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Chapter Text

Wednesday’s POV

The rain doesn’t fall here. It stalks. Each droplet strikes the glass as though the heavens have decided to remind me of their persistence. The windows rattle. The old bones of the house make creaking sounds. I imagine if I stood still long enough, I might hear the roof whispering.

The house and I share that in common. We are both decaying gracefully, with style, of course. A candle flickers beside my typewriter. Its flame trembles each time I press a key.

“Bartholomew Crane, age forty-two, met his untimely but not undeserved end after a regrettable episode of lunar mania coincided with a freak electrical storm…”

I pause, tapping the keys with a rhythm that might sound like thinking to an optimist.

“…Witnesses describe his final moments as ‘howling at the sky’, which, given his condition, feels less poetic than predictable.”

The machine clicks, the paper trembles, and somewhere in the walls, something small scurries. I smile faintly. Even the rats here respect deadlines.

I live on the edge of New Orleans, in a house that tilts slightly to the left. As if bowing to the ghosts that inhabit it. I share my days with dust, silence, and the occasional corpse in need of narrative framing. My novels sustain my income; my obituaries sustain my soul. Writing about death feels honest. Writing about life always feels like lying.

The air smells of iron and ink. It clings to me. I push the chair back and cross the room, my boots whispering over old wooden boards that protest with each step. Through the warped glass, the garden looks skeletal. The black trees bend beneath the rain; headstones of forgotten weeds show from the soil. Somewhere beyond the fog, I imagine the Mississippi stretching like a dark vein through the city.

This is where I belong: between the smell of decay and the heartbeat of thunder.

My editor calls occasionally to remind me that most writers use social media to “connect with readers”. I remind him that my readers are primarily dead. He stopped calling after that.

The clock above the fireplace ticks every second away. Each sound is a small, smug declaration that I am, against all odds, still alive.

The obituary sits finished beside the typewriter. A neat ending for a man who howled himself into oblivion. I envy him slightly. Not for the electrocution, but for the conviction. It takes courage to scream at lightning and expect an answer.

I pour myself a cup of bitter coffee that tastes faintly of iron. I sit by the window. The storm has thickened. I see the thunder pacing in the distance. The rain carves its signature against the glass.

There are moments, in the long quiet between the thunderclaps, when I think about the past.
I close the notebook and force the thought away. The past is a grave, and I have grown skilled at not digging.

Outside, lightning stitches the horizon. It’s a crooked silver thread across a black sky. I watch it split the clouds apart and wonder, absently, who it will choose next.

…

The house wakes before I do. A window somewhere downstairs moans against the wind, and the pipes gurgle like something drowning in the walls. The sound that finally drags me from sleep is softer. It’s a metallic clatter from the front gate, followed by the hollow squeal of my mailbox surrendering to intrusion.

I know I’ve got mail. How intimate. I sit up slowly, the sheets cold and stubborn. The rain has thinned into a grey drizzle that presses its forehead against the glass, refusing to leave. The air smells of candle wax.

The hallway is a tunnel of shadows. The portraits along the walls stare as I pass, each ancestor judging my dishevelled hair and my decision to remain among the living. Their disappointment comforts me. The staircase creaks underfoot. Downstairs, the air grows thicker. A peculiar blend of ink, old paper, and damp wood that most people would call mildew fills the air. It’s the scent that I call home.

My mailbox waits beside the front door, a rusted mouth still chewing on the morning’s offerings. I open it. There are bills, circulars, and one envelope that doesn’t belong. The paper is heavy, the handwriting deliberate. The return stamp reads Jericho County.

The name sits there, pulsing faintly in my chest like a bruise I’d forgotten. Jericho.

I close the lid. The envelope stays in my hand longer than I intend, the weight of it measured not in ounces but in memories I’ve worked years to embalm. The postal code stares back at me.

I take it to my study. It’s my favourite room and the most unfriendly one. The curtains are permanently drawn; sunlight is treated as an uninvited guest. Shelves line the walls, sagging with books that smell of dust. A single raven perches on the windowsill outside, tilting its head like always.

The desk is cluttered with drafts, coffee cups, and the obituary from last night. I set the Jericho letter on top of the pile. I tell myself I’ll open it later. After breakfast, after I’ve earned the right to bleed a little.

Instead, I roll a fresh sheet into the typewriter. There’s another client, another end to document.

“Isadora Leclerc, age one hundred and three, former patron of nocturnal arts and noted enthusiast of SPF denial, met her final sunrise yesterday morning.”

The keys click with renewed vigour. “Having dismissed centuries of sensible shade, she elected to sunbathe on her roof ‘for the thrill of it.’ Witnesses report a brief sizzle, followed by what can only be described as spiritual evaporation.”

I pause to sip what passes for coffee and glance at the unopened letter. It watches me from the desk, silent and insolent. “She leaves behind a modest fortune in vintage coffins and one extremely confused pool boy.”

The sentence earns the faintest smile from me. The raven outside croaks once.

I look at the letter again. Jericho. My fingers itch to tear it open. My spine tells me not to.

I return to the obituary instead.

…

The rest of the morning passes on quietly. The rain has stopped, leaving the air heavy and wet. The sky outside is the colour of diluted ash; the river beyond it gleams faintly, like a scar that never healed right.

I linger in the kitchen, if one could call it that. The room is narrow and tiled in black and white like the inside of a piano. A single light bulb hums overhead, making everything look faintly haunted. My breakfast is simple: black coffee and a slice of burnt toast that resembles a crime scene.

I distract myself by tending to my plants. All of them carnivorous, all of them in various stages of moral development. One particularly aggressive Venus flytrap I’ve named Morticia snaps at my sleeve as I mist it. I find the gesture endearing.

The rest of the house is quiet except for the grandfather clock that clicks like a metronome for ghosts. Upstairs, something in the attic shifts. Perhaps a squirrel or a rat.

I move into my study. The letter still sits where I left it. I ignore it expertly and turn instead to the typewriter. A blank page stares up at me with insolent purity.

“Chapter One”, I type, and stop.

It’s not an obituary. I’m working on a draft of a new gothic romance novella, though the phrase makes me gag slightly. My editor insists readers want passion. I remind him that 'passion' and 'suffering' are the same word in different fonts.

I write three sentences about a woman burying her lover alive, then decide it’s too optimistic and reach for my coffee instead.

That’s when it happens. I hear three firm knocks at the front door. The sound echoes through the house. Visitors are a myth here; the gate alone keeps out most of humanity. I stand still long enough to let my imagination wander through every possible horror. Maybe it’s a tax collector, an exorcist, or a Jehovah’s Witness before I finally cross the hall.

The second set of knocks is louder. It sounds impatient and familiar. When I open the door, the world briefly fills with colour.

Enid Sinclair stands on my porch, grinning like a sunrise that refuses to be subtle. Ten years have not dulled her. Her hair is still a chaotic waterfall of pastel streaks, her clothes a riot of texture and warmth that make my monochrome world look funereal. She’s older, yes. There’s a touch of confidence in the way she stands, a shadow of sadness behind the brightness, but unmistakably her.

“Wen!” she says, as if no time has passed at all.

My pulse does something uncooperative. “Enid,” I reply, in the tone one might use when identifying a species long thought extinct.

She looks me up and down, eyes sparkling. “You look exactly the same! Like, eerily so. Do you sleep in a coffin or…”

“I’ve upgraded,” I say, stepping aside. “It has sheets now.”

Her laughter fills the house. It sounds too loud, too alive, too her. The walls seem tense, uncertain how to absorb such warmth after a decade of silence.

She glances around, taking in the gloom with a fond sort of horror. “Still dark, still creepy… and still you.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as one,” she says, and when she smiles, something inside me shifts. An old door I thought I’d nailed shut creaks open just enough to let the past slip through.

Behind me, on the desk, the letter from Jericho waits. Enid follows my gaze, and her smile falters ever so slightly. “I see you got it,” she says quietly.

I look at her, expression unreadable. “So it’s not a mistake, then.”

Her eyes soften, and in them I see pity, concern, and the ghost of something far more dangerous: memory. “No,” she whispers. “It’s not a mistake.”

…

I step back from the door, gesturing for her to enter. Enid hesitates for half a heartbeat. Perhaps weighing the risk of contagion from prolonged exposure to gloom before she steps over the threshold.

Her perfume, something floral and naïvely hopeful, clashes with the air’s usual scent of ink and mildew. The light that follows her in filters through the windows reluctantly, like it knows it isn’t welcome.

“This place…” she breathes, turning in a slow circle. “It’s very you, Wen.”

“I should hope so,” I say, closing the door behind her. “Otherwise I’d have to burn it down and start over.”

We move through the corridor. The floors creak under our steps. Enid glances at the portraits lining the wall. They’re my ancestors, painted in their preferred states of faint disdain. “Still got the whole haunted manor vibe going, huh?” she says with a small grin.

“It’s less a vibe and more an inheritance.”

The main hallway opens into the living room. It’s almost a cathedral of shadows. Black lace curtains sag over tall windows. Dust motes hang in the morning light. The fireplace is cold, though a few charred logs sit like memories of warmth.

Enid’s gaze darts to a cluster of framed photographs on the mantel. Most people assume I don’t keep them. They’re wrong. I collect reminders the way others collect regrets.

Her fingers hover above one frame. It’s an old photograph from our Nevermore days. The three of us stand in front of the gates: Enid in a pink scarf, Agnes clutching a coffee she wasn’t allowed to have, and me, looking like I’d just escaped an asylum (which, in retrospect, wasn’t far from the truth). “You kept this?” Enid asks softly.

“Morbid curiosity,” I answer.

She smiles. “You look so…”

“…miserable?”

“I was going to say young,” she says, eyes crinkling. “But yeah, that too.”

Next to that frame sits another. It’s smaller, silver-edged, and more carefully placed. It’s a single photograph of Tyler. His hair tousled, his eyes caught mid-laughter, that same unguarded expression that had once made me furious for existing.

Enid notices. Of course she does. Her voice is careful when she says, “You still have that one.”

“I keep it for symmetry,” I reply, too quickly.

Enid says nothing. She just nods, her expression soft. It’s a mixture of understanding and sadness that makes the room feel smaller.

I lead her toward my study, where the smell of old paper and ink thickens. The typewriter sits on the desk, still loaded with the obituary I started for the vampire. Shelves line every wall, groaning under the weight of books, most of them banned or, worse, self-published.

“This is where I work,” I say, motioning toward the chaos. “Or avoid working. Depending on my level of existential dread.”

Enid runs her hand along a stack of manuscripts. “You’ve been busy.”

“I find the dead less judgemental than editors.” Her laughter, soft and involuntary, fills the corners of the room. It stirs the air like music in a mausoleum.

She moves to the window and pushes the curtain aside. Outside, the garden lies under a damp veil of mist. A row of skeletal trees frames a cracked fountain where rainwater trembles. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “In a terrifying way.”

“Thank you,” I say. “It’s important that visitors leave slightly unsettled.”

Enid turns toward me then, her smile dimming just a little. “You really haven’t changed.”

“Would you prefer I had?”

She hesitates. “No. I don’t think I would.”

For a moment, silence settles between us. It’s not awkward, but heavy, thick with ten years of unspoken things. Her gaze drifts back to the letter on my desk. It lies there, pale against the dark wood, the Jericho stamp glaring like a wound that hasn’t closed.

She doesn’t mention it again. Neither do I. Instead, I offer her coffee, and she accepts because even in this house, some rituals survive.

…

Enid sits across from me, elbows resting on my desk as though it were still our dorm table at Nevermore. She hasn’t changed her posture in ten years. It’s all careless warmth and restless fingers. It’s unnerving how easily the years fold between us.

The coffee steams between us, curling into the air. I sip mine slowly, letting the bitterness coat my tongue. I like when it tastes slightly burnt, as if it resents being consumed.

Enid’s cup trembles in her hands. She blows on it even though it’s already tepid.
Her nervous habits haven’t evolved either. “You make your own coffee now?” she asks, glancing at the French press like it’s an artefact from a cult ritual.

“I trust no barista to brew it properly,” I say. “People who smile for a living tend to over-sweeten things.”

She smiles at that. It’s softly, the way people do when they’re relieved a ghost still behaves as they remember.

The house is quiet except for the clock, the whisper of rain against the glass, and the faint hum of the city beyond the fog. New Orleans exists somewhere outside this little coffin of a home, vibrant and oblivious. It can stay that way.

Enid glances around, eyes catching on everything. The photographs, the half-dead plants, the stacks of paper that lean like tired tombstones. “It’s so… you,” she says. “Dark, but cosy. In a morbid kind of way.”

“Morbid is cosy,” I reply. “For the right kind of person.”

She snorts softly and sets her cup down. “You could’ve written, you know. After you left. You didn’t have to vanish like…”

“A corpse?”

Her lips twitch. “I was going to say a magician, but sure.”

I don’t answer. I watch the reflection of her face in the window. I notice her colour against grey.
Enid Sinclair, still the personification of an emotional highlighter pen, sitting in my dim study where everything else has the decency to stay monochrome.

There’s a pulse in my throat I pretend not to feel. She looks at the letter again. The Jericho stamp glares up at us from the desk, a single piece of paper somehow capable of filling the entire room.

“You got it,” she says quietly.

“Obviously.”

“You haven’t opened it.”

“I find anticipation far more tolerable than disappointment.”

Her gaze lingers on me, the kind of look that used to make me want to crawl out of my own skin. I’ve always hated how easily she reads what I try not to write on my face. “Wen…” she says, voice low, the nickname still sharp as broken glass. “It’s about him.”

There it is. The pronoun that can still cut. I don’t ask her to clarify. I simply tilt my head and study her as if she’s a riddle that’s forgotten its punchline.

She takes a breath. “They found him. Tyler.”

My pulse stutters once. It’s a traitorous thing. I place my coffee cup down, perfectly centred on the desk, to keep my hands from moving. “Found,” I repeat. “Past tense. An excellent word for things that stay still. Corpses, for instance.”

Her eyes flicker. “Please, Wen. Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Hide behind words.”

I could tell her that words are safer than people. That they stay where you leave them and bleed only when you want them to. But she already knows that. Instead, I say nothing.

The silence between us grows. Outside, thunder rolls lazily over the river. The light shifts, bruising the walls with dusk.

Enid watches me, waiting for a crack in the marble. When none appears, she exhales. “At least promise me you’ll open it.”

“I will,” I say. “When the moment feels properly tragic.”

Her mouth curves in that half-sad, half-fond way she’s perfected. “You never change.”

“I consider that one of my finest qualities.”

We finish our coffee in silence. The rain starts again, slow and deliberate. Enid’s warmth radiates across the desk, and I hate how it feels like a memory. When she finally rises to leave, she glances once more at the letter. “He’s not what you remember,” she says. “Just… be ready.”

I don’t ask what that means. I simply walk her to the door. The house feels emptier after she’s gone. As if her brightness took a piece of the air with it. I stand in the doorway, watching her car disappear into the fog, and only then allow myself to look at the envelope still waiting on my desk.

…

The rest of the day unspools in an annoyingly mortal way. The rain stops, the light turns the colour of weak tea, and the air presses in like damp velvet. Somewhere, a church bell rings for reasons that have nothing to do with salvation.

The letter remains on my desk. I move around it the way one moves around an open grave. Be careful not to look directly inside.

I try to work. The typewriter waits, its keys gleaming like small. I roll in a fresh sheet of paper and tell myself that words will keep my hands busy.

“Chapter Two”, I type. The carriage dings. My brain, however, refuses to cooperate. Every sentence that follows mutates into something grotesque and sentimental.

“She missed the sound of the monster breathing.” Delete.

“She told herself curiosity was not the same as longing.” Delete again.

The page tears slightly under the force of my irritation. The machine hums with what feels like judgement.

I stand and pace. The boards creak in rhythm with my thoughts, which is to say: poorly. Of course Enid had to bring it here herself. She could have mailed it, texted, or sent a ghost with decent penmanship. But no, she wanted to see me.

I drift into the kitchen, pour another cup of coffee so black it reflects nothing, and lean against the counter. The cup warms my palms; it’s the closest thing to comfort I allow. The letter sits in my peripheral vision even from here. It’s extraordinary, really, how something so small can command so much gravitational pull.

I tell myself I’m not afraid to open it. Fear is irrational. I am merely editing the moment, choosing the correct punctuation for a sentence ten years long.

I return to my study. The light has thinned to that fragile grey that makes the world look half-developed, like a photograph that never quite decided to exist.

The letter waits. I speak to it because apparently that’s what isolation does to a person.
“You’re just paper,” I tell it. “Trees that failed upward.”

It says nothing, which is considerate. My mind, unfortunately, refuses the same courtesy. It supplies a thousand possibilities: he’s dead. He’s alive. He’s both, in the way monsters sometimes are. Each scenario curls through me like smoke.

