Chapter Text
There are things I can’t explain anymore. Not with science. Not with logic. Not even with the practiced detachment I used to joke was the best thing I ever learned from my mother. There’s a line you cross when you touch something ancient: something sacred, or cursed, or maybe both. Something that was never meant to be understood. Never meant to be named. And once you’ve crossed it, you don’t get to come back. I crossed it and then something crossed with me. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Just a joke. Just a dare. One of those stupid, drunken Halloween things, when you’re young enough to believe you’re immortal, and arrogant enough to think you know better. I did know better, but I said her name anyway. And that was the beginning of the end.
My first mistake was thinking the stories weren’t real. That urban legends were just boredom passed down through bored mouths. I thought they were meant to keep kids in line, or to give the town something to whisper about when the air turned cold. I didn’t believe the Devil lived in the old cemetery nor did I believe she could be summoned. I definitely didn’t believe she was listening, so I took the dare. I left the party with tequila pumping through my veins like wildfire, my mouth numb and my limbs unsteady. The footpath off campus led straight to the abandoned cemetery, the one no one talked about, except to joke. The one even the crows wouldn’t cross. I climbed the rusted gate and trudged through half-dead ivy and stones too old to remember their names, and that’s when I saw it, the mausoleum in the farthest, darkest corner. It was the kind of dark that swallows sound and listens back. Vines of ivy wrapped through the broken stone like veins. Something in the air shifted as I approached, it became thicker, heavier, like fog beneath the skin. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t question it. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cheap silver lighter Cristina had given me last semester, mostly for cigarettes, but tonight it was a torch for something far older. I lit the candle and I said her name.\
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then I waited. At first, nothing happened. No thunder. No wind. Just the sound of my own breathing and the flicker of the flame. I almost blew the candle out, but then she appeared. I don’t remember the exact moment the world changed, I only remember her. One second I was alone, and the next I wasn’t. She was standing there, like she’d always been, like she belonged to that corner of the world more than I ever could. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Only she wasn’t a woman, she was the Devil. The legends were wrong, Satan doesn’t have horns. She doesn’t carry a pitchfork or stomp around in smoke and sulfur. No, the Devil is elegant. The Devil is hauntingly beautiful. The Devil is desire dressed in skin and shadow. She was pale and her skin shimmered like diamonds caught in moonlight, as if her flesh was carved from something colder than stone. Her eyes weren’t red, not exactly. They were blood-moon crimson, sparkling, endless. Her hair was the darkest red I’d ever seen. Not cherry. Not wine. Blood before the oxygen hits it. She looked at me like she already knew every part of me. Every failure. Every fear. Every want I didn’t dare name.
I tried to act brave. I smirked. I shrugged. I said something stupid, I don’t even remember what it was, but she saw through me. Of course she did. She laughed and she taunted and then she stepped close. So close I could feel her heat, I could smell smoke and roses on her breath, and then she kissed the space just beneath my collarbone and my ears filled with the sound of my soul screaming. Her lips burned as they seared a shape into my skin I had no words for. A mark. A brand. A promise. And just like that, I belonged to her.
There’s a silence that follows when your life is no longer your own. Not a loud silence, not the kind that wails or begs. It’s soft and smothering. Like smoke in a sealed room, curling into your lungs and stealing your breath inch by inch. That silence lives inside me now. I feel it when I wake. I taste it in the back of my throat. I carry it like a bruise under my skin. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if anyone else notices. If they can see that I’m different. Sometimes I catch Cristina watching me when I pretend to sleep, but she hasn’t asked me any questions. She hasn’t said a word about the night I came back from the cemetery. Maybe she thinks I had a panic attack, or that I hallucinated. Maybe she sees the light still on but doesn’t realize the house is hollow. Because that’s all I am now, a house with the lights still on but the windows all boarded up from the inside.
