The wind carried the stink of woodsmoke and unwashed flesh, a heavy, unchanging aroma that clung to the bones of the village. It was a smell Cassian had learned to tolerate, a constant reminder that the early twentieth century—with its clean electricity, its roaring engines, and its antibiotics—was a fading dream.
He stood on the muddy, sloping bank overlooking the cluster of thatched roofs in Wallachia. The year, he calculated with grim precision based on the local priests' scattered, ill-kept records, was approximately 1543. To Cassian, who had last witnessed a functioning automobile and read a newspaper, this era felt less like the past and more like an entirely separate, brutal medieval dimension.
He was a man caught between two worlds, physically an outsider, yet possessed of the unnatural stillness and watchful intensity of an apex predator. His clothes were homespun and coarse, designed to blend with the traveling herbalists and mendicant healers common to the region, but his movements were too fluid, too economic. His eyes, an intense amber in the deepening twilight, constantly scanned the uneven lines of the forest and the darkening shadows between the hovels.
Decades of warfare—even if that warfare had occurred in a time that didn't yet exist here—had trained his instincts to a razor edge. He was a True Alpha, born to the cycle, a beacon of strength and protection. Now, that power felt muted, like a roar swallowed by thick fog.
The residual magic from the ritual that had ripped him from his universe—what he internally called the Veil Corruption—still clung to his spirit. It didn't strip him of his strength, but it certainly muffled the clarity of his senses and constantly sought to suppress the purity of his Alpha transformation. He was a sentinel operating on half-power, in a world full of dangers he had yet to catalogue.
He carried a leather satchel of poultices, tinctures, and medicinal herbs. His current cover as a Wandering Healer was less a ruse and more a necessity; the natural elements of the earth helped him regulate the internal conflict of the Corruption. Earlier that day, he had found something unsettling near a secluded cave: a patch of aggressive, purple-flowered plants. They gave off a bitter, almost metallic scent that made his inner wolf growl in vague warning. He had collected a handful, tucking the stems loosely into his sleeve for later study.
But he was here tonight for a different reason than medicine.
For the past week, the village had been suffering from the "Red Death," a swift illness that left the victims pale, weak, and strangely bloodless. The fear was thick enough to taste, but Cassian's intuition told him this wasn't disease. This was hunting.
He descended the bank, allowing the shadows of the nearest trees to cloak his final approach. He didn't need to track the prey; it was tracking the flock. He simply needed to be where the flock was.
His amber eyes narrowed, focusing on the darkest corner of the central square—the empty, dilapidated barn. That particular shadow felt wrong. It felt hungry.
He moved not toward the barn, but toward the largest house in the village—the home of the Bulibașă, the village chief. As he approached the rough-hewn wooden door, the faint sounds of muffled, anxious conversation grew sharper, resolving into distinct words that would have been whispers to any normal man.
"...gone without a trace," the Bulibașă's voice, gravelly with fear, was saying. "It is the evil eye, I tell you! Or perhaps the night-demon that drinks the life."
Cassian's exceptional hearing, though slightly muffled by the Veil Corruption, was more than enough. He listened keenly as a distraught woman described her husband's demise: "His strength left him like water poured into dry ground. There were two small marks, no bigger than the thorn of a rose, on his neck."
Marks no bigger than a thorn. Cassian's jaw tightened. In his time, he had studied ancient folklore and had read enough on the subject of blood rituals and mythical beasts to recognize the pattern. This was not a beast driven by hunger and rage; this was a calculating predator.
He knocked once, a sharp, authoritative rap on the door.
The chief, a stout man named Stefan, opened the door cautiously. His eyes widened slightly at the sight of the lean, intense stranger. "Healer," Stefan acknowledged, his voice wary but laced with desperation. "I had forgotten you returned."
"The plague concerns me," Cassian stated, his Romanian slightly accented but firm. He stepped inside, his heightened senses immediately registering the metallic tang of dried blood beneath the floorboards and the stale scent of fear clinging to the air. The faint, high-pitched scratching of a rat in the ceiling was a distraction he forced himself to ignore.
"It is worse than a plague," Stefan pleaded, gesturing to the distraught villagers huddled near the fire. "It takes only the strong. And there are no marks of fever. Only... the wasting."
Cassian's eyes swept over the faces. The fear was palpable, a heavy blanket of despair. "I have remedies that may ease the illness, but I must know its pattern," he said, using the cover of a healer to fish for details. "When did this wasting begin? Where do the victims vanish from?"
The villagers spoke quickly, tripping over each other in their fear: the attacks always happened between the second and third hour after moonrise, always targeting someone who was alone, or separated from the main group, often near the barns or the edge of the forest.
As Cassian listened, his ears caught a sound that was entirely separate from the frantic human voices and the crackling fire. It was incredibly faint, originating from the direction of the empty barn across the square—a sound that was both too quick and too soft to be a rat.
It was the delicate, barely audible snap of a small twig being stepped on, followed immediately by the whisper of dry earth being brushed clean.
It's here now, Cassian concluded. Listening.
The predator was not waiting for the cover of deepest night. It was drawn by the loud sounds of human distress. He had exposed the flock, and now the wolf—or, in this case, the creature that drank life—had come for the kill.
"I understand," Cassian said, his voice dropping to a low, commanding tone that instantly silenced the room. He didn't look at Stefan; his gaze was fixed on the chief's old musket leaning against the wall. "I will prepare my strongest remedy. But the night is upon us. You must all stay inside. Bolt your doors. Do not, under any circumstance, leave the light of the fire."
He turned and strode out, his heart rate spiking not from fear, but from the sudden, thrilling recognition of a hunt initiated. The sound was gone, but the impression remained. He moved toward the empty, dilapidated barn—the one shadow that felt hungry.