Chapter Text
Been sinking my teeth down, the deeper they sink now
The more that I bеlieve they'rе really falling in love
I won't let you bleed out
So please keep your screams down
'Cause baby you're the one I wanna hide from the sun
The day Andrew Minyard dies starts the same as any other.
He sits on his porch with a cigarette and a coffee, feeling older by half a century as he inhales the scenery through a veil of smoke.
The September morning still blisters with the rage of Southern summer. Sunlight crawls up the porch stairs, threatening to trap his legs in its torrid embrace. When the outside world no longer suffices, he scrolls his socials. His fragile peace lasts until his phone buzzes with an incoming call.
“Kevin,” Andrew answers.
“I have a new lead,” Kevin announces, as allergic to pleasantries as Andrew is.
“Uh-huh,” Andrew replies, balancing the phone on his shoulder to lift his mug to his lips again.
“There’s a manor in Charlotte,” Kevin begins. His even tone is punctuated by the soft clicks of a mouse navigating too many tabs at once. “Seemingly abandoned for decades. But I traced it back to a family.” He pauses, waiting for Andrew to indicate that he’s listening.
Andrew obliges with silence.
“The house has been in the Wesninski estate for two hundred and fifty years—maybe longer. Before Charlotte was even incorporated. But get this: there are no records of any living Wesninskis. No birth certificates. No obituaries. The estate claims they live abroad, but I checked.”
“No bite there either,” Andrew guesses.
“Exactly. Nothing abroad. A real family of ghosts, if you will.”
Not ghosts. Kevin’s obsession has always belonged to another branch of the unnatural. Andrew has indulged it since college, but only up to a point.
“Don’t get excited,” Andrew warns.
“Too late,” Kevin mutters. “I think we should check it out. The kids have a game tonight, but we can go this weekend?”
The kids are Kevin’s unruly college athletes at Palmetto. The Foxes are having a worse season than usual, and Andrew can hear the strain creeping into his friend’s voice. Even Kevin’s implacable spirit bends under exhaustion that borders on defeat.
“I’m covering shifts this weekend,” Andrew says, grinding the cigarette out under his heel. “Send me the address. I’ll go tonight. If I find anything, we can go back together.”
“Okay,” Kevin agrees slowly. “Be careful though. The house looks creepy as fuck.”
“Oh, now I am getting excited,” Andrew replies in a flat tone. “I’m picturing a dilapidated Victorian. A real Addams Family house.”
“Not even close,” Kevin says, cutting his fantasy short. “It’s a classic Antebellum. A little rundown and overgrown. Nothing too conspicuously off. But—” Quiet falls so absolute Andrew can hear Kevin’s chair creak as he leans back. “The neighbors report that the house is dark all the time, year round. Except in the basement, where the lights come on intermittently.”
“The neighbors?” Andrew echoes, unimpressed.
“One neighbor,” Kevin admits curtly. “I found his post buried in a paranormal subreddit.”
“Have you considered—”
“Squatters? Yes. But why in the basement?”
“Guess I’ll find out,” Andrew replies.
Andrew heads out to Charlotte later in the afternoon to avoid rush-hour traffic on I-77 and arrives with time to spare before nightfall. He circles the neighborhood near the manor, noting its variable quality—simple suburban houses beside decades-old condos and crumbling government housing. Once, this might have been a tranquil corner of the city, tucked behind the main road to downtown. Now it’s a patchwork left to sink under neglect.
He kills the rest of his time at a strip-mall bar wedged between a massage parlor and a mobile store. He expects filth when he walks in. Instead, the place is clean, inoffensively lit, cool against the Southern heat.
The bartender gives him the wary once-over reserved for strangers who wander in at the wrong hour. Andrew ignores it and chooses a high chair directly across from him.
The man’s eyes catch on Andrew’s tattoo sleeve, the glimpse of ink between shirt hem and armband. They linger on the death’s-head moth design spilling across his hands, on the silver rings and black-polished nails, before finally climbing back to his face. “What can I get you?”
“Whiskey neat,” Andrew says. He takes the glass when it’s slid across, weighing his next move. Conversations with strangers aren't part of his skillset, but if there’s a local myth about the manor, he wants to hear it.
The bartender drifts away, flips through channels on a mounted screen, exchanges a few words with a patron nursing a beer. Andrew sips his whiskey and waits.
