We’d moved in together after a couple months, but I’d been seeing less and less of him at the club. He told me his boss had him doing other things. I tried to ask questions, but he would just go kind of twitchy and change the subject. I tried not to think about it, but his nightly excursions were becoming more frequent, and the sleep-talking more frantic. Once, I caught the word “fantoma” repeated over and over again, interspersed among his mumbled syllables. I didn’t need a translator to know what that meant, but I looked it up on my phone anyway and tumbled down an internet rabbit hole full of ghost stories poorly translated from Romanian. In each one of them, there was a current of muted sadness running just beneath the text that was almost too subtle to put into words.

In one, there was a woman who fell in love with a man and gave up everything to be with him, only to have her head taken the night before her wedding by her furious father. Her lover, already dead by his own hand, watched as they burned her, patiently waiting his turn for his own body to be thrown on the pyre so he could finally join her. In another, a man, a woman, and their young daughter waited out the winter in their mountain hovel, subsisting on meager rations until one night a traveler came to their door seeking shelter. Without telling their little girl of their plans, the couple offered the stranger a bed but plotted in secret to kill him and boil his flesh so that they might survive a few weeks longer. But they didn’t know that this man was not a man but a strigoi, an undead creature roaming the countryside in search of flesh and blood it might consume. In the end, the couple begged the Strigoi to take their lives and spare their daughter, but just like them, it had grown too hungry to be reasoned with. There were pictures to go with that one, and I couldn’t get them out of my head for hours.

Suddenly that dead-eyed expression of Vic’s didn’t seem so vacant to me anymore. There is ugliness in this world that numbs us and drain away the warm blood that used to flow so freely when we were young. I remembered what it felt like to see my twin brother, the soul I had come into the world with, lying on the carpet, incoherent and drooling with a needle still stuck in his arm. I hadn’t been the same since then, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t hurt for him. It just felt different now, farther away than before.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The night I found Vic like that, I’d been tired. Not the kind of tired where you just need a good night’s sleep, but deeply tired. The kind you feel in your bones. I thought it was weird that the light was on in the bathroom, and since he told me he’d be out all night, I figured I must have left it on by mistake. But when I opened the door, I felt it catch against something heavy on the other side. I peered through the crack and saw him lying there, staring up at the ceiling like he sometimes did in bed. On the grimy floor beside him were the discarded leavings of his sin, the remnants he would sweep away once the euphoric low had faded so that we could both just look the other way and pretend for one more night.

But once I’d seen it, it was hard to go on pretending. Vic had a habit. A serious habit. What the fuck could I do except the same shit I’d done for Jeremy three years ago.

He tried to fight me as I shoved him into the tub and turned on the cold shower water, all the while cursing at me in that strange language of his. But I kept talking to him, slapping his face lightly when he would start to drift away from me. Then, somewhere in the middle of it all, he sat straight up and stared with an unholy fury, as if he were possessed by the devil himself, at something in the hallway just beyond the bathroom threshold.

“Get. Out,” he said to the thing I couldn’t see. “Leave us alone!”

I jumped when he screamed those words, falling backwards against the cold tile. “Vic!” I said through tears I hadn’t felt against my cheeks until now. “There’s no one there, baby! There’s no one here but us!”

I watched as the look of burning hot rage faded from his face, and he settled back against the tiled wall of the shower. “Sorry,” he said softly, the sound of his voice muffled by the noise of the water falling over him like rain. “I thought I saw… Never mind.”