DAGON MANSION

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES

The café was nearly empty, its windows fogged with the pale breath of morning. Outside, autumn clouds sagged low and heavy, as if mourning something the world had not yet learned to grieve.

Mia stirred her cup absently. Sleep had not visited her with mercy, only with jagged fragments of memory—fangs, blood, the black silence after a scream.

Randolf watched her with lupine stillness, elbows resting lightly on the table. Not predatory. Ancient.

"Your body is healing," he said quietly. "But your spirit... still bleeds."

Mia exhaled, the steam from her drink mingling with her breath like a fading prayer.

"I am so tired," she admitted. "Inside. Not just here."
Her fingertips touched her heart.

Randolf nodded. "Magic consumes. Fear consumes. Grief is their twin."

"And the wound?" she whispered.

"It will mend. But exhaustion after battle against the unnatural is natural."
His dark eyes softened. "You survived what many would not."

She looked at him then—truly looked. Not as a strange, unsettling presence, but as something older than violence, older perhaps than blood. A creature carved by time and sorrow.

A friend, maybe. Or fate wearing a familiar shape.

"I have questions," Mia murmured.

"And I owe you answers." He leaned back, letting shadow fall across his face. "Ask."

"What are you, really?" she asked. "Werewolves... do you suffer when you change?"

A low laugh escaped him—not mocking, but warm, reassuring.

"Pain is a human invention. Our shift is instinct. Breath. We do not wait for moons like puppets in old tales. Our nature obeys need, not stars."
His voice lowered, velvet and dangerous. "The moon merely sings to us. As desire sings to you."

Heat prickled her neck. She looked away.

"And silver?"

"A superstition mortals forged to comfort themselves."
He traced a circle on the table's wood. "Metal is metal. Fear gives things power, not nature."

Mia hesitated, then—almost shyly—

"And... intimacy? Does instinct rule that too?"

Randolf's smile was wolfish in truth now, though gentle.

"We love fiercely when we choose. But not only because flesh demands it. We are not slaves to rutting or heat."
A ghost of sadness crossed his gaze. "Desire is sacred. Rare. Like a blade—beautiful and deadly in the same breath."

She swallowed. Her pulse fluttered like a trapped bird.

"And children?"

"We do not bring life lightly." Randolf folded his hands. "I am ninety, yet I am still... young. Our blood walks centuries. A child is not a blessing—"
His voice dipped, shadowed.
"—but a promise and a burden."

Mia shivered. "And vampires?"

"A story of love," he whispered, "and ruin."

Randolf leaned closer, and even the candles on nearby tables seemed to still.