If Andrew were behind the counter, he wouldn’t waste another glance on an out-of-towner. But most people aren’t like Andrew.
Eventually the man comes back, mouth working toward some inane small talk. Andrew cuts him off: “Client of mine’s interested in restoring the manor on Ashmore Court. Think the owners would sell?”
The bartender snorts. “A likely story. If you had a client like that, you’d know the owners aren’t around.”
“You got me.” Andrew tips his glass at him. “No client. Just me. I like abandoned houses.”
“Great,” the bartender grumbles, scrubbing at a dry patch on the counter. “One of those YouTube ghost hunters?
“Not exactly.” Andrew nearly winces at the implication. “Call it research. You heard anything about the family that owns it? The Wesninskis?”
The man’s face, half-hidden behind an untrimmed beard, stays inscrutable. Only his fingers tighten around the rag.
Andrew isn’t superstitious, not in the slightest. But something about the name, spoken aloud, changes the air—drops the temperature enough to lift the hair on his arms.
The bartender sways back from the bar, then says quietly, “Never. I’m not from here.”
The lie hangs between them, so palpable Andrew can almost taste its sour edge. He bites back the urge to say oh, fuck off, and lets the silence stretch, make the man fill it.
It works. The bartender jerks his head toward the other side of the room. “Jack’s a local. He’ll know more than me.”
Andrew quirks an eyebrow at the dodge, but the man calls out anyway, voice booming louder than the room deserves:
“Hey, Jack! What’s that story you like to tell? About the boy who lived on Ashmore Court and disappeared?”
Reluctantly, Jack tears his gaze from the TV and his mouth from the beer bottle. His hair is all grey, swept back in a long ponytail. His eyes stare back flat and void-like, until the bartender’s words spark a light in them that should not be there, that does not exist in the dim bar.
Andrew drowns the unease with a swallow of whiskey.
Jack studies him, taps the neck of his bottle, and says, “Ah, yes. My old friend from the manor on Ashmore Court.”
“I thought no one’s ever lived in the manor,” Andrew says, steady.
“Sure,” Jack replies, mouth curling. “Officially. But I knew a boy who did.”
“What was his name?” Andrew asks. The unease rises the longer he looks at this man, whose eyes glow faintly. A chill crawls up Andrew’s spine like fingers counting vertebrae: one, two, three.
“Abram,” Jack says faintly. His gaze unfocuses as he drifts into memory. “He was an interesting little boy.”
“How so?”
“The bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Hair like rust. Strong—he helped fight off bullies for me once. But gentle too. Especially with animals. Had a whole retinue of feral cats trailing after him like he was their king.” Jack smiles, caught in the undertow of recollection.
Andrew doesn’t care for the sentiment. “And his parents? Wesninskis?”
Jack’s eyes sharpen. “His mother died in childbirth. And Abram’s gone now too.”
“What happened to him?” Andrew presses, determined to get something useful out of this.
“It was the Butcher,” Jack whispers. “He took him.”
The bartender groans, dragging Andrew’s attention back. “Don’t start, Jack. I don’t like this one.”
“I don’t see why, with a name like that,” Andrew deadpans. “What was he? A serial killer?”
The bartender nods once, dismissive. “Look it up in your own time.”
A few hours later, standing under the cold moonlight, Andrew starts to think this might be the first real lead they’ve ever had. Not just because of the bizarre encounter at the bar, or the oddity of the Wesninskis existing and not existing, but because of the manor itself. A relic washed out of time, beckoning to be examined.
Its silhouette looms against the night sky, dark and silent, breath held as it judges Andrew's advance. The ash trees along the drive thrash in spasms, like a heart collapsing in on itself.
Andrew’s instinct hasn’t failed him yet. Right now it tells him to turn back. Which is exactly why he doesn’t.
He thumbs out a few texts to Kevin: talked to some locals. might be onto something with this one. look up the Butcher.
Then he picks the lock on the front door and goes inside. The door shuts behind him with a creak that seals him from the moonlit world. Inside the house, everything is as it should be—antique furniture covered by sheets that sag beneath the weight of decades of dust, floors that exhale more of it with every press of his boots, motes swirling madly in the air where his flashlight shines in the dark.
