Chapter 2

VANDA

The shape across the street was gone by the time I made it out the door.

I stood in the rain scanning both directions, every sense stretched thin, and found nothing but wet pavement and a stray cat bolting under a parked car. Whoever it was knew how to disappear. That told me something. Humans do not vanish that clean.

I walked the block twice anyway, slow, counting doorways, counting shadows. Nothing. Whoever had been watching that door was gone, and that was worse than if they had stayed.

I did not go back inside. There was nothing left to order that would explain why a stranger sat with an untouched whiskey for twenty minutes and then bolted into a storm. I found a doorway across the street instead, deep enough to keep the rain off, close enough to keep the bar in view, and I stood there the rest of the night like I had stood in a hundred other doorways watching a hundred other targets.

Except this was not a target. This was a woman who was supposed to be two centuries of ash.

I ran her name through every channel I still had access to once I was back at the flat I had rented under a name that was not mine. Iana Zainab. Bank account opened six years ago. Lease signed six years ago. No school records. No family listed anywhere. No birth certificate that led anywhere real. A woman who simply began existing the year everything else in my life had gone quiet.

Six years. I sat with that number a long time.

Six years ago I had been in Prague, closing out a job that had nearly killed me, and I remembered waking up in a cheap hotel room certain something in the world had shifted, though I could never say what. I had written it off as exhaustion. I had written off a lot of things as exhaustion.

I did not sleep that night. I watched the bar's lights go dark one by one until only the back room stayed lit, and I told myself I was watching for the shape that had been standing in the rain.

That was not entirely the truth.

IANA

Closing time always feels different in the rain.

Xena left first, jogging for the bus with her jacket over her head, shouting something back at me about locking the second bolt because the first one sticks. I told her I would, and I meant it, and then I stood behind the bar a long minute after she was gone, doing nothing, listening to nothing, feeling like the room was waiting for something I could not name.

The stranger's glass was still sitting where he left it. Whiskey untouched. Rain still clinging to the shoulders of his coat when he walked out without a word, without paying, without so much as a nod goodnight.

I should have been angry about that. Mostly I kept staring at the empty stool.

I told myself it was nothing while I wiped down the bar top, rinsed glasses, counted the till twice because I had lost count the first time. My hands were doing all the right motions and my mind was somewhere else entirely, back at his face, the particular way he had looked at me like he was bracing for something to happen.

Locking up, I caught my reflection in the dark window glass, and for one strange second the reflection did not look like mine. Not different exactly. Older somehow, tired in a way that had nothing to do with a long shift. I blinked and it was gone, just me, just tired eyes and rain-damp hair.

The walk home was fifteen minutes if I hurried. I hurried.

The streets were empty the way Dublin gets after midnight in a downpour, orange light pooling in puddles, my own footsteps the loudest thing for blocks. I told myself the prickling at the back of my neck was the cold. I have told myself a lot of things over the years and mostly they turn out to be true.

This one did not feel true.

I stopped once, halfway down Merchant's Lane, certain I had heard a second set of footsteps fall out of rhythm with mine. I turned. Nothing. Just rain hammering an empty street, a cat's eyes catching light from a window somewhere above, my own breath fogging in front of me.

I kept walking, faster now, keys already out and gripped between my fingers the way my father taught me before he died, though even that memory felt strange tonight, like it belonged to someone standing slightly behind me instead of inside me.

By the time I reached my building I was almost running.

I got the door locked behind me and stood in the dark hallway with my back against it, breathing hard, feeling foolish. It was rain. It was a long shift and a strange customer and an overactive imagination.

I climbed the stairs to my flat, let myself in, and did not turn on the lights right away. I stood at the window instead, looking down at the empty street, at the rain-slicked pavement where nothing at all was standing.

Nothing was standing there.

And then, for just a moment, under the broken streetlamp on the corner, something was.

Tall. Still. Facing my window like it had been waiting for me to look.

I did not blink. I could not make myself blink. And when I finally forced my eyes shut for one second, one single second, and opened them again, the street below was empty.

I told myself that was better.

It did not feel better. My hands were shaking too hard to find the light switch, and somewhere behind my ribs a voice that was not quite my own whispered that I knew that shape, that I had seen it before, in a place with no electric light at all.