They saw it clearly now. It was tall, shifting, vaguely human, but slick with something like oil on plastic. It had no face, just a smear of flesh.
“Not friendly,” Michael said.
“Understatement,” Daniel replied, hurling a flask of salt fire.
Its scream sounded like an electric, metal-shredding wail. Then it recoiled.
“Good,” Payne barked. “Now we pin it!” He launched himself at the thing, landing hard with the axe in his hands.Finally. Something to swing at.The thought was savage, primal. No politics, just him and the thing trying to eat his people. He liked the clarity.
The axe bit deep into its neck. It shrieked and buckled, glitching between forms. Michael’s mother, Daniel’s childhood dog, Rayna.
That last one hit strong. His grip faltered for a split second. Rayna, with blood on her lips and fear in her eyes.No. Not her. Never her.
“Don’t look!” he barked, voice hoarse with fury. “It’s trying to distract us.”
Michael drove a blessed spike through the creature’s leg. Daniel blasted it again, frying its edges with preloaded magic.
The mimic shrieked, yanked out the spike, and lunged, but the wards flared, locking it in place.
“Now,” Payne growled, and began the banishment chant he’d been taught long ago.
Each syllable scraped from his throat like iron dragged over stone. Old magic. Older than he could have remembered. Druidic stuff.
Together, they shoved it backward. Michael and Daniel rammed it with the enchanted battering ram toward the splintered front door. The creature twisted, screamed, and vanished.
A momentary silence. Michael broke it. “How did it get past the wards?”
Breathing hard, Payne wiped ichor from his axe. “It’s damn powerful, that’s how.”
Daniel wiped oil from his cheek. “What do you think it wants?”
“I’m guessing it’s here for the kid,” Payne said. “Rayna texted me. The graffiti. They think it’s a message. And maybe a map. And whatever our faceless wonder is, it’s getting bolder.”
Michael picked up what was left of the door and leaned it against the frame. “So, what now?”
Payne stared out the side-light window at the quiet street beyond, heart still hammering.This was just round one.“Now,” he said grimly, “we take the fight toit.”
Daniel looked down at the ruined rug. “Think we can expense a new Persian under ‘hostile extra-terrestrial or dimensional breach’?”
Michael snorted. “That’s under ‘miscellaneous.’ Right next to coffee filters and goat cheese.”
Payne cracked his neck, grim but satisfied. “Remind me to bill the apocalypse.”
17
Katie woke with a start.
The dream clung to her skin like sweat. Shadows flickered behind her eyelids, and a new graffiti message glowed in her mind. She sat up on the couch in the mansion’s lounge, blanket tangled around her ankles. Bubbles hovered motionless in his orb a few feet away, as if someone had paused his animation.
“Katie,” it said without moving, voice a whisper underwater. “The moon is still hungry.”
“Great,” she croaked, pushing hair from her eyes. “Can you be more specific?”
Bubbles blinked. “About what?”
Katie sighed. “Never mind.”
The image was still there. Not just in her memory, but hovering at the edge of her vision, like afterburn. A symbol. It looked like a stylized eye, angular, dripping, with what might have been roots stretching downward. She reached for the notepad Lioness had left beside her and scratched it out in pencil.