Ivory Teeth

by Notforviews

Summary:

In New Orleans, a city drowning in heat and rot, a wolf meets a vampire.
Will promised himself he’d be the one to stop the murders.
But the closer he gets, the harder it is to remember that promise.

Notes:

Hi everyone I hope y'all like this!
I leave October 28th for bootcamp (BMT), I will be gone for months but I will if I can write while I have time. I wanted to take a break from my other fic while thinking of what to do next so I am sorry if you're waiting on an update!
The support and thanks I get on here is so amazing and I appreciate it all, thank you so much.
Unsure how long this will be but I have about 10 chapters that are just in need of editing, so hopefully that will give ya'll something from me!
Again as always please feel free to leave me a comment or kudos, it is always gratefully appreciated and welcomed!
You guys are the best and if you are a returning reader or a new reader thank you sm.
I know this is a long intro and I do hope that you enjoy my story and that you can get joy from it the way I did.
Lots of thanks, Bri.
All Art credited to me.

Chapter 1

Art page! 

All art done by me! My Tumblr is https://www.tumblr.com/beesartstuffs if you'd like to give me a follow!

Chapter 2

Will was not a righteous man, nor did he pity himself much for what he was. He was cursed in his own right, and often wondered, if there was a God, why that God seemed content to watch him suffer. It was as if he’d been handed, from birth, the destiny of a tortured man.

On the nightfall of his sixteenth birthday, after a brutal fight with his father, he had run out of the house and down an old road that led to the water. 

The mosquitoes bit hard, bugs chirped like a scream in chorus, and the air clung to his skin like sweat-soaked gauze. He knew he shouldn’t be out that late, but he didn’t care.

An old woman had once told him, half-laughing, that the moon listens. That it grants the wish it hears most often, and takes twice in return. He didn’t believe her at the time. Not really but he still wished. 

But that night, crying alone at the edge of the black water, whispering into the stillness for something, anything to change, the moon must have finally heard him.

What it gave him wasn’t salvation. 

It was a reckoning.

Through his guttural tears, he felt his spine crack behind him, a snap that jolted his entire body. Every sob and tear turned to anguished screams. His nails grew long and curved like claws, each bone breaking, every tendon tearing and weaving itself anew. His jaw unhinged, molars and incisors lengthening, sharpening. He vomited blood between his teeth as convulsions overtook him.

When he collapsed forward, he watched his fingers distort and lengthen, fur overtaking skin. His body betrayed him in slow, brutal symmetry. When it ended, when he unfurled, his screams fused to a loud rough howl, he knew something feral had claimed him.

From that night on, the boy who had begged the moon for a change no longer existed.

Will never returned to Sulphur after he turned eighteen. The town, like the name, left a taste in his mouth, something chemical, industrial, and barely survivable. He took odd jobs in Lake Charles, kept his head down, and worked toward a quiet sort of penance.

New Orleans came years later.

It was, at the time, an attempt at normalcy. The kind only someone like him could hope for. A city big enough to lose yourself in, but old enough to still whisper back.

He joined the police academy not out of justice, but guilt. If anyone ever found out what he was, what he could do, then the only defense he’d ever have was this: I tried to be good.

Trying didn’t help.

Most days, the cases he took were echoes of his own nightmare. It was as if the city itself was mocking him, handing him mirror after mirror and asking: Do you recognize yourself yet?

⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ 

Will stood in the center of a rotting shotgun house on St. Roch Avenue, the wood swollen from heat, the plaster flaking like old scabs. The air smelled of damp rot and mildew, thick enough to chew. The windows were nailed shut. The walls were sweating and the woman inside or what was left of her was arranged like a warning or a prayer.

A prayer to what, he could only ask to himself.

“Same pattern,” said Officer Landry from behind him, his voice uneven. “That’s three this week. No signs of forced entry. No prints. Not even a broken latch.”

Will didn’t answer. He was crouched near the body, arms wrapped loosely around his knees. The woman’s eyes were wide open. Her throat, precise. Not torn, not the kind of savagery he knew too well. This was something else. 

Clean, cold, intentional.

What disturbed him most was how dry she was. No blood, no trail. Just that silence where a life had once been.

He closed his eyes, just briefly.

And there it was.

The hum of insects. The low shiver of river fog. A voice elegant, lilting, French. Whispering something just beyond the reach of comprehension.

His eyes snapped open.

Nothing had changed.

“I’ll write up the report,” he said quietly, scrunching his nose in distaste.

Landry exhaled like he’d been holding it in for ten minutes. “You sure you wanna stay in here alone?”

