We moved through the town like blood through a clogged artery — slow, deliberate, surrounded by rot.

  The deeper we went, the worse it got. Street signs melted into each other, bent into new, unreadable angles. Buildings listed like drunkards, warped by impossible geometry — too many windows, too few doors. And the colors… things shimmered in shades that didn’t belong on the visible spectrum. Shades your eyes saw but your brain refused to file under anything real.

  No birds. No wind. No buzz of swamp insects. Just the slow drip of slime from ruined gutters and the squelch of meat-wet concrete beneath our boots.

  Lucien loped ahead in full Rougarou form — ten feet of gangly bone and muscle, hunched forward like a starving hound. His paws splashed through ankle-deep sludge, claws clicking on what remained of the asphalt.

  He hadn’t spoken since the shift. Just low growls, throat-clicks, the occasional yip. His eyes glowed amber through the mist, darting in sharp, paranoid arcs. The beast was in control now, and it didn’t care for language.

  Colette kept close to me, breath coming in short bursts. Sweat slicked her forehead, and the glow from the bone dagger had dulled to a faint red ember. That spell — that wail, it had taken the breath out of her. Spellcraft wasn't like you see in games. Pointy hats and flowing robes, flinging arcana around like it's confetti. It took effort, preparation, ritual and catalysts. And it sapped strength and stamina, eating it like a sponge.

  Each step deeper into town felt like wading through a dream sliding toward nightmare — the kind where the walls breathe and the moon watches you. Streetlights buzzed with static that didn’t come from electricity. Shadows moved wrong. And the air ran rank with the rancidly sweet stench of rotting carcasses.

  No people.

  No survivors.

  Just egg-sacks — too many to count. Strung up like paper lanterns in the trees. Swaying on porches. Half-buried in mud. Bloated things of veined jelly and fetal twitching. Human hosts to thalassic terror.

  “I don’t like this,” I said.

  “Understatement,” Colette muttered.

  She staggered, knees buckling like a marionette with one too many strings cut—and my hand shot out by instinct, snapping around her bare midriff. Too thin. I could damn near wrap my whole palm around her waist. Might’ve been her frame, might’ve been the fact I’ve always had hands the size of shovels—even before the fangs. Either way, she'd always struck me as too damn thin for her own good.

  "You still with me?" I asked, voice low and rough.

  She looked up through heavy lashes, eyes glassy and half-lidded, but burning somewhere deep beneath.

  “No,” she rasped. “But I’m still walking, ain’t I? That’s gotta count for something.”

  I didn’t push. I’d seen her sling spells before—seen her turn flesh to crumbling sand and burst hearts inside chests with nothing but will and whisper. But this one had cost her, ripped straight into her vitality, sapped her like a parasite. And I could hear the proof of it: the woman's heartbeat thundering against her ribs like war drums. And we weren’t anywhere near done. No rest. Not here. Exhaustion was a luxury she couldn't afford.

  "This is why I overprepare," I muttered, hitching my rucksack around mid-stride and digging through the mess inside. My voice cut through the thick air as I barked out, "Lucien! Perimeter!"

  The Rougarou tilted his hound-like skull, gave a single huff, and launched like a missile—thirty feet in a clean arc, landing on the sagging bones of a half-collapsed roof. Watchdog that was leagues better than a bunker.

  “What the hell are you—” she started, but her voice died in her throat as I dropped the thin metal tube into her palm.

  “Synthetic adrenaline,” I said. “With a kiss of Alraune blood. Five hundred bucks a hit. You’re welcome.”

  She stared at it, long and slow, lips curling into something wicked and amused.

  “Vamps don’t need this crap. You didn’t haul this around just for little ol’ us, did you?” she said, lashes fluttering like a mockery of innocence.

  I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.

  She grinned, a slightly lascivious smile curling those full lips. "You glorious, over-planning nerd. If we survive this, I’m doing that thing you like. Y’know. In the boudoir.”

  Then she bit the cap clean off, jammed the needle into her shoulder, and slammed the plunger home.

