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**CHAPTER 12 – SOMEBODY IS WATCHING **[Corrected]

The warning didn't end when David left the Nursing Department.

"David, my office," Dr. Anya had said, and closed the door behind him. "I hear you are doing research on the history of the clinic. Interesting. Just be careful what history you dig. Some histories do not like to be disturbed."

She smiled when she said it. It didn't reach her eyes.

Now, outside, the sun was too bright. The campus was noisy with students going to lectures, hawkers shouting, bikes passing. David pulled his bag tighter and started walking.

Halfway to the admin block, the feeling came.

He was being followed.

He stopped and turned.

Nobody. Just two girls in nursing uniforms laughing, and a man pushing a wheelbarrow.

He continued. The feeling stayed. Like a hand at the back of his neck.

He turned again, quickly this time.

Still nobody.

Then, near the corner of the administration block, a movement. A flash of blue.

The maintenance worker from the clinic. The same faded uniform. He was turning behind the maintenance building, walking fast, head down. He didn't have tools in his hands. Again.

For the third time now. Clinic. Store. And now here.

David stood there watching the corner where the man had disappeared. A student bumped him.

"Sorry," the student said.

David didn't answer. He started walking again, faster.

---

Room 13 was locked when he got back. He remembered locking it.

He opened it and stopped at the doorway.

Something was off.

His plastic chair was not where he left it. It was pulled slightly away from the reading table, angled, as if someone had sat in it.

His wardrobe, which he always closed because the door was stiff, was open by two inches.

He stepped inside slowly and locked the door behind him.

His notebook was on the table. He always left it under his mattress. Always. Since the phone photos disappeared.

He stared at it for a long time before touching it.

Nothing had been stolen. His power bank was there. His small money inside his textbook was there. His clothes were still folded.

He picked up the notebook and opened it.

The pages where he had written about Ada — Ada Nwosu, Sept 14, 2002, 11:42 p.m., male patient, name cut out — were folded at the top corner. Neatly folded, one after the other. Five pages.

Someone had read them.

Someone had wanted him to know they had read them.

He sat on the bed and the bed creaked. The room suddenly felt very small.

---

"Guy, you don dey reason too much," Tunde said.

They were outside the hostel, under the mango tree. Tunde was eating groundnuts from a small nylon.

David had told him about the worker, the chair, the notebook.

"Maintenance man dey everywhere for campus na. Na him work," Tunde said, pouring groundnuts into his palm. "And your chair? Maybe Musa enter your room. You know how that guy be."

"Musa no get key," David said.

"Window dey open. You dey forget to lock am."

David lowered his voice. "And the notebook? The pages were folded. The Ada pages."

Tunde's hand stopped halfway to his mouth.

He looked at David. "Which Ada?"

"The ID I told you about. Ada Nwosu. The one whose name was in the register."

Tunde looked away. He poured the remaining groundnuts back into the nylon and tied it.

"David," he said quietly, not laughing again. "You think say na only you sabi do history research? Dr. Anya don dey ask about you. She say you too dey dig old files. David, abeg leave this matter."

David stared at him. "Dr. Anya?"

"Yes. People don dey notice say you dey ask questions. I dey tell you as your guy. Leave am."

He stood up and dusted his trousers.

"I go class," he said. "Lock your window."

He left.

David stayed under the tree. Even Tunde was afraid to say her name now. And Dr. Anya — who had warned him privately that morning — was now asking about him publicly.

---

That evening, David decided to test it.

The normal route from the hostel to the library was through the main walkway. He didn't take it. He took the small bush path behind the chemistry lab, the one that led past the old generator house. No one used it unless they wanted to smoke or be alone.

He walked.

Behind him, footsteps.

Soft, on sand.

He stopped.

The footsteps stopped.

He listened. Crickets. Faraway generator.

He started walking again.

The footsteps started again.

His chest tightened. He kept his pace normal, even though his legs wanted to run. He counted — one, two, three — then sharply turned left into a narrow passage between the library and the water tank. A dead end he knew had a second small exit.

Whoever was behind him didn't react fast enough.

He heard a quick shuffle, a foot slipping, trying to stop.

David pushed through the second exit and spun around, looking back down the passage.

Just for a second, he saw it. Someone disappearing around the corner of the tank. Fast.

No face. Only blue.

A faded blue maintenance uniform.

David didn't chase him. He stood there breathing hard, sweat running down his back despite the evening cold.

It was not coincidence.

---

It was almost midnight when he returned to Room 13.

The corridor was dark. The bulb had blown again. He used his phone torch to find his lock.

The door was still locked. He was sure. He unlocked it and pushed it open.

The room was exactly as he left it. Chair in place. Wardrobe closed. Notebook under the mattress where he had put it again.

He exhaled. Maybe he had imagined the morning.

Then he saw the bed.

In the centre of the bed, perfectly centred, was a folded sheet of white paper.

He had not put any paper there. He was certain. He would have seen it.

He didn't move for a long time. He just stared at it.

Then he walked to it and picked it up with two fingers. It was cold and damp.

He unfolded it.

Inside, written in thick black marker, the ink bleeding into the wet paper, were three words:

YOU ARE NEXT.

His hand started to tremble.

At that exact moment, three slow knocks came from the door.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

David froze. The paper shook in his hand.

He didn't move. He didn't breathe.

The knocks stopped.

Silence.

He waited. Ten seconds. Twenty.

Then he forced himself to the door and pulled it open.

The corridor was empty. Completely empty. No one running. No footsteps.

Only the floor.

A trail of wet footprints led away from his door, down the dark corridor, and disappeared around the corner.

They were bare.

And the paper in his hand smelled faintly of stagnant river water.

😂 If you were David, would you still sleep in Room 13 after this... or carry your load and relocate immediately?

Drop your answer in the comments—I read every one. And if you're enjoying the story, follow this thread so you don't miss the next chapter. Things are only getting scarier. 👀

You're right—I accidentally posted the wrong Chapter 13 before uploading the correct one, and I understand why that was confusing. I sincerely apologize for the mix-up.

Please consider "Chapter 13: The Watchtower" as the official version of the story. The earlier Chapter 13 was posted by mistake and belongs to a different project.

Thank you for pointing it out instead of quietly leaving. I really appreciate your patience and support. From here on, the chapters will continue in the correct order. I hope you'll keep reading and let me know what you think.

Chapter 13: After Hours

Elizabeth waited until the floor was nearly empty before making her move.

Most of the staff had left by 7:30 PM. The 45th floor was quiet except for the low hum of servers and the occasional footsteps of night security. She slipped into the archive room on the executive level, using the temporary access card Kelvin had given her earlier that day.

The room was dimly lit, rows of secure cabinets lining the walls. She moved quickly, searching for the physical backup logs of the European contract. Her heart beat hard against her ribs. This was risky. If she was caught, it would look like she was trying to destroy evidence.

She found the cabinet she needed and pulled it open. The folder was there — but someone had already been through it. Pages were slightly out of order. A small USB drive was missing from the sleeve where it should have been.

Elizabeth’s pulse quickened. She photographed the folder with her phone, then closed the cabinet.

That’s when she heard it.

Footsteps. Soft. Careful. Coming from the hallway outside.

She froze.

The lights in the archive room suddenly went out.

Darkness swallowed her. Only the faint emergency exit sign glowed red in the corner. Elizabeth held her breath, pressing herself against the wall.

The footsteps grew closer.

She moved silently toward the door, adrenaline surging. As she reached the hallway, a shadow darted past her — someone in dark clothing, moving fast.

“Hey!” Elizabeth called out, breaking into a run.

The intruder sprinted down the corridor toward the emergency stairs. Elizabeth chased, heels abandoned behind her, bare feet slapping against the cold marble. The figure was fast, but she was fueled by anger and fear.

They rounded a corner. Elizabeth lunged, grabbing the intruder’s sleeve. The person twisted violently, shoving her hard against the wall. Pain flared in her shoulder, but she held on.

The intruder broke free and disappeared down the stairwell.

Security alarms began blaring.

Lights flooded the hallway as guards rushed in. Two of them grabbed Elizabeth, mistaking her for the intruder.

“I was chasing them!” she shouted. “They went down the stairs!”

The guards didn’t release her immediately. One of them spoke into his radio. “We have a situation on 45. Possible breach.”

Moments later, Kelvin appeared, moving through the chaos with calm authority. His eyes locked on Elizabeth, taking in her disheveled appearance and the red mark on her shoulder where she had been shoved.

“Release her,” he ordered.

The guards let go immediately.

Kelvin stepped closer, his voice low enough that only she could hear. “What the hell were you doing, Elizabeth?”

“Looking for answers,” she replied, breathing hard. “Someone was already in the archive room. They ran when I saw them.”

Kelvin’s jaw tightened. He reached out and gently touched her shoulder where the bruise was forming. The contact was brief, but it sent a shock through her body.

“You’re hurt,” he said, something dark flickering in his eyes. “And reckless.”

Before she could respond, a security guard called out from the stairwell.

“Mr. Ruven! We found something.”

He held up a Ruven Empire security badge.

It wasn’t Victor’s.

It wasn’t hers.

It belonged to someone else — someone who wasn’t supposed to have access to the executive floor at all.

Kelvin’s expression hardened.

The game had just become deadly.

And Elizabeth had stepped directly into the middle of it.


---

Chapter 10 – The Hidden Basement

David got back to the hostel before dawn. The gate creaked as he pushed it open, and the night watchman gave him a sleepy nod without asking questions. He climbed the stairs quietly, shut his door, and sat on the edge of his bed with the enlarged photograph in his hands.

The image was grainy, the edges worn, but the faces were clear enough. The message from the back kept replaying in his mind: “Find where they buried the lie.”

He read it again and again until the words felt like they were burning into his brain. The hostel was quiet except for the sound of distant traffic and the hum of a generator somewhere down the street. David closed his eyes and tried to think. If someone had hidden something important, they would not choose a place that was easy to find. They would choose somewhere people avoided.
His thoughts went straight to the abandoned mortuary from earlier in the term. The building at the edge of campus that no one wanted to talk about. The place with broken windows, rusted doors, and rumours that followed it like a shadow. If anything was ever meant to stay hidden, that was the most likely place.
He opened his eyes and looked at the photograph again. The faces stared back at him without answers. He folded the paper carefully and slipped it into his pocket. Sleep was not going to come. He already knew what he had to do.
By evening, the campus had quietened down. Most students were in their rooms or at the few places that still had light and generator noise. David waited until the sky turned dark and the paths grew empty. He packed a small bag with a torch, a pair of gloves, and the rusted mortuary key he had taken from the clinic archives weeks before. He did not tell anyone where he was going. It felt safer that way.
The walk to the mortuary took longer than he remembered. The road was rough in places, with deep potholes filled with rain water. He stepped around them and kept his torch low so the light would not carry too far. When he reached the building, it looked worse than before. More broken windows. More peeling paint. The air around it felt still, like the place was holding its breath.
He stopped at the main door and listened. There was no sound from inside, no movement, no voices. He slid the key into the lock and turned it slowly. The metal groaned but gave way. The door opened with a long, low creak that made his skin prickle.
He stepped inside and swept his torch across the floor. Dust covered everything. Old tiles were cracked in places, and the smell of damp and river water hung heavy in the air. He moved deeper into the building, checking each room as he went. Most were empty except for broken furniture and scattered papers that had turned brown with age.
Then he noticed the signs.
Fresh footprints in the dust near the entrance. A cigarette butt on the floor by one of the windows. A new scratch on the old padlock of a storage room that should have been untouched for years. Someone had been here recently. Maybe more than one person. The thought made his stomach tighten. He was not the only one searching.
He moved from room to room, comparing the layout with the old plan he had copied from the clinic archives. The paper was crumpled at the edges, but the lines were still clear. One storage room did not match. On the plan it was much larger, but inside it felt small, like part of the space was missing.
He pushed a rusty metal cabinet aside. It scraped against the floor with a harsh sound that echoed through the empty building. Behind it, the tiles were cracked and loose. He tapped the floor with the handle of his torch and heard a hollow sound. He crouched down and worked at the tiles until they broke away. Beneath them was an old iron trapdoor with a rusted ring handle.
He stared at it for a long moment. The metal was cold under his fingers. He pulled, and the trapdoor resisted, then gave way with a sudden jerk that almost made him lose his balance. A wave of stale, damp air rose from the darkness below. It smelled of river water and something older, something that had been closed off for too long.
Narrow concrete steps disappeared into the blackness. Water dripped somewhere in the depth, each drop echoing like a slow heartbeat. He turned on his torch and began to climb down. The air grew colder with every step. His breath came out in faint white clouds that vanished quickly in the dark.
At the bottom, the beam of his torch revealed old shelves lining the walls. Broken hospital equipment lay scattered across the floor. Rusted stretchers leaned against the wall like tired skeletons. Rotten record boxes were stacked in corners, their cardboard soft and falling apart. The place did not look like storage. It looked like somewhere people wanted forgotten.
He moved slowly, checking each shelf, each box, each corner. The silence pressed against his ears. Then he saw the writing.
It was scratched into the wall in uneven lines. Faded dates. Strange symbols. Signs that someone had tried to scrape parts away and failed. He moved closer, shining his torch along the surface. The plaster was cracked and stained with old water marks. Some of the writing was too faint to read.
Then his torch flickered and went out.
He stood in complete darkness for a heartbeat before he shook it and got the light back. When the beam returned, it fell on a dark brown stain spreading across one section of the wall. Not fresh. Old. Dry. The shape was unmistakable. Blood.
Beside the stain, something hung on a broken nail. He reached for it with trembling fingers. It was an old nursing name badge, the metal dull with years of dust. He wiped it carefully with his glove. The faded letters slowly came into view.
ADA NWOSU
His heart pounded in his chest. If Ada had disappeared, why was her name badge hidden beneath the mortuary, behind a trapdoor no one knew existed.
He raised his torch higher. The dried blood continued across the wall. It was not random. Someone had written something in blood. Most of the words had faded with time. Only three remained clear.
“…DON’T OPEN…”
Before he could read the rest, he heard three slow knocks.
From somewhere deeper inside the basement.






What do you think is hidden deeper inside the basement? Who—or what—is knocking in the darkness? And why was Ada's name badge left beside that bloodstained wall? Share your theories in the comments. I read every one, and some of your guesses might be closer to the truth than you think... 👀

**Chapter 9 – The Watchman**

The night air in Port Harcourt carried that kind of sticky heaviness that made even breathing feel like work, the kind of night that reminded David of the hostel corridors, of Room 13 and the way the silence there always seemed to have weight

He had spent the last week like a mad man, chasing whispers from cleaners, old gatemen, retired staff, anybody that had ever worked in the school before the new management took over, everybody had one thing in common, once he mentioned “2002” and “Room 13,” their eyes shifted and their voices dropped

That was how he heard about him, the old watchman, the one they never called by name, just “Baba that used to do night,” the one that left suddenly after some things happened, the one nobody wanted to stay long on when you asked too many questions

David found him in a small compound at the edge of town, the kind of place where the zinc roofs looked tired and the walls carried old rain marks, where NEPA light was a visitor, not a resident, he stood outside the wooden door for a long minute, listening, feeling that familiar tightness in his chest

He knocked

“Who is there,” a voice came, deep, rough, carrying more years than strength

“My name is David,” he said, forcing his voice to stay steady, “I am a student at Rivers State College of Health, I’m looking for the watchman that used to work there,”

The door opened just a crack, one sharp eye studied him, the man looked like life had been beating him small small for a long time, his grey hair rough, his singlet hanging loose, but his gaze was steady

“Go home, young man,” the old man said, trying to close the door

“Please, sir,” David stepped forward, his hand on the wood, “Room 13 is still causing trouble, people are seeing things, hearing knocking, someone is missing, I need to know what really happened in 2002,”

The old man’s hand froze, that eye softened for one brief second, then hardened again

“You people have started again,” he muttered, more to himself than to David, “more than twenty years, and that room is still calling,”

He opened the door wider and stepped aside

“Come in, sit down, if I talk, I will talk once,”



Inside, the room was simple, plastic chairs, one small table, a dusty calendar hanging on the wall, a Bible kept face down on the table like someone had dropped it in a hurry, the air smelled of gari and old oil

The watchman sat opposite David and studied him quietly, as if weighing whether this boy deserved the weight of what he was about to hear

“I left that place in 2003,” he started, his voice slower now, “but my own wahala started in 2002, that is when everything changed,”

David leaned forward, his fingers locked together, knuckles white

“I was the night watchman then,” the old man continued, “from six in the evening till six in the morning, I knew every corner of that compound, I knew when one rat passed behind the lab, I knew when boys sneaked to meet girls near that small mango tree, I knew all those nonsense,”

He gave a tired half smile that did not reach his eyes

“But Room 13,” he said, looking directly at David now, “Room 13 was different, even before that girl disappeared,”

David swallowed

“What do you mean different,”

“From the first term they opened that hostel block, nobody liked that room,” the watchman said, “students complained about knocking inside the wall at night, they complained about wet footprints on dry floor, they complained about one woman in white they used to see by the window, some of them begged to be moved out, some of them just endured,”

His hand rubbed his left arm like an old wound sat there

“So Room 13 was feared before Ada,” David said slowly, “before she disappeared,”

The watchman nodded once

“Yes, before Ada,” he replied, “but after she vanished, everything became worse,”

He shifted in his chair, eyes on some point beyond the wall

“Before that night, the room was just strange, people talked, they were afraid, but nobody had died,” he said, “after Ada disappeared, the whole hostel changed, boys started refusing bunk close to that door, some staff stopped passing that side at night, even me, I stopped going there alone,”

David’s blood ran cold

“Sir, please,” he said, “what happened that night, what did you see yourself,”

The watchman took a deep breath, his chest rising slowly, like it took effort

“I was on night duty,” he said, “I was the one that locked the hostel doors that evening, I remember because rain had fallen small in the afternoon, the ground was still damp, the corridor had that smell,”

He paused, his fingers tapping the table once, twice

“Sometime around midnight, I heard shouting from upstairs,” he continued, “students running, banging, calling my name, I went up and saw crowd near Room 13, some crying, some shaking, one boy just sat on the floor like his spirit had left him,”

David’s heartbeat picked up

“And Ada,” he whispered

“I never saw her body,” the old man said quietly, “that is the part that still worries me till today, the bed was scattered, the window open small, the door hanging one kind, but there was no girl, only that feeling,”

“What feeling,”

The watchman’s gaze met his, fear sitting deep inside it

“Like the room had swallowed somebody and was still chewing,” he said, voice almost a whisper, “you know when you enter a place and you can tell something just happened, the air heavy, the silence somehow loud, that is how it was,”

He shifted again, rubbing his palms on his shorts

“They called us together later,” he went on, “principal, matron, hostel master, they told us not to mention that night to anybody, said it will spoil the school, said we should say Ada ran away, that she left on her own, that nobody saw her again,”

His mouth twisted bitterly

“By the next week, the story had changed completely,” he said, “parents were hearing ‘she ran away with boyfriend,’ some staff were hearing ‘she travelled,’ they said the hostel should continue as normal, but everybody that worked there knew that was not the truth,”

David felt anger rise under his fear

“So they covered it,” he said, “they just pretended nothing happened,”

The watchman nodded slowly

“Room 13 was feared before Ada disappeared,” he repeated, “but after that night, it was like something entered fully, as if whatever had been knocking before finally found way inside,”

There was a heavy silence now, the kind that made every small sound outside feel loud, a generator starting in one compound, distant laughter, a passing keke, life going on as if this conversation did not matter

David leaned forward, voice low

“Sir, you mentioned woman in white,” he said, “you said students used to see her, did you ever see her yourself,”

The old man hesitated, his lips pressing together, his eyes shining slightly in the dim light

“One night, around 2 am,” he said at last, “I was outside, near the back of the hostel, that side that faces the small bush, I looked up and saw somebody in faded white uniform standing at the door of Room 13, the corridor light was off, but I could see her shape,”

He swallowed

“She knocked three times,” he continued, “waited, knocked again, like she was calling somebody inside, I did not go close, I am old, not foolish, I just watched from far, but when I remembered Ada and that night, I knew this thing is not ordinary,”

David’s fingers went cold, his mind jumping to the soft knocks he had been hearing, the pattern, the time, the way it always came just before sleep

“Sir, do you know who she is,” he asked, his voice almost breaking, “is it a person, is it something else, is it Ada,”

The watchman looked at him for a long moment, darkness sitting under his gaze

“There is one name they erased from that place,” he said slowly, “one staff member they pretended never existed, they removed her from files, from reports, almost from memory,”

David’s breath caught

“What name,”

The watchman opened his mouth to speak

The bulb above them blinked

Once at first, then again, then it went off completely, cutting the room into thick darkness

From the corridor outside, a soft, familiar sound came, three gentle knocks, spaced out, deliberate, echoing around the small house as if the walls had been hearing that rhythm for years

David’s skin prickled, his mind screaming even though his mouth stayed shut, it was the same pattern, the same timing, the same sound that had followed him in the hostel, that had kept him awake night after night

“Sit down,” the watchman whispered sharply, his voice suddenly hoarse, his chair scraping as he stood, “don’t stand up, don’t answer,”

David could hear his breathing now, fast and uneven, the old man moving in the dark, one hand searching for something on the table

The knocks came again

This time, they sounded closer

David’s heart pounded against his ribs, his palm wet, he wanted to ask what was happening, wanted to shout, but his throat felt locked

Then, as suddenly as the light left, it came back, the bulb humming weakly as the room returned

David blinked, his eyes adjusting

“Sir,” he exhaled, “what is—”

He stopped

The chair opposite him was empty

The watchman was gone

No door slam, no hurried footsteps, no sound of somebody rushing out, the wooden door was still closed, the window still shut, the Bible still lying on the table, but the man that had been sitting there only seconds ago had disappeared as if he had never been there at all

David stood up on shaky legs, his chest tight, his mind trying to process what his eyes were seeing, he moved around the small room, opened the door, checked outside, nothing, no movement, no voice, no old man cursing under his breath, nothing

On the ground near the table, something lay half under the plastic chair

It was a photograph

David bent and picked it up, his fingers trembling, the paper soft and worn, corners bent from years of handling

His breath caught immediately

It was the same old staff photograph Papa Emeka had given him days earlier, the one that showed nurses and teachers lined up in front of the old administration block, but this copy was different, it had been enlarged, as if someone wanted one face to stand out

In the front row, slightly to the left, stood a young nurse in white, her eyes looking straight at the camera, her expression calm, almost too calm

For a long moment David simply stared

Then a cold realization settled in his chest

It looked exactly like the woman survivors had described, the woman in the wet white uniform, the one that used to stand by Room 13 and knock

His stomach twisted as he turned the photograph over

On the back, in red ink that had bled slightly into the paper, someone had written three short lines, letters shaky but clear

“She never died.

