The moon was a bone-white scythe in a sky of perfect, depthless black. The air was cold and sharp, the kind that made each breath feel clean and brittle, carrying the distant scent of frost-killed leaves. Stars glittered like shattered ice, casting just enough light to turn the familiar street into a landscape of long, uncertain shadows.
Ace moved through the silence like a part of it. He pushed the heavy gate open just wide enough to slip through, catching it before the hinge could utter its usual groan. He wore an all-black uniform of his own choosing: black sneakers, raw denim jeans, and the faded blue zipper hoodie with wings on the back, now looking more like a shadow's shadow. Black gloves covered his hands.
His fingers brushed against the hard, familiar shape beneath his hoodie—the cool, blued steel of the Beretta, resting in a new holster against his ribs. It wasn't named yet. It was just the gun. A promise. A question. Its weight was the only thing that felt entirely real.
He took one last look at his house, a dark silhouette against the star-flecked sky. A single light glowed in Sophie's window upstairs. A sentinel's light. He turned and merged with the night.
The RV was parked up the block, a hulking, mud-spattered beast that looked alien on the pristine suburban curb. It seemed to absorb the moonlight rather than reflect it. Three figures stood beside it, their breath frosting in the air.
Cedric, also in dark, practical clothes, gave a tight nod. Axl leaned against the RV's grille, looking like a punk-rock gargoyle taking a break. Garath stood apart, a still and watchful statue, his gaze already scanning the empty street, the rooftops, the spaces between.
Ace approached, the sound of his footsteps swallowed by the immense quiet.
"You're late," Garath remarked. His voice was a low gravel scrape, not accusatory, just a statement of fact. He wasn't looking at Ace; he was looking past him, back towards the compound, ensuring their exit was clean.
"Yeah, I know. Sorry," Ace said, his own voice barely above a murmur. "Had to convince my mom to let me go on the hunt. She… required details."
Axl pushed off the grille and clapped his hands together once. The sound was shockingly loud, a gunshot in the cathedral quiet. "Alright! The debating society is adjourned. Are we going, or are we gonna stand here and get frostbite on our asses? I didn't get this beauty stuck in three different swamps for a scenic neighborhood watch."
He didn't wait for an answer. He yanked open the RV's side door, which opened with a sound of protesting metal, and vanished inside.
Cedric followed. Ace moved to go next, but Garath's hand, a heavy, grounding weight, landed on his shoulder for a second. "Check your gear. Once we roll, there's no turning back for forgotten things." It wasn't a question. It was the final item on a pre-op checklist.
Ace gave a single, sharp nod. He had everything. The gun. A knife. His phone, off. Nothing that tied him here.
He climbed into the RV.
The world changed. The cold, silent clarity of the night was replaced by a dense, layered atmosphere. The air inside was warm and carried a complex scent—stale coffee grounds, the sharp, mineral tang of gun oil, the faint, sweet-rot smell of old vinyl, and beneath it all, the dry, earthy scent of distant clay and something metallic, like blood on copper.
It wasn't just a vehicle. It was a capsule from another world. A small dining table with bench seats was bolted to the floor, maps and loose papers held down by empty mugs. The kitchenette was a monument to utilitarian survival: a propane stove, a tiny fridge humming loudly, cabinets stuffed with non-perishables. A faded, topographical map of the region was taped to the ceiling above the driver's seat, covered in handwritten notes and symbols. Towards the back, a curtain was drawn across a narrow doorway, hiding the sleeping quarters.
Axl gestured for Ace and Cedric to take the bench seats. He tossed a heavy keyring in a high, lazy arc towards the front. Garath, who had entered behind Ace, caught it without looking.
"You drive," Axl said, dropping into the passenger seat up front and propping his boots on the dash. "I'm gonna lecture these two kiddos."
Garath just nodded, settling into the driver's seat with the ease of a man slipping into a second skin. The RV's engine turned over with a deep, grumbling roar that vibrated up through the floorboards into Ace's bones. The headlights cut twin swathes of yellow through the darkness.
They pulled away from the curb, leaving the quiet street, the sentinel light in the window, and the last pretense of a normal night behind. The gate of the Eldren compound shrank in the side mirror, then vanished as they turned a corner.
They were in the dark now, moving. The mission had begun.
