Chapter 23 Xen
By dusk, the rest of the team had already gone out, yearning for vengeance and answers in equal measure.
He would ensure they got both.
Once he figured the best way out of the building.
The elevator built for monsters groaned under his weight. He was only as bulky as a large human, but everything about him was compact and condensed.
He left through the sub-basement loading bay.
Nocturne was 5.85 miles away by road, but only 3.2 as the crow flies.
Xen was not a crow—but that was what the jump jets were for.
Tucked beneath his heels, slim as suspicion, paired with micro-thrusters at the small of his back. Enough for launch, not for distance. Enough to be terrifying. Enough to arrive wrong.
He stepped into the alley behind HQ.
Calculated wind shear. Angle. Trajectory.
And jumped.
The sound was not thunder. It was what thunder would sound like if it only warned you.
He cleared four city blocks. Hit a rooftop like a curse. Tar paper shredded; nearby solar panels whined. The vines of a rooftop garden shrank away from him like they knew what he was.
Another jump—2.0 seconds of burn, shallow arc.
And a third—0.6 seconds, vertical gain only, to clear a wall lined in old spikes.
Then he dropped and landed like punctuation, in front of Nocturne’s main entrance, in the middle of a fleeing crowd.
Xen walked against the flow. Upstream. Unshaken.
Bodies parted without knowing why—without even seeing him, really.
He was matte as shadow. Featureless as fear.
When someone did glance his way, their pupils shrank.
One woman screamed without understanding.
Another dropped her vape and didn’t stop to pick it up.
He stepped through the doors as someone got kicked through them.
And the club’s interior was utter chaos. Tables overturned. Chairs scattered like ribs. Strobing emergency lights painted the walls in crimson pulses. The noctylis vines were awake now, twitching high above with agitated tendrils, trying to interpret the scene.
At its center?
Lung, bare-chested and snarling. Claws flexed. Tail like a whip.
Thorne, wings high, chest heaving, tail braced, stone-gray and glowing at the joints.
The air between them hummed with murder.
Ellum stood back, a war hammer resting on his shoulder like he was trying to look casual but failing.
Cassia was behind him, arms crossed, a single snake poking out from under her wrap like a scout.
Aceon lounged against a table, legs tensed, ready to spring if anyone came through a back door—and he noticed Xen first.
“What the fuck?”
Everyone turned.
Ellum’s hand tightened on his hammer. Cassia’s snakes lifted in surprised unison beneath her hair wrap. Aceon straightened, eyes narrowing, the muscles in his calves coiling.
Lung spared him a glance, bared his teeth, but didn’t move.
Even Thorne paused—wings still high, chest still heaving—but there was a flicker behind his eyes now.
Not recognition.
Fear.
Because none of them had ever seen him.
The matte-black armor.
The faceless helm.
The thing that wore the shape of a man but definitely was not one.
“What the fuck?” Aceon said again, lower this time.
“I wish to fight,” Xen said.
The voice was low.
Not artificial—but not human.
Stripped of tone, but not of meaning.
And then he tilted his head toward Thorne.
“The clanker,” he said, with calm precision, “wishes to fight.”
Thorne straightened. Scoffed. Tried to recover his authority like it hadn’t already shattered on contact.
“Look, I don’t know what this is, some new toy Royce made to—”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
Xen moved.
Not fast, not slow—efficient.
One step. Then two. Then a full-body acceleration designed for one purpose only: impact.
There was no charge, no roar, no threat display.
Just physics, perfectly aimed.
He hit Thorne center mass.
The contact was clean. The effect was not.
Thorne lifted off the ground. Wings flared reflexively, too late to matter. His body pinwheeled backward, slamming through a table, then through the bar itself. Bottles exploded. Liquor sprayed. Glass skittered across the floor like alarm bells.
Lung approached the gargoyle’s crash site. “Damn,” he muttered with a dark chuckle, padding up to survey the damage. He had a clawful of skin and fur missing from his chest, and no doubt, if Xen were to check under Thorne’s claws, he’d find it there.
“It’s easier to interrogate people if they still have intact internal organs,” Lung added.
“That was for Sirena,” Xen explained, while staring at the gargoyle. “And I am not a toy.”
Thorne lay still among the wreckage—stone wing crushed beneath him, bar shelf collapsed over his back, liquor slicking the floor like spilled blood.
Then a door at the rear of the club slammed open.
“Sophia—wait!” someone yelled from behind it, too late.
Sophia was already in motion.
She was barefoot, in jeans and an oversized T-shirt with the Nocturne logo faded on the front. Her hair was wild. No makeup. No shoes. Just purpose.
And precision.
She moved fast—but not recklessly. Every step, she placed, adjusted, calculated. She wove through toppled chairs and broken glass without hesitation as two men chased after her—the Maukin bouncer and an energy feeder, one in just his fur, the other dressed in black.
The Maukin bouncer reacted first, leaping for her, but she dropped below him with a kind of ease that wasn’t learned—it was installed.
Cassia lunged to intercept, but Sophia twisted sideways at the last moment and clipped her with an elbow—not hard, but enough—enough to throw Cassia’s balance off, enough to make her stumble.
Enough to be remembered.
Xen’s sensors logged five anomalies in under two seconds.
Center of gravity shift: ideal.
Trajectory adjustments: sub-threshold.
Impact efficiency: 83%.
Origin: untrained. Execution: embedded.
“Who are you?” she shouted at Xen as she put herself in the path between him and the gargoyle. Glass had cut her feet, and she did not care.
“Who are you and what do you know about what happened to Sirena?” Xen asked back.
Thorne picked himself up off the floor and straightened his wing with a grunt. “She doesn’t know anything—”
“Then you’d better,” Ellum said, meaningfully tapping his hammer against one of his hooved heels.