The rational part of me, the part that files its nails on reason, reminds me that closure is a social construct. That no letter can exhume or bury what already haunts.

And yet. I wander through the house to escape it. The hallway mirrors catch my reflection in pieces: an eye here, a shoulder there, like a ghost assembling itself. In the living room, the photograph of him still sits on the mantel. I pick it up and wipe away the dust.

He looks younger than I remember. Perhaps because I’ve aged everywhere but my eyes.
I hate that the image still carries warmth. Photographs shouldn’t be allowed to do that.

I set it down facing the wall.

The sun begins to die behind the mist, bleeding gold into grey. The house creaks. I light the first candle of evening; its flame bends like a spine underweight.

The letter remains. I decide, firmly, that I will not open it tonight. I will file it with the rest of the dead things: unsent drafts, unspoken words, and emotions that refused to decompose.

I sit at the desk, pick up my pen, and write instead: “Self-control is the most elegant form of suffering.” The ink spreads, dark and clean.

…

Sleep has never been a loyal companion of mine. It arrives, if at all, like an uninvited guest. Late, intrusive, and bringing with it the stale breath of memories I have buried but not quite killed. Tonight it lingers at the edge of consciousness, knocking politely before breaking in.

The house creaks as if warning me. The rain has returned, not in earnest but in whispers, slinking down the windows. I stare at the ceiling and count the cracks in the plaster, each one resembling a branch, a scar, a path I once refused to follow. I lose track at twelve or perhaps thirteen and let my eyes close.

The darkness behind them is not empty.

I am in Iago Tower again. The moon outside is too bright, hanging above the trees. Fog clings to the ground, thick and milky, curling around my boots. The air is cold enough to sting, the kind of cold that feels like a punishment for remembering.

And there he is. Tyler. Lying on a table before me. His wrists bound, his breath visible, rising and breaking in small desperate clouds. His hair is matted, his face half in shadow, and when he looks up, the light catches the cut on his lip. It’s a thin, defiant smile carved in red.

The axe is in my hands. It always is. Its weight is a familiar ache, the kind that speaks of choice and consequence. The steel hums faintly, as if impatient for its purpose.

He doesn’t plead. He never did. His voice, when it comes, is steady enough to irritate me. “Kill me.’’

The statement hovers between us, a dare disguised as resignation. In another life. In another version of this memory I would swing. I would end what I started. But the dream is cruelly original. The axe slips from my hands and buries itself in the wood.

The cuffs fall away from his wrists. He exhales. I can smell the iron on his breath, the storm in his veins.

’Why?’’ he asks me.

“I missed,” I tell him; my voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds younger, less certain, and more alive.

…

I wake with my throat dry, the sound of the storm still echoing somewhere above the house. The candle beside the bed has bled itself into a puddle. For a moment, I can’t tell if I’m awake or merely dreaming that I am. The two states so often share a border made of bad decisions.

The room feels smaller. The air smells of rain and something else. It smells of old paper, maybe, or dread.

I sit up. The floorboards groan in protest as my feet find them. The shadows on the wall shift with the lightning, long and skeletal, like fingers trying to reach me before the light dies.

I make my way downstairs, guided by the kind of instinct that people mistake for bravery. I know this path well: hallway, staircase, right turn past the bookshelf that leans at a degree.

My study waits. The candle I left earlier has burnt out completely, the wax congealed in tragic little folds, but the storm outside provides its own illumination. It’s brief, violent flashes that turn the room into a negative photograph.

The letter is still there. Unopened. The seal glints whenever the lightning finds it, like a wink from the dead.

I approach it slowly, as though it might bite. A part of me hopes it will. “Still here,” I murmur, and the sound of my own voice startles me.

I rest my hand on it, feeling the paper’s chill seep into my skin. The edges have softened from the damp, the ink just beginning to bleed. For hours I have circled this moment like a moth refusing the flame, knowing full well it was only ever going to end one way.

I think of the dream. Of the axe that never fell. Of the cuffs that untied themselves. There are very few truths I still fear, but the ones tied to his name have teeth.

Lightning flares again, flooding the room with white. I tear the seal before the thunder can catch up.

…

The candle beside me is almost gone, its flame trembling in the stale air. The house is utterly still; even the rats in the walls seem to have surrendered to the hour. I sit behind my desk, back straight, fingers resting lightly on the edge of the letter that has been haunting me since it arrived.

It feels heavier now. Paper should not feel this heavy unless it is soaked in blood, or memory, or both. The edges are frayed from my hesitation. I imagine it judging me for the cowardice of restraint.

For hours I have circled it, pacing the length of this room like a caged thought. The floorboards know my impatience by heart; they echo it in small, sympathetic creaks.

Finally, I break the seal. The sound is soft but obscene, like the tearing of old skin. The paper unfolds with deliberate grace, refusing to hurry, as though it knows that revelation loses power when rushed. The handwriting is neat. It’s an old-fashioned cursive.

I begin to read. The words are simple, unadorned, and polite. They describe, with a bureaucrat’s precision, the death of Tyler Galpin, to be mourned at St Morwenna’s Chapel in Jericho. They ask that I attend, should I wish to “pay my respects”.

For a moment, my eyes refuse to move. They cling to the ink, to the cruel calm of it, to the way his name looks so fragile on paper. I never thought I would receive a letter inviting me to write an obituary for the ghost I buried inside myself ten years ago.

I had thought that part of me long decomposed. Sealed away beneath layers of work, sarcasm, and carefully manufactured indifference. But ghosts are persistent creatures; they do not rest merely because you tell them to. They wait. They rot politely. And then, when you have finally stopped listening for them, they knock on your door in the middle of the night disguised as correspondence.

I read the letter again. Each sentence feels like a nail tapping against glass. Deceased. Funeral.
Interment. Each word clinical, precise, merciless.

My heartbeat remains measured, but there is an unfamiliar tightness in my throat. A constriction that feels almost biological, as though the body remembers grief even when the mind refuses.

How ironic that my profession should betray me. I have spent years composing eloquent farewells for strangers, stitching beauty into death as one might embroider lace onto a shroud. It was easy work; their stories ended neatly. Their ghosts were quiet.

But this…this is different. This is the universe handing me a pen and saying, ‘Here, write the eulogy for the only monster who ever looked at you and didn’t flinch.

My fingers curl around the edge of the desk until the wood creaks. The candlelight trembles, throwing his photograph on the mantel into sudden clarity. I have never moved it, though I told myself it stayed there out of symmetry. Lies are so much easier to maintain when they wear the costume of logic.

The boy in the picture smiles, unguarded and absurdly alive. I wonder if the man in the coffin will have learnt to stop.

The storm outside deepens. Rain thrums against the windowpane in a rhythm that sounds dangerously like a heartbeat. The sound crawls beneath my skin.

I trace his name on the page with my fingertip. The ink smudges slightly, staining me. The mark is small, almost invisible, but it feels like ownership.

There was a time when I thought I understood death. Where I thought I understood its boundaries, its etiquette, and its quiet dignity. Now I see that death, like love, is far less obedient than I once believed.

I fold the letter carefully, the way one might close the eyes of the newly dead. My pulse steadies again, but my thoughts do not. So, he is gone. Or he is pretending to be. Or the universe has finally decided that our story required a proper ending, and I am to be its scribe.

Somewhere in Jericho, a coffin waits for him. And somewhere inside me, the grave I built for his memory has begun to stir.

I lean back in the chair, staring at the ceiling where the shadows bloom like bruises. I think of the night I left him in that tower, bloodied but breathing, and how I convinced myself that mercy was synonymous with abandonment. Now mercy feels like a word invented by people who have never had to choose between killing a monster and missing one.

The letter lies open on my desk. I press my palm flat against it until the paper warms beneath my skin.

…

I sit there long after the storm has begun its slow retreat, listening to the water crawl down the gutters. The candle finally gutters out, leaving the room draped in that peculiar shade of darkness that belongs only to confession.

It occurs to me that grief is not a flood, as the poets like to insist. It is a drip. It’s slow, methodical, and steady enough to hollow out even stone. You do not drown in it; you erode.

I had thought myself immune to that particular weather. I built walls, routines, and sentences; I turned feeling into punctuation marks and told myself that control was victory. But the letter sits here like proof that control is only another form of denial, one that decays at the first sign of memory.

I should be writing, not feeling. I should be cataloguing his sins, not measuring the distance between what he was and what I allowed him to become. Yet the words refuse to obey. They gather in my throat.

Perhaps that is the punishment for those of us who survive the monsters we love: we become the curators of their silence. We tend it, polish it, and make sure it gleams.

I glance once more at his photograph. The smile, the light behind his eyes. These tiny, reckless things are now trapped forever in glass. If I were sentimental, I might admit that I miss the noise he made simply by existing. Fortunately, I’m not sentimental. I am merely tired. I told him once that monsters don’t get happy endings. I didn’t realize he’d be considerate enough to prove me right.

The night outside folds itself around the house, heavy and familiar. I breathe in the damp air, the ink, and the faint scent of something burnt and sweet.

Tomorrow I will pack. Tomorrow I will go to Jericho, to the chapel, to the coffin, and to whatever version of the truth waits for me there.

But tonight, I will allow the dead to have their victory. I will let him haunt me properly.

Chapter Text

Wednesday’s POV

Morning arrives not with sunlight but with the pallor of surrender. The storm has washed the city clean of sound. Even the gulls have the decency to keep their mourning to themselves. In the kitchen, a single bulb hums above the table. My breakfast is simple: black coffee, unbuttered toast, and a folded obituary that still smells faintly of scorched paper.

The vampire’s death reads well enough. Isadora Leclerc, age one hundred and three, evaporated under the impertinent curiosity of daylight. I wrote her farewell with appropriate detachment, trimming sentiment. I always finish the work before travel; leaving a sentence incomplete feels like abandoning a body mid-autopsy.

I rinse my cup, watch the coffee spiral down the drain, and let the silence reclaim the house. It suits the place. The curtains hang heavy with last night’s rain; the air carries the faint metallic scent of ink and dust. My boots echo through the hallway.

Packing is a ritual, not a task. I fold each black dress with the precision of a coroner preparing evidence. Two notebooks, one fountain pen, a vial of ink the colour of dried blood, and the letter. The treacherous invitation I slip into my bag last. The seal has broken further overnight; it leaves a small constellation of wax crumbs on my desk.

In the mirror, I study myself with the clinical interest reserved for rare specimens. The reflection offers no revelations. I look the same, same unrepentant hair, same expression that people mistake for serenity when it is merely exhaustion.

Outside, New Orleans steams in the aftermath of rain. The garden is a cemetery of magnolia branches and drowning weeds. A crow observes me from the fence, tilts its head, and croaks.

I lock the door behind me. The key resists turning, reluctant to release me, as though the house prefers my company to its solitude. For a moment I consider staying. Writing another obituary, pretending the letter never came, but cowardice dressed as discipline has never suited me.

The cab waits at the gate, engine coughing, the driver wisely avoiding conversation. I slide into the back seat, the smell of oil and rain seeping through the cracked leather.

As the house recedes into the mist, I feel a peculiar stillness. Jericho lies somewhere ahead, festering quietly under its pines.

The letter in my bag shifts with the movement of the car, a small heartbeat of paper. I rest my gloved hand over it. “Very well,” I murmur, almost to myself. “Let the dead have their audience.”

The city fades behind me, and the road stretches north, long and grey and mercifully empty.

…

The highway cuts through the wetlands. On either side, the cypress trees bow toward the water, draped in moss that sways like the frayed hems of funeral veils. The sky is colourless. It’s neither grey nor blue but something in between.

The driver keeps his eyes on the road. He is polite enough to mistake my silence for sleep. I let him believe it; people tend to behave better when they think you’re unconscious.

The city’s humidity lingers even as the miles unspool. It clings to the inside of the window, smearing my reflection until it looks appropriately spectral. The rain has not returned, but the clouds travel with us.

I try reading the newspaper I bought at the station. Its headlines are mundane. It’s about politics, economics, and a local scandal involving someone who drowned under circumstances too uninspired to be interesting. I fold it away after the obituaries; they are thin, unimaginative things. The living have forgotten how to write about the dead.

The landscape begins to shift. The air grows colder, thinner. The Spanish moss gives way to pine, the swamps to stone. I recognise this terrain even though a decade has passed. It’s the kind of place that forgets nothing and forgives less.

Jericho is still hours away, but I can already sense it. The gravity of that small town, the way its name moves in the back of my mind like an unanswered question. Every mile drags me closer to something I am not sure I want to recognise.

I glance at the letter again. It lies folded in my lap, pale against the black of my dress. The handwriting is still too neat, too confident. Death should not have such tidy penmanship.

Ten years. It feels both precise and meaningless. Ten years of pretending I was incapable of nostalgia. Ten years of writing the final words of strangers so I wouldn’t have to write my own.

The car passes a field of crows, hundreds of them gathered on wet soil, their wings black as ink stains. They lift in unison as we approach, a silent explosion of motion that blots out the sky. For a moment I think of them as punctuation marks, rising to close a sentence I’ve taken too long to finish.

The driver glances at the mirror. “Storm coming,” he mutters.

“Of course,” I reply. “They usually do.”

He looks puzzled but wisely decides not to ask.

I settle back into the seat. The rhythm of the road beneath the tyres becomes hypnotic. Thud, sigh, thud. Almost like a slow heartbeat that matches my own. I could almost sleep if sleep didn’t insist on bringing him with it.

Instead I watch the horizon tighten, the light thinning to that peculiar silver that always precedes rain. Somewhere beyond it lies Jericho, and in Jericho a coffin, and in that coffin a boy who once made me question the virtue of survival.

The thought is unpleasantly human. I banish it and focus on the clouds. They look like ink spreading through water. They look like something trying to remember how to disappear.

…

The road begins to climb, the trees thinning until the horizon opens like a wound.
Rain speckles the windscreen, then stops. The driver hums to himself, a nervous little tune that dies each time he remembers I’m here.

I stare out the window. The landscape has turned skeletal. I see bare branches, old barns, and the occasional church tilting under its own moral weight. I recognize none of it and all of it at once. Memory is a cruel architect; it rebuilds things you thought you had demolished.

My reflection stares back at me from the glass. I study it as though preparing for cross-examination. If I see them again. Enid, Agnes, and the scattered members of my family. What will I say?
I can already hear the questions, each one an unwelcome echo. ’How have you been?”
Alive. Against my better judgement.

“Why didn’t you visit?” Because solitude never asks to share the bed.

“Do you still write?” Yes. Mostly epitaphs. Sometimes for people who haven’t died yet.

I imagine Enid’s expression when she sees me again. Bright, hopeful, and entirely resistant to decay. She will hug me before I can stop her. Agnes will hover at the edge of the room, unsure whether to smile or exorcise me. My mother will call me her “resilient little orchid” while my father tries not to look proud of the damage.

The images flicker across the window glass, ghosts layered over trees. They fade as the clouds swallow the light.

For years I’ve lived inside a silence so complete it learnt to mimic comfort. New Orleans was kind in that way; it allowed me to vanish politely. A house that creaked in sympathy, a city that pretended not to see me. It was a truce between me and the world.

Now I am travelling back to the place where I first learnt how noisy ghosts can be.

The driver clears his throat. “We’ll hit Jericho by nightfall.”

“Appropriate,” I answer. “It was never much of a daytime town.”

He glances at me in the mirror, unsure if I’m joking. I’m not.

I let the movement of the car lull me. The rhythm feels almost like breathing. Inhale, exhale, thud. I imagine the funeral waiting ahead, the smell of lilies struggling to mask the odour of decay, and the polite horror of small-town sympathy.

If anyone asks why I came, I will tell them I was invited. If they ask if I cared, I will tell them I am still deciding.

The first drops of rain return, heavier this time, splattering against the glass like ink spilt on paper. I trace one with my fingertip, watch it run down, merging with another until it disappears.

This is what people call closure. It looks suspiciously like repetition.

…

By the time the road begins to narrow, the light has thinned to that peculiar shade of silver.

The driver slows without being told; the tyres hum against cracked asphalt, and a sign appears out of the mist: Welcome to Jericho. Its paint peeled, its cheerfulness an act of defiance or denial. Perhaps both.

Ten years, and the town still smells the same: damp pine, cold earth, and the faint sweetness of rot that clings. The gas station where I once bought matches and contempt is still standing, its neon sign flickering like a pulse. The bakery next to it has become a pharmacy; progress always finds the least poetic direction.

The Weathervane Café appears on the corner. Its windows are darker now, the once-warm light replaced by the jaundiced glow of cheap bulbs. The door is shut, the “Open” sign hanging crookedly, as though unsure of its own meaning. I look away before the ache of memory has the chance to articulate itself.