Will didn’t respond. 

The silence spoke for itself. The officer took it for a yes and backed out without another word.

Will waited until the room was empty.

Then he breathed.

Slowly, deeply. Through his nose, taking in any notes he could.

It wasn’t something he did around others. It was too much like giving himself away.

The scent hit him like a whisper curled in smoke. 

Old and sweet. Too sickening sweet, not perfume nor decay. Something outside of that scale. Something else. It threaded through the stagnant air like silk.

It made him sick.

Will stood, hands flexing at his sides. The feeling coiled beneath his ribs, the one he feared most. He let his hand drag over the lower half of his face as a low growl formed heavy in the pit of his stomach. The pull toward something he hid deep in his soul. The instinct that made his spine itch and his mouth dry. 

⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ 

His hands shook as he unlocked his apartment door. Winston waited, tail tapping, eyes bright. A smile formed on Will’s face for the first time all day. He dropped to his knees, burying his face in the warm fur behind Winston’s ears, holding on like he’d drown without it.

“Hey, buddy,” he whispered.

Winston huffed softly, unbothered. 

Will clung to him until the tremors passed.

That night, sleep refused him. He lay flat on his bed, tracing ceiling cracks like maps. Every creak in the floorboards was a step. Every sigh of the walls was a breath. Something had followed him home. A nagging and racing mind that only consumed him with every passing thought, even if he had been tired his mind wouldn’t sleep.

Before dawn, he gave up pretending. He lit a cigarette and stepped onto the balcony.

The French Quarter was suspended in its in-between hour closing time thinning into first light. Ghosts tucked themselves back into their corners.

But Will felt it still. Eyes on him.

Not hostile. Not even hidden. Just… interested.

A gaze without shape. A question without words.

Will shivered.

⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ 

The next body was worse.

An older man this time, late sixties maybe, skin loose over bones that no longer had use for him. They’d found him in a sagging Creole townhouse off Burgundy Street, the kind of place tourists called charming until they stepped inside and realized charm could mold, rot, collapse.

He was seated in a high-backed chair near the hearth as though waiting for company. Or like he’d tried to face something down and failed. His mouth hung open a little, showing teeth gone gray.

Same condition as the others: bloodless.

But this one had been prepared.

The floor had been scrubbed, polished hard enough that the boards gleamed wet in the low light. At his feet, scrawled heavy and deliberate, an unbroken ring of coarse ivory-colored salt. 

Not decoration. 

Not an accident. A ward, a trap.

Will stood just inside the threshold, shoulders drawn tight like if he let himself ease for a second he might split open. The stink of vinegar and lavender clung to the air, sharp enough to sting the back of his throat. It made something under his skin twitch, made him want to bare his teeth at nothing.

Salt circles. Jesus.

He hated this kind of thing. Not because he dismissed it, God, he wished he could, because it felt like it was meant for him, arranged like a stage on which only he would understand the script.

He lingered too long on the ring before dragging his gaze upward to the window. The cracked panes caught the daylight in spirals, dust curling slow in the beams. The fractures reminded him of eyes. 

Old ones, patient and watching. 

Every hair on his body prickled upright.

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

That night, he couldn’t stay contained.
He went walking.

Not as a man.

The change came quicker lately, but it never stopped hurting. It always started in the spine, like the body thought being human was the natural order and had to be broken of that illusion. Bones bowed and snapped. Hands clawed themselves open. His ribs cracked wide, stretching like wings desperate to escape.

And then it was done.

He exhaled into the dark, steam ribboning from his jaws. Rain hung in the night like gauze. The bayou pressed close on every side, thick with secrets. Nights like this, it was easier. Nights like this, he didn’t have to pretend.

The wolf moved silent through the Quarter, paws whispering across broken pavement. To anyone looking out a window, he would’ve been a hulking shadow, menace incarnate. But no one looked. 

No one ever saw.

A shadow in the dark.

The city bent differently in this shape.

Scents were everything: blood, piss, rust, jasmine. The wet rot of cypress. The perfume of a storm coming. His ears flicked toward every drip of water, every human heartbeat hidden behind shutters.

Here, he wasn’t hunted.

Here, he wasn’t other.

Here, he belonged.

And he was awake.

That was when he caught it.

The scent.

The same one as before, the bodies, the bloodless husks. 

Stronger now. Purer and undiluted.

It wasn’t human. 

It wasn’t wolf. 

It wasn’t dead, though death clung to it like perfume.

It smelled sweet, but wrong. Stillness folded over ferality. Velvet pulled tight to hide the teeth.

Will followed it, tail low, breath shallow, because not moving toward it felt worse than walking into the teeth of it.

