Luca

Luca doesn’t talk much about where he came from. Not because he’s evasive, but because, to him, there’s nothing there to talk about. The past is a drowned whisper, a shadow he learned to ignore. He was born in a nowhere town near the skeleton of a church swallowed by the sea. Delivered in a rust-stained bathtub, surrounded by women who spoke in tongues and trembled when he cried. His arrival wasn’t marked by joy, but by omen. There’s no birth certificate. No hospital record. No surname he trusts. His mother either died that night or disappeared into the tide, leaving behind only the sharp scent of saltwater and the uneasy certainty that Luca was not alone in his own skin. The local church took him in out of duty, not mercy. The nuns whispered prayers over him, fingers tight on rosaries, calling him “blessed” with voices that didn’t quite believe it. When strange things began to happen, when candles bent toward him like they recognized something inside him, when water pooled beneath his crib without cause, they tried baptism again. And again. And again. Until one day, they didn’t stop. Three sisters held him under in the stone basin. They whispered verses. Clutched crosses. The water churned around him like it didn’t want to let him go. He stopped struggling halfway through, not from fear, but from something colder. Curiosity. He wanted to see what they’d do when it didn’t work. When they pulled him up, his eyes were open. He smiled. And the holy water in the font had turned black.

They sent him to the orphanage the next morning. He grew up in the in-between: halfway houses, overworked social workers, foster homes with locks on the outside of the doors. His file said “night terrors,” but the truth was harder to classify. He spoke in borrowed voices. Drew himself with too many faces. The temperature dropped when he was angry. Once, he bit a man and his teeth came out blackened and sharp. By the time he was nine, he had learned to stop talking about the second head in his dreams, the one that hovered just behind his shoulder and watched him sleep. He called it “the louder me.”

At eleven, they brought in a priest. It wasn’t official: no Church sanction, no records kept. Just a man with heavy eyes and shaking hands, muttering scripture in a language Luca had already outgrown. They strapped him to a bed in the basement of the group home, drew chalk circles on the floor, and lit too many candles. He could smell their fear. It tasted like iron. When the priest began the rite, Luca arched, screamed in voices that didn’t sound like his own. His eyes rolled white. The air grew wet and sharp. Then he went still. One heartbeat. Two. And then.....He bit off his own tongue. He sat up, looked the man in the eye, and spat it at the priest’s feet. It grew back before the candle finished guttering. No one touched him after that. They stopped calling him a child, and they started calling him something else.

The full manifestation came when Luca was fifteen. Another backwoods town in another home. There was a playground, with a haunted well that spoke to Luca in ways that he didn't know how to explain. It started as a dare that went too far. One of the others, a kid named Denny, pushed him in, the sound of their laughter echoing as he fell into the icy cold water below. Luca, however, didn’t drown. This time, he broke open. He clawed his way out of the well in a way no one should survive. When they found him, his body was covered in scale-like growths, and two other heads were whispering over his shoulders, both speaking languages no one taught him, finishing each other’s thoughts. The townspeople drove him out before dawn.

That night, he ran until his legs gave out. Barefoot, bloodied, and burning with something too old for his bones, he collapsed in the dark and woke up in the home of an occult archivist named Mara. She was one of the few people who didn’t flinch when she looked at him. She didn’t try to bless him or banish him. She just studied him, gently, like a puzzle she already knew the shape of. She was the first to name it: Hydra. Not just a myth, but an echo of something ancient, elemental, and deeply broken. Something that remembered drowning and fire and too many heads whispering in the dark.

Mara didn’t treat him like a monster. Or a miracle. Just a boy with too much power in his blood and no one to teach him what to do with it. She taught him how to survive. How to hide. How to use what he was without letting it devour him. She showed him how to draw ritual boundaries, how to speak with spirits without offering pieces of himself, and how to silence the screaming in his head with salt, smoke, and sigils. She trained him to fight, but also to think, to feel, to ask questions. When to run. When to strike. And how to tell the difference between a ghost and a memory wearing a face.

He stayed with her for nearly three years. Long enough to learn the rhythm of her quiet, how she tapped her thumb against old books when she was reading, how she hummed tunelessly while prepping wards in the kitchen, how she never flinched when he lost control. She only waited, steady as tide rock, until he came back to himself. He stayed long enough for his hands to memorize her body. They slept together. Not often. Not lightly. And never with the illusion that it meant safety. It was hunger and comfort, tension and trust: a silent surrender neither of them could name, but both returned to more than once. Her skin, her breath, the quiet sounds she made in the dark, they became part of his world in a way nothing else ever had. And yet, neither of them said love. Not out loud. He wouldn’t have known how. And if she did, she never told him. But when she touched him, it was with care. When he held her after, it was with something soft and scared and aching. He didn’t know what to call it then. He just knew he felt more around her. More human. More real. More dangerous. She looked at him like she saw through him, and didn’t run.

She never asked him to be less than what he was. Never told him to fight the hydra inside him. Just showed him how to live beside it. And for a while, he started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t cursed after all. Not if someone like Mara could look at him the way she did. Like he wasn’t a monster. Like he was wanted.