The RV rumbled through the sleeping outskirts of the city, a metal womb of diesel fumes and tense silence. The playful energy from their departure had been swallowed by the dark, leaving behind the grim purpose that had drawn them from their beds.
Cedric broke the quiet, his voice flat. No curiosity, just a demand for the operational data he'd been denied. "Where are we going? You've treated this like a state secret. Not a single detail."
Ace shifted on the hard bench, the new weight of the Beretta a constant, sobering presence against his ribs. The frustration he'd swallowed for hours boiled over. "Yeah, what he said. Do you have any idea how hard it is to dodge your mom when she's in full interrogation mode? 'Where are you going? What are you doing? Who's driving?' I had to tap-dance in the dark because you gave me nothing to work with."
From the passenger seat, Axl didn't turn. His silhouette was a cutout against the passing streetlights. "Alright. Point taken. The mystery tour is over." His voice had lost all its chaotic melody. It was the tone of a man opening a briefing. "You want details? Here they are."
He bent, wrestled with a latched compartment under his seat, and emerged with two thick, worn manila folders. He tossed them onto the table. They landed not with a slap, but a dense thud, like the sound of a body hitting soft earth.
"Open. First page."
Ace glanced at Cedric, whose face was all sharp focus in the gloom. He flipped the cover.
It was a map. Not a clean, printed one, but a well-used topographical sheet, its creases soft with age. And on it, someone—likely Axl with his precise, aggressive script—had made a series of small, furious marks in red ink. Each was a stark, bloody asterisk. Next to each, a date was noted in the same hand.
One. Two. Five. Ten. Ace stopped counting after fifteen, the numbers blurring into a single, sickening realization.
"These marks…" Cedric's voice was tight.
"Are locations," Axl finished, his words clean and surgical. "Where a person was murdered in the last fourteen months. The official reports read like bad fiction. Animal attacks. Sudden disappearances. Convenient suicides. These," he tapped the window, pointing at the invisible landscape beyond, "are the real coordinates."
A cold, greasy feeling settled in Ace's gut. He looked at the map not as a chart, but as a graveyard. Each mark was a story ended in terror and silence.
"Well, shit," Cedric breathed, the profanity a soft punch in the quiet.
"Yeah," Axl agreed, no humor in it. "Now look closer. Don't just see the dots. See the space between them."
Ace forced his eyes to move, to not just absorb the horror but to analyze it. The marks weren't random. They clustered in the industrial yards by the river. They dotted the edges of the old quarries. They were absent from the dense downtown grid. There was a pattern, a terrible, sprawling grammar to the violence.
Cedric saw it too. He snatched a pen from his pocket, not waiting for permission. On the open margin of his own map, he began to connect the marks with swift, sure lines—not every one, but key ones. From the northern cluster to the western outlier, back to the southern spread.
A shape emerged. Harsh-angled, asymmetrical, undeniably deliberate. It looked like a broken crown, or a chemical symbol for something corrosive.
"It's a sigil," Ace said, the word leaving his mouth before he could stop it. He'd seen similar shapes in Garath's weathered books, diagrams of containment and calling.
"It's a ritual," Axl corrected, his voice dropping. "Someone is writing in blood. This is the penmanship."
Cedric leaned back, his analytical engine hitting a wall. "Okay. So it's a spell. What's it for? Summoning? A ward? A curse? What's the payload?"
Axl was silent. For several long seconds, the only sound was the groan of the RV's suspension. When he spoke, the confidence was gone, replaced by something that made Ace's skin prickle: professional frustration.
"That," Axl said slowly, "is the question that's been keeping me up for a month. The structure… it's a mess. It's like a child's scribble over a sacred text, or a sacred text defaced by a child. I see elements I recognize—anchors, pain conduits—but they're configured all wrong. Twisted. It doesn't match any known paradigm. Not for summoning, not for banishment, not for protection."
He finally turned in his seat, his face half-lit by the dashboard's sickly green glow. For the first time since Ace had known him, Axl looked genuinely uncertain.
"I don't know what it does."
Axl's confession didn't fade. It expanded, filling the rumbling, dim space of the RV until the air felt too thick to breathe. The map on the table between them seemed to pulse with a malevolent light of its own.
Ace stared at Axl, his brain scrambling for purchase. This had to be a joke. A twisted, last-minute Axl-ism designed to make them piss themselves. The sarcasm was a reflex, a lifeline back to a world where things made sense.