Everything is as it should be in a house deprived of human touch, and yet the silence feels warped, alive, drumming with an ancient heartbeat that Andrew swears he can feel in the walls’ bones when his hand brushes past a frame.
He has a choice: go upstairs or find the way down. Upstairs is likely to offer more of the same—decay and emptiness. The basement is the variable, and it makes his blood ice over even as his pulse revs up with excitement, with the thrill of standing at the edge of discovery, of having something within his grasp that no one else has ever held.
He doesn’t examine the feeling, only obeys it, and begins searching for the entrance to the basement. But inside, there’s nothing—no doors, no stairs, no hidden pantry or forgotten servants’ passage. So he steps back outside and walks the perimeter until he comes to the sloped cellar doors: corrugated with rust, held fast by a chain strung through a strange lock, crystal-shaped and etched with a thorned rose.
Steel, Andrew thinks at first, running a gloved finger over it. Except it’s too smooth, too pristine, untouched by the summer storms that should have caked it in dirt. The metal feels wrong, almost soft under his touch. Maybe silver, then.
He wedges his flashlight between his teeth and tries to pick it, the night breeze whispering incessantly at his back, but the mechanism proves stubborn, unyielding. It needs a key with too many teeth. Frustrated, he lets the lock drop, the chain rattling against the metal doors loud enough to make him curse and look around, though he knows he’s alone. For now.
That’s when he sees the outline of a shed at the back of the yard. He pushes through the overgrown meadow to reach it, picks the easier lock, and steps into a place half-claimed by the green. Moss has carpeted the floor, vines crawl the walls like veins, and rusted gardening tools dangle in clusters—rakes, shears, hoes. But farther down the wall are tools of another trade altogether: a cleaver, a saw, a butcher’s knife.
None of them sharp, none of them usable. But Andrew gets an idea all the same. He hefts the chopping axe and returns to the basement doors.
He swings hard. The chain shudders, resists. Another strike, and it breaks. The clamor splits the night, shrill as a scream, and Andrew goes still, listening. It isn’t the neighbors he doesn’t want alerted—the property is large and secluded. He doesn’t know exactly what it is he fears, only that he can’t banish the feeling that it waits in the dark below, long-clawed and infinite-shadowed.
He descends the stairs, dragging the axe behind him, disturbing the dark with his breath and the narrow glow of his flashlight. Each step lands with staccato precision, echoes bouncing, thinning, then dying into silence.
The hallway is sleet-grey cement, its only relief the outlines of doors long ago filled in; skeletal frames pressed into stone. Somewhere to his right he hears a steady trickle, a leak maybe, but he ignores it and moves on.
At the end the passage twists right. He breathes damp, earthy oxygen that blooms like mushrooms inside him and steps into the only room in the basement.
The smell hits him first—copper flooding his nostrils, freezing him where he stands. His light catches a long wooden table in the center of the room, its surface darkened by stains. Above it hangs an ornate lamp with stained glass, out of place, promising light that never comes.
Andrew steadies his hand, drops the axe and guides the beam toward the walls, searching for a switch. He finds it after a few heartbeats and flips it. Nothing.
“The circuit’s dead,” a voice cuts into the gloom. Sharp and unsettling, like steel skidding along another blade.
Andrew’s flashlight quivers. A violent shiver threatens to take him, but he forces it down and swings the light toward the sound.
There. A man sits on the floor, back against the wall, one arm hooked around his knees. A fall of fiery hair hides his face until he lifts it—unblinking blue eyes locking on the light’s nexus. Then the man looks past the glare, directly at Andrew, unsurprised.
“If you want more light,” he says evenly, “there are candles on the table.”
Three concerning developments register at once. One: Andrew hadn’t realized he wasn’t alone—felt no presence, heard no breath in the dark. Two: the man matches the description Jack gave him, and coincidence is a hard sell. Andrew feels as though fate is a gentle maiden leading him by the hand straight into hell. Three: motherfucking candles. Because this place wasn’t medieval enough already.
Dread tugs at his limbs, but he works against its paralyzing nature and moves forward. He finds the promised candles not on the blood-dark table in the room’s center, but a smaller side table crowded with melted wax and half-burnt sticks.
“Cozy,” Andrew mutters, striking at the wheel of his cigarette lighter.