  The effect was instant. Her spine straightened, color surged back into her cheeks, and that twitch in her legs? Gone—replaced by the steel certainty of someone who could power-walk the side of a mountain, with pep in her step, to boot. The adrenaline helped, sure, but the real miracle was the Alraune blood—liquid vitality, richer than steak and smoother than bourbon. A single drop could turn an anemic into a marathon runner. For a time.

  She exhaled, slow and hot. “Now that’s the stuff,” she whispered like a lover’s confession, eyes closed in bliss.

  If I hadn’t known better, I’d have taken her for a junkie.

  Then her gaze slid sideways, half-lidded and playful again—but this time, her voice carried something sharper under the sugar.

  “Y’know,” she said, “you could just give me a sip of your blood. Would work a helluva lot better. Faster, too.”

  I froze—just a half-second hitch in my breath—but she caught it. Of course she did.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “No?” She arched a brow. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  She snorted. “What, scared I’ll get addicted? Witches are made of sterner stuff. And you don't need to enthrall me to get to the good stuff”.

  I didn’t answer. Just kept moving. Eyes scanning the sagging ruins around us, one hand on my carbine. The place felt wrong—like the buildings were listening. Waiting. Even the shadows looked hungry. A sharp whistle was all that Lucien needed to start shadowing our advance, leaping from roof to roof.

  The silence stretched between us like a drawn wire.

  Truth was, yeah, I was scared.

  I was scared because vampire blood does addict. And for all her surety, the way that it addicts is subtle. Didn't want to chance it. Makes mortals stronger, faster, almost as hard to kill as a bloodsucker. But it also binds. Not with chains, but with feelings. Chemical affection. Synthetic loyalty. And I’d seen what that did to people. Too many vamps in the Lodge, sauntering with a gaggle of hollow-eyed sycophants, living blood bags and bed-warmers, lined behind them, yipping for the smallest attention like crackheads willing to go down for a fix.

  Lovers who swore they loved you, but couldn’t tell if it was them talking, or the taste still clinging to their tongue.

  No way in hell I was gonna poison this ragtag crew of mine with that kind of leash. Especially not Colette. Not when her smirks, her smiles, her touches, even the way she called me “nerd” without an ounce of malice—those were real. Or at least, I liked to believe they were.

  "Give it a couple seconds," I said, keeping my tone flat, matter-of-fact, as I changed the subject. "Let it absorb into the bloodstream."

  Colette narrowed her eyes, then shook her head with a half-laugh. “Neeeeeerd,” she whispered. No venom in it. Just tired affection buried under layers of grit. And it did me good to hear it.

  I grunted in reply and checked the shell slot on my carbine for the eighth damn time.

  The wind picked up again, moaning low through the collapsed buildings. Somewhere out there, water moved where water shouldn’t. The stink of salt and decay followed it. The mermaid was close. Closer than comfort.

  Colette flexed her fingers, arcs of magic crackling like static through the air. "Maybe I should do a scrying spell before we go any further, make sure there's no ambush..."

  I flicked my carabine to firing position in a spasm of lightening-fast motion. We'd almost missed him at first.

  Half-submerged in the muck at the center of the square, face-down like just another bloated corpse. A body left to rot where the storm had thrown it. Dozens like him all around — slumped against broken benches, strung in trees, caught in fences like driftwood.

  But then he moved. Not a twitch. Not a stir. No warning.

  He stood. Straight up. Like a board on a hinge. No scramble, no stagger — just a sudden, jarring rise, too fast, too stiff. Every vertebra in his back straightened all at once, a sick marionette pulled upright by a drunken puppeteer. Water and mud slopped from his clothes in great gouts. Something squelched where his boots should’ve been.

  It was the way he moved. The way his head turned — too slow, then too fast, eyes snapping toward us like someone had yanked an invisible wire. His joints bent wrong when he stepped forward. Jerky, hesitant, like he was still figuring out how to work a human skeleton.

  His face looked… fine.

  Too fine.

  Like someone had painted normal onto a mask made of skin and held it in place with pure disinterest. Exactly like a mask. There was nothing real inside that calm expression. Dressed in what might’ve once been a sheriff’s uniform, buttons gone, badge hanging by a twisted safety pin, hair hanging in wet clumps over a face that smiled like it didn’t know what smiling meant.