His nose scrunched into a snarl.

The scent drew him through streets slick with rain, to wrought-iron gates strangled by ivy and a house that waited like a mausoleum in mourning. Two stories dressed in shadow and windows shuttered like closed eyes. Iron balconies, Ivy clung to brick. From the street, it looked asleep, but not dead. 

Behind the glass, red drapes, a room lit low and honey-warm. A man sat in an armchair, long fingers poised against a folder as if he’d been waiting there forever. 

Still, perfect, every line intentional.

Will froze under the dripping trees. His lungs seized. Fear wasn’t familiar; he wasn't built for it but something in his bones recoiled and leaned forward all at once.

He had never felt this before.
And that terrified him most of all.

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

Two nights later, the city bled again.

A man this time. Mid-thirties, bartender, found curled like a comma between two dumpsters off Royal. Mardi Gras beads clung to the chain-link above him, glittering in the low light like cheap halos left behind by drunk gods.

The man clutched a rosary, but it had to be staged. His hands pressed in a perfect parody of prayer, the beads wound tight around his thumbs and palms as if bound. The cross lay nestled neatly between his knuckles. 

Too neat, too reverent.

Will ducked beneath the tape, boots crunching through broken glass and damp flyers. The air reeked: rot, stale liquor, the metallic tang of piss. And beneath it all something too clean. Sterile. The sour bite of bleach layered over filth. 

Wrong, too wrong.

The scene before him set his stomach roiling. A sharp ache coiled beneath his ribs, ugly and insistent. He covered his mouth with his hand, shaking his head as if that would dislodge the way the murder wanted inside his bones.

Death had never disturbed him. Death was usually food for thought. But these, these were not death. These were messages, cruel and knowing. 

Not to the city.

Not to the police. 

To him.

He felt it. The mocking intent of someone who had looked into his nature and chosen to play with it.

The sirens were gone. The chatter, gone. Only the buzz of streetlamps overhead and the raw sound of someone vomiting in the dark. Wet, human, alive. Will envied that ease, envied the simple violence of a body rejecting horror, instead of swallowing it whole.

“He was last seen leaving work around two,” an officer said. Tugging at a latex glove, too tight, like the material might save him from memory. “No struggle. No blood. Just…”
He trailed off.

Will didn’t answer. He crouched by the body. The scent struck him like a blade to the gut. His throat clenched, chest tightened. 

That sick-sweet rot again. Violent in its beauty, taunting in its familiarity.

The man’s eyes were open. Just like the others but they didn’t scream.
Not fear or pain. 

Something else.

Surprise? Awe, maybe?

The look of someone who had begged for mercy and been answered with something holy or unholy. The distinction was getting harder for Will to make.

The throat wound was clean. Careful, almost tender.

Will turned his head, following the dead man’s stare. Wanting to capture what he could, see through those eyes what they had last seen. What they had witnessed.
He lingered too long.

Not the body. 

The walls.

The alley breathed with memory. Not still, but echoing. 

Predation left behind like residue.

Will closed his eyes and pressed his palm against the brick. Not balance nor comfort. 

Instinct. 

The wolf in him listening through his skin.

Something whispered back. Not in words, just a presence.

Teeth in the dark. 

Will opened his eyes. The alley was the same but he felt haunted for the first time.
Not by the dead but by the living who knew his secret.

He knew they knew.

⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ 

The walk home helped, a little.

He kept to the shadows, blending with the scraps of night as the city sobered. Street cleaners hissed down gutters. Neon signs blinked like tired eyes. The drunks had gone to ground, most of them at least.

Will walked like a man wearing his own skin wrong. Like he was pretending to be human.

At a corner before turning, he froze.

A balcony overlooked the street, elegant ironwork, lavender in pots, carefully tended. Familiar, though he had no reason to know it.

And for a heartbeat, a figure stood there.

Tall, and still. Hands resting on the rail. Skin pale as something exhumed but beyond that he couldn’t make out any features on the figure's face.

Will’s heart stumbled once.

The wind stirred, the balcony emptied.

His apartment above the antique bookstore smelled of Winston, old wood, and dust. Safe, familiar, contained. He shut the door behind him and breathed. The pressure in his chest didn’t leave but it loosened, slightly.

He stripped his shirt, let it fall, leaned over the bathroom sink. Cold water shocked his face. 

He looked up.

And there it was. 

That look.

His eyes too dark, pale blue muddied into something feral. Not quite human. Just close enough to fool people.

His lips parted. His canines glinted, sharper, longer. His tongue skimmed their serrated edge, so sharp he could taste the cut of his own skin.

