Ace opened his eyes to the hum of a single, fluorescent light tube.
It took a moment for the world to solidify. The first sense to return wasn't sight, but feeling. A deep, throbbing ache encircled his ribs, a constant, tight pressure that made every breath a conscious, careful effort. He felt wrapped, constrained, like his own body was a broken thing held together by force.
He looked down. From his hips to just below his armpits, his torso was a landscape of crisp, white bandages, wound with a clinical precision that spoke of experience, not panic. The clean, sterile scent of antiseptic clung to the gauze, mixing with the cooler, older smells of the room.
With a grunt that sparked fresh pain in his side, he pushed himself up on his elbows. The room swam for a second before settling into grim focus.
Rough, grey concrete walls, unfinished and cold. A heavy, industrial metal door with a wheel lock, like something on a submarine or a bank vault. Shelves of utilitarian metal held not books or tools, but the stark, efficient geometry of a field hospital and an armory. Rows of ammo cans, green metal boxes of various calibers. Neat rolls of gauze, shears, bottles of clear fluid and brown disinfectant. On a rack bolted to the wall, a pump-action shotgun and two rifles stood sentinel, their oiled metal and dark wood stocks the only things in the room with a kind of deadly polish.
Recognition seeped through the pain. He knew this place.
Cedric's house. The basement.
More specifically, it was Becca's basement. It wasn't a rec room or a storage space. It was a hunter's bolt-hole, a secret triage center and tactical cache buried beneath the normalcy of a suburban home. The air was perpetually cool and still, carrying the faint, permanent odors of concrete dust, gun oil, and the sharp, astringent bite of isopropyl alcohol.
The space was divided by a half-wall of cinderblocks. On his side—the medical bay. Two simple cots with thin mattresses. A wheeled stainless steel tray holding a blood pressure cuff, a penlight, and other unnamed instruments. Wall-mounted cabinets with glass fronts revealed their sterile contents. Through the open doorway in the half-wall, he could see the other room. The war room. A long, battered wooden table, its surface scarred with rings and scratches, was surrounded by mismatched chairs. The wall behind it wasn't decorated; it was a living, breathing archive. It was plastered with topographic maps of the state, their corners curling. With grainy, blown-up photographs of wooded areas and city alleys, red circles drawn on them. With sheets of notebook paper covered in dense, handwritten script, the ink faded to a rusty brown over years. The legacy of Becca and her late husband. A history of the hunt, pinned to the wall for reference.
His gaze, weary and sore, drifted to the other cot in the medical bay.
A woman lay there, utterly still. She was a stranger.
She had light brown hair spilled across the thin pillow, and her face was soft, unmarked by the hard lines of constant vigilance or the subtle scars of a life spent in conflict. She looked young, maybe early twenties, and in her unconscious state, there was a peaceful emptiness to her features. One of her hands lay atop the grey wool blanket. Her fingers were slim, and her fingernails were clean, neatly shaped, and bore no trace of grit or grime.
This was no hunter.
She looked like she belonged in a sunny campus quad, holding a textbook. Or in a quiet office, typing at a computer. She carried the aura of a normal, unburdened life. Her presence here, in this gritty, hidden tomb dedicated to violence and survival, was the most jarring thing in the room. She was a question mark laid out on a cot, a piece of a peaceful world that had somehow fallen into the dark, concrete reality of his.
A heavy mechanical clunk broke the silence, followed by the soft, electric whir of a motor.
The vault-like door swung inward. Becca rolled through the opening in her wheelchair, the oversized tires whispering over the concrete floor. She saw him propped up on his elbows, and her expression—usually a mask of stoic readiness—softened. The tight line of her mouth relaxed into something genuine. Relief.
"Ah," she said, her voice a low, steady tone that fit the room perfectly. "You're awake."
She maneuvered her chair closer with practiced ease, coming to a stop beside his cot. Her eyes performed a quick, professional scan. They checked the pallor of his face, the clarity in his eyes, the rise and fall of the bandages around his ribs. Her hands, resting on the chair's arms, were strong and capable, crisscrossed with fine white scars. They were the hands of someone who had patched more holes in people than in drywall.