  Lucien slammed in front of us, heckles raised, snarling low and guttural — not a warning, but a statement. Wrong. This one was wrong.

  As he opened his mouth, a cacophony of noises, roughly approximating words, belched out alongside black bile and rancid blood, as if something was trying to mimic human speech through broken chords and rotten lungs.

  The voice wasn’t made of sound. Not really. It bypassed the air entirely, crawling through bone like centipedes rummaging inside marrow, pressing cold fingers against the soft folds of the brain. A wet, burbling static that assembled itself into something like language — more tasted than heard. And it tasted of rot.

  The man’s jaw hung slack, gums torn, the lips cracking with every syllable. His body jerked with every utterance, elbows spasming, legs locking and unlocking with each horrible step. Something was speaking through him. And whatever it was, it had no mouth of its own.

  “The Eye that never Closed……has seen your act of predation.”

  His head lolled to the side with a sickening crunch, neck bending like damp twine. Behind the glassy, unseeing eyes, something writhed — not metaphor, not madness — magots, parasitic worms.

  “Of the meat that walks this mud……you were the better.”

  Lucien let out a low, guttural growl. Lips peeled back to reveal rows of unnatural teeth — but not in anger. In fear. Unease.

  Colette pressed closer to me, both hands on her rifle, aiming it at the flesh-puppet, like it could anchor her to something sane. Her breath trembled with each word the corpse spat.

  “The Children have fallen. They were the weaker. You are the better life. Their meat is yours”

  A thick tear of black fluid oozed from the puppet’s nostril. His chest deflated as if something inside had uncoiled and left a hollow shell behind.

  “The Mothers will test you next. Walk the path. Walk every path. Walk no path.”

  The final phrase came with a sickening crunch as the thing that had been puppeteering it dislodged itself form the marionette's. We saw it now. It hadn't been visible moments before.

  A tendon of flesh, trunk buried in the muck at the flesh-puppet's feet, connected to the small of his back. It burst off, severing it's connection to the spine in a violent shower of bony splinters and spinal fluid. Like a sea anemone, myriad of branches twitching and jolting in spasms of motion and primeval life.

  Then the muck began to swell.

  The impact took us both off our feet, launching us back twenty feet, as Lucien lunged back, pushing us out of the way, a hair's breath away from being caught in the geyser of boiling brine that burst upward from the mud and gore-caked sludge.

  She was a thing of thalassophobian horror. A mad-man's fever dream fueled creation.

  Her body, bulbously bloated and fish-belly pale, moved with the heavy sway of a corpse long lost to the tides, spongy and soft, the color and consistency of a drown victim. The flesh sagged in unnatural ways, puckered and pitted with growths, tumorous and chitinous, sprouting vestigial mouths and unseeing, blind eyes. From her twisted neck sprouted not the face of a siren, but the hell-born maw of an anglerfish—jaws split wide in a rictus of bone-piercing fangs, heavy-browed and lantern-jawed. The "eyes" that regarded us, two black bottomless orbs, set too far apart on the head, glinting with the cold cruelty of a shark.

  The undulating length of flesh that had been puppeting the corpse, that sea-anemone looking thing, slithered out from her forehead where the angler lure should have been, thrashing and undulating like an eel. Her "hair" writhed with a mind of its own—squid tentacles, black and glistening, coiling and uncoiling like serpents in heat, each slick appendage covered in barbs and suckers that pulse with obscene life.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  From the waist down, it only got worse. A living armor of chitin and ancient scale; the hardened carapace of some primeval crustacean. Segmented limbs twitched and clacked, each one ending in talons meant to crush bone and tear flesh. Her tail—massive, plated, hideous—slithered with the weight of forgotten epochs, trailing ichor and barnacles from unknowable depths.

  There was no nubile young woman here, moving in the undulating slithers of youthful flesh and carnality, no bountiful swell of breast and hip, no alluring eyes staring from behind lashes as thick as tree crowns. Not a temptress. That's not what mermaids are.

  They are the deep trench given form and function. The passionless savagery of thalassic predation.

  Lucien didn’t make it clear.

  Not all the way.

