Part One: The Arcade at the End of the Pier
By midnight, the arcade had started to smell of wet coats, hot dust, spilled lager and old electricity.
Jodie liked it then.
Not liked, exactly. Liking things belonged to people with money in their accounts, kitchens with food in them, families who texted to ask where they were. But the arcade at midnight suited her. The day-trippers had gone back to their rented flats and Premier Inns. The children had been dragged away from the claw machines with their plastic prizes and open-mouthed grief. The parents had stopped pretending they were not exhausted. The stag parties had either found clubs or police.
What remained were the serious ones.
Men in padded jackets who fed twenty-pound notes into fruit machines with the solemnity of men paying tribute to an indifferent god. Women with scraped-back hair and gold hoops, smoking under the awning between spins. Old boys who had once come to the pier with girls in white boots and now came alone with plastic cups of two-pence pieces. Boys who thought they were men because they could drink vodka from a bottle in the shelter of the sea wall.
The arcade was called Neptune’s Palace, though there was nothing palatial about it. Its carpet was patterned to conceal stains. Its ceiling tiles sagged where the damp had got into them. The air conditioning rattled like something dying in a box. Beyond the smeared windows, the Channel shifted in the dark, black and flat and enormous, chewing at the pylons beneath the pier.
Jodie worked nights because Mr. Preece paid cash when he remembered, and because she did not have to explain why daylight made her ill.
He thought she was on something. Most people did. She was too thin, too pale, too still. Her black hair hung lank around a face that looked younger than it was and older than it should. She had the sort of beauty that made people uneasy before they knew why. In certain lights she looked almost luminous. Under the strip lights of Neptune’s Palace she looked like she had been printed badly from an old photograph.
“You want to watch machine twelve,” Mr. Preece said, passing behind her with a key ring heavy enough to brain someone. “Bloke’s been kicking it.”
Jodie was restocking prize tickets behind the counter. She did not look up.
“Which bloke?”
“The one who looks like a divorced PE teacher.”
“That’s most of them.”
Mr. Preece gave a tired little laugh. He was fifty-eight, diabetic, and always smelled faintly of fried onions. He wore his keys on his belt like a gaoler. He trusted Jodie with the arcade at night because she never stole, never called in sick, and never asked questions about the machines in the back room.
“Just keep an eye,” he said. “And don’t let anyone use the staff toilet. Last week someone was in there twenty minutes and came out without their shoes.”
When he went into the office, Jodie leaned both hands on the counter and closed her eyes.
The hunger was bad tonight.
It had been bad all week, but tonight it had a shape. A small, hard animal inside her, pacing. It moved behind her ribs and under her tongue. It made sounds sharper, colours brighter. She could hear blood inside people when they came close enough. Not the actual pulse, not like in films, not some romantic drumbeat. More like pressure in pipes. Heat under skin. A living system, wet and stupid and wasteful.
She had once fed from chosen people.
That was what her coven had called them. Chosen, gifted, blessed, invited. They had said all the old words because old words made ugly things presentable. They had lived inland, in a red-brick house behind cedar trees, where the curtains were velvet and the wine glasses were crystal and blood came warm from wrists offered willingly by people who believed pain could be a sacrament.
Jodie had ruined that.
Or they had ruined her.
It depended on the night.
A man slammed a fist against machine twelve.
“Come on, you robbing bastard.”
Jodie opened her eyes.
The divorced PE teacher was not divorced, probably, and maybe not a PE teacher, but Mr. Preece had not been far off. He was broad in the shoulder and soft in the middle, with close-cropped hair and an expensive watch he kept checking as if the future might arrive there. His face was pink from drink. He had been losing for forty minutes.
Jodie watched him feed another note into the machine.
The fruit machine sang at him. Lights chased each other in idiot celebration. Lemons, bells, sevens. Almost. Nearly. Try again.
He swore.
The hunger pressed against her teeth.
She waited until he went outside to smoke.
That was another thing about Neptune’s Palace. Everyone eventually went outside to smoke, even the ones who had quit. The pier drew it out of them. The damp air, the salt, the sound of gulls screaming over bins at two in the morning. It made people want to stand in the dark and damage themselves slowly.
Jodie slipped through the side door and found him under the awning, cupping a lighter against the wind.
“Machine twelve’s tight tonight,” she said.
He turned, startled, then smiled because she was young-looking and pretty enough to make him forget annoyance.
“Tell me about it.”
“They reset them on Tuesdays.”
“Do they?”
“No.”
He stared at her for a moment, then laughed. People liked being told the truth when they thought it was flirting.
“You work here every night?”
“Most nights.”
“Bit grim.”
“It’s all right.”
“Can’t be all right. Girl like you.”
There it was. Girl like you. A phrase men used when they wanted to imply a rescue but meant an appetite.
Jodie stepped closer. He smelled of lager, stress sweat, and a cologne that had cost him too much. Beneath it all was the red warmth of him. His life, moving in channels.
“What kind of girl am I?” she asked.
His expression changed. Not much. Just enough. He had moved from conversation into calculation.
“You tell me.”
She smiled without showing her teeth.
The trick was not to make it dramatic. Drama made people remember. A frightened person became a witness. A confused person became a story. So Jodie touched his arm lightly and let him lean toward her. She let him think the next decision was his. She guided him around the corner, out of sight of the door, where the awning ended and the pier’s maintenance shed cast a black wedge of shadow.
He said something. She did not hear it.
Her mouth found the side of his neck.
For a second he stiffened. Then her hand was against his chest and her mind was against his mind, not inside it exactly, but over it, like a wet cloth over a lamp. She pressed down gently.
Quiet.
His breath went out in a long shudder.
She drank carefully. She had learned carefulness through fear, not virtue. Too much and they dropped. Too little and the hunger came back before dawn. She took enough to blur his evening, to make him think later that he had stood too quickly, drunk too much, maybe needed iron tablets. He would go home pale and ashamed of losing money. He would not remember the girl from the arcade except as a shape in bad light.
When she pulled away, his hand twitched once against her sleeve.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
People often apologised. That was the worst part.
Jodie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You’re fine,” she said.
He was not fine, but he would live.
She watched him stagger back toward the front of the arcade. He paused by the door, touching his neck. Then he went inside, back to the lights and noise, back to machine twelve, back to the god that had already eaten him once.
Jodie stayed outside.
The sea wind moved through her jacket. It carried chips, weed, diesel, rain. Along the promenade, the nightclub signs glowed in colours that did not exist in nature. Blue Pulse. Mercy. The Pink Room. Valhalla. Their queues had thinned now, but music still leaked through walls and vents, bass notes travelling through concrete like something buried trying to get out.
She could go to them.
Sometimes she did.
Club blood was different. Fast, bright, chemical. Ecstasy, ketamine, cocaine, cheap vodka, panic. It made her thoughts jump. It made her sentimental. Once she had fed from a girl outside Mercy and spent the rest of the night crying behind the bins because the girl had been happy, genuinely happy, in a way Jodie could not remember being.
She did not go to the clubs tonight.
After work, she took her cash from Mr. Preece in a white envelope and walked inland through streets that became worse the farther they got from the seafront. The town had two faces. One was painted for visitors: lights, murals, seafood boards, rainbow flags, boutique hotels with driftwood in the windows. The other was where the staff lived. Damp flats above takeaways. Betting shops. Hostels. Bins overflowing behind converted terraces. Men on bicycles with delivery bags on their backs, moving like ghosts under orange streetlamps.
Jodie lived in a bedsit on Norfolk Road with a man named Ash, who was not her boyfriend and not her friend.
