The fire burns low, greenish at the edges where something damp has been fed to it. The crackle carries wrong echoes—too sharp, too wet—like bones splitting under careless teeth. You sit close enough to feel the heat without needing it. Your skin doesn’t prickle. It tightens, draws inward, as if remembering a reflex it no longer owns.

Somewhere in the dark, the moan of the restless carries through the trees—a low, dripping sound that makes the air sticky and thick. You feel it, not with surprise, but with recognition, like a memory you cannot fully claim. Your skin tightens, a coil of anticipation, tightening over muscle and something else beneath that no longer obeys you entirely.

Warren May kneels across the fire from you, sleeves rolled up, forearms pale and corded. He always does this before you ask. The ritual is precise, deliberate, as if knowing that every small motion can coax the monster back under control. The firelight catches the fine hairs on his arm, the pale flush of skin that’s lived in sunlight too little and too often, and the faint scar that winds like a river near his wrist.

“You’re shaking,” Warren says, calm, low, eyes fixed on your hands. Not judgmental, not curious, just observant. Brown eyes, the kind that feel like a weight pressing, seeing through you, noting everything. The kind that doesn’t blink at horrors that should make you scream. Kind, if you don’t look too long.

You glance down at your fingers. The joints twitch unnaturally, like gears moving under too-thin metal, and the skin looks pallid in the firelight, stretched over lines that shouldn’t flex so smoothly. Hunger coils in your chest, tight and sharp, pressing under ribs and skull alike. You swallow. Nothing moves down the way it used to.

“I’m fine,” you lie.

“We took the long way,” he says quietly, almost conversationally, as if he is pointing out a route on a map. “You burned through more than you think.”

It sounds like care. It always does.

He steps closer. The fire throws light across his forearm—scarred, pale, whole. You smell him before you touch him: iron and salt and the clean wrongness of skin that doesn’t fear being broken. Your mouth fills, painfully.

“You can take a little,” Warren says. Not asking. Offering. “Just to take the edge off.”

You hate the word edge. It implies something you can fall from.

You turn your face away. The night presses in, full of shapes that won’t come near. Zombies keep their distance when you're awake. They sense the stillness, the way rot learned to think. Somewhere beyond the trees, something moans. You don't.

Warren moves into your line of sight again. He doesn’t touch you yet. He waits. “I don’t want you hurting anyone else,” he adds, soft. A reminder dressed as mercy.