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T he abandoned mill loomed against the moonlit sky, its broken windows like empty eye sockets in a decaying skull.

Two weeks had passed since the cabin, since I’d drained that woman dry while her Christian prayers died on her lips.

I’d barely spoken to Silas since then, but silence was its own kind of communication.

He knew I suspected him. He simply didn’t care.

“Another witch,” he’d said this morning, sliding a crude map across the table.

“More dangerous than the last.” His eyes had held a challenge, and God help me, beneath my dread lurked a shameful anticipation.

The great wheel of the mill hung motionless above the stagnant river. Rust had frozen its mechanisms decades ago, though water still trickled through the rotting paddles. Silas moved ahead of me, his dagger already drawn. I followed with a reluctance that wasn’t entirely feigned.

“She’s skilled in fire manipulation,” Silas whispered as we approached the mill’s sagging door. “The Order believes she’s responsible for three house fires in Providence. Children died, Alice.”

I nodded, but doubt had taken root. “What evidence do we have?”

Silas’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve been over this.

The Order doesn’t require your approval of its intelligence.

Do not forget, Alice. That we are offering you this chance at redemption is a mercy we’re not required to offer.

It’s only on account of your past faithfulness, and for your father’s sake, we’ve agreed to allow you this chance to save your soul. ”

“Right.” I wasn’t sure I believed it anymore, but what else could I do?

Inside the mill was a hollow cathedral of dust and shadow. Machinery stood like forgotten altars, and the floor was littered with debris from the collapsed upper level. Our footsteps echoed despite our caution. If anyone was hiding here, they already knew we’d come.

She emerged from behind a massive gear assembly—a red-haired woman in her forties, her face lined with exhaustion rather than malice. Her hands rose immediately.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. “I’m just seeking shelter.”

Silas advanced with the confidence of righteous purpose. “Eileen Maddox, the Order of the Morning Dawn has evidence of your communion with dark forces.”

The woman’s eyes darted between us, lingering on me with sudden recognition. “You’re the preacher’s daughter,” she whispered. “The one who survived the consumption. The one who prayed over the sick.” Her gaze hardened. “Now look at you. What would your father say?”

The words struck like physical blows. I faltered, and in that moment, Silas attacked. Not a killing blow. Instead, he slashed her shoulder, deep enough to bleed freely, but not to incapacitate.

The scent hit me like a wave. My body tensed, ready to spring. But this time, I recognized the manipulation. This time, I tried to resist.

“Remember your training,” Silas said, stepping back just as he had before. “This is your path to redemption.”

The woman started chanting, her hands weaving patterns in the air. The surrounding dust swirled, and sparks danced between her fingers. Real magic—not like the simple healing of the previous woman.

But even as I registered the threat, my hunger overwhelmed my reason. I lunged forward, teeth bared, and caught her mid-incantation. Or was it mid-prayer? Her blood was hearty and rich. I drank until there was nothing left, then dropped her empty body to the floor.

Silas watched with that same careful mixture of disapproval and satisfaction.

“Your control needs work,” he said, but his eyes gleamed with success. “I believe the only way you’ll overcome this problem is through exposure. Next time, you’ll do better.”

T hat night, alone in my sparse quarters at the Order’s regional headquarters, I tried to pray. The words burned my tongue, but I forced them out in a whispered torment.

“Our Father, who art in heaven—“

Pain lanced through my skull. I pressed on.

“Hallowed be Thy name—“

My skin began to smoke faintly where I’d clasped my hands together. I welcomed the pain. It was righteous. It was deserved.

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done—“

A memory surfaced: Daddy at the pulpit, his tall frame commanding, his voice ringing through our little Exeter church. “Sin takes many forms,” he’d thundered. “But none so insidious as the sin that disguises itself as necessity.”

I’d been sixteen then, sitting in the front pew in my best Sunday dress, hanging on his every word. The good daughter. The faithful daughter. The daughter who prayed over the sick and was mysteriously spared from their fate.

I forced myself back to the prayer, though each word scalded. “On earth as it is in heaven—“

Another memory: Mama on her deathbed, her face hollow with consumption, her eyes bright with fever. Me, holding her hand, reciting Psalms as she slipped away. The peaceful smile that had touched her lips at the end—had that been God’s mercy, or just the relief of final surrender?

