The Consumption Cure

Three nights after they buried Mercy, Clara stood at the crypt. Her breath misted in the February cold. The cemetery's eastern edge caught no wind tonight.

Through the iron gate, she could see her sister's pale form. The hand-embroidered burial shroud Mercy had made herself last summer. White linen wrapped around shoulders that would never rise again.

But Clara saw more than that.

The luminescence started as a flicker. A candle flame guttering in darkness. Then it spread like frost across glass—pale, reaching, hungry.

Clara's second sight activated. Her body froze completely still.

The spectral energy pulsed from Mercy's preserved corpse. It moved like fingers through the iron bars. Grasping. Seeking. Something in Clara's chest recognized it—the same terrible hunger her mother had whispered about five years ago in her final delirium.

"The hungry ones," her mother had said. "Clara, you must see them. You must—"

And Clara had dismissed it. Grief-induced hallucination. Fever dreams.

Not science. Not real.

Her fingers found her mother's locket. The metal burned cold against her skin. She could leave right now. Walk back to the house. Tell her father she'd been at the cemetery paying respects like a dutiful daughter.

Rational. Measured. Sane.

The frozen condensation on the gate caught her eye. Ice crystals forming patterns across the wrought iron. Not random—Clara's pulse quickened as she recognized them from her mother's old books, the ones hidden in the attic trunk.

Warning symbols from the old country.

Protection marks that appeared when the dead weren't resting.

Clara's hands shook. She wiped them on her apron—the gesture automatic from years in her father's surgical theater. But no amount of scrubbing would wash away what she was seeing.

The luminescence reached toward her. A grasping motion that made her stomach lurch.

This wasn't delirium. This wasn't weakness. Her mother hadn't been mad.

Mercy was one of the hungry dead. And only Clara could see it.

The spectral energy pulsed again. Stronger this time. Clara stumbled backward, her breath coming faster now. The hunger radiated from the crypt in waves—seeking to fill an unfillable void, draining life from the living to feed something that should no longer need feeding.

Her mother's locket felt heavier. A weight against her chest like a stone.

Trust what can be felt, or dismiss it? The same choice her mother had made. The same choice that had gotten her labeled delirious, superstitious, weak.

Clara turned. Ran.

Her boots crunched through frozen grass. The cemetery blurred around her—headstones and bare trees all shadows in the dark. But she couldn't outrun what she'd seen.

The sight was real. The hunger was real.

And somewhere in this town, someone had to know what it meant.

Someone had to believe her.