The candle flares to life, casting its arc over the man on the floor. A thick collar gleams at his throat, seamless metal—steel or silver, no buckle, no keyhole. The light drags over the rest of him: he isn’t wearing anything except black pants, torso bared and every inch of skin marked. His chest is a map of scars, faint white lines crossing into raised welts, burns stitched into old wounds. A crosscut scar mars his cheek, a red burn beneath his eye vivid even in scarce light.
On anyone else, it would be grotesque. On him, the scarring absolves him, gives his beauty a more cruel edge as it molds into his face, sharpens his cheekbones, draws attention to the almond cut of his eyes, the fullness of his mouth. His chest rises shallowly, pale muscle flexing under ruined skin.
“Abram,” Andrew tries.
The name provokes an immediate response. The man whips his head toward him, eyes narrowing.
“How do you—” he starts, then cuts himself off with a shake of his head. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“What about you?” Andrew muses, scanning the room. “Should you be here? Or is this some elaborate BDSM set-up?”
Abram says nothing. His gaze drops to the floor, where his bare feet hug the indifferent stone. Silence reigns for a few moments. Then Abram barks a laugh—jagged and wrong-pitched. It rattles Andrew enough to break his assessment of the room. He looks back. Abram has tipped his head against the wall, the collar biting raw skin at his throat.
“Oh, I see.” The laugh dies abruptly. “He sent you to torment me, didn’t he?”
“Who is he?” Andrew asks, jaw tight around the question.
“You know who.” Abram’s nostrils flare, his voice vicious. “Nathan.”
“Never heard of him,” Andrew says, breezy, though the effort drains him; saps the last of his composure.
“So you expect me to believe you’re some idiot who wandered in here by accident?”
“Seems like it.” Andrew resumes pacing, casual as he can under Abram’s watchful gaze.
In the far corner he finds black bags piled against the wall. He nudges one with his boot, the stickiness clinging to the threads. He wonders if it’s even worth asking. He scrapes his sole against the floor, trying in vain to rid himself of old blood.
“You should leave before he comes back,” Abram warns.
Andrew abandons the futile task and steps closer. He draws a knife from the arsenal in his armband, the blade flirting with the candlelight.
“Will this help?” he asks.
“Not unless it’s silver.”
Andrew detects no lie in the answer. His knives had always given him a measure of safety, but tonight their steel feels heavy, mocking.
“Silver. Interesting,” he murmurs, sliding the knife away. “The lock to the basement was silver too. Why?”
“You’re not listening.” Abram’s voice strains, storm coiling. “He’ll kill you. And I won’t feel sorry.”
“You shouldn’t,” Andrew agrees. “You don’t know me.”
But Abram’s paranoia is contagious. It dawns on Andrew, with the finality of a trapped animal on the cusp of slaughter, that he’s made a grave mistake coming here.
“You aren’t worried on my behalf,” Andrew says just so his voice would have to contend with the terror in the air, dilute it, make it bearable. “You really do fear him.”
Abram’s eyes fall shut, pain rippling across his face. His voice escapes, hollow: “He’s close.”
Then his eyes sever open. When he speaks again, he’s fiercer, conviction animating every syllable: “Free me.”
Andrew swallows thickly. “Why would I do that?”
“Because that’s the only way you’re getting out of here alive.”
“I would say that too,” Andrew replies, gaze narrowing. The danger of this man is undeniable; barely contained by the collar at his throat. The only question is whether it’s worse than the one swelling in the dark beyond, putrid and pervasive, gathering strength just out of sight.
“I have no reason to lie to you,” Abram tells him. “You’re the one who came to me. Why?”
“The Wesninskis,” Andrew says. “Tell me about them.”
Abram tilts his head, curious, hawk-like in the moment before a strike.
“I will tell you everything I know,” he replies. “But free me first.”
“A deal?”
Abram nods, ruby lips shaping the word bargain, lighter than a whisper.
Andrew knows they’re out of time when his fingers close around the axe. He lifts it anyway, fighting the abhorrent chill creeping closer. He swings at the chain anchoring Abram to the wall. It rattles, groans with impact, but doesn’t give.
“Stop,” Abram says quietly. Andrew lets the axe fall with a clatter.