That scent, the one clinging to his skull, the one that coiled and pulled at every primal urge rose in his chest again. He couldn’t name it, couldn’t escape it. The thought of it alone made rage swell hot, blind, feral.

He gripped the sink. Hard enough it creaked in protest. The only thing tethering him to reality was the weight of porcelain against his palm.

When he finally calmed, he sat on the bed. Lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. Smoke scorched his lungs. Winston lingered close, rigid, staring into the corner shadows.

Will followed his gaze.
“You sense it too, don’t you?” His voice was a whisper.

Winston didn’t bark. Only breathed.

By morning, he hadn’t slept.

He dressed, drove to work, then sat in his truck outside the precinct for twenty minutes before giving up. He couldn’t walk in there not with this weight still pressing his ribs, not with that scent still gnawing his thoughts.

He drove without thinking. Past cemeteries, past tourists, past sins. Until the city softened, greened. Magnolia and rot mixing on the wind.

The Garden District.

He hadn’t chosen to come here. But some part of him already knew the way.

And then there it was.

That house.

Will froze and just stared out the window. Every hair on his arms rose. A sickness crawled his spine. His knuckles turned white against the grip on his stirring wheel.

In the second-floor, behind pale curtains, movement.
A shift, barely there. 

Will’s heart slammed against his ribs.
He ripped his gaze away and drove off. 

Not fast but not slow.

The wolf inside was silent but it listened.

Chapter 3

It took years to find the man.

Not for lack of obsession. 

Hannibal had pursued him with the same patience a surgeon gives a delicate procedure. But the creature was clever, always a shadow’s width ahead, hidden in folklore, in rumors carried by the dispossessed, in fragments scrawled in forgotten diaries.

Hannibal became fluent in the language of monsters. By candlelight, he read old words bound in cracked leather, priests' warnings written in Latin, superstitions pressed into the margins of French parish records. 

Les morts qui marchent. 

No clear proof, never more than whispers but enough to sustain him.

Years passed, Hannibal wore different fashions, moved to new cities, reinvented himself. His grief aged with him, yet never dulled. He could still smell Mischa when the snow thawed, still heard her voice in the lull between heartbeats. Always, behind that memory, the echo of the man who had taken her.

Paris, almost twenty years later. Winter nights stretched long, brittle with cold. It was there that Hannibal finally caught up to him. Dressed like any man, though untouched by time. His face had not aged a day since Hannibal was a boy. The recognition carved through Hannibal like ice.

The vampire smiled when Hannibal approached, as though the decades of pursuit had been his game all along.

“You’ve worn my shadow a long time,” he said in French. “I could smell the fear on you before you entered the room. So much like your sister.”

Hannibal did not answer. His intent was murder, clean and exacting. He hadn’t cared if he lost his life trying, it had been the one thing he’d prepared for his whole life. It had been his everything. 

Revenge.  

But the creature moved first, swifter than Hannibal could register. Cold hands seized his jaw, and before he could resist, blood burned against lips, searing his throat.

The burn spread fast. The world buckled and warped. He fell, gasping, into darkness.

When he woke, everything was changed. The taste of blood, and violated senses. The night sang with heartbeats. The walls throbbed with blood. Even silence was sharp, alive, unbearable. Hunger swallowed him whole, but his anger stayed.

The vampire crouched above him, indulgent, smug.

Whispering something, though Hannibal couldn’t hear the man, he knew it had been the wrong thing to say and he had always hated the rude.

Hannibal lunged, his strength feral and merciless. The fight was a blur of teeth, blood, and shattering bone. The vampire shrieked, disbelief breaking into terror as Hannibal’s hands crushed his throat, flames devoured him, as centuries of cruelty dissolved into ash.

When it ended, Hannibal stood over fire, the smell of burning filling the air. His hunger was quiet, his grief crystalline.

He had hunted a monster just to become one.

What had been taken from him, he now embodied.

From the ashes of his enemy, Hannibal Lecter was reborn. Patient, eternal, more dangerous than the myth he had pursued.

⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ 

The Garden District house was not his, not truly.

It had belonged to a family long dead, their lineage snuffed out by fever and folly before the century had even turned. He had purchased it under another name, then another, weaving his paper lives into the city’s bureaucracy with the same precision he used to dissect a body. 

He had always lived lavishly, in estates where walls echoed history and those long since passed. This house was humbler by comparison, but it pleased him. A facade of civility built over graves.

