The candle fla swayed.
A quill scratched across parchnt in the flickering light, and through the window, a full moon hung cold and indifferent above the city.
The man holding the pen was dressed impeccably, but his breathing had gone ragged, and sothing raw and bitter sat heavy behind his eyes.
On the corner of the desk sat a syringe. The liquid inside was a deep, vivid crimson.
*Experintal Formula Type I — Vampire.*
Henry Isaac signed the last stroke of his farewell letter, leaned forward, and blew out the oil lamp. He picked up the folded pages and held them for a mont.
Outside his office, alarms had been screaming for God knows how long. The sounds of a fight bled through the walls, slamming, crashing, soone’s voice cutting off mid-curse.
Then silence.
Just footsteps. Steady, unhurried, growing closer.
*Knock. Knock.*
Two raps on the door. The voice that followed was polite in its words and utterly empty in its tone.
"Mr. Henry Isaac. Your ti is up."
Henry closed his eyes.
He folded the letter and slid it between the pages of a thick volu on the shelf. His hand wasn’t quite steady.
*Knock. Knock.*
No words this ti. Just the knock, and then that sa suffocating silence pressing against the door from the other side.
Henry exhaled slowly. Picked up the syringe. Pressed the needle to the side of his neck.
His lips trembled. His gaze wavered.
Then he pushed the plunger down.
The crimson spread fast, climbing the whites of his eyes in an instant, draining the color from his skin. His canines began to lengthen at a pace that shouldn’t have been possible.
**BANG.**
The shotgun blast punched through the door lock. A second shot followed imdiately after. The handle exploded outward in a spray of splinters and shredded wood.
A hand reached through the gap. Black glove. Calm, deliberate fingers finding the chanism inside and turning it.
The door swung open.
He was tall. Black trench coat, sharp jaw, sharper eyes.
The kind of face that gave nothing away because there was nothing left to give.
Blue eyes — unusual ones — frad by lightweight rimless glasses. A scar cut across his brow bone.
The stolen sawn-off shotgun dropped from his hand without ceremony.
His right hand still held a suppressed 9mm as he swept his gaze across the room in one practiced arc.
Behind him, the corridor leading to the office looked like a battlefield. Bodies at wrong angles.
So still twitching. So not. Every one of them lying in spreading dark pools, their weapons scattered uselessly around them.
Henry knew who this was.
One of the Southern Federation’s Black Gloves.
*Raphael Alanster.*
His grip tightened on the leather armrest without him aning to. Cold sweat traced a slow line down his temple.
Raphael’s gaze paused briefly on the mounted deer head near the door.
Then it found Henry, and stayed.
Like a hunter who’d already decided the hunt was over. The weight of that stare made it hard to breathe.
He stepped inside. Closed the door. Walked to the desk.
"Henry Isaac. Suspected theft of a restricted cultural artifact from the 3rd District. Suspected narcotics trafficking." A beat. "Anything you’d like to say in your defense?"
Henry tried to pull up sothing like a smirk. His face didn’t cooperate.
The gun barrel touched his forehead — cold tal, no hesitation — and his heart seed to stutter and miss. He raised both hands slowly and stood.
"Hand it over."
There wasn’t much choice in that voice. There wasn’t much of anything in it.
Henry walked stiffly to the bookshelf and pulled out a specific volu.
The chanism triggered imdiately. The shelves on either side slid apart with a low grind of gears, revealing the hidden room beyond.
At the center stood a glass display case.
Inside it: a triangular stone tablet. Carved into its face in relief, a bronze eye, rendered in painstaking detail, staring at nothing and everything at once.
Henry stared at it.
His hand flew to his chest. The breath he pulled in ca out jagged.
His heartbeat was all over the place, too fast, then stuttering, then lurching, and the light hitting his skin felt like it was burning straight through.
Raphael noticed. He tilted his head slightly and keyed his earpiece.
"This is Raphael. Stolen artifact located. Target displaying abnormal behavior."
"*Ha—*"
Henry’s voice ca out low and guttural. Sothing shifted under his skin, a crawling, rolling movent, like muscle and tissue rearranging itself against its own will.
Raphael looked at him for exactly half a second.
Then he pulled the trigger.
*Thud.*
Henry went down. The body hit the floor and kept twitching, small, erratic movents, like sothing inside still hadn’t gotten the ssage.
The earpiece crackled. An older voice, asured and unhurried.
"Dispatch here. Evidence reviewed. Lethal force authorized."
Raphael looked down at the body.
"Already handled."
He’d always been better at acting first and reporting after.
He used the pistol to knock out the display case glass, reached in, and lifted the stone tablet free.
*Thud. Thud.*
The mont contact was made, he heard his own heartbeat.
It was too loud. Wrong sohow.
Static flooded his vision, fragnted symbols, cascading like broken code, and the edges of his sight began to warp and tear.
A burning sensation spread through his eyes, deep and insistent, like sothing trying to push its way inward through the pupils.
"That’s—"
He wrenched his gaze away. His voice, for the first ti, carried sothing other than flat indifference.
"This is Raphael. During contact with the recovered artifact, an incident has—"
The words stopped.
Fabric tearing. A sound like that, behind him, wet and violent, followed by sothing between a growl and a scream, and the sll of blood rising sharp and sudden in the air.
He turned his head.
Henry’s corpse had its hands on the floor.
It was getting up.
The body moved wrong, joints bent at angles they shouldn’t, spine curved in a shape no living thing was built to make, but it was rising, slowly and steadily, until it was upright and facing him.
"*Hk— hk—*"
The fingers had changed. Too long, the nails drawn out into razors. The canines were grotesque. The eyes were solid red.
Raphael watched it for a mont.
"...This is Raphael. Situation is out of control."
The red eyes found his blue ones.
Two predators. Neither blinking.
Then the tablet in his hand vibrated.
He glanced down instinctively, and his eyes t the carved bronze eye on its surface for the second ti.
The symbols ca back. But this ti they weren’t just static.
They bypassed his eyes entirely, writing themselves directly into the back of his mind in a language he’d never learned and sohow understood completely.
*[Hunter qualification detected.]*
*[Connecting to Sinner’s Hunting System...]*
"...What."
It was the first genuinely confused expression Raphael Alanster had made in a long ti.
He didn’t get ti to think about it.
Henry *moved* — a burst of speed that was closer to teleportation than running, crossing the distance between them in the span of a blink, those elongated claws already slicing through the air with a shriek of displaced wind—
*One mont of distraction.*
That was all it took.
The claws were already filling his vision.
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