“Any reason that dusty old bloodsucker wants your head on a stick, chère?”

  Colette’s voice came low and casual, but I could feel her eyes on me. I didn’t bother looking up. Kept mine fixed on the tablet, watching our blip crawl through the swampland. The satellite feed lagged a bit, but it was holding. We were deep in the bayou — the real bayou. The kind tourists never saw. Trees pressed in like prison bars, and the air hung thick with rot. Everything here felt alive, and most of it wanted you dead.

  “Not the time for heart-to-hearts,” I muttered. “Short left, up ahead.”

  She fell in step beside me, rifle slung over her shoulder like it weighed nothing. The carvings etched into the stock — old runes, charmwork — caught the light in flashes as she moved.

  “We’ve got time. Half an hour, easy,” she said, peeking at the screen over my arm. “Lucien’s scoutin' ahead. If anything was out there, we’d know.”

  Lucien grunted behind us. “She’s right, fré. Ain’t nothing sneaking past me. And I’ve been wonderin’ too. First time Lucien call a leech ‘friend’. That be a first, even for me.”

  Friend. That word still felt strange. I’d had “friends” before — the kind who answered when you called, but never called first. You made the plans, they showed up. But it never went both ways. Not friends. Just company.

  Lucien and Colette weren’t like that. No matter how many times I told them this was just business — survival, money, convenience — they still kept dragging me into things that looked a lot like friendship. And I didn’t hate it.

  I flipped open my notebook, thumbing to a page marked Observations.

  “Ainar hates me because I’m Steregoi Clan.”

  Colette raised a brow. “That’s not much of an answer. I’ve heard bloods talk about clans in the Lodge, but they never go into detail.”

  “Yeah. We don’t share much with pulse-havers. No offense.”

  She clutched her chest in mock pain. “Sounds like a slur.”

  “It is,” I said, straight-faced. “You just can’t use it. It's our word for your kind.”

  "Alright neck-nibbler." She smirked, sticking her tongue out. Lucien chuckled.

  They laughed at the joke — mine, of all people. That didn’t happen much when I was still breathing.

  Colette stayed quiet for a beat, eyes flicking to the underbrush like she was checking for threats, but I could feel her curiosity digging at the edges.

  Finally, she continued, “Never heard of that word. Steregoi. Old World clan?”

  “Yeah,” I said, tucking the notebook back into my coat. “Steregoi are rare even among Vampires. That's because the Clan's formed mainly of the old fogeys from back in the day. Old man Vlad Tepes the Impaler's personal retainers. Very exclusive club. Isolationists. Still got the old knight rituals and whatnot.”

  "Merde! Dracula himself? So, you're like the first bloodline?"

  I scoffed. "Dracula wasn't the first, just the most famous. To his own detriment. Vamp history is as long as human history. We're just a Clan like so many others."

  She didn't answer, just looked at me, interest obvious on her button nose face. It felt good to be interesting. Another thing I hadn't had in my mortal days.

  "Every vampire starts the same. Doesn’t matter if you’re turned in the back alleys of New Orleans or the Carpathians. Once you cross over, you get the baseline set — strength that can tear oak trees in half, reflexes that rival predatory cats, and the ability to dominate mortal minds. Man, or beast. You're immune to age, sickness, and every toxin the world can throw at you. You can tank even 9mm like its pebbles. And sure, you’re unkillable... until someone caves in your skull and drives a stake through your heart. Then it's lights out. Instant trip to the hereafter.

  But that’s just the start. Vampires aren’t uniform. We’re bloodline bound. Clans. Each line's got a trick, a gift baked into the blood. Unique. Inherited. Most of them keep that secret tighter than a priest’s confessional.

  But vamps are uppity. Love to show off just how a cut above the rest they are. So there's rumors.

  The Mahrani out of Northern India — they can slip between shadows like water, blink in and out of sight. The Aellai from Turkey supposedly drink pain and puke fear — the more you hurt, the more your mind conjured up horrors. Illusionists. The Kuroba from Japan? Word is they can become mist, billow in and rip you form the inside out. Then there’s the Viscari from Italy — shapeshifters. Real monsters, stuff of nightmares. Not just wolves or bats. I’m talking abominations of muscle and bone."

  "Merde, that's cool. Don't worry, I'm not goanna ask you to tell us yours. If keeping the gift secret is so important for Vamp..." she began, until I interrupted brusquely.

  "There are some gifts that're simply known in Vampire society. Steregoi-power is one of them. It's the reason we're so hated."

  "What fre, them others scared of you lot? You too strong?"