  The blast had caught him mid-lunge—one moment he was airborne, muscles rippling, fangs bared, the next he was gone, swallowed whole by the geyser of boiling, brine-stinking rot. He'd lunged to get us clear, and now he was paying the price.

  I cussed, but the sound was ripped from my throat by the scream—a resonance that wasn’t made of noise but intent. It hit like a migraine behind the soul. My ears rang, my vision tunneled, and something inside me—the beast, the blood—shrank away. Colette fll to her knees, puke and blood bursting from her mouth. Reality rot.

  When I looked back, she had him.

  Tentacles—sinewy, gleaming wet with seawater and slick mucus—had him in a dozen places. One around his throat, another looped twice around his chest, and two more coiled tight around each thigh. She lifted him like a broken doll, ten feet of Rougarou muscle dangling like butcher’s meat swinging on a hook. His claws slashed and spasmed, but his body wasn’t cooperating—twitching like something short-circuiting. So close to the beast, the reality rot was hitting him like poison in the blood.

  She looked at him. And that’s what made my stomach twist.

  There was no hunger in it. No malice. Just... curiosity. Like a scientist inspecting an animal she didn’t understand. Like a human looking at a ladybug, wondering whether it was worth effort to crush it.

  Then the lure, that pulsating, anemone looking length of slick flesh—punched into his chest. No warning. No ceremony. Just shhk! and blood. The branches burrowed into fur, skin and meat like hungry corpse-maggots. She was feeding. Eating him alive.

  Lucien yowled, a canine whine that struck me to the core. I lashed out.

  Shrapnel-25 Spetialy rounds, each cartridge, 4 buckshot pellets, barbed and designed to lacerate and burst on impact, to carve red ruin into whatever flesh they struck, slammed into her. Bloated, blubbery flesh burst like rancid pustules, opening deep trenches into her body, showering the ground in pus and brackish blood that stunk of brine and rotten fish.

  With each shot I advanced, one hand on the trigger, the other replacing each cartridge as it was expended.

  The Reality Rot hit me like a bulldozer as I got close, warping my vision into vertigo, pulsing just behind my face like a ballon of pressure waiting to burst. I powered through, tearing into my own tongue with my teeth.

  The pain gives me focus. Clarity of purpose.

  My teeth itch inside my gums, my jaw locked tight like the bolt on a coffin lid. Blood sings in my skull. Not hunger. Not fear. Just the cold arithmetic of justice.

  You break the rules, you die. That’s the equation. No variables. No nuance. No second draft.

  Every breath she takes is a subtraction from the world’s balance sheet. And I have to collect. To do anything less would be a perversion of my own code.

  My boots hit the ground like gunshots. My hands shake—not with fear, but with the effort it takes not to just let the carbine clatter to the ground and dig my fingers into her eyes.

  Because this is war, and war demands clarity.

  Black. White. No grey.

  

  Rounds struck home, a jagged-edged wall of ruin. Flesh parted, ripped and tore, but she wasn't even recoiling. A bastion of abominable, flexible meat.

  More, it needed to be more. Four more rounds slipped into the slot, Barrikada, solid steel slugs, designed to punch through engine blocks from 100m away.

  Four rounds. Four shots. Meaningless. Each slug piercing through the bulbous body, slowing, stopping, momentum caught in the molasses of her flesh.

  More. Had to be more.

  Colette gasped beside me, stumbling to her feet, one hand on her churning stomach, vomit staining her chin, the other drawing sigils in the air with a trembling finger.

  “LUCIEN!!! Not like this—NOT LIKE THIS!” she screamed, voice cracking.

  Her power surged —green light twisting around her like licks of flame. The bone dagger in her belt sang, a long, low hum of want and wrath. She plunged it into her palm without hesitation. Blood sprayed.

  "Par le sang et les os," she tore it out, the spray of her own blood painting her face, then arched her spine, calling out to the bayou. "Par le sel et la sueur."

  The ground shook.

  Not a tremor. A pulse. As if something titanic had just shifted below the earth.

  Mud hissed. Water seethed. Trees bent away in dread. Even the mermaid paused—her tentacles rearing back, hiss like a bursting pressure valve, sensing the rival song of an older apex.

