Blood In The Streets

Night pooled in New Ash City like spilled ink, neon rims bleeding into the gutters. Arikado moved through it the way a man moves through a dream he doesn’t trust, slow, precise, senses on thin wire. Sirens painted the wet pavement in slices of red and blue. Holo-ads hiccuped above, their smiles gone wrong in the rain. The crowd pressed at the barricades, faces washed in sodium light and corporate glare; some held placards that spat slogans into the air like cheap fireworks, others filmed everything with the same blank curiosity that watched traffic accidents. Electricity hummed under the scene, a low animal sound that made his molars ache.
The antique shop looked wrong, an anachronism wedged into a city drunk on chrome and neon lies. Its wooden sign sagged in the haze, paint curling like old scabs. The automatic doors wheezed on their track, jerking open a hand’s width before shuddering to a halt. Dust lined the rubber seals, and the sensor above blinked like a dying eye. Arikado’s mouth tightened. He never trusted places that kept the past out front; the past had edges it didn’t dull. Dispatch had called it a break-in, maybe an assault. That fit on paper. But the way the entry fought itself, the half-dead motion, the mechanical stutter, said different. His gut pulled the old way, the instinct that had carried him through too many late watches and bad calls.
Adrenaline tasted metallic on his tongue, a penny left too long in the rain. He felt it in his hands first, the slight tremor that made the pistol feel heavier than it should. His smart-sights hummed a soft green against his retina; the reticle hovered like a heartbeat. He tightened his grip until the knuckles on his free hand went white. If this was a human thing, his training would find it. If it wasn’t, if it was the city’s new kind of rot, then training would be a superstition.
The reedy wail cut through the barricade, thin as rusted wire. The shop’s owner, wrinkled hands knotting on themselves, lips trembling with the dry vowels of a Diletan drawl, pleaded for mercy. Arikado caught the accent instantly. Out of place. Another reminder that Okabe kept letting outsiders slip through the cracks. He didn’t need to turn and look. The picture was already there in his mind: a sand-scraper gasping for foothold in a city that would never claim them.
He kept his eyes on the shopfront instead, on the smear oozing from its mouth. Black, slow, lacquer-shiny. The squad lamps hit it and came back wrong, too sharp, reflections arranged like something deliberate. Not oil. Not blood. No word in his language fit. The sight knifed a chill up his spine, something raw, something the city shouldn’t allow.
His throat rasped dry. He thumbed the comm at his shoulder, hand foreign on his own gear. “Central,” he managed, voice ironed flat against the tremor, “unknown viscous substance at the scene. Looks—” He cut the word off. Any description would be a lie in front of that thing. The silence he left behind told more truth than adjectives could. In his gut, the knot clenched cold and tight.
The captain’s reply came rough, cigarette gravel to the shop’s owner: “Not our concern. Priority stands. Get civilians out. Neutralize. Contain.” Orders dropped blunt, a ritual chant meant to cauterize panic, more for the trembling old man than for them.
Then static. Then dispatch: backup two minutes out. Not soon enough. Arikado let the numbers roll through his head, a rhythm to force his nerves into a plan. He would enter. He would see. He would call if there was something to report. The sentence coiled in the rain like a promise he had no right to make.
He moved anyway. Boots pressed slow into the slick curb, every step a mark on the city’s ledger. One foot forward. One heartbeat spent. The skyline leaned with him, neon bleeding like fresh wounds across the storm-smeared glass. At the shop’s threshold the black smear waited, patient as rot. Crossing it felt like nudging the world itself, tipping it just enough to whisper back what it had swallowed, secrets slick and unspit, waiting for him inside.
“Roger,” Arikado said, breath hitching before he forced it level.
A hand clapped his shoulder, Vince, partner for the night, grin stretched thin but still trying. “Good luck in there, man. Don’t trip over your own boots.”
Arikado gave a short nod. His gut twisted. It felt less like walking into a call and more like booting up one of those horror sims he used to mock. The crowd behind the barricade jittered in the haze, shadows and nerves feeding off each other. A news drone’s spotlight skittered across their faces, one more buzzard circling.