We only told the world she did.

Find where they buried the lie.”

***





What do you think happened to the watchman? Did he disappear... or was he taken? And what do you think "Find where they buried the lie" really means? Drop your theories in the comments—I read every one of them.

Chapter 13: The Watchtower

The watchtower rose from the mist like a bone from the earth.

It stood at the end of a cobbled lane that had not seen maintenance in a century, its stones dark with damp, its narrow windows glowing faintly as if the structure itself was holding its breath. The iron gate was unlocked. The garden beyond had surrendered to brambles long ago. I pushed through the overgrowth and stopped before a door of oak reinforced with iron bands.

Before I could knock, the door swung inward.

"Come in, child," said a voice from the dark. "You have walked a long way to ask questions I may not be able to answer."

---

The interior of the watchtower was a vertical library. Bookshelves spiralled up the curved walls, crammed with volumes in languages that predated the Underworld's founding. A fire burned in a stone hearth, its light catching the spines and casting dancing shadows across the floor. The air smelled of old paper, woodsmoke, and something older — dust from tombs, perhaps, or the faint mineral tang of ancient stone.

Mareth sat in a high-backed chair beside the hearth. She was older than any vampire I had ever seen. Her hair was white as bone, her skin thin as parchment stretched over a framework of delicate bones. Her eyes were a pale, faded violet, and they looked at me without surprise, without hostility, and without the deference I was accustomed to receiving.

"You know who I am," I said.

"I know your bloodline. The Vane name carries weight, even here." She gestured to a second chair. "Sit. You have questions. I have fragments. We may as well be comfortable while we disappoint each other."

I did not sit. "Elizabeth sent me. She said you might know what the stone truly is."

"Elizabeth." A faint smile touched Mareth's lips. "The assassin who fell in love with her target. Yes, I know her. She is braver than she believes." The smile faded. "The stone. You were told it would wake your betrothed. A cure for a wasting curse. That is what they told you, yes?"

"Yes."

"It is a lie."

The words landed like a blade between my ribs. I had suspected. I had gathered fragments from Voss, from Elizabeth, from the assassins who had tried to kill me. But hearing it spoken aloud, in this quiet room, by this ancient creature — it was different. It was final.

"What is it, then?"

Mareth studied me for a long moment. The fire crackled. "What I can tell you is this: the stone was created by a civilisation that existed before the realms were divided. They were not vampires. They were not human. They were something else — something that has not walked this world in millennia."

"What happened to them?"

"They disappeared." Mareth's voice dropped. "Some say they destroyed themselves. Others say they opened a door they could not close. The only certainty is that the stone was at the centre of whatever catastrophe consumed them. It was buried here, in this place, by those who survived. They bound it with wards and set guardians to watch over it. They believed it was too dangerous to be used. Too dangerous even to be studied."

"The factions," I said. "Voss's journal mentioned two. One that wants it destroyed. One that wants it retrieved."

"The Severed want it destroyed. They believe that whatever the stone contains should never be released. They have killed to keep it buried, and they will kill again." Mareth leaned forward, her ancient eyes suddenly sharp. "Dorian's family leads the faction that wants it retrieved. They have been searching for it for centuries. They believe it will give them power beyond anything the Underworld has ever known."

"What kind of power?"

"I do not know. And I suspect they do not know either. They are reaching for something they do not understand. That is what makes them dangerous."

The fire popped. A shower of sparks rose and died. I turned toward the hearth, watching the flames consume the wood.

"You said my bloodline carries weight. What did you mean?"

Mareth was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was slower, more careful. "The Vane name is woven through the stone's history. I have seen it in the oldest records — not as seekers, but as something else. Guardians, perhaps. Or something older. But the truth has been obscured. Deliberately. By someone who did not want the connection known."

"Why?"

"Because someone erased that page long before I was born." She settled back in her chair. "I cannot tell you what your ancestors were to the stone. That is a thread you must pull yourself. But I can tell you this: Dorian's family did not choose you by accident. Whatever they believe you can do — it is connected to your blood."

I stared into the fire. The pieces shifted in my mind. My mother's coldness. The mission that had been framed as duty. Dorian's slumber, which was beginning to look less like a curse and more like a convenient fiction.

"Who else knows I am here?" I asked.

"No one. I have lived in this tower for two centuries, and no one has visited me in fifty years. You are the first."

"Yet someone followed me." I turned from the hearth. "When I left the campus, I felt a presence. I thought it was one of the Severed, but they would have attacked. This was different. Watching. Waiting."

Mareth's expression did not change, but her fingers tightened on the arm of her chair. "Then you have less time than I thought. Whatever you decide next — someone else is already moving."

She closed her eyes, and the conversation was over.

---

I left the watchtower as dawn was breaking, the mist thinning to reveal a city still half-asleep.

At the end of the cobbled lane, I stopped.

Across the street, a lone figure stood on the rooftop of a shuttered shop, watching the tower in silence. The lean stillness of someone who had been waiting. Too far away to recognise. Too motionless to be ordinary. One hand rested on the chimney, and a strip of dark fabric stirred once in the wind before falling still.

I met the stranger's gaze for a heartbeat. Then I turned and walked back toward Ashthorne, the weight of Mareth's fragments pressing against my spine.

I never realised I had just been seen by the one person who would soon refuse to let me disappear again.

---

Chapter 8: Room 13's Victims


---

David set his phone aside and stared at the pages of his notebook. The words blurred together—dates, names, official reports that said nothing. His phone photos had mysteriously disappeared. The records he copied into his notebook were all he had left.

Official records can be altered.

The thought kept circling in his head. Someone had buried the truth about Room 13. But documents could be edited, files could be deleted—people were harder to silence.

Using names from old alumni WhatsApp groups and contacts Tunde helped him find, David spent the next two days calling former occupants of Room 13. He scrolled through his phone and stared at the list of contacts he had gathered. Former students. Alumni. People who had once lived in that room and walked out alive.

His thumb hovered over the first name: Femi.


---

Femi – Class of 2018

David met Femi at a small café near the university. Femi was thirty-one now, married with a child, working as an accountant at a firm in Surulere. He wore a neat polo shirt and glasses. He looked normal. Stable. The kind of man you would never guess had spent a year in Room 13.

"To be honest," Femi said, stirring his coffee, "I don't like talking about that year. My wife doesn't even know."

"Why not?" David asked.

Femi laughed bitterly. "Because she'd think I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy half the time. It's been what—eight years? And I still check my door twice before I sleep."

"What happened?"

Femi was quiet for a long moment. He stared into his coffee like he was searching for words that had been buried for years.

"I lived in that room for about three months," he finally said. "First two months, nothing. Just normal hostel life—noise, fights, people stealing noodles. Then one night, I woke up around 2 AM. I don't know why. I just... woke up."

He paused. His hand tightened around the cup.

"There was this woman standing by my door."

David leaned forward. "What woman?"

"I don't know. I couldn't see her face properly. She was wearing something white—like a nurse's uniform. Soaking wet. Water was dripping on the floor. I could hear it. Drip. Drip. Drip."

Femi set the cup down. His fingers were shaking.

"She just stood there. Looking at me. I couldn't move, couldn't scream—it was like my body was frozen. Then she was gone. Just like that."

"Did you tell anyone?" David asked.

"I told my roommate the next morning. He said I was dreaming. I believed him. I wanted to believe him. So I let it go."

"But you still check your door?"

Femi finally looked up. His eyes were tired.

"Because she came back three more times before I moved out. Always the same. Always wet. Always standing by the door. And every time, I couldn't move. Like she was holding me in place."


---

Chidinma – Class of 2019

Chidinma lived in Room 13 for two semesters before transferring to another school. Now she worked at a bank in Abuja. She agreed to speak to David over the phone.

"I don't even know why I'm agreeing to this," she said, her voice low. "I've tried to forget that place."

"Please," David said. "Anything you remember might help."

She sighed. "Fine. It happened during exams. I was studying late, trying to cram everything. Everyone else was asleep. Around midnight, I needed water. So I got up and walked to the door."

She paused. Her breathing changed.

"Someone was standing outside."

"Who?"

"I don't know. A woman. I just saw her through the gap in the door. She was wearing something wet—like she had just walked out of a river. And she was staring at me. Not moving. Just... staring."

"Did you see her face?"

"No. That was the worst part. Her hair was wet and covering everything. But I could feel her looking at me. You know that feeling when someone is watching you? It was like that but a thousand times worse."

"What did you do?"

"I ran back to my bed and hid under my blanket. I stayed there until morning. The next day, I asked around. No one believed me. People said I was stressed from exams. But I know what I saw."

She paused again.

"Two weeks later, I changed my room. Then I changed schools. I never told anyone the real reason. I just said I wanted a fresh start."


---

Obi – Class of 2020

Obi was the hardest to reach. He had moved to Port Harcourt and worked as an engineer for an oil company. When David finally got him on the phone, Obi's voice was quiet and guarded.

"What do you want to know?" Obi asked.

"Everything," David said. "What happened when you lived in Room 13?"

Obi was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his words were slow and measured.

"It was the second week of my stay," he said. "I was the only one in the room. My roommate had gone to visit his family. So I was alone."

David wrote this down quickly.

"I was reading," Obi continued. "My phone had a little torchlight. And then I smelled it."

"Smelled what?"

"Water. Stagnant water. Like a river that hasn't moved in years. I thought maybe the bathroom was flooding. So I got up to check."

"Was it flooding?"

"No."

Obi's voice dropped.

"I opened the door and saw her. She was standing at the end of the corridor. A woman in white. Soaking wet. Water was pooling at her feet. And she was staring at me."

"Did she do anything?"

"She just stood there. For maybe three minutes. Then she turned and walked away. But there was no sound of footsteps. Just the sound of water dripping. I ran back into my room and locked the door. I didn't sleep that night."

"Did you tell anyone?"

"I told my roommate when he came back. He laughed at me. Said I was seeing things. I almost believed him. But a week later, I woke up in the middle of the night, and she was standing beside my bed. The water was dripping on my floor. I could smell the river. She was just standing there, looking down at me."

Obi stopped. His breathing was heavy.

"After that, I moved out."


---

The Patterns

David spread his notebook across the desk.

Three names.

Three different graduation years.

Three people who had never met.

He drew a line beneath the final testimony and compared every description one last time.

White nurse's uniform.

Long wet hair.

The smell of stagnant river water.

She never spoke.

She only watched.

David slowly closed the notebook.

They weren't describing three different ghosts.

They were all describing the same woman.

The same woman who had vanished more than twenty years ago.

And for the first time since this nightmare began, David no longer wondered whether Ada Nwosu was real.

He wondered why she kept returning to Room 13.


---
Three survivors. Three different years. One identical story.

If you were David, would you keep investigating... or walk away before Room 13 claimed another victim?

Drop your theory in the comments, and don't forget to follow the story for Chapter 9: The Watchman.

.


---

Chapter 11: The Stranger in the Stacks

The restricted archives were silent when I entered, the lamplight casting long amber fingers across the shelves. I had the name "Mareth" in my pocket and no idea where to begin.

The archives held more than hunter genealogies and poison lore. They held records of the city — census documents, property deeds, maps that stretched back to before the university was founded. If Mareth was an exile, she would have chosen a place old enough to have history, quiet enough to avoid attention. A place purchased in cash, never transferred, forgotten by everyone except the archivists.

I pulled down volume after volume, searching for patterns in the faded ink. An abandoned church near the river — owned by three different families in two centuries, none of them real. A manor house on the outskirts — burned in 1847, never rebuilt. And then, tucked into a property register from the early 1800s, a watchtower.

The deed was registered to a name that appeared nowhere else. The building had been purchased in cash, the transaction witnessed by a notary whose other clients all shared the same telltale pattern — names that shifted, identities that dissolved under scrutiny, paper trails that led nowhere. The ownership had never transferred. The taxes were paid annually by a solicitor's firm that had gone bankrupt sixty years ago.

It was exactly the kind of place a vampire would choose to hide.

I committed the address to memory and closed the register. When I turned toward the exit, a figure blocked the aisle.

Professor Aldric Voss stood with his hands in the pockets of his worn tweed coat. His silver hair caught the lamplight. His spectacles glinted. Behind them, his eyes were the pale blue of a winter sky — calm, patient, and utterly unsurprised to see me.

"Miss Nocturne," he said. "You spend a great deal of time in the restricted section."

"I have an interest in history."

"So I've noticed." He stepped closer, his gaze moving past me to the shelves. "Property records. That is an unusual area of study for a transfer student."

"I am an unusual student."

"Yes." He paused. "You are also remarkably composed for someone who has been attacked three times in the past month. Most students who suffer such misfortunes visit the infirmary. Or the police. You, however, seem to heal without assistance."

The word attacked was deliberate. He knew the incidents were not accidents.

"I have a strong constitution," I said.

"I am sure you do." He removed his spectacles and polished them with a cloth from his pocket. The gesture was unhurried, almost meditative. "I spent thirty years as a hunter, Miss Nocturne. I know what a vampire looks like. I know how they move. I know how they heal. And I know, with absolute certainty, that you are not human."

The silence that followed was absolute. I did not move. My hands remained at my sides. Every instinct demanded I neutralise the threat — but Voss was not reaching for a weapon. He was not calling for reinforcements. He was simply standing there, waiting.

"I have no intention of exposing you," he said. "I retired from the hunter's life for a reason. I grew tired of the certainty that every vampire was a monster and every monster deserved to die." He replaced his spectacles. "You are the first of your kind I have seen attend lectures and take notes on Caravaggio. That intrigued me."

"What do you want?"

"To give you something." He reached into his coat and withdrew a leather-bound journal, worn soft with age. "I have been watching this campus for twenty years. I know about the relic beneath the chapel. I know it has been stirring. And I know something is coming that will require more than frightened students and retired old men to stop."

He held out the journal.

"This contains everything I have been able to piece together. Its history. Its guardians. The factions that have tried to claim it. There are significant gaps — things I could never confirm. But it may help you."

I took the journal. The leather was warm from his body.

"Why?" I asked. "Why help me?"

"Because I am old," he said. "And I have learned that the world is not divided into hunters and hunted. Some of us stand in the space between." He turned and walked toward the exit. At the end of the aisle, he paused. "The stone is not a cure, Miss Nocturne. Whatever you were told — it was a lie. Find out why."

His footsteps faded. The door closed. I was alone with the journal and the address in my pocket.


---

I read through the night.

Voss had compiled fragments over decades — eyewitness accounts, translated texts, genealogical records, property disputes that masked deeper conflicts. The stone, he wrote, had been created by a civilisation that predated the division between realms. They had done something with it that the records deliberately obscured. Pages had been torn from histories. Witnesses had disappeared.

Two factions had been fighting over the stone for centuries. One wanted it destroyed. They believed whatever the stone was connected to should never see the light. The assassins who had attacked me, Voss suspected, belonged to them. The other faction wanted it retrieved. Not to cure any curse — Voss was emphatic on this point, though he admitted he did not know their true purpose. The retrieval was everything.

Dorian's family was connected to the second faction. The journal was less clear on how. Voss had circled a name — Vane — with a question mark beside it, as if he had suspected a link to my bloodline but could not prove it.

I closed the journal as the first grey light of dawn seeped through the window. The address of the watchtower was in my pocket. Voss's fragments were in my hands. And somewhere in the city, an exile named Mareth had been waiting for someone to come asking questions.

I slipped the journal into my coat and stood. By tonight, I would be at Mareth's door. Whether she welcomed me or tried to kill me, I would finally get answers.


---

CHAPTER 7 – THE LAST PATIENT

The phone was useless.

David sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the black screen. The photos were gone. Not corrupted, not blurry — gone. Three pictures of the attendance register, taken less than six hours ago, vanished from his gallery, his deleted folder, his cloud backup.

He hadn't deleted them.

He turned the phone over in his hand. The back was warm.

He didn't sleep again after that. He left his phone in the hostel and walked to the clinic at exactly 8:00 AM, when he knew Mrs. Okafor would be on duty.

The clinic smelled the same — Dettol, old paper, and damp concrete. The standing fan made the same tired noise.

"Ah, David," Mrs. Okafor said, looking up from her desk. She didn't look surprised to see him. "You again. Hope you slept well? You were looking... somehow yesterday."

"I did, ma," he said. He forced a smile. "Actually, ma, I wanted to ask for your help. I'm writing a small paper. History of the nursing department. For our departmental week."

Mrs. Okafor raised an eyebrow. "History?"

"Yes, ma. I thought since this clinic is the oldest building, maybe you have old registers I can reference. How the clinic started, students treated, that kind of thing."

She studied him for a long time. David kept his face still.

"You people and all this sudden interest in history," she muttered. "Last week somebody wanted history of the boys hostel. Before that, history of the library. Everybody wants to do history when exam is near."

"It's not for exam, ma. It's just—"

She waved him off. "That back room. The store. There are cartons there from when I was still a student. Nobody touches them. Don't scatter my things. And don't stay long. I have antenatal by ten."

"Thank you, ma."

The back room was smaller than he remembered. No windows. One naked bulb that flickered. Cartons stacked on top of each other, some torn open, some sealed with masking tape that had turned brown. The air was thick with dust.

David pulled the first carton down. Student medical cards from 1998. Second carton — expired drugs. Third — duty rosters, faded.

He worked quickly, quietly. Sweat ran down his back. His hands were grey with dust.

He was looking for one date. September 14, 2002. The night Ada disappeared.

He found the patient register for the 2002/2003 session at the bottom of the fourth carton. The book was heavy, hardcover, the pages yellow but still firm. He opened it.

July. August. September.

He flipped faster. September 10. September 11. September 12. September 13.

September 14.

His finger stopped.

The page was there. But something was wrong immediately.

The entries were in Ada's handwriting. He recognized it now — small, neat, slanted to the right. She had written five entries that day. Malaria. Headache. Stomach pain. Asthma. Then the last entry of the day.

The time was written: 11:42 p.m.

That was late. Very late for a routine complaint. Clinic closed by 6 p.m. Except for emergencies.

Under it:

Attending Nurse: Ada Nwosu

Complaint: Emergency - bleeding

Treatment Given: Dressed wound, administered...

The rest of the line was missing.

Because the name was missing.

Right where the patient's name should have been, there was a clean, rectangular hole in the paper. About two inches wide. Someone had taken a razor blade and cut out the name. Not torn. Cut. The edges were straight, sharp.

David stared at it. He held the page up to the bulb. Light came through the hole.

It wasn't age. The rest of the page was intact. Only that one name.

He turned the page. September 15. The next nurse had resumed duties. No mention of Ada.

He checked the treatment log, a different book where they recorded drugs used. He found September 14 again.

Same thing. 11:42 p.m. Cotton wool, iodine, gauze, tetanus injection — used. Patient name column — cut out. Same neat rectangle.

He checked the emergency admission book.

September 14, 11:42 p.m. entry was completely stained. A dark brown stain, like tea, had spread over the entire line, obscuring everything. But only that line. The entry above and below were clean.

This was deliberate.

Someone had gone through three different books and removed one name.

David's throat was dry. He put the books down and looked around the store room.

