Page 13 of The Beautiful Dead

Her eyes darkened. “Family isn’t defined by blood, kid.”

I tipped my head slightly, watching her. This was the longest conversation I’d had with anyone in months.

“Or at least, it doesn’t have to be,” she continued. “Find your people. Your person. Then you’ll know what family truly is.”

She glanced toward the group of men at the far end of the diner, something unreadable flickering across her face.

“But take my word for it,” she muttered. “These streets aren’t safe anymore.”

I exhaled slowly. “Thanks, but I have nowhere to go.”

“There’s a shelter down on Clayburn Avenue. If they have space, they’re open until midnight.”

She grabbed a napkin and scribbled out a rough map. “Words can be forgotten,” she said. “Ask for Tilly.”

Before I could say anything else, she hurried back toward the kitchen—Where the cook was losing his shit in the kitchen over a table of high schoolers inhaling their weight in fries.

By the time I looked up, the diner had transformed. What had been nearly deserted was now buzzing with life—the heartbeat of the city thrumming between these walls. The diversity was staggering.

College kids. Strangers on the run. Workers just trying to make it through another night to rinse and repeat the following day. The noise rose like a wave, crashing over me, pressing against my ribs.

I wasn’t leaving anytime soon—not with the rain lashing down in thick sheets against the sidewalk. The streets beyond the glass were swallowed by darkness, and I wondered...

What secrets did they hold? Did the wind whisper the city’s nightmares to those who knew how to listen?

My pencil spun between my fingers, a quiet rhythm against the chaos in my mind. Blood. Bone. The fragility of life.

People mistook life for power, but power wasn’t in living—it was in taking. A bullet. A blade. A whisper of poison in the bloodstream. Life could be snuffed out in a breath, stolen before a scream could form. That was real power. To wield it. To control it. To decide.

I wondered what that kind of power felt like.

Would it be a slow burn, seeping into your veins, intoxicating? Or would it be instant, a spark of adrenaline, a rush so consuming it became impossible to stop?

The world faded as my pencil scratched across the page. Lines and shadows formed vertebrae, each delicate curve stretching into an exposed spine. Bone by bone, the skeleton took shape. Ribs jutted out, arching across the thick white paper, brittle yet unyielding as they formed from nothing.

Vines sprouted from the broken ground. They twisted between the bones, curling like hungry fingers, pulling the skeleton downward—back into the earth, back into the abyss. Like hands from hell, clawing to reclaim what had been lost.

There was beauty in death. A purity that life smothered and twisted, distorting it into something it was never meant to be.

The bones told a story, a struggle that reality lied to you about. The sharp lines carved into them, the fusion of the bone plates, were like little bread crumbs that bore the brutal truth. You could learn so much from them if only you took the time to look closely and piece them all together.

“That’s not something you see every day.”

My pencil halted mid-stroke. A slow, creeping sensation of awareness trickled down my spine. His voice was a rasp of gravel, sliding over me like a blade against my skin. I looked up, locking onto dark green eyes that held too many secrets. Even lost in shadow, they seemed to see me in a way no one ever had.

My heart skipped—not in fear, not exactly. Intrigue, maybe?

“Or maybe it is…?”

There was something in the way he said it, an unspoken weight behind the words. A test. A challenge. A flicker of amusement ghosted across his features, but his stare remained steady, searching. The diner had quieted, all waiting to see what would happen next.

Without breaking eye contact, he reached out. A single tattooed finger dragged my sketchbook across the table, slow and deliberate. He turned it toward himself, releasing me from the intensity of his gaze—but not from its effect.

“You like art?”

“You don’t?” I shot back, my voice steadier than I expected.

His mouth curved, something unreadable in his expression as he settled into the opposite side of the booth. When he finally looked up again, the dim light caught in his eyes—green laced with flecks of metallic gold. Hypnotic. Dangerous.

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