Gonca walks through a dimly lit street, shadows pooling beneath every flickering lamp. The streets around her felt older than memory—narrow Ottoman lanes from the sixteenth century, paved with uneven stones polished by centuries of footsteps. Wooden houses leaned toward each other, their upper floors jutting overhead like watchful faces, blocking the moonlight and drowning the path in deep shadow. Oil lamps flickered in iron brackets, their weak flames trembling in the night breeze.

The smell of spice, damp timber, and distant smoke drifted through the air, mixed with the faint clatter of a closing market and the muffled murmurs of people behind shuttered windows. Stray dogs prowled between clay-walled shops, and the wind carried the creak of hanging lanterns swinging on their chains.

It was a street that belonged to another century—quiet, ancient, and unsettling.

 She scans the market stalls for whatever it was her mother asked her to buy, though the memory slips through her mind. At the end of the street, she notices blood—dark, fresh, glistening. No one else seems to see it.

She follows the crimson trail into a narrow, lightless alley and finds a figure that barely resembles a human being. She cannot tell whether it is simply a strangely shaped woman or some creature dragged up from the depths of hell. She is drinking from a boy’s neck, lips sunk deep into his skin.

The woman drops the body, and her eyes lock with Gonca’s.

She stands like a living nightmare draped in elegance. Her red hair cascades in loose waves, fiery against the stark porcelain white of her skin, a skin so pale it seems almost translucent under the dim light. Across her body, strips of white fabric are pinned in place like ceremonial bindings, shifting with her every movement, ghostly against her form yet somehow intimate, accentuating the sharp angles of her frame.

Her nose is hooked, giving her face a predatory sharpness, a profile that could be beautiful or cruel depending on the light. Her long nails, tapered and sharp, glint when they catch the light—tools of menace and seduction alike. Her eyes, burning like embers in the dark, fix on Gonca with a magnetic, terrifying intensity. Every motion she makes is deliberate, a predator dancing on the edge of playfulness and violence, a creature who exists only in nightmares.

In her presence, the air grows thick. She smiles at her, and Gonca watches the blood drip from her chin.

Gonca wakes on a hospital bed, wrapped head to toe in bandages. She is in a place where the smells and sights are more medical, more modern. A serum line runs into her wrist. A man sits beside her, his head bowed over a magazine so she cannot see his face.

“Where am I?”

The man lifts his head, and she recognizes him.

“In a hospital. You were in a car accident.”

Gonca looks down at her bandaged, blanket-shrouded body.

“Fire?”

“Yeah. A big one.”

She looks back at him. He pretends to read, flipping pages without meaning.

“Dad.”

He looks at her again. There is a sorrow in his eyes that unsettles her.

“Can I have some water, please?”

He sighs, rummages through a black bag at his feet, pulls out a metal bottle, and presses the plastic straw gently to her lips.

“Here, hun.”

Gonca drinks. Her throat is dry, painfully so. When she’s done, she’s breathing hard. Her father wipes the corner of her mouth. For an instant, she sees herself—pressed against someone else’s neck—and the vision vanishes as quickly as it came.

“Thank you.”

“Mhm.”

She sinks back into the pillow.

Who was that? Someone I’ve seen before?

Gonca breathes slowly, remembering the devil with orange eyes.

Not a woman. Not a person. Something pretending to be human.