CHAPTER TWO
The Wanderer's Curse
The city of Prague shimmered beneath a cold spring moon, its towers and spires rising like black fingers from the Vltava's restless current. The year was 1831. Europe whispered of revolution, industry, and plague—but Alexander Holmes, now a man of thirty in appearance though far older in truth, walked its cobbled streets with the steady tread of one who no longer belonged to time.
He had changed names a dozen times since leaving England—Gregor, Elias, Viktor—and had worn them like coats, shedding each when the eyes around him began to question why he did not age. But tonight, he was simply "Mr. Holmes," a quiet Englishman staying in the attic rooms of the Golden Angel Inn, overlooking the shadowed Jewish Quarter.
It was there, amid the scent of ink and old wood, that he first heard her laughter.
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Her name was Lenora Vysotská—a bookseller's daughter with a voice like cello strings and a gaze that stripped Alexander's carefully guarded composure. She walked into his life carrying a leather-bound volume of forbidden folk tales and asked, with no hesitation, "Why do you read about death so often, Mr. Holmes? Are you afraid of it, or envious of those who can reach it?"
He did not answer.
But he returned to her father's bookshop every day after.
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Lenora smelled of parchment and jasmine. She spoke five languages, hated mirrors, and laughed as though she were trying to outrun some secret grief. In her, Alexander saw not salvation, but silence—a rare moment where the noise of centuries dulled. He never told her what he was, only that he had seen too many wars and lost too many names.
She didn't pry.
Instead, she taught him how to be still.
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The stillness didn't last.
Rumors swept the Quarter: someone was robbing graves. Bodies, freshly buried, vanished. Dogs howled outside the cemetery. The townsfolk blamed Romani caravans, or witches, or demons. But Alexander knew better.
One evening, a beggar-turned-corpse tried to speak to him.
It rose from a stone slab behind St. Vitus Cathedral, eyes glassy with undeath, mouth sewn shut with gold thread. When Alexander unstitched its lips, it whispered the same words he had heard as a child:
"The old blood awakens."
And then it crumbled into dust.
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Fearing what was to come, Alexander returned to Lenora to say goodbye.
But she was already waiting. Candle in hand, standing at the threshold of his rented attic room, she looked into his eyes and said softly, "You're not running again. Not from me."
He opened his mouth to argue, but she placed her fingers to his lips.
"I don't care what you are," she said. "I only care that you came back."
That night, they made love beneath the watchful eyes of forgotten saints, and Alexander—for the first time in a century—slept deeply and dreamed.
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When he woke, she was gone.
No note. No scent. No trace.
But carved into the wooden bedpost, in blood-red ink, was a sigil he hadn't seen since the moors of England: a twisted circle of serpents, biting their own tails—a mark of the ancient covenant.
Lenora had not vanished.
She had been taken.
And whoever had taken her… knew exactly what Alexander Holmes was.
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To be continued…