It was a stilling cold. A cold that didn’t hold you in place so much as it sucked motion from your bones. Life, the fool that it was, never knew when to retreat. But it had been reduced to a pricking feeling at the tips of Hammond’s fingers and toes— a numbing, staticky memory of warmth that martyred itself at the edges of existence.

Movement was wrong. When Hammond tried it, the needles of pain tesselated out until it was all he was — the faded imprints of nerves sharply shrieking and begging him to recoil.

Hammond, the fool that he was, refused.

He had to set an example, now that Charlotte was gone. She had always been impatient, and what Hammond had first thought to be a strong will was, in fact, a mind ruled by impulse. Hammond had warned them all, repeatedly, about the dangers of inorganic sustenance. Charlotte’s paranoia had subsumed reason— she hadn’t trusted Hammond, in spite of everything he’d done for her.

She had succumbed to the memory of desire, diving into the television to feel the heat of electricity burning hot in what became, once again, for the briefest moment, her lungs.

In their world, her scream of agony was the equivilant to the smell of a freshly cooked roast. It was a flash of _becoming_ in a place where things only ever _are_.

Then, she was nothing but ash and air.

Hammond understood the frustration they all had with the icy teeth that tore into their existence. They couldn’t shake and shudder the way the living did — they had to stiffen, quiet, drift. It took discipline to endure.

The others refused to learn this lesson, eagerly plotting in the shadows, circling their current, pitiful prey.

The occupant’s name was Edith. Frail and ancient, Edith spent most of her day in bed, fingers worrying over the beads of her rosary, muttering her prayers in raspy, breathy bursts of energy. Her lungs rattled and her heart beat at a sluggish pace, providing an unsteady rhythm that was her stumbling shamble towards death.

Edith was like a diseased steer whose flesh had started rotting even as it ran.

She was hardly a meal, let alone a recruit, not that this was something that Hammond could convey to the others.

But there was a way to use her. They didn’t need to settle for the lukewarm spirit in her failing body.

Edith could, at times, see them clearer than she could see her own world. It made sense; she was as bound to this place as they were, and as territorial about it. They were wasting precious energy coaxing her towards the dark with an addict’s unsteadiness. If anything, she grew stronger in defiance, unmoved by Gordon’s nibbling at her cheek, or Emile’s hands slipping inside her, fondling her organs with fingers too ethereal to yank her liver from her body so he could drink her blood and bile.

Hammond didn’t stop them. Better their energy than his, in the end. He simply focused on other things. Flipped phone book pages. Changed TV channels. Soft, whispered doubt.

Until, finally, she got the hint.

The ringing phone was a symphony of hope; Edith’s voice was an operatic run, pushing sound to its limits.

“I need an exorcism,” she said.

And Hammond knew that, finally, he would have fresh meat.