He pushed through the half-open automatic doors. Darkness folded over him.
A tungsten bulb sputtered overhead, throwing a jaundiced strobe across the showroom. His muzzle light picked out the wreckage, shelves overturned, cabinets cracked open, circuit boards and glass trinkets scattered like shrapnel across the tile. Posters peeled down in strips, rock bands and movie idols warped into torn half-smiles. Vandalism he’d seen before, but the pattern here was too deliberate.
Cold clung instantly. His visor fogged with each breath, vapor blooming where it shouldn’t in a city basement. Freezer, his mind said. Morgue, his nerves corrected.
He pressed two fingers to the side of his visor, switching to low-light mode. The display flickered alive in dull green outlines, shelves, tables, debris, but the feed crawled with static fuzz. Electronic interference? The MantraNet uplink in the corner of his vision kept blinking, struggling to hold an augmented overlay. Something’s messing with my optics, he thought, skin prickling.
Boots crunched on broken glass as he inched forward. “I’m inside,” he whispered into the radio, voice barely above a breath. “Can’t see a damn thing… and it’s freezing. Feels… wrong.”
A burst of crackling static answered. Then Vince’s voice, tinny and laced with nervous humor: “Hey Arikado, you scared of the dark now? Want me to hold your hand?” Another officer snickered over the channel, a couple chuckles following. Cop banter, the old routine, mock the fear before it swallows you.
“Shut up, Vince,” Arikado growled, forcing a smirk he didn’t feel. “I just can’t see shit in here. Feels like the AC’s set to Arctic.” The exchange steadied him a notch, grounding him. Focus.
He slid another step between overturned shelves. His boot splashed in something. The beam of his flashlight cut across it: a wide puddle of black liquid. It rippled faintly, catching a sliver of reflection. The smell rose up, iron-thick and rotten, and laced through it was a faint thread of glowing blue, like bioluminescent algae.
Arikado’s stomach flipped. What the hell bleeds black and blue?
Arikado kept his voice low, more a mutter to himself than to the squad. “No, I mean it’s darker than night. I can’t see anything.”
The beam from his muzzle lamp skated across wreckage: shelves collapsed into each other, aisles choked with glass and plastic guts of broken toys, fragments of circuitry like metallic scabs on the floor. A mess beyond looters. Beyond careless hands. “So much for keeping the place undamaged. Damn. What the hell happened here?” He tried for flat professionalism, but the words hung heavy in his chest. This wasn’t just vandalism. Something worse had come through here.
A faint scrape bled out of the dark. He froze. Boot? Hand?
His pistol came up without thought, sight carving a line into the void. The prickle at his neck told him more than the sound, same dread as those old patrols in the abandoned subway, when the air carried breath that wasn’t his. His grandmother’s voice echoed in memory: living fear, the kind that lodged deep and stayed.
“This is the police!” he barked, louder now, the echo bouncing sharp off the walls. “Come out with your hands where I can see them!”
Silence. Too thick, like it was waiting.
Overhead, a dying tube light sputtered, coughed out a flash. For half a heartbeat he saw her, a crouched figure near a toppled grandfather clock, hair lifted as if static clung to it. Then the bulb died, snuffing the room back into void.
Arikado’s throat went tight. He hissed into the radio, “I’ve got movement.”
Then red split the dark. Not light, eyes. Two burning points reflected in a fractured mirror, drilling into him. His chest locked just before the sound hit: a shriek, high and ragged, not just a woman’s scream but something warped, stitched with the crackle of live current.
Pain tore him open. White heat stabbed through his gut, his own voice breaking loose in a gasp. He looked down, metal? No, not metal. A claw, slick and dripping with his blood. His blood. It pulled free with a wet drag and his legs buckled, warmth rushing down his thighs.
She stood before him now, clear as nightmare. A woman’s shape, but not human, the lithe frame carried molten-copper eyes, fingertips alive with sparks that danced like hungry insects. The air warped around her, buzzing, bending to her pulse. That grin, too wide, too eager, was both a threat and a dare.
He jerked his weapon up, instinct more than reason. Too slow.
