Chapter 6

For three long days, Victor tried to talk himself out of it. He told himself Malach's strange, cryptic questions were nothing more than the unhinged ramblings of an eccentric stranger who had spent far too much time alone with his own thoughts. He told himself the creature in the alley had merely been a trick of bad street lighting, a manifestation born from a sleep-starved, hyperactive mind, stitched together out of old childhood terror he had never fully outgrown. He told himself a dozen entirely reasonable things, in a dozen perfectly logical voices, and not a single one of those rationalizations held up for longer than it took him to close his eyes.

Because the moment his eyelids fell shut, he was back there—standing frozen at the mouth of that narrow, concrete alleyway, staring straight into those flat, pitch-black, unblinking eyes that had locked onto him not with the wild hunger of a beast, but with a terrible, unmistakable flicker of recognition, like they had some sort of business together.

By the third night, the pull had stopped being something he could logically debate with himself.

He understood it now, in a way he hadn't when his father had first tried to explain his own sudden obsession after their shared nightmare. “It's a gut feeling, Liz. You can never be truly sure with these things.”  He had heard his father say to his mother. At the time, Victor had thought his father sounded completely unhinged, dragging his terrified family out to an abandoned cathedral on nothing more than a desperate hunch. But now, that exact same instinct sat heavily behind his own ribs—dense, insistent, and sharp—refusing to let him sleep, refusing to let him sit still, refusing to grant him a single moment of peace until he went back and looked the shadow in its dead black eyes once more.

He waited until well past midnight, until the household had settled into its familiar, nocturnal rhythm of quiet sounds—the low, steady hum of the refrigerator, the occasional creak of the roof cooling under the night air—before he reached under his bed, slid the dagger out from beneath the frame, and carefully wrapped the bare metal in an old cotton t-shirt.

He turned toward his bedroom door, only for it to swing open before his hand could even reach the handle.

"Where," Isaac demanded, standing squarely in the middle of the dark hallway in a rumpled shirt with his arms tightly folded, "do you think you're going, dressed like a cat burglar, holding what I can only assume is a weapon, at—" he tilted his phone screen toward his face, squinting, "—twelve forty-five in the morning?"

Victor pinched the bridge of his nose. "Go back to bed, Isaac."

"Absolutely not." Isaac took a firm step forward, completely blocking the doorway. "Try again, bro."

Victor let out a long, slow exhale, weighing his limited options. He could make up a lie. He could physically shove past his younger brother and simply slip out into the night. But some persistent part of him—the same part that had forced him to confide in Isaac after their nightmare—didn't want to walk out that front door without a single soul knowing where he had gone.

"There's something lurking in the alley behind Marsh Street," Victor said finally, his voice dropping into a barely audible whisper. "I saw it a few nights ago. In real life, for what that’s worth."

Isaac's mouth opened slightly, then closed tight. "And your brilliant plan is to go out and hunt it down. Alone. At midnight. Armed with a dagger you literally stole from an haunted abandoned church."

"It wasn't haunted, it's just old—"

"Not the point, Victor!"

"Keep your voice down!" Victor hissed, shooting a nervous glance down the corridor toward their parents' bedroom. He stepped closer, lowering his voice until it was almost a breath. "I need to see it again, Isaac. I need to know if it's real, if I'm completely losing my mind, or if there's actually a physical monster connected to all of this. I can't just sit in my room waiting for Dad or anyone else to figure it out while we're being watched."

"So you're doing the exact same recklessly stupid thing Dad did," Isaac said flatly, his eyes hard. "The exact thing you shouted at him for."

The comparison hit Victor far harder than he expected. He stood there in the dark with his mouth slightly open, unable to offer a defense, mostly because his brother was entirely right.

"If I'm not back in exactly one hour," Victor said instead, shifting his stance, "wake Mum and Dad. Tell them every single thing. The dagger, the alleyway, the monster—all of it. I'm dead serious, Isaac. Give me one hour."

Isaac stared at him for a long, heavy moment, his jaw tightly clenched as he cycled through every argument he could throw at his older brother, before silently discarding each one as useless. Finally, he took a step to the side, clearing the doorway, though the intense glare on his face made it abundantly clear how much he hated the idea.

"One hour," Isaac repeated, his voice cold and steady. "And if you aren't standing back in this hallway when that timer hits zero, I'm not just waking Mum and Dad. I'm grabbing a pipe and coming after you myself."

"Deal." Victor squeezed Isaac's shoulder once, gripping it tight, then slipped past him into the pitch-black hallway.

The neighborhood at midnight felt like a completely different world—quiet in a way that felt less like peace and more like a deliberate, watchful silence. Every shadow stretched unnaturally between the pale amber streetlamps, holding its breath just long enough before Victor's eyes adjusted to prove it empty. He kept the t-shirt stripped off the dagger now, holding the weapon loosely against his outer thigh. The complex, geometric symbols etched deep into the dark metal caught the faint, flickering threads of orange light as he walked.

The alley behind Marsh Street looked precisely as it had three nights ago—a narrow, claustrophobic corridor squeezed between a high concrete boundary wall and the dark rear of a shuttered commercial shop, littered with abandoned debris and rotting cardboard. Victor stopped short at the mouth of the alleyway, his heart hammering against his ribs so violently he could feel the pulse throbbing in his throat.

"Come on," he muttered under his breath, stepping into the shadows. He wasn't sure if he was calling out to the beast, to himself, or to whatever invisible hand had been steering his life off a cliff for weeks. "I know you're out here."

For a long, agonizing minute, the alley remained completely motionless. Nothing moved.

Then, without warning, the ambient temperature plummeted.

