It had been two weeks, but it might as well have been a lifetime. The city felt different now—colder, even as winter began its reluctant retreat. The sky hung low, leaden and heavy, pressing down on the streets like it was trying to smother any sign of life. I wandered through it, half in a daze, my head pounding with the kind of ache that didn’t come from a bottle.
I didn’t remember much of the last two weeks. Not clearly, anyway. There were flashes—cold hospital rooms, the hiss of machines, the dull hum of voices that never spoke directly to me. I kept coming back to that feeling of something being drained, as if a part of me had been siphoned off while I slept. The city itself felt like it was hemorrhaging, bleeding out through wounds nobody could see.
They said I had been found in an alley, face down in a pool of rainwater and my own blood, a bullet lodged somewhere deep where it hadn’t killed me but had come close enough to make me wish it had. They said the wound was clean—too clean, like someone who knew exactly what they were doing had put the shot there and left me to crawl my way back to consciousness.
But who pulled the trigger didn’t matter. Not anymore. What mattered was that the blood still ran in my veins, even if it wasn’t all mine. Somewhere in the fog of those two lost weeks, I’d taken in something else, something that didn’t belong to me. Godhead’s blood, or maybe the city’s, the dark pulse of the streets coursing through me like a virus.
The doctor had said I was lucky to be alive. He didn’t know the half of it.
I reached up, touched the side of my jaw where the skin still felt tight, healing around the wound that had nearly ended me. My teeth ached, like something had been lodged between them, a pain that throbbed with every beat of my heart. It felt like a hole there, a gap where something had been taken out or put in, I couldn’t tell which. The memories came back in fragments, like shards of glass I was too afraid to piece together.
Madeleine’s face flickered in and out of my mind, pale and distant, like a ghost seen from the corner of the eye. I didn’t know if she was alive, dead, or somewhere in between. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been hooked up to those machines, fighting to stay on this side of the grave. But that was two weeks ago. Anything could have happened since then.
And Achilles—where was he? The name still carried a chill, that same coldness that clung to the wound on my jaw. I could feel him out there, somewhere, like a shadow stretching across the whole city. He hadn’t disappeared. He was waiting, as always, biding his time while the rest of us stumbled through the fog he’d created.
I walked aimlessly through the streets, letting my feet carry me wherever they wanted. I found myself outside a small chapel, its wooden doors warped and cracked, the paint peeling away in long strips. I stepped inside, the air heavy with the scent of wax and dust, as if the place had been abandoned for years.
There was a man standing at the front, his back to me, dressed in a black robe. I couldn’t tell if he was a priest, a mourner, or something else altogether. He didn’t turn when I entered, didn’t acknowledge my presence. I could hear him muttering under his breath, the words indistinct, like the kind of prayer that’s spoken more for the sound than the meaning.
I moved closer, my footsteps echoing through the empty chapel. That’s when I saw it—an urn on the altar, dull and unmarked, resting in the hollow of the man’s outstretched hands. The priest turned slowly, revealing a face I didn’t recognize, but his eyes—they had that same dark sheen, that look of something that had seen too much and not enough at the same time.
“We all carry the blood,” he said, his voice low and ragged. “And we all lose it, drop by drop, until there’s nothing left.”
I stared at him, trying to piece together the words, the meaning behind them. “What’s in the urn?” I asked, though part of me didn’t want to know.
He didn’t answer right away, just lifted the urn slightly, his fingers tightening around its sides. “It’s the truth,” he said finally, “the kind that we pin to the backs of our teeth and choke on until we die.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I could feel the weight of it settling over me, heavy as a shroud. I took a step back, my eyes drifting to the urn. The thought occurred to me that it was more than just ashes in there—something darker, something that spoke to the same cold ache in my jaw, the hole that had been left behind.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice sounding distant, like it wasn’t mine.
He set the urn back down on the altar, turned his gaze back to me. “I’m no one,” he said, a hint of a smile curling his lips. “But I know who you are.”
A cold shiver ran through me. “And who’s that?”
“Someone who’s already dead,” he whispered. “You just haven’t stopped breathing yet.”
The words cut through me, sharper than the bullet that had grazed my jaw, and for a moment, I thought I could see it—Achilles, standing just beyond the light, watching. He wasn’t done. Whatever he’d done to me, whatever blood had been spilled, this was only the beginning. He was pulling me deeper into his web, one thread at a time.
I turned and walked out of the chapel, the priest’s words still ringing in my ears. Outside, the city was waking up, the gray light of dawn pushing through the cracks in the sky. But it didn’t feel like morning. It felt like the end of something, or maybe the beginning of something worse.
I touched the wound on my jaw again, felt the ache deep in my bones. There were still too many questions, too many holes in my memory. But one thing was certain: Achilles hadn’t forgotten about me. And whatever lay in the urn—whatever truth had been pinned to the teeth of the dead—it wasn’t going to stay buried for long.
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