Chapter 1: The Burning Vigil
The grass was black, and it cut their bare feet. Not like blades, but like cold, wet teeth. Every step sank into the ground, which gave way like rotted flesh. Above them, the moon wasn’t white. It was a raw, unblushing crimson, a gouged wound in a sky the color of a bruise.
Paul looked down at his own hands, saw the dirt grimed under his nails from where he’d been clawing at the earth. His clerical robe was tattered, hanging open. The cold air prickled against skin that was and wasn’t his. The curve of his breasts, the familiar, vulnerable dip between his legs—all of it exposed under the torn fabric, all of it feeling grotesquely real in the dream’s hyper-clarity. He wasn’t a man. He wasn’t a woman. He was an error, kneeling in the filth.
A hundred yards away, Jud stood as if rooted. His own robe was in no better state. He held a crucifix, its silver smoking faintly in his palm, the skin around it blistering and angry. He didn’t seem to feel the burn. His eyes, wide and blue and haunted, were fixed not on the dying god in his hand, but on the church in the distance.
Its spires were sharp against the bleeding sky, wrapped in silent, golden flame. No crackle of wood, no roar of collapse. Just a pervasive, holy heat that warped the air. The stained-glass windows had burst outward, leaving jagged shards that reflected movement—not their own, but frantic, weeping faces they almost recognized.
Then the screams began. Not from the church. From the plain, somewhere in the deep, choked dark behind them.
They turned.
Figures moved in the gloom. Fledglings. That was the word that dropped into Paul’s mind, cold and sure. Newborns. They moved with a jerking, frantic speed, all hunger and no grace. He saw one fall upon a struggling shape, heard the wet, rending sound, the high shriek that was cut off into a gurgle. The coppery stench of blood bloomed on the wind, and Paul’s mouth flooded with an acid-sweet longing. His canines throbbed, a sharp, insistent pressure against his lower lip.
He pressed his tongue against them, felt the points. Fear, cold and slick, coiled in his gut.
“No,” he whispered, but the wind stole it.
Jud took a step backward, his bare heel crushing a brittle stalk of black grass. He was watching the fledglings feast, his face a mask of horror and a dreadful, understanding pity. The crucifix sizzled louder. This was a slaughterhouse. A farm. The humans were cattle, and the young vampires were gorging, turning the plain into a wet, red chaos.
Paul’s hunger rose, a second heartbeat in his throat. It would be so easy. To let go. To join the riot. To be full for the first time in his cursed existence. The idea, the sheer magnetic pull of it, made him sway on his feet.
A voice cut through the cacophony. It wasn’t the wind.
It was the moon.
It whispered, a vibration in the marrow of their bones, in the roots of their teeth. Paul Hill. The sound was accusatory, a judge reading a sentence. Jud Duplenticy.
Paul’s head snapped up. Jud flinched as if struck.
The crimson light seemed to coagulate around them, pinning them in place. The moon was no longer just a thing in the sky. It was an eye. And it had seen them. Named them.
Players, the moon-voice sighed, a sound of dry, endless desert. You have entered the field.
Jud’s gaze finally tore from the carnage and found Paul’s across the distance. The space between them crackled with shared horror. Paul saw the gentle lines of Jud’s face twisted into a kind of agonized resolve. He saw the burned hand, the smoking cross. He saw the body that mirrored his own contradiction—the masculine frame housing the soft, life-giving curves, now just another source of shame under the glaring, bloody eye.
Jud was looking at him, and Paul knew what he saw. A monster barely leashed. A priest with fangs. A lover of a man named Riley, a love that felt damnable and divine and was currently the only tether keeping him from sprinting into the dark to feed.
In Jud’s eyes, Paul read his own trial reflected back: You will become this. You will be one of them.
And in Jud’s eyes, Paul saw Jud’s own terror, clear as scripture: I will fail. Everyone I love will die here, and I will be helpless.
The understanding passed between them in an instant, wordless and absolute. This wasn’t just a dream. It was a blueprint. A prophecy written in fire and blood and whispers.
Another scream, closer now. A fledgling, its mouth a red slick, had lifted its head. It was looking at them.
The moon’s pressure intensified. The game is older than your god. It will destroy you. It will digest your faith and your love and wear your skin.
Paul stared at Jud. He committed the lines of his face, the set of his jaw, the specific blue of his eyes in this hell-light, to memory. This other broken priest. This other mistake. This ally.
Jud did the same, his gaze sweeping over Paul, a quick, desperate inventory.
The fledgling took a stumbling step in their direction. Then another. Its hunger shifted, focusing.
Now, the moon whispered, you wake.
Paul Hill woke with a gasp that tore at his throat.
His hands flew to his chest, to his stomach, patting down the rough, clean fabric of his intact black shirt, his clerical collar tight against his neck. He was in his narrow bed in the small rectory on Crockett Island. Pale, pre-dawn grey light filtered through the window. The sheets were tangled around his legs, damp with cold sweat.
His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. His mouth was dry, but his fangs were retracted. No blood. No screams. Just the distant, peaceful sound of waves on the shore.
He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, and buried his face in his trembling hands. The image of the other priest—Jud—burned behind his eyelids. The terror. The recognition.
It was just a dream. A figment of his tormented imagination.
But the taste of hunger, the feel of the black grass under his feet, the accusatory whisper of the moon… they clung to him, more real than the quiet room around him.
Across the country, in a different quiet room, Jud Duplenticy jolted upright.
A soft cry escaped him. He clutched his right hand. The palm was smooth, unburned. No crucifix. The other side of the bed was empty, cool. Benoit was away on a case.
He was breathing too fast. He fumbled for the small, simple cross on his bedside table, his fingers closing around the cool wood. He brought it to his lips, not to kiss it, but to feel its solid reality.
The dream replayed behind his eyes. The burning church. The feeding things. Paul Hill. The name was unfamiliar, but the face… the intense, dark eyes, the anguish barely contained… he knew it as surely as he knew his own.
He had seen a man like him. A priest like him. Cursed like him.
And he had seen the war coming for them both.
Jud sat in the growing light, the wood of the cross pressed to his forehead, and prayed. Not for deliverance, not anymore. He prayed for strength. Because the dream wasn’t just a warning.
It was an invitation to a fight. And the face of the other priest was the only compass point he had.