"You don't know about a spell?" Ace's voice came out too high, edged with a disbelieving laugh that cracked in the middle. "You, Axl? The guy who once identified a banshee by the phlegm in its shriek? Doesn't know?"
Cedric just shook his head slowly, a deep weariness settling into his features. He wasn't playing along. He was staring at the sigil, his analytical mind running into a wall and starting to bruise. "This isn't funny," he said, his voice flat and drained. "Just tell us the truth. What are we walking into?"
"I'm telling you the truth!" Axl's protest was sharp, stripped of its usual playful arrogance. It was the raw, frustrated snap of a master craftsman presented with a tool he couldn't name.
"Yeah, right," Ace muttered, the words automatic. He looked down at the map, at the ugly, intelligent scar of violence.
From the driver's seat, Garath's voice cut through the tension. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It was the sound of bedrock.
"It's true."
The two words landed with the finality of a coffin lid closing. The last of Ace's desperate skepticism shriveled and died. Cedric simply closed his eyes for a second, absorbing the operational reality.
They weren't hunters tracking prey. They were probes being sent into a dark, incomprehensible machine, with no idea what it was built to manufacture.
Two words. Delivered with the weight of a mountain.
The last of Ace's defiant disbelief shattered. He looked from Axl's tense profile to the back of Garath's head. Garath, who never spoke unless it was necessary. Garath, for whom a lie was a useless, flimsy thing. If Garath confirmed it, it was the operational reality.
A cold, heavy understanding settled in the RV. They were driving blind.
The silence stretched, taut and uncomfortable, before Ace found his voice again, weaker now. "So… where are we going, then?"
Axl shifted, the first sign of unease they'd seen from him all night. He didn't meet their eyes, staring at a fixed point on the table. "Well, uhh… we're going to a place. Where the next murder is likely to take place." The words came out stilted, lacking any of his trademark certainty. He sounded like a student guessing on a test.
Cedric's head snapped up, his analytical mind seizing on the inconsistency. "The next murder? How could you possibly know that? The pattern shows a sigil, not a timetable."
Axl ran a hand through his pink hair, a gesture of pure agitation. "Well, erm… actually, I had a psychic tell me about it." He said it slowly, as if testing the words himself.
The statement landed with a thud.
Ace and Cedric just stared. The rumble of the RV's engine filled the void. A psychic? After a map of ritual murders and a confession of ignorance, this felt like the punchline to a bad joke.
Cedric's controlled composure finally snapped. "A psychic?" he burst out, his voice rising in incredulous rage. "Are you fucking kidding me, Axl? You know most of them are scams! Cold readers and con artists!" He stood up suddenly in the confined space, his head nearly brushing the low ceiling, driven by a fury that had no other outlet.
Ace moved faster than thought. He didn't stand. He just shot out a hand, grabbed Cedric's wrist, and yanked him back down onto the bench with a firm, controlled force.
"Alright, before you two totally freak out," Axl said, his voice regaining a sliver of its usual command. "I know her. She's a close friend. And she's the real deal."
"The real deal?" Cedric spat, rubbing his wrist, his anger now mixed with a profound sense of absurdity. "More like you got scammed! How can you be this dumb? You're a fucking priest yourself! You know the mechanics! You know what real magic costs—the sacrifice, the incantations, the focus! It's not parlor tricks and crystal balls!"
"I know! I know, you don't have to teach me what a priest is!" Axl shot back, his own frustration boiling over. "She's not some carnival fortune teller. She's a priest, like me. And what she did wasn't gazing into a magic orb. It was a reading. A costly one. Now, will you shut up and let me explain?"
Ace, who had been watching the verbal tennis match, finally nodded. It was all they had. A mysterious sigil and a tip from a psychic. It was threadbare, but it was a thread.
Cedric didn't nod. He turned to stare out the dark window, his jaw clenched, his entire body radiating furious, skeptical disbelief. He'd followed them into the unknown, but this… this felt like a step too far into the dark.
Axl took a steadying breath, joining his hands together on the table as if preparing for a sermon no one wanted to hear. The RV sped on, carrying them toward a destination guided by faith in a vision, with the map of blood their only tangible proof that something, at least, was horribly real.