Inside, it smelled of beeswax, old paper, dried herbs, and iron. He kept it immaculate, not because he valued cleanliness for its own sake, but because the human eye equated order with safety. He allowed his rooms to whisper of taste and wealth, but never clutter. 

No paintings of himself, no mirrors, only what he wished others to see. Though he had long since allowed himself to the public, the modern world did not interest him much.

Hannibal Lecter had worn many faces. 

Doctor, scholar, teacher. 

Monster. 

He no longer differentiated between them; each was simply another mask stretched across the same hunger. A well stitched human-suit, though he had long accepted what he was, and had never once begged God for reprieve. 

Vampirism was not a curse, it was refinement, a gift he served well. A distillation of human weakness into something sharper, crueler, eternal. What mortals feared in him was not his teeth or his thirst, but the fact that he did not fear himself.

Florence had once been enough.

The city was a jewel, a living museum where every stone was heavy with memory. Hannibal had walked its cloisters in the silence of midnight, tracing marble veins with fingertips, his reflection shimmering in the waters of the Arno. There had been years when he believed he might never leave.

But centuries corrode even beauty. The familiar streets soured with repetition, the frescoes dulled, the faces of men and women blurred together until they were no more distinct than rain on glass. Even the blood, once a delight of subtle palettes, salted with language and passion, had grown bland.

Worse were the others.

The young vampires, restless and loud, littered the old city like graffiti on stone. They had no grace, no discipline. They killed in doorways, in alleys, in ways so brutal and obvious it was an insult to centuries of refinement. Where Hannibal sought art, they sought sport. Where he perfected silence, they smeared noise. He found their laughter vulgar, their appetites crude, their presence intolerable.

He had loved Florence once, loved it deeply, with a fidelity that could outlast kings and dynasties. But love, like all things, withered under monotony. He could not walk the piazzas without hearing the echo of his own steps from years before. 

The world, it seemed, had condemned him to repetition. Circles within circles, a wheel of suffering, each century a pale reflection of the last. A torture by monotony.

So he left.

Not for Paris, not for London, cities that burned too brightly with familiar fires. No, he sought distance, exile, something rough and unpolished, where the old world’s echo did not reach every corner.

America was no jewel, but it had emptiness. It had room for hunger, room for solitude. Here, he thought, he might taste something untasted. Something unspoiled by centuries of repetition.

So he bought his house in New Orleans, French bones and Creole blood, a city that rotted beautifully. Here, decay was not hidden but celebrated, ironwork curling like black lace, paint peeling in the humid dark. It was not Florence, but it was honest.

And yet, even here, after years of silence, boredom gnawed at him still.

It was not his killings that concerned him. He never feared discovery and was unopposed to leaving. Not that they could hurt him if they found out, he was much older, stronger than any being walking the city. 

He killed carefully, with the same deliberate hand that tuned a harpsichord. Each throat cut was an aria, each body a composition. But He killed only to eat, not to be seen, not like he had in Europe.

Yet someone was seeing him all the same.

The killings had attracted an unusual pair of eyes.

The first time he scented Will Graham, it was not in the flesh but in the papers. He had acquaintances in the police department, men eager to curry favor, and through them he acquired the files. 

He read with the detachment of a surgeon: Male, thirty-two, single, profiler, New Orleans Police Department CID. Willoughby Graham. 

The name felt awkward on the tongue, but the reports intrigued him. No ordinary investigator could have sketched such uncannily intimate portraits of death. No ordinary man could have touched the residue left behind without recoiling.

The boredom built up in Hannibal was intrigued to sniff out the detective.

When he finally scented him in the flesh, the truth was immediate.

Not a man, nor prey. A creature who carried exile in his marrow, as Hannibal did.

Wolf. 

The investigators themselves were dull: sweat, whiskey, starch, fear. 

But Will carried another note altogether, deep and unmistakable, woven into his being. Hannibal had known wolves in every century. Had listened to their howls echo through snow and forest. This one stood among men, but it was there all the same: The restless prowl in his eyes, the scent of musk under his skin, the bones that longed to bend and break.

That first glimpse had confirmed what the files only suggested. Will had looked up, his expression raw, haunted, like a dog pricked by an invisible whistle. 

Hannibal had not smiled, though every instinct urged him to bare his teeth. The recognition had been mutual. It always was between predators. 

He had left Europe because the world repeated itself.

Now he'll stay in New Orleans because Will Graham was not repetition.

⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ 

The murders had been quiet things, at least at first. He had not been careless. Each body arranged like an etude, blood drained, flesh offered to the silence of the room. He did not need recognition, he had just been bored, but now they were to draw out the wolf.

