Page 28 of Of Faith and Fangs

All gone now. My father murdered on our doorstep. My mother long in her grave. The church forever closed to me—its prayers like knives, its crosses like fire. The world I’d known was as dead as the creature in my hand, and I couldn’t even weep for its passing.

I tried. Standing there in the moonlit forest, I tried to cry for all I’d lost. I felt the grief, the overwhelming sorrow, but no tears would come. My dead body refused this final human release.

“Dear God,” I whispered, flinching at the pain the words caused, “what am I now?”

The forest offered no answer. The stars continued their cold burning, indifferent to my suffering. The wind carried no message, no comfort. I was alone in my damnation.

I looked down at my hands—pale, strong, stained with the opossum’s blood. They were trembling, not from exertion or cold, but from the weight of understanding. These hands would kill again. These hands would never again fold in prayer without agony. These hands were no longer human.

Taking a deep breath I didn’t need, I turned back toward where Silas waited. The path was clear to me, marked in scent and memory, a straight line through the tangled woods. I followed it, the opossum’s body swinging at my side, each step taking me further from the girl I’d been and deeper into the darkness I’d become.

The night embraced me, claimed me as its own. And somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard Mercy Brown laughing.

Chapter 13

The forest held its breath as we approached the cabin. Shadows stretched like reaching hands across the forest floor, and somewhere, a crow called out a warning. I followed Silas’s broad back, my footfalls silent where his boots crushed the underbrush. Three months since my transformation, and still I marveled at the way my body moved—like water, like wind—divorced from the clumsy humanity I’d once known. The cabin’s rotting beams emerged through the trees, and my nostrils flared at the mingled scents of mildew, wood smoke, and the unmistakable musk of human fear.

“She knows we’re coming,” I whispered.

Silas didn’t turn. “It doesn’t matter.”

The dusk light filtered through pine needles, painting everything in shades of blue and gray. My eyes—once merely human—now registered every variation of shadow, every subtle movement. A mouse scurried beneath fallen leaves twenty yards to my left. The heartbeat of a rabbit pounded from somewhere behind us. And ahead, in that dilapidated cabin with its sagging porch and broken windows, a human heart fluttered like a trapped bird.

I swallowed hard against the thirst that rose unbidden. Three months wasn’t long enough to master this new hunger. Three months of prayers that burned my tongue, of crosses that seared my vision, of holy water that raised welts on my skin. Three months of Silas’s stern guidance and the Order’s rigid training.

Three months since Mercy Brown had turned me, then vanished into the night.

“Focus,” Silas said, as if reading my thoughts. “Remember your purpose.”

My purpose. To hunt those who wielded dark powers. To protect humanity from supernatural threats. To atone for what I had become by destroying others like me. Not necessarily vampires, but any who traversed the path of darkness. The Order of the Morning Dawn had found me wild with grief and hunger, offering structure and redemption when I’d lost everything else. My life, my prayers, my father.

The irony wasn’t lost on me—I had gone from praying over the sick and the lost to becoming something that fed on them.

We paused at the edge of the clearing. The cabin stood before us, a black silhouette against the darkening sky. One window glowed with feeble lamplight. The roof had partially collapsed on the western side, and the porch listed dangerously to the right. Nature was reclaiming it inch by inch—moss crept up the walls, and a young birch had sprouted through the steps.

Silas turned to me, his face half-hidden in shadow. The scar along his jaw looked deeper in this light, a permanent reminder of some past violence.

“The witch has been practicing for months,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Six children have fallen ill in the nearby town. Two are already dead.”

I nodded, forcing myself to focus on the mission rather than the way his pulse beat steadily in his throat. Silas was safe from me—he had some kind of talisman, something he refused to show me, that repelled me if I touched him—but the awareness of his blood never quite left me.

“The Order has tracked her movements since winter,” he continued. “She trades with local farmers, offering charms and potions. She’s been seen gathering herbs by moonlight and speaking to animals.”

“Speaking to animals isn’t witchcraft,” I mumbled.

Silas’s eyes hardened. “Don’t start doubting now, Nightwalker. We have testimony from a farmer’s wife who saw her dancing naked in this clearing, surrounded by floating lights. We have a child’s corpse with strange markings carved into its skin.”

I looked away. How was I supposed to know if this evidence was true, or if Silas was making it up on the spot? “What’s our plan?”

“I’ll take the lead. You’ll follow. If she attempts to escape, you’ll intercept her.” His hand moved to the silver dagger at his belt, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the ornate hilt. The blade had been blessed by the Order’s chaplain—lethal to both witches and vampires. “If she begins an incantation, I’ll silence her immediately.”

“And if she’s innocent?” The question slipped out before I could stop it.

Silas’s expression didn’t change. “The Order doesn’t make mistakes, Alice.”

But they did. Of course they did. I’d heard of witch trials elsewhere in Massachusetts, but Silas and the Order didn’t even bother with fake juries and judges. They gathered the evidence and rendered a verdict and a sentence without giving the accused much chance to respond at all.

“Remember,” Silas said, sensing reluctance in my silence, “this is your path to salvation. Each witch we stop, each vampire or witch we destroy—it cleanses you a little more in the eyes of God.”

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