That's when he started noticing other things.

On the carton he had just opened, there were fresh fingerprints on the dust. Clear, recent, overlapping his own. Someone had opened this same carton not long ago.

He opened another carton. A filing cabinet in the corner — it shouldn't have been in the store room, it belonged outside — was slightly open. Inside, files were not arranged. They were leaning, as if someone had pulled them out quickly and pushed them back.

And the smell.

Faint, but there. Cigarette smoke. Stale. Mrs. Okafor didn't smoke. No nurse smoked inside the clinic. Smoking was prohibited.

Someone else had been here. Searching.

David heard the main clinic door creak outside.

He quickly closed the register, pushed the carton back, and stepped out, trying to look normal.

A man stood at Mrs. Okafor's desk. Tall, in a faded blue uniform — the maintenance staff. David had seen him before, cutting grass near the hostel. The man wasn't supposed to be inside the clinic.

"Ah, Emeka," Mrs. Okafor said from her chair. "You don come again? I tell you, make you come tomorrow. The sink still dey leak small."

"Sorry, ma," the man said. His eyes flicked to David, just for a second, then away. "I just wan check the pipe for that back room."

"Which back room? I get student inside there. Come tomorrow."

The man nodded and left. But before he left, David saw it — the man wasn't holding any tools. No plumber came to check a pipe without tools.

Mrs. Okafor hissed. "Every time, story. You see that boy?"

David forced a laugh. "Yes, ma."

He waited five minutes, then went back to the store. He wasn't done. He needed to see if there was anything else from that night.

He found the nurses' duty handover book. This one was supposed to contain notes from one nurse to the next.

September 14, night shift: Ada Nwosu.

Her note was short. Two lines, in her handwriting.

11:42 p.m. - Emergency patient brought in. Male. Injury from—

The rest of the sentence had been scratched out with a black biro. Not cut. Scratched, hard, with so many strokes that the paper had almost torn. Whoever did it pressed so hard the pen had bled through to the next page.

David turned to the next page. The day shift nurse had written:

Resumed duties 7:00 a.m. Night nurse not present to hand over. Patient from last night —

Again. The name was missing. But this time, the page itself was gone. Ripped out. Only the frayed edge remained in the binding.

For more than twenty years, someone had kept this secret.

And they were still here, making sure it stayed secret.

David sat on the dusty floor, the books open around him. His hands were shaking, not from fear — from anger. Ada didn't resign. She was on duty. She treated someone at 11:42 p.m. A male patient. Bleeding. Injury from something that someone didn't want anyone to read.

And then she vanished.

He heard footsteps again in the main clinic. Lighter this time. Mrs. Okafor's.

"Oga historian, you still dey there?" she called. "Time don reach. I wan lock store."

"Ma, coming," David answered. His voice was hoarse.

He took a small notebook from his pocket and quickly copied the page number, the time, and the exact shape of the cut. He drew the rectangle. Then he carefully arranged the cartons the way he found them and left the registers exactly where they were. Taking them would raise an alarm. Knowing what they contained was enough.

Mrs. Okafor locked the store with a big padlock.

"You see anything useful?" she asked.

"Small, ma. Thank you."

As he walked out of the clinic, his palm was sweaty around his notebook.

He walked past the maintenance block. The man in the blue uniform was there, sitting on a bench, smoking. He watched David walk past. He didn't look away.

David didn't look back either.

Back in his hostel, he locked his door. He sat down and opened his notebook to the page he had just drawn.

Patient Received: 11:42 p.m.

Attending Nurse: Ada Nwosu

Below that, in his own quick sketch, the space where the patient's name should have been.

A clean, empty rectangle cut with a sharp blade.

Not torn.

Not faded.

Not damaged by time.

Someone had cut that name out more than twenty years ago. And somehow... someone was still guarding the empty space it left behind.

CHAPTER 6 - MISSING RECORDS

The first sign that someone was watching him was the dust.

David had left his bag zipped. He always zipped it because the zipper was bad and he used a small safety pin to lock it. When he came back from afternoon lectures, the safety pin was open.

Nothing was missing. His one extra shirt was still there. His Bible was still there.

But his clothes had been turned. Not scattered, just... moved. Like someone lifted everything, checked underneath, and put it back quickly.

David stood in the middle of Room 13 for a long time, listening. The room was quiet. Too quiet for afternoon. He bent down and checked under the bed.

On the floor, in the thin dust, there was a fresh shoe print. Big. Not his slippers. A man's leather shoe. Pointed at his bag, as if someone stood there and searched.

He quickly checked above the wardrobe, inside the broken ceiling board where he hid Ada's things. The ID, the rusted key, the photograph wrapped in towel were still there.

Someone alive had entered Room 13.

And that was scarier than any ghost.

---

He went to the records office anyway.

He wasn't looking for proof anymore. Chapter 5 had already proved it. Ada Nwosu never officially resigned. Her employment file just said "File Closed - Management." No resignation letter. No transfer.

He was looking for whoever was hiding it.

The woman at the records office barely looked up. "We no dey give students staff record."

"Ma please, na for Nursing History project. Mrs. Okoroma send me."

She hissed, unlocked the cabinet and dropped the file on the table. "Ten minutes."

David opened it. He flipped straight to Ada's page.

Nothing had changed. Still marked "File Closed - Management." No resignation letter. No transfer. No explanation. But he noticed something new today. A fresh fingerprint in the dust on the file. Someone else had checked this same file today, before him.

He closed it. "Thank you ma."

As he walked out of the admin corridor, he saw the hostel manager coming out of the HOD's office. The manager saw him. Their eyes met for one second.

The manager's face tightened. He immediately brought out his phone and started calling someone.

David walked faster.

---

The next day, David went back to the library to check the 2002 night duty attendance register. Papa Emeka had said Ada entered night duty and never came out.

He went to the archive shelf where he had seen the registers before.

They were gone.

The shelf was empty. A cleaner was mopping there.

"Aunty, the big books wey dey here yesterday, where dem dey?"

"Oga Librarian say make dem carry am go store. Say rats dey chop am."

"Which store?"

"Admin store na. For back."

David went to the admin store. Locked. Big padlock.

He went to find the librarian who gave him the note. Her desk was empty. Another young man sat there.

"Where is the aunty wey dey here before?"

"She don go on leave. Emergency leave. From today."

David felt cold.

Someone was one step ahead of him. Always.

---

Tunde met him behind Block C that evening. David had told him everything, except the mortuary key.

"Omo, this thing don pass ghost o," Tunde said, looking around. "This na cover up. You don enter serious trouble."

Tunde lowered his voice. "My senior wey dey final year tell me say for 2018, one guy for Room 13 try do the same thing you dey do. Him go meet one cleaner too. Next week, school give am expulsion. Say him steal drugs for clinic. Everybody know say na lie, the guy no dey even near clinic."

"So dem go fit expel me?"

"Guy, if dem fit kill person, expulsion na small thing."

David swallowed. "I need to see that attendance register. If I fit see say she clock in for night duty and no clock out, that na proof say she disappear for work."

Tunde thought. "I know one guy for admin. E dey work for night for exams office. If you give am something... like 2k... e fit open store for you for night."

David had only 3k left for the whole month.

"Make we do am."

---

11:47 p.m.

The admin block was dark. Only the security light outside. Tunde's guy, a lanky boy called Chidi, opened the back store with a key, sweating.

"Oga fast o. If dem catch me, I don die. Five minutes."

David entered with his torch phone. Dust. Files piled on floor. Rats running.

He searched quickly. Attendance registers stacked by year. 2000... 2001... 2002... 2004...

He stopped.

There was a gap.

Between 2002 and 2004, an empty space on the shelf. Dust outline where a book should have been. The gap between 2002 and 2003 was obvious. Someone had removed an entire register.

But the one he wanted was still there. 2002 - NIGHT DUTY ATTENDANCE - CLINIC / HOSTEL. Maybe they missed it. Or maybe they thought it was not important.

He opened it, hands dusty. Pages sticky. July... August...

September 14, 2002.

His finger traced down.

Nurse on duty: Nwosu A. - In: 19:45 - Signature: Ada Nwosu. Her handwriting was neat, small.

Out:

Blank.

Empty space.

Every other staff that night had signed out. 07:10. 07:15. 07:05.

Only her space was blank. Her name was the last entry on the page. After that night, her name never appeared again.

Proof. She clocked in for her shift and never clocked out. She disappeared during work.

David quickly snapped photos, page after page. Click. Click. His hands shook.

On the floor, near the entrance, he noticed fresh footprints in the dust. Two sets. One was his and Chidi's slippers.

The other was a man's leather shoe. Big. Pointed.

Same shoe that entered his room.

Someone had been in this store today. Searching too.

"Guy time don reach!" Chidi hissed.

David closed the book, put it exactly back, and ran out.

Chidi locked the store fast. "You see wetin you want?"

David nodded, breathing hard, and brought out his phone to show Tunde waiting outside. "I get am. I get proof."

He opened his gallery.

He froze.

The screen showed:

0 Images.

No photos. No recent.

Every photo he had just taken of the attendance register...

was gone.

As if someone had erased them before he even left the building.

He looked up at Tunde, his mouth dry.

"Guy... my photos don disappear."

From the second floor of the admin block, a light that was off a second ago...

came on.

Someone stood by the window, watching them.

Chapter 10: The Turning

The stone woke at 3:17 a.m.

Sera felt it through the floor. Not a hum this time. A pulse. Slow. Deep. Like a heartbeat under the campus.

She sat up in bed. The room was dark. The portrait faced the wall. She hadn’t turned it back.

The pulse came again.

Sera was out of bed before the third one hit. Jeans. Boots. No jacket. She didn’t bother with silence.

The dorm hallway was empty. She took the stairs two at a time.

Outside, the air was wrong. Still. Too still. No wind. No insects. Even the night birds were quiet.

The quad was empty. The lamps buzzed.

The chapel sat at the far end. Dark. Locked. Vines crawling up the stone like veins.

Sera walked toward it. Not fast. Not slow.

The pulse was stronger with every step.

It wasn’t calling her. It was counting down.

She stopped ten feet from the doors.

Something moved in the shadows to her left.

Sera turned.

Not an assassin. Not campus security.

A deer.

It stood at the treeline. Head up. Eyes reflecting the lamplight.

It should have run. Deer didn’t stand in the open at night. Not with a predator nearby.

It stared at Sera for three seconds. Then it bolted.

Animals could feel it too.

The stone was waking.

And whatever was coming, it had started.

---

Sera found her at the east gate.

The woman from the trees. The one who wouldn’t fight. The one who nodded after the archive.

She was walking. Not running. Not hiding.

Heading toward the residential halls.

Heading toward Kael.

Sera stepped out from behind the oak.

The woman stopped.

They stared at each other. Ten feet apart. Same as last time.

“You’re not here for me,” Sera said.

“No.”

“You’re going to him.”

The woman didn’t answer.

“Why?” Sera asked.

The woman’s jaw tightened. “To warn him.”

“About what?”

“About you.”

Sera didn’t move. “Try it.”

The woman’s eyes flicked to Sera’s hands. To her stance. Measuring.

Then she sighed. The fight went out of her shoulders.

“I won’t.” She looked tired. “Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Because you were there.” The woman nodded toward the library. “The archives. You stepped between her and the blade.”

Sera said nothing.

“I saw it,” the woman said. “You could have let her die. It would have been easier. Fewer questions. Cleaner.”

“It wouldn’t have been clean.”

“No.” The woman studied her. “It wouldn’t.”

Wind moved through the gate. Rattled the chain.

“What’s your name?” Sera asked.

The woman hesitated.

“Elizabeth.”

Sera filed it away. Didn’t react.

“Why are you warning him about me?” Sera asked.

“Because I was ordered to kill him.” Elizabeth’s voice was flat. “And I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

Elizabeth looked past Sera, toward the dorms. “Because he looked at me like I was a person. Not a monster. He gave me a chance to leave.”

Sera knew that answer. She’d heard it before.

“First human in a hundred years who didn’t try to kill me on sight,” Elizabeth said.

Sera understood.

“You love him,” Sera said. Not a question.

Elizabeth flinched. “That’s not—”

“It is.” Sera kept her voice even. “I’ve seen it before.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. For a second, she looked her age. Whatever that was. Old. Tired.

“Yes,” she said. Quiet. “I do.”

The word hung there.

Sera let it.

She thought of Ivy. Of paint on her fingers. Of What are you hiding from?

She thought of Kael. Grey eyes. Steady. I’m starting to think I don’t care.

Two hundred years. And it took two humans to break her.

“You’re not what they said,” Elizabeth said.

“Who said?”

“The people who sent me.”

Sera waited.

“They said you were a weapon. Cold. Loyal. Empty.” Elizabeth shook her head. “But you threw yourself in front of a human girl. You chose her over your mission.”

“My mission isn’t finished.”

“No.” Elizabeth’s mouth twisted. “But it’s not what you think it is.”

---

Sera stepped closer. “Explain.”

Elizabeth looked around. The gate. The street. The shadows.

“Not here.”

“Then where?”

“Nowhere safe.” Elizabeth met her eyes. “They’re watching. Both of us.”

“Who?”

“The people who sent the assassin.” Elizabeth’s voice dropped. “They’re not students. Not security. They’re a faction. Old. Quiet. They don’t want the stone found.”

Sera’s pulse stayed steady. “Why?”

“Because if you retrieve it, something ends.”

“What ends?”

“I don’t know.” Elizabeth ran a hand through her hair. Frustrated. “I wasn’t told. I was given a name and a face. Kael Mercer. Nothing more.”

“Nothing more?”

“Nothing more.” Elizabeth shook her head. “I was kept blind. Just like you.”

Sera believed her.

She didn’t want to. But she did.

“What do I do?” Sera asked.

Elizabeth was quiet for a long time.

Then: “You find out who’s lying.”

“How?”

“I can’t tell you.” Elizabeth’s eyes were sad. “I don’t know enough.”

She reached into her coat. Pulled out a scrap of paper. Old. Folded.

She held it out.

Sera took it.

One word. Written in ink. Faded.

Mareth.

“What is this?” Sera asked.

“A name.” Elizabeth stepped back. “The only one I was ever given. The person who knows. The person they’re afraid of.”

“Where do I find them?”

“I don’t know.” Elizabeth was already moving away. “But if you want the truth… start there.”

“Elizabeth.”

She stopped.

“Thank you,” Sera said.

Elizabeth didn’t smile. Didn’t nod.

She just said, “Don’t thank me yet.”

Then she was gone. Into the street. Into the dark.

Sera stood at the gate. The paper in her hand.

Mareth.

---

Sera didn’t go back to the dorm.

She walked.

Past the library. Past the quad. Past the chapel.

The stone pulsed under her feet. Steady. Counting.

Dorian’s voice in her head: Retrieve the stone. Do not question. Do not hesitate.

Two hundred years of obedience.

She stopped.

Looked up at the night sky. No stars. Just clouds.

She thought of Ivy. On the floor of the archives. Terrified.

She thought of Kael. I trust you anyway.

She thought of Elizabeth. I’m tired of being a weapon.

She thought of the assassin. You’ll know soon enough.

She thought of the paper in her hand.

Mareth.

Sera closed her eyes.

She’d spent her life following orders. Being the weapon. The knife. The thing pointed at other people.

She was done.

She wasn’t a weapon anymore.

She was going to find out why she’d been made into one.

She opened her eyes.

The decision settled. Cold. Clear.

No more blind obedience.

No more Dorian.

She would learn the truth herself.

Even if it killed her.

---

She stood outside the steel door of the restricted archives.

Basement level. Library. No windows. One camera in the corner, blinking red.

Sera didn’t touch the keypad. Didn’t try the handle.

She just stood there.

The stone pulsed under the floor.

In her hand, the paper.

Mareth.

Tomorrow, the hunt for the truth would begin.

She had one objective now.

Find Mareth.

---

CHAPTER 5 – THE OLD MORTUARY

David didn't sleep that night.

He lay in his bunk and stared at the dark ceiling and listened to the other boys breathing, and all he could think about was what the girl in Room 9 had said.

She didn't leave. They made her disappear.

He had come to Rivers State College of Health believing Ada Nwosu was just another hostel ghost story. A rumor older students used to frighten freshers. Now he knew her name was real. And someone had erased her from the school's history.

By 5:30 AM, he had made a decision. He wasn't going to wait for her to come to his window again.

He was going to find where she died.

The Old Mortuary was behind the school clinic. Everyone knew it. No one went there. It had been locked since 2002 when the new sick bay was built closer to the administrative block.

The old one was too close to the river. Too damp. Too far from the hostels.

That was the official reason.

David waited until prep was over and the evening games noise started. That was the only time the back of the clinic was empty.

He climbed the small fence behind the laboratory. The grass back there was high and untouched. It scratched his legs.

Then he saw it.

The gate was rusted, leaning to one side as if time had forgotten to hold it up. The paint that once said CLINIC MORTUARY was faded to ghosts of letters. The windows were broken, black holes in the concrete.

Time really had stopped in 2002.

He pushed the gate. It screamed.

The smell hit him first. Bleach. Old, sharp bleach mixed with something damp and earthy, like river water that had stayed too long in a bucket. The smell of a place that had been cleaned once and then left to rot.

The main door was held by a padlock. Big, rusted. But as David got closer, he frowned.

The padlock was broken. Not rusted shut. The shackle had been cut recently. The metal inside the cut was still silver, shining against the orange rust.

Someone had been here.

He pushed the door open. Dust rose and choked him.

Inside, it was colder. Much colder than outside, even though the afternoon was hot.

The examination room was exactly as the old students described. Dust everywhere, so thick it felt like carpet. Old medicine bottles lined the shelves, labels faded. Cabinets hung open, empty. The walls were covered in patches of black mold that looked like maps.

And in the center, the operating table.

Stained. Dark brown stains that had soaked into the metal and never left.

David swallowed. His heart was beating so loud he could hear it in his ears.

He forced himself to walk. His slippers left prints in the dust.

Then he stopped.

Next to his prints, there were other footprints.

Fresh.

Someone had walked here after the rain last week, because the dust had settled over the old prints, but these were clean, sharp at the edges. They went from the door straight to the records room.

He wasn't the first person to investigate.

He followed the footprints, stepping carefully. In the records room, a drawer had been left open. Inside, files were scattered, as if someone had searched in a hurry and didn't care about arranging them again.

David's eyes caught something small on the floor.

A battery. A modern torch battery. Double A. Duracell. Not old. The expiry date said 2027.

And beside it, fresh cigarette ash. Still grey, not damp. And a plastic bottle of water — Aquafina — with a little water still inside.

His mouth went dry. Someone was looking for Ada too. And they had been here days ago, maybe hours.

He turned to the steel filing cabinets. This was why he came.

He pulled the first one open. PERSONNEL FILES 1999-2003.

Empty.

Second drawer. DUTY ROSTER.

Empty, except for a few duty charts from 2001. Ada Nwosu's name was not there. But there was a gap in the dates. March 2002 to June 2002 had been torn out. The torn edge was still white.

Third cabinet. INCIDENT REPORTS.

Empty. The whole cabinet had been wiped clean. Someone had taken everything about her.

It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't lost. Someone had removed her deliberately. A person, not a ghost, was hiding the truth.

David's hands were shaking. He started checking every drawer, every shelf. His slippers kicked up more dust. He coughed.

Then, behind the last cabinet, pushed against the wall, he saw a small wooden box. It had been forgotten. The footprints didn't go there. The box was covered in thick dust, untouched.

He dragged it out.

Inside were old inventory logs. Not important files, just lists of gloves, bleach, cotton wool received.

He flipped through them, bored, until a name made him stop.

Hostel Manager — E. Okoro — Signature.

E. Okoro. Mr. Okoro. Their hostel manager.

His signature was on every page from 2001 to 2003. He had been here since then. He was in charge of supplies for the mortuary.

David flipped faster. Another page. A duty schedule for night guards. Mr. Okoro's handwriting. David recognized it. The same slanted writing he used when he wrote names of noisemakers on the hostel wall.

Mr. Okoro was here in 2002.

And then, at the very bottom of the box, under a pile of receipts, one thin file.

It was stuck to the bottom, damp.

He pulled it out. The cover said: STAFF MOVEMENT REGISTER — 2002

He opened it. The pages were mouldy. He turned to March. April. May.

There.

ADA NWOSU, NURSE II — EMPLOYED: 12 JAN 2000

Next column: RESIGNED / TRANSFERRED / DISMISSED: —

Blank. Nothing.

Next column: CLEARANCE SIGNED BY: —

Blank.

No resignation letter. No transfer request. No exit clearance. Her file just... stopped. In May 2002.

Everyone had said she resigned and left. But the official records told a different story. Ada Nwosu had never signed out. It was as if she had simply vanished.

David felt cold all over. The operating table. The stains. The bleach smell. The missing files.

She didn't resign. Something happened to her here.

