CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I didn't run from the police precinct. I moved like a ghost, the journal from the dead detective a cold, hard lump against my chest. It was the only solid thing left in my world.
The Hunter was on the roof. I saw the glint of her scope. She wasn't just watching. She was a predator, waiting for her prey to make a mistake. To her, I was the mistake. The butcher who broke the world.
I slipped into the alleyways, my body screaming with every step. The knife wound in my side was a living thing, a hot coal burning a hole through me. I could feel the infection starting, a dull throb that promised a fever. I didn't have time for it.
The plan was simple. It was the most evil thing I'd ever conceived.
Find the Guide. The man who wrote the journal.
Find the Church. St. Jude's. The cage.
Find the Family.The ones who would take my curse.
I pushed forward, my mind racing. But as I moved, the city around me began to change. The distant sirens faded. The shouts of soldiers vanished. It wasn't a peaceful quiet. It was a dead quiet. The air got thick, heavy. It was hard to breathe, like I was walking underwater.
I stopped at the mouth of a wide street. My skin crawled.
This was new. This was worse.
The buildings here weren't blown apart. They were… sick. The brickwork was bleached pale, like old bone. The windows weren't broken; the glass had melted and dripped down the walls like black icicles. A streetlight was bent double, its metal soft and twisted like taffy. A car was just a dark, shapeless lump, its tires fused to the asphalt.
This wasn't destruction. This was un-making. Lily wasn't just breaking things anymore. The Archon was changing the rules, turning the world into its own nightmare. The air hummed with a low, wrong energy that made my teeth ache.
I named it in my head, the words tasting like ash: The Zone of Annihilation.
And it was growing.
My hands shook as I fumbled with the journal. I had to know more. I had to understand the price. I flipped to the last pages, to the detective's final, desperate scrawl.
The entry was dated just before the Original was caught.
"The Archon is a leech on the soul. It feeds on the worst of us: hate, malice, the joy of causing pain. It gets stronger with every act of cruelty. To force it to let go… you must give it the one thing it cannot digest. The absolute opposite of its fuel."
I read the next line, my heart freezing in my chest.
"The host must offer a willing, self-sacrificing death. An act of pure, untainted, undeserved love. A love so strong it chooses to die for the monster, hoping the person inside can be saved."
Willing, self-sacrificing death.
The words hit me like a physical blow. It wasn't enough to just die. I couldn't let Lily kill me in a rage. I had to go to her. I had to look into the black eyes of the thing that wore my daughter's face, and I had to offer my life. Not as a fight, but as a gift. A gift for her. I had to make the Archon feel a love it couldn't understand, to choke it for just a second.
Long enough to redirect it.
But who would do the redirecting? And who would we redirect it to?
A soft sound behind me. A click of a boot on a piece of rubble.
I spun around, my body screaming in protest. I dropped into a crouch, Miranda's knife held out in a shaking hand.
She was there. Ten feet away, stepping out of the shadows like she was made from them. The Hunter. Her face was covered by a black balaclava, but her eyes were all I could see. They were cold, flat, and focused. Like a snake's.
"David Thorne," she said. Her voice was low, calm. It held no anger. That was somehow worse. "Miranda's partner. My name is Alex. You broke the circle."
"My daughter—" I started, my voice a ragged mess.
"You killed your wife," she cut in, her tone never changing. "You completed the final ritual. You fed the entity a feast of its own bloodline. You are not a grieving father. You are the Architect of this." She raised her rifle. The barrel looked like the mouth of a cave. It was aimed right at the center of my chest. "My job is cleanup. Miranda failed to stop you. I won't."
"If you kill me, there's no one left who understands!" I pleaded, holding up the journal like a shield. "This is how we fix it! Redirection! I found the place! We can pull it out of her!"
Alex didn't even blink. "The Quiet Man feeds on lies. It's all you have left."
"LOOK!" I screamed, my voice breaking as I pointed a trembling hand toward the warped street. "Does that look like the work of a man to you? That's a god! A wrong god! If you want to finish what Miranda started, if you want to starve the entity, then you have to help me! I know how to pull it out of Lily and put it somewhere else!"
Alex held the rifle steady, her finger tight on the trigger. "You're bleeding out. Infected. You're trying to buy a few more minutes of air before I earn my paycheck. Give me one reason not to pull this trigger right now, Thorne. One reason that isn't a delusion."
I didn't argue. I didn't beg. I just tossed the journal onto the ground, sliding it across the rubble toward her. It stopped at her boot.
"Miranda's final message is in there," I gasped, the effort making my side feel like it was splitting open. "She marked the church. St. Jude's. She wrote about redirection. I didn't find the answers. She did. This isn't my plan. It's hers. And I'm the bait. If you don't trust me, trust the woman whose death you're avenging. Prove you actually cared about her work."
The words hung in the dead air. Alex's eyes flicked from the journal to me, then back to the worn leather cover. I saw a flicker of something—not trust, but doubt, and a furious, buried grief for her partner. She moved her boot, nudging the journal, then she slowly lowered the rifle, the action painfully deliberate.
"Redirection," Alex said, the word a bitter taste in her mouth. "A myth we stopped talking about years ago. Fine. For Miranda." She kicked the journal closer to her, but didn't pick it up.
"The writer," Alex said, her tone flat and final. "He's not a guide. He's a broken tool. But he's the only one left. He operates out of a rust-bucket ship in the old docks. He's the only man who faced the Original and didn't end up in a cage or a grave. His name is Solomon Vance."
Solomon Vance. A name. A target.
"You walk," she ordered. "I follow. You try to run, you try to lead me into a trap, or if I even smell the Archon on you, I put a bullet in your spine. We have one goal. Sever the child from the parasite. The cost," she said, her cold eyes locking with mine, "is irrelevant."
The cost is irrelevant.
But I knew the cost. It was a mother, a father, a child. A family who had no idea what was coming for them.
I turned my back on her, feeling the crosshairs between my shoulder blades. I started walking toward the docks, each step heavier than the last. The journal felt like a brick. I had an ally now. A professional killer. My own personal grim reaper, here to make sure I committed one last, perfect atrocity.