The Blackwood Public Library was a tomb of good intentions. A Carnegie relic built of stern grey stone and leaded glass, it smelled of dust, despair, and the ghost of a million paper cuts. Katie was its sole nocturnal guardian, a part-time library assistant whose life had shrunk to the dimensions of the stacks after dark. She liked the silence. It was easier than the noise of her own failures—the abandoned PhD, the quiet, persistent dread that her life was a book no one would ever check out.
He first appeared in the Local History section, a tall, pale man in an impeccably tailored coat that seemed to drink the weak fluorescent light. He moved without sound. Katie only sensed his presence by the sudden, profound cold that emanated from the aisle, a chill that had nothing to do with the library’s ancient heating system. It was the cold of deep earth, of a place the sun had forgotten.
“Pardon me,” his voice was a rustle of dry leaves, cultured and utterly devoid of warmth. “I am looking for genealogical records. The Blackwood family line.”
She helped him, her fingers trembling slightly as she pulled the heavy, leather-bound ledger from the restricted shelves. He didn’t touch it. He merely leaned over, his eyes—the colour of tarnished silver—scanning the pages with an unnerving speed. His proximity made her skin prickle. He smelled of ozone and old roses, a cloying, sweet decay.
“Thank you,” he said, straightening. His gaze fell upon her, not on her face, but on the side of her neck, where her pulse fluttered under thin skin. “You are very… diligent.”
He became a regular. Mr. Valerius, he called himself. He only came after sunset, and he never checked out a book. He would request obscure texts: treatises on medieval metallurgy, diaries of plague doctors, botanical guides to nightshade. He would sit at a carrel in the furthest, darkest corner, turning pages with a slow, deliberate precision that never made a sound.
Katie began to dream of him. Not nightmares, but unsettlingly vivid dreams where she was in the stacks, and he was simply there, watching her from the shadows, his eyes glowing like coins at the bottom of a well. In the dreams, the cold was pleasant, a relief from a heat she couldn’t name. She’d wake shivering, her throat parched.
One Tuesday, the library was empty, the silence a physical weight. She was reshelving in the Philosophy wing when she felt him. The cold washed over her first, then the scent of dead roses.
“Miss Vance,” his voice came from directly behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach. “You have a drop of ink. There.” A finger, long and pale as a bone, pointed to her collarbone. He didn’t touch her, but the air where he pointed burned with cold.
She stammered, wiping at nothing. He smiled. It was a terrible thing, all calculated charm without a shred of human feeling, like a skull trying to remember how to grin. “Your dedication is commendable. This place… it hoards knowledge like a miser hoards gold. But some truths are not written in books. They are written in the blood.”
That night, as she closed up, she found a single, perfect black rose on her cart. Its petals were velvety and cool, and its scent was the same as his: sweet, deep, and subtly rotten. Against all reason, she pressed it to her nose, inhaling deeply. A wave of dizziness hit her, accompanied by a flash of sensation—the taste of copper, the sound of a distant heartbeat, the feeling of flight over moonlit fields.
She took the rose home.
Her waking life began to fray. She was tired, a fatigue that sleep couldn’t touch. Colours seemed muted. Food tasted like ash. But her senses were heightened in strange ways. She could hear the scuttle of mice in the library walls three aisles over. She could see the individual threads in the curtains across the street. And she craved the cold. She started wearing lighter clothes, seeking out the drafty corners of the library, waiting for the wave of chill that announced his arrival.
The encounter happened during a thunderstorm. The power flickered and died, plunging the library into a darkness so complete it felt solid. Katie fumbled for a flashlight, her heart hammering. Then, a soft, blue-white luminescence bloomed from the Local History aisle.
Mr. Valerius stood there, holding an old-fashioned gas lantern that cast no heat. He looked different. The careful, human mask had slipped. His face was sharper, paler, his eyes pools of liquid mercury. His smile showed the tips of his teeth, which were very, very white and just a little too pointed.
“The storm has made you a prisoner here,” he said, his voice a hypnotic hum that vibrated in her bones. “And I, a grateful guest.”
“The generator… it should kick in,” she whispered, backing away until the shelves dug into her back.
“It won’t.” He took a step closer. The cold radiating from him was intense, beautiful. It promised an end to the constant, low-grade fever of being alive. “You have been so kind. So attentive. You have curated the silence for me. I wish to show you my appreciation.”
