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I lay there for what felt like hours, heart hammering so hard I thought it might break my ribs.

When I finally managed to move, I crawled to Mercy’s bed on hands and knees.

She was cold. Her chest did not rise. Her diary had fallen to the floor, open to a page with a sketch of a crescent moon and a girl walking alone beneath it.

I pressed my ear to her lips. No breath.

I felt for a pulse, found none. Her skin was smooth and flawless, the grey cast of death already creeping in at the corners.

A cry built in my throat, but I choked it down.

Had that man not arrived, the one who’d drunk her blood, Mercy might have lived a few days more.

I might have had the chance to save her.

But now, I’d clearly failed. And try though I wished, I couldn’t bring myself to cry for the nurse.

I couldn’t speak at all—as if the strange man had cast a spell on me, as if he’d commanded me to remain quiet.

Or, perhaps, it was out of abject horror.

Would I ever be able to speak again? I’d heard stories of men, soldiers from the Civil War, who returned and never spoke another word the rest of their lives.

It was thought to be on account of the terrors of war. Was that what happened to me?

Dawn arrived with all the warmth of a blade drawn across skin.

The sanatorium’s corridors filled with the faintest rattle of keys and footsteps, the subdued theater of the morning routine playing out behind every door.

Through the fogged window, the outside world was blanched white, as if God himself had spilled milk across the landscape and left it to curdle.

I sat on Mercy’s bed, spine curled against the wall, the cross still clutched in my fist. My knuckles ached, but I did not relax my grip. I could not.

A sharp knock split the silence. The door opened before I could answer, and in strode Miss Hartwell, trailed by a doctor in a brown suit so worn it might have been his only one. He smelled of mothballs and stale tobacco. His hair was parted precisely.

Miss Hartwell’s eyes flicked to Mercy, then to me, then away. “Doctor,” she said quietly.

The doctor moved to Mercy’s side, stethoscope already in hand. He touched her wrist, her throat, then pressed the cold disc to her chest. I watched him work, unable to speak or even to stand. He lifted one of Mercy’s eyelids and let it fall again. He did not look at her face, only at the evidence.

“She’s gone,” he said, voice flat as the surface of a pond. “No pulse. Pupils fixed.”

Miss Hartwell nodded. She produced a form and a pencil stub, and the doctor scrawled something in a cramped hand.

I tried to rise, to say anything, but my legs would not answer. The world tilted, then steadied. My body felt both empty and too full, as if every nerve ending was crowded with bad news.

“Time of death?” the nurse prompted.

“Five minutes past six,” the doctor replied. “Notify the family.”

He was already halfway to the door when I found my voice. “Wait,” I said, a pathetic croak. I was half-surprised that I was able to speak at all.

He turned. “Yes, Miss Bladewell?”

I wanted to ask what had happened. I wanted to say I had seen something, that I believed someone had come in the night and stolen Mercy away, that death was not a thing that happened in a vacuum but had to be caused by something, or someone.

But I heard myself say only, “She was alive at midnight. I heard her breathing.”

He looked at me with professional boredom. “The disease is not kind. Sometimes it’s sudden.”

Miss Hartwell moved to the bed, hands deft and efficient. She folded Mercy’s arms across her chest, brushed the hair from her brow, and closed her eyes. Then she stripped the sheets, rolling them into a tight bundle as if she were making a bed for a new arrival.

The doctor made a final note and left without another word. I watched him go, feeling a tremor in my chest that I recognized as something close to rage, or maybe terror.

Miss Hartwell turned to me. “Would you like a few moments alone?”

I nodded. I could not look at her. I could not look at anything.

When she was gone, I reached out and touched Mercy’s hand.

It was cold, yes, but not rigid. The skin was soft, almost warm in the crook of her fingers.

There was no rigor mortis, no sign of the slack-jawed horror I’d seen in other corpses.

Instead, Mercy’s lips were curved in a faint smile, as if she’d finally remembered the punchline to a joke she’d been chasing her whole life.

I stared at her for a long time, searching for the boundary between life and death, but found only a blur. I wanted to pray, but the words would not come. My hand shook as I picked up the Bible from the nightstand, but it slipped from my grip and landed on the floor with a thud that sounded final.

In the hallway, I heard the rumble of the laundry cart. Soon they would come to take Mercy away, to wrap her in a sheet and consign her to the cold earth. I wanted to weep, but my eyes were dry.

The nurse returned with a pair of orderlies.

They wheeled in a gurney, lifted Mercy onto it with practiced care, and rolled her out without ceremony.

Her diary was left behind. I picked it up, thumbed through the pages, trying to make sense of the words and drawings.

None of it meant anything. Or maybe it meant everything, and I was just too blind to see it.

The room felt larger with Mercy gone, but emptier, too. The air was stale. The cross, my Bible, the handful of things I’d brought with me—none of them seemed to matter in the face of what had happened here.

I sat on my bed, staring at the blank wall across from me. I tried to pray, but the silence was so deep it drowned out even my thoughts. All I could do was listen to the wind rattling the window and wonder whether Mercy’s soul had gone anywhere at all.

Soon, my father would pick me up, I was sure.

But that was no consolation. What was that man—the one who took Mercy’s life?

He seemed a man, but something more. Was it the devil himself?

Had Mercy fallen so far into Satan’s clutches that the fallen angel arrived himself to usher her into hell?

I didn’t even know what to think, much less if I could tell anyone what had happened. Who would believe me if I did?