The car passes the edge of town. The streets are narrower here, the houses older, each porch sagging under the weight of its own nostalgia. Curtains twitch as we go by. Jericho’s citizens have always been generous with suspicion.

I sit perfectly still, hands folded on my lap, eyes cataloguing every detail: the sagging church steeple, the chipped statue of Crackstone that still presides over the square like a bad idea that refuses to die, and the stray cat that watches from the kerb as though appointed to witness my return.

So little has changed. That is the curse of small towns: they preserve everything, especially the things that should have been allowed to decay.

The driver glances at me in the mirror. “Where to, ma’am?”

“St Morwenna’s Chapel,” I tell him. The name tastes metallic.

He nods and turns left. The road climbs gently toward the hill. From here, I can see the outline of Nevermore in the distance. Its towers half-rebuilt, its windows catching the last light.

Something twists low in my chest, a muscle remembering pain. I press my gloved fingers to the window, cold glass meeting colder skin, and let the view blur.

We pass the cemetery gates. They are open. The ironwork glistens with rain. For a moment the headlights catch on the headstones, turning them into a field of teeth.

The car slows again. The chapel appears. A narrow building of grey stone, its spire crooked, its windows lit by candlelight that flickers like an uneasy heartbeat. The driver pulls to a stop.

“We’re here,” he says.

Of course we are. The living always are.

I pay him and step out into the damp air. The smell of wet grass and lilies wraps around me, suffocatingly clean. Behind me, the car engine fades into distance.

…

The chapel yard is empty. The rain has given up, leaving the air damp and sweet. I walk between the rows of headstones, their names blurred by moss and weather, and for the first time in years I feel almost at home. The dead at least understand boundaries.

Inside, the air is cooler, heavy with wax and stone. Candles burn low along the walls; their light crawls across the pews, illuminating dust motes that drift like exhausted spirits. I sit in the back row, bag at my feet, and let the silence wrap around me.

It is not grief that settles on my shoulders. It is memory wearing its best imitation. The chapel smells of wet wood, candle smoke, and the faint trace of metal that always follows a storm.

I close my eyes. For a moment, I allow myself the indulgence of stillness. Ten years of motion, of writing, of keeping death at arm’s length, and now here I am, waiting for it to catch up.

A door creaks open somewhere behind the altar, the sound slicing through the quiet. Footsteps echo, light but sure, the measured cadence of someone who belongs here.

“Never thought I’d see you back in Jericho,” a voice says. It’s smooth and clear, with that same undertone of command I remember from the halls of Nevermore.

I turn. Bianca Barclay stands at the end of the aisle, a clipboard in one hand, a candle in the other. Time has been kind to her, or perhaps she’s simply learnt to hide its cruelty better than most. The years have sharpened her edges; her posture still says 'queen' even when surrounded by ghosts.

“Bianca,” I say, and the name tastes strange on my tongue. Like a word I’ve used in a dream.

“Wednesday Addams.” She smiles, small and knowing. “You still have a talent for arriving at inconvenient hours.”

“It’s one of my few social skills.”

She walks closer, the candlelight tracing gold along her cheekbones. “I’m overseeing the final preparations for the service. Never thought I’d be doing this, but the headmistress asked for someone who could ‘handle the awkward guests.’” Her gaze flicks over me. “I assume that means you.”

“How considerate,” I murmur.

Bianca studies me for a heartbeat too long. “You look exactly the same.”

“I take preservation seriously.”

The faintest smile crosses her face, gone almost before it begins. “You really came.”

“I was invited.”

“And if you hadn’t been?”

“I probably would have written something scathing about the catering.”

She laughs quietly, then sets the candle down on the pew beside me. “It’s strange, isn’t it? All these years, and somehow Jericho still manages to pull us back when it wants to. Like gravity, or guilt.”

I look at the altar, at the black-draped coffin waiting there. “I’m not sure which of those is stronger.”

Bianca’s eyes follow mine. “He’s really gone, Wednesday.”

I don’t answer. The truth of it moves in the air between us, too large and too fragile to touch.

After a moment she straightens, professionalism reclaiming her. “I’ll finish the setup. Stay as long as you need. Just… try not to startle the undertaker; he scares easily.”

She moves away, her footsteps receding into the side hall. I remain seated, staring at the ceiling.

…

The chapel settles after Bianca’s footsteps fade. The air thickens again, as if memory itself has weight. I sit motionless, listening to the candle crackle. It is the only sound besides my pulse and the soft percussion of water dripping somewhere behind the walls.

I should leave. I tell myself that twice. But leaving has never been my most consistent virtue. I rest my elbows on my knees, fold my hands, and let the memory rise. Not the first one. The last.

He had been sitting by the window in the infirmary at Nevermore, bandaged, too pale, still human. The sun had already begun its descent, pouring amber light through the cracked glass. I remember the dust floating in it, lazy, almost holy. I remember his voice. Quiet, uncertain, the kind of quiet that made you want to fill it with words.

“You don’t have to stay,” he’d said.

“I’m not staying,” I had answered, though I had been.

We’d both known it was a lie.

He had turned his head, the light catching the green in his eyes, and smiled in that irritating, disarming way of his. “Then don’t leave either.”

I never answered. I had simply stood there until the shadows grew long enough to hide the expression I wasn’t supposed to have. Then I had walked away, slow enough that he could have stopped me if he wanted to. He didn’t.

It had felt clean at the time. Logical. Merciful. Now, in the hush of the chapel, it feels like cowardice disguised as grace.

The candle beside me gutters and spits. I watch the wax slide down the brass holder and harden.

He would have hated this place, the solemnity, the pity. He would have joked to break the tension and said something irreverent about ghosts and guilt. I would have corrected his grammar and pretended not to care.

A small, humourless smile touches my mouth. “You would have mocked the flowers,” I murmur. “And you’d be right. They don’t suit you. Nothing that soft ever did.”

The chapel answers only with its own breathing: the stretch of timber, the sigh of old stone.

For a long moment, I allow myself the luxury of silence. I let the memory dissolve back into the dark, the way one allows an infection to drain. When it’s gone, only the ache remains. Familiar, almost comforting.

…

Morning arrives early. The hotel room has the charm of a hospital ward: white walls, a single window overlooking Jericho’s empty street, and the persistent sound of rain trying to remember how to stop. I drink the coffee they provided. It’s an offence against both caffeine and decency. I dress with the same care one applies to an execution. Black on black, hair pinned, expression calibrated between indifference and caring.

The chapel is a mile away. The walk feels shorter than memory should allow. Jericho looks unchanged; its sidewalks still lean, and its shop windows still try too hard to appear alive. The air tastes of soil and lilies. The official perfume of funerals and lies.

By the time I reach the hill, the bell has already tolled once. I slip inside quietly, closing the door on the whisper of rain. The chapel is dimmer than it was last night. Candles line the aisle, their flames bending toward the open door. The coffin rests before the altar, surrounded by flowers that have begun to wilt under their own sincerity.

There are fewer people than I expected. Death, it seems, has lost its social appeal.

Enid is seated near the front, her hair subdued into soft gold instead of its usual rebellion of colour. Even grief cannot make her small; she radiates warmth into the stone around her, an indecent contrast to the chill. Agnes sits beside her, posture rigid, eyes dry, hands clasped as if in prayer or restraint. Bianca stands near the aisle, all composure and silence.

The rest are strangers. Faces blurred by distance and disinterest. A few townspeople, a man in an ill-fitting suit, a woman clutching a tissue she doesn’t need. They look at the coffin the way one looks at an unfinished novel. Curious, impatient, uncommitted.

I take my place in the back pew. The wood is cold, the air colder. It smells of wax and the peculiar sweetness of flowers that have already started to decay.

For a moment, it is almost peaceful. But then the door opens again.

The sound of heels on stone breaks the hush: a deliberate, familiar rhythm that could belong to no one else. Morticia Addams glides down the aisle, her husband a dark shadow at her side. Gomez, ever theatrical even in grief, bows slightly to the empty air as if greeting the deceased personally. Behind them follows Pugsley. He’s taller now, broader, the clumsy angles of adolescence tempered into something resembling confidence. He carries himself like a man who has discovered that mischief, when properly aged, becomes charm.

They take seats near the front. Morticia’s hand rests lightly on Gomez’s arm; he covers it with his own, fingers twining, a gesture both tender and possessive. The sight strikes me with that familiar paradox: revulsion and envy wrapped neatly together.

Pugsley turns once, scanning the chapel. When his eyes find me, recognition softens them. He gives a small, almost shy nod. I return it. Ten years apart, and this is the most honest conversation we’ve ever had.

From where I sit, I can see the coffin, the lilies, the condensation on the stained-glass window.
I think of the boy who once laughed too easily and the monster who never learnt how. They have both been reduced to this single box.

…

The service begins with the slow rustle of bodies settling, a collective surrender to ritual. The officiant. A thin man with the kind of face that looks perpetually apologetic. He steps up to the lectern. His cassock hangs from him like borrowed skin. The Bible in his hands is large.

“Tyler Galpin,” he says, and the name breaks the air. “A life cut short, but not without meaning.”

It’s a predictable opening. I have written better first lines for clients who met their end through kitchen accidents.

He speaks of forgiveness, of mercy, of redemption. I watch the crowd rather than listen. Enid bows her head, shoulders trembling once. Agnes stares straight ahead, unblinking, as though she could hold the whole service together through sheer will. Bianca’s jaw is tight, her hands folded perfectly, a statue of restraint.

The townspeople shift and fidget. They have come for the performance, not the grief. Their eyes dart from coffin to stained glass, waiting for something dramatic to justify their attendance.

I can’t blame them. Even death has a marketing problem these days. The officiant reads from Psalms; his voice cracks once, perhaps out of habit. He speaks of peace, of gentle sleep. The irony is exquisite. Tyler never slept gently in his life.

A local musician. An elderly man with a violin that looks older than Jericho itself rises. The first notes quiver in the air, thin as breath. The melody is neither hymn nor lament, but something in between, uncertain of its own purpose. It wavers, stumbles, then finds itself.

The sound fills the chapel like mist. It seeps into the pews, the walls, and the small fractures of memory I pretend not to have.

I remember the first time Tyler played music in the Weathervane after hours, hands still dusted with flour, humming under his breath. It had been off-key, earnest, infuriatingly human.
Now the tune is a ghost of that same effort, slower, sadder, lacking his careless warmth.

Enid reaches for Agnes’s hand. Bianca exhales through her nose, the smallest crack in her mask. My mother closes her eyes, and my father lowers his head until their foreheads touch. It’s love and mourning indistinguishable in silhouette.

I sit motionless. Grief requires movement; mine has always been skeletal. The song ends. The last note trembles, dissolves. Silence follows, long enough to feel sacred and then, inevitably, uncomfortable.

The officiant clears his throat again. “If anyone wishes to speak…”

No one moves. The quiet stretches. Then Enid stands. Her voice, when it comes, is small but steady. She talks about friendship, about forgiveness, about second chances that never arrived. She talks about monsters as though they are metaphors and about love as though it is an act of defiance. Her words are kind. Too kind. They bruise as they land.

When she sits, even the officiant looks relieved.

I do not stand. My silence is its own speech.

…

The rain begins its slow descent before anyone can leave the chapel, as if the sky itself has decided to attend the burial. The mourners shuffle out beneath umbrellas, black wings unfolding into the grey. I follow them into the damp air, though “follow” implies I belong among them, and I never have.

The graveyard spreads out before me like a dark field of punctuation. Headstones jutting from the earth, everyone a comma in someone else’s unfinished story. The coffin waits at the edge of its grave, slick with rain, surrounded by flowers that already look like apologies.

The priest recites something from his book. His voice has that faint tremor of a man who speaks of heaven while suspecting he’ll never see it. The others bow their heads. I do not. The living lower their gaze when they’re afraid of what they might recognise.

Enid stands near the front, the hem of her coat soaked through. Her shoulders tremble once, twice. Agnes is beside her, jaw tight, refusing the luxury of visible grief. Bianca hovers close, a silent sentinel, her umbrella angled just enough to hide her eyes.

The sound of soil hitting wood is shockingly soft. It’s the most civilised sound in the world.

And then I see them again. At first, I think the rain has created the silhouettes, figures rising from the mist to remind me that ghosts are impatient creatures. But the shapes move closer, clearer. My pulse stutters once, traitorously human.

Morticia. Gomez and Pugsley. They walk together, the three of them, framed by the cemetery gate like a portrait that time has tried and failed to ruin. Gomez holds the umbrella, though the rain ignores him. Morticia’s hand rests lightly on his arm, a touch practised through decades of devotion. Pugsley walks a step behind, older now, his shoulders squared, the boy long since consumed by the man.

I haven’t spoken to them in ten years. A decade of silence sits between us like another coffin, larger than the one before me.

They spot me almost instantly. Of course they do. An Addams is not difficult to find in a graveyard. Gomez’s expression flickers first: surprise, then something heavier, gentler. Morticia’s face softens, though the softness feels like a wound. Pugsley’s mouth parts, as if he might call my name. He doesn’t. None of them speak. Neither do I.

We simply look at each other across the grave, across ten years, across everything that has rotted quietly in our absence.

Morticia’s eyes are exactly as I remember them. Dark, endless, unreadable. But I can see it there, the smallest tremor beneath her calm, the almost imperceptible break that she will never let the world see. Gomez looks as though he wants to run to me, but her hand on his arm stills him. Pugsley takes a hesitant step forward, and for a moment, I think I will too. I don’t. He stops.

Rain collects on their shoulders, their faces, and their lashes. None of them move to wipe it away. It feels too symbolic, perhaps. The Addams family has always been theatrical about suffering.

I want to say something. Anything. I want to tell them I am fine, that solitude has been kind to me, and that I no longer dream in colour. I want to tell them I am sorry, though I am not sure for what. For leaving, perhaps. For not missing them enough. For missing them at all.

But I say nothing. Because the words would make it real.

Instead, I lower my eyes first. It feels like defeat, which is precisely why I do it.

When I look up again, they have turned toward the path. Morticia’s hand lingers at her husband’s back; Pugsley glances once over his shoulder. It’s not long enough to meet my gaze, just enough to prove he tried. And then they are gone.

The rain fills the space they leave behind. The gravediggers return, their shovels biting into the earth with soft, repetitive finality. I stand there, soaked and silent, watching the last flicker of black disappear into the mist. My family has always known how to make an exit. I am the only one who never learnt how to follow.

…

The graveyard empties with the practised efficiency of people escaping discomfort. Umbrellas tilt and vanish down the path, the last few words of condolence dissolving into rain. Soon there is nothing left but the smell of earth and lilies, the dull percussion of water striking stone.

I stay.

The gravediggers have finished their work; the coffin is hidden now, swallowed neatly by soil. A thin layer of mud gleams where the earth has been disturbed, slick and fresh, a wound bandaged too quickly. Someone has left a handful of white flowers at the edge of the mound. Lilies again, as if repetition could qualify as sincerity.

I stare at them until my vision blurs, until the petals melt into the mud. The rain seeps through my clothes and settles in my hair. It’s not unpleasant. Cold has always been more honest than warmth.

For a moment, I let myself imagine that I am the last living thing left in Jericho. It feels almost peaceful.

And then I feel it. The subtle prickling along the back of my neck, that quiet instinct that belongs to prey and those who’ve learnt to imitate it.

I lift my head. At the far end of the graveyard, just beyond the crooked gate, someone stands in the rain.

A figure. Tall, motionless, wrapped in a long, dark coat. The hood is pulled low, obscuring the face, but even from here I can sense the focus. It isn’t the casual glance of a passerby. It’s the stillness of someone watching.

For a heartbeat, neither of us moves. The wind shifts. A sheet of rain passes between us, and when it clears, the space is empty. The figure is gone.

I wait, eyes scanning the tree line, the road beyond the fence, the shadows between headstones. Nothing. Only the rhythm of rain, the flicker of lightning somewhere far off, and the world returning to its ordinary decay.

My pulse slows again, though not entirely. Logic offers explanations. Maybe it’s an undertaker, a mourner too shy for company, or a trick of the light, but logic has always been a poor consolation when it comes to ghosts.

I glance once more at the mound of earth, the lilies already bruised by weather, and exhale. I turn away at last, boots sinking into the wet ground, and start back toward the gate. The mist closes behind me, erasing the path as I go.

…

The hotel room is small, square, and impersonal. It’s perfect for anonymity, disastrous for distraction. Its single lamp hums like a nervous insect; the wallpaper curls at the corners as if recoiling from the damp.

Outside, the rain has settled into a steady rhythm, soft and relentless, the kind of sound that erases time rather than marking it.

I sit by the window, still in my funeral dress, still damp from the graveyard. The glass is fogged where I’ve been breathing too close, a faint circle of human evidence I keep wiping away.

The figure at the cemetery refuses to dissolve. I replay it with precision. The distance.
The height. The tilt of the head. Too deliberate for accident, too familiar for chance.

