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I press my fingers onto the papers to prevent them from flying away and look up from my desk. The candles flicker out, plunging my cottage into darkness, but I can see the doctor clearly.

“A month,” I repeat, panic making my mouth taste sour. Four weeks of absolution until I have to sin again.

Until I have to kill again.

I hope my voice doesn’t betray the despair inside me, twisting into acidic knots, but Abe’s expression softens, and I know he can smell my fear.

“You knew I had to leave,” he says gently as he slowly crosses the room. “I can only keep you company and do your…dirty work for so long.”

The dirty work. That is my term for my appetite. Abe uses more innocuous words: our instincts. Our hunger. Our drive. As a doctor, he looks at our affliction as merely that: something that had befallen us, like a disease, to be dealt with matter-of-factly. But Abe isn’t like me, not exactly. He was born with an appetite for blood. I wasn’t. I was born human. I had a family, a future.

I had a soul…until I didn’t.

“There are others,” Abe says as he stands by my desk, his fingers tracing the gold-foiled script stamped on the Holy Bible. “The last correspondence from the monastery said it resembles an epidemic. More of your kind have been created in a surge of violence. Some of them were witches, such as yourself.”

“By him? By Kaleid?” I whisper. Saying his name causes my heart to race, even after all this time.

The doctor stares at me for a moment, as if weighing the truth, then nods once. “I fear it may be worse than I originally thought, and my expertise is needed. They can’t be allowed to roam. They must be rehabilitated. They must be saved. You know there is a word for us now? The humans are catching on. They call us Vampyres.”

“Vampyres,” I repeat. The word seems fitting.

“There are people at the monastery…” I begin, but I trail off because there is no one like the doctor. I knew he wouldn’t be down here with me at the bottom of the world forever, but when he stepped off the ship eight months ago, I had hoped he would stay at least a couple of years.

Yet I know there is nothing for him here, nothing but me, and I’m not good company. My job is to become the voice for God in this cold, barren, windswept region, to provide both faith and guidance for the settlers who have been stationed here in Nombre de Jesus by command of the Governor of Chile. The people are here to prevent English privateers and pirates from taking over the Strait of Magellan, and I am here to provide salvation.

This place is supposed to be my salvation too.

But I haven’t found it yet.

“When will you be back?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, sighing again. The doctor is my oldest friend—my only friend. Abe was the one who saved me from staying a monster forever. Through his faith in me and in the rigid teachings of the monastery, the beast I became has been tucked away in the deep, black recesses of my former soul. Abe keeps me fed, keeps me pure, keeps my demons at bay.

But though I am his reason for being here, I am not his purpose in life. He has devoted his study of science and medicine to the very things science can’t explain, that medicine can’t control and magic can’t save. Through his help, the teachings of the Lord, and the discipline of the doctrine, I have turned myself back into a man. Perhaps a shell of a man, but enough that people no longer have to fear me.

And there are others like me who need his help.

So, I know he must go.

Still, it sits inside me like a spreading stain, the sense of terror and futility of what I’ll do—what I’ll become—when I’m on my own again.

“Eight months wasn’t enough,” I manage to say, my voice thick. I want to tell him more. I want to beg him not to leave me, to choose me instead of his life’s work, to let the monsters roam freely in the world so long as he can keep me sane and in his company.

Alas, even after all this time, I have my pride.

“I will be back,” Abe says, putting his hand on my shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I don’t know how long it will be, but what’s a few years when you’re immortal? You’ll have visitors in the meantime.”

He removes his hand, and I glance up at him. “Who?”

“Men such as ourselves,” he says, looking around the sparsely decorated cottage as if he’ll see something new instead of paintings of mountains and crosses on the walls.

“Men like you? Vampyres? Or monsters like me?”

He gives me a chastising look. “You’re not a monster, my priest. You are Father Aragon. You were born a man. I wasn’t.”

“That man died when my family died,” I say bitterly. “I was turned. You’ve always known of your true nature, always been in control.”

“That may be, but we both drink blood to survive, and we do so discerningly, do we not? That makes us the same in my eyes. But yes, men like myself, blood-drinkers who call themselves the Brethren of the Blood. They’re pirates who sail the high seas on their ship, the Nightwind, nicknamed by mortal men as the Ship of the Undead. They’ve made quite a name for themselves in all parts of the world, looting merchant ships and ports, hunting Syrens for their blood. It’s partly the reason they’ll be by here one day.”