Decker Knight

Background   Adrian Clay was born into a family that read cards at kitchen tables and told fortunes in back rooms, the kind of folk magic that keeps the lights on. His gift was different. As a boy he learned that holding a grieving widow’s hand didn’t just sense sorrow—it stole it. The gray in her eyes eased. The gnawing in his bones quieted. For the first time in his life, he felt full.   By 1930, he was feeding with intent. The pulp press called him “Doktor Drakula” after a string of glamorous suicides and collapsed starlets in Manhattan and L.A. He wore the nickname until the real undead paid him a midnight visit and suggested, vividly, he pick another brand. He did, quickly. Names could change. The appetite didn’t.   The decades taught him camouflage. In the ’40s he was a revival-tent “healer,” leaving congregations glassy-eyed and ecstatically empty. In the ’60s, a velvet-throated guru with a Laurel Canyon address and a house band. In the ’80s he discovered talk shows and built a clinic. In the present, he is Decker Knight—podcasts, masterclasses, stadium seminars on “emotional optimization,” and a rolling entourage of unstable orbiters who swear he saved them. In private, he calls them the herd.   He ages backward when the meals are rich—wrinkles ironing out after a tragedy he orchestrated “accidentally,” eyes brightening after a stadium’s worth of catharsis. He taught others of his kind to pass: how to graze gently in crowds between “harvests,” how not to spook the herd, how to leave marks tired but grateful. They call him their Dracula, their Cain, their Father. He smiles and demurs. He’s had literal children too—women who woke changed after loving him, daughters and sons who found the same hunger rising in their throats.   He has fed everywhere emotions run hot: war zones and wake houses, greenrooms and rehab centers, chancelleries and casinos. His palate has broadened with the century. Fear is clean fuel; grief is heavy and long-burning; lust crackles and fades; ambition is the good stuff, marbled with anxiety and pride. Prayer, qi, prāṇa, “vibes,” leyline hiss—call it what you want. He can drink it.   He is careful where caution profits him. He remembers the night the undead came to correct a stolen name, and he has no wish to meet them again. He neither crusades nor apologizes; he farms.   Personality   Decker moves through rooms like a sommelier among barrels, tapping the varnish, listening for hollows. People are not mysteries to him; they are vintages—ambition-cured, shame-smoked, guilt-aged—and he has spent a lifetime refining a palate that can tell this year’s grief from last year’s fear at twenty paces. He is unhurried. The hunt begins with comfort, with perfect eye contact and the kind of questions that make a person feel uniquely visible. He gives aftercare the way a farmer walks his fence line, not out of mercy but maintenance.   He is charming because charm pays, patient because patience fattens, and cruel only when the numbers justify it. When he kills it is rarely heat; it is timing—a private catastrophe arranged so the last exhale breaks like a wave and he can stand in the spray. He cultivates believers and keeps them close: the girl from the support group who would bleed for him; the bassist whose stage fright tastes of salt and copper; the deputy mayor who calls him “coach” and never asks why he sleeps so well after their sessions.   He tells himself he does not hunt innocents, and then he defines innocence down to zero. He respects power, especially the quiet kind—true empathy, the rare mind that meets his gaze and does not give. Those are the only moments he feels anything like caution, a cold prickle under the ribs that tastes suspiciously like hunger with nowhere to go.   If eternity has taught him anything, it is that most lives want to be taken—if not by death, then by someone who promises to carry the weight for a while. Decker Knight is that promise. He will lean close, take your pain, leave you light enough to float—and then, when you finally need that pain back to be a person again, he will already be gone, smiling, younger by a decade, and hungry for the next room.