He closed the file. He had to go. He had to show this to someone — maybe the senior who told him the story, maybe the new Biology teacher who seemed kind.

He stood up too fast and hit the small swinging light above him. It creaked and swayed, casting moving shadows across the stained table.

He walked quickly back to the main entrance, his heart hammering, clutching the file.

He reached the door. Pulled the handle.

It didn't move.

He frowned. Pulled harder. The rusted metal rattled, but the door was shut tight.

He looked down. The broken padlock he had seen earlier was gone.

In its place, a new padlock. Heavy. Black. Locked.

He pulled again. Hard. The door shook but didn't open.

Then he heard it.

Outside. Footsteps on the dry leaves.

Clink.

The unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal.

Someone was fastening a heavy padlock.

From outside.

David froze, his hand still on the handle.

Someone knew he was inside.

And they had just locked him in.

---

What do you think — is the person outside the mortuary a ghost... or someone still alive trying to bury the truth? Tell me your theory before Chapter 6.

"Thanks! Wait until you see what happens in the old mortuary. 👀"

Chapter 9: The Line


The library was quiet at 4 p.m. Too quiet.
Sera sat three tables away from Ivy. Close enough to see the charcoal smudges on her fingers. Far enough that it looked accidental.
Ivy was sketching. Not Sera this time. A tree. The old oak by the east gate. Her brow was furrowed. She kept glancing up, then back down, like she was trying to remember something that wasn’t there.
Sera wasn’t reading. The book in front of her hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes.
She was listening.
To the librarian reshelving returns. To the scrape of chairs two rows over. To the air vents. To the space between sounds.
Since last night, the quiet felt different. Heavier. Like the pause before a storm.
Someone else is playing.
The thought hadn’t left her. Not during morning patrol. Not during class. Not now.
She shifted. Her shoulder brushed the table leg. Ivy looked up.
“You okay?” Ivy asked. Her voice was low. Library voice.
“Fine.”
“You’ve been tense all day.” Ivy capped her charcoal. “Did something happen?”
Sera met her eyes. Grey. Direct. No suspicion. Just concern.
“No.”
Ivy didn’t believe her. Sera could see it. But Ivy didn’t push. She never did. That was the problem.
“Okay.” Ivy went back to the tree. “But if you need to talk. Or not talk. I’m here.”
Sera’s throat tightened. She looked away.
That was when she heard it.
A door opening. Not the main entrance. The side door. The one that led to the archives. It was supposed to be locked.
A step. Too light. Too careful.
Not a student.
Sera stood. The chair didn’t scrape.
Ivy looked up again. “Sera?”
“Stay here.”
“What—”
Sera was already moving.
---
The archives smelled like dust and old paper. Rows of shelves. Narrow aisles. No windows. One way in, one way out.
Perfect for an ambush.
Sera walked down the center aisle. Slow. Controlled. She let her senses open.
Copper. Earth. The same scent from the treeline. But older. Sharper.
And something else. Sweat. Fear. Human.
She turned the corner.
Ivy was there.
Backed against the shelves. Sketchbook clutched to her chest. Eyes wide.
In front of her stood a man.
Tall. Broad. Dark clothes. Face covered except for his eyes.
And in his hand, a blade. Short. Curved. The edge caught the fluorescent light.
He wasn’t looking at Sera.
He was looking at Ivy.
“Don’t move,” he said. His voice was rough. Human.
Ivy froze.
Sera didn’t think.
She moved.
---
The man heard her. He turned. Too late.
Sera hit him low. Shoulder to his ribs. Drove him back into the shelf. Books fell. A crash that echoed.
He grunted. Slashed out.
Sera caught his wrist. Twisted.
The blade clattered to the floor.
He was strong. Trained. Not random. He recovered fast. Brought his other hand up. Knife. Smaller. He’d had two.
He aimed for her throat.
Sera stepped inside his reach. Elbow to his jaw. Hard.
He staggered.
She didn’t give him time. Sweep to his legs. He went down. She put her knee on his chest. One hand on his throat. The other took the second knife.
It was over in six seconds.
Ivy was breathing fast. Still against the shelves.
“Sera?”
“Are you hurt?” Sera didn’t look at her. Her eyes were on the man.
“N-no.”
The man’s eyes were on Sera. Not afraid. Measuring.
“You’re faster than they said,” he rasped.
Sera’s grip tightened. “Who sent you?”
He smiled under the mask. Blood on his teeth. “You’ll know soon enough.”
Then he bit down.
Sera smelled it instantly. Bitter. Almond.
Poison.
His body convulsed once. Then went still.
Sera checked his pulse. Nothing.
Dead.
She stood. Fast. Turned to Ivy.
Ivy was staring at the body. At the knives. At Sera’s hands.
“Sera,” Ivy whispered. “What—”
Footsteps. Running.
Kael burst around the corner. Saw the body. Saw the knives. Saw Sera standing over them. Saw Ivy pressed to the shelves, shaking.
He stopped.
His eyes went to Sera. To her stance. To the way she held herself. Not scared. Not shocked.
Ready.
“Are you both okay?” His voice was steady. But his eyes weren’t.
“Yes,” Sera said.
Kael stepped closer. Looked at the dead man. At the blade on the floor. Then back at Sera.
“You did this.” Not a question.
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a beat. Then: “We need to call campus security.”
“No.”
Kael looked at her. Really looked. “Sera.”
“They can’t help.” She kept her voice flat. “He’s dead. It’s over.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is today.”
Ivy made a sound. Small. Broken.
Sera went to her. Put a hand on her arm. Ivy flinched, then leaned into it.
“I’ve got you,” Sera said. “You’re safe.”
Kael watched that. His jaw worked.
The librarian appeared at the end of the aisle. “What was that noise? Is everyone—” She saw the body. Screamed.
Chaos after that. Security. Police. Questions.
Sera answered all of them. Calm. Precise.
I heard a noise. I came to check. I found him attacking her. I fought him off. He took something. He died.
She left out the speed. The six seconds. The way she’d known exactly where to hit.
Kael didn’t contradict her. He stood next to Ivy. Close. Protective. But his eyes kept going to Sera.
Like he was seeing her for the first time.
---
They let them go after two hours.
“Shock,” the officer said. “Go home. Rest. Someone will contact you.”
Ivy could barely walk. Sera kept a hand under her elbow.
Kael followed them out.
They stopped at the edge of the quad. The sun was setting. The sky was orange. Students walked past, normal, unaware.
Ivy looked at Sera. “You saved me.”
Sera didn’t answer.
“How?” Ivy asked. “He had a knife. Two knives. You moved so fast.”
“I got lucky.”
“No.” Ivy shook her head. “No, you didn’t.”
Kael stepped in. “Ivy, let her breathe.”
Ivy looked at him. Then back at Sera. “I’m not crazy. I saw it. You—”
“Ivy.” Sera’s voice was soft. “Please. Go home. Sleep.”
Ivy stared at her. Then nodded. Slow. “Okay.” She touched Sera’s hand. Cold fingers. “Thank you.”
She walked away. Alone.
Sera watched her go.
Kael didn’t leave.
“You keep showing up,” he said.
Sera looked at him.
“First the quad. Now the archives. Every time someone’s in danger, you’re there.” His voice wasn’t accusing. It was careful. “Why?”
“I was in the library.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Sera said nothing.
Kael stepped closer. “You’re not telling me everything.”
“No.”
“I’m starting to think I don’t care.”
Sera blinked.
He ran a hand through his hair. “You saved her. You didn’t have to. You could have run. But you didn’t.” He met her eyes. Grey. Steady. “So whatever you’re not saying… I trust you anyway.”
Sera’s chest hurt.
She didn’t deserve that.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Too late.” He gave her a half smile. Didn’t reach it. “Go home, Sera. Before I ask a question you can’t avoid.”
He turned and walked after Ivy.
Sera stood there. Alone.
Across the quad, in the shadow of the oak, a figure watched.
Dark hair. Pale face. Still as stone.
The woman from last night.
She met Sera’s eyes. Gave one short nod.
Then she was gone. Melted into the crowd.
I warned you someone was coming.
Sera closed her eyes.
---
Her dorm was dark.
She didn’t turn on the light. Sat at her desk. Opened her laptop.
Report to Dorian.
Assassin neutralized. Target was human civilian. Civilian unharmed. Local authorities involved. No compromise.
She stared at the last line.
No compromise.
A lie.
Kael was compromised. He’d seen too much. Ivy was compromised. She was a target now.
Sera deleted the line.
Rewrote it.
Status unchanged.
Sent.
She closed the laptop.
The portrait was on the wall. Ivy had left it.
Sera looked at it. At the girl with grey eyes. At the shadow in the background.
She couldn’t do both. Not anymore.
Protect the mission. Protect them.
The line had been crossed.
She’d chosen.
She stood and went to the window.
The campus was dark. Quiet. But she knew better now.
Someone was hunting her.
Kael was getting too close to the truth.
Ivy was marked.
And the woman from the trees was still out there. Watching. Waiting.
Sera couldn’t hide anymore. Not from them.
Not from herself.
She pressed her forehead to the glass.
The stone hummed under the chapel. Louder now. Like it knew.
The game had changed.
And she was no longer just playing it.
She was protecting the board.
---

Chapter 8: The Knife That Didn't Cut

The portrait sat propped against the wall of Sera's dorm room, still damp in places where Ivy had laid the paint on thick.
Sera had been staring at it for seventeen minutes.
She knew because she'd counted.
The girl in the painting looked like her. Same dark hair falling past her shoulders. Same grey eyes that caught the light wrong. Same stillness in the way she held herself.
But Ivy had done something. Something Sera couldn't name.
The brushstrokes around the eyes were too careful. Too knowing. As if Ivy had painted what she'd seen rather than what was there.
"You're very good at showing people what you want them to see."
Sera's jaw tightened.
She'd heard that line before. From elders who thought they understood her. From enemies who thought they could read her. From people who were wrong.
But Ivy wasn't an elder. Wasn't an enemy. Wasn't even a vampire.
Just a human with paint-stained fingers and too many questions.
Sera reached out and turned the portrait to face the wall.
She didn't like how it made her feel.
Not because it was bad. It was technically excellent. Ivy had skill. Real skill. The kind that came from years of practice and something else. Something that made Sera's skin prickle whenever the human's eyes lingered too long.
"What is it you're hiding from?"
Sera had told her nothing. Had given her nothing. Yet Ivy had painted something that felt uncomfortably close to the truth.
That was the problem.
Sera could handle suspicion. Could handle fear. Could handle the way most creatures looked at her and saw a weapon waiting to be aimed. What she couldn't handle was being seen.
Not like that.
Not by someone who had no reason to look that deeply.
She crossed to the window. The campus sprawled below, all dark stone and dying ivy. Students moved between buildings in small groups, their voices carrying up through the glass. Laughter. Arguments. The mundane rhythm of human life.
Sera had been here weeks. Long enough to learn the patterns. Long enough to know which paths to take and which to avoid. Long enough to feel the stone's pull from across the quad, a constant hum beneath her skin that she'd learned to filter out during the day.
But tonight, something else hummed.
She felt it first as a pressure at the back of her neck. A shift in the air that had nothing to do with temperature. A wrongness that settled between her shoulder blades and refused to leave.
Sera stepped away from the window.
The room was empty. The door was locked. The window was closed.
She stood very still and listened.
Footsteps in the hallway. Distant. Human. A door opening two floors down. A laugh that faded into silence.
Nothing unusual.
But the pressure remained.
Sera moved to the door and pressed her ear against the wood. The hallway was quiet. She opened it a crack and looked out.
Empty.
She closed the door and turned back to the room. Her gaze swept across the furniture. The bed. The desk. The portrait facing the wall.
The portrait.
She crossed to it and flipped it around.
Ivy's paint stared back at her. Grey eyes. Dark hair. A face that looked like hers but wasn't.
And behind the face, in the shadows Ivy had layered into the background, Sera noticed something she hadn't seen before.
A shape.
Not a face. Not a figure. Just a suggestion of movement in the darkness. A smear of black that didn't quite match the rest of the composition.
Sera's fingers brushed the surface. The paint was dry now, but she could still feel the ridges where Ivy had pressed too hard.
She set the portrait down and walked to the window again.
The quad was darker than before. The students had gone inside. The lamps along the path cast small pools of orange light, but between them, the shadows stretched long and deep.
Sera scanned the treeline. The library roof. The bell tower.
Nothing.
She was about to turn away when a flicker caught her eye.
A movement on the far side of the quad. Too fast for human. Too deliberate for animal.
A figure stood at the edge of the trees. Dressed in dark clothes. Still as stone.
Watching.
Sera didn't move.
Neither did the figure.
They stayed like that for a long moment. Two predators measuring each other across the distance. The air between them felt thick, charged with something that made the hair on Sera's arms rise.
Then the figure turned and disappeared into the trees.
Sera was out the door before she made the conscious decision to move.
She took the stairs in silence, her feet barely touching the concrete. The dormitory was quiet. Most students were in their rooms. The few who passed her in the hallway didn't register her presence beyond a brief glance.
She reached the ground floor and slipped through the side exit.
The night air hit her face. Cold. Sharp. Carrying the scent of damp leaves and something else. Something metallic.
She crossed the quad at a pace that looked casual but wasn't. Her eyes stayed fixed on the treeline where the figure had vanished.
The trees at the edge of campus were old. Gnarled oaks that had stood for centuries, their branches twisting toward the sky like fingers. The shadows beneath them were absolute.
Sera entered the treeline and stopped.
The scent was stronger here. Copper and earth and something she couldn't place. Something old.
She listened.
Nothing. No breath. No heartbeat. No rustle of fabric.
But she knew she wasn't alone.
"You can come out," she said. "I know you're here."
Silence.
Then, from behind her, a voice.
"You're more observant than I expected."
Sera turned.
The figure stood ten feet away, half-hidden behind a tree trunk. Female. Tall. Dark hair pulled back from a face that was sharp and pale. Eyes that caught the moonlight and held it.
Not human. A predator. Ancient enough that Sera's instincts sharpened immediately.
"You've been watching me," Sera said.
"Watching the campus," the figure corrected. "You're just the most interesting thing on it."
"That's not a compliment."
"It wasn't meant to be."
The figure stepped out from behind the tree. She moved like water. Fluid. Effortless. The kind of grace that came from decades of practice.
Up close, Sera could see her more clearly. Her clothes were expensive. Tailored. The kind that didn't draw attention but didn't need to. Her face was beautiful in a way that felt calculated. Every feature placed precisely where it should be.
"I'm not here to fight you," the woman said.
"Then why are you here?"
"To see for myself."
Sera's eyes narrowed. "See what?"
The woman tilted her head. Studied Sera with an intensity that made her skin crawl.
"You."
Sera didn't react. Her face remained still. Her heartbeat stayed steady.
"Why?"
"Because I was told to." The woman's voice was flat. No accusation. No warmth. Just fact. "I know you're here for a reason. Just as I am."
Sera said nothing.
"You and I," the woman continued. "We're not so different. Sent. Given targets. Expected to obey."
"Is that what you are? Obedient?"
The woman smiled. It didn't reach her eyes.
"I was. Until recently."
The words hung between them.
Sera understood. She didn't want to, but she did.
"You're watching one of the students," Sera said.
"I was."
Sera studied her for a moment.
"Kael Mercer."
The woman's silence lasted only a heartbeat.
"Yes." The woman looked away. "He is."
"Why?"
The woman was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was different. Lower. Less sure.
"Because he looked at me like I was a person. Not a monster. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He gave me a chance to leave." She paused. "First human in a hundred years who didn’t try to kill me on sight."
Sera didn't say anything. She got it.
She thought of Ivy. Paint on her hands. What is it you're hiding from?
She thought of Kael. Grey eyes. Steady. You look like you didn't sleep.
Two hundred years of walls. Cracked by two humans who didn’t even try.
"I could kill you," Sera said. The words came out flat. Not a threat. Just a fact. "You were watching an innocent. Whatever you were sent here to do, you chose not to do it. I have the right."
"Yes," the woman said. "You do."
She didn't reach for a weapon. Didn't tense to run. She just waited.
"But I won't."
The woman blinked.
"Why?"
Sera looked at her. Really looked. Saw the shadows under her eyes. The tension in her shoulders. The way she held herself like someone waiting for a blow.
Sera knew that stance. She’d worn it herself.
"Because you're not my enemy," Sera said. "You're a weapon who chose not to strike. A knife that didn’t cut. Where I come from, that would make you weak." She thought of Ivy. Of Kael. "Here… I think it makes you something else."
The woman didn't answer.
"I’m leaving," Sera said.
She turned. Took two steps. Stopped.
"If you’re telling the truth… stay away from him unless his life is in danger."
The woman said nothing.
"If anyone comes for Kael again," Sera said, "warn me."
"And if I don’t?"
"Then I’ll find you. And I won’t be merciful next time."
Sera didn't wait. She walked back through the trees, across the quad, toward the dormitory.
Each step felt heavier than the last.
She was more confused than when she went out. Something about the mission was wrong. She could feel it. But she still didn’t know who was lying… or why.
The wind picked up. It carried rain and cut grass and something else. Something human.
The mission could be false. The orders could be lies. But Kael and Ivy were real. And Sera would protect what was real, even if it meant betraying everything she had ever believed.
Even if it meant becoming the monster they thought she was.

Chapter 7: The Space Between

I saw him standing in the quad.

He did not wave. He did not call out. He simply stood at the edge of the cobblestones, his hands in his pockets, his face tilted up toward my window. The pre-dawn light painted him in shades of grey and silver, and even from this distance, I could read the change in him. The set of his shoulders was different. The angle of his jaw. The way he held himself utterly still — not the stillness of fear, but the stillness of someone who had just learned something irreversible.

He knew.

I did not know how much he knew, or how he had learned it, but the certainty settled into my bones like cold water. The boy who looked at me like I was worth examining had finally seen beneath the mask. And instead of running, instead of going to the hunters who were his birthright, he had come to my dormitory and stood in the rain-damp silence, waiting for me to see him.

I did not open the window. I did not go down to meet him. I simply stood behind the glass and let him look, let him see the shadow I had become, and when he finally turned and walked away, I felt something I had not felt in two centuries.

Loss.

The word surfaced unbidden, and I crushed it with the same practiced violence I used on assassins. I had not lost him. I had never had him. He was a human, a complication, a risk I could not afford. Whatever he knew, whatever he suspected, it changed nothing. The mission was the mission. The stone was the stone. And I was still the predator, no matter how the prey looked at me.

But the ache in my chest, the one I refused to name, did not subside for a long time.

---

The morning brought no clarity.

I attended my lectures, sat in the back of halls filled with chattering humans, and felt the stone pulse beneath the chapel like a second heartbeat. The poison in my shoulder had finally faded, the wound knitting closed with the slow, deliberate patience of my bloodline. By evening, there would be no scar. By midnight, it would be as if the assassin had never touched me at all.

If only all wounds healed so easily.

I did not see Kael that day. I did not seek him out. But I felt his absence like a missing tooth, a gap in the fabric of the campus that I had not noticed before he filled it. The library felt emptier. The quad felt quieter. Even the rain, when it returned in the late afternoon, seemed to fall with less conviction.

This was dangerous. This was unacceptable. I was Seraphina Vane, Warlord Princess of the Crimson Seat, heir to the Obsidian Throne. I did not pine for mortal boys with storm-grey eyes and ink-stained fingers. I did not linger in doorways hoping for a glimpse of a face that had no place in my world.

And yet.

I found myself walking toward the eastern quad as the sun sank below the horizon, my feet carrying me along a path I had not consciously chosen. The art building loomed ahead, its windows glowing with the warm light of evening studios. I told myself I was patrolling. Monitoring the campus for threats. The assassin with the poisoned claws had not been the last — I could feel more coming, gathering in the shadows like storm clouds.

But when I stopped outside the window of the third-floor studio, it was not an assassin I saw.

Ivy stood at her easel, her back to the window, her auburn curls pinned up in a messy knot. She was painting — a large canvas, taller than she was, covered in sweeping strokes of deep blue and gold. I could not see the image from this angle, but I could see the way her body moved with the brush, fluid and absorbed, utterly lost in the work.

She had not noticed me. She rarely did. Ivy was the kind of human who lived inside her own mind, seeing the world through the lens of whatever she was creating. It made her vulnerable. It made her easy prey, if anyone had been hunting her.

The thought should not have bothered me. It did.

I stood in the shadows and watched her paint, and tried to understand what it was about this particular mortal that drew me back, again and again. She was not powerful. She was not connected to the stone or the hunters or the politics of the Underworld. She was simply... warm. A source of light in a world that had been dark for so long I had forgotten what brightness looked like.

She had tended my wound without flinching. She had laughed at my coldness and called it refreshing. She had looked at me — really looked — and seen something worth saving.

No one had ever tried to save me before.

The thought was so foreign, so utterly alien to my understanding of the world, that I almost laughed aloud. I was a princess of the dead. I had killed more creatures than this girl had drawn breaths. I did not need saving. I did not want it.