  Something rose from the mire behind us—tall as judgment, draped in the filth of a thousand drowned years. Moss hung like rotting skin from its frame, bones jutting from the muck-caked skeleton. Its antlers were jagged driftwood and bayou bones, twisted into a crown animal could ever bear. It walked on hooves slick with river-mud, serpents tangled around its legs like it had dragged hell up with it.

  And its eyes—they were Colette’s. She was staggering, blood pouring from her palm, her lips twitching with the strain of control. She wasn’t just summoning—she was riding it, lashing her will against its spine like reins on a warhorse.

  The Bog-Beast roared, a sound like trees snapping under a hurricane, and hurled itself at the mermaid. A juggernaut of the swamp, forged from time and rot, twice Lucien's prodigious height, near as tall as the creature it charged.

  They met like war machines. The thing hit her shoulder-first, antlers plunging deep into spongy, sea-born flesh, the ground shaking beneath the impact. But like my rounds, it meant nothing. blood, no stagger. Just insult.

  The mermaid turned with the grace of an eel and struck back, a bloated, meaty backhand that crushed through wood and bone and hardened swamp much like it was tissue back, a single strike almost enough to shatter the construct's entire midsection.

  Rattling, like hail bouncing against metal sheeting cut through the air, Colette, one eye closed, the other red with strain and half her mind focused on controlling the Bog-Beast, was firing her AK-47, trying to cut the appendage on the mermaid's forehead. The mermaid's hair thrashed and spasmed like a snake orgy, tentacles lashing the air front of her face, catching the bullets before they could touch the appendage.

  In vain. It all looked in vain. The Bog-Beast roaring, Lucien's desperate thrashing, Colette's efforts, my carbine's shrapnel rounds. There was a reason why almost no one was mad enough to try and take this job.

  In the tier-list of Freak types, mermaids lie in the top ten. In gaming terms, a raid boss.

  But this wasn’t a game. It was real life. The "skull icon" doesn't exist. And at the end of the day, an eye is still an eye, a throat is still a throat. Weak spots. Variables in the impossible equation that was the mermaid.

  Equation. Flesh like viscous tar, impervious to blade or bludgeon. Height and strength and stamina. Lower half of chitinous solidity, as thick as tank armor.

  Variable. Tentacles, swarming like serpents around the head, lashing out by instinct against any threat. I couldn't jump to it, the tentacles would just bash me out of the air. Couldn't clamber on it either, the pulpy rotten skin

  Solution. The head.

  And it was not in vain. Nothing is wasted when you seek to solve a deathly equation. The Bog-Beast's assault, Colette's desperate fire, Lucien's agony – all bought me time. Time to change the play, to slip low, between the bog behemoth's legs, between the battling titans.

  To wrest the M18A2 Rupture from my pack, where it lay buried beneath a jumble of supplies, flares, and the myriad tools of my trade. It always amused the "badass"-es in the Lodge that I always carried all this stuff with me. So much so, that I'd derisively earned the moniker, "Boy Scout", among the Hunters. As much because of my habit to overprepare, as it was because I was "green around the gills". Whatever, half of them were dead now, so who gets the last laugh?

  To pull the claymore, buried under all too many supplies, flare and myriad other items that I always carried on assignment, from my rucksack and arm it.

  M182 Rupture. It wasn't sleek. Wasn't meant to be. Olive drab, blocky, brutally functional. The polymer casing was cold against my gloved fingers, the words "FRONT TOWARD FREAK" stark and uncompromising in the dim light. Fourteen by eight inches in size, four inches in girth, it was almost half again the size of a standard claymore. Then again, it needed to be. And at a standard price of 800 dollars per piece, directly from the Lodge, I expected it to be.

  The suits in their high-rise tombs, you gotta hand it to them, they knew how to arm a Hunter. Strap this baby to a wall, the flank of a tank, and pull the trigger – it'd chew through half a battalion of heavy infantry like a dame's silk stocking. Or you could get creative, like I intended.

  In one savage motion, I slammed the Rupture against the mermaid's distended gut, my shoulder driving it home, and yanked the firing line.