The room was on the second floor and smelled of mould, incense, unwashed clothes and the sweet chemical smoke Ash exhaled through a cracked window. There was a mattress on the floor, a microwave, two mugs, a rail of second-hand clothes, and a small television with a line through the middle of the screen. The landlord had promised to fix the boiler in November. It was now March.
Ash was awake when she came in, though awake was perhaps too generous. He was sitting against the wall in his tracksuit bottoms, bare chest grey in the light from his phone. His collarbones stuck out like handles. Beside him were foil, a lighter, and a spoon he had once stolen from Wetherspoons.
“Where you been?” he asked.
“Work.”
“What time is it?”
“Late.”
He nodded as if that explained something important. His eyes moved over her and away again. He rarely looked at her properly. That was why she stayed. A person who did not notice you could not ask what you were.
“There’s noodles,” he said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You never are.”
She almost laughed.
Instead, she took off her jacket and hung it over the chair. Ash shifted on the mattress to make room for her. They slept beside each other without touching, like bodies laid out after an accident.
At first she had thought she might feed from him.
It would have been easy. Too easy. He was always half-gone, always drifting through rooms inside himself. His blood would not have been good; she knew that without tasting. Thin with damage. Bitter with whatever he used to keep the day from landing on him. But it would have kept her alive.
She had not done it.
This restraint did not make her good. She knew enough about goodness not to claim it cheaply. It was more that Ash was already being consumed by something else, and there was a professional courtesy in leaving him to it.
He lay down, back to her.
“Jodie?”
“What?”
“You ever feel like there’s someone else in the room?”
She went still.
Ash laughed softly, embarrassed by himself.
“Stupid.”
“No,” she said. “Not stupid.”
“Sometimes I wake up and I think there’s someone standing over us.”
“That’s the mould.”
“Yeah.”
He was quiet for a while. His phone screen dimmed. The room settled around them. Pipes knocked in the wall. Somewhere below, a couple argued with the deadened rhythm of people who had argued the same argument many times before.
Then Ash said, “You’re cold.”
“You’re always saying that.”
“You are, though.”
Jodie looked at the back of his neck. The skin there was marked with old spots, razor rash, a small tattoo done badly by someone in a kitchen.
“I know.”
“You should see a doctor.”
“I’m all right.”
“No one’s all right.”
That hung in the room longer than either of them expected.
By four, Ash was asleep. By five, the sky beyond the thin curtains had begun to pale.
Jodie lay rigid on her side, counting the seconds between cars passing outside. She could not sleep in daylight, not properly. Sleep took her like drowning. The coven had slept in cellar rooms, in antique beds, behind locked doors. Jodie slept on a mattress in a room where the curtains did not meet in the middle.
Before sunrise, she got up and taped a towel over the gap.
That was when she saw the envelope under the door.
For a moment she thought it was from the landlord. Then she saw there was no stamp, no address, only her name written in block capitals.
JODIE.
She picked it up.
Inside was a playing card.
The queen of hearts.
Across the queen’s face someone had drawn two small fangs in blue biro.
On the back, in the same careful block capitals, were seven words.
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. WAYNE.
Part Two: Wayne
Wayne worked days at the bowling alley and evenings wherever the town would let him stand.
That was how he described it, when people asked. They rarely did. Most people made a decision about Wayne quickly, then filed him away in the mental drawer marked harmless, odd, do not encourage. He had a pale, narrow face, hair cut too short at the sides, and eyes that seemed permanently overfocused, as if the world had been printed in a font too small for comfort. He wore a black bomber jacket even when it was warm, and carried a canvas army surplus bag filled with notebooks, old receipts, battery packs, and paperback books about folklore, missing persons, ley lines, coastal hauntings, urban legends and unsolved murders.
He was thirty-two, though he looked younger when excited and older when disappointed.
He had been watching Jodie for three weeks before he gave her the card.
Not every night. He was careful about that. Careful was one of Wayne’s words. He liked systems. Patterns. Rotas. Sightlines. CCTV blind spots. The times arcade staff took breaks. The way Neptune’s Palace emptied after one and filled again briefly after the clubs kicked people out. He noticed things other people did not notice, partly because he had no one to distract him, and partly because he had spent most of his life being told that what he noticed did not matter.
He had first seen her behind the change counter, counting tokens without looking down.
That was the first thing.
Nobody counted tokens like that. Not even Mr. Preece, who had owned the place for twenty years and could identify most coin jams by sound. Jodie’s fingers moved in small, precise motions, her eyes elsewhere, as if the money were arranging itself by instinct under her hands.
The second thing was the mirror behind the prize shelves.
The mirror was there to make the shelves look fuller than they were. It doubled the plush dolphins, the off-brand headphones, the plastic tiaras, the boxes of sweets no one wanted unless they won them. Wayne had watched Jodie pass in front of it and seen, for less than a second, not nothing but a kind of error. A smear. A hesitation in the glass. The prizes reflected properly. Mr. Preece reflected properly. A drunk woman in a silver jacket reflected properly.
Jodie did not.
Wayne had felt something open inside him then. Not fear. Fear would have been simple. What he felt was recognition, although he had no right to recognise her.
Since childhood, he had believed the world was not thin exactly, but badly sealed. Things leaked through. Voices in baby monitors. Shapes at upstairs windows. Men who did not age in pub photographs. Women in service stations at three in the morning who asked for lifts to villages that no longer existed. His mother had called it nonsense. His teachers had called it attention-seeking. His doctor had used softer words. Anxiety. Fixation. Pattern sensitivity.
But Wayne knew the difference between illness and evidence.
Illness was when the world lied inside your head.
Evidence was when the world lied in front of you.
He followed Jodie after shifts. Not close. Never close enough to be seen, or so he thought. He learned she lived on Norfolk Road. He learned she avoided the morning sun with a care that could almost pass for preference. He learned she sometimes went behind the awning with men from the arcade, and that the men came back pale, confused, obedient to their own embarrassment.
He knew what she was before he wrote the card.
The problem was what to do with knowing.
He had imagined this moment all his life, in one form or another. The proof. The breakthrough. The impossible thing stepping out from behind the ordinary. He had thought he would document it. Photograph it. Record, categorise, expose. He had thought there would be vindication in it. A final correction issued to every person who had laughed, sighed, rolled their eyes, changed the subject.
Instead, when he found Jodie, vindication became less interesting than proximity.
He wanted her to talk to him.
He wanted her to look at him and know he had seen.
That was why he was waiting outside Neptune’s Palace the next night, eating chips from a paper cone with a wooden fork, when Jodie arrived for her shift.
She stopped under the pier lights.
Wayne lifted one hand.
“Hello, Jodie.”
The sea was loud beneath them. The wind carried salt and fryer grease and the sour-clean smell of rain on concrete.
Jodie’s face showed nothing.
That frightened him more than anger would have. He had prepared for anger. In several notebooks, he had prepared for anger.
“Wayne,” she said.
The sound of his name in her mouth went through him with embarrassing force.
“You got my card.”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was better than a note.”
“It was a note.”
“Yes. But also a card.”
She stepped closer. He forced himself not to step back. Her eyes were dark, not black exactly, but with that depth some harbour water had at night. The surface caught light. Underneath was something that did not.
“You need to stop following me,” she said.
“I wasn’t—”
“Wayne.”
He swallowed.
The way she said his name made lying seem childish.
“I had to be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“You know what.”
“No. Say it.”
He glanced toward the arcade doors. A couple came out laughing, the woman holding a plastic keyring she had presumably won after spending twelve pounds. Music from the nearby clubs thumped faintly through the promenade.
Wayne leaned in slightly.
“You’re a vampire.”
Jodie stared at him.
For three seconds he felt ridiculous. Not wrong, exactly, but exposed. A grown man saying vampire on a pier in March while holding chips. It was the kind of scene the world arranged to humiliate people like him.
