist. paige let her, sagging against the emerging coolness of her body.

the trees seemed to lean inward, oaks and aspens closing them off, funneling them along a narrow trail neither had to name.

they moved together, half-merged and stumbling, until the forest yawned open into stone. a cavern mouth, jagged and low, waiting with quiet expectance. the air that exhaled from it was damp, mineral, protective.

the air of a womb.

paige pressed closer into azzi’s side, her eyes fluttering shut with exhaustion.

“home?” she murmured, and azzi paused as if considering the question.

“no,” she answered.

then, azzi guided her inside.

ACT V. MISERERE.

the cave held them in its belly.

stone wet with the relic of water, the humidity solid and close as skin. paige could taste the salt of her own blood in azzi’s mouth, feel the shiver of life returning beneath her hands. for a moment, she thought the earth itself might close over them, burying them in its dark heart, mother and tomb alike.

she pressed her forehead anxiously to azzi’s, saying nothing, engaging urgently in the rhythm of breath, of please, of stay. outside, the world strained at the seams.

azzi held her, cooing softly as she fed bits of blood back to her, forcing her to swallow. it was like this for what seemed like an eternity, paige limp as she allowed her best friend to nurse her, return her to a more lucid reality.

maybe after twenty-four hours, this could still sustain. maybe she would be allowed this, could be given this version of life after every bit of cleaning she’d done.

she knew better. therefore, she was unsurprised at what followed.

paige felt it first in the shift of her body, the sudden alertness. azzi stiffened beside her, then turned, pushing paige up. paige watched as azzi’s lashes fluttered, the vampire’s head tilting like a deer catching the wind.

her head lifted higher, eyes gone distant, the fine-boned listening of something beyond human imagination.

“someone’s coming,” azzi said, the words pulling tight with dread.

paige felt her stomach bottom out, her heart dropping into the cavern. she wanted to deny it, press back into azzi, press them both harder into the stone, make this earthly cavity their entire world. but then she heard it too: the low churn, the weight of boots breaking ground, the steady chorus of movement that didn’t belong to either of them.

her throat spasmed, fingers quivering with slow fury. she knew that cadence. she had marched to it her entire life.

her father’s cadence. her mother’s. her brothers’.

“fuck,” she hissed.

the air in her chest curdled cold.

ryan had made the call. she had never been given the hours she’d almost bled him for, not once. he had only been waiting for her to falter, to lead them to the thing she could not kill.

ryan and his weak constitution.

drew adored her, idolized her. he would’ve held. but not ryan. never him. he was always the first to spring into action, no matter how damning.

“FUCK!” she roared.

azzi belatedly tried to silence her, but it was too late. the noise echoed. paige no longer cared. she staggered upright, yanking avidly at azzi until she, too, rose.

“c’mon. we gotta move, az. gotta go, baby. gotta—”

“paige.”

azzi’s call of her name was quiet, final.

the woods seethed with voices. paige could hear them breaking through the treeline, the bible-bound language of family, the hymn she had always known by heart:

hold your ground. keep the land clean. finish the work, finish the work.

they didn’t have time for this. again, her name.

“paige.”

she knew azzi. through death and after.

“no,” paige answered. “i’m not going to let them kill you. and they will kill you, and i just got you back.”

closer, and closer. the mouth of the cave was thrumming with voices, now. a terrible choir of them: her father’s barked orders, her mother’s sharp breath, ryan’s panicked cries.

paige turned to azzi, desperate. “you don’t matter to anyone the way that you matter to me.”

all the years of discipline and blood-work, every vigil and purging, had culminated in this single refrain—finish the work. and yes, maybe that had been paige’s refrain, too.

but then the forest had opened its throat and offered her azzi.

she’d come out of the dark like the final stanza of a song half-forgotten: a blood-streaked half-moon, body stripped and bled, remade by intimate violence into something ruinous and divine. from the moment paige had found her, the ground had tilted beneath her feet, the world sluicing toward a single point of gravity.

paige shuddered in place, finally terrified. “azzi, we don’t have any other choice. we have to get you out.”

azzi’s voice was raw when it found her. “paige, there is another choice.”

the words cracked open a thousand doors inside her. paige’s hand twitched toward her weapon, then fell useless to her side. she turned to the mouth of the cave.

azzi stood trembling, mouth wet with craving, eyes wide with something far greater. terror and love braided together, indistinguishable. her hands lifted like supplication.

“look back,” she whispered, hoarse and breaking. “please, paige. just once. look back at me.”

the truth was: paige had never been devout in the way they wanted. her devotion was azzi’s mouth against the straw of their shared water bottle, azzi’s soft, sweet laugh echoing among the bleachers, azzi’s hand brushing her hip as if by accident, and then winking when paige went pink.

her faith was a girl in a wetland, blood-wet and deer-eyed, who had haunted every shadow of paige’s waking. had kept her living past the expectations of her immense grief.

and now, that faith was calling.

behind her, azzi’s voice rose above the approaching commands, above the slur that was hurled at their feet. neither plea nor demand. just the pulse of her name, stretched long into a rosary.

paige.

my angel.

my girl.

her family rose before her, her immediate lineage coming into crystal focus before her. she could see the whites of her mother’s eyes.

paige’s whole body was ice and fire. the years of training, of “holy work”, of killing and burning nests to cinders? none of it had ever filled the wound azzi left. and now here she was, brought back, begging her not to look away.

and if paige looked away, she would not survive a second mourning.

she met her father’s gaze.

she thought of the nights she had buried herself in sleep because love had nowhere else to go. she thought of azzi at sixteen, alive and unargued with. she thought of azzi now, eyes like snakes, body marked by other hands of righteous cruelty, how she’d still looked at paige like she was salvation when she stumbled from the trees into the field.

this town will suffer another girl, her father had said so long ago. he’d always known.

there had never been another choice.

she knew what waited if she turned. the glisten of those garnet eyes. the crush of a throat. a vow written in hunger and eternity. she knew she would be devoured, remade. she knew she would fall.

drew understood first, his face so little as it crumpled. ryan was next. he bellowed:

“don’t you dare do it, paige. don’t you listen to her! don’t you let her take you—”

she drowned him out. she was already lost. always had been.

her family kept screaming. don’t. don’t. don’t.

but her mother—her mother kept still. lowered her rifle. she unfurled her hand, long and limber and pale, and clutched it around drew’s eyes. turned him into her. she watched him burrow into her side, arms encircling her waist.

paige softened.

thank you, she mouthed.

her mother nodded, smiled faintly.

the voice again returned.

good girl.

paige inhaled like it was her first breath. she had always known it would end this way. hunting had never been about cleanliness, about sacred duty.

it had always been about her. the loss of her, the ache of her.

she was not called to destroy azzi.

she was called to answer her.

good girl.

one last call from her father, sharpened into horror, always too slow:

“she will end you! paige. PAIGE!”

paige turned.

the world slowed, shutter-flash clear. she saw azzi hurtling toward her, faster than air, faster than benediction. leaping, flying, her body stretched and terrible, jaw unhinged in the revelation of teeth.

and beneath the monstrousness, that same face paige had always known: the face of her beloved.

in her eyes, pride.

and then—

his mouth is most sweet, yes, he is altogether lovely. this is my beloved, and this is my friend. — song of solomon 5:16

♱.

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