Chapter 172: You Are Something Else

Elias stood in the darkness outside the house, the cold night air filling his lungs as he watched Liana and the children.

The Passenger’s voices still murmured in the back of his mind, a chorus of hungry anticipation.

“Kill them. Kill them now. They deserve it. They deserve worse.”

And they did, every fiber of Elias’s being agreed with that assessment. These four men were monsters wearing human skin, predators who had used their authority to hunt the most vulnerable.

Elias could understand the need for power. If these men had hunted all of these children just to kill them for power that only children could give, he would understand this reason. What he could not understand or tolerate was the glee and happiness they had in inflicting pain on others… and in turn, he had to suffer the visions of the dead in their final moments as they were broken in body and spirit, it was inevitable that the anger grew inside of him.

Liana’s face haunted him, her hollow eyes, and the mechanical way she tended her garden, as if the only thing keeping her moving was the simple repetition of motion. And her daughters…

If Elias killed these men tonight, Liana would never know the truth. She would spend the rest of her life mourning a monster, never understanding that the man she loved had been responsible for unspeakable horrors. Her daughters would grow up venerating a father who didn’t exist, their memories shaped by lies.

That was a different kind of cruelty. One that Elias could not commit.

People wore different masks, but some masks carried more weight than others, and for men like Josef, they do not deserve to be mourned.

The Passenger screamed in frustration, using the voices of the dead children.

“WHAT DOES IT MATTER? THEY ARE PREY. WE HUNT PREY. THAT IS ALL. THEIR GRIEF IS NOT OUR CONCERN.”

But it was. Somehow, impossibly, it was. If he were a mortal, Elias would not have concerned himself with this part of the hunt, but he was an Ascendant Candidate, and he had watched hundreds of children being violated and butchered in ways that were extremely sickening, and he could not turn his eyes away.

Elias had learned something in the past days, something about choice, about consequence, and about the weight of decisions made in darkness.

Elias had spent six years hunting Josef. He had watched the man, studied him, learned every detail of his life. He had seen Liana through windows, heard her laughter through walls, and watched her play with her daughters in the garden. She was innocent. Completely, utterly innocent. And she deserved the truth.

He stepped back into the shadows, letting the night swallow him.

“They are going to die,” Elias whispered to himself, or perhaps he spoke to the Passenger, “but they must die in the right manner.”

The Passenger’s voices subsided to a sullen murmur as Elias made his decision.

Ⓔ

Elias followed the four guards through the middle district, staying far enough back that even their enhanced senses could not detect him. His Agility (165) made his footsteps silent on the cobblestones; his Perception (207) tracked their every movement, their every whispered conversation.

“—think she suspects?” That was the scarred one—Corin.

“Doesn’t matter if she suspects,” Aris replied. “She’s got no proof, no witnesses, no nothing. Josef was careful.”

“Josef was an idiot,” the fat one, Mikel, muttered. “I told him not to bring that last one home. Too risky. But did he listen?”

“They never listen.” Derrick, the tall one, spat into the gutter. “Doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. Whoever did it probably saved us the trouble of silencing him ourselves.”

Aris laughed, a short, ugly sound. “True. But we still need to be careful. If whoever killed Josef is still out there…”

“Then we find them first.” Corin’s hand drifted to the knife at his belt. “We’re guards. We have authority. We can ask questions, search homes, and make life very difficult for anyone who looks suspicious.”

“And if we find them?”

Aris smiled. “Then we make sure they don’t talk. Ever.”

They turned into a narrower street, heading toward a part of the district that Elias recognized, older buildings, fewer lights, the kind of place where people learned not to ask questions.

“They’re going to their meeting place,”

the Passenger whispered. “The basement. Where they did their work.”

Elias followed them in silence, and it helped that the night had returned and the light of the first moon was still covered by clouds, leaving the faint glow of cheap Ember Orbs lighting up the night.

They soon reached their destination, it was a building that was formerly a warehouse, now converted into cheap housing for those who couldn’t afford better. The four guards entered through a side door, descending stairs that led into darkness.

Elias waited three minutes. Then he followed them. In the time he had spent waiting, he contemplated the attitudes of these four men and how they were able to get away with their activities for so long.

Stormfall was not a lawless city, and for these relatively weak guards to be able to inflict such a reign of terror for so long was certainly not normal.

Breaking into the building was easy, and Elias descended into the basement, which was larger than he expected. It was a single open space lit by a few guttering candles and three faint Ember Orbs.

The walls were lined with hooks, shelves, and strange stains that Elias’s enhanced vision identified immediately as blood. Old blood, new blood, blood that had soaked into the wood over years of use. In the far end of the basement were large cages, now empty, but not for long.

In the center of the room, the four guards had gathered around a crude table. On it lay maps, documents, and, Elias’s eyes narrowed, a small locked chest that pulsed with faint Lumina.

“—need to move the rest of the merchandise before anyone else gets curious,” Aris was saying. “The buyers in the lower district are still interested, but they’re getting nervous.”

“Let them be nervous,” Mikel grunted. “They want what we have; they pay what we ask.”

“And if they don’t?”

Derrick smiled. “Then we find new buyers. There’s always a market for fresh stock.”

They all laughed, and Elias, at that moment, stepped out of the shadows; his hat was not pulled low, but it was hard to see his face; what could be seen were two points of light shining with different colors. They were his eyes.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

Four heads snapped toward him as their hands automatically reached for weapons, even as their four faces registered shock, then fear, then the dawning realization that they had no idea who this was or how he had gotten so close.

Aris was the first to recover; the authority of being a guard had given him spine over the years. “Who the hell are you? This is private property—”

“I know.” Elias walked toward them; his steps were silent on the blood-stained floor, and for a moment, the guards here thought they were looking at a ghost.

“I also know who you are. What you do, and what you’ve done.”

Corin’s knife was in his hand. “You’re dead, friend.”

Elias smiled. “No. I’m not your friend, I’m something else.”

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