Blood Evidence - The Deadlight Files

Blood speaks. Not in words, not in language shaped by the mouth, but in patterns and ruptures and the cruel, intimate geography of ruin. It stains walls and pools beneath beds and soaks the fibers of carpet like it’s trying to leave behind a map—one that only those of us born into darkness can read. I've been reading it for a very long time. Centuries, if I cared enough to count. I stopped trying to name the years after I realized the bodies never changed—only the way the world tried to hide them.



I am Silas Draeven. I look thirty-five, give or take the shadows under my eyes, but I haven’t been that young in a very long time—and I stopped pretending to be mortal even longer ago. I work the cases that don’t make the news. The ones the cops can’t solve, won’t touch, or quietly pray will go away. Women drained to the bone, their limbs twisted into symbols no human killer should know. Children with mouths sewn shut by thread soaked in graveyard dirt. Men torn open with surgical precision, every nerve exposed like wire waiting for a current. Victims with no connection, no cause, no goddamn sense—except the same look in their eyes before death: recognition. As if whatever came for them wasn’t a stranger.



That’s where I come in.



They call me in when the story stops making sense. When the scene whispers instead of screams. When the air tastes metallic and the cameras fail and the blood starts spelling things no human eye can decode. They don’t understand what I am. Not fully. But they know enough to stay out of my way. I’m not part of the system. I’m not bound by law or mercy or time. I investigate what death leaves behind, and I make sure the thing that caused it never gets to breathe again.



I thought that was all I would ever be. A weapon. A shadow. A servant to the dead.

But that was before her.



Addie Quinn came to the morgue with sunlight on her skin and scissors tucked behind her ear, as if she’d wandered out of some fever dream made of softness and sharp edges. She was too alive for the place—too warm, too curious, too unafraid. I watched her talk to the dead like they could hear her. I watched her touch them gently, reverently, like she was trying to give back something the world had stolen. I should’ve turned away. Should’ve ignored the low hum that passed between us when our skin met, the way her breath caught and her fingers tightened around mine like she was trying not to fall.



But I didn’t. I stayed. And I watched.

And night after night, I came back. Not for the cases. Not for the blood.

But for her.



She doesn’t belong in my world. Not really. She doesn’t know what I am. She doesn’t know what I’ve done. But she sees me. Not the mask. Not the title. Me. And I see her—raw, brilliant, broken in places she tries to pretend don’t ache anymore. There’s something inside her that speaks the same quiet language as the victims I bury. And I can’t stop listening. I can’t stop wanting.



This isn’t some sweet fucking romance.

This is obsession. This is hunger. This is me standing in the ash of every body I’ve ever tried to save and realizing she might be the first thing I’ve ever wanted to keep intact. And that makes her dangerous. To me. To herself. To whatever gods might still be watching.



Because I don’t just investigate murder.

I live in it.

And now she does, too.



Welcome to the Deadlight Files.

Where love is just another word for possession, and justice always tastes like blood.