He had not approached again. He had only watched, standing in shadow, as Will Graham lingered too long over the salt circle left in the townhouse. Hannibal had not needed to be close to feel the recognition ripple across the space between them. The profiler’s posture had stiffened; his breath had hitched as though he had caught a scent in the air. 

My scent.

It was not merely that Will saw more than others. Hannibal had met many brilliant men and women, and discarded them when their vision failed to reach him. But this one, this strange, wary man recognized. He stared too long, nostrils flaring faintly, like an animal parsing the world by smell. His silence said more than words would have.

In his study that night, beneath the low lamps and the rustle of the bayou rain against his windows, he laid Willoughby Graham’s file across his lap. He had already memorized the words:  Male, thirty-two, single, profiler, New Orleans Police Department CID. A history of instability, some note scribbled about “discomfort with people.” They did not understand him. That much was obvious. The wolf lived poorly in cages.

He read Will’s name again. Willoughby Graham. It amused him that the man who had begun threading himself into his thoughts was the very one assigned to catch him. The wolf sent to hunt the vampire. How could he resist?

Hannibal did not delude himself into thinking this was chance. The world was never so accidental. Predators found each other. Always.

From his armchair, he could still picture Will in the doorway of that ruined townhouse, framed in failing light. The narrow shoulders drawn tight, the jaw clenched as though against a growl. Eyes so tired they had become translucent, as if sleep were a cruelty denied him. He had smelled of wet dog, rust, and something Hannibal had not encountered in decades, a loneliness so pure it was almost sacred.

Yes, he thought, pressing long fingers against the paper file.

This would be interesting.

For the first time in decades, he felt… not hunger, not quite.

Appetite.

He felt him before he saw him.

The wolf’s scent carried through the storm, musky, iron-rich, edged with something wilder. It was sharper in this form, stripped of the polite disguises of clothing and breath mints, badges and weary words. 

This was him unmasked. 

Willoughby Graham, Will, Wolf.

Hannibal sat as though idly, his body arranged in still repose, long fingers folded across a file. But every nerve within him was alert, a hunter listening for the shift of grass in the dark. The bayou spoke of him: a heartbeat too quick, a pawfall too hesitant.

When Will came to the gates, Hannibal felt the weight of his gaze. Not the human kind, scattered and shallow. This was the stare of something that saw.

The wolf froze beneath the trees, head lifted, ears pricked forward, nostrils widening at the scent wafting from the manor. Hannibal did not move. He wanted him to linger. He wanted him to feel the pull of it, that sweet, unnatural stillness, the perfume of velvet draped over something feral.

Lure him closer.

And Will did feel it. Hannibal saw the moment recognition struck him. The body tense, the breath held too long. A step forward, aborted. Fear, but not the ordinary human kind. 

This was something deeper: an animal meeting another predator in the dark and knowing the rules of the world had changed.

Hannibal’s lips curved faintly, the smallest ghost of a smile. 

The thought delighted him. Not because Will was afraid, but because he had not turned away. He stayed, shivering in the rain, paws planted in the mud, eyes trained on the glow of the room where Hannibal sat.

Hannibal wondered, then: did he know? Did the wolf know that what he watched was not a man at all, but another of the night’s old tenants? Did he know there were others like himself, not just wolves, but creatures who had walked centuries in silence, who had tasted empires rise and collapse like waves?

And if he knew, would he come closer?

The longer Hannibal sat beneath the lamplight, motionless, the more exquisite the tension became. It was as if they were both suspended in amber, a wolf in the shadow of the trees, a vampire in his gilded cage, each tasting the other on the air.

Finally, Will withdrew, as he must. He was not ready. But Hannibal could feel the invisible tether had been knotted. The wolf knew now, without words or proof, that he was being watched. That the watcher was real.

And when the moment came to introduce himself, he would not come as the monster Will’s nose had already recognized. He would come as something softer, human, inevitable. Consultant, historian, doctor, the title hardly mattered. Masks always did what they were meant to. It was only the question of, would Will pick up on Hannibal as quickly as he had.

For now, it was enough to know that Will Graham had looked up, into the darkness of the room, and felt him there. Enough to know the wolf had scented the vampire.

Hannibal leaned back in his chair, closing the file with deliberate care.
Patience had always been his ally. Predators recognized each other in the end.

And Will Graham had already begun to see him.

Notes:

this isn't beta read so I apologize for any inconsistency, I'm trying to get these out fast and go back into editing when posted since I'll be gone for awhile :) Also I don't like to use the name William, so I would like to give credit to who ever came up with Willoughby graham, since that's my dog's name and I love that name sm.