A trick of the light, I tell myself. A mourner, late to the ritual, unwilling to share the stage.
But the thought collapses the moment I build it. The scene rearranges itself each time I blink, and in every version, the figure stands still while the world around them moves.

The rain deepens; thunder rolls somewhere over the hills, too distant to be a threat, too close to ignore. I light a candle, mostly for the company. The flame trembles, mimicking the heartbeat I insist I don’t feel.

On the nightstand lies the folded funeral programme. I smooth it flat and study the printed name: Tyler Galpin. The letters sit neatly in their lines, obedient, harmless. Paper, ink, nothing more.

Yet when I close my eyes. The image returns. The hooded figure. The rain running down their sleeve. The stillness that wasn’t quite human.

A memory tries to surface: the exact angle of his shoulders, the particular way he used to stand when pretending not to be guilty. I banish it. Imagination is a parasite; feed it once, and it never leaves.

I look out into the night. The street below is empty, the puddles reflecting only the streetlight’s exhausted glow. No movement, no shadow. Yet the sensation lingers. The faint awareness of being observed by something that doesn’t require eyes.

I set the candle on the sill and whisper to the glass. Either haunt me properly or stop wasting my time.

The wind presses against the window as if testing it. The flame bends, almost goes out, then rights itself. I sit there until the candle gutters low, until the rain softens into silence, until the edge of exhaustion blurs thought into dream.

When sleep finally comes, it arrives like surrender. Somewhere in that thin, dark space between waking and forgetting, I think I hear footsteps in the hallway.

Chapter Text

Wednesday’s POV

I wake to the sound of something small and deliberate scraping against my hotel door. It’s not loud enough to be a threat and not soft enough to be ignored. It’s the kind of sound that slips into sleep and pries it open with cold fingers.

My eyes snap open before my body catches up. The room is still soaked in the remnants of candlelight. The wick has a blackened spine curled in its own ashes, and the air is heavy with the scent of extinguished wax.

For a moment I think the noise was part of a dream, another cruel replay of the figure in the graveyard. But it comes again.

It’s almost a whisper of movement. Like fabric brushing wood. A breath where there shouldn’t be one.

I’m out of bed in a single motion, feet silent against the warped floorboards. The hotel offered slippers; I declined. Slippers are for the excessively hopeful.

The noise shifts. It’s a faint scuff, retreating away from my room.

I reach the door, fingers wrapping the knob, pulse annoyingly present. And without hesitation. Because hesitation is how people die in stories I refuse to participate in, I wrench the door open. The hallway is long and narrow, illuminated by a single flickering bulb that looks one shock away from surrender. The wallpaper peels in strips, and the air smells of dust. At the far end of the corridor, a shadow bolts. I see a figure. hooded, dark. It’s just a smear of movement against the dim light. I don’t see their face. Only the shape of them disappearing around the corner.

I step out, feet cold on the faded carpet, and start toward them, but it’s already too late. By the time I reach the turn, the staircase is empty, the door at the far end swinging slightly from recent use. The night outside presses against the windows.

I stand perfectly still, letting the silence recalibrate around me. My breath evens. My pulse does not. Someone knocked on my door. Someone waited, and then they ran. I return to my room, closing the door with a soft, final click. The kind that suggests the next attempt should be more interesting if it hopes to keep my attention.

I glance down at the floor. A single piece of paper lies just inside the threshold. It’s small, folded and damp at the edges.

Maybe it’s a message. Or a warning. Or maybe even a summons.

I do not pick it up yet. I let it sit there, bleeding rainwater into the wood, while I study the shadows for movement that isn’t there. It seems Jericho has decided that one funeral is not enough entertainment for the week.

I close the curtains, switch on the lamp, and sit at the edge of the bed, the paper waiting at my feet like a very polite threat. I do not believe in coincidence. I believe in patterns.

And something or someone is trying to make one. Only when the quiet settles deep enough to taste do I finally reach down and lift the note, holding it between two fingers.

I unfold it slowly, bracing myself not for what it might say, but for the possibility that it says nothing at all. Sometimes silence is the most dangerous message.

…

The paper unfolds with an unwilling crackle, and immediately I can see where the rain has seeped into its edges, saturating the fibres until the ink began to bloom in places like small, dark contusions.

There, in the centre of the page. Alone, stark, unaccompanied by a single word rests a symbol. A spiral. Not a decorative flourish or a whimsical doodle traced absentmindedly by a bored hand, but a tight, constricting coil of black ink, drawn with such deliberate pressure that the nib must have threatened to tear straight through the fragile paper. It narrows inward, smaller and smaller, until the line ends in a point.

I study it without touching it at first. The room around me seems to withdraw as I stare, the dim lamplight shrinking to a pale halo on the paper.

A spiral. Of all things, a spiral.

Once, a long time ago, someone carved it into the stone beneath Nevermore Academy with unsteady hands. Maybe a clumsy spell, a desperate prayer, or a warning scratched by someone who realised too late what was hiding in the dark.

Another time, I saw it tucked into the corner of a sketchbook that wasn’t mine, drawn over and over by someone who feared the symbol’s shape but couldn’t stop themselves from repeating it.

And once, just once, I saw it pressed lightly into the dirt by the heel of a boy who believed he was perfectly calm, until one shaky moment proved he wasn’t.

The symbol has always meant different things depending on who draws it: fear, surrender, confession, control. But drawn here. Slipped under my door at the hour when ghosts start to whisper, it feels without a doubt like a summons. Or worse, an invitation.

I lift the note between two fingers, holding it up to the lamplight. The ink glistens faintly, suggesting the writer used a fountain pen. It’s a detail that narrows the field considerably, because most people lack the patience or precision required for such an instrument.
The line work is steady, too steady, as if the hand that made it was very sure or very practised.

Someone who knows me. Someone who understands how to speak without speaking.
Someone who wants me to chase the answer.

A foolish expectation. I never chase. I simply observe until the truth grows impatient and throws itself at my feet.

Still, my fingers tighten slightly around the paper. It’s an involuntary reaction, but an honest one. I crease the damp edges as I fold it neatly.

I place it on the nightstand beside the half-melted candle, the spiral staring upward. For a long, suspended moment, I do nothing except watch it.

The rain outside, relentless and methodical, taps against the window.

A floorboard creaks somewhere in the hallway. Too close to be coincidence. Too controlled to panic.

Whoever stood outside my door is still nearby. Lingering in the stale shadows of the hotel corridor, watching, listening, deciding.

I rise slowly, not out of fear but curiosity. The far more dangerous of the two crosses the small room with soundless steps until I reach the door once more.

My hand hovers above the knob. The hallway is silent now. It’s the kind of silence that feels manufactured rather than natural.

…

Morning drags itself across Jericho. The rain has thinned into a mist that clings to windows.

I leave the hotel without breakfast. The concept of eating in a place built for temporary lives has always felt excessive. I walk through the town with the slow, deliberate pace of someone retracing a crime scene.

Jericho hasn’t changed, though it has certainly faded. Shops slump against their own foundations. Brick bleeds rust. Signs creak tiredly from a single hinge, as if even language is exhausted here.

Sitting meekly at the corner like a loyal dog waiting for a master who never returned is the Weathervane. The door is the same faded blue. The windows still fog around the edges. The small “Open” sign hangs crooked, as though hung by someone too distracted to notice the angle.

I push the door open. The bell above it gives a weak jingle. Inside, the air smells of coffee, old wood, and the faint sweetness of pastries that have spent too much time on display. The tables are mostly empty. A single teenager wipes the counter with the apathetic despair of a minimum-wage employee.

The memories arrive before I can stop them. They’re unwanted and intrusive. I remember his laugh behind the counter. The clatter of mugs. The smell of cinnamon on his hands.

I banish them. Memories are attention-seeking parasites.

I move toward the booth in the far corner. It’s the one where the light is weakest, and therefore the only one I can tolerate, but halfway there, the atmosphere shifts. A change so subtle most would miss it. But not me. I always notice it.

I sense her before I see her. It feels like a disturbance in the air. I suddenly see Morticia Addams sitting at the counter, her back turned to me, the black fall of her hair as flawless as a midnight sea. Her posture is a poem about composure. Her fingers cradle a porcelain cup the way one might hold something sacred or dangerous. Which is often the same thing, in my experience.

She has not seen me. Not yet. But I feel the exact moment she senses movement behind her.
Her shoulders go perfectly still. Her fingers freeze on the cup’s handle.
She turns her head an inch, just enough for me to see the line of her jaw, the echo of yesterday’s rain still clinging to her lashes.

Her eyes find mine. Dark to dark. Mother to daughter.  Ten years collapsing into a single, unbearable moment.

The room around us seems to fall silent, though perhaps it simply recognises that it is not invited to this reunion.

Morticia’s lips part slightly. Not in surprise, but in something softer, something infinitely worse.
There is a tremor in her breath she tries to hide. She always forgets she taught me how to observe. “Wed…” My name begins to leave her mouth.

I cannot allow it to finish. I turn before the second syllable can escape, before the word becomes a rope that pulls me backward into a past I spent years scraping from my ribs. My boots make no sound on the café floor. My pulse is louder than my footsteps.

I push the door open and step into the mist without looking back. The bell jingles weakly behind me, pitiful in its attempt at ceremony.

Outside, the cold air hits my lungs. I walk fast, deliberately, as though the very act of moving forward could prevent the past from gaining on me.

I do not know where I am going next. Only that I must keep walking until the tremor beneath my sternum fades.

Morticia wanted to speak. I did not want to listen. Some distances are maintained not for safety, but for survival.

The mist thickens around me, swallowing the street, the café, and the fragile thread that nearly connected us again. I am alone. As I intended. As I am practised at being.

…

The mist thickens as I walk, swallowing shopfronts and street corners in slow motion. Until Jericho becomes nothing more than greyscale outlines and half-remembered shapes. The town always looked better in the rain. It looks cleansed, muted, stripped of its false wholesomeness.

The park lies at the centre of Jericho. Its benches sag with age, the flowerbeds are more mud than bloom, and the stone paths buckle beneath years of neglect. And there, grotesque and triumphant as ever, stands the statue of Joseph Crackstone, sanctimonious, self-righteous, and eternally pointing toward a future no one asked for.

It is just as hideous as I remember. Time has softened none of his edges.

I approach the statue slowly, boots sinking into the rain-soaked grass. His carved eyes glare at me with the same hollow, humourless disdain they always had. Ironic, given that the last time I faced him, he was made of far softer material than stone.

I stand before him, silent, letting the sour nostalgia settle over me. The past has a remarkable talent for crowding even the most carefully curated solitude.

Suddenly I hear footsteps crunch behind me. They’re light, hesitant, and unmistakably familiar. I don’t turn immediately; the delay is intentional, a small courtesy I never grant lightly.

“W-Wednesday?” Enid’s voice slips into the mist, golden even when subdued.

I inhale once, then turn. She stands a few feet away, hair damp, jacket clinging to her arms, and mascara slightly smudged from the funeral’s weather or its emotions; with Enid, it could be either. She holds an envelope in her trembling hands, as if its weight requires more strength than she expected.

“You left the café so fast,” she says, trying and failing to keep her tone gentle rather than concerned.
“It's a skill,” I reply.

She almost smiles. Then she extends the envelope toward me. “This came for you. From the probate office.”

The words fall awkwardly, as if she still cannot believe she is saying them. “They’re reading Tyler’s will this afternoon. It’s… a meeting of beneficiaries.”

I take the envelope but don’t open it. Paper can wait. Grief, apparently, cannot. “I’m not a beneficiary,” I say.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Enid’s expression tightens. She has always hated my certainty. “Just…just go,” she murmurs. “You should hear whatever they have to say.”

She turns as if to leave, shoulders curling inward, but something arrests her mid-step.

Her gaze shifts past me, toward the sidewalk at the park’s edge, where the Weathervane’s door has just swung open. Morticia steps out. Elegant and composed. The mist coils around her.

Enid exhales sharply. “Oh.” Her voice is small, but her outrage is not. She rounds on me with surprising heat, fingers tightening on her jacket sleeves. “Wednesday… what are you doing?”

“Avoiding unnecessary complications.”

“That’s not what this is.”

I say nothing. Silence is my best armour. Unfortunately, it only frustrates wolves.

“So you’re just…” Enid motions helplessly, “… pretending they’re not here? Pretending they didn’t travel all this way? Pretending they don’t…”
She chokes on the last word. It’s love. She can’t say it, and I won’t.

“They don’t hate you,” she whispers.
“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” she shoots back.
“Because I saw your mother’s face when she saw you.” Her voice softens, dangerously. “She looked like someone who’d finally found the thing she’d been searching for in the dark. And you walked away.”

I keep my eyes fixed on Crackstone’s stony sneer. It’s a safer enemy than the truth, in Enid’s words.

“You haven’t spoken to them in ten years,” she says more quietly, “but it doesn’t mean they stopped wanting you.”

“I prefer distance,” I answer, each syllable precise, practised, unforgiving. “It ensures no one bleeds on me when they fall apart.”

Enid steps closer. “Wednesday… they’re your family.”

“They forfeited that title,” I say. But even I can hear the fracture in the sentence.

Enid’s eyes glisten. Either from rain or sorrow, I can’t tell.
She looks toward Morticia, then back at me. “Maybe they didn’t,” she whispers.

“Maybe you did.” Before I can respond, she turns abruptly and walks away, her boots splashing through the wet grass. I watch her until she vanishes around a bend, swallowed by mist.

Morticia stands across the street, still looking in my direction. Still waiting. Still unbearably composed.

I do not move. Neither does she. Eventually she lowers her gaze, just slightly, as though acknowledging defeat without admitting vulnerability. She walks away. Her silhouette dissolves into the pale morning.

I am left alone with Crackstone’s stony scowl and the envelope in my hand. My thoughts filled with the spiral from last night. The hooded figure. The will reading. My family and Tyler.

Everything is converging whether I want it to or not.

…

Jericho’s library sits at the edge of town. Its once-white stone is now yellowed and cracked, its windows opaque with age. The sign out front, JERICHO PUBLIC LIBRARY, tilts at an angle.

Inside, the air is thick with dust and disuse. It smells faintly of old paper, mildew, and a nostalgia I refuse to acknowledge. Rows of shelves loom like skeletal ribs, narrow aisles forming the spine of a creature that died long before any of us learnt to read.

It is, in short, comforting. I move toward the occult section. It’s still tucked away in the farthest corner, as though Jericho hopes its strangeness will suffocate under the weight of cookbooks and historical fiction. My boots echo faintly on the floor.

I don’t know what I expect to find. Books on spirals, on symbols, on sigils, on the quiet madness of those who once lived in Jericho’s shadows. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.

I pull several volumes from the shelves. They are dust-thick tomes with cracked spines and pages that sigh when opened. One book contains diagrams of runes, another catalogues the superstitions of 19th-century outcasts; none of them match the symbol exactly, but they brush close, uncomfortably close. Spirals used as warnings. As lures. As marks of those who wished to come back from the dead or never leave it in the first place.

I am mid-page when I feel the presence behind me. “Addams.”

I do not turn right away. Bianca has always been patient enough to tolerate a dramatic pause.

When I finally look up, she stands at the end of the aisle, arms crossed, posture immaculate even under the dim library lights. Her hair is braided tightly, as if woven with purpose; her expression is sharper than any blade I have ever held.

“You’re predictable,” she says.
“That’s disappointing. I hoped ten years would cure you of that.”

“How generous of you to think I can be cured,” I reply, closing the book with a soft thud.

She steps closer, boots silent on the carpet. “Looking for something?” she asks, though her eyes have already flicked to the books in my hands.
“I’m doing research.”

“Of course you are.” Bianca exhales, a slow, measured sound, not quite exasperation, not quite pity. “Wednesday, you realise you don’t have to do this alone.”

“I am alone by design,” I say. “It eliminates variables.”

“It eliminates people,” she counters. “And somehow, you always pretend that’s the same thing.”

I turn slightly, annoyed at how effortlessly she reads me.

Bianca gestures toward the open book. “Let me guess…someone left a little…message for you?” Her eyebrows lift in a way that suggests she already knows the answer.

I do not confirm. I do not need to.

She clicks her tongue softly. “You know, for someone who claims to have no feelings left, you’re acting remarkably rattled.”

“I’m not rattled,” I say.

“Right. And I’m not observing the exact same avoidance tactics you used senior year whenever something scared you enough to pretend it didn’t.”

“That never happened.”

“It happened constantly,” Bianca says, stepping closer until we are separated only by the sliver of shadow between us. “Addams… You can keep running circles around everyone else, but you can’t do it with me. I trained with you. I fought with you. I know how your lies bend before they break.”

“That sounds like an overestimation of my transparency.”

“It’s not,” she says quietly. “It’s an indictment of your denial.”

