Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Phoenix
Viper and I walk into the bar half-expecting a theater. Tourists, smoke, neon voodoo masks. Instead, it’s too quiet. Low jazz croons from a radio behind the bar, and every eye turns toward us like they’ve been waiting.
Viper leans in and whispers, “Wrong. This place feels wrong.”
A man stands near the jukebox. He’s average built with a shaved head and a spiral tattoo just under his jaw. He looks at me, eyes flat like spoiled milk. Then he smiles too wide and lunges.
I meet him mid-air. My elbow connects to his throat. My knee finds its target in his gut. But he doesn’t stop. Just grins with bloody teeth. He fights like something unhinged, more than drugs. More than rage. Like his pain doesn’t register.
Viper stabs him through the ribs, but he doesn’t flinch. He still comes at me like a man possessed. It takes a broken barstool leg to the throat to drop him. He doesn’t bleed right.
We leave him gasping on the floor and get the fuck out of here. We drag ourselves out through the back door, silence ringing in our ears. I text Ghost before the adrenaline fades, before I can second-guess what the hell I’d just fought.
A little while later, Viper and I are standing in the alley, waiting for Ghost. He finds us near Bourbon Street, pressed into the shadows between a jazz bar and a tarot reader’s stall. Viper is scanning the crowd, and I’m pacing. My lip is split, and my knuckles are scraped.
“What happened?” Ghosts asks as soon as he sees me.
I look at Ghost and shake my head once. “Not here.”
I grab his hand and squeeze. My fingers are ice cold against Ghost’s warm skin. We step into the crowd, swallowed by music and screams and strobe lights.
Someone pushes past us dressed like a plague doctor. Another laughs, splattered in fake blood. But none of it feels fake anymore, everything feels too real now.
And then the three of us see him. A street performer crouched on the pavement, painting something in what looks like blood.
The spiral. Big and deliberate.
He’s chanting under his breath. Low and wet. Like the sound of dirt being poured into a grave. Ghost looks at me, but I’m already watching him. Viper’s gone still. Something's here.
The bar smells like smoke, rum, and something older. Older than wood rot. Older than sin. Like bones buried too long in cursed earth.
Mama Dusk’s eyes glint like polished coal in the candlelight, tracking me and Viper like we’re already ghosts.
“You’re late,” she rasps, voice low and dry like paper curling in flame.
“We got delayed,” I mutter, jaw tight. “Some asshole tried to bite Viper’s face off.”
Mama Dusk doesn’t blink. “You mean the dead man in the alley?”
Yeah. That one.
She watches us like we’re ink stains she’s trying to read. “You’ve stirred something,” she says. “Now it stirs back.”
Ghost enters the room like a shadow trailing smoke. His face is tight and pale. Something happened to him, but I don’t ask. Not yet. I step closer, like I can shield him with my presence alone.
“Your boy saw a corpse blink,” Mama Dusk adds. “Didn’t he?”
Ghost doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
She lights a bundle of dried herbs, sage, maybe, but it smells wrong. Like burning hair and scorched sugar.
“You don’t understand the kind of war you’re in.
Not yet.” She slides a rough, hand-drawn map onto the table, written in blood red ink.
Five spirals are arranged like points of a compass.
“These are nexuses. Places where the veil between the world and what’s underneath is thin. Someone’s trying to tear it open.”
She points to one spot: the meatpacking plant.
“You’ve already been to one. You bled there. That opened it.”
Another point: St. Roch Cemetery. Tonight. Midnight.
“They’ll try again. Bigger this time. Blood feeds it. Fear fuels it.”
I clench my fists, fighting the instinct to shut it all out. But Ghost’s hand finds mine under the table, and I let him ground me.
“I don’t believe in demons,” I whisper.
Mama Dusk leans forward. “Don’t need to believe in fire to get burned, baby girl.”
We step into the New Orleans night like it might eat us whole. Viper’s pacing. Ghost keeps checking the rooftops. My side still aches from the alley fight.
“I’m going to the cemetery,” Ghost says. “Tonight. Before midnight. Alone if I have to.”
“No.” My voice is flat steel. “That’s not how we’re doing this.”
He turns to me, jaw set. “You said it yourself, something’s riding this. It’s not just Vale anymore.”
“I’m not arguing that.” I take a step closer. “But if this thing kills you, I don’t crawl back from that.”
Ghost flinches like I hit him. But he doesn’t argue.
Before he can answer, the crack of a rifle splits the air.
“DOWN!” Viper grabs Ghost. I dive behind the parked food truck just as another shot blows out the headlight.
I peek out. They’re on the rooftop two buildings over, wearing masks. An intricate tattoo is visible even from here. A spiral inked over one eye.
“Move!” I shout. “Back alley!”
We run. Ghost shields me, hand at my back. Viper covers us, laying down return fire with her compact Glock.
A round hits my shoulder. I grunt and stumble. Ghost catches me before I fall.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
“You’re bleeding,” he growls.
“So are you. Shut up and keep moving.”
We duck into a courtyard behind an abandoned jazz bar. Halloween masks hang from the rafters, fluttering in the wind like watching eyes.
I’m shaking, not from pain, but from the whisper I felt when the bullet hit me. Like it wasn’t lead, it was a message. It said: You opened the door. Now, stay and watch what comes through.
Ghost presses his hoodie to my wound, gentle but furious. Viper's scanning the rooftops, still on edge.
“There’s more coming,” she says quietly. “I can feel it.”
Then we hear it. A low chant coming from around the corner. We peek around the alley wall.
A street performer crouches on the pavement, painting a massive spiral in what looks like blood. His fingers move too fast, too wrong. He chants in a voice that sounds like it’s coming from underneath him.
Ghost stiffens. I already know. The world’s unraveling, and I’ve got a target painted on my soul.
The chanting grows louder as the man looks up. The first one we saw felt wrong. This one? This one wears the face of someone I buried. He’s wearing Reese’s face, the man I killed behind Ghost’s bar.
My brain stutters. My hands go numb. I watched Reese die. Hell, I made sure of it. But now he’s kneeling here, painting spirals like they’re scripture, grinning with lips stitched shut like a goddamn doll.