The candlelight gasps, nearly going out, then flares brighter. Andrew peers around the room but sees nothing. Only feels it, horror cleaving his ribcage, crawling up his spine, digging fingernails into his skin.
There is nothing there—and then there is.
The horror wears a man’s face. Abram’s face, almost. Just older and unscarred. His eyes transform from night to twilight, pinning Andrew as he growls, “Who is this?” The noise is wet, like lungs being squeezed.
“No one,” Abram replies flatly.
Andrew turns. Abram has moved—without moving at all. A shadow leaping walls. Now he’s across the room, chain taut, the axe gone.
“A gift then,” the man pronounces, smiling lavishly. Long black fingers close around Andrew’s throat, lifting him with no effort at all. Andrew fights against it, futile, darkness gripping harder to spite him.
He accepts his fate and this last vision: black sapphires burning in a flame, a serpent’s mouth opening, fangs sinking into his flesh.
Andrew wakes in a strange bed, violently sick. His body is wracked with shivers he can’t control, though he’s neither cold nor hot. He isn’t much of anything; his skin numb, his limbs distant. Just the beast of an illness thrashes inside him, desperate to escape.
He heaves over the bed’s edge and vomits green, sticky bile. It doesn’t help. He only feels lighter, emptier, slipping off the mattress. When he tries to push himself back up, he sees his hands are blue.
They tremble badly when he holds them to the light on the bedside table. Or maybe it’s just his vision. If this is death, he doesn’t want it. If death is better than this, he’ll take it.
With his eyes closed, he gropes for his knives. They are gone, along with his armbands. He flings upward anyway, trying to climb off the bed, but all he manages is to slide to the floor like a corpse slipping from a slab.
He sits there, back pressed to the bed, enacting a forced rhythm. But when he spreads a hand over his chest, he feels nothing. No rise, no fall. No heartbeat at all.
“It will get better,” a voice says.
Andrew looks up. Abram stands in the doorway now, dressed in a white shirt, only one button undone at the throat. The furious red mark from the collar still burns around his neck.
Andrew smirks deliriously. Abram had looked better shirtless, collared, carved in scars. He misses the sight.
Abram lifts his hand, fingers brushing the red welt at his neck as he closes the button. Then he drifts into the room, bare feet ghosting the floor, and kneels to lift Andrew back into the bed.
Andrew can’t stop him. But in his head, he seethes venomously: don’t touch me.
Abram’s arms go still. He lets go, steps back, and murmurs, “Sorry.”
Sorry about what , Andrew wants to snap. He hasn’t said a word. Delirium coats him, twisting reality until he can’t tell which conversations are real and which are imagined. He drags himself back onto the bed, collapses into the mattress.
Abram sighs—an achingly human sound that doesn’t belong to him. Andrew turns his head despite himself.
“You’re not imagining it,” Abram says. “I can hear you.”
“Hear me,” Andrew echoes numbly.
Abram taps two fingers to his temple. “Up here.”
“You’re insane,” Andrew mutters. He’d laugh if he had the strength. Instead his head drops back into the pillow. He fixes his eyes on the canopy of the four-poster bed so he doesn’t retch again.
“Yes, you’re in one of the bedrooms at the manor,” Abram explains into the lull. “And don’t worry. I have your knives. All but one.”
Andrew props himself on his elbow. “How the fuck,” he bites out, because that was the exact sequence of his thoughts, ripped straight from his head.
Abram nods, satisfied now that Andrew’s full attention is on him. “It’s the link. From turning you.”
“The link,” Andrew repeats flatly. “Explain.”
Abram slinks to the curtained windows. For a moment his outline falters, coalescing back from shadow. He shimmers, not with the light, but with the absence of it. “My father killed you. I had no other way to save you.”
Andrew isn’t sure he’s worth saving. That's an honor reserved for those who don't throw their lives away recklessly.
Abram spins back. “I had to save you. We made a bargain.”
“Get out of my fucking head,” Andrew growls.
“I’m not trying to be,” Abram shoots back. “You’re just so…” His scowl falters. “So loud.”
“I’m not,” Andrew protests. “Why can’t I hear you?”
“Because I’ve learned to be quiet,” Abram says. He hesitates, winces. “Also, would you…stop calling me that? Nathaniel or Neil would do.”