Her voice softens. It’s not kind but precise, cutting with the tenderness of someone who knows exactly where your armour has hairline fractures. “You left your family,” Bianca says. “You left Jericho, you left all of us. Fine. That was your choice. But you don’t get to pretend the past evaporated just because you walked away from it.”

I open my mouth, but she holds up a hand.

“And now you’re back,” she continues, “because someone died. Someone you pretend meant nothing, but whose death is still dragging you by the throat toward places you swore you’d never look again.”

Her eyes flick to the spiral symbol as though she can see it through my coat. Perhaps she can. Sirens have always been inconveniently perceptive.

“You can’t avoid your past forever,” she says. “Eventually, it stops waiting for you to acknowledge it and starts crawling under the door.”

A long silence stretches between us, taut and uncomfortable.

Finally, she steps back, reclaiming her regal composure. “The will reading is in two hours,” she says. “You should go.”

“Should I?”

“Yes,” Bianca replies. “Not because you want answers. But because you’re terrified of what happens if you don’t.”

She turns, walking away with the kind of poise that suggests she always wins the argument, even when I don’t admit it out loud.

At the aisle’s end, she pauses and glances back. “Wednesday?” Her voice is almost gentle.
“Running never suited you. You always had more instinct for hunting.”

Then she disappears into the stacks, leaving me alone with the smell of dust, old paper, and truths I am not ready to swallow.

…

Tyler’s house sits at the edge of Jericho. The road leading to it is cracked, buckled by roots and time, and lined with skeletal trees that reach toward the sky as if begging for the sun they never receive. The air grows colder the closer I get, as though the landscape itself would prefer I turn back.

When I finally reach what used to be the Galpin residence, I almost fail to recognise it at all.

The house is a ruin. Not the poetic, ivy-clad decay one might find in a tragic novel or a forgotten countryside manor, but a brutal, stripped skeleton of a home—collapsed beams, half-charred walls, windows shattered into teeth. The roof has caved inward, leaving a hollow, gaping wound exposed to the pale morning sky. Ash stains the brickwork like old bruises. The porch, once crooked but charming in its stubbornness, now sags under its own exhaustion.

It didn’t just fall apart. It was destroyed. Not recently. But years ago. Years in which the world continued spinning, uncaring, while this structure sank into its own grief.

I step through what used to be the front door. It hangs crooked on a single rusted hinge, swinging slightly whenever the wind decides to meddle.

Inside, dust floats through shafts of weak light. The floorboards groan under my weight, not out of warning, but in resignation. Like a sigh exhaled by something that expected me long before I arrived.

I do not know what I am looking for. Evidence maybe, or even answers. A sign the symbol from last night wasn’t a hallucination born from inconvenient emotion.

But mostly, I am looking for him. Not physically. The dead rarely stay put. No, I’m looking for the imprint he left on this space, the residue of a life that intersected with mine more violently than I ever allowed myself to examine.

The living room is filled with the remnants of burning: blackened beams, scorched furniture, and the faint scent of smoke that should have vanished years ago but refuses to surrender. Some stains never fade. Some flames never die.

I crouch beside what used to be the coffee table. A fragment of ceramic lies in the dust. It’s the corner of a mug, glazed blue and white, with the faint outline of a sun peeking over a mountain.
It looks familiar. Painfully so.

The handle is missing. The rest is ash.

Something in my ribs tightens. I rise and move toward the staircase, or what’s left of it. Most of the steps have collapsed, but the top portion remains suspended, a staircase leading to nothing.

The bannister is charred. He would have run his hand along it every day.

I touch it with two fingers. It leaves soot on my skin. Of course it does.

Outside, a breeze pushes through the empty windows, stirring the debris in a slow, mournful spiral. The shape presses against the inside of my mind like a brand.

Coincidence. I despise coincidence.

I walk deeper into the ruins, stepping over collapsed boards and shattered glass. The remains of the kitchen reveal nothing but quiet destruction: melted metal, burnt tile, and the skeletal frame of the fridge leaning like a drunk toward the blackened wall.

The house is silent. Not peacefully silent, expectantly silent. Like it remembers. Like it knows something I don’t. I kneel near the far wall, brushing aside ash and rubble until the outline of something faint and familiar emerges in the dust. A shape etched into the floorboards, partially obscured by charring and debris. It’s a spiral. Drawn hurriedly or painfully.
I can’t tell which.

I sit back slowly, breath steady but colder now. He drew this. Years ago, before the house became a grave of its own. Perhaps as a warning. Perhaps as a confession. Perhaps as the last thing he could still control.

The silence trembles faintly, disturbed by the weight of the past dragging its chains across the present. A floorboard shifts upstairs. A sound that should be impossible because there is no upstairs anymore.

I rise instantly, spine straightening, senses sharpening into something predatory. I hold my breath. I hear another sound. It’s light, subtle, and deliberate. It’s definitely not the wind.

Someone is here. But by the time I turn toward the source, the faint whisper of movement above halts, and the ruin sinks back into stillness. No shadow moves. No breath stirs the dust.

But the silence has changed. It is no longer empty.

I step backward, every muscle coiled, eyes scanning every shattered window and doorframe.

…

The probate office squats between the post office and an abandoned craft store, its chipped sign proudly declaring TOWN HALL ANNEX.

Inside, the air is dry, stale, and tinged with the faint scent of old paperwork and ink. The waiting area consists of three mismatched chairs, a dying fern, and a water cooler that gurgles with the enthusiasm of someone drowning slowly.

The perfect venue for dissecting the remnants of a dead man’s life.

I arrive on time not out of respect, but because lateness implies caring about the schedule I’m disrupting.

Bianca stands near the front desk, arms crossed, posture rigid with authority. Enid sits on one of the chairs, leg bouncing restlessly, chewing her lip with the nervous intensity of someone trying to gnaw her own anxiety into submission.

A few unfamiliar townspeople hover in the background, whispering the way small minds do when confronted with anything more complex than a grocery list.

The room falls silent the moment I step inside. Enid’s head snaps up. Bianca’s eyes narrow in their usual, affectionate disdain. One of the strangers mutters something about “that Addams girl” as if I’m deaf, which I’m not…just selectively indifferent.

I stop three steps inside the doorway, letting the silence thicken. It hangs in the room heavy and suffocating, settling into every crack and crevice.

Enid clears her throat first. “Oh…uh… Wednesday! Hi! You came.”

“Observant of you,” I reply.

She deflates slightly but forces a smile that looks more like pain management than joy.

Bianca steps forward with the slow, commanding grace of someone who has learnt to accept leadership even when she despises it. “You made it,” she says. “Congratulations. That puts you ahead of half the beneficiaries.”

“I aim to exceed expectations,” I answer.

“That would be a first,” she mutters.

A clerk behind the desk, who is a thin man with spectacles and the complexion of a boiled potato, shuffles through papers nervously. He keeps glancing at me the way one looks at a spider they’re afraid to step on because they suspect it will fight back. “We’ll, ah, begin shortly,” he stammers.

Enid shifts in her seat. “Wednesday, do you… want to sit?”

“No.”

“Oh. Right. Of course you don’t.”

A painfully awkward silence settles over the group. After an excruciating thirty seconds, Bianca sighs and says, “Okay, someone say something. This is awful.”

No one speaks. Not even the clerk. He attempts to retreat into his paperwork like a frightened tortoise.

Enid bites her lip again. “So… um… Did you sleep okay? At the hotel?”

“No,” I say flatly. “Something attempted to break in.”

Every head snaps toward me. “What?” Enid sputters.

“Relax,” I add. “It ran away before I could break anything essential.”

Bianca rubs her temple. “Of course you attract intruders. You probably radiate existential dread.”

“That’s not measurable,” I say. “Yet.”

The clerk coughs nervously, trying to regain control. “W-well, we’re just waiting on one more person, and then…”

The door behind us opens with a soft creak. The room freezes.

I do not turn. I let the footsteps fill the silence, slow and deliberate, moving toward us with a weight that presses against the back of my spine.

Enid stands abruptly. Bianca’s jaw tightens. Even the potato-faced clerk sits up straighter.

The footsteps stop just behind me. My pulse remains steady. My breath does not.

I turn slowly and intentionally and find myself staring at the one person I thought I would not see today. My father.

Gomez Addams stands in the doorway, rain still clinging to his coat, eyes bright with a hope he tries and fails to conceal beneath a gentleman’s stoicism. He smiles. It’s the soft, trembling kind of smile that should be illegal in public. “Mi pequeña tormenta…” he whispers. “My little storm.”

The silence becomes unbearable. Every eye shifts between us.

But I do not speak. And neither, for a moment, does he. Something heavy and wordless fills the room, a decade’s worth of distance packed into the space of a heartbeat.

Then the clerk clears his throat loudly and says, “Ah…everyone may…take their seats.”

I remain standing.

…

The clerk clears his throat with unease. He sounds like a man who knows he’s about to ruin a good morning and possibly darken the afternoon as well. He shuffles the small stack of documents in front of him.

The air in the probate room is stale and too warm. The scent of old paper and dust mingles with the nervous breaths of the gathered beneficiaries, forming a kind of atmospheric tension that feels almost physical, almost touchable.

Bianca sits with her arms crossed, her expression carved into marble. She looks proud and impenetrable, yet betrays the smallest, nearly imperceptible flicker of curiosity she tries to suffocate beneath a veneer of detached competence.

Enid sits near the corner, shoulders hunched, twisting a tissue between her hands so violently it is already halfway shredded, her eyes darting toward me every few seconds as if checking that I haven’t vanished between blinks.

My father sits near the door, hands folded behind his back in a posture so painfully formal it resembles a penance, and he watches me with a softness so raw it threatens to split the air.

I stand rigidly where I am, refusing the courtesy of a chair, refusing the suggestion that this room or this moment deserves anything so comfortable as sitting.

The clerk finally begins. “Tyler James Galpin, being of sound mind and body…”
He pauses here, as though expecting divine retribution for allowing such a questionable phrase to leave his lips. He exhales, relieved, and continues.

He lists names first, as clerks always do when easing into tragedy. A few old locals. A former coworker. A distant cousin from Burlington no one in the room recognises.

Followed by “Enid Sinclair”.

Enid gasps softly, eyes widening. The clerk informs her that Tyler left her a set of car keys and a tin box containing photographs. A gesture so unexpectedly gentle that Enid trembles, wiping her eyes with what remains of the tissue.

Bianca is next. She gets a painting, one of questionable artistic merit, and she accepts it with her characteristic blend of poise and reluctant nostalgia.

After that, more names follow. With more items. More remnants of a life being parcelled out piece by piece.

Then the clerk’s voice changes, or perhaps it is the air itself that shifts, tightening, as if recoiling in anticipation of impact.

“And finally…” He clears his throat again, though this time the sound is faint and strangled. “…Wednesday Addams.”

Silence takes over. No one speaks. No one moves.  The clerk fumbles for an envelope, worn and softened at the edges, sealed with a pressure that suggests hesitation and regret. “This”, he says carefully, “was left with explicit instructions to be read aloud at the will hearing.”

I do not blink. I do not look at anyone. I simply incline my head, permission enough.

The clerk unfolds the letter slowly, the paper crackling like something brittle forced back into motion after years of stillness. He reads the letter.

“Wednesday,

If you are hearing these words, it means the world has already ended for me, and whatever remains is simply the debris left behind.
I do not know whether you chose to come or whether someone coerced you with the promise of answers, justice, or morbid curiosity. Knowing you, any of these motivations would suffice.”

A faint, collective breath ripples through the room.

“I am not arrogant enough to assume you mourn me. I am not naïve enough to imagine you forgive me.
I am only hopeful enough to believe you might listen, if only because you always listened to the things most people were terrified to hear.”

My hands remain still at my sides, though something deep within my chest shifts like a creature waking.

“I spent the years after Jericho trying to outrun the shadow of the monster I became, but the truth is that the Hyde clung to me long after the chains were broken, long after the bruises faded, and long after I convinced everyone, including myself, that I was finally safe to stand beside.”

The clerk’s voice falters, but he continues.

“I wish I could tell you I became someone good. I wish I could tell you redemption was simple, or that love, God, or even the idea of love was enough to cleanse the blood off my hands. But you were always the one who saw things clearly, who understood that some stains are not meant to be removed. You once told me monsters don’t get happy endings. It was the only time I hoped you were wrong.”

The room shivers in its stillness.

“So I leave you the only thing I have that ever felt honest. I leave you my journal I kept during the years after Nevermore, the years spent trying to remember who I had been and trying even harder to forget who I became. It contains the things I never said, the truths I never trusted myself to speak aloud, and the memories I prayed would not break me if I wrote them down.”

The clerk’s hand trembles as he flips to the final lines.

“And Wednesday… If there is a world, somewhere, where monsters earn their endings,
where we are permitted to be more than what was carved into our bones,
Then know this: in that world, I would have chosen you. Every time. Even if it ruined me.”

The letter ends. The silence does not.

The clerk lowers the paper slowly, as if afraid the sound of setting it down might fracture the atmosphere entirely. He reaches beneath the desk and retrieves a small, battered, leather-bound notebook. It’s burnt at the corners, the edges warped as though it survived fire only by refusing to let go.

“His journal,” the clerk says quietly. “For Miss Addams.”

Every eye turns to me. Enid, openly crying. Bianca, rigid and calculating. My father, watching with an ache I cannot bear to acknowledge.

I step forward with slow, measured precision. A movement so devoid of hesitation it feels like the entire room holds its breath in sync. The clerk extends the notebook toward me with both hands, the way one might present a relic or a weapon.

I take it. My fingers close around the worn leather. It is warm. Or perhaps my hands are shaking. Either explanation is irritating.

Inside my chest, beneath bone and practised indifference, something long-buried shifts, stretching like an old wound recalling its first cut. The dead, it seems, are not content with silence. Not when there are truths left to unravel. Not when there are ghosts left to resurrect. Not when there are spirals that refuse to end.

…

The air outside the probate office is colder than it should be. The door swings shut behind me with a thud that sounds suspiciously satisfied.

I walk without direction at first, boots sinking into the soft mud where the rain has gathered, Tyler’s journal a heavy, unwelcome weight inside my coat. The words from the will hearing swirl in my mind like debris caught in a slow-moving current – not loud, not urgent, just persistent enough to make breathing feel like a conscious act.

The hotel is only a few blocks away. I tell myself I will make it there before anything else can go wrong.

I am, as always, wrong.

“Wednesday.”  I hear my name. It sounds soft, broken, and spoken like a prayer and a confession. It halts my steps before I can decide to ignore it.

I turn. Gomez stands several feet behind me, coat damp from the mist, hair slightly dishevelled, his expression the kind of raw heartbreak he usually reserves for opera tragedies and exceptionally good soufflés. But there is nothing theatrical about him now. No flourish.
No melodrama. Just pain. “Mi pequeña tormenta,” he murmurs, taking one cautious step closer, as though I might bolt like a startled animal. Or disappear like a guilty thought.

I do neither.

He stops in front of me, hands twitching at his sides, as though warring between the instinct to reach for me and the knowledge that he no longer has permission. “Please,” he says quietly, “tell me why you won’t speak to me.”

The words strike harder than the will reading. I force my gaze past him, to the sinking rooftops and peeling paint of Jericho’s streets, to anything that does not have a heartbeat. I feel the weight of his desperation, thick as fog, settling around us with suffocating insistence.

“Wednesday,” he tries again, voice cracking in the middle like a snapped violin string.
“Ten years. Ten years and not a letter. Not a single word. Not even a sign that you were still alive.”
He swallows, the sound small and unbearable. “Your mother cried for months. Pugsley kept your room exactly as you left it. I…” His breath stutters. “I walked past your empty seat at dinner every night and told myself I was proud of you… even though it felt like lying.”

I do not flinch. But my ribs tighten in their cage. “I don’t need your pride,” I say, the words sharp enough to leave a mark.

“I know that,” he answers gently, “but I thought you might still need me.”

The sentence hits like a blunt weapon. It feels slow and heavy and unforgiving.

He steps closer, stopping just within arm’s reach, though he still does not touch me. His restraint feels more violent than any embrace.

“What did we do?” he asks, barely above a whisper. “What did I do? Tell me. I will fix it.
I would move mountains. I would tear down the world. Just tell me where I failed you.”

I look at him. I mean, really look at him. At the man who raised me with tenderness sharpened into steel. At the father who taught me to hold a blade properly and to never apologise for being the weapon fate forged me into. At the man I left behind without a backward glance because… Because. My throat aches with the force of the word I cannot say.

He waits. Gomez Addams, patient as dusk, waits for me as though the universe owes him that courtesy.

I open my mouth. I almost speak. Almost. But the truth is a creature with teeth, and releasing it would devour both of us. So instead I say nothing.