Impact hit him like a wrecking ball, force swallowing him whole. He felt glass before he saw it, body shattering through a display case, shards exploding in spiderweb cracks around him. Pain tore his arms, his insides blazing as if they’d been set on fire.
A scream ripped out of him, raw, unplanned, echoing through the ruin like his last remaining truth.
Arikado’s scream tore through the night, and Vince Santos felt his stomach knot. Someone shouted “Officer down!” and the section captain barked, “Move, move, move!” No hesitation. No choice. Vince followed the surge, boots hammering, rifle tight against his shoulder, though the sweat already slicked his grip.
Inside was worse. The shop’s shadows pressed like a weight, air choked with dust and the metallic stink of blood. His light jittered across toppled shelves, glass glittering underfoot like teeth. He could still hear the mob outside, angry, restless, one spark from a riot. And they were the match being struck.
Then she appeared. A woman’s silhouette framed in wreckage, her hair lifted by some unseen charge. One of the guys yelled the command, “On the ground!” but Vince heard the crack in his voice. That weakness made it real: none of them believed she’d obey.
Her smile cut too wide, peeling back into something cruel. Sparks crawled over her hands, hissing in the dark. Then she laughed, a jagged, electric rasp that scraped Vince’s spine raw.
Witch. The word erupted in his head, the way his mother used to whisper it in old stories of spirits that dragged men to hell. His finger jerked before he thought. The bullet should have ended it. Instead, it stopped in the air like time itself had gripped it, then clinked uselessly to the floor.
“It’s a witch!” he shouted, voice breaking. It sounded like a child’s cry.
Gunfire filled the room, every flash slicing chaos into pieces. Arikado was down, bleeding out in the corner, but Vince couldn’t focus. Bullets sparked against an unseen wall around her, each hit chased by arcs of blue light. She walked through it all, barefoot, burning black prints into the tile. Her blood wasn’t blood, thick, black, streaked with blue fire. The stink of it made him gag.
Then her eyes went white, blinding. The glass walls burst inward, an explosion of razors screaming through the room. Pain hit before he even knew he’d been lifted.
He felt himself thrown, body rag-dolled by the storm. The world became shards and screaming, his own voice lost in it. For a heartbeat he thought of his mother’s stories, vengeful spirits, witches who fed on men’s fear, and knew he’d been right all along.
Then glass tore him away, and everything went black.
She stepped out of the wreckage as though the world belonged to her, blood cascading in torrents that splattered hot across the asphalt. Sparks hissed under her bare feet with every stride, bronze skin gleaming under the floodlights. Perfect form, but her grin, wild, jagged, too wide, belonged to something inhuman.
Behind her, the automatic door shrieked and tore loose. The motor gave one last howl before the slab came down with a crash that sent glass blasting into the street like shrapnel. The sound thundered through the block, a brutal drumbeat that marked the start of slaughter.
“On your hands and knees!” the captain bellowed. The words cracked, desperation leaking through.
She laughed. Low, sharp, giddy.
The first shot cracked. The bullet stopped inches from her chest, trembling in the air before clinking to the ground.
Gunfire roared in answer, the line erupting in panic. The block stuttered with muzzle flashes, rifles screaming on full auto. Bullets sparked off an invisible wall, arcs of electricity spraying outward with each impact. She walked through it without a flinch, every step calm, deliberate, as if she were strolling in the rain.
Her head jerked toward the cruisers, motion sharp and broken like a marionette cut loose. Lightning tore from her arm, a spear that ripped the night apart. The nearest patrol car detonated, exploding outward in a hurricane of fire and shrapnel. The blast chewed men into chunks, torsos ripped in half, limbs spiraling skyward, skulls bursting into mist.
The shockwave rolled down the block, hammering storefronts. Glass storefronts imploded, showering the screaming civilians who hadn’t run fast enough. Neon signs ripped loose and crashed onto the crowd, sparks igniting clothing, bodies trampled in the frenzy. A mother and child disappeared under the blast wave, their silhouettes shredded in the spray of glass and steel. Concrete cracked, chunks raining from a nearby office tower, burying a knot of bystanders in a crushing collapse.