  A thousand quarter-inch steel teeth, spat out by two pounds of C4's raw fury, ripped through the air in a lethal storm. The Bog-Beast's clumsy swings, Colette's buzzing slugs, my own pathetic shrapnel – the creature hadn't even registered 'em. But this?

  This was fifty thousand pounds per square inch of pure, tearing force. The sound wasn't an explosion, more a wet, sickening KRRRUMPH, and then the mermaid's back just… blossomed, a grotesque flower of rotten meat and foul fluids. Along with the sharp crack as every bone in my left arm decided to go its own way.

  For all its bulk and muscle, this was a hurt even a creature from the deep couldn't shrug off, and its scream was a mind-shattering blend of serpent's hiss and a woman's high-pitched agony. A sound as chillingly human as it was alien.

  It fell back, bloated arms grabbing at the red ruin of her front, as if she could close the wound by sheer outrage alone. She never got the chance to try. In a mass of mossy muscle, muck-caked oak and bog bleached bone the Bog-Beast barreled into her, as if some ingrained primeval instinct had recognized that the kill was close, driving the monstrous mermaid to the muck, laying into her with arms of oak and driftwood, pulping flesh with hooves of granite and limestone.

  The Bog-Beast’s assault was a clumsy, brutal ballet, a dance of death in the fetid mire. While the monstrous mermaid thrashed beneath its weight, a symphony of snapping bone and pulped flesh, I saw my chance. Lucien. He was still, a dark shape tangled in the mermaid’s slick embrace, the lure a gruesome vine buried in his chest.

  Ignoring the white-hot lance of pain that shot up my shattered arm with every twitch of the behemoth, I moved. Low and fast, a shadow slipping between titans. The lure pulsed, a sickly, organic beacon. I reached it, the slick, rubbery flesh cold and alien beneath my torn glove. A primal disgust coiled in my gut, but I choked it down. This wasn't about revulsion; it was about extraction. With a guttural grunt, I ripped. The fleshy tendon tore with a wet, sickening schlorp, and the anemone-like head flopped uselessly to the side, its myriad tendrils spasming.

  Lucien slumped, free but still. Unconscious. No time for sentiment.

  From beneath my jacket, tucket neatly to it's holster against the small of my back, I drew the stubby, brutal lines of the sawed-off. The grip was comforting in my hand, a promise of violence. Two shells nestled in the breech – Dragonfire rounds. Incendiary. For creatures that shrugged off steel, sometimes you just needed to burn them from the inside out. But it still had to be close. Personal. In the weak spots.

  The mermaid’s bloated form spasmed, angler maw snapping blindly. Her black, bottomless eyes – twin pools of unfocused rage. I planted the barrels a handspan apart, right where those cold, cruel orbs had stared moments before. The roar of the double blast was deafening in the already cacophonous swamp. Two geysers of white-hot fire erupted from her skull, painting the grotesque flesh in flickering orange light. The smell of burning blubber and ozone filled the air, acrid and satisfying.

  It wasn't enough.

  Driven by a primal fury, the mermaid thrashed, massive tail slamming against the mud with the force of a battering ram. Her arms, still locked in the Bog-Beast’s crushing embrace, spasmed and twitched. And then her jaws locked. Agony exploded in my right shoulder. Her teeth, wickedly sharp and designed for crushing bone, sank deep, tearing, grinding into my muscle and sinew. She was trying to rise, to drag me up with her, like a prized catch on a hook. Tentacles ending in chitinous hooks lashed at my face and back, suckers with barbs nestled into the folds of flesh carving red ribbons out of my upper body.

  Had I been anything less than what I was, the pain and blood-loss would have been enough.

  But I was a creature of nightmare too.

  My fangs flicked out from their sheaths, thumb-long and sharp as daggers. My left hand, useless and throbbing, limp at my side. My right, the one still barely functioning, snaking around her slick, fish-belly pale head. I found purchase in the soft, yielding flesh of her cheek, my thumb pressing against the corner of her ruined eye socket.

  And I bit.