Silence stretches between us. It’s thin, brittle, and ready to shatter.

He breaks first. His voice, when it comes, is soft and devastating. “Is it… something you can’t forgive?” he asks.

I blink once. A slow, deliberate movement. “No,” I answer, and even that single syllable feels dangerous.

Relief flickers in his eyes. Hope, trembling and fragile. “Then what is it?” he whispers.

I take one step backward. The distance is small, but it feels enormous. “Some things”, I say, voice steady despite the tremor beneath it, “cannot be fixed.”

He inhales sharply, as if my words have struck him somewhere vital. “Then tell me,” he pleads, “so I can learn to live with the breaking.”

Just like that, without warning, without intention, without mercy, the truth surges against the back of my teeth. But I swallow it. Not because it isn’t real. But because speaking it aloud would unravel everything I have spent ten years stitching shut.

So I turn. I walk away. Not fast. Not dramatically. Just simply with purpose. The way one walks away from a cliff they nearly stepped over in the dark.

“Wednesday!” His voice cracks behind me. “Please…don’t go.”

I stop. Only for a breath. Only long enough to let the moment hurt. Then I keep walking, the mist swallowing me. Behind me, Gomez Addams remains rooted in the street, broken and silent, and I leave him there. Because if I turn back now, everything I’ve buried will claw its way out.

Chapter Text

Wednesday’s POV

By the time I reach the hotel, the afternoon has turned into the kind of dull, colourless light. Leaving behind only the bones of buildings and the long, empty breaths between footsteps.

Each step toward my room feels strangely suffocating. It feels like something unseen is reaching out and slowing time just enough for the dread to catch up to me. Even the carpeted hallway absorbs every sound; the growing silence wraps around me. I keep walking without slowing down, because slowing would mean I’m expecting something. Expecting something is really just another way of saying I’m scared.

I unlock the door with a sharp twist of my wrist, and the moment the latch releases, something inside me goes still.

The room is a crime scene of quiet violations. Not the chaotic, panicked ransacking of a desperate thief, nor the performative destruction of someone trying to frighten me, but rather the meticulous, unnervingly intimate search of an intruder who did not simply enter the space; they inhabited it.

My suitcase lies overturned on the floor, but not in a tumble of mindless disorder; instead, my clothing has been lifted and placed in small, unnervingly neat piles, sorted by fabric or purpose or perhaps meaning known only to the intruder, as though they were dissecting me through the objects I chose to carry.

My spare boots, once aligned beneath the nightstand with mathematical precision, now sit at opposing angles as if someone tried them on, stood in them, and tasted the weight of my footsteps.

The curtains have been drawn, though I left them open that morning, and the thin slivers of light that seep around the edges feel foreign, contaminated.

But it is the journal drawer. The one place I exercised the courtesy of concealment is the thing that delivers the blow.

It stands open. It’s been emptied. The sight is so jarring that for a fraction of a second. One brief, treacherous beat of the heart, and I feel something that might be called panic if I believed in labelling emotions with such melodramatic precision. The feeling is cold, sharp, and mercifully fleeting, as fleeting as a shadow darting across a floor.

I cross the room in three long, silent steps, scanning each surface with the clinical, predatory calm of someone trained to look for evidence of a crime long before the body has been found.

The lamp has been tilted slightly; someone touched it. The notebook I left closed now lies open, its pages bent, with a faint oily print along the margin where someone’s fingers lingered too long.
The candle stub is broken, its wax spread in thin streaks across the table.

Nothing is smashed. Nothing is ruined. But everything is violated.

The air still holds the faintest impression of another presence. Another human breath, subtle warmth, the ghost of movement in a space that should smell only of disuse and disinfectant. The room feels occupied even in its emptiness.

I draw a slow breath to steady the tightening in my ribs, but the air feels wrong. The sensation crawls beneath my skin with a deliberate malice, stirring an old, unwelcome instinct: it’s the awareness that I have been watched, studied, hunted.

I check the bathroom. It’s empty. I check the closet. It’s empty. I check beneath the bed. Not because I believe in monsters hiding there, but because I understand the efficiency of cramped spaces. It’s also empty.

But the sheets are wrinkled where they should be flat. Someone sat there. Waiting. Feeling comfortable in my room.
Comfortable.

A quiet fury unfurls in my chest, elegant in its clarity. But beneath it I feel rage; beneath the indignation is something colder, heavier, more personal: someone has stolen the journal.
Tyler’s journal. The only piece of him left that carries his unedited truth. Something that was meant for me and no one else.

Whoever broke in did not come for my belongings. They came for what he left behind. The thought settles like frost across my spine.

I make my way downstairs. Towards the phone that’s sitting on the front desk of the hotel. I reach for it. There are many numbers I could call, but only one whose voice I can currently tolerate.
Only one person whose intentions, while occasionally irritating, are unambiguously sincere.
Only one person who has never weaponised my silence.

I press her name. Enid picks up after a single ring, her breath a rush of static and concern.
“Wednesday? Thank God. Are you okay?”

My voice remains steady, but the words move faster than my usual cadence. “Someone has broken into my room. They searched everything. They took something.”

Enid inhales sharply. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come right now. Just tell me where to meet you.”

“Downstairs in the hotel,” I say, already turning toward the door, already abandoning the ruined stillness of the room behind me. “And Enid?”

“Yes?”

“Come alone.”

There is no hesitation. “Always.”

I end the call and leave, going back upstairs before locking the door behind me, not because it will keep anyone out, but because it feels like drawing a thin line between trespass and retaliation.

…

Enid arrives sooner than expected. It’s a testament either to her reckless disregard for speed limits or her instinctive inability to remain still when I sound even remotely distressed.
Her knock is rapid, frantic, and too loud for the muted, tomb-like hush of the hallway, and I open the door before she has the chance to knock again.

She bursts into my ruined hotel room, her eyes widening in horrified bewilderment as she takes in the overturned suitcase, the scattered pages, and the gutted drawer.

“Oh my god,” she breathes, “Wednesday… Someone really went through your stuff. This isn’t…this isn’t just snooping; this is…this is…”

“Deliberate,” I finish. The word settles between us with the weight of a gravestone lowering into place. “Someone was looking for something. And they found it.”

Enid’s throat works as she swallows. “You mean… the journal?”

I don’t answer. I don’t need to. The absence speaks for itself.

She reaches toward me, hesitates, then lowers her hand. It’s a mercy, really, because if she touches me now I might shatter, and shattering in front of someone else is a luxury I do not indulge.

“We need to tell someone,” she says instead, voice trembling but resolute. “Bianca or… or the sheriff or…’’

“No.” The refusal slices clean and final. “I’m not involving anyone until I know the rules of the game being played.”

Enid opens her mouth to argue, but before she can, I move past her toward the window.
The mist outside has thickened again, swirling in slow coils across the courtyard, a restless, shifting veil.

And then, like a parasite sliding into the corner of a viewer’s eye, I see him. The figure. The same silhouette I saw standing at the cemetery after Tyler’s burial, half-obscured by the crypts and the grief-stricken fog. Still looking tall, standing still and watching me.

He stands across the street now, cloaked in the same dark coat, hood pulled low over his face, posture rigid and unnervingly patient, as though my hotel room window were a stage and he were simply waiting for the next act.

A chill runs through me. It’s not fear but recognition, a familiarity I cannot yet name but which tightens something deep in my ribs.

Enid senses the shift in my breathing. “Wednesday? What is it?”

I do not answer with words. Instead I step closer to the glass, slowly, deliberately, until the figure turns, only slightly, as if acknowledging the fact that I have noticed him.

He does not run. He simply waits. That, more than anything, is what makes my pulse quicken.

“Stay here,” I tell Enid as I move toward the door.

She lunges after me. “Wednesday… No, wait, what did you…”

But I am already out in the hallway, moving fast, the air slicing past me as the instinct to hunt. A cold, precise, bone-deep feeling kicks into place. My boots thud against the stairwell steps in long, controlled strides; I do not run, because running implies desperation, and I am not desperate.

I am furious. I burst through the lobby doors and out into the street, the mist swallowing me.

The figure is already moving. He doesn’t move hurriedly, not even panicking. He just slips between the fog and the lampposts.

I break into a sprint. For a moment, just a moment, I feel the old, familiar burn of pursuit in my lungs, the echo of Nevermore chases through the woods, and the relentless cadence of hunting something that should not exist.

“Wednesday!” Enid’s voice echoes from behind me, frantic, breathless, and desperate to keep up.

I ignore her.

The figure cuts across the street, moving with a strange, fluid confidence, as if he knows exactly how far ahead he needs to stay to keep me from catching him. Close enough to lure, far enough to evade.

I gain on him anyway. The distance between us shrinks.

He glances back once. It’s a small, calculated tilt of the head, and for a fraction of a second I see the gleam of something in the darkness beneath his hood. Recognition presses to the back of my skull.

I push harder. My footsteps splash through puddles. Mist wraps around my legs like grasping hands. The streetlamp flickers.

The figure turns the corner. I follow a moment later, but he is gone. Not vanished gradually. Not ducked behind a building. Not slipped out of sight like a mortal man. Gone. As if the mist simply swallowed him, as if the street itself opened and closed around him.

Enid catches up to me moments later, panting hard, clutching her side. “Wednesday…h-how are you… How are you that fast…? What…what happened…where is he…?”

I stare into the fog, chest rising and falling in slow, controlled inhalations. “He’s playing with us,” I say. “And he’s very good at it.”

Enid shivers beside me. “Why would someone follow you? Break into your room? Take the journal? Watch you like that?”

I answer without turning. “Because he’s not following me.” I let out a long breath. “He’s leading me.”

The mist curls in front of us like a beckoning finger. This is no longer coincidence.

…

The walk back to the hotel is suffocating in its silence. It’s the kind that stretches thin between two people like a sheet pulled taut, threatening to tear if either of us breathes too deeply.
Enid stays close, her steps rapid and uneven beside my own slower, more deliberate stride, and although she tries to keep her head high, I can sense the tremor in her posture. It’s not fear of the dark or the mist or the chase, but fear of the implications threading themselves through everything that has happened.

She keeps glancing sideways at me, checking whether I’m going to explode, crumble, vanish, or simply continue walking with the same predatory calm that has always made her shoulders tighten with concern.

“Wednesday…” she finally murmurs, voice low and hoarse, “I saw someone. I mean… I didn’t see him clearly, but I saw movement. I saw something. And it wasn’t you.”

“That much is obvious,” I reply, though the dryness of the comment is more reflex than cruelty; my mind is too occupied.

We pass under a flickering streetlamp, and its dying light stutters across the pavement. The mist curls at our ankles.

By the time the building comes into view, its peeling sign glowing faintly through the fog, the air feels heavier, thicker, as though every shadow in the vicinity has conspired to gather here.

We step toward the entrance, and that’s when Enid’s hand clamps around my wrist with startling force. “Wednesday.” Her voice fractures into a whisper sharp enough to cut skin. “Look.”

I do, and there he is. The figure stands on the opposite side of the street, motionless, shrouded in mist yet unmistakably present, the same silhouette that haunted the graveyard, the same dark outline that watched my window, the same shape that lured me into a chase designed to fail.

He stands beneath a broken lamp, and the faint glow sketching his form is just enough to make the scene almost grotesque in its precision, as though someone placed him there deliberately, framing him in a tableau meant for me and only me.

Enid inhales sharply. “Oh my god,” she whispers, and there is no mistaking the fear in her voice now. “You weren’t imagining it. He’s real. He’s…he’s right there.”

For a moment. A single, heavy moment – the figure doesn’t move.

He simply watches. The stillness is so absolute, so suffocating, that it feels less like a man standing and more like an omen deciding whether to speak.

Then, with an unsettling slowness, he tilts his head. Just a fraction. Just enough to acknowledge us. Just enough to suggest recognition.

Enid presses closer to me on instinct. “Wednesday… do something.”

“I am,” I say quietly. “I’m observing.”

The figure remains for one more moment. A long, deliberate, calculated moment, and then, without warning, the mist thickens around him, swallowing his silhouette.

Enid stumbles back a step, voice cracking. “No…what? Where…how did he…? What is happening?”

I stare at the space where he stood, letting the absence etch itself into my mind, letting the final position of his feet, the angle of his shoulders, and the shift of the fog around him sink into memory.

“He wanted us to see him,” I say finally, the words slow. “He wanted confirmation.”

“Confirmation of what?” Enid demands, panic colouring her tone.

“That he’s not finished.”

Something electric and rotten coils through the air as I say it, as though the mist itself tightens in agreement, and for a moment, the street feels haunted by anticipation.

Enid grabs my arm again. She is warm, shaking. It feels intrusive, but this time I don’t pull away. “Wednesday… what does he want?”

The answer rises unbidden, unwelcome, and undeniably true: “He wants me to follow.”

Enid goes pale. “And are you going to?”

I turn toward the hotel door, my pulse steady, my mind already calculating my next steps. “Yes,” I say, voice low enough to make her shiver. “Eventually.”

I push the door open. “But he won’t like what happens when I catch him.”

…

We return to my hotel room in a strange, suspended quiet, the kind that settles after a near-disaster rather than before one. The air inside still feels tainted. The room is rearranged in ways my eyes can’t fully catalogue, but my instincts can feel like fingerprints pressed against my spine.
I close the door behind us, locking it more out of symbolism than practicality, because locks only keep out the unimaginative.

Enid moves cautiously, her gaze sliding over the piles of disturbed belongings, over the violated drawer, over the imprint of the intruder’s presence that still lingers like a scent. She sits on the edge of the bed, hands bundled together so tightly in her lap that her knuckles glow white under the cheap lamplight.

I do not sit. I stand at the window, staring at the patch of street where the figure vanished, replaying every detail. The angle of his shoulders, the stillness of his breath, the familiarity in the tilt of his head.

Enid breaks the silence first, her voice soft and trembling, like a sheet of paper held too close to a flame. “Wednesday… I have to ask you something. And I don’t want you to get mad.”

“I don’t get mad,” I answer. “A volcanic eruption is more subtle.”

She swallows. “This is important.”

I finally turn to face her. She looks small on the edge of the bed. Not physically, but emotionally, as though she is shrinking under the weight of a question she has been holding for ten years.

“Why did you disappear?” she asks. “After Iago Tower. After everything. You were just…gone.”

The tension in the room rises. I feel it. I notice she feels it.

I do not answer. Not because I cannot but because answering means peeling back a wound I stapled shut years ago with enough force to break the tool.

Enid continues, her voice breaking with each syllable. “You didn’t tell anyone. Not me. Not Agnes. Not Bianca. Not even your parents. One day you were there. Alive, bruised, breathing, and the next day you just… vanished. Like you wanted to erase yourself from all of us.”

Silence follows. The kind that stretches, quivers, and starts to splinter.

I force my gaze away from her and back to the window. The mist outside thickens. It feels fitting.

I try not to let my memories surface. They surface anyway. I remember the tower. The screams that followed, and I remember the blood. I also remember the suffocating silence after. The choice I made was cold and detached. I had to cut myself free before anyone could see how much I had already broken.

I had stood on the balcony of Iago Tower, hair stuck to my face with rain and grief, listening to the echo of something dying in front of me, around me, inside me, and I understood, with terrifying understanding, that if I stayed one moment longer, just one moment, everything tethering me to my life would snap.

I left because the alternative was worse. I left because staying meant shattering in public. I left because I am not built to be witnessed in my ruin. I left because they did not give me any choice.

Enid watches me, her eyes bright with unspilled tears. “You never gave us a chance to help you,” she whispers. “You never gave anyone a chance.”

“I didn’t need help,” I say. It is a lie so old it has grown roots.

Enid stands abruptly, frustration blooming through her grief. “That’s not true,” she says, voice rising. “You were hurting. Everyone could see it. Something happened in that tower, something awful, and instead of letting anyone in, you just…ran.”

I inhale slowly. She’s not wrong. She will never know how right she is.

She takes a step closer. “Your family has missed you every single day,” she says, each word thick and trembling. “Morticia still sets a place for you at dinner sometimes. Gomez talks about you like you’re going to walk through the door any second. Pugsley…god, Wednesday, Pugsley looks for you in every crowd he passes. You weren’t just gone. You were a ghost. And a ghost hurts worse than a grave.”

The sentence hits something deep inside my chest. It’s a place I thought I had cauterised cleanly.

I close my eyes for a moment, not to hide emotion, but to restrain it. I left because I was afraid I had become something they couldn’t look at. I stayed gone because I feared they already knew it. I remained silent because speaking requires a kind of softness I have never mastered without bleeding. I stayed away to save everyone. Because I was told to.

When I open my eyes, Enid is staring at me with a hollow, pleading ache. “Just tell me,” she whispers. “Tell me why you left. Tell me why you never came back.”

My voice emerges slow, cold, and painfully calm. “Because staying,” I say, “would have destroyed me.”