But I did not walk away from the window, either.

---

Ivy turned suddenly, as if sensing my presence. Her eyes found me through the glass, and her face broke into that same tentative, crinkling smile she had worn in the café. She raised a paint-stained hand and waved.

I inclined my head — my customary fraction of acknowledgment — and expected her to return to her work. Instead, she set down her brush and crossed to the window, pushing it open with a grunt of effort.

"You know," she said, leaning on the sill, "most people just come inside. We do have a door."

"I prefer the shadows."

"I've noticed." She tilted her head, studying me with those gold-flecked eyes. "You look better. Your shoulder, I mean. You're not favouring it anymore."

"The wound has healed."

"That fast? You must have supernatural healing powers or something." She said it lightly, teasing, but there was a flicker of something beneath the words. A question she was not quite asking.

I did not answer. The silence stretched.

Ivy did not flinch from it. She simply rested her chin on her hands and looked at me with the same quiet patience she had shown in my dormitory. "You know, I meant what I said. Whatever you're hiding, whatever you're running from — you don't have to carry it alone."

"You barely know me."

"I know you enough." She reached through the open window and, very gently, touched the back of my hand. Her fingers were warm, paint-stained, utterly unafraid. "I know you're not as cold as you pretend to be. I know you listen when I talk, even when you pretend not to. And I know that whatever hurt you, it happened a long time ago, and you've never let anyone help you carry it."

I stared at her hand on mine. The touch was light, barely there, but it burned in a way the assassin's poison had not.

"You are remarkably perceptive," I said.

"I'm an artist. We're trained to see what's really there." She withdrew her hand, but the warmth lingered. "Will you come inside? I want to show you something."

Every instinct told me to refuse. To retreat into the shadows where I belonged. To remember that I was a predator and she was prey, and that whatever fragile connection was growing between us could only end in tragedy.

But I did not refuse.

I walked through the door, into the warmth and the light and the smell of oil paint and turpentine, and let her show me her canvas. It was a portrait — half-finished, the features still emerging from the background of deep blue and gold. A face I recognised.

My face.

"It's not done yet," Ivy said, her voice suddenly shy. "I started it after the first time we met. I couldn't stop thinking about your eyes. They're so... old. Like you've seen things the rest of us can't imagine."

I stared at the painting. At the way she had captured the stillness, the coldness, the predator's patience. But there was something else there, too — something I had not seen in my own reflection for centuries. A flicker of sadness. A ghost of longing.

She had painted not just what I was, but what I had lost.

"You should not have done this," I said. My voice came out harder than I intended.

Ivy flinched, but did not retreat. "Why not?"

"Because I am not what you think I am."

"Then what are you?"

The question hung in the air between us. I could have lied. I should have lied. But the warmth of her hand still lingered on my skin, and the face in the painting looked at me with an honesty I had not earned.

"I am someone who will bring you pain," I said. "If you stay close to me, you will be hurt. Perhaps killed."

She was silent for a moment. Then she did something that surprised me. She picked up her brush, dipped it in gold paint, and added a single stroke to the portrait — a line of light across the eyes, brightening the sadness into something closer to hope.

"I'll take my chances," she said.

And for the first time in two centuries, I did not have the strength to argue.

---

Sorry for the late updates I was busy with work but now am free stay tuned for more chapters ☺️

Thanks stay tuned for more daily updates,and keep in touch for my new release book,*what aunty did to me*

Chapter 4: The Unwritten Law

The air in Block C didn't just feel cold; it felt heavy, pressing against my lungs like a physical weight. I dropped my bag on the bunk, the sound echoing too loudly in the cramped room.
Tunde sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, flipping through a textbook. He looked up, his expression shifting from a smirk to something sharper.
"You brought your books to Room 13 to study, David? You really have a death wish, eh?"
I laughed, pulling a chair toward the wooden desk. "Na superstition, Tunde. Students just dey exaggerate. It’s just an old building, nothing more."
Tunde closed his book with a soft thud. The playful light in his eyes vanished. "You think so? The building has a memory, David. And it has laws. Nobody write am anywhere. Senior students just dey pass am from one set to another. If person no tell you, na the hostel go teach you."
I rolled my eyes, uncapping my pen. "What laws? Ghost laws?"
"Listen," Tunde said, his voice dropping an octave. "Never answer a knock at 2:13 a.m. Never whistle after midnight. If you smell river water—real, swampy, stagnant water—you run. Do not look for the source. And never, ever look under your bed after midnight."
I chuckled, tapping the paper. "Who made these rules?"
"The people who didn't come back," Tunde said, staring at me until the hair on my arms stood up.
He didn't say another word. He grabbed his pillow and went to his own bed. The room fell into an uneasy silence.
I tried to focus on my chemistry notes, but the silence was thick. Then, from the hallway outside, a soft sound drifted in. Whistle. Someone was walking down the hall, whistling a slow, off-key melody.
It was 12:05 a.m. The sound got closer, then stopped abruptly right outside our door. No footsteps. No breathing. Just silence.
Then, the scent hit me. Not old dust. The pungent, rotting smell of stagnant river water. I frowned, reaching out to turn a page of my notebook. The paper felt tacky. I pulled my hand back; the bottom corner of the page was soaked, dark and damp as if it had been sitting in a puddle.
"Don't," Tunde hissed from his bed.
I didn't move. I forced myself to stare straight at the damp paper until the smell faded and the silence returned to the room. Old pipes, I told myself, though my hands were shaking. Nothing more.
I pushed through the physics problems, my brain fogging over with exhaustion. I checked my phone to see the time.
2:13 A.M.
My hand slipped. The pen rolled off the desk, clicked against the floor, and vanished into the shadows beneath the mattress.
I didn't think. I didn't remember Tunde’s warning. I just leaned down, my face inches from the dark floor, and reached my hand blindly into the black space under the bed to retrieve my pen.
My fingers brushed against something.
It wasn't the cold floor. It was skin.
Freezing, clammy, and far too thin.
My hand stopped. My heart stopped.
Down there, in the absolute darkness, another hand slowly curled around my wrist, its grip tight and impossible. I watched as the pen slowly slid deeper into the void—not by itself, but because unseen, pale fingers were dragging it away.
I didn't scream. I didn't breathe.
I just stared into the darkness beneath the bed, knowing that whatever was down there was staring back.



Rule number one: No ever look under your bed after midnight. David don break am, and now e dey see shege. You think say you fit survive Room 13? Drop 'SURVIVE' for comment make we see."

CHAPTER 3 - THE CLEANER KNOWS

David did not move.

He sat on the bed with the rusted key clenched in his fist, listening to the silence outside his door. His heart was so loud he was sure anyone in the corridor could hear it.

Then a student outside shouted, "Ah! Who pour water for corridor again? Every day water for this place!"

A door banged. Normal hostel noise rushed back in. Laughter, buckets, someone arguing about soap.

David let out a breath. His shirt was soaked with sweat.

He unwrapped his handkerchief and looked again. The key was real. MORTUARY DOOR scratched into the rust. The long black hair was still wrapped around it, damp, smelling faintly like river mud.

He shoved it deep inside his bag, under his clothes. He didn't want to sleep in that room again, but he had nowhere else to go.

In his pocket, the librarian's note felt hot.

Ask the cleaner.

---

There were many cleaners in Rivers State College of Health. Young women who mopped and gossiped loudly. But David knew who the note meant.

Everybody knew Papa Emeka.

Seventy-something. Bent back. He had been sweeping Block C since the school was still a small midwifery school. He woke at 4:30 a.m. every day. He lived in a small boys-quarters behind the hostel.

David found him the next morning at 5:10 a.m., before sunrise. The corridor was still dark. The old man was sweeping with a long broom, slow, steady.

"Good morning sir," David whispered.

Papa Emeka looked up. His eyes were cloudy but sharp.

"You be the boy for Room 13," he said. Not a question.

David swallowed. "Yes sir."

"I dey clean that corridor for twenty eight years. I know which room no suppose get person." He continued sweeping. "You no suppose dey there."

"Sir, I need ask you about somebody. Ada Nwosu."

The broom stopped mid-air.

Papa Emeka froze. His hands started shaking.

He looked around quickly. The corridor was empty.

He grabbed David's elbow and pulled him into the small cleaners' store, a dark room that smelled of bleach and old mops. He locked the door.

"Where you hear that name?" he hissed. "Who tell you that name?"

David brought out the ID card, wrapped in paper. He didn't touch it with bare hands again.

Papa Emeka did not collect it. He stepped back as if it was fire.

"Jesus... na still the same ID be this," he whispered. "After all these years."

"Sir you know am?"

The old man sat on an overturned bucket. Suddenly he looked even older.

"Ada?" he said, voice low. "Ada na staff nurse. No be student. Very good woman. Quiet. Fine. All the students love am. She dey work for clinic, dey teach for class, dey help for hostel. Everybody respect am."

"What happened to her sir?"

"2002," Papa Emeka said. "Rainy season like this. One night she enter night duty for clinic. She never come out again. Morning, her room empty. Her things still there. Her uniform still hang for rope."

"She run?"

The old man laughed bitterly. "Run go where? That time, police no dey play. School say she resign. Say she travel go Canada. Quick quick, dem pack her things. Dem close her file. But we wey dey here, we know say na lie."

"Why you say na lie?"

"Because after she disappear, things start," Papa Emeka looked at the store's small window. "First, the smell. For Room 13 corridor, water go dey for ground every morning, even when rain no fall. Then students for that room begin dey sick. One boy swear say for night, im mattress dey wet, but roof no dey leak. Another girl for that side say she dey hear person dey cry inside wardrobe."

He leaned closer.

"Anybody wey try find truth... e no end well. One matron wey talk say she go report for Ministry, na so motor jam am for East West Road. One security man wey talk say he see Ada for night for old mortuary side, next week he resign, run go village. Till today he no gree come back."

David felt cold despite the hot store.

"So na why dem lock Room 13?"

"Dem no lock am. Dem just stop giving am to people. But every few years, when school forget, or when new manager come wey no know story, dem go give am to new student. Like you."

Papa Emeka stood up.

"My pikin, you still get chance. Carry your bag comot for that room today. Go beg for squat for another room."

"Sir, but why me? Why e dey follow me?"

The old man stared at the ID in David's hand.

"Because you carry her face small. That kind innocent face. Maybe she think say you go help am."

He opened the store door small, checked outside.

"If you want truth, you no go see am for library. Truth dey for old mortuary. Before dem stop you."

David remembered the key. "Mortuary door..."

Papa Emeka's eyes widened. He grabbed David's shoulder tight.

"You get the key? Then she don choose you. Go before anybody stop you. But no go alone for night. And if you hear water sound inside there... run."

He pushed David out.

"And no tell anybody say I talk to you. Abeg."

The old man locked the store and started sweeping again, loudly, as if sweeping away the conversation.

---

That afternoon, David was packing his small bag to move to Tunde's room to squat, when someone knocked on his window. Not the door, the window.

It was Papa Emeka. He looked scared. He quickly pushed a small brown envelope through the window bars and walked away fast.

David opened it inside.

It was an old photograph. Faded, edges torn. 2002 written at the back with biro.

Staff photo. Nursing tutors standing outside the old college building. Men in shirts, women in white gowns.

David found her immediately. Third from left. Young, beautiful, smiling gently. ADA NWOSU. Same face as the ID.

Standing beside her, his hand almost touching her shoulder, was a much younger man, smiling broadly. Slimmer, no beard, no cigarette smell.

David's blood ran cold.

It was the current hostel manager.

But that was not what shocked him.

At the back of the photograph, someone had written in thick red ink, hurried, angry. The ink had bled over the years.

"WE BURIED THE WRONG PERSON."

David turned the photo over again. Ada was still smiling in the photo.

But the hostel manager's face in the photo had been scratched out with a sharp object. Deep scratches, as if someone wanted to remove him completely.

Behind him, his room door, which he had locked...

slowly creaked open on its own.

End of chapter 3





🕵🏾 Investigation Time

Who do you think is hiding the truth?

- Papa Emeka?
- The Hostel Manager?
- The School?
- Or is someone else pulling the strings?

Drop your theories below. I'll be reading every one before Chapter 4.

CHAPTER 2 - DON'T OPEN IT

David did not sleep again.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his back against the cold wall, the ID card in his palm, staring at the door that had closed by itself. He listened for knocks. For whispers. For footsteps.

Nothing came. Just the too deep silence and the smell of river water that would not leave the room.

By 5 a.m., the hostel started waking up. Buckets clanging. Someone shouting, "Who carry my sponge?" A radio playing. The normal morning noise returned like someone had pressed play again.

Morning light entered through the small window. The room looked ordinary. Dust. Cobwebs. Broken wardrobe.

David looked down at his hand.

The ID card was still there.

He stared at the photo.

She was smiling again.

Small, gentle smile. Like a passport photo where they told you not to smile too much.

David blinked hard. He turned the card over, then back. Smiling. Still smiling.

"See fear," he whispered to himself and forced a laugh that sounded fake even to him. "You don dey craze. You sleep wake you don dey see things."

But his other hand was still wet.

Not sweaty wet. Cold. Clean water. The same water that had been on the ID card.

He wiped it on his shorts. It stayed cold for seconds after.

He stood up, grabbed his towel and went to open his door.

---

The corridor was empty. Too early. Most students were still inside, fetching water, praying.

Then he saw them.

On the cement floor, leading away from his door.

Wet footprints.

Bare footprints. Small. A woman's size.

Not coming toward Room 13.

Leaving it.

Each print was dark with water, edges dripping. One after the other, heading down the corridor toward the main staircase.

David's chest tightened.

A boy walked past him with a bucket on his head, humming. He stepped right through one of the footprints. Did not notice. Did not slip.

Only David could see them.

"Hello? You dey hear me?" David wanted to call out, but his voice refused.

He stepped out. His slippers made no sound. He started following them.

Step by step. The prints were fresh. The water still glistened.

Past Room 12. Past Room 11. The footprints continued, steady, unhurried.

About thirty meters from his door, just before the junction that led to the bathrooms, they stopped.

Not turned. Not faded.

Stopped.

One last right foot, half printed, as if the person had lifted her leg and never put it down again.

As if she disappeared into thin air.

David bent down slowly and touched it with his fingertips.

Still wet. Ice cold.

---

"Ah ah, Sherlock Holmes!"

David jerked.

Behind him stood a boy about his age, tall, skinny, wearing a singlet and shorts, toothbrush in mouth, foam at the corner.

He was grinning.

"You dey investigate wetin happen for hostel? You be CID?" The boy laughed. "You be the new guy for Room 13, abi?"

David stood up quickly, wiping his hand on his shirt.

"How you know?"

"Everybody know. Na only that room empty for this whole Block C." He removed the toothbrush. "I be Tunde. Room 8. Nursing too, ND2."

David felt relieved to hear another person speak normally. "I be David. Room 13. I..."

He stopped. Should he tell him about the footprints? It sounded crazy even in his head.

Tunde's smile was friendly. For the first time since yesterday, someone was not moving away from him.

"You first time for boarding house?" Tunde asked.

David nodded.

Tunde looked at his face properly and his grin faded a little. "You never sleep, abi? Your eye red."

David hesitated. Then quietly, "Tunde, make I ask you something. Why everybody dey fear that room?"

Tunde's smile disappeared completely.

He looked left and right. The corridor was still empty.

He stepped closer and his voice dropped.

"Guy, if you value your life..."

He swallowed.

"Leave that room today."

David stared at him. "Wetin happen for there?"

Tunde shook his head fast. "I no fit talk am for here. That place... e no good. My senior tell me say since 2002, nobody dey stay there reach one week."

2002. The year on the ID card.

Before David could ask more, two other students came out of the bathroom, and Tunde immediately became loud again.

"Oya now, go bath. Later we go gist. You go come my room later, make I give you bucket."

He walked away quickly, not looking back.

David looked down again. The footprints were already drying. Fading under the morning heat.

---

By 9 a.m., David was back in the hostel manager's office.

He had washed his face. He held the ID card wrapped in a small piece of paper so his hand would not get wet again.

The manager was eating bread and beans. He didn't look up.

"Sir, I want change room," David said.

"I tell you yesterday. No room."

"Sir please, that Room 13... something dey there."

The manager finally looked up, annoyed. "Wetin dey there? Rat? Clean am."

David unwrapped the paper and placed the ID card on the table.

The old man's eyes went to it. And his whole body froze.

The bread fell from his hand.

His face turned pale. His hands began to shake.

"Where you get am?" he whispered.

"For my door last night. For ground. The name na Ada Nwosu."

The manager did not touch the card. He stared at it like it would bite him.

"Throw that thing away," he said, his voice suddenly small. "Throw am now now. No carry am near me."

"Sir, who be she? Why everybody dey fear..."

"Leave my office!"

The manager stood up so fast his chair fell. He walked into his inner office, slammed the door, and locked it. CLICK.

David stood there, confused, the ID still on the table.

From inside, he heard the manager breathing hard.

"Sir?"

No answer.

David picked the card back up. It was cold again. He left the office.

---

The school library was quiet and hot. An old fan turned slowly, moving hot air around.

David went to the archive section. Old yearbooks. Files. Newspapers tied with rope.

He searched for 2002. 2003. Nursing school records.

Nothing.

He searched the name Ada Nwosu in the student register computer. The computer was slow. No result.

He checked the newspaper clippings from 2002. Pages were missing. Cut out with scissors.

It was as if she never existed. Someone had wiped her away.

He sighed and closed the book. His head was pounding.

As he stood up to leave, the old librarian, a woman with glasses low on her nose, walked past his table. Without stopping, without looking at him, she dropped a small folded piece of paper on his book.

David looked around. She was already arranging books on another shelf, her face blank.

He opened the paper.

Two words, written in hurried biro.

Ask the cleaner.

No name. No explanation.

David folded it and put it inside his pocket. His heart was beating again.

---

He returned to Room 13 around 4 p.m. The hostel was noisy again. That made it feel safer.

He locked the door behind him. Put his bag on the table. Everything looked exactly as he left it.

Maybe Tunde was just trying to scare him. Maybe the manager was just superstitious.

He laughed a little. Old people and their stories.

He was tired from not sleeping. He lay down on the bed, faced the ceiling.

He stretched his hand under his pillow to adjust it.

Something hard touched his fingers.

David froze.

He had not put anything under his pillow. He never did.

Slowly, he lifted the pillow.

Underneath, lying neatly in the middle of the mattress, was the nurse's ID card.

Perfectly dry this time. No water. No puddle.

And beside it...

A small rusted key.

Not the hostel key. Smaller. Older. The head was round and rusted brown. Wrapped tightly around it, stuck to the rust, was a strand of long black hair. Still slightly damp. Still smelling like river water.

David picked up the key with two fingers. The hair clung to it.

Scratched into the rusted metal, in tiny uneven letters, as if someone used a nail to write it, were two words.

MORTUARY DOOR

From the corridor outside, at exactly that moment, all the noise stopped again.

And somewhere far down the hallway, bare feet began to walk.

Slap. Slap. Slap.

Coming toward Room 13.











Thank you for reading Chapter 2.

So... what do you think?

- Who was Ada Nwosu?
- Why is someone trying to erase every record of her?
- And what exactly does the Mortuary Door unlock?

Drop your theories in the comments. I read every one of them.

If this chapter gave you chills, Chapter 3 will answer one question... and raise three more.

Case File #1

One man is dead.

One abandoned room has been opened again.

One forgotten nurse has returned.

If you were David... would you stay in Room 13 or leave before sunset?

Let's hear your answer.

CHAPTER 1 -

2:08 A.M.

The red pen finally slipped from his fingers.

Dr. Benson rubbed his eyes. Twenty seven exam scripts, marked. The staff block at Rivers State College of Health smelled like old paper, disinfectant and burnt coffee. Outside, the rain had stopped an hour ago. The whole campus was silent except for the low hum of the old fridge in the corner and mosquitoes tapping against the window net.

He was too tired to drive home. Too tired to sleep too.

He pushed his chair back and walked to the small staff kitchen. Flicked the kettle on. The water began to growl.

Knock.

Benson paused. The kettle hissed.

He looked toward the door. The corridor outside was dark. Everyone had left by 6 p.m.

Knock. Knock.

Louder this time. Slow. Deliberate.

Benson sighed, dropped two spoons of Milo and milk into a chipped cup and called out, "Who dey there?"

No answer.

He walked to the door, opened it. Cold air rushed in. The long corridor was empty. The emergency light at the far end blinked yellow. Rain had left puddles on the floor, but there were no wet footprints.

He smiled to himself. Wind.

"Old man don dey hear things now," he muttered and turned back.

As he poured the hot water, steam fogging his glasses, a woman whispered directly behind him.

"You finally came back..."

The voice was soft. Wet. Like someone speaking with water in her mouth.

His hand jerked. Hot water splashed his wrist. He spun around so fast his glasses fell.

Nothing.

The kitchen was empty. The chair where he had been marking was still there.