Then Jodie smiled.
It was small. Almost pitying.
“You shouldn’t say things like that to women at night.”
“I know what I saw.”
“You saw a tired girl working in an arcade.”
“I saw you take blood from a man by the maintenance shed.”
The smile went.
Wayne felt, with an almost academic clarity, that he had made a mistake.
Jodie moved so quickly he did not understand the movement until his back hit the corrugated metal shutter of the closed ice-cream kiosk. His chips fell, scattering hot, pale lengths over the wet boards. Her hand was around his throat. Not squeezing hard. She did not need to. Her thumb rested lightly beneath his jaw, placed over the pulse like a bookmark.
“Listen to me carefully,” she said.
Her voice had changed. It was still quiet, but the human softness had gone out of it. “You don’t know me. You haven’t seen anything. You’re going to go home, tear up whatever little notes you’ve made, and find a new hobby.”
Wayne should have been terrified.
Part of him was.
Another part, the defective and hungry part that had spoiled most of his life, felt radiant.
“You knew I had notes,” he whispered.
“I guessed.”
“No, you knew.”
Her nostrils flared slightly.
He realised then that she could smell him. Not just sweat and vinegar and damp wool. His excitement. His fear. His blood racing under her hand.
“Please,” she said, and that was worse than threat. “Leave me alone.”
He looked at her face. Really looked. Not as evidence, not as phenomenon. She looked exhausted. There were purple shadows under her eyes. Her lips were dry. One cuff of her cheap black jumper was fraying. Up close, she did not look like a queen of the dead. She looked like someone who had missed several meals and had nowhere safe to go.
“You’re hungry,” he said.
Jodie let go as if burned.
“Don’t.”
“I can help.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to take it from people who don’t know.”
“No.”
“Take from me.”
The words came out too quickly, too bluntly. He heard what they sounded like after he said them.
Jodie recoiled with an expression that was not disgust exactly. It was more complicated. Anger, yes. Alarm. A hard, wounded contempt.
“You’re sick,” she said.
Wayne’s face tightened.
“I’m not.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I do.”
“No. You’ve read books. You’ve sat online with other lonely men arguing about ghosts. You don’t know anything.”
He flinched.
That got through. She saw it get through, and for a moment something like regret crossed her face.
Then the arcade door opened and Mr. Preece called, “Jodie? You coming in or what?”
She stepped away from Wayne.
“Forget me,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“That’s your problem.”
She went inside.
Wayne stood in the wind, throat warm where her hand had been.
At half past two, Jodie found him still outside.
He was sitting on the low wall by the closed doughnut stand with his bag between his feet. The rain had come in thin and slanted. His hair was wet. He looked at her as though he had always known she would come back out.
“You’re going to get pneumonia,” she said.
“Can’t afford pneumonia.”
“That isn’t how illness works.”
“It is if you ignore it.”
She almost smiled despite herself. It irritated her, that almost-smile. It felt like losing ground.
She had spent the shift unsettled. Machine jams. Payout disputes. A girl vomiting blue liquid into a bin near the air hockey table. Mr. Preece complaining about electricity costs. Through it all, Wayne remained under her skin like a splinter.
Not because he knew.
Others had known, or guessed, or been close enough to guessing that they had to be pushed away. The coven had enemies. Hunters, fantasists, academics, occult hobbyists, rich men with private collections of bones and letters. Jodie had been warned all her life about people who noticed too much.
Wayne did not feel like a hunter.
He felt like a door left open.
“You need to go home,” she said.
He shook his head.
“I want to talk.”
“I don’t.”
“You came out.”
“I came out to tell you to go.”
“But you came out.”
She looked toward the sea. The tide was high, slapping the supports. Down the coast, the club district still pulsed. The town never slept properly. It merely entered different stages of intoxication.
“What do you want, Wayne?”
He seemed to have prepared several answers. None arrived intact.
“I want to know,” he said finally.
“No, you want to matter.”
His mouth opened, then closed.
Jodie immediately wished she had not said it. Not because it was untrue, but because truth was a crude instrument in the wrong hands. She had seen the coven do that. Slice people open with accurate observations and call it wisdom.
Wayne looked down at his shoes.
“Doesn’t everyone?”
The rain thickened.
For a while neither of them spoke.
Then Jodie said, “There’s nothing romantic about it.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
“You think you didn’t.”
He took that in.
“What’s it like?”
“Being poor?”
“Being what you are.”
She leaned against the wall, leaving a careful distance between them.
“It’s like being very tired and never being allowed to die.”
Wayne looked at her.
That answer was not in his books.
She laughed once, flatly.
“Disappointing?”
“No.”
“What did you expect? Castles? Blood cults? Silk sheets? I live in a bedsit with a man who thinks cereal is dinner and smokes things off foil.”
“Why?”
“Because rent exists.”
“But your coven—”
Her head turned.
Wayne stopped.
The word had done something. It had landed badly.
“You don’t talk about that,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just don’t.”
A bus passed at the far end of the road, almost empty, lit from within like an aquarium. Wayne watched it go. He seemed to be trying to compose himself into the right shape.
“I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“Most people aren’t.”
That struck him too.
The door to Neptune’s Palace opened again. Laughter spilled out, then cut off as it closed. A man stumbled toward the railings, unzipping his fly before thinking better of it when he saw them.
Jodie smelled Wayne’s blood again. It was too near. Clean enough, anxious, quick. Not good in the refined sense. Not coven blood. Not perfumed, prepared, offered in candlelight by the beautiful and bored. But alive. Human. Immediate.
The hunger moved.
Wayne saw the change in her face.
Instead of backing away, he tilted his head slightly.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not afraid.”
“That’s because you’re an idiot.”
“No. I mean, yes, maybe. But not about this.”
Jodie grabbed his collar and dragged him under the dark side of the shutter, out of the light.
For an instant Wayne thought it was happening. The secret. The threshold. The thing he had imagined in so many forms that reality could only disappoint or annihilate him.
Instead she shoved him hard against the metal.
“You are afraid,” she said. “You’re shaking.”
He was. His hands trembled at his sides.
“Good,” she said. “Remember that. That’s the part of you that still wants to live.”
His eyes were wet now, though from rain or humiliation she could not tell.
“I don’t have much,” he said.
The words were quiet enough that she might have missed them if she were human.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. I don’t have people. I don’t have a place. I work, I go home, I read, I notice things no one wants noticed. People think that’s nothing, but it takes up your whole life. Waiting for the world to admit it’s stranger than they said.”
Jodie’s grip loosened.
“And then there’s you.”
There was the mistake. Not his alone. Hers too, because she let the sentence live.
He looked at her with terrible openness.
“I thought maybe it meant something.”
Jodie stepped back.
The rain tapped the shutter between them.
“It doesn’t,” she said, but without force.
Wayne nodded as if accepting a sentence.
“Okay.”
She should have gone inside. She should have left him there, pathetic and wet and alive. She should have told Mr. Preece to ban him. She should have packed her two bags before dawn and moved on to another bad town with another pier and another arcade where lonely people fed machines and machines fed landlords.
Instead, when Wayne said, “Can I buy you tea?” she said, “I don’t drink tea.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Chips?”
“No.”
“What then?”
She looked at him for a long time.
“There’s a twenty-four-hour café by the taxi rank,” she said. “You can sit with me for half an hour. Then you go home.”
The café was called Dino’s. It had laminated menus, chrome-edged tables, and staff who no longer reacted to anything short of arson. Taxi drivers drank tea by the window. Two club girls shared toast and tried not to come down too quickly. A man in a suit slept with his forehead on the table, one hand still around his phone.
