Blood of Midnight

by DevotedSub

Chapter 1: The Man Who Only Comes at Night

Isolde Vane worked the hours the rest of the city threw away.

Midnight to five, mostly, in a studio above a closed florist's shop on Marlowe Street, where the rent was cheap because the windows leaked cold air and the radiators clanked like something chained in the basement. She drew tarot cards for a living — not the slick mass-market kind, but heavy hand-inked things on black cotton paper, the Queens all sharp-eyed women, the Devils all beautiful men. Her clients found her online and never asked why she only answered messages after dark. The night was her country. She had lived in it so long she couldn't remember feeling at home anywhere else.

She had always felt watched by the dark, and she had always liked it.

That was the thing she never said out loud. The other girls she grew up with had been afraid of the dark — the real dark, the kind past the streetlights, the kind that gathered in the corners of the woods behind the school. Isolde had never been. When she was eight she used to sneak out of her bedroom and sit on the back porch in the small hours, listening to the night sounds, feeling looked at by something patient and far away, and she had felt — she had never found a better word — accompanied. Whatever watched her never wanted anything from her. It only wanted her to be there.

So she noticed, in the autumn of her twenty-seventh year, when the watching changed.

It started in October, the week the maples along Marlowe Street turned and dropped everything at once, so the gutter ran red-gold with wet leaves. She was inking the Ten of Swords — her favorite card to draw, all that beautiful theatrical betrayal — when she looked up at three in the morning, the way you do when a draft crosses your neck, and saw him.

Across the street, under the dead streetlamp at the corner of Marlowe and Ninth, a man was standing and watching her window.

Tall. Taller than the doorway behind him, though she couldn't have said by how much. A long black coat, collar up. Dark hair, long, not moving in the wind that was moving everything else. And he was utterly, unnaturally still — the kind of stillness she'd only ever seen in perched ravens, in the moment before they decided to move. He faced her building directly. His head was tilted back just slightly, and she knew, with a certainty that sat cold in her stomach, that he was looking at her lit window. At her.