Their voices overlap until they become a single, unnerving sound.
“People who lie to him…” one says.
“…don’t last very long.”
“And you’re already half dead, man.”
“Tell him something useful.”
The Hellhound swallows hard enough, I hear it click. “I… I heard something!” he blurts, voice cracking. “Something concrete, like, literally. An old building. A shelter. That’s all, I swear, that’s all.” Aloiki advances, silencing the man for good.
We saunter out of the warehouse, heading toward our bikes parked in the alley, when a Hellhound lunges at me with a blade, but he’s too slow, too sloppy, too desperate.
I catch his wrist and slam it against a steam pipe that glows orange from the burner beneath it. His scream ricochets off the concrete walls as the smell of burning flesh fills the air.
“Who supplied the sedatives?” I ask, voice low enough that even the buzzing lights seem to quiet for it.
He sobs something incoherent. I shove his palm harder into the heat, feeling his body jerk with each second. “Try again.”
This time, he manages a name. A name I dread, and knew it was coming.
The next warehouse reeks of gasoline and fear. A man bolts the second he sees us. He makes it two steps before I grab him by the back of his shirt and slam him into a concrete pillar. His head whips backward. The crack echoes.
“Driver’s name,” I say.
“S-stop… please…”
My fist crashes into his kneecap. The sound is sharp, sickening. He screams the same name without breathing between syllables.
Through every location, the Twins shadow me. Violent reflections that share one brain and two bodies.
“You think he won’t hit harder if you lie?” One taunts a shaking Hellhound.
“He’s not even using half his strength,” the other adds, leaning close enough that the man flinches back into my grip.
One circles left. The other mirrors him on the right. Their voices weave together into something seamless and unnerving.
At one point, one twin wipes blood off his glove and says, “You know,”
“This would go a lot faster if you idiots stopped lying,” the other finishes.
Another man breaks immediately, sobbing names into the dust.
Aloiki tries twice to pull me out of the spiral, voice softer each time.
“Eh, Tiny… you losing pieces of yourself out here, brah.”
I can’t look at him. If I do, I might feel something other than rage, and feeling anything else terrifies me more than the violence tearing through me.
Trigger finds us behind the warehouse on Soto. He stops dead in the doorway, gaze fixed on the scene of me pounding a man so hard his body lifts with each hit. Blood splatters across my arms, my shirt, and the floor beneath us. The sound of ribs cracking feels distant, muffled by the roaring static in my head.
Trigger steps closer, voice shaking. “Tiny… brother… look at me.”
I don’t.
“Look at me,” he says again, and this time his voice breaks. “You’re scaring everyone.”
For half a second, I want to stop, but I don’t. His words drift toward me like they’re underwater, distorted and slow. They sink somewhere deep, but not deep enough to stop me.