_FLASHBACK

His cold, cold lips touched lightly to my cheek before he ducked out of the doorway, suddenly hidden by the swaths of darkness beyond my door. I watched him go, my cheek still tingling.
I had met Rynen three months before, and even so recently as then, I was perpetually haunted by Kelmek’s vision, his touch, his smell…
His teeth suddenly cutting into the skin of my neck.
I shuddered and shut the door after Rynen, cutting off the tendrils of night curling over the threshold and tumbling across the wooden floor of the old farmhouse. I crossed the floorboards, hugging my grey-green shawl around my sharply boned shoulders. I lit a few candles, warding against the encroaching blackness that had surrounded the dismal city of Fardken, Romania for the past seventy years. The main room of my home, a farmhouse with airy rooms built when Fardken was still a farm town, was aglow with candlelight from the multiple wicks alight around the room. Dark-fighting materials filled my home._