Jodie and Wayne sat in a booth under a flickering light.
He ordered tea. She ordered nothing.
The waitress did not care.
Wayne talked. Once permitted, words came out of him in uneven bursts. He told her about the bowling alley, about his mother in Worthing, about his flat with damp in the kitchen wall, about the time he had found a nineteenth-century report of a “white woman” seen near the old smugglers’ steps and spent six months trying to connect it to unexplained drownings. He told her about forums, about being banned from two of them for arguing with moderators, about a man in Leeds who claimed to have a mummified hand that moved during thunderstorms.
He did not ask her age. That was something.
He did ask whether crosses worked.
“No.”
“Garlic?”
“No.”
“Holy water?”
“Depends who’s holding it.”
He wrote that down on a napkin.
She should have hated him for it, but she found herself watching his hand. His handwriting was blocky and controlled, each letter trying very hard to behave.
“Do you always write everything down?” she asked.
“Mostly.”
“Why?”
“So it doesn’t go away.”
That answer was too close to something.
Jodie looked out of the window. Dawn was not far off. The sky had begun to thin behind the roofs.
Wayne followed her gaze.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Sunlight?”
“Everything.”
He nodded.
The tea steamed between them.
“What’s your real name?” he asked.
“Jodie.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
He considered that.
“No. Not entirely.”
That made her smile properly for the first time.
It changed her face so much that Wayne stared. She saw him staring and the smile disappeared.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“What?”
“Make me into proof.”
He looked down.
“I don’t want to.”
“You do.”
“I want you to be real.”
“I was real before you noticed.”
He nodded slowly.
“That’s fair.”
Dawn pressed faintly at the window. Jodie stood.
“I have to go.”
“I’ll walk you.”
“No.”
“At least—”
“No.”
This time he heard it.
Outside the café, the town was entering its grey hour. The hour when no one looked good. Pavements shone with rain. Delivery vans idled. Gulls tore open bin bags with surgical malice. The clubs had emptied, leaving trails of glitter, sick, cigarette ends and lost eyelashes.
Wayne stood with his bag over one shoulder.
“Will I see you again?” he asked.
Jodie should have said no.
She meant to.
Instead she said, “Don’t come to my room.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t follow me in daylight.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“I wouldn’t.”
That one she believed, which was foolish.
She walked away.
He watched until she turned the corner.
By the time she reached Norfolk Road, her skin was beginning to prickle. She took the stairs two at a time, unlocked the room, and slipped inside.
Ash was awake.
He was sitting on the mattress, eyes red, face slack with some private defeat. He looked at her, then at the window, then back again.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Work.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“It was true yesterday.”
He frowned as if trying to remember how suspicion worked.
“There was someone outside.”
Jodie went still.
“When?”
“Earlier. Dunno. Man. Looking up.”
Her fingers tightened around her keys.
“What did he look like?”
Ash shrugged.
“Normal. Sad.”
That described too many people.
Jodie crossed to the window and looked through the gap in the towel.
The street below was empty except for a delivery cyclist and a woman in pyjamas putting rubbish into the wrong bin.
“Probably nothing,” Ash said.
But he was watching her now.
Properly, for once.
“You in trouble?”
Jodie let the towel fall back into place.
“Yes,” she said.
Ash blinked. He had not expected the truth.
“With who?”
She sat on the edge of the mattress, suddenly exhausted beyond hunger.
“I don’t know yet.”
Across town, Wayne returned to his flat above the closed carpet shop and laid the damp napkin carefully on his desk.
Holy water depends who’s holding it.
He looked at the sentence for a long time.
Then he opened a fresh notebook and wrote a title on the first page.
JODIE.
Under it, after some thought, he added:
Do not expose. Protect. Understand.
He underlined the last word twice.
By noon, he had searched social media for every Jodie within ten miles.
By one, he had found Ash.
By two, he had found the landlord, the arcade company records, Mr. Preece’s public Facebook profile, and three old articles about unexplained assaults near the pier.
By three, he had stopped pretending he was not building a shrine.
By evening, before his shift at the bowling alley, Wayne had printed a photograph of Jodie taken from the background of a tourist video outside Neptune’s Palace. She was blurred, half-turned, almost not there.
He pinned it to the corkboard above his desk.
Then he stood back and looked at her.
For the first time in years, Wayne felt he had been given a purpose.
That was the danger.
Not the blood.
Not the teeth.
Not even the hunger.
The danger was that loneliness, when it finally found an object, called itself love.
Part Three: What Wayne Thought Love Was
Wayne began by improving things.
That was how he understood it. Not interfering. Not stalking. Not controlling. Improving.
He brought a scarf to Neptune’s Palace the next night because Jodie’s neck always looked cold. He left it folded on the counter while she was dealing with a man who claimed the coin pusher had cheated him out of a Spider-Man keyring. It was black wool, still with the shop tag on it, because Wayne did not trust himself to choose second-hand clothing. Second-hand things had histories. He did not know what histories were safe for her.
Jodie looked at the scarf, then at him.
“No.”
“It’s just—”
“No.”
“You don’t have to wear it.”
“I’m not taking presents from you.”
“It isn’t a present.”
“What is it, then?”
He had no answer that would not expose the machinery inside him.
She pushed it back across the counter.
“Take it home.”
Wayne did.
The next night, he brought cash.
Not much. Forty pounds in two twenties, folded inside an envelope. He had written no note this time. Notes were evidence, and Jodie had made it clear she did not like evidence.
She found the envelope under the staff door and came out onto the pier ten minutes later with a face like shut metal.
“You can’t do this.”
“You need money.”
“Everyone needs money.”
“You said rent exists.”
“That wasn’t an invitation.”
He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking not at her but just to one side of her face, where her reflection would have been if the night had been glass.
“I don’t want anything back.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“No. You want to be necessary.”
The words struck harder because she did not sound cruel when she said them. She sounded tired. Tired enough to be accurate.
Wayne’s mouth tightened.
“I’m trying to help.”
“You’re trying to get closer.”
“Is that so terrible?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her properly then. The wind dragged at his thin hair. Behind him the arcade machines flashed red and blue through the windows, a cheap aurora over his shoulder.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said.
Jodie almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because the sentence was one of the great human warnings. Men said it before falling off ladders, before driving drunk, before investing in schemes, before loving someone who had already told them not to.
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
But he would not stop.
That was the trouble with Wayne. He had mistaken refusal for a test of sincerity. Each boundary became, in his mind, a new form of communication. If Jodie said do not follow me, he translated it into she is afraid to be followed. If she said do not give me money, he translated it into she has never been given anything safely. If she said leave me alone, he heard the loneliness beneath the phrase and considered himself appointed to answer it.
He began appearing at the edges of her nights.
Across the road from Dino’s.
At the taxi rank.
On the promenade, pretending to photograph the moon over the water.
In Neptune’s Palace, spending small disciplined amounts on the machines so Mr. Preece could not accuse him of loitering. Two pounds on the penny falls. Three on the grabber. One pound in change converted to tokens and fed into a racing game no one played anymore.
Mr. Preece noticed.
“Your admirer’s back,” he said one night, bending under the counter for receipt rolls.
“He’s not my admirer.”
“What is he, then?”
Jodie watched Wayne through the glass. He was standing near the change machine, looking at nothing too deliberately.
“A problem.”
Mr. Preece grunted. “Want me to bar him?”
“Yes.”
But she said it too late, and not firmly enough.
Mr. Preece gave her a sideways look. He was not sentimental, but he was old enough to recognise trouble orbiting a young woman. Or someone he believed was a young woman.
“I can, you know.”
“I know.”
“Men like that don’t always get bored.”
“I know.”
“You got someone? Family?”
“No.”