Then the lights went out.

Not a flicker. A hard cut. Total darkness.

Benson's breath became loud in his own ears.

In the dark, he heard bare feet. Slap. Slap. Slap. On the wet floor. Coming closer.

He opened his mouth to shout, but his throat locked.

Then a scream tore through the staff block. It wasn't the woman's. It was his.

And then, silence.


---

Morning came too bright.

By 7:30 a.m., a crowd had already formed behind the health sciences block of Rivers State College of Health. Nursing students in white and green, lab coat students, food sellers, okada men. Two police vans. Yellow tape.

The wind carried the smell of rain and crowd sweat.

A body lay on a stretcher, covered with a faded wrapper. The DPO lifted the wrapper just a little to speak with the crime officer and a final year student standing too close saw it and screamed.

The lecturer's eyes were wide open. Frozen in pure terror. His mouth was half open as if still screaming. His fingernails were packed with thick, wet, black mud. And tangled tightly around his right wrist, like a bracelet, was a small clump of slimy green river weed.

There is no river inside the staff block.

The police quickly covered him again.

"Na heart attack," one security man was saying loudly, as if trying to convince himself. "Na stress kill am."

But the students weren't listening. They were whispering among themselves, eyes darting up to the second floor of the old male hostel across the road.

"Na lie," a girl in year two whispered, clutching her friend. "Room 13 don collect another person. I tell you say that room no be ordinary."

"Shhh, no talk am loud," her friend hissed. "You wan make e follow you for night?"

Standing at the edge of the crowd, chewing groundnut from a small nylon, David heard it and laughed.

David was twenty, but he looked sixteen when he smiled. One old traveling bag, the type with broken zipper tied with black nylon rope. One extra shirt folded badly. Slippers dusted from the long journey. First time away from home. First time outside his mother's house for more than two days.

He thought they were catching cruise. Every school for Rivers State get one ghost story like this.

"Abeg, make una shift," a policeman shouted, pushing the crowd back.

David shifted, but kept smiling. He had admission into Rivers State College of Health. He had finally escaped. No ghost story was going to spoil that.


---

The hostel manager's office smelled like cigarettes and old files.

"Name?" the man didn't look up.

"David Okoro. Nursing, ND1."

The man flipped through a thick, torn ledger. Ran his finger down the list. Flipped again. His face tightened.

He looked up at David, then at the bag, then back at the ledger.

"All rooms full."

David's smile faded. "Sir? But my admission letter say school go give hostel..."

"I say all rooms full. You no hear?"

David swallowed. The excitement in his chest turned to cold water. He had no money for off-campus. He had nowhere to go in Port Harcourt.

The manager stared at him for a long time. He scratched his beard. Then he sighed, like a man making a decision he would regret.

"Except one," he said quietly.

He picked up his biro. His hand hesitated above the hostel allocation form.

"Room 13."

He wrote it. 13. The ink bled a little.

He pushed the key across the table. It was an old iron key with a red plastic tag. The number on it had been scratched off and rewritten with marker.

"Block C, last floor, by the corner. No make noise for night. No waka for midnight. And no carry person enter your room."

David grabbed the key. "Thank you sir, God bless you sir."

The manager didn't answer. He was already looking away.


---

Block C was the oldest block in Rivers State College of Health. The paint was peeling like dried skin. Clothes hung on lines, music blasted from different rooms, someone was shouting about a missing bucket.

David climbed with his heavy bag hitting his leg at every step.

As he passed, things changed.

Conversations paused.

A boy carrying a bucket of water stopped and stared at him. Then stepped aside.

Two girls by the corridor moved away, whispering fast.

David felt their eyes on the key in his hand. The red tag.

"Guy, which room dem give you?" a tall lanky boy finally asked.

David smiled, proud. "Room 13."

The boy's face changed.

"Another one..." he muttered, and walked away quickly. "Omo, dem don give am that room again."

A woman selling puff puff by the stairs hissed, "Chai! This small pikin?"

David laughed nervously this time. "Na prank be this? Una dey do welcome prank for new student?"

Nobody laughed back.

By the time he reached the last door at the end of the corridor, the passage was empty. Everyone had disappeared into their rooms. Doors closed.

The last door had no sticker, no poster, no name. Just a number painted in white, already fading.

The lock was stiff. He had to use two hands to turn it.


---

Inside, it was... normal.

That was the disappointing part.

Four bunk beds, but only three had mattresses. A small wooden table. A broken wardrobe with one door hanging. Dust everywhere. Cobwebs at the ceiling corner. A single small window that looked out to the thick bush behind the school. It smelled damp, like rain that never dried.

David dropped his bag and laughed out loud, relieved.

"Na this room una dey fear?"

His voice echoed a little.

He swept a little with his palm. Opened the window to let air in. The bush outside was quiet.

He lay on the bare mattress, pressed his phone. No network in the room. He stood up, raised it to the window. One bar.

He typed: Mummy I don reach hostel. Room fine.

He pressed send and slept off without eating.


---

Night in Block C always comes with noise. Generators, arguments, loud laughter, plates clanging.

But that night, by 2 a.m., everything stopped.

David woke up sweating.

Silence. Total silence. Like the hostel had been emptied.

He checked his small torch phone. 2:13 a.m.

It was cold. Too cold. The air smelled suddenly like a river. Like wet clothes that stayed too long inside water.

Then.

Knock.

David sat up.

Knock. Knock.

Three slow knocks on his door.

"Who be that?" he called.

No answer. No footsteps.

"Abeg no dey play that kind play for night o," he said again. His voice shook.

Silence.

He stood up. The concrete floor was cold under his feet. He walked to the door, each step loud.

His hand reached the iron handle. It was freezing. Wet.

He pulled it open in one sharp move.

Nothing.

Empty corridor.

The yellow bulb outside flickered. No one.

He almost laughed.

Then his foot stepped into something wet.

He looked down.

The floor was dry everywhere else. But right at his threshold, there was a small puddle. Fresh water. Still spreading.

And inside that puddle lay a small plastic ID card.

David bent and picked it up, water soaking his fingers. It was an old staff ID, the type nurses wore. The lamination was peeling at the edges. The photo was faded but clear. A young woman, smiling a little, hair packed neatly, white uniform.

The name typed under it:

ADA NWOSU - STAFF NURSE
RIVERS STATE COLLEGE OF HEALTH - 2002

Twenty four years ago.

As he stared at it, a single cold drop of water landed on the back of his hand with a soft plok.

He flinched and looked up.

The ceiling above him was completely dry. No leak. No pipe.

The corridor was dry too.

Behind him, with a soft creak...

The bedroom door slowly closed by itself.

CLICK.

David spun around.

The door had closed.

Slowly...

He looked back at the ID card in his shaking hand.

The smiling woman in the photograph...

was no longer smiling.

I
---

Chapter 6: The Hunter's Son

The rain did not stop for three days.

Kael Mercer watched it fall from the window of his dormitory room, the grey light painting shadows beneath his eyes. He had not slept. Sleep, when it came, brought dreams he did not want — dreams of cold eyes and colder truths, of a girl made of stillness who looked at him like he was already dead and simply hadn't realised it yet.

Sera.

He did not know her full name. He did not know where she came from or what she was hiding. But he knew, with the bone-deep certainty of a hunter's son, that she was not human. The way she moved. The way she held herself utterly still, like a predator conserving energy. The way her eyes tracked movement in the dark with a precision no mortal could match.

And yet, when she had stood in the library with her books of poison lore and her carefully guarded pain, she had not looked like a monster. She had looked like someone who had been wounded a long time ago and had never learned how to heal.

He had meant what he said. He was not afraid of her. That, perhaps, was the most dangerous thing of all.

A knock at his door pulled him from his thoughts. He turned, expecting Elizabeth — she had visited twice more since that first rainy night, always with her quiet questions and her violet eyes that held secrets she would not share. But the voice that came through the door was not hers.

"Kael? You in there?"

Marcus.

Kael's younger brother stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. He was taller than Kael, broader in the shoulders, with the same grey eyes but none of the restraint. Where Kael had chosen books and solitude, Marcus had chosen action. He wore the hunter's sigil openly — a silver pin on his collar, shaped like a crossed blade and stake — and he carried himself with the easy confidence of a man who had never doubted his purpose.

"You look like hell," Marcus said, dropping into the chair by Kael's desk. "Have you slept at all this week?"

"I've been reading."

"You're always reading." Marcus picked up the book on Kael's desk — Bloodlines of the Ancient Houses — and flipped through it with practiced disinterest. "Still chasing fairy tales? Dad would have a fit if he knew you were wasting your time on this stuff."

"Dad's not here."

"No. But his expectations are." Marcus set the book down, his expression sobering. "Speaking of which. The family's calling. There's been activity in the city. Vampire activity. Real stuff, not the usual drifters and scavengers. The elders think there's something big happening. Something organised."

Kael's blood chilled. "What kind of activity?"

"Hard to say. Bodies turning up without a drop of blood in them. Hunters going missing on patrol. And the stone — you know the one, the old relic under the chapel — it's been pulsing. The guardians say it hasn't done that in centuries." Marcus leaned forward, his grey eyes sharp. "Something's coming, Kael. Something old. The family wants all hands on deck. Even yours."

Even yours. The words landed like a blow. Kael had never completed his hunter training. He had walked away at seventeen, sick of the blood and the vengeance and the endless, grinding hatred that consumed his family. His father had called him a coward. His brother had called him a fool. But Kael had not cared. He had wanted a different life — a life of books and quiet and truths that did not require a blade to uncover.

But the truth, it seemed, had found him anyway.

"I'm not a hunter," Kael said quietly.

"You're a Mercer. That's the same thing." Marcus stood, his expression unreadable. "Look. I know you don't want this life. I know you think you can just... opt out. But whatever's happening, it's not going to skip you just because you're a student. If vampires are moving, they're moving for a reason. And that reason might be the stone. Which means they're here. At Ashthorne. Right under our feet."

Kael thought of Sera. Of her stillness. Of the way she had looked at the poison lore books like they held answers she was desperate to find.

"What if they're not all the same?" he asked.

Marcus frowned. "What?"

"The vampires. What if they're not all... what we think they are?"

"They're blood-drinkers, Kael. Predators. They kill people. What else is there to know?"

Kael did not answer. He did not know how to explain the feeling that had settled in his chest since the night Elizabeth had first appeared at his window — the growing certainty that the world was not as simple as his family believed. That there were shades of grey in the darkness. That some monsters, perhaps, were not monsters at all.

"Just... be careful," Marcus said, his voice softer now. "Whatever you're mixed up in, whatever you think you know — be careful. These things are dangerous. Even the ones that don't look it."

He left without another word, the door clicking shut behind him.

Kael sat alone in the grey light, his brother's warning echoing in his ears. He thought of Elizabeth, who had looked at his grandmother's silver ring like it had burned her, but had never once threatened him. He thought of Sera, who had stood in the lamplight with her bandaged shoulder and her carefully guarded pain, and had told him nothing — and everything.

And he thought of the stone, pulsing beneath the chapel, patient and eternal. Waiting.

He reached for his coat.

---

The restricted archives were empty when Kael arrived.

He had half-hoped, half-feared that Sera would be there. But the stacks were dark and silent, the only sound the whisper of rain against the high windows. He moved through the aisles with the ease of long practice, his fingers tracing the spines of books he had memorised years ago.

He was not looking for poison lore tonight. He was looking for something else. Something he had only glimpsed in fragments, in books that had been banned by his family for centuries.

The Other Histories.

That was what Elizabeth had called them. The books written by the hunted, not the hunters. The stories that had been buried under generations of Mercer doctrine. She had mentioned them once, in passing, during her second visit — a quiet observation, almost accidental. But Kael had not forgotten.

He found what he was looking for in the deepest corner of the archives, behind a false panel he had discovered years ago and never told anyone about. A small collection of texts, handwritten in languages that predated the hunter families by millennia. Some were in code. Some were barely legible. But one — a slim volume bound in black leather, its pages brittle with age — was written in English.

Accounts of the Lower Realm.

He opened it with careful fingers. The book was old, written by a scholar whose name had been scratched from the title page. It described a world beneath the world — a realm of ancient bloodlines and impossible politics, where vampire lords warred for power and mortals were little more than currency. The author spoke in fragments, half-remembered rumours and whispered warnings, as if the very act of writing the words had been dangerous.

One passage caught his attention. It mentioned a mission — a retrieval, some kind of relic — dispatched to the mortal world under the banner of an alliance between two great houses. The details were vague, the names deliberately obscured. But the scholar noted one thing with grim certainty: the relic was not what it seemed. The mission was built on a lie. And the one sent to retrieve it did not know.

Kael stared at the page. His pulse was a slow, heavy drumbeat in his ears.

A mission. A relic. A lie.

The stone beneath the chapel. The assassins. The girl in the library with the predator's stillness and the bandaged shoulder and the eyes that held something ancient and wounded.

He did not have a name. He did not have proof. But the suspicion that had been growing since the night Elizabeth first appeared at his window now hardened into something cold and undeniable.

The girl from the library was connected to this. The girl who had looked at him like he was worth examining. The girl who had stood in the lamplight and said I am someone who does not wish to be asked that question.

She was part of this. Whatever this was.

He closed the book and stared at the darkened shelves. He should have been afraid. He should have gone straight to his brother, to the family, to the hunters who would know what to do.

But all he could think of was the way she had looked at him. The way her voice had cracked, just slightly, on the word alone.

She was hiding something. Something dangerous. Something that might make her the enemy his family had trained for generations to destroy.

And he did not want to destroy her.

He wanted to understand her.

The realisation settled into his bones like a sickness. Or a prayer.

---

When he left the archives, the rain had finally stopped. The campus was silent, the cobblestones slick with water, the sky a pale wash of pre-dawn grey. He walked without thinking, his feet carrying him toward the eastern quadrangle, toward the dormitory where he knew she stayed.

He did not knock on her door. He did not even approach the building. He simply stood at the edge of the quad, his hands in his pockets, and looked up at the darkened window on the third floor.

A shadow moved behind the glass.

She was awake. She was watching him.

He did not wave. He did not call out. He simply stood there, letting her see him, letting her know that something had shifted. That he had questions. That he was no longer the oblivious human she had met in the library.

Then he turned and walked away, the weight of the book's fragments heavy on his shoulders.

Behind him, the shadow at the window did not move for a long time.

---

🩸 CHAPTER 5: What Are You, Really?

*(Kael is starting to ask the real questions... and who is this mysterious vampire lurking in the bell tower? Drop your theories in the comments below!)*

---

The wound healed slowly.

Four days had passed since the second assassin had raked her claws across my shoulder, and still the flesh refused to knit. The poison was a cunning thing. Not lethal to a vampire of my lineage, but tenacious. It lingered in the tissue like a splinter, burning whenever I moved too quickly, seeping a thin, grey discharge that stained the bandages Ivy had applied.

Ivy. She had returned the following evening with fresh bandages and a small tin of salve she claimed her grandmother had sworn by. I had not asked her to come. I had not encouraged her. But she had come anyway, sitting on the edge of my bed with her gentle hands and her endless, quiet patience. She did not ask about the wound again. She simply tended it, and talked about her art, and filled the silence with the uncomplicated warmth of her presence.

She told me about the way light fractured through the cathedral windows at dawn. How the stone there was older than the city. How she had once spent three hours painting a single shadow because it looked like a sleeping wolf. She did not ask me why I flinched when her fingers brushed too close to the bandages. She did not ask why my skin was cold. She only hummed under her breath, a tune I did not recognize, and when she finished, she pressed the tin into my hands.

“For the pain,” she said. “It won’t heal it. But it helps.”

I had stared at the tin. Ceramic, glazed blue, with a crack running through the lid. It smelled of lavender and something earthier. Something real.

“Thank you,” I said. The words felt foreign.

She smiled. It was a small thing, barely a lift at the corners of her mouth, but it reached her eyes. “You don’t have to thank me. Just don’t bleed on my bed next time.”

She left. The room felt colder after.

I did not understand her. I did not trust her. But I did not send her away.

Tonight, however, I was alone. The poison had subsided enough that I could move without wincing, and the restlessness had returned. The stone pulsed beneath the chapel, a low and constant drumbeat that reminded me with every passing hour that my mission was stalled. The hunters still patrolled. The stone still waited. And I was no closer to understanding who had sent the assassins or why.

I needed information.

The restricted archives of the Ashthorne library held more than hunter genealogies. They held records of old battles, ancient poisons, the names and methods of every vampire hunter who had ever lived. If the poison in my veins was known to the hunters, it would be documented there. And if it was documented, I could trace it back to its source.

I pulled on a loose coat. Something that would hide the bulk of the bandages. I checked the lock on my window twice before I left. Habit. Or paranoia. The line between them had blurred centuries ago.

I slipped out into the night.

---

The library at midnight was a different creature than the library at noon.

The vaulted ceilings stretched into shadow, the amber lamps dimmed to a low, honeyed glow. The stacks were empty, the silence so complete that I could hear the whisper of dust settling on ancient spines. The night guard, a man named Harlow with a limp and a fondness for crosswords, had already made his first round. He would not return for two hours. I had timed him.

The restricted archives were locked behind a wrought-iron gate at the far end of the main hall. Students called it the Cage. The gate was old, its bars twisted into the shapes of thorns and sleeping serpents. A plaque beside it read: Access by Faculty Permission Only. Violators Will Be Expelled.

Locks were no obstacle to me. A whisper of pressure, a twist of metal, and the gate swung open without a sound. The hinges had been oiled recently. Someone else had been here.

I moved through the shelves like a ghost, my fingers trailing the spines of books that had not been touched in decades. The air smelled of parchment and mildew and something older. Time, perhaps. The archives were kept cold to preserve the texts. My breath did not fog. It never did.

Venoms of the Old World. The Poisoner's Codex. A Treatise on Blood-Borne Toxins. I pulled them down one by one, scanning the pages with a speed no human eye could match. The text blurred, lines of ink and age and Latin, but the relevant passages surfaced like stones in a stream.

The poison was called Nightshade Bane. An old formula, derived from a plant that grew only in the lightless caves of the Underworld. It was used by assassins who hunted vampires. A rare and expensive toxin that slowed regeneration and caused prolonged pain. It would not kill a vampire of the high bloodlines. It was meant to incapacitate. To humiliate. To send a message.

The entry listed several known practitioners, most of them long dead. Their names were etched in red ink, a tradition for hunters who had fallen in the line of duty. A strange honor. We killed them, and they memorialized them.

One name remained. A house I recognised from the Underworld court. A house that had once opposed my betrothal to Dorian. I closed the book before reading further.

The message was clear enough. Not just an attack. A statement. Someone wanted me to know that the mission was not as straightforward as I had been led to believe. Someone wanted me to question everything.

You're the prey, Princess. You just don't know it yet.

The words were not mine. They belonged to Dorian. Spoken years ago, in the training yard, after he had disarmed me for the third time in an hour. He had laughed when he said it. I had not.

I stacked the books carefully. Returned them to their exact positions. A misplaced volume was a signature. I left no signatures.

---

"You're here late."

The voice came from the end of the aisle, quiet and unstartled. I had been so absorbed in my research that I had not heard him approach. A mistake. A dangerous, inexcusable mistake.

I turned.

Kael stood at the edge of the lamplight, a book tucked under his arm, his storm-grey eyes fixed on me with that same unnerving directness he had shown in our first encounter. He wore the same worn leather jacket, the same ink stains on his fingers. He looked, as he always did, like a man who had not slept enough and did not particularly care.

"As are you," I said.

"I'm always here late." He stepped closer, his gaze flicking to the pile of books on the table beside me. I had not returned them all. The Poisoner's Codex lay open, the page on Nightshade Bane still visible. Careless. "Poison lore? That's an unusual subject for midnight reading."

"I have an interest in the morbid."

"Clearly." He stopped a few feet away, close enough that I could catch the faint scent of rain and old paper that clung to his clothes. His eyes dropped to my shoulder, where the coat did not quite hide the bulk of the bandages. "You're hurt."

It was not a question.

"A minor injury. I fell."

"That's the second time you've said that. I didn't believe the first."

"You were not there for the first."

He tilted his head, a flicker of something crossing his face. Amusement. Suspicion. Both. "No. But I notice things. You've been moving carefully all week. Keeping your left arm close. You're favouring it."

"You are remarkably observant."

"I'm a history student. We're trained to notice details." He set his book on the table. Bloodlines of the Ancient Houses, the same volume he had been reading the day we met. The cover was more worn now. He had been through it many times. "Nightshade Bane. I think I've seen that name in one of the older manuscripts. Bad stuff."

"Allegedly."

He was quiet for a moment. The lamplight caught the silver ring in his pupils. A trick of the light. Or something else. Hunters often had them. A sign of diluted old blood, from when their ancestors drank vampire blood to gain strength. It rarely manifested now. But it did sometimes.

Then he said, very softly, "What are you, really?"