I still go to class and take notes dilligently. I still raise my hand and answer questions about arteries and atriums and cadavers and surgical technique. I still laugh at Cristina’s sarcasm and eat cafeteria mac and cheese, but I am not the same person that I was before the cemetery. I am haunted. Branded. Watched. Sometimes she he visits me in my sleep, and not metaphorically. I mean literally. She walks through my dreams like she owns them, because she does. Sometimes she speaks. Sometimes she only smiles, her teeth sharp and so white they seem to have an ethereal glow to them. But no matter what, the one thing that never changes is that I wake up with the mark beneath my collarbone pulsing like a second heart. It burns when I try to forget her and it hums when I whisper her name. Sometimes when I look in the mirror it’s not my reflection staring back, instead it’s hers.
Waiting.
Watching.
Patient.
I tried to cut the mark out once. It was Thanksgiving break. Cristina was home in California. I was here, alone. My mom, ever the surgeon, was at a medical conference in Italy. She never called. I didn’t expect her to, after all I hadn't seen her since the day I left for college at eighteen. I was drunk again, vodka this time.
Lonely.
Spiteful.
Stupid.
I found a scalpel in my dorm drawer, leftover from my study group. I thought maybe if I carved deep enough, if I bled enough, maybe she’d let me go. Maybe my debt would be paid, but I was wrong. Her laughter filled my skull like knives. My worst memories spilled behind my eyes, played like reels I couldn’t stop. I dropped the scalpel and I fell to my knees. I screamed until my throat tore, but she didn’t stop. She mocked me like a reader enjoying a book where she already knows the ending. It felt as if she was letting me pretend I still had choices. I don’t and I haven’t for a while. I woke up the next morning with blood on my hands and the mark already healed; scarred, raw, shining faintly under the pale morning light. Still there. Forever. I think it glows brightest when she’s near, usually when I’m alone. She’s careful not to be seen by anyone else. Maybe to keep the legend quiet, or maybe because she doesn’t need more than me, or maybe because she’s waiting for others to be just as stupid as I was. I don’t know. The only thing that I know for sure is that Satan has my soul. That’s not a metaphor. That’s not poetry. That’s not self-pity. That’s reality. I don’t know what she is exactly. A demon? A goddess fallen from the stars? A storm in a skin-tight dress? It doesn’t matter, She never told me what she wanted. Only what she owns. and when her mouth touched my skin, when her gem pulsed with my soul inside, I knew: I am hers. Even if I still have my body and my name. I may walk amongst the living, but I am only visiting. I’m only borrowing time and one day, maybe soon, she will come for the rest of me. Just like she promised.
I almost told Cristina. After Thanksgiving break. After the blood and the dreams, but I was afraid. I was afraid that saying her name would open the door again. Afraid she’d come not in smoke and whispers, but in bone and breath. Afraid she’d wear me. But the part that terrifies me most is that sometimes, I want her to.That’s what keeps me up at night. Not the mark. Not the dreams. Not even the loss of my soul, it’s the ache. The heat in my veins when I think of her and the way my lips still remember the shape of her kiss. The way my body wants her even when my mind says run.
I am marked.
Claimed.
Bound.
And part of me likes it. I hate that, but it’s true and I can’t lie anymore. This is a confession and a warning, this is the only prayer I know how to give. I don’t even know who’s listening. Maybe you’re someone who likes ghost stories, or maybe you laugh at demons and shadows. Maybe you think none of this is real. If that’s the case, good. Stay that way. Stay safe. Do not follow in my footsteps. Don’t light candles in forgotten places. Don’t whisper spells in languages older than your bones. And whatever you do, don’t say her name because the moment it leaves your lips, she will you and she’ll come. Not with fire or with fury. She’ll come with a smile that will gut you and a kiss that will mark you forever. Once it’s done, once she’s cleaned your soul of everything but her you will never sleep soundly again.
I shouldn’t have taken the dare, even if I didn’t believe the stories, even if I laughed at the legends. I should’ve known better, but I didn’t. So now let me go back to the beginning. To the Halloween party I went to during my second year of medical school where I was dared to summon the Devil in the old cemetery. My name is Meredith Grey, and this is my story.