“Friends?”
She did not answer.
He tore open a packet of receipt rolls with his teeth. “Right.”
It was the nearest thing to kindness he had offered her. She disliked him for making her notice.
At home, Ash was deteriorating.
There was no dramatic collapse. No cinematic decline. Just the small administrative failures of a life losing its argument. He stopped washing his clothes. He forgot shifts at the kitchen supply warehouse and then lied badly about it. He slept through afternoons with his mouth open and woke in panic at dusk. He borrowed money from people who did not lend money out of kindness.
Jodie found him one morning sitting on the floor by the microwave, trying to untangle a chain from around his wrist.
There was no chain.
“Ash.”
He looked up at her, wild-eyed.
“It’s on me.”
“There’s nothing on you.”
“It’s on me.”
She crouched in front of him, careful not to touch.
His pupils were huge. His skin smelled wrong. Sour terror, stale smoke, the faint metallic edge of someone running out of minerals and luck.
“You took something.”
“No.”
“Ash.”
“No, I didn’t. Not like that. It was just—” He swallowed, losing the rest of the sentence somewhere in his throat. “I saw him.”
“Who?”
“The sad bloke.”
Jodie’s body went very still.
“Where?”
“Downstairs.”
“When?”
“Don’t know. Night. Morning. He asked about you.”
She closed her eyes.
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“Ash.”
“Nothing important.”
“What did you tell him?”
Ash rubbed at his wrist again, still trying to free himself from what was not there.
“That you don’t eat. That you sleep weird. That you put towels over the window. That you’re not my girlfriend.”
Jodie stood.
He flinched, though she had not moved toward him.
“I didn’t mean anything.”
“I know.”
“He gave me twenty quid.”
“Of course he did.”
“I needed it.”
“I know.”
That was the worst thing. She did know. Poverty made treachery practical. Hunger made privacy negotiable. Ash had sold her for twenty pounds because twenty pounds could become powder, smoke, warmth, silence. She could despise it, but not misunderstand it.
She went to the window and looked down.
Wayne was not there.
That almost made it worse.
That evening, she waited for him outside the bowling alley.
It was inland, part of an entertainment complex built in the hopeful late nineties and now patched with discount gyms, vape shops and a soft-play centre. The bowling alley sign had lost two letters, so at night it read OWL ZONE, which Jodie thought was an improvement.
Wayne came out at ten past eleven carrying his canvas bag.
When he saw her, his face changed.
Not surprise. Confirmation.
That angered her before he spoke.
“You talked to Ash,” she said.
Wayne stopped under the broken sign.
“He was outside.”
“You went to my building.”
“I didn’t go in.”
“You gave him money.”
“He looked ill.”
“He is ill.”
“I was worried.”
“You were collecting.”
His face tightened. “That isn’t fair.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You wanted to know what he knew. You paid for information.”
“I wanted to know if you were safe.”
Jodie stepped closer. A family came out behind him, two children arguing over a plastic trophy from a birthday party. She waited until they had gone.
“Safe from what, Wayne?”
He looked at her, and in that moment she saw the answer form before he softened it.
“From yourself,” he said.
It should have been absurd. A man with notebooks and no life telling a predator she needed protection from herself. But absurdity did not stop a thing from being dangerous.
“You don’t know what I am.”
“I know enough.”
“No. You know stories. You know symptoms. You know what frightened people wrote down before they died.”
His eyes brightened at that despite himself.
“There were deaths?”
She recoiled.
“Listen to yourself.”
The brightness collapsed into shame.
“I didn’t mean—”
“You did. That’s the problem. You want the monster and the girl at the same time. You want to rescue one and study the other.”
Wayne looked wounded, which irritated her further because she had not harmed him. Not yet.
“I care about you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know more than most.”
“No. You’ve watched more than most.”
The distinction hung between them.
Rain began to fall, gentle at first, visible only in the cones of light from the car park lamps. Somewhere inside the bowling alley someone laughed too loudly. The ordinary world continued, offensively intact.
Wayne said, “What happened to your coven?”
Jodie slapped him.
She did not mean to hit him as hard as she did. She pulled back at the last instant, but not enough. His head turned sharply. His bag slipped off his shoulder and hit the wet pavement.
For a second neither of them moved.
Then Wayne touched his mouth. His fingers came away red.
Jodie smelled it immediately.
The hunger rose so fast it was like being shoved from behind.
Wayne saw her see the blood.
His fear came up too, hot and honest and threaded with something else. Anticipation. Permission. A ghastly, intimate triumph.
“No,” Jodie said, though she did not know whether she was speaking to him or herself.
He did not back away.
“Jodie—”
“Shut up.”
“You need—”
“Shut up.”
But his lip was bleeding, and he was too close, and she had been hungry for days because Wayne had made ordinary feeding difficult. She could not risk the arcade men now. Could not risk the smokers, the gamblers, the drunk girls outside clubs. Wayne had turned them all into potential witnesses. He had made her conscious of herself. That was his first real injury to her.
He lifted his hand.
Not to defend himself.
To offer.
Jodie grabbed his wrist and dragged him behind the closed vape shop.
The alley there smelled of bins, rain, cardboard, old fat. It was narrow enough that the light from the car park did not reach the ground. Wayne’s back struck brick. Jodie held him there, breathing hard though she did not need breath.
“Say no,” she said.
He looked confused.
“What?”
“Say no.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Say it anyway.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Her teeth had already changed. Not dramatically. No theatrical lengthening, no monstrous transformation. Just a subtle sharpening, the body revealing what it had hidden.
Wayne stared at her mouth.
A tear slipped down his face.
“Beautiful,” he whispered.
That nearly saved him.
Not because it moved her. Because it disgusted her. Because for one clean second she saw the whole shape of his fixation, and how little room there was inside it for her actual suffering. He had made even this into an answer to himself.
She turned away.
Then he said, “Please.”
Not afraid.
Begging.
The hunger took the word and used it as permission.
She bit him.
Wayne made a sound like grief leaving the body.
She drank too much.
She knew it as it was happening. Knowing did not stop it. His blood was not refined, not clean, not anything the coven would have approved, but it was alive with intensity. Fear. Want. Loneliness fermented into devotion. Amphetamine from a pill he had taken to stay awake through his shift. Tea. Cheap food. Adrenaline. It hit her like bad music in a club bathroom, like light under a locked door.
Wayne’s hands clutched her shoulders.
Not pushing her off.
Holding on.
That made it harder to stop.
When she finally pulled back, he sagged. She caught him before he hit the ground. For several seconds they remained like that in the alley, his weight in her arms, his blood in her mouth, the rain making everything shine.
“Wayne.”
His eyes fluttered.
“Wayne, look at me.”
He smiled.
It was not a good smile. It was weak, lopsided, almost childish.
“I knew,” he whispered.
“No, you didn’t.”
“I knew you wouldn’t kill me.”
Jodie looked at the red mess of his neck, the pallor already spreading through his face, and felt the terrible old contempt of the dead for the living.
“You stupid man.”
She tore strips from the lining of his jacket and pressed them against the wound. Her saliva would close some of it. Not enough. She had taken too much and cut badly because she had been angry when she bit. Anger made poor work. Hunger made worse.
“Hospital,” she said.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No hospital.”
“You’ll die.”
He looked pleased by the scale of the word.
“Then give it back.”
Jodie froze.
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No.”
“You can.”
“No.”
“I’ve read—”
“You’ve read shit.”
“You can make me like you.”
She laughed then. A short, appalled sound.
“You think this is a gift?”
“I think it’s not being alone.”