Enid’s breath catches. “And leaving”, she replies, “destroyed everyone else.”

…

Enid’s words still hang in the air between us like the aftershock of an explosion.

Something inside me fractures. Not in a loud, dramatic way. But with the precise, devastating crack of a bone splitting under too much pressure.

My breath sharpens. “You think I wanted to leave?” I spit, the words carving their way out of me before I can contain them. “You think it was a choice?”

Enid’s eyes widen. Not with fear, but with heartbreak. With recognition. With a dread she doesn’t yet understand but feels anyway, instinctively.

I take one step closer. Then another. “I didn’t have a choice,” I say, voice trembling with the kind of intensity I despise. It’s raw and involuntary. “You have no idea…none…what was happening. What I was dealing with. What I had to do.”

Enid flinches, not backwards, but inward, as though the force of my words has landed inside her chest. “Then tell me,” she whispers, voice cracking. “Wednesday, you can tell me. You can tell someone.”

“No,” I snap, too quickly, too forcefully. “No, I can’t.”

Her voice rises, soft but desperate. “Why? Why not? What could be so terrible that you had to disappear from your whole life?”

The air tightens around us. My pulse is way too fast. “Because I was forced to leave,” I say, each syllable sharp and jagged. “Do you understand? Forced.”

By whom?

I almost say it. The name burns the back of my throat, threatening to escape. But speaking it would be like opening a cage I spent ten years reinforcing with steel and silence.

Enid steps forward, eyes glassy, pleading in a way that feels dangerously close to mercy. “Wednesday… forced by whom?”

I swallow. The truth rises like a scream, but I push it down.

“Don’t,” I say quietly, hoarsely. “Don’t ask me that.”

“Why…?”

“Because I can’t answer without shattering. Without unravelling everything I built to survive. Without dragging her into something, she will not survive. The words constrict my throat until they feel like barbed wire.

Enid opens her mouth, ready to pry, ready to insist, ready to finally demand the explanation she has waited a decade for, when suddenly there’s a knock on the door.

It’s not tentative. Not polite. But firm. Two slow, deliberate knocks that reverberate through the room like the pulse of something unwelcome pressing its face against the threshold.

Enid jumps, one hand flying to her mouth. I don’t move.

The knock comes again. It’s a fraction louder. It feels more intentional. More… familiar.

Enid whispers, “Wednesday, who is that?”

I say nothing. Because I know. On some deep, instinctive, marrow-deep level, I know. Because the air around the door feels wrong. It feels suffocating. Making it hard to breathe.

Enid grips my arm. Her fingers tremble. “Wednesday,” she whispers, barely audible, “please tell me you’re not expecting someone.”

“I’m not,” I answer, voice low and cold.

Another knock follows. It’s a slow, final one.

Something inside me tightens with a quiet surge of dread and recognition. It’s the distinct, unmistakable sensation of the past standing on the other side of a door, waiting to be let in.

I take one step toward it. Only one.

Then the hallway outside goes silent. Too silent for my liking. The kind of silence that suggests the person behind the door isn’t leaving. They’re listening.

I turn my head slightly, meeting Enid’s wide, terrified eyes.

“Stay behind me,” I say softly.

…

The words leave my mouth in a low, controlled tone, the kind of tone meant to serve as both command and reassurance, though I suspect it succeeds only at the former.
Before Enid can do more than nod, I grip the handle, twist, and pull the door open in one sharp motion. I’m prepared, poised, braced for a shadow, a monster, a threat.

But I am not prepared for her. Morticia Addams stands in the hallway. As beautiful as she has always been. She looks timeless.

She’s draped in black that glimmers like polished obsidian beneath the hotel’s flickering lights.
Her hair flows over her shoulders like a river of night, and her eyes. Those dark eyes are bottomless. They widen the moment they meet mine. “Wednesday…” My name breaks on her lips like a wave collapsing into itself.

I freeze. Not the simple stillness of caution, but the deeper, colder kind. The kind that locks the ribs and hollows the breath and turns the world into a thin, fragile sheet of glass held too tightly in trembling hands.

I do not speak. I do not blink. I simply begin to turn away. The movement is small, subtle, but decisive. It’s a quiet, desperate retreat. My body pivots toward the room, away from her, away from the scent of her perfume, away from the memories her silhouette pulls from the places I have buried them.

Enid, caught between us, gasps softly as she realises what I’m doing. She sidesteps instinctively, as though trying to make room in a space where emotion is pressing in from all sides.

Morticia steps forward. “Wednesday, please…” Her voice quivers, just once, quickly smothered under decades of practised poise. “Do not turn away from me.”

I keep turning anyway. My face angles toward the wall. My back was toward her. My hands curl into fists at my sides, nails biting into skin that has always been too pale, too cold, and too stubborn to bruise properly.

Morticia crosses the threshold without permission, the soft rustle of her dress brushing against the air.

Enid takes a shaky step back, eyes darting between us, her breath hitching as she realises she is witnessing something she is not meant to see. A wound so old it has learnt to bleed quietly.

“Wednesday,” Morticia tries again, softer, pleading now, the word unravelling around the edges, “look at me.”

I don’t. I stare at the wall, at the peeling wallpaper, at nothing, because nothing is safer than the weight of her gaze. Behind me, I hear her inhale. It’s a shaky, fragile sound that does not belong in her voice.

“You vanished,” she whispers. She doesn’t say you left us. She says you vanished, as though admitting the truth would shatter her too. “I woke up the next morning, and you were gone,” she continues. “No note. No trace. No explanation.” A long, trembling pause follows. “No goodbye.”

My throat tightens. I keep my face turned away, because if I let even one muscle soften, the flood will break through every barrier I’ve kept sealed for ten years.

Enid presses a hand to her mouth, eyes already swimming, shoulders trembling under the weight of a heartbreak she cannot fix.

Morticia steps closer. Her voice drops to a whisper. A hush reserved for children too hurt to be touched. “I searched for you,” she says. “Everywhere. Everywhere, Wednesday.”
Her breath shakes. “I thought…” She cuts herself off. I feel the crack in her words. “I thought perhaps you had been taken.”

My chest constricts violently.

She continues, voice trembling despite her attempt to steady it. “And when I realised you left by choice…I had to ask myself what I did, what we did, that drove you away so completely that you couldn’t bear to look back.”

I swallow hard enough that it hurts. In my peripheral vision, Enid turns toward me. She is silent, devastated, waiting for me to say something, anything.

I don’t. Because I can’t. Because opening my mouth would release the truth, and the truth would destroy us both.

Morticia takes another step, now so close I can feel the cold, trembling edge of her breath against my shoulder. “Wednesday,” she says, voice breaking like a bone being set the wrong way,
“My little storm… Tell me what I did. Tell me why you left us. Tell me why you will not come home.”

Her hand lifts, trembling, reaching for my arm.

At the last second I flinch. Not dramatically, not violently. Just a small, involuntary jerk, the kind of flinch that says, ‘Don’t touch me, or I will fall apart.’

Morticia freezes. Her hand hovers in the air, suspended between reaching and retreating, and for the first time in my life, I see something in her eyes that I never believed possible: fear. Fear of me. Fear for me. Fear that the distance between us has become an ocean with no shore.

“Wednesday…” she whispers, a sound so fragile it seems impossible that Morticia Addams could make it. “Whatever it is…whatever hurt you…you do not have to carry it alone.”

My voice, when it finally emerges, is a whisper sharp enough to cut her. “I do. I did. And I still must.”

She inhales sharply. It’s a wounded, trembling sound.

Enid’s breath breaks audibly. “Wednesday”, she whispers, voice cracking, “this is your mom. Your family. Please…just tell her…”

“No.” The word slices through the room.

Morticia presses a shaking hand to her own heart, as though holding it together.

Her voice comes out in a thin, splintering whisper. “Tell me one thing, Wednesday.
One thing only. Whatever forced you to leave…is it still following you?”

I go still. Completely still.

Morticia’s eyes widen as she sees the answer in my silence. “Oh,” she breathes, terror blooming under her words. “Oh, querida… What have you become tangled in?”

I say nothing. I close my eyes. Because if I look at her now. I will break.

…

Morticia stands in the middle of my ruined hotel room with the patience of someone who has spent ten years rehearsing a conversation that has yet to begin, her composure stretched dangerously thin beneath the weight of a grief she refuses to name, her hands trembling ever so slightly as she waits. Waits for a word, a look, a scrap of acknowledgement that I have no intention of giving her.

The silence between us grows so heavy it feels like a living thing, filling every corner of the room, pressing itself between our breaths, attaching its cold fingers to the softest parts of her expression and squeezing until even Morticia Addams, master of poise, queen of control, blinks too rapidly, as though warding off tears she would rather die than spill.

She whispers my name again, and the sound of it is a quiet implosion. “Wednesday… please.”

I stand with my back to her. Unmoved. Unreachable. Unwilling to crack even a fraction of an inch, because I know exactly what will spill out if I do. I cannot let her see me bleed.

“Just speak to me,” she continues, her voice breaking around the edges like something delicate dropped from a great height. “Anything. A word. A sentence. A single truth. I am not asking for your forgiveness. I am only asking to understand what drove you so far from us.”

I remain still enough to be mistaken for stone.

Enid watches us with the helpless horror of someone who has stumbled into the last act of a tragedy she never auditioned for, her hands clasped tightly in front of her chest, her eyes darting between mother and daughter as though searching for a crack in either of us through which she might slip and fix what has been broken for a decade.

Morticia takes a step closer. Then another. Her voice trembling more with each movement, the fissures in her composure spreading like frost.

“When you vanished,” she says softly, “I thought someone had taken you. I searched every corner of the world I could reach. And when I finally realised…when it finally became clear you left by choice…” She swallows, the sound thick and trembling. “…I had to face the possibility that I had done something unforgivable.”

The words hit me like a slow, crushing weight. I keep my back turned, because turning around would be surrender.

I hear her inhale. “Wednesday… I do not fear monsters,” she whispers, “but I fear losing my children. I fear losing you. Tell me what chased you away. Tell me what followed you out of that tower ten years ago.”

The name nearly escapes my mouth. A tight, suffocating pressure builds in my throat. It’s almost a scream, a confession, a warning; I cannot tell which, only that speaking it would unleash something I have spent ten years shackling behind layers of silence thick enough to choke me.

I breathe in shallowly. I still do not turn.

And then, just as Morticia gathers one more breath, one more plea, one more attempt at reaching the daughter who has spent a decade slipping through her fingers is stopped by a sudden sound.

At first it is negligible, barely present, a soft peel of wood shifting against itself, the innocent sigh of an old building settling into its age.

But the sound deepens. It’s a slow, scraping pressure dragging across the floorboards like a fingertip tracing the hem of a coffin lid. It’s too heavy, too deliberate, too alive.

Enid stiffens instantly, her breath cutting off as she lifts her gaze toward the shadowed corner near the wardrobe, where the pale light does not reach even at midday.

Morticia’s spine straightens, her hand flying toward her chest in a gesture of instinctive dread.

I go cold. Colder than the grave. Colder than the night I left ten years ago. Colder than the truth I have refused to speak.

…

The lamp on the nightstand flickers once, then flickers again, and finally goes dark.

A sudden silence swallows the entire room. Enid grabs my arm. Morticia turns toward the darkest corner near the wardrobe. The one place none of us bothered to look when we first entered.

Something stirs there. A shadow shifts. It is not a shadow cast by light, nor one created by any of our bodies. It is the kind that moves with a will of its own.

My heart turns to ice. Morticia whispers, her voice trembling with a terror she has never permitted herself to show in front of anyone. “Wednesday… what is that?”

The wardrobe door begins to creak open. It’s slow and agonising, as though pried apart by a hand that has not touched sunlight in years.

Enid gasps and stumbles backward. Morticia’s hand flies to her throat. My breath locks in my chest.

From within the widening crack of darkness, inside that pitch-black gap between the door and its frame, a shape begins to emerge. It is tall, unnervingly distorted, and disturbingly familiar. Familiar in the way nightmares are familiar when they finally reveal a face.

I see a hood and a coat. A silhouette I have seen before in a graveyard, at a street corner, and during a mist-choked chase that ended with nothing but empty air.

But this time he does not vanish. He steps into the room. Slowly and deliberately. His presence is quiet and suffocating, carrying a breath I can hear, a weight I can feel, and an intention that makes my skin crawl in recognition.

Morticia gasps. Enid goes completely still. The world tightens to a single point.

He lifts his head just enough for the faintest sliver of his face to catch the dying light.

In that instant, everything inside me collapses inward with sudden, brutal clarity.

Because I know him. I know him. I have seen that shadow before. I have seen those movements.
I have heard that breath. I have felt that presence watching from afar for a decade.

Morticia watches the horror dawning across my face, and her voice breaks as she whispers, “Wednesday… you know him.”

I do not answer. I cannot.

The figure steps fully out of the shadows now. His hood slips back just enough to reveal the outline of a jaw, a familiar scar, and the curve of a cheek – features that form the impossible shape of someone who should not exist. Someone who should not breathe. Should not walk. Should not be standing in this room. Someone dead. Someone buried.

Enid’s voice escapes in a strangled whisper. “Wednesday… is that…”

I inhale once. It feels sharp, desperate, and final. The figure steps towards me before I can answer her.

Chapter Text

Wednesday's POV

There’s a total silence for a few seconds. The silence stretches out. The only movement in the room is the shallow rise and fall of our breaths, and even those seem muted beneath the crushing weight of disbelief that settles over all three of us with the suffocating heaviness of freshly turned soil.

Tyler stands before us. Tyler Galpin is alive as ever. Looking more human than he did 10 years ago.

He is not the monster I once knew, nor the trembling boy caught between humanity and its mutation. He looks like a man shaped by years of hardship, his body surviving where his life was declared extinguished, his presence defying the neat conclusion of a funeral that now feels staged, scripted, and designed to deceive.

He looks… changed. Older in a way that has nothing to do with time. His face is leaner, carved with exhaustion rather than violence, his looks and skin pale beneath the flickering lamplight. There are shadows under his eyes forming dark crescents that speak of sleepless nights and endless running.

His hair has grown longer, falling messily across his forehead as if he hasn’t seen a proper mirror in years, and although a scar now interrupts the smooth line of his jaw, it only serves to make him more painfully real. He looks like a man who has suffered, not a creature who has transformed.

He stands dripping with mist from the night outside, his chest rising in slow, tentative breaths, as though he is afraid each inhale might shatter the fragile space between us.

Enid makes the first sound. It’s a strangled, raw gasp, her hand flying to her mouth as though trying to hold in a truth too large to swallow. Her whole body trembles violently, her eyes wide and glimmering with disbelief that borders on terror.

Morticia’s reaction is quieter but far more devastating; she stumbles back a fraction of a step, her hand pressing against her heart with trembling fingers, her expression cracked open in an intimate portrait of fear, awe, and maternal dread.

But me? I do not move. I do not blink. I feel the room shift around me, the floor tilting in a slow, nauseating arc, as though reality is attempting to recalibrate itself and failing.

He lifts his head a little, enough for the dim light to catch his eyes. They are not glowing, not feral, not predatory. There’s nothing Hyde-like flickering in their depths. They are simply human eyes, tired and hollow, carrying the weight of something he has dragged behind him for far too long.

He says my name. “Wednesday.” The sound of it sounds hoarse, hesitant, and threaded with a familiarity I never granted him permission to keep.  

He takes one careful step forward. The worn floorboard groans softly beneath his boot, a quiet acknowledgement of his intrusion into a space already stretched too thin.

Enid whimpers, her back hitting the dresser as though she’s trying to anchor herself in a room that no longer obeys the laws of sense or logic.

Morticia finds her voice only after several shaky breaths, her tone a fragile whisper. “This… this cannot be.”

Tyler lowers his gaze briefly, guilt flickering across his expression in a way so deeply human it feels almost cruel. “I know,” he murmurs. “I shouldn’t be here. But I had nowhere else to go.”

My pulse stutters. It’s a single, sharp, traitorous beat.

Morticia’s lips part, her voice steeped in disbelief and dawning horror. “We buried you. I saw the body. I saw the death certificate.’’

Tyler winces, the pain in his face unmistakable. “They wanted you to see it,” he says quietly.
“They wanted everyone to believe it.”

Enid’s breath catches. “Wh-who?” She stammers, her voice trembling.

He shakes his head slowly, not in refusal but in an exhausted heaviness that suggests the truth is too large to fit in the space between us.

His eyes lift again, and this time they find mine with pinpoint accuracy, and something flickers there, something fragile and wounded and terrifyingly earnest. “You know why I’m here,” he says, his voice cracking in the middle, the words spilling out like a confession or accusation or plea. I cannot tell which.

My chest tightens, sharp and sudden.

Morticia turns to me, terror twisting her features. “Wednesday… what does he mean? What does he know?”

