Adrenaline is a remarkable chemical.” The lie echoed in the silent archives for days. Evie tried to dismiss it, to rationalize what she had seen. Maybe the shelf was perfectly balanced. Maybe his strength was just that of a man in peak condition, amplified by a surge of panic. But she knew better. She had felt the ground shudder when the shelf settled back into place. She had seen the utter lack of strain on his face. The memory of it, of him appearing from thin air to stand between her and certain death, had become the silent, thrumming baseline to their nightly work.

The sessions took on a ritualistic quality. The heavy clang of the iron gate, the scent of dust and decaying vellum, the small circle of lamplight in an ocean of darkness. They became her entire world for three hours a night. His explanation for the bookshelf incident was never mentioned again, but it changed everything. The professional distance she had tried to maintain was gone, replaced by a tense, hyper-aware intimacy.

They were bent over a 14th-century grimoire one night, its pages brittle and illustrated with unsettling depictions of creatures that were half-man, half-beast. Her job was to transcribe the faded Latin script.

"The loneliness of these beings is always their defining trait," she murmured, more to herself than to him, tracing the outline of a winged, tormented figure. "They're cursed not just by their nature, but by an eternity of solitude."

Morgan was sitting across the narrow oak table from her, so close their knees brushed. The contact sent a familiar, chilling jolt through her leg, yet she didn't pull away. He hadn't been looking at the book; he had been watching her.

"It is not solitude they fear, Miss Rowe," he corrected softly, his voice a low vibration that seemed to sink directly into her bones. "It is the repetition. Watching the same patterns of love, betrayal, and death play out over and over, until every human face is just a ghost of one you knew before. To see cities rise from dust and know they will return to dust, while you remain. That is the true curse. Solitude would be a mercy."

The words were spoken with a profound, weary authority that had nothing to do with academic study. It felt like testimony. Her breath caught. She looked up from the manuscript and met his gaze. His eyes were black, ancient, and for a moment, she saw an abyss of time swirling within them.

"You speak as if you've… experienced it," she whispered, her heart hammering against her ribs.

A flicker of something—regret, perhaps, or anger at his own slip—crossed his features before the mask of detached scholarship fell back into place. He leaned forward, his cool presence washing over her, and pointed a long, pale finger at a line of text. The tip of his finger hovered inches from her hand. "The text suggests the creature's lamentations focus on the cyclical nature of the moon, a metaphor for the recurring cycles of mortal life from which it is excluded. A fascinating, if tragic, perspective for a scholar to consider."

He was close enough now that she could see the faint, almost invisible lines at the corners of his eyes, the only sign of age on his otherwise flawless face. He didn't smell of anything. No cologne, no soap, not even the scent of living skin. Just the cold, clean smell of stone and old paper. The pull toward him was overwhelming, a terrifying, magnetic force that silenced all reason. She wanted to close the distance. She wanted to touch his hand, to see if the cold was real, to feel the impossible strength that had saved her life. The air grew thick with everything they weren't saying, a simmering tension that was equal parts fear and a dark, consuming desire.

Her hand was trembling slightly as she reached for the next page of the manuscript. The air between them was so charged it felt like a physical substance, thick and humming. To break the spell, she focused on the task, on the fragile, razor-thin vellum. She slid her finger under the edge to lift it. The corner, stiffened by age into something as sharp as flint, sliced deep into the pad of her index finger.

“Fuck,” she hissed, pulling her hand back instinctively. A perfect, clean line opened across her fingertip, and a bead of dark crimson welled up, impossibly bright against her skin. It overflowed, tracing a thick, wet path down her finger toward her palm. The scent hit the air almost immediately—sharp, coppery, and intensely vital in the dead-scented room.

Morgan went rigid. It wasn't a subtle shift; it was a total, instantaneous transformation. His head snapped up, his eyes locking onto the drop of blood on her skin. The scholarly detachment vanished, annihilated. His pupils blew wide, swallowing the black irises until his eyes were nothing but two consuming pits of absolute darkness. A low sound tore from his throat, a guttural growl that was not human. His nostrils flared, and he shoved himself away from the table with such violence that his heavy oak chair screeched across the stone floor and slammed into a bookshelf behind him.

He recoiled as if she had thrown acid at him, scrambling back another step, his body taut as a drawn bowstring. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a silent snarl, and for a terrifying, heart-stopping second, she saw the glint of something too long, too sharp. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides, his whole body trembling with a terrible, restrained violence. He looked like a wolf fighting the urge to lunge.

