The café door swung open, the small bell above it ringing clean and bright.
Warm outside air pushed in around Raphael as he stepped through and pulled the door shut behind him. Across the crowd, his eyes found the stalker imdiately.
Even in forty-degree heat, the man was wearing a black hoodie. Mask on. Sunglasses on. The full ensemble.
He realized he’d been spotted. He turned and ran.
The food district at midday was dense with people, families, couples, tourists with bags, children moving unpredictably in every direction.
Running in a straight line wasn’t an option for either of them.
Raphael didn’t hurry. He maintained a fixed distance, not closing, not falling back. Close enough that the man couldn’t pretend he’d lost his pursuer.
Far enough to let the panic build at its own pace. The oldest kind of hunting: patient, inevitable, waiting for the prey to spend itself.
The stalker kept looking back. Every ti he did, Raphael was exactly where he’d been.
"Hh — hh — hh—!"
The man’s breathing was audible at twenty ters. His body had not been built for this. Within a few blocks he was soaked through, heaving for air, his pace dropping despite himself.
Ahead, a cluster of children playing, two by two, holding hands. The stalker didn’t slow. He shoved through them.
"Out of the way!"
A small boy stumbled, tipped sideways, his head angling toward the wall.
A hand caught him.
"You alright?"
Raphael steadied the boy, set him right, and walked on.
The crowd around the incident had turned hostile, people on their phones, a few young n already looking at the retreating figure with purpose.
The stalker was generating his own problems now.
Ahead, a father and daughter walking side by side. The stalker checked over his shoulder, saw Raphael, and shoved the girl out of his path.
She went down hard. Scraped knees, a sharp cry of pain.
Her father was a large man with a beard and the kind of build that took up significant space in any room.
He turned around abruptly, glaring angrily at the person who had pushed his daughter away. Without a word, he raised his hand and slapped the person hard across the face.
Crack.
The stalker went sideways and down. Half his face swelled imdiately. A tooth hit the pavent. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
Raphael whistled quietly.
He noticed a set of keys near his foot, dropped soti during the chase, and pocketed them.
The stalker glared up at him with the maximum available hatred, pushed himself onto his hands and knees.
The large father was not finished. His daughter was pulling his arm.
He ignored this and delivered a kick to the midsection that sent the man rolling two ters before he stopped, curled around himself, making sounds suggesting his ribs had submitted a formal complaint.
"He’s a stalker," Raphael ntioned conversationally to the surrounding crowd. "Been following a woman for weeks. Today he finally showed himself."
The crowd, which had been uncertain about the spectacle of a large man kicking soone in a public street, erupted in approval. The father’s posture shifted from slightly guilty to openly proud. He flexed.
Raphael ca to stand over the stalker and watched him try and fail to get upright several tis.
Too many eyes here. Not the right place.
He reached down, grabbed the man by the hair, and pulled him to his feet. Then he put a boot in the back of him, not hard, just enough to get him moving.
"Keep running, little rat."
"Damn you!"
The stalker lurched into a side alley behind a furniture shop, grabbed a discarded clothing rack, and threw it across the path behind him. He didn’t look back as he rounded the corner.
In the shadow of the wall, there was a brief sound, his sunglasses falling, landing lens-up on the ground. The reflection caught his eyes. They were full of a specific, burning hatred.
"That bastard. Nosy bastard. And that woman, she deserves everything coming to her."
He spat blood onto sothing he’d pulled from his pocket. A figure, palm-sized, bundled straw bound with cord, its surface covered in small carved symbols.
His blood landed on it and the figure seed to drink it. His body began to shudder, then convulse in slow, rhythmic pulses, until the convulsions settled into sothing almost controlled.
He put the sunglasses back on and started climbing.
---
Raphael stepped over the clothing rack without breaking stride, rounded the corner, and found the stalker using garbage bins, broken furniture, and an old air conditioning unit as a climbing route up the exterior wall.
"More coordination than I expected."
He picked up a small pebble from the ground, set it against his fingertip, and flicked it.
Snap.
It struck the man’s climbing hand with precision. A muffled sound of pain, and the hand opened, leaving him hanging by one arm, swaying against the wall.
"You’re really not letting go. Fine, if you want to be up there, I’ll help."
He stepped back, took a short run at the wall, and went up it without using any of the improvised handholds, just Body Functions Lv3 applied to a vertical surface, feet finding grip.
He landed on the air conditioning unit, used the stalker’s shoulder as a step without ceremony, and pulled himself onto the roof.
The stalker grunted. His other hand held on.
Raphael crouched at the edge and looked down at him with mild curiosity.
"One hand. That’s not normal."
He reached down, took hold of the man’s wrist, and hauled him up onto the roof. Then one smooth pivot of the hips, minimal effort, and the man hit the concrete surface back-first.
"Ah—!"
Finally a real sound. He lay there twitching, pulling air in shallow gulps.
Raphael stood over him.
"Good location. No caras. Plenty of options."
He crouched beside him, voice conversational.
"I could take your arms. You’d never hold a cara again. Or your eyes, simpler, more direct.
Or the spine. Paralysis. You’d spend the rest of your life in a public ward, maintained by people who don’t know your na, and eventually you’d die in there, unremarked, and they’d put you in a grave without a stone."
The stalker bared his teeth.
"You’ll regret this."
Then he went still.
His skin began to change.
It softened, then split, then pulled away from the surface, and underneath it, where flesh should have been, there was straw.
Raphael watched this with his hands resting on his knees.
The corner of his mouth curved upward.
"Interesting."
User Comments
0 comments from readers