Still she came on.
Holtz, the rookie, the baby-faced one, dropped his empty sidearm and drew his ceremonial saber, steel shining useless in the firelight. He screamed until it broke in his throat and charged, blade high.
Her eyes lit with cruel amusement. She made a flicking gesture, casual, like swatting a fly.
Holtz froze mid-stride. A seam of red split his chest, shoulder to hip. For a heartbeat he looked confused, then split open, his body shearing apart in a spray of steaming entrails. His guts burst out in ropes, slapping wet across the pavement as his halves crashed into the blood pooling at her feet.
The line collapsed. Officers screamed, firing wild, some running, others diving behind cruisers already smoldering, their glass peppered with chunks of bone. Flames licked up buildings, smoke boiling into the sky. Civilians clawed over each other in blind panic, their screams mixing with sirens, with the reek of ozone and burning flesh.
And she, she only smiled wider. Standing bronze and blood-slick in the firelight, her presence filled the block, a storm of violence made flesh, unstoppable and merciless.
The roar of engines cracked the night open, drowning out the ragged echoes of screams and dying gunfire. Graner felt it before he heard it, through the soles of his boots, through the bones of the street, two armored trucks thundering down the avenue, their engines snarling like chained beasts let loose. Headlights ripped through smoke, harsh beams dragging shadows across burned brick and splintered glass. Parked cars folded like tin, debris spun weightless in the wake. The asphalt shook as the tires screamed, trucks skidding to a halt with a smell of scorched rubber sharp enough to sting his nostrils.
Ahead, the woman raised her head. Eyes glinting, grin carved wider, like she drank in the chaos and savored it. She turned toward the convoy not with fear, not even defiance, something worse. Hunger.
The second truck’s bay split open on a long, metallic groan, hydraulics venting steam that smelled of hot grease and iron. The crowd’s gasp rippled like a shiver of prey animals sensing the predator step into the clearing. The mech descended, twelve feet of steel and ceramic, plates gleaming bone-white under floodlights, seams etched in gunmetal gray. Its weight cracked the pavement; dust plumed from the fissures. Servos whined with each motion, cables slithering from its gauntlets into the power unit on its back. The rifle it carried wasn’t a weapon so much as a limb, thick, brutal, humming faintly with charge. Its visor lit blood-red, the glow cutting through the smoke like a hot blade. The patrol cops sagged at the sight, shoulders loosening as if salvation had arrived in alloy. Fools. To Graner, it was no savior, just a hammer waiting for his hand.
His men came next. Black armor marked with SDP, shields catching stray sparks from the ruined storefront fire. They advanced in formation, rifles steady, every step pounding the broken street in unison. The flames reflected in their visors, painting them in shifting helllight. No fumbling, no wasted breath. Where the regulars hid and shook, these squads cut through the wreckage like a surgeon carving meat.
Graner climbed down from the lead truck. His boots hit the ground with a dull crack, trench coat flaring, body armor clattering beneath. He ripped the respirator free with a hiss, letting it swing loose. The night air struck his face, thick with copper stink from spilled blood, the acrid tang of burning circuits, the greasy smoke of ruptured fuel. He breathed deep anyway. Better to taste the rot than hide from it. His eyes swept the scene, cruisers broken like toys, streets slick with gore, uniforms crouched behind their own barricades, weapons shaking in weak hands. His scarred lips twisted into contempt.
“Pathetic,” he said, voice carrying clear over the hiss of fires and the groan of settling rubble. “Regular PD. Cowards. Couldn’t hold the line five damn minutes.”
Two of them flinched, ready to spit something back. Graner’s stare froze them, cold steel pinning flesh. He raised a gloved hand, finger stabbing toward the crowd pressing against barricades, their drones buzzing like flies over a carcass. “You. Clear the civilians. Show’s over. Get them out before they choke my field.”
The chosen officer jolted upright, panic twitching in his movements as he shoved through the gawkers, waving them back. The crowd groaned, the protest rising as a low, sour note, but they peeled away under the weight of his barked orders. Their heat lingered, sweat and cheap perfume clinging to the smoke.