And then she was gone. It happened during a possession case. She was sealing a mirror, chanting low and sure, just like always. And then—just like that,...she vanished. No scream. No goodbye. Just a sudden stillness. A salt ring burned into the floor. And a single black feather where her hand had been. He’s never stopped carrying her name. Or her ring. Or the deep wound she left behind. Luca didn’t return to anyone after that. He just started walking toward the strange.

Luca’s presence alone is enough to stir the dead. Even before he steps into a place, spirits feel him, like pressure behind old walls, like the air just before the sea pulls back too far. His hydra blood distorts the veil around him, warping spiritual fields, calling out to anything half-forgotten and still hungry. He didn’t choose to be a magnet for the supernatural. Instead, he chose what to do with it. At first, while he grieved Mara, the jobs were small. A child possessed by a grief spirit clinging to her shadow. A cursed ring whispering rot into a man’s ear until he forgot how to sleep. A coastal house where the walls wept seawater every night at 3:03 a.m. He solved them. Bound them. Freed what could be freed. Quietly, without spectacle.

The deeper he went, the less random it all began to feel. Names started repeating, names no towns had reason to share. Symbols appeared in basement corners, burned or scratched in the same shaking hand across multiple states. Mirrors reflected things he hadn’t done yet. Sometimes, things he hoped he never would. It was like something in the world was remembering itself through him, stitching together from forgotten rituals, trauma, and blood.

Word soon began to spread. Hunters whispered he was a “walking tear in the veil.” Mediums called him a fraud, until their own dead started speaking his name. Witches left charms and warded candles outside his door, asking for answers, or maybe forgiveness. And sometimes… the spirits thanked him. Whispered his name like a lullaby. Left tokens in his dreams.

The job, without guidance, would begin to take it's toll. The more Luca leaned into the hydra, his fractal memory, his ability to walk layered timelines, to smell lies and touch echoes, the harder it became to stay rooted in just one version of himself. Some days, he’d wake mid-sentence with a voice already talking in his head. One that wasn’t quite his. Other times, he’d find pages added to his journal in a hand that looked like his, but wasn’t. Truths he didn’t remember learning. Notes from places he didn’t think he’d been.

He lives by strict routine now. Cleansing rituals. Dream wards. Iron. Black salt. Anchors. Knives with names etched into their blades. Still, the pull never stops. The hydra is always watching. Always waiting. Always ready to take more of the wheel.

And as if he wasn't haunted enough, always—always—there’s Buttons. A little ghost, no older than eight, who follows him from job to job like some pale echo of innocence he never had. She doesn’t speak. She wears a gauzy nightdress that trails around her ankles and seems to float when she walks. Her long hair hangs damp over her shoulders, and in her hands she clutches a stuffed rabbit, one ear torn and stitched back on with red thread. He met her during a job in a flooded school where the water never dried, where forgotten things swam just below the surface. She was there when he arrived, standing in the hallway with wet footprints leading nowhere. She didn’t run. Didn’t scream when he let his teeth show. She only watched him with eyes too old for her face. Like she already knew how it would end.

That job nearly killed him. She never left. Now, she appears when something is off. She stands quietly in corners. Draws things in the margins of his books. Sometimes he finds her rabbit on his pillow. Sometimes it’s missing entirely. And sometimes, when the veil is too thin and Luca is too tired, he sees her lips moving, mouthing things he can’t hear. Things he doesn’t want to. No one else usually sees her.
But when they do, they always say the same thing: “She’s crying black water.”

He’s never tried to send her away. Some nights, some jobs, he even talks to her, softly, like she’s still alive.
"Stay close, Buttons," He’ll whisper. "Just in case I forget which one of me I am."

To cope, and to contain, Luca began writing. At first, it was simple. Journals. Scrawled fragments. Names of spirits he’d banished and the ones that slipped through. Dream notes. Bloodstained sketches. Bits of ritual theory written in half-sleep when the veil was thinnest. But over time, the pages began to shift. What started as a record became something deeper: a retelling. A reframing. A way to translate the fractured, impossible things he’d seen into shapes he could survive. He didn’t write to be understood. He wrote to stay whole.

At twenty-four, he self-published his first book under the name L. V. Thorne. It was a fictionalized account of a failed exorcism. His failed exorcism. It was marketed as horror. But to those who knew how to look, it was something else entirely. Buried beneath the lyrical prose were ritual sequences too precise to be fabricated. Sigil patterns layered into chapter structure. Truths disguised as metaphor. He claimed it was a story. But some readers felt seen. Others felt watched.

The book caught fire in the underground, among practitioners, fringe readers, scholars, and cultists. Some claimed it was a modern grimoire. Others swore it made them dream of places they’d never been. Luca never confirmed anything. He didn’t have to. Since then, and especially now, writing is part of the work. Necessary. Dangerous. Sacred. His books aren’t safe. They aren’t entirely fiction. They’re survival maps dressed in narrative. Each chapter functions like a ward. Each dedication is a tether. Every page is a pressure valve for the creature in his blood, a way to bleed it out without letting it win. They are beautiful. Brutal. And not for the uninitiated.

He’s published six so far. All of them read like confessions. None offer comfort. None provide answers. They ask more than they resolve. They haunt the reader long after the last line, like a whisper behind the eyes. Luca calls them books. The hydra calls them offerings. And though he closes each one, ties it off with sigils and salt, he never really walks away. Some stories, like some ghosts, refuse to stay buried.