The question hung in the air between us, heavy and impossible. I could have lied. I could have deflected with the cold, practiced ease that had served me for two centuries. But something in his eyes. Direct, unflinching, utterly without fear. It made the lie catch in my throat.

"I am someone who does not wish to be asked that question," I said.

"That's not an answer."

"It is the only one I have."

He held my gaze. I expected him to push further, to demand the truth as any sensible human would. But he did not. He simply nodded, as if my evasion had told him everything he needed to know.

He shifted his weight. The leather of his jacket creaked. "Someone came to my room a few nights ago."

My blood chilled. I kept my face blank. "Did they?"

"A strange girl." He looked past me, into the dark of the stacks. "She climbed through my window. Didn’t use the door. Didn’t knock." A pause. "She knew things she shouldn't."

The poison in my shoulder throbbed.

"She warned me to stay away from... someone." His eyes came back to mine. "She wouldn’t say who. Just that I was in over my head. That the campus wasn’t safe. That I should stop asking questions."

"And did you?" I asked. My voice was steady.

His lips quirked into something that was not quite a smile. "I told her I'd make my own decisions."

"You should listen to her."

"Probably." He stepped closer, close enough that I could see the slight tension in his jaw. "But I've never been good at listening. When someone tells me to stay away from something, I want to understand why."

The girl. The female vampire. The one who visited Kael. She had been in his room. She had warned him. She had told him to stay away from someone.

Whoever the warning had been about, Kael clearly hadn't connected it to me. Good. Let him keep it that way.

"I don't know why I'm telling you this," he said. The admission seemed to surprise him. He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it more disheveled than before. "I don’t know you. You’re... you’re the girl in the library. You read poison books at midnight. You lie about being hurt. I should be walking away."

"Yet here you are."

"Yeah." He exhaled. "Here I am."

The silence stretched, taut as a wire. Outside, the rain had begun again, a soft patter against the high windows. The lamplight flickered, casting his face in shifting planes of shadow and gold.

Finally, he stepped back. "I'm not afraid of you," he said. "I don't know what you are. I don't know why you're here. But I know what fear looks like, and you're not it. You're something else."

"And what is that?"

"Alone." He picked up his book and tucked it under his arm. "You're alone. The same way I am. The same way the girl at my window is. Whatever's happening in this place, it's drawing lonely things together. That's either a coincidence or a trap."

He turned to leave, but paused at the end of the aisle.

"My name is Kael," he said. "Kael Mercer. In case you were wondering."

He did not wait for a response. He walked into the dark, and the shadows swallowed him whole.

I stood alone in the lamplight, the books of poison lore spread around me like a fortress, and tried to remember how to breathe.

The unknown vampire. The female vampire. The one who visited Kael.

She had been in his room. She had warned him. She knew he was asking questions.

She was close. Closer than I thought.

---

I did not return to my dormitory immediately.

The rain had thickened, drumming against the cobblestones in a steady, percussive rhythm. I walked the perimeter of the campus, letting the cold water soak through my coat and bandages, letting the discomfort ground me. The stone pulsed beneath the earth. The hunters patrolled in pairs now. I counted four of them near the science building. More than usual.

And somewhere in the shadows, I felt it again. That flicker of Underworld blood, distant but distinct.

The unknown vampire.

She was still here. Still watching. Still close enough to be a threat.

I followed the scent through the rain, past the music hall and the eastern quadrangle, until I reached the old bell tower. The door was ajar, the darkness within absolute. The tower had been closed to students for decades. Unsafe structure, the signs said. A lie. It was closed because three students had disappeared there in 1923. Hunters had covered it up.

I stepped inside.

The air was cold and still. The scent of Underworld blood was stronger here, mingled with something else. The faint, floral sweetness of night-blooming jasmine. The female vampire had been here. Recently. Hours, not days.

But the tower was empty now, the shadows undisturbed. Only water dripping from the broken roof, echoing in the stairwell. I climbed. The steps were slick with moss. The higher I went, the stronger the scent became.

At the top, the bell hung silent. Its bronze surface was green with age. Beneath it, on the wooden floor, were two marks. Scuffs. Fresh. Someone had stood here, looking out over the campus.

The female vampire had stood here recently. Whether she had been watching Kael, me, or the stone, I could not tell.

I stood in the dark, the rain a distant murmur beyond the stone walls, and spoke into the silence.

"I know you are watching. I know you have spoken to the human. If you mean him harm, I will find you. If you mean to help, you are a fool. Either way, stay out of my path."

There was no answer. Only the rain, and the silence, and the slow, relentless pulse of the stone.

I turned and walked back into the storm.

---

Ivy was waiting when I returned.

She sat on the steps of my dormitory building, huddled under a red umbrella, a canvas bag at her feet. The rain had plastered her hair to her cheeks. Her sketchbook was wrapped in plastic to keep it dry.

"You’re soaked," she said when she saw me.

"So are you."

"I was worried." She stood. Water ran off the umbrella in sheets. "You didn’t answer your door. I thought..." She shook her head. "Stupid. You’re probably fine. You always are."

She was not. She was human. Fragile. She would die if the wind blew wrong.

"I was in the library," I said. It was not a lie.

"Until two in the morning?"

"I lost track of time."

She studied me. Her eyes were the color of warm tea. They saw too much. "You’re hurt worse than you said."

"I am healing."

"Let me change the bandages."

"I can do it."

"I know you can." She held out the bag. "But you don’t have to."

The rain fell between us. The stone pulsed. Someone in the Underworld was moving.

And Ivy was standing in the rain. She offered help as though it required nothing in return.

I took the bag.

"Thank you," I said. Again. The word was still foreign. But less so.

She smiled. "Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t seen my stitching."

We went inside.

Later, after she had gone and the room smelled of lavender salve and wet wool, I sat by the window and watched the campus. The rain had stopped. The clouds were breaking. Moonlight pooled on the cobblestones.

Another vampire had entered my territory. She had approached the human.

Whether she came as friend or enemy, I could not yet tell.

Until I learned the truth, she remained a threat.

---
Leave a comment below! What do you think the rogue vampire's angle is? Chapter 6 is coming soon!

Chapter 4: The Weight of Silence

The days began to blur.

I had been on Earth for three weeks. Three weeks of lectures and libraries and the ceaseless pulse of the stone beneath the chapel. Three weeks of watching and waiting and killing in the shadows when the shadows demanded it. Three weeks of Kael's grey eyes lingering in my thoughts like smoke, and Ivy's laughter echoing in my memory like a song I had not meant to learn.

The mission was not progressing.

The stone was close — I could feel it, a constant pressure at the base of my skull — but the hunters guarding it were disciplined and numerous. They patrolled in shifts, their silver blades catching the moonlight, their blood bitter with ancient oaths. I had mapped their movements, catalogued their weaknesses, and determined that I could kill them. All of them. It would be bloody, and it would draw attention, but it was possible.

What stopped me was not fear. It was uncertainty.

Lilith's warning echoed in my mind every time I stood at the edge of the chapel grounds, ready to strike. You know this mission stinks of Dorian's design. And she was right. The stone had been lost for centuries, guarded by creatures even our historians feared, and now — suddenly, conveniently — it was within reach? The timing was too perfect. The location too accessible. The hunters too... expected.

Something was wrong. I could feel it like a splinter beneath my skin. But I could not name it, and I could not prove it, and until I could do both, I was trapped in this interminable waiting.

So I waited. And I watched. And I tried, with diminishing success, not to think about the two humans who were slowly, inexplicably, becoming something more than complications.

---

The second assassin came on a Thursday.

This one was better than the first. Faster. Quieter. She did not announce herself with a blade at my throat — she came from above, dropping from the chapel bell tower with the silence of a hunting owl. I sensed her at the last possible moment, the displacement of air the only warning before her claws raked across my shoulder.

Pain flared, hot and immediate. I spun, my own claws extending, and caught her across the ribs before she could retreat. She hissed — a sound of fury, not pain — and lunged again.

We fought in the shadow of the chapel, our movements too fast for human eyes to follow. She was old, this one. Not as old as me, but old enough to have skill. Her claws were coated in something that burned — not silver, but something older, something that made my blood sting where it welled from the wound in my shoulder.

"Who sent you?" I demanded, catching her wrist and twisting until the bones creaked.

She laughed. It was a broken sound, unhinged and desperate. "Does it matter? You'll be dead before dawn."

"Unlikely."

I snapped her arm. She screamed — a sound that would have woken the campus if I had not chosen this hour for its silence — and dropped to her knees. I gripped her throat and lifted her until her feet dangled above the ground.

"One last chance," I said, my voice cold and even. "Who sent you?"

Her eyes met mine. In them, I saw something unexpected. Not hatred. Not fear. But pity.

"You think you're the hunter," she rasped. "But you're the prey, Princess. You just don't know it yet."

Then she bit down on something in her mouth — a capsule, a poison — and her body went rigid in my grip. Within seconds, she was ash, scattering into the wind like the first assassin had scattered. No trace. No evidence. No answers.

Only the wound in my shoulder, burning with whatever poison she had laced her claws with, and the echo of her final words.

You're the prey, Princess. You just don't know it yet.

I stood in the silence, my blood dripping onto the cobblestones, and for the first time since arriving on Earth, I felt something close to fear.

---

The wound did not heal.

By the time I returned to my dormitory, the burning had spread from my shoulder down my arm, tracing the pathways of my veins like fire. I stripped off my coat and examined the injury in the mirror. Four parallel gashes, deep and angry, the skin around them turning an ugly shade of grey. The poison was slowing my regeneration. Not stopping it — my bloodline was too old for that — but slowing it enough to be a problem.

I needed blood. Fresh blood, not the cold, preserved animal blood I had been subsisting on. Something living. Something warm.

The hunger stirred, sharp and demanding. I pushed it down.

Not tonight. Not yet. I could endure a little longer.

I bound the wound with strips of fabric torn from an old shirt, the pressure dulling the pain but not extinguishing it. Then I sat on the edge of my narrow bed, staring at the rain-streaked window, and tried to think.

Two assassins in three weeks. Both Underworld. Both sent by someone who knew where I was and what I was doing. The first had been a hired blade, likely from one of Dorian's rivals. But the second — the female, the one with the poisoned claws — had spoken with the certainty of someone who knew more than she was paid to know.

You're the prey, Princess.

Someone was watching me. Someone who knew the mission was a lie.

Dorian? It was possible. The alliance between our houses had always been political, never personal. He had no reason to love me. But he was supposed to be asleep, wasting away under the grip of his curse. If he was awake — if the curse was a fabrication — then everything I had been told was a lie.

And if everything I had been told was a lie, then what was the stone? What was I retrieving? And for whom?

The questions circled like vultures, and I had no answers.

---

The knock on my door came just after midnight.

I was on my feet before the second knock fell, my claws extending, my senses sharpening. The scent beyond the door was human — warm, living, with the faint undertone of coffee and charcoal.

Ivy.

I retracted my claws, smoothed my expression, and opened the door.

She stood in the hallway, clutching her sketchbook to her chest like a shield. Her auburn curls were damp from the rain, and her hazel eyes were wide with something I could not quite read. Fear? Concern? Both?

"Hi," she said. "I know it's late. I'm sorry. I just... I saw your light on, and I wanted to check on you."

"Check on me?"

"You missed our coffee thing. Well, not missed — it's not like we have a standing appointment or anything. But you weren't in the café, and you weren't in the library, and I got worried. Which is stupid. You're clearly fine. You don't need me checking on you. I'm going to stop talking now."

She bit her lip, her cheeks flushing. The rambling was endearing in a way I did not wish to examine.

"I was occupied," I said.

"Occupied." Her gaze flickered to my shoulder, where the bandage was visible beneath the torn fabric of my shirt. Her eyes widened. "You're hurt."

"A minor injury."

"That's blood. Sera, that's blood." She stepped forward, her hesitation vanishing, replaced by something fierce. "What happened? Did someone hurt you?"

"It was an accident. I fell."

"You fell." She did not believe me. It was written all over her face — the scepticism, the worry, the stubborn refusal to accept my lie. "Sera, you're the least clumsy person I've ever met. You move like... like water. Or a predator. You don't fall."

I said nothing.

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she did something that surprised me. She stepped past me into my room, set her sketchbook on my desk, and turned to face me with her hands on her hips.

"Let me help," she said.

"I do not need help."

"Everyone needs help. Even mysterious, terrifying, beautiful people who sit alone in the back of lecture halls and never eat croissants." She pointed at my bed. "Sit."

I did not sit. I did not take orders from anyone, least of all a mortal girl with charcoal smudges on her fingers and rain in her hair. But I did not throw her out, either. I stood frozen in the doorway, watching her, caught between irritation and something far more dangerous.

Curiosity.

"Why do you care?" I asked. "You do not know me."

"I know you enough." She opened my desk drawer — a presumptuous act that should have angered me — and found the first aid kit I had never used. "I know you're lonely. I know you're hiding something. I know you look at people like you're expecting them to hurt you. And I know that when I talk to you, you listen. Actually listen. Do you know how rare that is?"

I did not answer.

She crossed the room and stood before me, close enough that I could smell the rain in her hair and the faint sweetness of her soap. She held up a roll of bandages.

"Please," she said, softer now. "Let me help. You don't have to tell me what happened. Just... let me help."

No one had ever said please to me before. Demands, yes. Commands, certainly. But never a request. Never a choice.

I sat on the edge of the bed.

Ivy smiled — not triumphant, but relieved — and knelt beside me. Her fingers were gentle as she peeled away the torn fabric of my shirt and examined the wound. She did not flinch at the sight of it, though it must have looked terrible: four jagged gashes, the skin around them grey and sickly, the blood still seeping slowly through the makeshift bandage.

"This doesn't look like a fall," she said quietly.

"No. It does not."

She did not press. She simply dipped a cloth in water and began to clean the wound, her touch steady and warm. The poison made the contact sting, but I did not pull away. Her closeness was strange. Unfamiliar. No one had touched me with gentleness in over a century. Touch, in the Underworld, meant violence or politics or both. It was never soft. Never kind.

Ivy's touch was kind.

"You're cold," she murmured, her fingers brushing my skin. "Like, really cold. Are you sure you're okay?"

"I am always cold."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the only one I have."

She looked up at me, her hazel eyes searching my face. I did not know what she was looking for. Whatever it was, she seemed to find it. She nodded once and returned to her work.

When the wound was cleaned and bandaged, she sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork. "There. It's not perfect, but it should hold until you can see a real doctor."

"I do not require a doctor."

"Of course you don't." She smiled, that small, tentative smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. "You probably heal by moonlight and sheer force of will."

Something close to a laugh caught in my throat. I did not release it. But Ivy must have seen something in my expression, because her smile widened.

"There," she said. "I knew you were human in there somewhere."

Human. The word should have been an insult. Instead, it landed somewhere soft, somewhere I had long since armoured over.

I looked away. "It is late. You should return to your dormitory."

"I know." She stood, gathered her sketchbook, and moved toward the door. But she paused with her hand on the frame. "Sera?"

"Yes?"

"Whatever you're running from... whatever you're hiding... you don't have to carry it alone. I know we just met. I know you don't trust me. But I'm here. If you ever want to talk. Or not talk. Just... I'm here."

She did not wait for a response. She slipped out the door and closed it softly behind her, leaving only the scent of rain and the ghost of her touch.

I sat alone in the lamplight, my wound throbbing, my thoughts churning. The poison was still burning through my veins, but the pain felt distant now. Something else occupied the space beneath my ribs. Something warmer. Something more dangerous than any assassin's blade.

I did not name it. I would not name it.

But when I finally lay down to rest, I did not dream of the Underworld. I dreamed of hazel eyes and gentle hands and a voice that said please instead of obey.

And somewhere, deep beneath the chapel, the stone pulsed on, patient and eternal, waiting.

---

Chapter 3: The Art of Silence

The art history lecture hall was a cathedral of forgotten genius.

Morning light filtered through tall, arched windows, painting the worn wooden floors in shades of amber and dust. Rows of tiered seating descended toward a lectern where Professor Aldric Voss — retired scholar, suspected former hunter — droned about the symbolism of light and shadow in Caravaggio's later works. His voice was a low rumble, like distant thunder, and the students around me were sinking into the comfortable stupor of a Tuesday morning.

I sat in the back row, as I always did. My notebook was open to a blank page. I had not taken a single note since arriving at Ashthorne. I did not need to. My memory was older and sharper than any human record. But the notebook was part of the disguise, and the disguise was everything.

The stone pulsed beneath the chapel, a steady thrum only I could feel. It was stronger today. Restless, almost. The werewolf guardian was stirring. The hunters were sharpening their blades. And I was sitting in an art history lecture, listening to a man who might once have killed my kind talk about the interplay of shadow and grace.

The irony was not lost on me.

Professor Voss paused in his lecture and adjusted his spectacles. He was a lean man in his sixties, with silver hair and the kind of quiet watchfulness that made my instincts hum. He had not looked at me directly — not once — but I knew he had marked my presence. Former hunters did not forget how to sense a predator in the room.

"Art," he said, "is not merely the capture of beauty. It is the capture of truth. And truth, as you will learn, is rarely comfortable."

His eyes swept the lecture hall. For one brief, terrible moment, they rested on mine.

I did not blink. Neither did he.

Then he moved on, and the moment passed. But the warning lingered. He knew something. Perhaps not what I was — not yet — but something.

I filed the threat away and turned my attention to the front of the hall. That was when I noticed her.

---

She was seated three rows ahead, near the window, her soft auburn curls catching the morning light. Her head was bent over a sketchbook, her hand moving in quick, confident strokes — not taking notes, but drawing. Even from this distance, I could see the shape taking form beneath her fingers: the vaulted ceiling, the fall of light through the windows, the silhouette of the professor at his lectern. She was capturing the room. Capturing the truth, as Voss had said.

I recognised her immediately.

The girl from the art building window. The one I had seen on the night of the assassin's death, painting in the lamplight while violence scattered ashes into the roots of an oak. She had been a silhouette then — distant, unknowable. Now she was close enough that I could count the freckles on her bare shoulder, could hear the soft rhythm of her heartbeat beneath the professor's drone.

She was beautiful in the way of living things. Not the cold, sculpted beauty of the Underworld, but something warmer. Something that breathed and blushed and would one day fade. She was mortal. Fragile. And she was looking at me.

I did not know when she had turned. But her eyes — hazel, flecked with gold — were fixed on mine with an openness that bordered on reckless. Most humans looked away when I met their gaze. Instinct, perhaps. The prey recognising the predator. But this girl did not look away. She simply smiled, a small and tentative thing, and raised her hand in a half-wave.

I did not wave back. I did not smile. I simply inclined my head — a fraction of a movement, barely perceptible — and returned my gaze to the front of the hall.

But I felt her eyes linger for a moment longer before she turned back to her sketchbook. And I felt something else, too. That same unfamiliar ache I had refused to name.

I crushed it, as I always did.

---

The lecture ended. The students gathered their belongings and shuffled toward the exits in a wave of chatter and rustling fabric. I remained seated, letting them pass. Patience was a predator's virtue.

But the girl with the auburn curls did not leave.

She lingered by the window, her sketchbook clutched to her chest, her gaze flicking toward me and then away. She was working up to something. I could read it in the quickening of her pulse, the slight tremor in her hands. She wanted to speak to me.

I could have left. I should have left. Attachment to mortals was a liability, and I already had one human drawing too close. Kael's grey eyes haunted my thoughts more often than I cared to admit. I did not need another complication.

But I did not leave.

I stood, gathered my empty notebook, and walked toward the door. The girl stepped into my path.

She was shorter than me by several inches, forcing her to tilt her head up to meet my eyes. Up close, her face was even more alive — colour in her cheeks, a faint smudge of charcoal on her jaw, her hazel eyes wide with a nervousness she was trying very hard to conceal.

"Hi," she said. Her voice was soft, slightly breathless. "I'm sorry — this is weird. I just... I've seen you around. In the library, and the quad. And you sit alone a lot. I thought maybe you could use a friend."

A friend.

The word was so utterly, painfully human that I almost laughed. I had not had a friend in two centuries. I had allies. Servants. Rivals. Enemies. But never a friend. The concept belonged to a world of sleepovers and shared secrets and casual touch — a world I had never inhabited.

I looked at her — this trembling, earnest, impossibly brave girl who had no idea she was standing inches from a creature who could snap her neck before she drew her next breath. And I said, "I do not require friends."

Her face fell, just slightly. But she did not retreat. Instead, she did something that surprised me.

She laughed.

It was a small laugh, barely more than an exhale, but it was genuine. "Wow," she said. "Okay. That was... honest. Most people just pretend to be busy."

"Most people are cowards."

She tilted her head, studying me with those gold-flecked eyes. "And you're not?"

"No."

A pause. Then she held out her hand. "I'm Ivy. Ivy Castell. I'm an art student. And I've decided we're going to be friends, whether you like it or not."