Chapter 4

Another body turned up at the edge of Jackson Square.

Arranged, not discarded. Another offering, a message.

The call came just before dawn.

Will arrived as the sky bled from bruised purple into a dull, postmortem gray. That liminal hour when New Orleans forgot its name. Neither night nor morning. A drunk exhaling ghosts into the gutters. The rain had passed sometime in the night, but its fingerprints were everywhere: bricks shining like wet organs, iron balconies draped in mist like funeral lace.

He stepped out of his truck, boots crunching gravel, and the scent hit him.

That sweet, strange, mocking scent again. He wasn’t surprised by it but it had grown sickly strong, like incense burned too close to the lungs. It carried weight like a memory, bruising the back of his mind, and the wolf in his chest rose instantly, snarling. 

Will staggered, his knees bent before he registered it, hand bracing against his thigh to hold himself upright. His throat closed around a growl he barely kept inside. The wolf pressed hard, shoving against his ribs as though it could claw its way out and follow the smell straight to its source.

That scent, taunting, coaxing, promising he would never be free of it.

He forced himself forward, into the pool of floodlights where the scene waited.

This time, there were candles.

Four votives, small and deliberate, burned low around the woman’s body. Their wax had melted into uneven halos, tiny rivers hardened in place, like time puddled and cooled at her feet. They weren’t hurried, weren’t careless. Someone had lit them hours ago and stayed long enough to tend the flames.

Will tried his best to cover his nose with his wrist while he got closer, before kneeling before her.

The woman was maybe mid-thirties, hair curled neat despite the way she laid. A blue dress clung to her, fabric soaked dark up the thighs as if the ground had swallowed her down. Her lipstick hadn’t smudged. Heels scuffed but intact. 

She looked like someone who had dressed to be seen. Someone who had walked into a night expecting laughter, not death.

And yet, her face did not hold fear. 

Her eyes, glassed over, carried something else.

Both her arms were set straight at her sides, one hand curled stiff around a small Bible, the other clamped around a plastic vial marked Holy Water. Her ankles crossed, body stretched neat and precise. A perfect mimicry of a cross.

Will’s jaw locked, his vision narrowed into a tunnel framed by flame and wax. His stomach lurched with sharp violence, bile searing his throat. He rose too fast, nearly losing his balance, backing away from the candles, from the body, from the echo of perfume that threaded through every breath like smoke.

“Graham?” one of the techs called, glancing up from his kit. The man’s brow furrowed. “You okay?”

Will didn’t answer, couldn’t. He pressed his hand hard to his mouth, teeth digging into the heel of his palm. The wolf inside clawed to get out, to meet the scent head-on, but Will shoved it down with every ounce of his control. His stomach heaved, desperate to betray him. 

It hadn’t been the body that bothered him, it was the retched scent and the pointing finger of a cross. Laid out to push just him, and he knew it.

He never broke scenes, never.

But tonight, his body couldn’t choose between lashing out or becoming ill.

“Jesus,” another officer muttered under his breath, low enough that he thought Will wouldn’t hear. “Looks like he’s gonna puke. I’ve never seen him like this.”

“Maybe he caught a bug,” Someone else offered, softer.

Will turned his head sharply, hiding his face, dragging air through his lungs like each breath was a command. He tried to make the air clean, safe, ordinary but the smell lingered. Heavy, haunting, sweet and wrong, curling at the edges of his sanity.

Behind him, conversation trickled through the scene tape, carried on the low murmur of the crowd gathered where the light fell short.

“Vampires, man.”

“Vampires? You really believe that crap?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Somebody sure does.”

“Just stories. This city loves its ghosts.”

“Yeah, well, stories don’t light candles and lay out bodies like that.”

The wolf snarled in his chest. Will squeezed his eyes shut against the noise, the scent, the pull that felt like hands wrapped around his ribs. His whole body trembled with the effort to keep still.

Whether it was madness, the wolf, or something far worse. He couldn't shake the truth rising inside him.

Whatever had left this scene hadn’t just been telling a story.

It had been answering one.

And it was waiting.

⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ 

The morgue was quieter than the square had been. The silence stretched thin, like the walls themselves were holding their breath.

Will had lingered outside before going in. He didn’t like hospitals, morgues, anywhere the dead were filed away like tax records. But he couldn’t shake the scene, couldn’t stand the way his own body had betrayed him in front of everyone else. He needed another look. Needed to put the ritual in order.

The benches outside were damp with rain. A woman sat there, folded small in her shawl like a crow hunched against the weather. Skin the color of old parchment, deep lines mapped across her face. Her eyes were too sharp, too awake for the hour.

