My friends looked at each other, their faces saying "boy, we should have chosen a spokeperson before this". Eventually, most eyes settled for Bianca, who scoffed.

'What, I should be the soft touch because I'm the team girl? Alex, tell him.'

My ghost friend-from certain points of view, he was a strigoi too-looked at me with what he probably though was a reassuring smile.

'You look like you're about to tell me I'm pregnant with mutants or something,' I told him drily. We both laughed, despite ourselves. Because, in lives-so to speak-like ours, you take your laughs when you can.

'Do you feel any...different?' Alex asked hesitantly.

"You know I hardly feel anything these days. No. If not for pops' mirror, I probably would have missed my face starting to turn into a jigsaw."

'This can't be a curse,' pops said heatedly. "Or a poison, or sickness. Strigoi laugh those off, even if they happen at the same time. No, this..."

Usually, when it came to my nature, I deferred to pops. He'd been putting down freaks like me before I'd been born, while I'd only been undead for a few months.

I'm harmless, mostly. Usually, if you piss me off, the most you'll get are a few creative insults and a shove, if I'm feeling bold. Most strigoi aren't like me. Every story told about us-harried relatives, unnatural weather, animals drained of their life-is true, because people, or some of them, at least, believe them to be true.

Pops was born in the sixties, in the middle of the Long Watch. The decades when mankind spent every waking moment, and most sleeping ones, keeping an eye on their incarnate imaginations. They still reached out to the kinder, more reasonable creatures, and so it was that, in the nineties, the supernatural was accepted, if not embraced. Thanks, in part, to the efforts of people like pops.

Constantin Silva entered a church in his town in his teens, and, by the time he was eighteen, he was accompanying the old priest on patrols around the town and nearby forests and roads, looking for enchanted animals, iele, strigoi and other creatures that bothered the people and stirred up trouble. It was then that he'd learned to faithcraft, something he tried to pass on to me, and never managed to.

Neither of us knew why. I liked to consider myself fairly faithful, even now, abomination in the eyes of God that I was. I hope He does not take my prayers as mockery, because they are not. I pray every evening, and thank Him whenever something good happens, to me or those close to me. Or when something bad does not.

Pops was fairly tolerant, as far as Orthodox priests went. He even accepted other faiths, and had once regaled me for hours with his theory on how God, Brahman, the Tao and other supreme entities are actually the same thing viewed from different angles.

'The same god wearing different hats, if you will,' he'd told me with a smile. Because he was a Discworld fan, too.

'Could a priest have done this?' Luci asked, interrupting my train of thought. He was worrying his lip with his fangs, as he did when frustrated.

Pops shook his head. 'God would never grant someone the power to do this. However sinful they believed my son to be.'

Because suicide was a sin, indeed, and not just because the scriptures and traditions said so. The risk of suicides coming back as undead monsters with a grudge was a significant threat, which meant high buildings, cliffs, railroads and other such places were carefully watched by the government.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

It's the reason the Japanese cut Aokigahara down and burned the lumber. Too much symbolic weight, too many suffering ghosts drawing malevolent yokai and oni. Metaphysical echoes of the forest still popped up around Japan, occassionally, and even other countries, rarely.

On the bright side, it meant therapy and psychology were taken very seriously, which helped mankind as a whole. Even if suicide hotlines ended up having to answer questions like "how do I end myself without becoming a monster?"

I swear, some people want to have their noose and hang in it too.

'Strigoi can't be truly harmed by anything other than a priest channeling holy power,' Mihai said thoughtfully. 'Maybe it's not someone local. Maybe it's some self-righteous Catholic, or a jihadist, or...'

'Do not generalise,' pops told him with a stern look. 'Just because someone does not share our faith, it does not mean they wish us harm. And you share no one's faith, Mihai. Do not cast stones.'

'Hey, only a moron would say gods aren't real. I know...'

'There's a difference between knowing and believing. And our unknown enemy clearly believes, to harm David like this.' Pops shook his head. 'I still don't want to believe a fellow man of the cloth would do this, whatever they believed in. Perhaps there is something else that could have harmed David...'

'Unearthing and beheading?' Andrei suggested, crossing his arms. 'The meat of a pig slaughtered on Saint Ignatius' Day?'

'No,' Bianca said before Pops could answer. 'You'd need blessed tools for the first, and the users would have to believe they are holy too. Same thing for the pig flesh.'

'Besides,' Luci said, perching on a mausoleum like a living grotesque. 'David's walking and talking to us, not back in the ground, headless. He's falling apart slowly. It's why I suggested a curse earlier. Or something like one, backed by holy power. God cursed Cain to walk the Earth, so...'

'That was different,' pops said firmly. 'It was a decree of God, not a curse.'

'Look,' I said, giving pops back the mirror with a nod of thanks. 'While I appreciate the brainstorming, it's getting kind of late. Maybe we should move to somewhere more...reputable.'

The sun was setting when I arrived, and, after the others came and we talked, it was gone. And I didn't want to spend evening in Ghencea. So many supernatural beings talking in a cemetery under the cover of darkness could give the wrong impression.

Pops nodded. 'I drove here, and the truck's outside. Come on. We can go home...' and he turned, walking away. I frowned.

'Pops!' I called after him. 'Seriously? You drove to Bucharest just because I called you? I though you were already in town, or I wouldn't have asked. We could have talked on the phone!'

'Yes,' pops replied, neither turning nor stopping. 'But it wouldn't have been the same.'

And so, we left Ghencea, and headed to pops' truck. And then, it was back Urziceni, the town where pops and I grew up. The town where I was left as an infant, for pops to find me on his doorstep after returning from church.

As a priest, pops took chastity seriously, even though, with the laws passed in recent years, he could have married. He had certainly never expected to have children, but he could not turn a newborn away, or place him in foster care. He wasn't that kind of man.

And so, he adopted me. Constantin Silva was the first person I saw after being brought into the world.

For his sake, I hoped he would not be the last as well.