Ace tried to speak, but his throat was a dry riverbed. He managed a weak nod instead. He looked away from her assessing gaze, his own eyes drifting back to the cold, blank ceiling, focusing on a tiny crack in the concrete.
"How are you feeling?" she asked. Her tone wasn't bubbly or overly sweet. It was calm. Matter-of-fact. The tone of a medic who needed accurate information, not a performance.
"Fine," he rasped out. The word was a brittle thing, crumbling in the quiet room. He attempted a faint smile for her benefit, but it felt stiff and foreign on his face.
"That's good to hear," she said, and she sounded like she meant it. A simple statement of fact. She reached for a plastic cup with a straw from the rolling tray and held it for him. He took a sip. The water was lukewarm and tasted faintly of minerals, but it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. "Well, I think I should call your mother. She's been worried sick about you."
She pulled a sleek, black phone from a pouch on the side of her chair. Her thumbs moved over the screen not with frantic haste, but with a swift, deliberate efficiency. She wasn't just texting a worried parent. She was sending a secure, coded all-clear. A status update on an asset who was back online. The blue light of the screen reflected in her watchful eyes.
"Thanks," Ace said, his voice a little stronger now, scraped clean by the water. He swallowed, the action making the ache in his ribs pulse. "How long have I been out for?"
Becca looked up from the phone. She paused, her eyes reading something on the screen—a new message, a timeline. Her lips pressed together for a fraction of a second. Then she looked back at him, her gaze direct and unflinching.
"Almost fifteen hours."
The number didn't just land in his ears. It hit him in the center of his chest, a cold, solid weight that stole the shallow breath he'd just taken.
Fifteen hours.
A lifetime. He'd been hurt before. Bruised, cut, cracked a bone once falling out of a tree as a kid. He'd been sore and aching more mornings than he could count. But he'd never been… erased. That poltergeist hadn't just knocked him down. It had hollowed him out and left his body to shut down for over half a day. It had stolen time, leaving only this deep, pervasive ache and a fuzzy void where memories should be. A cold knot, different from the physical pain, coiled in his gut. It was the feeling of his own mortality, not as a concept, but as a measurable quantity—fifteen hours of it, gone.
Becca saw the shift in his eyes. The hunter's instinct trying to calculate the cost, the boy's shock at the price. She leaned forward slightly in her chair and placed the back of her cool, scarred hand against his forehead. It was a gesture of pure, practiced care, checking for fever, for the heat of infection.
"Don't worry," she said, her voice softening just a degree, but losing none of its firmness. "The injuries will heal. No permanent damage. No scars." She withdrew her hand, satisfied. "You were just… profoundly exhausted. Your body needed the dark and the quiet to fix itself. That's all."
Her words were meant to be a comfort, but they also felt like a clinical verdict. He wasn't a hero shaking off a blow. He was a biological system that had been overloaded and forced to reboot. He was breakable. The fight had proven it.
"Where's Cedric?" Ace asked, pushing the cold, clinical thought away. He needed an anchor in the here and now.
A faint, almost-smile touched Becca's lips. "He's fine. Woke up about two hours ago. Groggy. Sore. Complaining that his head feels like a snare drum. He's upstairs right now, probably eating his way through the second gallon of my chicken soup."
Ace gave a small, real nod this time. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction. "That's good to know."
Before Becca could say anything else—before she could ask another question, offer more water, or deliver another sobering fact—a new sound came from the doorway.
It wasn't the soft whir of her chair.
It was a bang. A violent, metallic crash as the heavy door was flung open hard enough to slam against the concrete wall.
Sophie stood framed in the bright rectangle of light from the hallway above. Her face was bone-white. Her eyes were wide, red-rimmed, and locked directly on him. For one endless second, she didn't move. She just stared, as if verifying that the image before her matched the nightmare she'd been carrying for fifteen hours.
Sophie did not walk. She ran.
The distance from the door to his cot was only a few yards, but she crossed it in a blur of desperate motion. She sank onto the edge of the thin mattress and her arms went around him, pulling him into a hug so fierce and tight it forced a pained grunt from his lips. She was shaking. He could feel the fine tremors running through her entire body, feel the dampness of her tears against his neck before he even heard her sob. She held him like he was something that had been lost at sea, something she had pulled back onto solid ground with her bare hands.
