The lantern’s glow barely held back the swallowing dark. Elara, a creature of bronzed limbs and rattling charms, pressed her back against the decayed chapel door, breath a ragged hymn to unseen gods. The carnival had long since dissolved into the abyss, leaving only the taste of absinthe and the whisper of unclean hands. She had danced, she had laughed, but now, now the night was not hers.
She felt him before she saw him, an absence, a subtraction of light, the air thickening as though choking on its own existence. The Phantom. Not a man. Not a beast. A rupture in the veil, a sliver of forgotten hunger. When he spoke, the words were wet, cavernous, sliding down her spine like a centipede’s legs.
“Elara.”
Her body shuddered at the violation of her name. No man had ever spoken it that way, as if it was a wound, as if it was a secret he had torn from the marrow of the world. Her nails dug into the rotting wood behind her, breath hot, pupils dilated, a primal stirring that had nothing to do with fear.
“You are lost,” it said, shifting closer, the outline of its form flickering like candlelight. “I will unmake you.”
A laugh bubbled up in her throat, part hysteria, part invitation. “Then do it.”
It did not hesitate. Shadows collapsed, tendrils of them slipping beneath her dress, curling around her thighs, cold and burning all at once. It was not flesh, not warmth, but a touch that bypassed skin and seeped into the trembling ruin beneath. Her body arched, her senses overloaded, pleasure twisting into agony, agony birthing something raw, euphoric. A hand, not a hand, an extension of void, curled around her throat, not choking, but claiming.
Something wet dripped onto her collarbone. Not sweat. Not rain. Blood. His mouth was close now, jagged teeth like the edge of a shattered mirror, parting as if to whisper a prayer, or bite.
Elara’s fingers clawed into the nothingness of him, and found texture, found resistance. Her own breath came in shudders, her body betraying itself, knees buckling even as she willed them to hold. He was inside her now, not physically, not in any human way, but inside the tangled labyrinth of her nerves, her veins, her mind unraveling like a spool of thread.
And still, she wanted more.
The first wound came without warning. A laceration along her ribcage, thin as a lover’s fingernail, deep enough to make her gasp. He drank from the wound, a serpent at the altar, and her head lolled back, surrendering. The pain was part of it. The consumption. She felt herself dissolving, her body less hers, her soul sloughing off like old skin.
Another cut. Another bite. Her copper blood sizzled in the cold, hissing like an incantation. She did not scream. She moaned.
The Phantom laughed, a sound that shattered reality at the edges. “You were never meant to survive the night.”
She smiled, lips painted in her own blood. “Then kill me beautifully.”