Chapter 4 #3
A woman holding her phone with shaking hands blinked as Delia approached. “Who are you?”
Delia smiled. It was small. Calm. Too pleasant for the situation.
“Someone helping,” Delia said softly.
She lifted a hand, two fingers brushing the woman’s temple.
The woman’s eyes widened, then unfocused, as if her brain had been gently unplugged.
Delia’s voice stayed low, measured. “You’re safe. You were scared. You saw a stunt that went wrong. You’re going to go home and drink water. You’re going to stop watching the street.”
The woman nodded slowly, face slack.
Delia removed her fingers, and the woman blinked again, confusion replacing terror. She lowered her phone as if she’d forgotten why it was raised.
Delia moved to the next witness.
Systematic. Precise.
It was eerie to watch. Like she was erasing chalk from a board, one line at a time.
Meanwhile, the street kept trying to kill us.
Two undead sprinted from the far side, darting between cars.
Eve threw hellfire. One ignited and dropped. The other dodged.
Dodged.
I stared, horrified.
Faith fired, taking its shoulder. It stumbled but stayed upright, snapping its head toward her with a twitchy focus.
Nishi lunged in, a blade flashing in her hand. She moved fast, slicing low at its legs, dropping it to a knee.
Faith’s gunshot finished it.
Nishi exhaled, eyes hard. “They’re adapting.”
Eve’s face tightened. “Then we burn them faster.”
She hurled another blast of hellfire.
Three corpses went up.
And then more came.
It felt endless. Like someone was feeding the street with bodies.
Victor shouted orders again, officers moving civilians back behind patrol cars. His shadow flicked out once more, tripping an undead that tried to reach the line. An officer shot it. Another dragged a screaming mundane away.
Delia continued her work, moving down the line of witnesses, her vampires flanking her, guiding people into small clusters, steering phones down, blocking camera angles with their bodies.
Spencer moved into the fight beside Tegan, his movements quick, his strength unnatural. He grabbed an undead by the collar and slammed it into the pavement hard enough that the concrete cracked. He looked disgusted by the feel of it, then snapped its neck with a quick twist.
It didn’t stop moving.
Spencer’s eyes flashed red again, and he muttered something vicious under his breath.
Tegan held a small relic in her hand and thrust it forward, and for a moment the air shimmered around the corpse. Its limbs slowed, as if something invisible had gripped it.
Faith shot it in the head.
It dropped.
“Thank you,” I breathed at Tegan.
She didn’t look at me. Her gaze stayed locked on the street, scanning for the next one. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Eve’s hellfire surged again, bright enough to make the streetlights look dim. The heat pressed against my skin, drying my eyes, turning the air acrid.
The burning corpses smelled like a nightmare.
And still, more kept appearing.
A new wave poured from the alley as if someone had opened a gate. Four at once. Five.
One sprinted straight toward Delia’s cluster of witnesses.
If it reached her, we lost memory control. We lost the only thing keeping this from becoming the most watched horror clip on the internet by morning.
Faith saw it too.
She moved like a snapped wire, sprinting across the street. She fired once, twice, three times. The undead staggered but did not fall fast enough.
I threw a force push, slamming it sideways, buying a heartbeat.
Eve’s fire caught it mid-slide and it ignited, collapsing into a burning heap.
Delia didn’t even look up. She kept her fingers on a witness’s temple, as calm as a surgeon.
Eve exhaled, voice tight. “This is not stopping.”
Nishi’s gaze swept the alley mouths. “It’s feeding from somewhere. It’s too constant.”
Victor’s eyes narrowed, and he stepped forward, scanning, as if he could read the street like a mind. Maybe he could. Maybe he was.
He looked back at us, jaw tight. “We need to move this perimeter outward. Now. If we keep fighting here, we’re just stacking bodies.”
Faith’s voice went rough. “You mean stacking people.”
Victor’s gaze flicked to her, and his expression hardened. “Yes. That.”
Delia finished with the last witness in her immediate cluster, then finally looked at the fight. Her green eyes narrowed, assessing the speed, the aggression.
“This is beyond sloppy necromancy,” she said, voice cool.
Andel’s words echoed in my head.
Beyond typical death magic.
Eve’s fire roared again, flames curling high, but the undead kept appearing from the alley as if the fire were just an inconvenience.
My arms ached from throwing force. My lungs burned from smoke and cold and effort. My mind raced, searching for that tether seam Alex had mentioned, searching for any hint of the hand holding the strings.
All I felt was that tight pull, like a line drawn taut through the night, leading somewhere I could not see.
And the worst part was the realization that settled in my gut as another wave of undead rushed us.
This wasn’t a single outbreak.
This was a machine warming up.
And downtown was only the beginning.