  Not out of rage. Not out of fear. But with a single-minded, brutal efficiency. My teeth tore through the blubbery skin, through layers of fat and muscle. I tasted the brackish, metallic tang of her blood, thick and foul. I tore the chunk of flesh off, spitting out the stringy meat, to bite again, deeper, angling my head, seeking the artery in her neck. Horror she may be, but she was still a horror made of flesh and bone and sinew. Arteries and blood. A guttural growl rumbled in my chest, a sound devoid of emotion, purely functional. A predator taking down its prey. There was no pleasure in it, only the grim satisfaction of survival. Of ending the threat. Of adhering to the code.

  I find it. Like a cable made of rubber, thicker than the barrel of a shotgun, nestled deep in layers of flesh, fat and muscle, throbbing with brine-laced blood from a heart half torn by my claymore. The artery.

  And the cascade hits the back of my throat like an ice-whiskey after a scalding August day. Her lashing tentacles become nothing, love taps as my flesh heals through the wounds, fresh blood sending my regeneration into overdrive.

  For a vampire, blood is life. It's crack and meth, love and lust, hate and spite. And nothing can unlatch me from her throat. Not the lashing tentacles. Not the bloated hand clawing at my back and shoulders, trying to tear me away. Not her wheezing whine.

  And with every greedy gulp, I make the world just a little bit more balanced. I make it right. She broke the rules, and now she dies. Simple as that.

  I don't know how long I drink. All that I know is that by the time I roll off her bloated mass, she's sprawled onto the muck, her bloodless body looking like a dried prune.

  "Jacob! JACOB!" Colette's voice sliced through the chaos, sharp as broken glass. She was beside me in a heartbeat, her hands fluttering over my ripped clothes, checking for the kill shot. I snagged her wrist, pulled two injectors from the utility box strapped to my thigh. The same juice I'd given her before.

  "Lucien. Use these. Now." I gritted out, my vision swimming, canines itching, the thrum of her pulse a dangerous drumbeat in my ears. Dumb move, getting this close after I'd fed. Months we'd been partners, she knew the drill – gotta ride out that edge. Otherwise, things could get… bitey.

  Colette snatched the injectors, a quick nod, and bolted towards Lucien's shivering form. Rougarou were tough, but they lacked the quick-stitch that ran in vampire and lycan blood. He needed to revert to heal clean. And for that, he needed to stay conscious.

  I rolled onto my back, pulled out my worn notebook, and scratched off a few lines. Always helped to ground me after the rush. Three synth-adrenalin shots. Fifteen hundred dollars. One M182 Rupture. Eight hundred more. Four dozen Barrikada, Shrapnel, and two Dragonfire rounds. A hundred. Replacing my torn clothes. Hundred more.

  I grimaced. Margins were tighter than I preferred, but still in the black. Job was good and done. Good riddance, good payday. And the take from this contract? Seventy credits a head, minimum. Along with seventy-five grand, split along the three of us. That wasn't even covering what we'd get for the merman bodies and...

  A voice, a wet rasp in the air: "The Eye that never Closed… has witnessed… your success… The paths lie deeper into the… bayou…"

  I was on my feet in a flash, my sawed-off already leveled at the mermaid's corpse, two fresh shells chambered.

  Dead. She had to be. No heartbeat, no pulse in that mangled chest. Yet, her head was turned towards me, sightless, gouged-out sockets fixed on me with a disturbing interest. Colette stood a few feet away, her gaze flicking between the corpse and me, pupils shrunk to pinpricks of pure fear.

  This was wrong. All wrong.

  "Muck and mildew… stone and sinew… go… deeper now… and deeper still… into the bayou's bowels… choose the path… choose all paths… choose no path…" the mermaid's head wheezed, its jaw moving like something crawling through thick mud. Then, silence.

  There it was. The hero crap from the pulp novels. The call to action. A dozen fancy names for the same damn thing. The idiot urge to charge into the teeth of impossible odds for some hazy idea of justice or good.

  "Nope," I said.

  "Oh, hell no!" Colette echoed, her voice dry and hoarse.

  "Yeah… screw that…" Lucien spat out, along with a mouthful of blood.

  We weren't heroes. We were glorified mercenaries, trying to make a buck.

  I lunged towards them, hefted Lucien's ten-foot frame onto my shoulders, and hauled ass in the opposite direction of the deeper bayou, Colette pounding the ground right behind me.