It wasn't a gradual chill. One second the thick, humid night air was clinging to his skin, and the next, an icy, unnatural frost rolled over the alleyway, making the hair on his arms stand straight up. Victor's fingers locked around the hilt of the dagger, his knuckles turning white.

The attack came from above.

Victor barely registered the subtle shift of shadow along the top of the concrete wall before the creature was already airborne—dropping down at him in total, terrifying silence despite its massive bulk, its jaws already open wide.

Pure, unadulterated survival instinct took over. Victor threw himself violently to the left, his shoulder slamming hard against the brick wall of the shop. The creature's heavy claws raked through the exact space where his ribs had been a fraction of a second earlier, so close that the rush of cold air from its leap fanned across his neck.

Victor hit the hard gravel, rolled across his shoulder, and scrambled back up onto his feet with a terrifying, fluid speed that felt utterly foreign to him—as if his muscles were executing a sequence of motion he had never formally learned, but had rehearsed ten thousand times in a forgotten life. He brought the blade up into an precise, defensive guard across his chest before his conscious mind even fully processed that he was up.

The creature turned slowly in the narrow space, its long, serpent-like tail whipping against the gravel as it sized him up.

Up close, it was far more grotesque than his memory had preserved. The hairless, charcoal-black hide was stretched tight over dense, grotesque muscle, and the deep, asymmetrical fissure down its skull oozed a slick, dark fluid that hissed faintly whenever a drop hit the damp pavement.

"Yeah," Victor breathed, his voice trembling slightly despite the unnatural, rock-solid stability of his posture. "I see you too."

The creature lunged.

What followed wasn't a fight so much as a desperate blur of survival. The creature moved with horrifying speed, far faster than something its size should have been capable of. Twice, its razor-sharp claws found flesh: first, a agonizing gash slashed across Victor's forearm when he threw his arm up to block a tear aimed directly for his throat; second, a deep, burning tear raked along his left flank when he misjudged a quick pivot and the monster's heavy shoulder clipped him. Pain flared up bright, white-hot, and immediate—yet it felt strangely detached, as though the injury belonged to someone else standing a few feet away.

With a sudden, explosive surge of movement, Victor stepped inside the creature's reach and drove the dagger forward with lethal precision, burying the black blade all the way to the guard into the thick meat of the creature's shoulder.

The reaction was immediate and terrifying. The creature unleashed a shriek unlike anything normal—a high-pitched, metallic screech that shattered the night silence as it reared backward, violently wrenching itself off the blade. A spray of black, smoking ichor erupted from the wound, hissing violently as it splashed onto the ground.

For one suspended, breathless second, Victor thought he had struck a killing blow.

Then the beast's solid black eyes locked back onto his face. Instead of collapsing, it staggered back a few paces, coiling its heavy limbs. To Victor's horror, the deep wound his blade had just carved into its shoulder was already knitting itself back together in slow, sickening, wet ripples. It let out a low, guttural growl—a sound that vibrated straight through the soles of Victor's shoes—before turning on its hind legs, leaping fifteen feet straight up over the concrete wall, and vanishing into the darkness above.

Victor was left standing alone in the silent alley, his chest heaving, his dark shirt quickly soaking through with hot, slick blood, the dagger trembling in his red-stained grip.

It hadn't died. He had injured it—badly, judging by the screech—but it was still alive. And deep down, in that quiet, ancient place within him, he knew with absolute certainty that it would return.

He remembered almost nothing of the walk back. His legs moved on complete autopilot while his mind reeled through the violent clash on a broken loop, replaying the terrifying speed of his own reflexes, the unnatural ease with which his wrist had turned to drive the blade into the mark. That sudden, lethal competence frightened him almost as much as the monster had.

Isaac was sitting on the top porch step when Victor finally staggered around the corner of the house—exactly seven minutes past their agreed-upon hour. Isaac bolted to his feet the second he caught sight of him, all of his earlier sarcastic composure vanishing instantly.

"Victor—" Isaac's voice broke awkwardly as he rushed down the steps. "Oh my god... you're bleeding. You're actually covered in blood, I thought you said—"

"I'm fine," Victor rasped, though his voice sounded thin and hollow. As the adrenaline began to rapidly drain from his system, his knees buckled slightly.

"You are not fine!" Isaac caught him beneath his uninjured arm, taking on as much of Victor's weight as his frame could support and dragging him toward the door. "Okay. Okay, don't panic. Don't wake Mum and Dad... we can figure this out. I have a first aid kit in the bathroom, I've watched like a hundred hours of medical dramas, I can handle this—"

"Isaac," Victor let out a weak, breathy laugh despite the agonizing throbbing in his side. "Just get me inside before I bleed out on the welcome mat."

Isaac carefully maneuvered his brother through the front door, shutting it behind them with painstaking precision, wincing at every tiny creak of the floorboards. Once they reached the dim light of the hallway, Isaac pulled back Victor's torn shirt to inspect the gash along his ribs, and all the color instantly drained from his face.

"That... that thing actually did this to you," Isaac whispered, the last trace of skepticism completely dying in his eyes.

"Yeah," Victor whispered back, leaning heavily against the wall as the full weight of the pain hit him. "And I stabbed it back. Deep. It should have died, Isaac. I felt the blade go all the way in to the hilt... it screamed... and then the wound just closed right up before it jumped the wall."

Isaac stared at his older brother in absolute silence. For the first time since their trip to Baldel, Victor watched the lingering doubt in Isaac's mind completely shatter, replaced by an overwhelming, icy dread.

"Then it's still out there," Isaac said softly.

Victor didn't answer. He didn't need to.

Both of them knew the hunt was far from over.