The First Seal

The apartment walls pressed in close, suffocating. Shane shucked his bloodflecked uniform into a pile, tracked mud and old city stink over cracked tile, and collapsed onto his couch—lights off, sirens still replaying through his skull. Sonia had dropped him at his door with a silence he couldn’t read, and left him with a shiver that felt more like a warning than camaraderie.

The ticking of the radiator was the only sound. Shane squeezed his eyes shut. In the darkness behind his lids, the world did not let him go.

He stands in the warehouse again. The blood isn’t dry. It surges, crawling up his ankles, slurping warm and living. The body rises, skin unfolding like an obscene flower, and mouths open along its midline, gasping his name. The glyphs on the floor glow like coals. Suddenly, dozens of eyes pierce him from the shadow, blinking, weeping black.

A hulking shape lumbers in the periphery—not human. Shane can’t move. The air grows hot and stinks of iron. Claws scrape against stone, dragging themselves upward. From above, a voice like rusted metal rips through the silence:

The first seal is open. The first to bleed is you.

He wakes flailing, fists knotted in the ratty couch cover. Sweat and something colder, his own breath fogging the air. His heart is a hammer.

It’s 2:11 a.m. Light from the streetlamp outside throws slatted shadows across his ceiling. Shane sits for a long time, trembling. There’s a bitter taste in his mouth—blood and copper. Then, he feels it, an ache on his forearm.

He rolls up his sleeve. Raised ridges of scarlet, angry and raw, spiral across his skin. Some mimic the glyphs from the warehouse, etched as if by invisible nails. His stomach lurches, bile rising. He palms his phone but finds no words. Not for Sonia, not for a doctor, and not for the cops.

He tries to clean the marks with a rag. They burn, deep in the dermis, deeper than skin. When he looks away, his peripheral vision buckles. For an instant, in the gap between stove and wall, he sees a long, segmented tail, rippling away. The fridge hums, and every shadow is a mouth waiting to open.

By morning, the city feels starved. He wears a hoodie to hide the marks, pretending to be another shade trudging toward payday. Paramedic station—coffee gone bitter, air thick with nervous laughter. Sonia finds him in the supply closet, back hunched, head in his hands.

“You look worse than shit,” she says with forced levity. “You puke? Or is it drugs now?”

“Just dreams,” he mutters.

She lays a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not okay, Shane. If you need—”

He winces away from her touch. In the flicker of overhead fluorescent, her reflection in his glasses morphs—a vertical slit for a pupil, teeth widening into a rictus. When he blinks, she’s normal, just worried.

“I’m fine. Never better,” he lies. He wants to believe it.

The next call is to a tenement off Bishop Road. Old man collapsed in bathroom, no next of kin. Shane kneels beside the corpse, hands steady from habit. But when he looks into the dead eyes, he swears he sees something scurrying behind the pupils, spider-black and slick.

He flinches. Sonia watches, lips pressed pale. “You need a break?”

“No. Let’s finish.”

As they bag the body, Shane’s sleeve slips. Sonia catches a glimpse of the swirling, raised symbols. Her eyes widen. “What is that?”

He yanks his sleeve down. “Nothing. Just… nothing.”

Her silence stings all the way back to the station.

The rest of the shift is a parade of emergencies—domestic stabbings, a teenage overdose, a woman going into labor on the corner of Carlton and 5th. Through it all, the city’s color runs like bad paint in the rain. Every other face seems to flicker, warp—eyes glassy, jaws too long, nostrils twitching at the scent of blood. Shane takes extra breaths between calls, blinks too often, tries anchoring himself with the sharp pain in his arm.

On his lunch break, he drinks burnt coffee in the ambulance bay. There’s a priest standing by the curb, pinched in a threadbare black coat, eyes like soot and scars. At first Shane ignores him. But the priest waits, patient as gravity, and the city noise seems to hush around him. Finally, Shane can’t help it—he’s drawn to the priest the way wounds seek salt.

He walks over, crossing the blur of dirty slush and cigarette ends. The old man fixes him with a look that is equal parts grief and recognition.

“Mr. Everhart,” the priest says. His Irish accent is dust and whiskey. “You’ve felt it, haven’t you?”

Shane opens his mouth, but everything he wants to say—the nightmares, the marks, the things in the corners—gets tangled in his throat. “Who are you?”

“Callahan. Father Callahan.” He shuffles closer. “You shouldn’t be here. The air’s already sour with prophecy.”

“Did someone send you?”

Callahan snorts. “No messenger, just a harbinger. I’ve served longer than you’ve lived, and I’ve seen the signs, lad.” His voice softens. “The first seal is broken. Blood called to blood. Has the mark come?”

Shane’s hand shields his forearm. “What do you want from me?”

Callahan frowns, gaze distant. “The world’s thinning, Mr. Everhart. There will be more blood. Your line was the lock, and now you’re the key.”

Shane’s throat aches. “You sound like the madmen I pick up downtown.”

The priest smiles, sad and hollow. “Maybe we’re all mad. But you, Shane—you’re the last of your blood, what little the world has left. I tried to warn your father before he drank himself numb. He carried the mark as you do. Couldn’t bear it.”

Wind rattles the chain-link behind them. Shane clenches his fists. “I just want to save people. Whatever this is—nightmares, visions, cult bullshit—I want it gone.”

But the world seems to shrink, pressing them together in the city’s crumbling heart. Callahan’s eyes are pits. “Some doors can’t be un-opened. Some wounds must be bled dry.” He leans in, breath sour and surprisingly warm. “Watch the shadows. They hunger now. You—

—You’ll be seeing things. Things hungry for your ruin. But you must stand. If you run, they’ll catch you. If you fight, maybe the world sees another dawn.”

He produces a tiny packet, wrapped in wax paper, and pushes it into Shane’s hand. “Blood for blood. When the time comes, burn this. It’s not enough, but it’s what I have.”

A horn blares, a sudden shriek in the cacophony. In the moment Shane’s attention falters, the priest is simply gone, vanished into the city’s veins. Shane stands there, pulse thundering, feeling watched by a thousand malignant eyes.

When he unwraps the packet, something sharp pricks his finger. Inside is a scrap of faded parchment, smeared in old, rusted blood. It bears the same spiral glyph now bruised into his arm. As he stares, a sickly warmth spreads through his palm and the world feels unsteady, as if waiting for another fracture.

That night, he sleeps in fits. He wakes at one point to find the window open, city wind rattling through his shabby curtains. In the moment before true wakefulness, he sees—no, he feels—a massive, slouched silhouette crouched at the fire escape, breath laced with ash and centuries-old fury.

When he jerks upright, he’s alone. But outside, the city blinks red, and somewhere—the echo of all those dying eyes—the first seal, once whispered in blood, bleeds quietly open.