I unclenched my burning hands and stared at the blisters forming on my palms. The price of prayer for the damned.

N ovember brought us to a forest clearing where frost rimmed the dead leaves underfoot. Our target—a woman barely older than me—had made her home in a structure half-cave, half-cabin built into a hillside. Smoke rose from a crude chimney of stacked stones.

“Witch,” Silas declared, with the certainty of the righteous. “She’s been stealing livestock from nearby farms for sacrifices. The Order has tracked her for weeks.”

I said nothing. The pattern was apparent now—just enough truth to justify the hunt, just enough doubt to torture me afterward.

“Focus, Nightwalker,” Silas said, using the name the Order had given me. Never Alice anymore. Alice had died with her humanity. “Remember why we do this. Each witch destroyed brings you one step closer to salvation.”

I questioned his words in my mind. He’d told me before that those I’d drained damned me further.

Now, he seemed less concerned with the manner of my success than that I completed the mission.

Whole-burnt offering, perhaps that was ideal, but he seemed to think now that even if my killings indulged my darkness, the sacrifice granted me a mercy that counterbalanced my evil.

I wasn’t making progress toward my redemption, but maybe I wasn’t damning myself any further.

Provided, of course, the witches I was killing were actually witches.

We approached from different angles. The young woman fled out the back at our arrival, but I caught her easily, my inhuman speed an obscene advantage. She fought with unexpected strength, clawing at my face and screaming curses that made the air vibrate strangely.

Silas arrived as I pinned her against a tree. With deliberate precision, he cut a line across her collarbone. Blood welled up, black in the fading light.

“She’s resisting,” he said, stepping back. “Do what needs to be done.”

“Please,” the woman gasped. “I’ve harmed no one. The animals were already suffering. I only meant to end their pain—“

I tried to resist. God as my witness, I tried. My body shook with the effort of restraint, but the hunger was a living thing inside me, clawing its way out. I bent my head to her wound and drank until her struggles ceased.

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?

D ecember 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.”

B ack 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.

I rose and moved to the window. Outside, snow continued to fall, covering the world in false purity. Somewhere in the distance, church bells rang, calling the faithful to evening prayers. The sound pierced me with a longing for what I’d lost.

The door to my quarters opened without a knock. Silas stood there, his broad frame filling the doorway, snow melting on his shoulders.

“We’ve located another witch,” he said without preamble. “We leave at dawn.”

I turned from the window to face him. “And if I refuse?”

His expression hardened. “The Order doesn’t recognize refusal, Nightwalker. You serve or you perish.”

When he was gone, I sank to my knees on the cold wooden floor.

Not in prayer this time—prayer was beyond me now—but in desperation.

The faces of the women I’d killed flashed before me, each one clear in memory.

The healer with her herbs. The fire-worker with her tired eyes.

The young woman in the forest. The old grandmother trying to save her family.

Had any of them truly been what Silas claimed? Or had they simply been convenient targets—isolated, vulnerable, and ultimately disposable?

A terrible suspicion took root. What if none of those women were actually witches? If that was true, I’d not only indulged my vampiric urges, solidifying my own damnation, but I’d earned no redemption since what I’d murdered wasn’t evil at all?

I thought of Brown, who had transformed me.

Had she been truly evil, or simply confused?

She’d attended Daddy’s church, sung hymns with apparent sincerity.

Yes, she’d gotten wrapped up with Moll Dwyer, she’d dabbled in things she shouldn’t have, but was that on account of her evil, or because of her father’s overprotectiveness?

She wouldn’t be the first girl to rebel against an overbearing parent.

It was barely tolerated, especially in our congregation, but it wasn’t uncommon.

I hadn’t understood then. Maybe I still didn’t. But one thing was becoming clear—the Order of the Morning Dawn was not what it claimed to be, and neither was Silas Blake.

Dawn would bring another hunt, another victim, another feeding engineered by Silas’s careful orchestration. The cycle would continue, driving me further from the girl I’d been, closer to the monster they wanted me to become.

Unless I found the strength to resist. To change. But how could I, given what I was, given what I needed ?