“The people who made you took her,” Xen told the smaller woman. “Have you remembered anything since we were last here?”
“Thorne’s in on it, clearly,” Lung protested, skipping over Sophia entirely.
“Sirena’s been . . . taken?” the gargoyle asked, standing straighter.
“We’re afraid she was a trap,” Cassia said, giving the girl Sophia a pained look.
“I . . . was?”
“Well, now that we’re here, it does seem unlikely,” she granted, giving her wrapped head a nod.
Just as Nex had told them in the conference room. But Xen could not blame them for wanting to see for themselves. He had, too.
He stepped in.
Close enough to smell the cheap detergent on her shirt. The blood on her feet.
Close enough to watch her pupils shift—fight or flight stuttering between frames.
He didn’t reach for her. Just lowered his gaze.
And engaged the scan.
His vision fractured—layers folding in. Bones mapped. Nerves lit.
Threads. Not natural. Silver filaments laced along her spine. Wrapped muscles like wire around will.
And there—beneath the clavicle, tight against her heart—something glowed.
Passive transmission. Ping: constant. Source: internal.
Hers was what they had threatened to do to Sirena, sans biometric tether.
This one was a remote trigger, on an unknown loop.
His hands curled, just slightly.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. Just rerouted the data.
To Cassia’s phone first.
Then Ellum’s.
Then Lung’s wristband.
Then Royce, remotely—wherever he was, he’d see it. He’d know.
No buzz. No sound. Just alerts, quietly blooming open.
TRANSMISSION CONFIRMED
SUBJECT: SOPHIA
SIGNAL: PASSIVE / LIVE
EST RANGE: 2.1KM
DO NOT ALERT.
ACT CASUAL.
CONTAIN.
Cassia read hers with a flick of her eyes, mouth flattening.
Ellum tilted his head, glanced over at Lung, who had gone suddenly still.
The energy feeder—Maxwell, vampire variant, former MSA—snorted, barely audible. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered—to himself, to his feed, not to her.
Sophia stiffened. “What? What is it?”
“We need to take you back to headquarters,” Xen told her.
Thorne went completely still. Like daylight had hit him, and he’d turned to stone mid-pulse.
His eyes flicked toward her. Toward the blood on her feet.
The sweat at her temples. The confused, frightened crease between her brows.
It was clear he’d be willing to fight Xen to the death before he let him take her—and a part of Xen found he would greatly enjoy that—but the silent Maukin interrupted Thorne by flashing him his phone.
Thorne read the texts, then snatched the phone from the cat-walker and messaged back: AND YOUR INTENTIONS?
Because he would fight Xen anyways, even though he knew it would be foolish to do so.
For his honor, perhaps.
Or, more likely, for love.
SURGICAL REMOVAL OF THE TRANSMITTING DEVICE.
Xen modeled the procedure across his surgical subroutines.
Biocompatibility: acceptable. Risk profile: high.
Viability: confirmed. It would take days to free her from the net she’d been trapped in, but he should be able to do it.
And she? She was young. Her body had already been through the transmitter insertion and extensive plastic surgery.
It was good at healing.
85.63% CHANCE SHE’LL SURVIVE, he messaged back.
Xen could tell by Thorne’s wrist he was tempted to crush the phone in his hand. The odds were not good enough.
100% CHANCE SHE WILL DIE OTHERWISE.
Because Xen could see that, too, with his integrated tissue mapping suite. There was a switch inside her.
When Sophia ceased to be useful to whoever had Sirena, they would kill her to cover their tracks. Planned obsolescence of the cruelest sort.
Because there was more.
Beneath the transmitter node—shielded, embedded—was a charge.
Not large. Not crude.
But smart.
Shaped. Lined in reactive gel.
Enough to tear through a body.
Enough to shred steel at ten feet.
They wired it to her heart.
He was not scanning for a bomb.
But he found one there anyway.
His mind forked, quietly.
One branch stayed present, passive, meat-soft. Watched Sophia blink. Watched Thorne shift behind her like he was trying to become a wall.
The other—
Calculated.
Detonation conditions:
Cardiac failure
Transmission disruption
Physical extraction
Kill-switch logic tree: irreversible. The moment the bomb suspected it’d been found, it would try to do its job.
So he didn’t move.
Only watched.
And silently began building the solution.
Stage 1: Decoy signal. Xen would fabricate a phantom feed—her vitals, her ping, her fear. All looped, all fake.
Stage 2: Internal suppression. A field at 12.3 millitesla, focused tight as a hug. He’d have to stay within thirty-six inches of her chest.
Stage 3: Faraday cage. Custom, fast. Enough copper to ghost her signal.
Stage 4: Surgery.
Done by him. Only him.
No one else was fast enough. Precise enough. Cold enough.
He sent the new plan to the team—only this time it was encrypted.
Cassia left to begin turning Annex C into the cage he needed, and Thorne warily watched her go.
Xen took a step forward. He needed to be close enough to Sophia when he took over her signal that there could be no detectable change to whoever was listening.
And so what happened next would depend on whether Thorne believed him or not.
The gargoyle texted back—not to him, but on the screen, so the Maukin could see it, and Xen could read it anyways:
Find whoever she’s transmitting to and make them pay.
Xen was in agreement on that. Go with the Maukin and the vampire, he urged the rest of the team present.
“Stop all of that and explain things to me!” Sophia cried out, unable to take the silence anymore.
“We’re going to MSA headquarters,” Thorne said, settling a heavy hand on Sophia’s shoulder.
“I apologize for the familiarity,” Xen said, and then before anyone could stop him, he picked her up to carry her.