I do not answer. The truth coils in my throat like a serpent, ready to strike if spoken aloud.

Tyler steps closer, not boldly but with a kind of quiet desperation, his hands trembling at his sides. “Please,” he says, “just listen. I didn’t fake my death. I didn’t choose this. I didn’t want it. But they took me. They forced me into hiding. And when I got free, I came here because I thought…” His voice fractures. “I thought you would understand.”

The room goes unbearably quiet. Enid’s tears finally fall. Morticia clutches at the nearest chair for balance.

I feel something old and heavy shift in my chest. Because he is not lying. Because I know exactly who “they” are.

…

Morticia is the first to recover her voice, though 'recover' is too generous a word; her tone is frayed and uneven, held together by sheer force of maternal instinct, and it slices through the thick air like a cracked blade. “Wednesday Addams,” she says, stepping forward with a trembling authority that would topple lesser mortals. “You will tell me what is happening. Now.”

Her voice rings through the room, shaking loose the last of the silence, setting every one of us on edge.

Tyler stiffens. Enid flinches.  I do not blink, I do not move, and I do not breathe in a way that could be misinterpreted as cooperation.

Morticia focuses her gaze on me, her eyes dark and wet with disbelief, hurt, and an anger born of fear. “For ten years,” she says quietly, dangerously, “you refused to speak of that night in Iago Tower. You refused to speak to anyone. Not us. Not Enid. Not Bianca. Not a single soul.”
She steps closer. “I demand the truth. What followed you out of that place? What forced this boy into the grave? And why…why in the name of all things unholy does he stand breathing in front of me now?”

It is the closest I have ever heard my mother come to pleading. Tyler’s breath catches in his throat; his eyes flick toward me, searching for the signal I will not give, hoping for a confirmation I cannot allow. His voice emerges, low and strained.

“Mrs Addams, I… I can explain, but…”

“No.” My voice comes out sharper than intended, a whipping crack of sound that freezes Tyler mid-sentence and makes Enid’s breath hitch. “You will not explain anything. Not here.”

Morticia’s eyes widen with a flash of fury and heartbreak. “You will not silence him,” she hisses.

But she is wrong. I will. If I have to.

Tyler opens his mouth again. “I came here because…”

“Stop talking,” I snap. This time my tone is enough. He stops talking.

The tension snaps through the room like a stretched wire giving way. Enid chokes on a shaky breath, sudden panic clawing into her voice. “N-No, no, someone tell me what is going on…how is he alive? How long has he been alive? Wednesday…Wednesday, you knew, didn’t you? You knew something!”

I don’t answer. I can’t answer.

Enid takes two frantic steps toward Tyler, her voice rising, breaking apart like shattered glass. “Where the hell have you been?! You died…people buried you! We cried over you!’’
Her voice cracks so violently she has to stop and press a hand against her chest. “Why didn’t you tell anyone you were alive?!”

Tyler flinches as if struck. He opens his mouth, but I cut him off again.

“Enid,” I say sharply, “stop.”

“I will not stop!” Enid screams, spinning toward me with tears streaking her cheeks.
“You kept everything buried! Both of you! You’re both standing here acting like we’re insane for asking questions when the dead is literally breathing in front of us!”

Morticia’s gaze snaps toward me, anguish pooling in her eyes. “Wednesday,” she says, voice trembling dangerously, “look at me and tell me the truth. Did you know he was alive?”

The room tightens to a single point.

Tyler watches me. Enid shakes beside me. Morticia’s heart beats so loudly I swear the walls echo it.

But I do not answer. Instead, I turn toward Enid and say in a low, commanding voice, “Leave. Now.”

The room erupts. Morticia’s voice rises in a sharp, horrified gasp. “You will not walk away from this conversation!”

Enid stumbles backward, caught between us. “Wednesday, you can’t just ask me to…’’

Tyler takes a step toward me, eyes desperate, pleading. “Wednesday, please…let me talk.’’

“Not. One. More. Word.” My voice is ice cracking under pressure, dangerous and precise.

Chaos spirals. Morticia's fingers clutch at her throat as if the very oxygen has betrayed her.
Enid covers her ears for a second, overwhelmed by too much noise, too much truth, and too much impossibility.

Tyler looks like he’s teetering on the edge of collapse, caught between fear and confession.

The storm converges. I step forward. “Tyler and I are leaving,” I repeat, voice quiet but immovable. “And none of you will follow.”

Morticia’s voice finally breaks, shattering into something raw and irreparable. “Wednesday… what are you so afraid of?”

Tyler breathes my name again. “Wednesday…” He sounds soft, desperate, and unfinished.

I turn away. I keep my silence. Because if I speak now. If I tell them the one thing I have carried alone for a decade, the thing that made Tyler vanish, the thing that dragged me out of Jericho,
The thing that made me forsake my family, the monster disguised by memory, will step into the room with us. And none of them will walk away intact.

…

The room becomes too small, too crowded, too heavy. It feels like a dark pressure chamber filled with grief, confusion, and ten years’ worth of unspoken truths all threatening to detonate at once.

Morticia’s trembling expectations, Enid’s unravelling fear, Tyler’s haunted presence. It is all too loud, too exposed, too dangerously close to the truth I have guarded with bone-deep violence.

I inhale once. Then I turn. Not toward Enid, not toward my mother, but toward Tyler.

His eyes widen just slightly, a flicker of disbelief because even he did not expect this.

“Come with me,” I say, the words clipped, controlled, and quiet enough that only he hears the command threaded beneath them.

Enid’s breath catches, a small, broken noise like a wolf hit mid-step.

Morticia freezes, her expression collapsing into naked horror as the meaning sinks in. “Wednesday,” she whispers, “no.”

But I am already moving. I walk past her without so much as a touch of my sleeve against her dress, without offering a single thread of explanation, without giving her the dignity of a backward glance.

The hallway air feels colder as I step into it, the heavy hotel lights flickering overhead like weakened pulse beats. Tyler follows. Not with confidence. Not with entitlement. But with the same haunted, desperate obedience of a man who has been hunted so long that survival depends on attaching himself to the only person who understands the thing chasing him.

“Wednesday…!” Morticia’s voice cracks open behind me, loud, jagged, wounded.
“Wednesday, stop! Don’t you dare walk away from me again!”

I keep walking. Her voice grows sharper, more frantic, ripping through the hollow hallway like a scream trapped in a cathedral. “Wednesday! Wednesday Addams, you look at me right now…!”

I do not. Because if I look at her, if I see the heartbreak in her eyes, I will hesitate. Hesitation is fatal.

I reach the end of the hallway, Tyler’s footsteps unsteady behind me, when Enid finally snaps.

“Wednesday!” she cries, stumbling after us, her breath shaking, tears streaking down her cheeks with wild abandon. “Wednesday, wait… WAIT…!”

I stop for a fraction of a second. Not out of compassion, but calculation.

Tyler nearly bumps into me. Behind us, Morticia stands frozen in the hotel doorway, hands pressed to her mouth, her entire posture trembling with a grief so palpable it crackles through the air.

Enid reaches me in a breathless rush, grabbing my arm with shaking fingers. “You can’t leave with him,” she chokes out. “You can’t…you can’t just… Wednesday, why? Why him? Why now? What is happening?”

I turn my head slightly. Only enough for her to see the side of my face, never the full truth. “Go back to my mother,” I say quietly.

Enid shakes her head violently. “No. No, I’m not leaving you alone with him. I don’t care if he’s alive, I don’t care how impossible this is, I’m not letting you walk into whatever this is…”

Her voice breaks. “Please, Wednesday. Please don’t do this again. Not like this.”

Tyler watches silently, guilt bending his posture into something sharp and uncomfortable.

Behind Enid, Morticia whispers my name again. soft, devastated, praying to a god she does not believe in. “Wednesday…”

Something inside me cracks. It’s a hairline fracture deep beneath the armour, one no one else can hear.

I step out of Enid’s grasp. Her hand falls to her side like a severed thread. “Go back,” I say again.

Tyler shifts beside me, gathering the remnants of his courage. Enid lets out a broken sob. “Wednesday… Don’t leave us again.”

I walk away. Tyler follows. And this time Enid chases us, her footsteps frantic, her breathing uneven, her voice cracking as she calls after me. “Wednesday! WEDNESDAY! Please…please…please don’t…!”

Her voice echoes down the hallway, frantic and heart-shredding, as Morticia calls after her, “Enid, darling, wait…”

But neither of them reaches me. Because I turn the corner.

And the moment I do, a door down the hall slams open, a shadow crosses the light, and everything that was waiting for me steps forward.

…

The hallway stretches ahead of us, its flickering lights trembling as though the entire building feels the tension. Tyler and I round the corner, the hotel carpeting muffling our steps, the air sharp and thin, tasting of metal and static.

I can still hear Enid’s footsteps behind us, followed by her panic echoing off the walls.
Her voice is cracking on my name like it’s a lifeline fraying in her hands, but her sounds feel distant now, swallowed by the sudden pressure building ahead of us.

Because someone is there. A shape steps out from the shadowed alcove near the vending machine. Slowly, deliberately, like a curtain being drawn aside.

The person looks tall. Clad in dark clothing. A face half-hidden beneath the low brim of a hat that casts a long, unnatural shadow.

Tyler tenses beside me, a soft, breathless “No…” slipping from his throat.

The stranger speaks. His voice is low and cold and heavy with malice. The kind of malice that has been marinating for years. “You made a big mistake,” he says, the syllables drawn out like a blade being unsheathed. “And you’re going to pay for it.”

Tyler stumbles back a step. I don’t. My gaze narrows, my pulse flattening into that calm, lethal line I only feel when danger tastes close enough to touch.

The stranger lifts his hand. Metal glints. It’s clearly a gun. My body reacts before thought has time to intervene.

Tyler’s voice shatters into a raw cry. “Wednesday, MOVE!”

But the stranger already has his target. His eyes lock on Tyler. The intention is unmistakable.
He isn’t here for us. He’s here for him.

Tyler gasps. “Please…don’t…”

The man lifts the weapon higher, sight locked dead centre on Tyler’s chest. His finger tightens on the trigger. The hallway shrinks to a single point of inevitability. Decision becomes instinct. Instinct becomes action.

I push off the ground in one long, decisive motion. Not away, not aside, but forward,
throwing myself between the barrel and Tyler’s body with the precision of a blade slicing through air.

The shot erupts. A violent, deafening explosion that tears through the narrow hallway like lightning ripping open the night.

Pain blossoms in my side. It feels sharp, hot, and white. Radiating outward in a scream of nerves that I refuse to let leave my mouth.

Tyler’s arms catch me before I fall, his voice breaking in a strangled, horrified yell. “WEDNESDAY!”

The world tilts. The corridor spins. My vision fractures at the edges, black creeping in like ink dropped into water.

Tyler’s hands clutch me. Desperate, shaking, terrified as warmth spreads across my ribs, soaking into my shirt, sticky and hot.

I feel my blood. My legs buckle. His grip tightens. “No…no, no, no… Wednesday, please…PLEASE!”

The stranger curses, furious, stumbling back as though even he didn’t expect me to step into the line of fire. His weapon trembles in his hand; he fires again, but the bullet rips harmlessly into the wall as Tyler drags me downward.

Enid screams somewhere behind us. It’s a high, broken, primal sound that rips through the hallway like a wounded animal.

Morticia’s voice follows, sharp, frantic, unreal. “Wednesday?! WEDNESDAY!”

But all the sounds feel muffled and distant, drowning beneath the pounding of my heart and the spreading warmth under my palm as I press it to my side.

Tyler collapses with me, pulling me into his lap, his breath shuddering, his hands frantic as they try to staunch the bleeding.

“Why did you do that?” he chokes, voice cracking. “Why would you…why would you…?!”

I try to speak, but copper floods my mouth. The hallway tilts again.

The stranger runs. His boots slam against the carpet as he flees down the opposite stairwell, disappearing before anyone can reach him.

Enid reaches us first, falling to her knees so hard the sound echoes, her shaking hands hovering helplessly over my shoulders. “Oh my god…oh my god… Wednesday…please…stay awake…stay with us…!”

Morticia arrives a heartbeat later, and the sound she makes is a raw, guttural, soul-shattering sound. It’s something I will never un-know.

Her hands cradle my face, cold and trembling. “Wednesday… my baby… Look at me… Look at me…please…”

My vision blurs. Heat throbs beneath my ribs. Tyler’s breath trembles against my ear. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispers, voice cracking entirely.

But my voice…my voice is nothing more than a thread when I manage to speak. “I… protect what’s mine.”

After that the world darkens.

…

Tyler’s POV

The moment her body drops, the world fractures.

Wednesday hits my arms with a force that knocks the breath out of me, not because she is heavy, but because the reality of what she just did slams into my chest like a blunt weapon.
Her blood. It’s thick, hot, and terrifyingly vivid. It soaks through my fingers before I can even think to catch her properly, spilling down her side in a dark, spreading bloom that makes my stomach twist violently. “No…no, no…Wednesday!” Her name rips out of me, shredded, unrecognisable, a sound torn from the deepest part of my throat.

Her eyes flutter once, barely, before going still. Too still. Her head falls against my shoulder, her breath shallow, uneven, slipping away with every fragile second that passes.

This is my fault. This is entirely, completely, irreversibly my fault.

“HELP!” Enid screams behind me, her voice cracking open with hysteria. “Somebody help…she’s been shot…PLEASE!”

Morticia drops to her knees on the other side of me, her black dress pooling around her like spilt ink as she cups Wednesday’s face in trembling hands, her breath coming out in sharp, broken bursts that no one should ever hear from a woman like her. “Wednesday, my darling, wake up, please…wake up,” she begs, panic spilling through every syllable.

I press my hand tighter against Wednesday’s wound, but the blood keeps coming. It feels warm, slick, and horrifyingly alive. My heartbeat explodes in my ears until I can barely hear anything else.

“I… I need something. Cloth…pressure…she needs pressure, right?” Enid stammers, scrambling for anything, her hands shaking so badly she can’t grasp onto her own thoughts.

Morticia grabs Enid’s wrist, her voice trembling violently. “Call an ambulance. Now. GO.”

Enid fumbles for her phone with shaking hands, her nails scraping against the screen as she dials the number, her voice splintering as she tries to form words coherent enough for the operator.

I pull Wednesday closer without meaning to, my fingers digging into her jacket as though gripping harder could anchor her to consciousness. “Wednesday…” I whisper, my voice collapsing. “You shouldn’t have… Why would you do that? Why for me..why……”

Her lashes do not move. Her breath barely stirs. Something inside me shatters so hard I swear I feel the pieces lodging in my ribs.

Morticia’s gaze snaps toward me. Her gaze looks sharp, furious and terrified, and her voice lashes out. “What do you know about this?” she demands, her voice a blade barely held in check by maternal terror. “What followed you here? Who wants you dead? Why would someone shoot at my daughter because of YOU?”

I swallow hard, throat burning, trying to form words that won’t come, because the truth is too large, too violent to fit in this hallway, because speaking it aloud would tear the world open in the wrong place. “I can’t answer that,” I manage, my voice hoarse, trembling. “Not…not here.”

“Answer me!” Morticia cries, her voice rising, cracking. “What have you dragged her into?”

Dragged her into it. Dragged her into it. The words hit like knives.

Enid sobs into the phone, repeating Wednesday’s location in a shaking voice, begging the operator to hurry, to send someone, anyone, because Wednesday Addams is bleeding out in a hotel hallway.

Morticia leans closer, eyes wild with anguish and fury. “You come back from the dead,” she hisses, “and now my daughter bleeds in your arms? Why? WHY?!”

I feel my breath slip out in a broken rush. Because she saved me once. Because she destroyed her life for it. Because I never stopped being the reason her world fell apart. Because someone else knows that too. Because they will never let her walk away from what she did for me. But I can’t say any of that. Not now. Not like this.

“I can’t,” I whisper, voice cracking. “I can’t explain until…until I know she’s safe.”

Morticia’s eyes fill with tears so sharp they look like they might cut her skin. “You aren’t protecting her,” she spits. “You are killing her.”

A sound leaves me. It’s a wounded, broken sound I didn’t know I had in me.

The ambulance sirens scream closer. Enid drops to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably, her trembling hands hovering above Wednesday’s body as though touching her might make the nightmare real.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, choking on the words, on the truth, on the years of guilt pressing down on me like crushed stone. “I’m so…so sorry…”

But sorry will not stop the bleeding. Sorry, will not bring her back to consciousness. Sorry, I will not undo the bullet meant for me.

And as the sirens wail outside and Morticia weeps over her daughter and Enid clutches at her own ribs like they’re cracking apart, I realise something cold, horrible, and painfully true: if Wednesday dies tonight, it will be because she chose to protect a ghost who never should have come back. Me.