The answer struck something so old in her that for a moment the alley vanished and she was back in the red-brick house behind cedar trees, listening to voices downstairs. The coven laughing softly. Someone crying with pleasure or fear. Velvet curtains. Crystal glasses. A woman with silver hair telling Jodie that eternity was not endured individually, that a bloodline was a family, that exile was the only real death.
Then another memory: Jodie running through wet fields at dawn, smoke behind her, mouth full of ash and someone else’s blood.
She came back to herself in the alley.
Wayne was watching her.
“You don’t want me,” she said.
“I do.”
“You want the end of being Wayne.”
He closed his eyes.
There. Truth again. Crude instrument, accurate cut.
His breathing became shallow.
Jodie swore and pulled out his phone. It opened to his face. Of course it did. His lock screen was a photograph of the sea at night.
She called an ambulance, gave the location, and left before the sirens came.
She did not go home immediately.
For an hour she walked the back streets with Wayne’s blood drying under her nails. She crossed through service yards, under scaffolding, past the shuttered backs of restaurants where staff smoked and did not look at her. She could feel his blood working through her, carrying fragments. Not thoughts, exactly. Vampires did not inherit minds from feeding, whatever Wayne’s books said. But emotion lingered chemically. A mood. A tint.
Wayne’s blood tasted of wanting to be found.
By the time she reached Norfolk Road, the sky had begun to pale.
Ash was not in the room.
At first, this was ordinary. Then she saw the mess.
The mattress dragged half-sideways. The cheap television knocked over. Her bag open. Clothes pulled out. The towel torn down from the window and lying on the floor like a shed skin.
On the wall above the mattress, someone had written in black marker:
WHAT ARE YOU?
Jodie stood in the doorway until the first light touched her hand.
Pain flashed up her arm.
She hissed, pulled back, and slammed the door.
Behind her, in the stairwell, something creaked.
“Ash?”
No answer.
She listened.
The building breathed its usual damp breath. A toilet flushed below. Someone coughed. Pipes ticked in the walls.
Then her phone buzzed.
She looked down.
A message from Ash.
No punctuation. No capitals.
he told me about you
i thought he was mad
but then i saw your bag
what are you jodie
what did you do to me
Her hand tightened around the phone.
Another message arrived.
i told some people
they know stuff
they can help
dont come back
For a while Jodie could not move.
Then she laughed once, quietly, in the stairwell of a rotten house as daylight gathered outside.
There it was. The consequence, neat as a bill through the letterbox.
Wayne had not meant to expose her. Ash had not meant to betray her. The people Ash knew probably did not know anything real, not at first. Nobody meant anything. Nobody ever meant anything. They simply wanted, feared, needed, followed the quickest road away from pain, and left wreckage behind them like footprints.
Her phone buzzed again.
Unknown number.
A photograph loaded slowly.
Wayne in a hospital bed, eyes closed, skin almost translucent, a white dressing at his neck.
Under it, a message.
YOU HURT HIM.
Then another.
WE KNOW WHERE YOU SLEEP.
Jodie stared at the screen until the letters blurred.
Outside, the sun rose over the south coast with absolute indifference.
Part Four: Bodies
By noon, Jodie was under the pier.
There were places beneath Neptune’s Palace that customers never imagined. Service crawlspaces. Storage cages. Old maintenance rooms where damp had swollen the doors and salt had furred the hinges white. Mr. Preece kept broken chairs there, obsolete signage, dead fruit machines with their innards stripped out, Christmas decorations no one had used since 2009.
Jodie found a cupboard behind the staff toilet, no window, concrete walls, one rusted shelf. It smelled of bleach, wet metal and mouse droppings. It was better than sunlight.
She sat on the floor with her knees drawn up and Wayne’s blood still in her.
Her phone had not stopped.
Unknown numbers. Blocked numbers. Ash. Then nothing from Ash. Then one message from Wayne’s phone, though she did not know whether Wayne had sent it.
please come
i didnt tell them
im sorry
Then a photograph: Ash in the bedsit, sitting on the mattress with his hands bound in front of him using a phone charger cable. His face was bruised, but not badly. Not yet. Behind him, a man held up Jodie’s cheap black dress like evidence at a press conference.
The message beneath it said:
MIDNIGHT. BODIES. COME ALONE.
Bodies was a club under the arches, one street back from the seafront, where the town changed shape after dark. It had been called other things before: The Cellar, Halo, Damage, The Engine Room. Every few years someone painted the walls black again and pretended it was new. Now it was Bodies, with a red neon sign in the shape of a heart and a sound system that made the pavement tremble.
Jodie had fed there once or twice. Never inside. Always outside, in the loose human wreckage around closing time.
She knew who the message was from by seven.
Not names. Names hardly mattered. She knew the type.
There were always people on the edge of night economies who thought they owned whatever washed up there. Small dealers. Door staff between jobs. Men with vans. Men with dogs. Men who lent money and called it friendship. Women who recruited girls into favours and called it looking after them. Addicts who informed. DJs who supplied. Influencers who filmed suffering from flattering angles. Amateur occultists who learned three words in Latin and mistook appetite for vocation.
Ash had owed someone money.
Wayne had brought them a myth.
Together they had made Jodie valuable.
At dusk, Mr. Preece found her in the cupboard.
He opened the door, saw her sitting in the dark, and did not scream. That was one of the few genuinely admirable things he ever did.
“You living here now?” he asked.
“No.”
“You look like death.”
“Yes.”
He stared at her for a long moment. His eyes went to her mouth, her hands, the dried brown on her cuff. He was not a clever man in any academic sense, but he had survived long enough beside fruit machines to understand hunger, compulsion, and the forms of debt people carried on their bodies.
“Police?” he said.
“No.”
“Ambulance?”
“No.”
“Someone hurt you?”
Jodie almost laughed.
“Not in the way you mean.”
Mr. Preece sighed and leaned against the doorframe.
“I should sack you.”
“Yes.”
“I should call someone.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not paid enough for this.”
“No.”
He rubbed his face with both hands. “There’s a back exit from the old laser quest. Comes out by the bins behind the chip shop. Cameras don’t work there.”
Jodie looked up.
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because whatever you’ve got yourself into, I don’t want it in my arcade.”
That was not kindness. It was better than kindness because it did not ask to be admired.
He threw her a hoodie from lost property. Pink, with a university logo faded from too many washes.
“Take that. You look noticeable.”
“I am noticeable.”
“Be less.”
She put it on.
At eleven forty, she came out behind the chip shop and entered the town like a thing returned from burial.
The seafront was alive in its usual dead way. Young men moving in packs, loud with pre-emptive embarrassment. Girls bare-legged in the cold, arms linked, faces bright and brittle. Taxi engines idling. Bouncers in black puffa jackets. Blue lights somewhere distant. Laughter that turned to shouting and back again without changing pitch.
Bodies pulsed under the railway arch.
The queue was short. It was raining. The neon heart buzzed red over the door, flickering every few seconds as if struggling to keep beating.
Jodie did not queue.
The doorman saw her coming and stepped aside.
That told her enough.
Inside, the club was too hot, too dark, too wet with breath. Bass moved through her bones. Lights cut the room into fragments: hands, mouths, shoulders, teeth, glitter, sweat. The walls were painted black, but the paint could not hide the old damp beneath. Nothing ever did. The whole place smelled of spirits, perfume, toilets, chemical courage and blood moving too fast.
For a second the hunger answered.
Not now, she told it.
Not now.
Ash was in the old VIP area at the back, though there was nothing VIP about it. Torn red booths. A rope barrier. A cracked mirror. Two men stood either side of him. One had a shaved head and a neck tattoo of praying hands. The other wore a leather coat and held his phone like a weapon.
Wayne was there too.
That stopped her.