He was before her in an instant, no movement in between. The lantern hung in the air beside them, lighting his face from below, painting monstrous shadows. He cupped her cheek. His touch was like marble left in a freezer, so cold it seared.
“Your warmth is a loud, bright, messy thing,” he murmured, his thumb stroking her cheekbone. “I have listened to it from across the room. The frantic drum of your heart. The rush of your blood—it sings such a desperate, mortal song. Let me… let me appreciate the composition up close.”
Terror locked her muscles, but beneath it, a terrifying thread of attraction unspooled. This was attention. This was a significance so profound it threatened to erase her. He was a scholar, and she was the rare, final text.
He leaned in. His lips were not cold, but cool, and surprisingly soft as they brushed the frantic pulse at the base of her throat. It was not a kiss. It was a tasting. A sigh escaped him, a sound of exquisite pleasure that had no breath behind it.
“Magnificent,” he breathed against her skin. “Fear and fascination, a vintage I have not tasted in an age.”
Then came the pain. It was not the sharp rip of movie vampires. It was an insidious, profound pressure, as if two points of absolute zero were being pressed into her vein. It was the cold, not the puncture, that was unbearable. It felt as if her very life, her heat, her noise, was being siphoned out through two tiny, glacial holes.
But with the drain came visions. She saw through his eyes: centuries passing like pages in a wind-blown book, faces of other men and women, their expressions blurring into a single mask of terrified ecstasy. She felt not his emotions, but the stark, clean geometry of his hunger, his ancient, relentless boredom. She saw the library not as a tomb, but as a beautiful, silent gallery of dead thoughts, and she, a fleeting, warm spot of colour on its canvas.
The pleasure was the horror. As her strength waned, as the cold spread from the bite through her limbs like poisoned honey, a profound sense of peace descended. The noise of her life—the anxiety, the ambition, the loneliness—was being siphoned away. She was becoming part of the silence she loved. She was being curated.
He pulled away, a single, dark droplet clinging to his lower lip. His eyes were closed in rapture. In the ghostly lamplight, he looked younger, vitalised. A faint blush of stolen life touched his marble cheeks.
Katie slumped against the shelves. Weakness washed over her, but so did a clarity sharper than any she’d known. The world was bleached, silent, and beautiful. She could see the dust motes hanging perfectly still in the frozen air. She could hear the individual patter of each raindrop on the slate roof.
He lifted a hand, and with a nail like an alabaster shard, he pricked his own chest. A bead of something darker than blood, a liquid that seemed to absorb the light, welled up. He pressed his finger to her lips.
“Drink,” he commanded, and his voice was the library itself speaking, the whisper of turning pages, the groan of old wood. “If you wish to truly see. If you wish to become part of the permanent collection.”
The hunger that answered was not hers. It was a hollow, ancient thing that woke inside her, answering the call of that dark bead. It was a hunger for the cold, for the silence, for the end of the desperate, sweaty struggle of being human. With the last of her will, she turned her head away, her cheek scraping against the rough wood of the shelf.
A flicker of annoyance, then amusement, crossed his face. “As you wish. A taste is enough. You will remember. You will crave. And the silence… the silence will never be enough for you again.”
He was gone. The lantern light winked out. The emergency generators finally groaned to life, flooding the library with harsh, yellow light.
Katie was found an hour later by the janitor, slumped and pale, with two faint, bruise-like marks on her neck she explained as a clumsy allergy test. She quit the library. She tried to go back to her life.
But the world was wrong. Sunlight was abrasive, a violent, screaming yellow that hurt her newly sensitive eyes. Sounds were assaults. The smell of food, of people, of life, was a nauseating cacophony. The only thing that brought relief was the cold, deep darkness. And the silence.
And in the silence, she hears it. Not a sound, but a pull. A cold spot in the world, beckoning. She finds herself wandering graveyards at night, not in fear, but in a aching longing. She stares at the necks of passersby, not with desire, but with a scholar’s cold curiosity, imagining the song of their blood, wondering how each vintage might differ.
She keeps the black rose, now dried and brittle, in a drawer. Sometimes, in the deepest part of the night, she takes it out and smells it. The rot is stronger now. It smells like home.
She is not a vampire. Not yet. She is something perhaps worse: a connoisseur in the making, her humanity slowly freezing into a perfect, silent appreciation for the thing that is hunting her. She is a book he has sampled, left on the shelf, but now forever yearning for the hand that will pull her down again into the beautiful, eternal dark.
