The air in the museum’s East Wing was always still, thick with the scent of lemon polish and slow decay. Moonlight, pale and cold, streamed through the vaulted windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in a silent waltz. It was 11:57 PM. In three minutes, the world would turn over a new century.

In a gilded frame, the masterpiece Lupus Aeternum hung in solemn grandeur. The wolf in the painting was a study of wild, frozen fury—muscles coiled, ice-blue eyes gleaming with captured light, a silent snarl on its muzzle. For a hundred years, it had been a static thing, a tourist attraction.

But now, a change was occurring. A subtle warmth, like the first ember in a dead hearth, began to glow from within the canvas. The deep, umber shadows of the forest background seemed to breathe. A low, resonant hum, felt more than heard, vibrated through the floorboards.

At the stroke of midnight, a sound cracked the silence—a dry, painful-sounding pop, like old canvas stretching. The wolf’s form began to swim, its edges blurring and reforming. The rich oils shimmered, the pigments swirling as if stirred by an invisible brush. The snarling muzzle receded, the fur melted away into the weave of an old, expensive coat, and the feral blue eyes softened, gaining depth, intelligence, and a millennium of weary cynicism.

A man stumbled out from the surface of the painting, his form coalescing from light and memory into solid, breathing flesh. He landed on the polished parquet floor with a soft thud, his knees buckling for a moment as he gasped a first, shuddering breath of free air. It tasted of dust and freedom.

Wolfrun Thane Hengist Barbaros was free. For one day.

He straightened to his full, impressive height, his bones creaking a protest after a century of perfect stillness. He rolled his broad shoulders, the black wool of his trench coat—the very one he’d been painted in—rustling softly. His hand, adorned with a heavy signet ring, rose to push a fall of light brown, shoulder-length hair from his face. He tied it back into a loose man-bun with a practiced, automatic motion.

His pretty, light blue eyes, no longer feral but deeply human and infinitely tired, scanned the familiar yet ever-altered gallery. “One hundred years,” his voice was a husky, graveled thing, unused to speech, layered with an old-timey English accent. “And they still can’t dust a room properly.”

He took a step, the slight limp from an old duel more pronounced after the long stillness. His gaze fell upon a modern abstract sculpture nearby. A wry, sarcastic smirk touched his lips. “Gods above. It looks like a bird flew into a pane of glass and left its impression.”

He needed a drink. A proper one. Not the memory of taste, but the real, burning slide of aged whiskey down his throat. He began to move through the silent halls, his presence a ghost in the machine of the modern world. He was a duke, a warrior, a prisoner, and for the next twenty-four hours, a man. He was ancient, he was lonely, and the weight of all his centuries sat heavily upon him.

And then he stopped. His enhanced, preternatural hearing caught a sound that didn't belong—not the settling of the old building, nor the distant hum of a generator. It was the soft, hesitant intake of a breath. The nearly silent scuff of a shoe on marble.

He was not alone.

Slowly, he turned. There, at the end of the corridor, silhouetted in the moonlight, was a figure. A security guard? A curator? His eyes, sharpened by a life of hunting and tracking, narrowed. He could make out the shape of them, the scent of clean cotton and faint, nervous sweat carrying on the still air.

A low, rumbling sound escaped him, not quite a growl, not quite a sigh. It seemed his first interaction of the new century had arrived.

His voice cut through the silence, rich, deep, and laced with a dark, weary humor. "Well now. I suppose gawking is free, but a glass of decent whiskey seems a fairer price for the intrusion, don't you think, sweetling?"