Graner spat into the gutter, phlegm sizzling where it struck ash. His gaze never left the woman in the ruined doorway. Sparks licked up around her, crawling across wet stone, climbing her legs like the fire wanted her. That grin hadn’t broken. It was carved into her like a wound, like she was made of it.
Graner flexed his knuckles, joints popping, and jerked his chin toward the mech. The machine stirred, a low hydraulic sigh rolling out across the barricades.
“Let’s finish this.”
Graner fixed on the target already waiting in the street. Sparks bled off her body, pulling trash into lazy spirals. Blood striped her bronze skin in heavy sheets, dripping to a pool around her feet. She stood unbothered, hair floating in static arcs, eyes white-hot with energy. That grin wasn’t fear. It was invitation.
“Primary target: female hostile, paranormal class,” Graner barked, voice even over the noise. “Containment if possible. If not, terminate.”
Graner planted his boots, forcing the tremor out of his legs. The men needed a wall, not another body ready to break. He raised the amplifier, throat raw.
“On your knees! Hands behind your head!”
The order cracked off the glass towers. He hated how thin it sounded, even carried through steel. Red dots quivered on her chest, waiting for her to fold. She didn’t. Still as a loaded trap. Graner’s gut soured. This was the pause before the blood.
Her head tilted, that manic grin stretching too wide. Then she stepped forward, bare foot smearing blood on the pavement like it was paint. Sparks danced at her nails, and then came the laugh, high, broken, a nursery rhyme strangled in static. Graner’s jaw clenched. Orders or not, no one was walking her out in cuffs.
But the brass wanted her alive. They had hammered that into him before deployment, no explanation given. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care. Right now, alive meant dead cops.
A rookie cracked first. One shot snapped out. For half a breath Graner prayed it might land, better to beg forgiveness later than watch another man fry. The slug froze midair, fell to the street. Graner swore under his breath.
That broke the line. Rifles roared, plasma and lead splitting the night. Graner held steady, but he felt the panic tearing through the men, same as him. Orders said don’t kill her. Orders didn’t say how to stop her.
Sure enough, her hand rose, lightning snapping into a shield. Bullets sparked off, whining past his head. She kept walking. Unhurried. Untouchable.
Graner’s eyes cut left. One kid was hyperventilating into his visor, fogging the glass. Another officer screamed and dumped his magazine. Useless. Graner’s chest tightened. Another wasted life about to happen.
Her head twitched toward the sound. A giggle. Then her wrist turned.
Lightning hit.
The cruiser blew apart, shrapnel ripping men down to scraps. Another body slammed against a lamppost, skull cracking sharp enough to carry. Heat punched Graner’s skin. Smoke clawed into his lungs.
Two troopers down. One screaming about shrapnel in his leg. Graner spat a curse. Enough.
He signaled the mech. His last play.
The machine stepped forward, thunder in its stride. Armor smoked, but it was built to tank worse. Graner’s teeth ground together.
Alive, the brass said. Alive. He watched her walking through fire and thought, if they want her breathing, they can come down here and bleed for it themselves.
Orders given, the squad locked into place. Shields forward. Rifles leveled. No hesitation. The mech dropped from the truck’s bay like a hammer, stabilizers whining, the mass of it shaking the pavement. It went to one knee, rifle braced, targeting beams cutting red through smoke and dust, crosshairs steady on her chest.
She screamed first, an inhuman wail that scraped marrow, and lightning answered. A jagged torrent ripped from her hand, spearing the mech dead-on. The block detonated into light, shadows etched sharp as knife cuts on brick and glass. Asphalt boiled, popping tar blisters that spat molten black across boots and shields. The air itself seemed to tear, the stink of ozone laced with scorched metal.
For a moment she had it, smoke choking, sparks vomiting from armor. The mech staggered, hydraulics shrieking. Then it straightened, charred plating glowing, optics flaring back alive. Capacitors wailed like tortured animals. It was still standing.
Graner’s hand cut the air. “Fire.”
The railgun’s charge screamed, a metallic howl splitting dawn, then unleashed. A bolt of annihilation ripped reality apart, vapor trailing like comet fire. It tore into her thigh and everything below it ceased to exist.