The entire episode lasted only a few seconds. Just as quickly as it came, the predatory mask dissolved. The blackness receded from his eyes, leaving them wide with something that looked like panic. His face went ashen, a stark, bloodless white that made his lips look dark. He pressed himself back against the bookshelf, one hand coming up to cover his mouth as he took a shuddering, ragged breath.

“Are you alright?” Evie asked, her own pain forgotten, her voice a shaky whisper. The sight of his reaction was infinitely more frightening than the cut itself.

He wouldn’t look at her. He stared at a point on the far wall, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek. “The… blood,” he choked out, the words strained and rough. “I have… it’s a phobia. Severe hemophobia.” He finally forced himself to look at her, and his eyes were filled with a convincing, desperate shame. “I’m sorry. I can’t… I can’t be near it.”

The lie was both perfect and pathetic. It explained the recoil, the pale face, the panicked retreat. But it didn’t explain the sound he’d made. It didn’t explain the flash of teeth, or the devouring hunger she had seen in his eyes. What she had witnessed wasn't fear. It was a desire so profound it bordered on agony.

“There’s a first-aid kit in the proctor’s office by the main entrance,” he said, his voice still tight and distant. He gestured vaguely without looking at her hand again. “Go. Clean yourself up. We’re done for tonight.” He turned his back on her completely, facing the shelves, his shoulders rigid with a tension that felt like it could shatter stone.

The lie was an insult. Hemophobia. As if she were a child who would believe any story an adult told her. For the next week, the air in the archives was thick with a new kind of tension. Morgan was meticulously professional, his voice a cool, distant monotone as he dictated notes or pointed out passages. He kept his distance, a chasm of several feet always between them, a dead zone she knew he was consciously maintaining. But his eyes would find her when he thought she wasn't looking, and the detached scholar would vanish, replaced by that same unnerving intensity she’d seen the night he’d saved her from the bookshelf.

Her fascination had curdled into obsession. Her days were no longer her own. She spent hours hunched over a microfiche reader in the library’s basement, the flickering green light illuminating her face as she scrolled through a century of local news. She wasn't just his research assistant anymore; she was his hunter. She searched for patterns, for anomalies, for anything that didn't fit. She found it in the winter of 1923.

A series of five articles from the Harrow’s Gate Chronicle. Five deaths in three months. Young people, all of them. The official causes of death were a bizarre mix of animal attacks and exposure, but the reporter’s prose was laced with doubt. The victims were found drained, pale, with small, almost surgical wounds on their necks or wrists that the coroner struggled to explain. But it was the last article, a short piece about the ensuing town panic, that made her stop breathing. It quoted a witness, a stable hand who had seen a man leaving the woods near where the third victim was discovered. He described "a pale, scholarly gentleman" with "dark, intense eyes" who "spoke like he was from another time."

That night, Evie brought the printouts with her. She waited until they were surrounded by books on lycanthropy, the silence of the archives pressing in on them. She slid the papers across the polished oak table. The grainy photographs of the dead stared up at them.

"I found a curious bit of local folklore today," she said, her voice betraying none of the furious pounding of her heart. "It seems this town had its own brush with what they thought was a monster."

Morgan didn't speak. He looked down, his long, pale fingers resting motionless on the cover of a Latin tome. He scanned the headlines, his expression unreadable.

"The witness descriptions are what I found most interesting," Evie pushed, tapping the final article. "They talk about a 'pale, scholarly gentleman.' It's almost a perfect echo of the vampire archetype we see in early European myths, don't you think?"

He was still for a long, heavy moment. The only sound was the faint hum of the lamps. When he finally looked up, his eyes were utterly devoid of warmth. He picked up the page with the witness statement, his movements slow and deliberate.

"An interesting, if predictable, example of communal hysteria, Miss Rowe," he said. His voice was a silken, academic dismissal, but it was pitched a fraction too low, too controlled. "Tragedy requires a narrative, and a narrative requires a villain. A frightened, uneducated man sees a stranger in the woods and his imagination, primed by fear, supplies the rest. It is the very definition of an unreliable narrator." He set the paper down, placing it perfectly square with the others. "It is a footnote in local paranoia. Nothing more."

It was a masterful deflection. He hadn't denied anything. He had simply re-contextualized it, buried it under a mountain of academic jargon. But his facade had cracked. As he spoke, the muscle in his jaw had tightened, a tiny, furious tremor. His eyes, for a single, unguarded second, had held not the disinterest of a scholar, but the cold fury of a man who had been found out. He was looking at her as if she were prey that had just learned to bite back.