TIME June 20th, the small hours (continuing) LOCATION Cove Street, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
The thing that crashed through the window into Dew’s burning apartment didn’t wait for an answer to its own question. Brad lay burning on the landing, Tilly backed toward the far door, and eight feet of matted fur and wrongly-hinged jaw filled the space between them and the stairs – while outside, thunder finally broke over Cove Street.
WHAT HAPPENED
Hawke got a hand to Brad’s wounds and stood, drawing his weapons, as the beast – on Tilly’s order, not its own – bent to scoop the boy up. Raven went the hard way, along the rain-slicked street and up through the apartment door while a terrified neighbour scattered ahead of her. Crowe thought better of vaulting the railing outright, tumbled across the landing instead, and came up in a flanking position on the beast as Hawke closed the distance.
Tilly screamed – and it wasn’t a child’s scream. Long, snakelike tendrils lashed out from somewhere above her mouth, catching Hawke and the beast both in a vortex of stunning force. Both shook it off. Crowe didn’t give her a second attempt – the cold iron dagger went in, and Tilly’s small body dropped where she stood. He held the ground over her, buying Raven the opening to step into the fight properly.
The beast raged. It let Brad fall and turned on Crowe and Raven both, dropping Crowe with a single swipe. Hawke and Raven pressed the advantage, but the beast scooped Tilly’s body back up and threw itself over the balcony to the ground floor, eating a round of opportunity attacks on the way down. Hawke gave chase over the rail, landed the drop cleanly enough, then stumbled and went down prone at the bottom – and before he could get his feet back under him, a raking claw put him on the ground for good. Ranger down.
Raven didn’t stop to check on him. She took the stairs at a run, opened the beast’s back with her blade, and kept coming as it clutched Tilly’s body and forced its bulk down the passageway toward the street. Liza, the neighbour, saw it coming and went down in the road trying to get clear. Raven ran it down from behind, cut its legs out from under it, and finished both the beast and the girl it had been carrying in the same stroke.
She went back for the fire. Hawke came out first, dragged clear of the blaze; Raven talked Liza into helping haul Crowe out behind him, stabilised outside with moments to spare. The KemerLexi beacon brought help for the fire itself. Before the smoke had even settled, Liza asked Raven for one more thing – would she check on her neighbour? She hadn’t heard from him and was starting to worry.
Raven left the others at the beacon and went to look. The apartment already smelled of death before she reached the door – flies confirmed it. Nothing through the keyhole, and the door held against every attempt to break it down. She went back to Dew’s building instead, pulled two rookie Agents off the street to secure the body properly at Cutters Causeway, and gave them the version of events that wouldn’t get anyone laughed out of the Section House: Tilly and the beast, demons, responsible for the fire.
At the Section House, Raven booked Tilly and the beast’s remains into the morgue and got Crowe and Hawke to the infirmary. Sam was on duty and gave Tilly’s body a proper look – a wormlike creature nested at the base of her brain stem, cuts on one leg, a welt at the base of her spine, and tendrils that had grown out through her cheekbones from somewhere behind her throat. Her teeth had started fusing and sharpening. Sam mentioned, carefully, that this wasn’t the first body like it – there’d been others with the same skull deformities. The two rookies arrived a few minutes later, considerably paler, carrying the pulsing, maggot-ridden body of an elderly man – Joren – his skull showing the same signs.
A small wooden box arrived from Asquith before they settled in to rest, delivered by his driver Marlin with a short note tucked inside: “May these protect you on your ventures. Regards, Asquith.” Inside, on a thin leather strap, hung a single gem no bigger than a thumbnail – a miniature cedar tree cut through with two letters, an A and a C. Raven checked it over, found nothing obviously wrong with it, and joined Crowe and Hawke in the infirmary to rest through the day.
Four days on, on the evening of the 24th, they started shift early – word was the Zhakarov Brotherhood had a ‘meeting’ planned for a couple of hours out.
First, they checked in on Dew’s neighbour, found him scrubbing smoke damage out of his own apartment.
He confirmed Tilly and Brad had been friends, that Dew had helped Branson move house recently – though he didn’t know where to – and that the local children, Tilly and Brad among them, tended to play together in the street and the public park.
A visit to Liza turned up a pencil sketch:
Dew, seated, a dog on his lap – a dog that looked very much like the one Raven had found butchered in his apartment days earlier.
Separately, Hawke’s dentist found something worth a second look – a missing molar replaced with an immaculate false tooth, a small black cross etched into the outside face of it.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Branson – still missing. Recently moved house with Dew’s help; destination unknown.
- What causes the transformation seen in Tilly, the beast, and now Joren? How many others has it already reached?
- The symbol on the beast’s cloak, and the drawings pinned across Dew’s bedroom wall – still unexplained.
- Hawke’s missing molar and its replacement, marked with a small black cross – whose work, and why?
CASE NOTE – MORGUE, SECTION HOUSE
Sam’s working theory, pieced together over Tilly, the beast, and Joren’s bodies:
Something is laying eggs in people.
Victims first grow sensitive to light.
A single tentacle is the first visible sign, and most try to cut it off before it’s too late – by then they’re already hearing voices, and their own limbs are no longer entirely answering to them.
What follows depends on how far it’s progressed:
cravings, aggression, and – in at least one case – a child working on the family dog’s brain with their bare hands.