He sat in the booth opposite Ash, pale under the club lights, hospital dressing visible above the collar of his shirt. He looked as if he had walked out of the ward without permission, which he probably had. His eyes found Jodie and filled with such relief that she hated him for it.
“I told them not to,” he said.
No one heard him over the music except her.
Ash looked up. His face changed when he saw her. Not relief. Not fear. Recognition, at last, and worse than recognition: accusation.
“What are you?” he shouted.
Jodie stood at the edge of the VIP area, hands loose at her sides.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Ash flinched as if she had insulted him.
The man with the phone smiled. He was older than the club crowd, maybe forty, with the sunken cheeks of someone who lived on stimulants and resentment. His leather coat was wet at the shoulders.
“Say it louder,” he said. “Audio’s shit in here.”
He was filming.
Of course he was.
“What do you want?” Jodie asked.
He gave a little bow.
“There she is. Straight to business.”
The shaved-head man laughed.
The one with the phone stepped closer. “Wayne here says you’re the real thing.”
Wayne shut his eyes.
“I didn’t—”
“You wrote it down, mate. You wrote everything down.”
Jodie looked at Wayne.
His face crumpled.
She understood then. Wayne had not deliberately betrayed her. He had simply documented her with the devotional stupidity of a man who thought private obsession remained private. Notebooks. Photos. Names. Dates. Her room. Her habits. Ash. The arcade. Blood. The world had not needed to torture him. It had only needed to find his corkboard.
The man with the phone continued, enjoying the sound of himself.
“So we’ve got two options. One, you do something interesting on camera, and we all get paid. Two, you don’t, and we test things. Sunbeds. Silver. Fire. Whatever works.”
“Silver doesn’t,” Wayne said weakly.
The man turned. “Shut up, Wayne.”
Wayne shut up.
Jodie looked at Ash.
His hands were bound, but loosely. He could have run if he had been sober, stronger, less used to captivity in its ordinary forms.
“They’ll kill you,” she said to him.
Ash laughed once, bitter and scared.
“You already did something to me.”
“I didn’t.”
“I’ve been dreaming you. I can feel you in the room when you’re not there.”
“That isn’t me.”
“Then what is it?”
“Withdrawal. Fear. Wayne talking poison into your head. Men using you because you owe them money.”
His eyes watered.
“You always do that.”
“What?”
“Make it sound normal.”
That landed.
Because he was right. She did make horror sound ordinary. It was one of the ways she had survived it.
The man with the phone lifted his voice. “Enough counselling. Bite him.”
Jodie looked at him.
“No.”
“Bite Wayne, then. He’s gagging for it.”
The shaved-head man laughed again.
Wayne stared at the table.
“No,” Jodie said.
The man’s smile thinned.
He nodded to the shaved-head man, who struck Ash in the stomach.
Ash folded forward, choking.
Jodie moved.
The club did not see her cross the space. One moment she was outside the rope, the next she had the shaved-head man by the wrist and had broken it cleanly enough that the sound disappeared into the bass. He screamed and dropped to his knees.
The phone man stumbled back, still filming.
Now the club noticed.
Not all at once. Crowds do not understand danger quickly when music is loud. They interpret everything first as entertainment, then drama, then inconvenience, then threat. People turned. Laughed. Stared. Someone cheered. Someone raised another phone.
Jodie should have run.
Instead, she bared her teeth.
The front row saw.
The scream began with one girl and spread outward.
The crowd broke unevenly. Bodies shoved toward the exit. Drinks fell. Glass cracked under shoes. The DJ cut the music too late, leaving only the ugly human sound beneath it: panic without rhythm.
The man with the phone lunged for Ash, perhaps to keep his hostage, perhaps just to have something between himself and Jodie.
Wayne got there first.
It was not heroic in the clean way. It was clumsy, desperate, almost absurd. He threw himself across the booth and grabbed the man’s arm. The phone went flying. The man cursed and punched him hard in the side of the head. Wayne held on.
“Run,” Wayne shouted.
Whether to Jodie or Ash, no one could tell.
Ash ran.
He did not look back.
That was Ash. Not a villain. Not a coward in any exceptional way. Just a man trained by life to recognise the opening and take it.
The shaved-head man, still on his knees, pulled a knife from his boot with his unbroken hand.
Jodie saw it.
Wayne did not.
The blade went into Wayne below the ribs.
His expression changed from effort to surprise.
Jodie killed the shaved-head man.
There was no romance in it. No elegance. She took him by the head and drove him backward into the edge of the table with enough force to stop the body from being a person. The crack was loud even without music.
The phone man backed away, slipping in spilled drink.
“Jesus.”
Jodie turned on him.
He pissed himself before she touched him.
That saved him, in a way. Not morally. Chemically. The stink of it cut through the blood-hunger and gave her one clear second to see Wayne sliding down between the booth and the wall, one hand pressed to his side.
She went to him.
The club continued to empty around them. Alarms began somewhere. Not fire alarms; door alarms, panic alarms, systems complaining that their expected world had been interrupted. Red light flashed over Wayne’s face.
“Jodie,” he said.
“Don’t talk.”
“That’s usually my problem.”
“Don’t.”
She pressed both hands over the wound. Blood pushed between her fingers. Too much. Human bodies were badly designed for puncture. So much depended on thin membranes, narrow tubes, pressure maintained by hope and muscle.
Wayne smiled faintly.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“I made it worse.”
“Yes.”
“I thought I was helping.”
“Yes.”
His breath hitched. He looked almost offended by the pain, as if pain were another person in the conversation and had interrupted.
“Do it,” he whispered.
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to die.”
That was the first honest thing he had said all night.
Jodie looked at him.
His blood was everywhere. On her hands. On the booth. On the floor where dancers had been twenty minutes earlier. The club was named Bodies and now it had become literal, stripped of branding and irony.
“I can’t make it good,” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“You will.”
He tried to laugh and coughed instead.
Outside, sirens approached.
Jodie knew the timing. Police first, probably. Ambulance delayed by crowd and confusion. Fire brigade if someone had hit the alarm properly. Phones already uploading. Her face would be somewhere by morning: blurred, open-mouthed, monstrous under red light. Wayne’s notebooks would be found. Ash would talk because fear made confession feel like protection. Mr. Preece would deny everything and mostly mean it.
There was no town left for her now.
No bedsit. No arcade. No dark corner under the pier.
Wayne’s hand found her sleeve.
“Don’t leave me.”
She almost said she would not.
But that would have been another lie given as comfort, and she had developed a late intolerance for those.
“I’m here now,” she said.
He nodded, accepting the lesser mercy.
The first police officer entered with a baton raised and terror poorly hidden under procedure.
“Move away from him!”
Jodie did not move.
The officer shouted again.
The phone man screamed from somewhere near the bar, “She killed him! She killed Darren!”
Wayne’s fingers tightened.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said, too quietly for anyone human to hear.
Jodie heard.
That was his tragedy, in miniature. At the end, he was still trying to author the scene.
The officer came closer.
Jodie could have escaped through the rear fire door. She could have taken Wayne’s blood, taken his life, taken the old road into something worse than survival. She could have killed the officer, the phone man, anyone between her and the night. She could have become exactly what Wayne had needed her to be.
Instead she bent and kissed Wayne once on the forehead.
His skin was already cooling.
“Goodbye,” she said.
Then she ran.
Not out through the doors, where police lights washed the alley blue. Not into the street, where the crowd had gathered with phones held high and faces bright with borrowed significance. She ran deeper into the building, through a staff corridor, past stacked beer crates, past a girl from the cloakroom crying into her hands, past a fire door swollen in its frame.
Behind her, men shouted.
Ahead, dawn was closer than it should have been.
