Page 32 of Of Faith and Fangs

Afterward, wiping blood from my chin, I caught Silas watching me with that same calculated approval.

“Better,” he said. “Quicker this time. Less hesitation.”

I turned away, disgusted with him, with myself. “Was she really a witch?”

“She was practicing unnatural arts,” Silas said, but he didn’t meet my eyes. “Again, Nightwalker. The Order doesn’t make mistakes.”

Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. One thing was obvious—they didn’t care about mistakes.

That night, I dreamed of Daddy’s church. In the dream, I knelt at the altar with bleeding knees, but no matter how hard I prayed, God remained silent. The crucifix on the wall bled, and when I looked down, I realized I was drinking the blood and water that dripped from Christ’s wounded side.

I woke screaming, my throat raw, my pillow wet with bloody tears.

What a vile image. What did it mean? Had I really descended so far that even my dreams had embraced sacrilege?

December found us in a decrepit farmhouse miles from the nearest town. Snow had begun to fall, muffling the world in white silence. Our breaths—Silas’s breath—formed clouds in the frigid air. Mine formed nothing, another reminder of what I’d become.

“This one’s dangerous,” Silas warned as we trudged through knee-deep snow. “A practitioner of blood magic.”

I almost laughed at the irony. What was I, if not a practitioner of blood magic in the most literal sense?

The farmhouse stood abandoned in a sea of white, its weathered clapboards gray against the snow. One window glowed with faint candlelight. As we approached, I caught the scent of human fear—now familiar, now anticipated.

“Remember,” Silas said, “the Order expects results. Your redemption depends on your service.”

The pattern had become clear through repetition. Find a solitary woman. Declare her a witch based on circumstantial evidence. Force her to defend herself. Spill her blood. Watch me feed. Get out of there and wait for some unknown lackeys of the Order of the Morning Dawn to show up before first-light to burn the evidence.

We broke down the door together. The woman inside was elderly, her white hair loose around her shoulders, her hands steady as she faced us. Someone had drawn a pentagram on the floor in what looked like animal blood.

“Proof,” Silas hissed, gesturing at the symbol.

But I’d seen enough now to doubt.

The old woman’s eyes widened at my words. “I didn’t do that!” she insisted. “Please—I left to get medicine to help my granddaughter, and this was here when I returned. The consumption took my daughter last spring, and now the child shows symptoms.”

Silas didn’t wait for more explanations. He lunged forward, his dagger slashing across the woman’s arm. Blood sprayed in an arc across the room, splattering the rough wooden walls.

“Alice!” the woman cried. The use of my name rather than ‘Nightwalker’ arrested my attention. “I know who you truly are. You prayed for the sick. You helped them. Please—“

But her words faded beneath the roaring in my ears. The blood called to me, a siren song I couldn’t resist. I fell upon her with the hunger of the damned, drinking until there was nothing left but an empty shell and my own echoing shame.

Silas’s hand fell on my shoulder as I crouched over the body. “Good,” he said, and the satisfaction in his voice was no longer disguised. “You’re learning efficiency.”

I pushed his hand away and stumbled outside into the falling snow. The pure white flakes sizzled as they landed on my blood-warmed skin. I fell to my knees, the cold seeping through my skirts, and tried to pray despite knowing it was futile.

“Forgive me,” I whispered to a God who no longer heard me, enduring the pain my prayers rightfully earned. “Save me.”

Back in my quarters, I sat motionless for hours, staring at my reflection in the small mirror on the wall. My face was unchanged from my human days—though my deep blue eyes had turned red, I had the same sleek brown hair, the same features Daddy had called “a map of your mother’s goodness.” But now those features masked a monster.

Three months since my transformation. Three months of hunting for the Order. And what had it brought me but deeper damnation? Each kill had been justified with the promise of redemption, but I was no closer to salvation than when I’d started.

Memory rose unbidden: Mama teaching me to bandage wounds when I was barely ten years old. “The Lord works through willing hands,” she’d said, guiding my small fingers to tie a neat knot. “Sometimes grace is as simple as easing another’s pain.”

I hadn’t eased pain. I’d ended lives. And for what? For an Order that used me as a weapon? For a man who manipulated my hunger for his own purposes?

Another memory: Daddy reading from Proverbs by lamplight. “My child, if sinners entice you, do not consent.”

Too late, Daddy. Far too late.

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