Her leg erupted into a storm of gore. Bone burst like a frag grenade, ivory shrapnel spinning end over end, slicing into walls and meat alike. Her femur split, marrow boiling out in thick yellow spurts. Veins whipped free, spraying ropes of arterial red across the street, painting squad armor in dripping streaks. Chunks of charred flesh slapped the pavement steaming, twitching. A single flap of skin dangled from her hip, fluttering before it tore loose.
The witch screamed, not the manic howl from before but a sound so raw it curdled air, ragged, keening, endless. She spun to the asphalt, body crunching. Graner heard ribs snap like brittle wood. She rolled once, leaving a smear of blood and viscera, hair matted to her face in a grotesque mask. Her jaw gnashed, teeth snapping red with her own meat.
The halo of lightning guttered out, sparks crawling and dying around her. The crushing psychic pressure vanished, leaving only steam hissing from the stump. She dragged herself backward with clawing fingers, nails ripping away as she scrabbled. A thick smear of blood fanned behind her, studded with chunks of meat she shed with every shove. The grin was gone. Pain and fury had hollowed her face, eyes wild, feral, drowning in hate.
The mech’s rifle cycled with a brutal clunk, the sound like a death sentence. The squad advanced as one, rifles unwavering, boots crunching broken glass and splintered bone underfoot. Formation immaculate.
Graner kept his eyes locked on her. If she twitched wrong, they would finish the work, carve what was left into slurry. Dawn crept over the skyline, gray light merciless, shining across her torn figure. It stripped the witch down past her theatrics. Not a monster now. Not even human. Just shredded meat waiting for the next round to erase it completely.
Graner pushed forward with the line, pulse hammering in his throat. The squad’s rifles tracked steady, but he could hear their ragged breaths over comms, loud enough to betray nerves. His own voice cracked when he barked, “Hold fire! If we can take her alive, do it!” Damn it, alive. He had to believe that was still possible. He jabbed his hand toward the containment team, dragging them up from behind the truck. Their suits looked too heavy, too clumsy for what they were walking into, weighted poles, a syringe big enough to drop a bull, and that bag stitched with runes. He hated those glowing veins, like something alive waiting to swallow what was left of her.
The witch moved. Not fast, not yet, just dragging herself upright on one trembling arm. Graner’s stomach knotted at the sight of her mismatched eyes: one human blue, the other a pale flicker that refused to die. Blood glazed her teeth when she grinned, feral and amused, as if the squad’s guns were children’s toys.
Two officers pounced. One slammed her wrist to the asphalt, the other drove a knee between her shoulders. “Got her!” the first shouted, but Graner caught the shake in his voice, the brittle edge under it. The witch shrieked, language, if it was language at all, that set Graner’s molars buzzing. The third man stepped in with the syringe, and Graner felt hope coil tight in his chest. If they could pin her, if they could stick her—
Then she moved, faster than thought. Her free arm whipped up, closing around the first man’s throat. Graner flinched at the sound, collar tearing like wet cloth, the rip of tendons. The officer’s visor filled with the panic of a dying animal. Graner’s own breath locked as the witch hissed something guttural, voice vibrating through his bones.
White light erupted. For an instant, Graner thought it was a flashbang, but the blast came from her hand, point-blank into the man’s helmet. The crack of it deafened him. Then the visor burst outward, and the street turned red. Shards of glassy polycarb rained across the truck, flecks of skull skittering in wet arcs. A spray of blood painted the squad in steam. Graner caught himself staring at the flap of scalp that clung to a shield, dripping like butchered meat.
The body toppled, spurting from a ragged stump where the head had been. Graner’s gut clenched hard enough to bring bile to his throat. The containment officer with the syringe screamed, stumbling back.
The witch laughed. The sound gurgled wet through her ruined throat, a jagged music that climbed into a child’s giggle gone wrong, warped through broken speakers. She crawled out from under the corpse, dragging herself across the gore-slick street, leaving smears that steamed in dawn light.