The old arch complex connected to a derelict amusements storage unit, and from there to the under-pier maintenance route. Jodie knew the path by smell more than memory: salt, rust, pigeon filth, old timber, black water moving below. Her body wanted speed. Her mind lagged behind, still in the booth with Wayne’s hand on her sleeve.
She reached the service platform beneath Neptune’s Palace as the eastern sky began to open.
The sea was grey.
The tide was going out, dragging foam around the pier supports. Above her, somewhere in the arcade, the machines would be waking into standby mode. Lights without players. Music without joy. Systems ready to accept coins from anyone with coins left to lose.
Jodie crouched behind a concrete support, shaking.
Her hands were red to the wrists.
She had not turned Wayne.
That was the last good thing she knew about herself.
It was not enough to save him. It was not enough to save Ash. It was not enough to undo the man dead in the club or the videos already splitting and multiplying across private chats, local groups, police systems, servers in countries where no one cared what a girl under red neon had really been.
But it was a boundary.
A small one.
Sometimes that was all a person had left: the line they did not cross, even when no one would reward them for it.
Footsteps sounded above.
Police on the pier.
Then Mr. Preece’s voice, strained and angry.
“You can’t come through here without a warrant. This is private property.”
Another voice answered. Official. Irritated.
Jodie closed her eyes.
Even now, he was buying her minutes.
The first strip of sunlight touched the water beyond the pilings. It flashed white on the moving surface. Pain prickled across her face though the sun had not yet reached her.
She could go lower. There were crawlspaces. Drainage channels. Old voids where the pier met the sea wall. She might survive the day if she moved quickly. She might leave after dark, take a train without a ticket, find another town with another arcade, another room, another Ash, another Wayne, another sequence of hunger and concealment and damage.
The thought exhausted her.
Not because she wanted death.
That was too simple.
She wanted, with sudden unbearable clarity, not to have to become another version of herself somewhere else.
Above, the arcade machines started their morning test cycle.
A burst of synthetic music drifted down through the boards. Coins rattled in a hopper. Neptune’s Palace announcing itself open to no one.
Jodie laughed.
It came out broken, but it was laughter.
On the beach beyond the pier, a few early dog walkers moved in coats and hats, heads lowered against the wind. The world had already resumed. It was merciless like that. Tragedy did not alter weather, rents, rotas, addiction, gambling, loneliness, the small economies of need. Bodies fell, and the machines waited.
Her phone buzzed once.
She looked at it.
A message from Ash.
im sorry
i didnt know theyd do that
are you alive
Jodie stared at the words for a long time.
Then she typed:
yes
She did not send it.
After a moment, she deleted it and wrote:
get clean if you can
She sent that.
It was inadequate. Almost insulting. But it was the only blessing she had.
The sun climbed.
Light entered beneath the pier in bright, broken sheets, reflected off the water. It touched the edge of her shoe first. Smoke rose from the fabric.
Jodie pulled back.
The survival instinct rose violently, ancient and absolute. It filled her limbs with command. Move. Hide. Descend. Live. It had kept her alive through the coven, through flight, through bedsits and hunger and men who mistook wanting for love. It did not care about meaning. It cared about continuation.
She obeyed it.
At the final second, she ran into the crawlspace behind the old maintenance room, tearing her hands on rusted mesh, forcing her body through a gap too narrow for breath. Sunlight struck her back and burned through the hoodie. She bit down on a scream and dropped into darkness below the boards.
There, in the wet black between the pier’s bones, Jodie lay curled among old cables and salt-stiff rubbish until day closed over her like a lid.
She did not die.
That was not mercy.
By evening, Wayne was dead. His name appeared online beside a bad photograph from his social media profile. Local man fatally stabbed during seafront disturbance. Police appeal for witnesses. No mention of vampires. No mention of hunger. No mention of the way loneliness had moved through all of them, wearing different faces.
Ash disappeared from Norfolk Road within a week. Some said rehab. Some said Eastbourne. Some said he owed too much and went wherever people go when the town has finished with them.
Mr. Preece closed Neptune’s Palace for three days, then reopened because insurance did not pay for feelings.
Bodies never reopened under that name. Six months later it became a cocktail bar called Saint Electric, with exposed brick, small plates, and a mural of wings where Wayne had bled out.
And Jodie left the south coast before anyone could decide what story she belonged to.
Years later, a woman working nights in an arcade in another town would sometimes pause by the change counter and listen to the machines sing to the desperate. She would wear a black scarf no one remembered giving her. She would refuse gifts. She would avoid men with notebooks. She would not feed from addicts, or gamblers too far gone, or anyone who looked at her as if she might complete them.
Most nights, that narrowed the field considerably.
Some nights, she went hungry.
And when dawn came pale over whatever cheap room she had found, she would tape the curtains shut and lie very still, thinking of a club called Bodies, a boy called Wayne, a man called Ash, and the terrible fact that being seen is not the same as being loved.
It is only being seen.
Love, if it exists, must do something harder.
It must look, and then let go.
Afterword
Bodies is a story about hunger, but not only the obvious kind.
Jodie’s hunger is literal, physical, humiliating. It is the need that makes philosophy irrelevant. She can dress it in restraint, rules, personal ethics, even shame, but it remains there beneath every scene: a biological demand moving through a social world already full of appetites. The gamblers feed machines. The dealers feed dependencies. The clubs feed loneliness dressed as glamour. Wayne feeds on significance. Ash feeds on oblivion. Everyone takes something from someone else, and everyone has a reason.
That is the central cruelty of the story. Nobody has to be purely evil for the damage to happen.
Wayne is not written as a monster, though he becomes dangerous. His tragedy is that he mistakes recognition for intimacy. He sees Jodie more clearly than anyone else, but that clarity is incomplete. He sees the vampire, the mystery, the proof, the wounded girl, the possible salvation from his own small life. What he does not see, until too late, is Jodie as a person separate from his need. His devotion is sincere, but sincerity does not make possession harmless.
Ash, meanwhile, is not a Judas figure in the grand mythic sense. He is weaker and more ordinary than that. He betrays Jodie because poverty and addiction have worn away the luxury of loyalty. He is not clever enough to understand the supernatural truth in front of him, but he understands fear, money, debt and escape. His betrayal is shabby, not operatic, which makes it more contemporary. It belongs to bedsits, phones, unpaid rent, broken boilers and men at the door.
The south coast setting matters because it is a place of surfaces. Arcades, clubs, neon, piers, tourist façades, seaside nostalgia. Beneath that are damp rooms, debt, shift work, addiction, sexual opportunism, loneliness, and a night economy where people become disposable. The vampire is not an intrusion into this world. She is almost a metaphor made flesh: a beautiful predator living among uglier systems of extraction.
Jodie survives, but the ending is not triumphant. Survival is simply the habit she cannot break. Her one moral victory is refusal: she does not turn Wayne, does not convert his loneliness into eternal dependence, does not grant his fantasy even when doing so might comfort him. That refusal is small beside the wreckage, but it is real. In a story full of people crossing boundaries, it is the one boundary she keeps.
The title, Bodies, points in several directions. Bodies as nightclub branding. Bodies as victims. Bodies as labour. Bodies as desire. Bodies as things filmed, consumed, handled, harmed, rented, fed upon, hidden, and mourned. But the story’s bleakest implication is that modern life is already vampiric before the vampire appears. Jodie is frightening because she reveals the structure honestly.
At the end, she understands something Wayne never quite did: being seen is not the same as being loved. To be seen may be exposure, possession, study, obsession, hunger. Love would require the harder act: to recognise another being’s reality without trying to own it, save it, consume it, or turn it into proof of one’s own importance.
That is why the tragedy is not that Wayne loved a vampire.
It is that he never learned how to let her remain herself.