I stared at her hand. Small. Unarmoured. The hand of someone who had never held a blade, never drawn blood, never known the cold weight of a crown. It was extended toward me with a trust so profound it was almost offensive.

I did not take it.

But I did say, "Sera."

"Sera," she repeated, as if tasting the name. "That's beautiful. Is it short for something?"

"No."

"Okay. Mysterious. I like it." She lowered her hand, unbothered by my refusal. "Well, Sera, I'm going to the café for coffee. They have terrible coffee, but the pastries are decent. Do you eat pastries?"

I did not. I had not eaten solid food in over a century. Blood was my only sustenance, and even that I took sparingly, in secret, from animals that would not be missed. But I could not tell her that.

"Occasionally," I lied.

"Great. Then you can occasionally eat a croissant with me. Come on."

She turned and walked toward the door, clearly expecting me to follow. And I — princess of the Underworld, heir to the Obsidian Throne, predator in a garden of prey — found myself following.

Not because I wanted to. Not because I needed to.

But because she had not flinched. She had seen my coldness, my refusal, my stillness, and she had not flinched. She had laughed. She had stayed.

That was rare. That was dangerous. That was, against all logic, intoxicating.

---

The café was a small, wood-panelled room attached to the student union. The coffee was indeed terrible — I could smell the bitterness from the doorway — and the pastries were stale. But Ivy did not seem to mind. She ordered a cappuccino and a chocolate croissant, then led me to a table by the window where the morning light fell in pale rectangles across the tabletop.

She talked. I listened.

She talked about her art — how she was working on a series of portraits capturing "the loneliness of crowded spaces." She talked about her grandmother's locket, which she always wore, and how it was the only thing she had left of her family's old country. She talked about Ashthorne, about the way the campus felt haunted in the early mornings, about the strange sense she sometimes had that she was being watched.

That last part caught my attention.

"Watched?" I asked, keeping my voice level.

She shrugged, brushing croissant flakes from her fingers. "It's probably nothing. Just... sometimes I feel like there's something in the shadows. Something old. Do you ever feel that?"

I felt it every moment of every day. The shadows were my home. But I could not tell her that.

"Ashthorne is an old place," I said carefully. "Old places have memories."

She nodded, her expression thoughtful. "That's exactly it. Memories. It's like the buildings are holding their breath, waiting for something." She looked at me then, her gaze suddenly sharper. "Do you believe in the supernatural, Sera?"

The question was so direct, so unexpected, that I almost flinched. Almost.

"Why do you ask?"

"I don't know. You just... you have this energy. Like you're not quite from here. Like you know things the rest of us don't."

I held her gaze. "Perhaps I do."

She smiled — not nervously, but with genuine delight. "See? That's why I like you. Most people would say 'don't be silly' or 'ghosts aren't real.' You just... admit it. Or you don't deny it. It's refreshing."

Refreshing. No one had ever called me refreshing before. Dangerous, yes. Cold, certainly. Monster, often. But refreshing was new.

I found that I did not dislike it.

---

We stayed in the café for an hour. Ivy talked. I listened. She did not seem to mind the imbalance. She filled the silences with stories and questions I deflected with careful non-answers. She was a healer, I realised. Not in the literal sense — she was not a medic or a mage — but in the way she approached the world. She saw broken things and wanted to mend them. She saw lonely people and wanted to sit beside them. She saw me, cold and still and armoured, and had decided I was worth the effort.

I did not know whether to be touched or terrified.

Both, perhaps.

When we parted outside the café, the morning had given way to a grey afternoon. Clouds gathered over the spires of Ashthorne, promising rain. Ivy tucked her sketchbook under her arm and smiled at me — a full, warm smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes.

"Same time next week?" she asked. "Assuming you don't get tired of me."

I should have said no. I should have told her to find another friend, someone human, someone safe. But the word that left my lips was not the one I intended.

"Perhaps."

Her smile widened. "I'll take it."

She turned and walked away, her curls bouncing with each step. I watched her go until she disappeared around the corner of the humanities building. Then I stood alone in the grey light, the stone pulsing beneath my feet, and tried to understand what had just happened.

I had come to Earth with a mission. Retrieve the stone. Save my betrothed. Return to the Underworld. It was supposed to be simple. Cold. Clean.

But now there was a boy with storm-grey eyes who looked at me like I was worth examining. And a girl with hazel eyes who looked at me like I was worth saving. And a vampire I did not know, creeping through the night, making the same mistakes I was making.

The mission was slipping.

I was slipping.

And for the first time in two centuries, I did not know how to stop it.

---

Chapter 2: The Girl at the Window

Kael Mercer did not believe in omens.

He believed in history. In the weight of old books. In the way truth could be buried under centuries of lies and still draw blood. That was why he spent his nights in the restricted archives instead of the student bars. That was why he read bloodline genealogies while others read sports scores.

And that was why, three days after the strange girl in the library had looked through him like he was made of glass, he could not stop thinking about her.

She had given him nothing. Not her name. Not her department. Not even a flicker of warmth. She had simply stated no as if his question was beneath her, then turned and vanished into the stacks. Most people would have been offended. Kael was not most people.

He was intrigued.

There was a stillness to her that did not belong in a university library. A predator's stillness. He had seen it once before, years ago, in the eyes of a hunter who had come to his father's estate to pay respects. That man had moved like death was a language he spoke fluently. The girl in the library moved the same way.

And yet, when she had looked at him, there had been something else beneath the ice. Something almost unguarded. As if she had not expected to be seen.

He had not stopped thinking about it. It bothered him. Not because she was strange — Ashthorne was full of strange people, himself included — but because she had looked at him and he had felt, for one brief moment, like he was the one being studied. He was not used to being on the other side of the examination.

He pushed the thought aside and returned to his books. It did not stay buried for long.

---

Elizabeth came to him on a night when the rain had returned to Ashthorne.

Kael's dormitory room was small and cluttered — books stacked on every surface, a half-eaten apple browning on the windowsill, his grandmother's silver ring glinting on his desk where he had removed it to shower. He sat at his desk, a single lamp burning, turning the pages of Bloodlines of the Ancient Houses with the careful reverence of a scholar. Outside, the rain hammered the glass in uneven rhythms. It was past midnight. The campus was silent.

The knock, when it came, was not on the door.

It was on the glass.

He turned. His window was on the third floor. There was no balcony. No fire escape. Nothing but wet brick and a thirty-foot drop to the courtyard below.

And yet, a girl was crouched on the sill.

She was pale — paler than any living thing had a right to be. Her hair was dark and plastered to her skull by the rain, her eyes a deep, bruised violet that caught the lamplight and held it. She wore a thin black dress, utterly impractical for the weather. She did not smile.

Kael did not scream. He did not flinch. He simply closed his book, stood, and walked to the window.

"You're aware there's a door," he said.

"There's also a groundskeeper who smells of garlic and old oaths," she replied. Her voice was quiet, measured. "I preferred the window."

She studied him through the wet glass, her head tilted slightly. There was no flirtation in the gesture. It was the look of someone weighing a decision.

"Are you going to let me in, Kael Mercer? Or shall I sit here until the rain washes me away?"

He should have been afraid. Any sensible person would have been afraid. But Kael had spent his childhood in a house full of hunters. He knew what a vampire looked like. And this girl, with her impossible perch and her too-still breathing, was unmistakably, undeniably something not human.

But she was also waiting. Not attacking. Not threatening. Just waiting, rain streaming down her face, her violet eyes holding something he could not name.

He unlocked the window and stepped back. "Come in."

She slipped through the gap with liquid grace, landing soundlessly on his carpet. Water dripped from her dress onto the floorboards. She looked around the room with open curiosity — the books, the clutter, the silver ring on the desk. Her gaze snagged on the ring for a moment. Something flickered in her expression. Recognition, maybe. Or memory. Then it was gone.

"Cozy," she said.

"You didn't answer my question. There's a door. You chose the window. Why?"

She moved past him, trailing her fingers along the spines of his books without quite touching them. Bloodlines of the Ancient Houses. The Hunter Codices. A Genealogy of the Silver Orders. Her expression did not change, but her hand stilled on the last one.

"You read dangerous things, Kael Mercer."

"I read true things."

"No such thing." She turned to face him. In the lamplight, her eyes were darker than before, and far older than her face suggested. "Every book on this shelf was written by the victors. The hunters. Tell me — have you ever wondered what the hunted have to say?"

He was silent. The rain filled the space between them.

"Why are you here?" he asked finally.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, very quietly, "Because you're the first person in a long time who looked at something dangerous and didn't immediately reach for a weapon. I wanted to know if that was courage or stupidity."

"And?"

"I haven't decided yet."

She moved toward the window. The rain had softened to a drizzle, mist curling against the glass like breath.

"Will you come again?" he asked.

The question surprised him. He had not meant to say it. It hung in the air between them, too honest, too unguarded. He did not take it back.

She paused, one hand on the sill. Without turning, she said, "Do you want me to?"

He did not answer. But he did not say no.

She glanced back at him then — just once. No smile. No wink. Just a look that held something heavier than he understood.

"Perhaps."

She slipped into the night, and the shadows drank her shape.

Kael stood alone in the lamplight, the scent of rain and something older lingering in the air. He looked at his books. At the ring on his desk. At the wet footprints on the floor.

He sat down heavily and did not read a single word for the rest of the night.

Sleep did not come. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her — not the girl at the window, but the one from the library. The cold one. The one who had looked at him like he mattered, then walked away like he didn't. And now this new girl, this Elizabeth, had appeared with her quiet questions and her too-knowing eyes.

What did she mean, dangerous things? What did she know about the books he was reading? And why had she looked at his grandmother's ring like it had burned her?

He had no answers. Only the rain, and the silence, and the growing sense that his life had just become far more complicated than he had ever intended.

---

Across the quadrangle, in the darkness of her dormitory room, Sera Nocturne stood at her window and watched the rain.

She had felt it. A ripple in the night. Underworld blood, close — far too close. She had risen from her chair, senses flaring, ready to kill whatever had dared enter her territory. The scent was faint but unmistakable. A vampire. Female. Young, by Underworld standards. And she had lingered near the east dormitory, near his window.

Sera's hands tightened on the windowsill.

She did not know the vampire's name. She did not know her purpose. But she had tracked the girl's movement — not toward violence, but toward stillness. A long pause at Kael's window. A conversation, perhaps. And then a departure, swift and silent, leaving only the faint trace of something that felt, impossibly, like loneliness.

Sera understood loneliness. She had worn it like armour for two centuries. But she did not trust it in others. Loneliness made people reckless. Loneliness made people talk.

If this vampire girl spoke to Kael — if she told him things she should not — the mission would be compromised. The stone would slip further from Sera's grasp. And Kael would be in danger.

Kael.

The name surfaced in her mind before she could stop it. She had not spoken to him since the library. She had not allowed herself to seek him out. But she had watched him, once or twice, from a distance. The way he walked across the quad with his hands in his pockets and his head slightly down. The way he paused to let others pass on the footpaths. The way he laughed — a brief, unguarded sound that transformed his whole face and made something in her chest constrict.

She crushed the memory before it could take root.

The vampire girl had looked at Kael. Sera had felt it through the brick and glass — a flicker of something that was not hunger. It was the same way Sera had looked at him in the library. Curiosity. Interest. The first dangerous thread of attachment.

And that, more than any assassin's blade, made her dangerous.

Because Sera was no longer certain the mission was the only thing at stake.

She closed her eyes. The stone pulsed beneath the earth, a low and constant drumbeat. The hunters patrolled the chapel grounds with silver blades and generations of hatred. And somewhere in the rain, a vampire girl who should have been an enemy had just made the same error Sera was making.

She was getting too close to the humans she was supposed to ignore.

Sera opened her eyes and stared at her reflection in the rain-streaked glass. A predator stared back, cold and composed. But beneath the surface, something had shifted. Something she could not name and would not acknowledge.

She pulled the curtains shut and returned to the dark.

Tomorrow, she would find out who the girl was. Tomorrow, she would assess the threat. Tomorrow, she would do what needed to be done.

Tonight, she stood in the silence and tried not to think about grey eyes and a laugh that lit up the rain.

---

SYNOPSIS:
"The Underworld did not weep for departing daughters."

Princess Sera Nocturne is sent to the human world on a dangerous mission: retrieve the legendary Somnium Stone from Ashthorne University to save her comatose fiancé and secure her mother's throne. But the university is crawling with deadly vampire hunters, ancient secrets, and distractions she never prepared for.

Sera is a predator in a garden of prey... but what happens when she becomes the one being hunted?

Genre: Dark Vampire Romance, Supernatural, Intrigue
Updates: Daily!

---

CROWN OF CRIMSON SHADOWS

Chapter 1: The Weight of Leaving

The Underworld did not weep for departing daughters.

It was a lesson I had learned before I could walk. Before I understood that the cold marble halls of the Obsidian Throne were not a home but a forge. Before I knew that love, in the mouth of my mother the Empress, was a word that meant obedience. Before Dorian Vane placed a ring on my finger and a lie in my chest.

I stood now at the threshold of the Gate of Echoes, the black stone arch that separated the realm of the dead from the living world above. The air here tasted of iron and old incense. Behind me, the court had gathered in silent judgment — rows of ancient vampires in silks and shadows, their faces unreadable, their hunger for politics sharper than any fang.

My mother stood at the front. Empress Morgana Vane, ruler of the Crimson Seat, wearer of the Crown of Ashes. Her hair was the colour of winter moonlight, her eyes the same blood-red as mine, but colder. She did not embrace me. She simply inclined her head.

"Retrieve the Somnium Stone," she said, her voice carrying the weight of two centuries of rule. "Dorian's family claims it can break his curse. Bring it to them. Secure the alliance. Do not fail."

Do not fail. Not come home safe. Not I will miss you. Just a command, dressed in the illusion of maternal concern.

I bowed, as protocol demanded. "Yes, Empress."

She turned away before I rose. The court followed, their robes whispering against the obsidian floor. Within moments, I was alone with Lilith, my royal guard and the only soul in this realm who had ever looked at me with something other than expectation.

Lilith stepped close. Her dark hair was pulled tight, her armour scuffed from a lifetime of service. She had trained me, bled beside me, and never once flinched at my rage. Now, her eyes held a flicker of something rare: worry.

"You know this mission stinks of Dorian's design," she said quietly. "The stone has been lost for centuries. Guarded by creatures even our historians fear. And suddenly, now, they know where it is?"

I had thought the same. But what choice did I have? The alliance between our houses hung on this. Dorian's slumber was no natural thing — a wasting curse, the court physicians claimed, one that the Somnium Stone might reverse. Or so his family insisted. If there was a chance, however thin, I was bound by duty to take it.

"If there is a chance," I said, "I must."

Lilith's jaw tightened. "And if it's a trap?"

I met her eyes. "Then I will spring it, and I will survive. As I always have."

She said nothing. She only pressed something into my palm — a small silver ring, unadorned, warm from her skin. "Old magic," she murmured. "It will hide your scent from lesser hunters. It won't stop a blade, but it might buy you a heartbeat."

I slipped it onto my finger. It fit perfectly. "Thank you."

She stepped back, her formal mask returning. "Return, Princess. The Underworld needs at least one ruler with a functioning heart."

I almost smiled. Almost.

Then I turned and walked through the Gate.

---

The transition was violence.

My body was unmade and remade between one breath and the next. Bone, blood, memory — all stretched across an impossible distance and snapped back into form. I landed on my knees in wet grass, gasping, the air of Earth flooding my lungs like shards of glass.

Cold. That was my first awareness. Not the dry, ancient cold of the Underworld, but a living chill — damp, restless, full of the scent of growing things. Rain. Soil. Something flowering in the dark.

I raised my head.

I had arrived in a forest clearing. The Gate stood behind me, a crumbling stone arch overgrown with moss and ivy. To any human eye, it would seem a ruin, nothing more. I pushed myself to my feet and let my senses extend.

The city was not far. I could hear the distant hum of traffic, the electric song of streetlights, the muffled heartbeat of millions of sleeping humans. And somewhere, faint but unmistakable, I felt the stone. A low, pulsing thrum deep underground, like a second heartbeat buried beneath the earth.

It was here. The mission had truly begun.

I allowed myself one moment to feel the weight of it. Then I smoothed the wrinkles from my coat, straightened my spine, and began to walk.

---

Ashthorne University sat on the edge of the city like a fortress of ivy and ambition. Its spires clawed at the grey sky, its courtyards gleamed with wet cobblestones, and its libraries smelled of dust and secrets. By the time I walked through the iron gates, the sun had begun its slow descent, painting the clouds in shades of bruise.

I had been given a student identity: Sera Nocturne, scholarship candidate, transfer from a private institution abroad. My documents were flawless. My dormitory room was sparse but adequate — a single window overlooking the eastern quadrangle, a narrow bed, a desk. I would not sleep in that bed. I had not truly slept in eighty years.

The first few days passed in careful observation. I attended lectures, sat in the back of halls filled with chattering humans, and mapped the university's geography. The stone's signal was strongest beneath the old chapel, where access was restricted. Vampire hunters guarded it — I could smell them, their blood bitter with ancient oaths and silver poisoning. They posed as groundskeepers, as librarians, as harmless old men. They were not harmless.

I would have to kill some of them eventually. The thought did not trouble me.

But what I had not prepared for — what no Underworld briefing could have accounted for — was the weight of human presence. Their laughter. Their casual touch. The way they slouched in their chairs and complained about deadlines and fell in love over coffee in the student lounge. They wore their mortality like a loose garment, unbothered by its fragility.

It fascinated me. It repelled me. I refused to name the ache beneath my ribs. To name it was to admit the possibility of need, and I had never needed anything but survival.

---

The first time I saw him, it was raining.

I had taken shelter in the main library — a Gothic monstrosity of dark wood and vaulted ceilings, lit by amber lamps that cast long shadows between the shelves. I was tracing the stone's signal, my fingers brushing the spines of books that had not been touched in decades, when I felt it.

Not the stone. A heartbeat.

Steady. Strong. Closer than expected.

I turned the corner and found him.

He was seated at a table near the restricted archives, surrounded by books on mythology and blood rites. His dark hair fell across his forehead in unkempt waves. His jaw was sharp, his shoulders broad beneath a worn leather jacket, his fingers stained with ink. He was utterly absorbed in his reading, unaware of my presence.

But then he looked up.

His eyes were storm-grey, the colour of lightning over a winter sea. They met mine without flinching, without the instinctive deference humans usually showed me. He simply looked, as if he saw something worth examining.

"Lost?" he asked. His voice was quiet but not soft. There was weight to it.

I did not blink. "No."

A pause. His gaze held mine a moment longer than politeness required. Then the corner of his mouth lifted — not quite a smile, but something close.

"Most people get lost their first week. The library's designed to confuse."

"I am not most people."

He closed his book, and I caught the title: Bloodlines of the Ancient Houses. A history of vampire hunter lineages. My pulse, slow as it was, flickered.

"That's an unusual choice of reading," I said.

His eyes flicked to the book, then back to me. "I like unusual things."

There was no suspicion in his voice. No recognition. He was just a human who found my stillness interesting, my coldness novel. He did not know what I was. He could not.

I turned and walked away without another word.

Behind me, I heard him exhale — something between a laugh and a sigh. I did not look back.

---

The assassin came three nights later.

I was walking the perimeter of the eastern quadrangle, tracking a hunter who had lingered too long near the chapel, when I caught the scent. Underworld blood. Old lineage. Not court-sanctioned — this was a hired blade, likely sent by one of Dorian's rivals to weaken the alliance before it could be sealed.

It did not matter who sent him. He was here to kill me. That was enough.

I let him follow me into the shadows behind the old music hall, where the streetlights did not reach. He was fast, I granted him that. A blur of pale skin and curved blades, aiming for my throat with the precision of a trained executioner.

I caught his wrist mid-swing. The bones shattered under my grip. He gasped, and I used the sound to locate his heart.

I did not feed on him. I simply ended him, quickly and quietly. His body turned to ash before it hit the ground, scattered by the wind into the roots of an ancient oak.

I stood in the silence, my breathing even, my hands clean. And I realised, with a cold clarity, that I was not merely a princess on a mission. I was a predator in a garden of prey.

No one had seen. No one would know.

But as I turned to leave, I caught a movement in a third-floor window of the art building across the quad. A silhouette — slight, with curls catching the faint moonlight. She was not looking at me. She was painting, her brush moving in slow, deliberate strokes, entirely unaware of the violence that had just occurred.

I did not know her name yet. I would learn it soon.

For now, I simply watched her for a moment. The way she tilted her head. The way she bit her lip in concentration. The way the lamplight haloed her hair.

Something stirred. I did not acknowledge it. I turned away before I could name what I saw.

Then I walked into the dark, and the night swallowed me whole.

---

End of Chapter 1

Did you enjoy the first chapter? Please drop your comments, thoughts, and predictions below! Chapter 2 will be posted tomorrow!

Warning: This is a dark vampire romance. Expect strong themes, possessive characters, and heavy drama. Updates will be daily!