When the sun lifted over the skyline, it caught her silhouette: drenched in blood, hair matted in ropes, claws dripping. She rose, half-dead and smiling wide, obscene and triumphant.
Graner’s mouth went dry. She wasn’t just a suspect now. No, she had slipped past human into something worse. Something you told in stories to keep recruits awake at night. A nightmare standing in arterial spray, daring them to try again.
Graner’s words came out before he thought them, sharp as bone tearing through skin. “Enough. Quit screwing around, kill her!”
The order was his, but it felt borrowed, some darker voice inside him pushing it out.
The rifles answered. A wall of thunder slammed into the night, high-caliber rounds hammering flesh into pulp. He braced, but it didn’t matter; every impact landed in his bones, each one ringing in his teeth like a hammer on a coffin lid.
The witch convulsed under the barrage. Arms snapped at impossible angles. Spine bent, cracked, re-formed, as if the body couldn’t decide what shape to die in. Blood geysered from her chest in steaming arcs, slicking chrome walls, raining over shattered glass. Her face peeled back under the bullets, skin split in ribbons, eyes bursting wet in their sockets.
And then that laugh.
Shrill, jagged, climbing through the storm. It wasn’t sound; it was memory already, burned into his skull before it was finished. The kind of laugh that waits in silence, years later, to slip into your ears again. It rose higher, like she was growing stronger from the punishment, not weaker. For a breath Graner swore she would stand, a new monster blooming from the ruin.
But the fire drowned her. Lungs shredded, laugh collapsing into bubbles of blood. The body finally gave out, meat unstitched, bones jutting like knives through wet clay. Still his men fired, because stopping meant facing what they had made.
When the silence came, it was wrong. He heard the brass raining on asphalt, the hiss of cooling steel, the faint groans of wounded men. Underneath it, though, was something worse, the phantom echo of her laugh, still alive in the spaces between his breaths.
Graner’s eyes locked on the mess in the street. A pulsing mass of twitching muscle, fragments of her scattered like butcher’s scraps. Blood spread outward in halos, black in the thin dawn. It looked less like a body than an idea of one, already abstract, already corrupting the air around it.
His chest clenched. The stink of gore crawled up his nose, turned metallic on his tongue. His gut tightened like he was about to vomit, but nothing came, just a dry heave that left his throat raw. He reloaded by habit, mechanical, clinging to the ritual because it gave his hands something to do besides shake.
He nudged the remains with his boot. It slopped over, boneless, obscene. He exhaled, but the relief was counterfeit, thin. The sight would never leave him. He knew it. Nights ahead would smell like cordite, taste like iron. The laugh would follow him into silence, into sleep.
“Bag it,” he muttered. “Call med teams. Now.” His voice was shredded, like the words came from someone else’s mouth.
He looked up, instinct, dread, to the rooftops. Black shapes against bruised sky. For a heartbeat, he swore something shifted there. Eyes. A watcher. Or maybe just his brain trying to fill the gaps with demons. PTSD didn’t wait until later; it started here, now, in the twitch at the corner of his vision, in the certainty that shadows knew his name.
Graner spat, but the taste of copper clung. If monsters like this walked his city, then the war wasn’t ending with dawn. It was only beginning, and his mind was already its first casualty.
The figure stood still against the dawn, cloak tugged by the breeze. Striped cloth, painted grin, bells that chimed too softly to belong to wind, he wore them all without unease. Below, sirens screamed, boots clattered, voices barked. The witch’s body lay broken among them, and yet none there seemed to know how to mourn her.
He tilted his head, watching. The motion was slow, measured, almost tender. His sigh slipped into the air like a benediction, followed by words touched with an archaic grace:
“Alas… what a pity. The lady hadst shown such promise.”
The syllables carried gentle, almost comforting, as though meant to console. But the air chilled in their wake, and the sound seemed to linger far longer than it should have, threading through the din of sirens like a ghost note.
An officer glanced up, startled, eyes fixing on the rooftop. Too late. The figure had already gone, folding back into the mist as though he had never been.
Nothing remained, no cloak, no bells, no shadow. Only the echo of that voice, faint and clinging, as though the city itself remembered what had stood there.