"Mom," he choked out, the word muffled against her shoulder. "I can't... breathe."
She loosened her grip, but only just enough to lean back and cup his face in her hands. Her thumbs brushed over his cheekbones, her eyes searching his, looking past the bandages and the pallor for her son. Fresh tears traced clean lines through the worry on her face.
The doorway filled with others, a silent audience to this raw reunion.
Axl stepped in first, moving with a hunter's quiet grace, but his usual smirk was gone. His face was grave, his eyes shadowed. He leaned a shoulder against a cabinet full of bandages, crossing his arms. He wasn't lounging. He was bracing himself.
Garath followed, a stoic pillar of quiet. He took a position near the heavy door, his back to the wall, his gaze sweeping the room once before settling, watchful and unreadable, on the scene at the bed.
Cedric hovered in the doorway behind his mother's wheelchair, looking older than his years. He had a faded bruise blossoming on his temple and moved with a stiff caution. His eyes met Ace's, and he gave a single, small nod. We made it.
Axl broke the heavy silence, his voice a low rasp that tried for his usual playful tone but missed by a mile. "Easy, Aunt Sophie. You'll finish what the ghost started. He needs air, not another crushing injury."
Sophie let out a wet, shaky sound that was half laugh, half sob. She released Ace's face but kept one hand firmly on his good shoulder, a point of contact she seemed unable to break. She swiped at her cheeks with the back of her other hand.
"How are you feeling?" she asked, her voice thick.
"I'm fine," he said automatically, the hunter's mantra. His eyes, however, slid past her to the other cot, to the unconscious stranger. His mind, cutting through the fog of pain and relief, was already clicking back into the only gear it knew. "Who's that girl?"
Axl followed his gaze. "That's Layla. The house you decided to remodel with your body? It was hers. I found her hiding in the upstairs toilet, curled into a ball and frozen with shock. She's been in and out ever since."
Ace absorbed this. The poltergeist. The haunted house. The victim. The pieces connected with a cold, logical click. "So does she have any connection?" he asked, his voice gaining a thread of focus. "I mean, why was it haunting her house? Is there a history, a family link? If we can figure out the connection, we can trace the ritual's—"
"Ace."
His mother's voice cut through his words, sharp and brittle as glass. He looked at her, the momentum of his thoughts stalling.
Sophie was shaking her head, her hand tightening on his shoulder. Her eyes, so full of relief a moment ago, were now bright with a different, fiercer emotion. "You just woke up. You're wrapped up like... like this. And the first thing you want to do is talk about the hunt?"
Ace stared at her, genuinely confused. "Well... yeah. The faster we figure this out, the faster it's over. We can't just stop."
"No."
The word was flat. Final. It was not a mother's suggestion. It was a declaration.
Sophie took a shuddering breath, trying to steady herself. The tears won, spilling over again. "You expect me to just let my teenage son go back out there? To fight something we don't even understand? Something that could..." Her voice hitched, breaking on the unsaid word. Kill you. She paused, gathering the shattered pieces of her composure. "The only reason I allowed you on this hunt was because I trusted them." Her gaze flickered to Axl and Garath, standing like guilty statues. "I trusted their ability to keep you and Cedric safe. And I mean no offense to either of you," she said, her voice trembling but direct, "but just look. Look at how this ended."
She turned her tear-streaked face back to Ace, her pain transforming into a devastating, simple truth. "You were gone for hours, Ace. Hours. Do you have any idea what that was like? I thought... I really thought I could lose you forever."
Her voice dissolved into a quiet, helpless sob. She brought a hand to her mouth, as if to hold the sound in, but it was too late. The sound of her fear filled the sterile, concrete room, louder than any monster's scream had ever been.
In the other bed, Layla slept on, lost in her own unknowable nightmares.
In this one, Ace stared at his mother, the mission that gave his life meaning crumbling to ash in the face of the love that had given him life in the first place. The silence that followed was heavier than the concrete, thicker than the bandages, and far, far more terrifying.