Shadow of my Soul. Of Nights in Paradise and Scars in Hell, #6

This volume does not begin in the hell Aiden usually tells his stories from. It begins on an airplane, in a stomach full of excitement and in a heart that believes it can fly far enough away, just for a moment, to find itself. Miami Beach - a place that for many exists only in postcards, music videos, and glittering images - becomes a turning point for Aiden that runs deeper than sun, palm trees, and clubs.
These chapters are about more than a vacation. Aiden carries his old longing across the Atlantic with him: the desire to be truly seen, to be loved, to be held, not merely desired. In Miami he meets Pie, a man who stands out from the crowd even though that crowd is made up of the most beautiful demons one could imagine. From a flirt on the beach, a glance through sunglasses, a kiss in the Score, grows one of the most intense encounters of his life.
The days in Miami are bright, colorful, loud, full of music and nights in which stars, sea, and bodies blur into one another. And yet a fine shadow hangs over everything: Aiden knows that every step on the beach exists on borrowed time. That every kiss with Pie ends at a boundary that lies not in their passion, but in continents, flight schedules, and the life that will be waiting for him once he flies back home.
This volume tells of the sweet cruelty in which a dream comes true and slips away in the very same moment. Pie is not simply a holiday flirtation. He is proof that a single night can remain in one's memory for an entire lifetime. When Aiden returns to his hell, nothing is the way it was before. The streets are the same, the Barflow is still standing, John still listens to him, Tom is still kissing demons on Kettengasse whom he has known for a long time.
And yet something inside Aiden has shifted. Anyone who has once experienced what a love feels like that has no future carries a quiet scar that throbs every time everyday life returns. Volume 6 follows Aiden on this road back. He tries to settle once more into his old life, between the bar, parties, ex-demons, and familiar faces. Martin is waiting, David is writing, old stories are still hanging in the corners of his apartment.
In the middle of all this chaos, someone suddenly appears whom he had never planned as a fixed part of his story: Elias, the vampire. At first Elias was simply the one who annoyed him, the one standing beside Tom, made up, loud, a little too much in every way. Then he became a kiss in a corner, a risk at a party, a night in the bathroom that shatters glass, decoration, and every firmly anchored rule.
And at some point he no longer stands only for drama, but for something Aiden had long thought he had lost: arriving in everyday life with someone who makes him laugh, provokes him, mirrors him, and accepts him in all his contradictions. In these chapters, you can watch Aiden grow without him fully realizing that he is growing. He stumbles from encounter to encounter, makes decisions that hurt, laughs at things he once would have cried over, and cries over moments that might once have been only a brief episode.
He gets tangled up, hurts others, hurts himself, and still tries not to unlearn how to believe in love - even though it never stays for long, and in his life it often appears in the form of demons who are just as lost as he is. Miami and hell stand opposite each other in this volume like two inner landscapes: there, the city in which Aiden feels for the first time what it might be like if one night changed everything; here, the streets in which he learns with the vampire Elias that it is not always about the great fireworks, but also about brief glances across Kettengasse, ironic dialogue between two shifts, a phone number on a beer mat, a scarf that hides more than bruises.