TIME July 2nd, evening into a stormy morning LOCATION The Section House, then Pine Street, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Mikael was dead, Get Stuffed was secured, and five children were safe in the infirmary – but Griffiths and his brother were still loose, and the city wasn’t done handing the Agents new horrors to work through.
WHAT HAPPENED
Reese came back with them from Get Stuffed and promptly set off the office alarm on the way in – not the homecoming anyone wanted after the day they’d had.
Reports filed, they went back to the Port Inn to rest; Jan deVries had nothing unusual to report from the night.
Come morning, Pitr DeVries passed along a note from Feydahr – he was on the trail of the new drug den and would have a location in a few days. The weather had other plans for the day, humidity climbing under dark clouds that promised a real storm.
Brin and Sam were already deep in a meeting about the Get Stuffed evidence when the Agents arrived – Mikael’s body alone promised to be a fascinating dissection. A debrief was set for end of shift once Sam’s team had sifted through the haul. Then came the morning’s grimmer news: four more bodies in an alley near the abattoirs, hands, heads and feet all missing, the clothing suggesting homeless men.
On the usual tour of the Section, a man named Stephan nearly collided with them in the drizzle – agitated, reluctant, asking for help. His wife was ill, he said, leading them to a third-floor hovel on Pine Street thick with heat, flies, and a stench that hit before the door was even fully open.
“She tried to stab me,” he said, wringing his hands.
“I had to restrain her, but I don’t know what to do. She doesn’t seem well. I’d seek a physician, but they’re so expensive… I don’t want to get her into trouble.”
Raven made him open the curtains. His wife Jules was bound and gagged to the bed, two reeking buckets nearby explaining most of the smell.
Krusha caught something moving beneath the bloodied gag before they’d even finished explaining to Stephan that the prognosis wasn’t good. Removing it confirmed the worst: fused teeth, a tentacled maw where a mouth should be. Whatever was killing children across the Section, it had Jules too.
Raven sent Stephan to find a cart. He’d barely turned to leave when Jules began convulsing on the bed – and three heavy thumps hit the roof overhead, followed by the drag of something large and the crash of tiles into the street below.
Krusha called on KemerLexi to hold her down while Raven hustled Stephan into the pantry for his own safety. Crowe, going for a clean knockout with his sap, put two attempts into a bucket of decomposing cat instead before the roof gave way entirely.
What dropped through was easily as bad as the smell suggested – a hulking, blanket-wrapped shape with a man’s ruined face, a jutting brow like a canopy, small yellow eyes, and claws built for tearing. The same strange eye symbol marked its filthy blanket that had marked the dog-beast from Cove Street. A second one dropped in from the stairwell moments later, fast enough to slam Crowe into a wall before anyone had fully processed the first.
The things healed almost as fast as the Agents could hurt them – ordinary steel closed up behind every hit, and only Raven switching to her silver longsword actually made a dent. Krusha landed KemerLexi’s pain on the first beast and drew a furious charge for his trouble, thrown hard enough into the window to shatter it, though he kept himself from following the glass out. The second beast, meanwhile, worked at freeing the unconscious Jules – drawing Stephan out of the pantry with a knife to defend her, for all the good a mortal blade did against something that sealed its own wounds shut in a blink.
Crowe finally found a vital point on the first beast and dropped it for good. The second didn’t wait to see how the fight was going – it grabbed Jules and threw itself straight through the window, hitting the pavement below hard enough to visibly hurt, and loped off into the rain as Crowe’s parting kemercannon shot chased it into the dark.
Thunder rolled and the rain came harder through the ragged hole in the ceiling. Stephan dropped to his knees, his knife skittering across the floorboards.
“Jules, where are you! I was trying to help. Why didn’t you save her?”
Stephan
The stairwell down told the same story – another ragged hole punched through the ceiling, rain streaming down the steps into the dark below.
EXTRAS.
THE FIRES, RECONSTRUCTED
Cross-referencing Stephan’s account against the case files finally gave the string of fires and deaths since mid-June a shape.
Jothar, a young dock worker, died accidentally on the 20th.
An older dock worker followed the next day, infected, cracking his own skull trying to knock the voices out.
On the 22nd, Jess – Agent Branson’s ex-wife – died the same way, having been given an Aramis pod while working at Dew’s wife’s apothecary.
Dew’s own flat burned on the 23rd, the same day his father Joren turned up dead with a deformed skull. All of it, it now looked certain, traced back to the wharf crate the Agents had first encountered weeks earlier – and the free Aramis pods dock workers had helped themselves to rather than see thrown out.