Will tried to pass her without acknowledgement, but her voice rose, rasping, thick with French and something heavier.

“Encore un.” She shook her head. “Toujours la même chose. Corps et prières.”

Will paused, his nose crinkled. “Excuse me?”

She looked up, and the weight of her gaze made his wolf stir. Not hostile, just… knowing.

“You go in there?” Her English was fractured, words tilting under the accent. She lifted a hand toward the building. “You police. Yes?”

“Yeah,” Will said, careful, already angling his body toward the door.

Her mouth pulled down, muttering to herself. “Merde, you not catch it. You won’t. Non, pas possible.” She switched back to English. “What walk, you cannot put in chains. Can’t shoot, can’t hold.”

“Ma’am,” Will said softly, “I’m just here to do my job.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Job? Pfff. You think it’s a man who do this?” She leaned closer, breath carrying tobacco and some sharp herbal note. “Non, not man. Creature. They drink, they take, they…” she broke off, clutching her shawl tighter. “Old ones say it. I say it too. Les morts qui marchent.”

That phrase, Will knew what it meant but it was only old stories and dumb fantasies. He almost laughed, not that he was against believing them, especially being who he was. But from her, it wasn’t fiction. It was a warning.

Will felt his chest tighten. His first instinct was to nod politely, disengage, file her under ‘local crazy.’ He’d met people like her before, brimming with folklore, half-rooted in faith, half-rooted in fear.

Except she didn’t look afraid.

“You should be safe,” she added, her tone dropping to a near chant. “Stay home, don’t walk alone when dark. You not meant for this. Not you, not your kind.”

That last part snagged at him. His jaw flexed, he started to move past her, muttering, “Thanks for the advice.”

But she called after him. 

One word.

“Loup.”

Will froze.

The syllable landed sharp as a fang. French, but not softened. 

Wolf.

When he turned, she was watching him with that crow-eyed steadiness, lips pressed tight like she had revealed something she wasn’t meant to say aloud.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then Will shoved his hands in his pockets and walked inside without another word, heart hammering against the ribcage of the animal inside him.

The word didn’t leave him, loup, it wound itself into his core, a coil of heat and ice, like the old woman had set something stirring that had been perfectly content to sleep.

How could she see him? That part of him was buried, chained, starved. He’d spent years convincing himself it wasn’t visible. That the wolf was an internal fracture, not something worn on his skin. But the way she’d said it not guessing, not taunting, but recognizing had left him hollow in a way he didn’t know how to fill.

He shook his head in hopes of dismissing the feeling but it hadn’t helped.

He’ll try to lose himself in the body, in the ritual. Try to be just another investigator scribbling notes under the morgue’s halogen light. But the scent clung to him still. That mocking, spectral rot he couldn’t name. 

It followed him.

After the morgue, the small things became loud.

Not the perfume that came and went, a phantom caught in the seams of his shirt but the pressure. It sat at the base of his skull like a fingertip pressing down, a weight he couldn’t shake no matter how quickly he turned.

Shadows twitched in his periphery. Tall, still, then gone. It was too much like the figure he’d glimpsed nights ago on that balcony, pale and unmoving until it wasn’t there anymore. He tried not to think of it, but the memory threaded through his thoughts like a crack spreading in glass.

He told himself it was the city. New Orleans wanted you to believe in ghosts. It sold them like trinkets on every corner. People paid for legends here. He was just another customer too tired, too haunted already, too ready to mistake shadows for something with teeth.

And yet the morgue woman’s word lingered, Loup, Wolf. One syllable that should have meant nothing, but it lodged sharp in his ribs. She had looked at him like she saw straight through his skin, naming the thing he never asked to carry.

He wanted to laugh it off. Pretend it hadn’t unsettled him. But the wolf beneath his ribs wasn’t laughing. It stirred instead, restless, every time the air thinned, every time a doorway yawned too empty. It wanted to bare teeth at the dark, wanted to stalk whatever circled close.

Will hated that instinct, hated that some deep part of him believed it. Because the alternative that there really was someone out there watching him, that another predator had found him was worse.

So he shoved the feeling down. He told himself he was paranoid, delirious, losing his mind.

Called it anything but the truth, that maybe he wasn’t alone anymore, and he couldn’t tell if the real danger was in the city or in himself.

Notes:

How are ya'll liking it?
Interesting stuff for sure. Anyways though, If you enjoy my work I should be free to get back to writing after bootcamp/school sometime next year in January/February but will be busy with my new duties. Until I leave though I shall try and keep up with writing some things before I go.
Thank you my friends.