“Neil,” Andrew repeats, voice hollow, the name falling from his mouth like petals onto blackened earth. He poses a hypothetical, not expecting an answer: “How does one learn to be quiet?”
“By being around my father.”
At the mention of Neil's father, Andrew can feel blackened fingers close around his throat all over again.
“Where is he?” Andrew asks with a shudder.
“Dead.”
The word opens a flood. Images cascade into Andrew’s mind—foreign, too vivid, painted in blood. He realizes Neil is feeding him memories, or else Andrew is stumbling through the door of Neil’s mind. The connection is tenuous. Andrew isn’t welcome.
But he sees it: Neil yanking leather gloves from Andrew’s limp body, his neck snapped like a ragdoll on the floor. Andrew’s knife, Renee’s Christmas gift, silver handle studded with ruby stones, glinting in Neil’s hand. The faint brush of acknowledgement at the knife’s origin grazes the back of Andrew’s neck, featherlight.
Then: Neil breaking his chain with the axe. Stalking his father through the manor. Wrapping the chain around his throat, choking until black sapphires burst from his sockets. Driving the silver hilt into his skull.
Andrew doesn’t need to ask if it felt good. The answer sings through him. When the vision recedes, secondhand decadent heat blooms in Andrew’s body. The satisfaction of revenge decades in the making.
The distraction fizzles out quickly, leaving him aching. His own failing body crashes back in: gurgling sickness rising in his gut, another coughing fit. “I need to get out of here,” he rasps.
“No,” Neil says, firm enough to drown the sound. “You need to stay here. Rest. And feed, if you’re hungry.”
Hungry.
The word hooks into the ravenous gnawing in his gut. It isn’t a perfect match, but close enough. Too close.
The mattress dips as Neil sits at the edge. Andrew turns his head weakly, vision swimming, black spots swarming like a hive of insects.
“Andrew,” Neil says his name for the first time. It shivers down Andrew’s spine.
Neil glances at the bedside table where Andrew’s wallet rests. Andrew takes the silent explanation and listens.
“You know what I am. You must have figured it out, even if you won’t say it.” Neil’s eyes hold him steady. “I’ve turned you. But unless you feed from me, the transformation won’t take.”
“So what if it won’t,” Andrew mutters around the bile rising in his throat again.
“You’ll die.”
“How many times can a man die,” Andrew muses, weary.
“Exactly,” Neil answers, and his voice might be coaxing. "Once is enough."
Andrew thinks of all the times he wanted this. When he was seven, small and powerless, pleas for help choking him silent. Thirteen, still too weak to break the hand that held him down. Sixteen, staring into a mirror he could never look away from, because his reflection walked and breathed beside him. Nineteen, standing on a roof’s edge, mesmerized by the fall, until Kevin offered him another choice: make me a deal.
Not many times since then. Certainly not lately. He’s chosen a name for his baby niece, due in a few weeks. He hasn’t told Aaron yet. If he doesn’t, it would die with him.
“Antonella,” Neil murmurs.
The name splits Andrew open. Not spoken, stolen. Plucked from the marrow of him, exposed to the air.
He doesn’t realize at first that Neil’s arm is pressed to his lips, vein pulsing, blood calling him. He gasps and his teeth pierce the flesh. Blood floods his mouth, spilling down his chin before he remembers to swallow. He coughs on a gulp, then drinks again, overwhelmed.
Neil tastes like pain. Like a lash dipped in silver, whipping his skin raw over and over, mangling him. Like darkness, ashy and silent, keeping him prisoner between two dead realms. Agony without an edge or color that Andrew can discern.
Andrew has never tasted anything so alive.
But Neil tastes like memory, too. The gloam falling too late on a summer’s day. Roses exhaling nectar into the night sky. Rain gliding down a windowpane fogged with warm breath.
Memory teases at Andrew, holding him from drowning—then morphs. Pebbles sliding under bare feet in a shallow creek, water cool against the sun. “Abram,” a voice calls. A little girl waits on the far bank. Jackie, the name whispers through him.
The vision tilts. A flame reaching, children at either side, black curls cradled in his palm.
“Enough,” Neil snarls, shoving him back into the bed.
Andrew is still hungry, and so tired too. He slips under, unconsciousness tipping him into an abyss. Yet his mouth works one last phrase before it claims him:
“Nelly. Nelly for short.”