  "On the contrary, our gift is seen as too weak." I answered dryly, scanning the bayou as we talked, finger hovering over the trigger of my shotgun as always. The silence droned one, oppressive and cloying.

  I continued. It was rare that I got to talk much, so might as well make the most out of it.

  "Steregoi? We got survival. That's our gift, the best endurance and healing factor out of all the Clans. Doesn’t sound flashy. Because it isn't. Doesn’t impress the other Clans. You cut off a Vampire's head and destroy their heart? Done. Dead Vamp. For my Clan, we just go catatonic. Give us enough time and we regrow both the head and heart. We survive. Cut off a vampire's arm and it'll regrow in a year. For Steregoi? A month. Two, tops."

  Colette did a double take.

  "Wait, what? How's is THAT considered weak?"

  "Because it doesn't matter if I heal through something that'd kill any other Clan Vamp. Regeneration takes time. If I'm catatonic for a week, my head and heart slowly regenerating..."

  "Nothing to stop your enemy from just sticking you in an incinerator." Lucien mumbled, face locked into a grimace.

  "Exactly. In a species that can just casually wield ice like a weapon, walk through shadows or turn into damn mist, just being slightly harder to kill than the average Vampire don't amount to much, does it? That's why they hate our Clan. Vampires get off on being top dog. Flashy powers, ancient lineages, all that dark drama. You show up with a gift they see as subpar, and it’s like throwing shit in their wine."

  Colette scoffed. "That's dumb. I still think it's a good gift."

  I shrugged, "It's useful. As long as you make sure whoever you're fighting bleeds out before you pass out, it's useful. Just got to play it smart."

  “You don’t sound proud of it,” Colette said.

  “Pride’s a luxury. Survival’s not.”

  She didn’t have a response to that.

  "Sorry to tell you this. But if my general demeanor's not been a dead give-away, I'm not exactly what you'd consider a prime vampire candidate. I was just some jagoff salaryman in life. And then I got turned into a Vampire of the weakest clan. Dare I say you two've picked a really bad card hand.... hrrk".

  A sharp elbow jabbed me in the ribs. Not playful. Not hard enough to really hurt, but it got the point across. I glanced over. Colette kept her eyes forward, mouth set in a flat line.

  “Cut the self-pity, neck-nibbler,” she said.

  “Wasn’t pity. Was just being realistic.”

  “Yeah? Well reality says we’ve been running jobs together for three months, and you’ve saved both our asses more times than I care to count. So, spare me the sad sack routine.”

  Lucien grunted in agreement in front of us. “Ain’t just ‘cause you’re hard to kill, either. You’re methodical. Precise. A bit weird, but eh, not everyone can be perfect like Lucien.”

  I let out a dry breath — might’ve been a laugh if you squinted at it sideways. “So now I’m dependable.”

  “Damn right you are,” Colette muttered. “You think I’d be hauling ass through this swamp, hunting a pod of mermen, if I didn’t trust you to have my back?”

  “That why you elbowed me?” I asked, flexing my ribs a little.

  “Damn straight. You start talking bullshit, I remind you.”

  “Warm and fuzzy, as always,” I said. But I didn’t mind it. Didn’t mind it at all.

  “Look,” she continued, quieter now, but still keeping that hard edge in her voice, “I’ve run with a lot of operators. Most don’t make it past the first month. Too flashy. Too cocky. They forget the golden rule.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t die.”

  I gave a slow nod. “Fair rule.”

  Lucien spoke up again, voice low and sure. “Flash don’t win fights. Flash gets you seen. Gets you killed. You? You're methodical, careful and professional. 'S far as Lucien sees it, this be a damn good hand.”

  We kept walking. The swamp buzzed around us, the air thick with insects and humidity and the scent of something long dead. A heat haze shimmered in the distance.

  "Thanks" I muttered, voice lower than I would've wanted it to be. They just nodded quietly.

  We fell into silence again after that. Not awkward. Comfortable. Three killers in step, weapons hot, eyes sharp, each one trusting the other to pull them out of the fire if the bayou turned mean.

  As we got closer, we slowly formed our tried-and-true squad strategy. Lucien in front, as the vanguard, being that he was easily the fastest and most capable in hand-to-hand combat out of all of us. Never underestimate just how quick a Rougarou can be. Neither Vampires nor Werewolves couldn't hold a candle to it. Once the change took him, man was lightning in a bottle.

  Myself in the middle, my assignment to keep Colette safe and provide supportive fire for Lucien. The Rougarou might be faster but I was easily the physically strongest and most durable of the group. Could rip a man in half with my bare hands and power through anything under high-caliber armor-piercing rounds. Which made me the perfect tank. Anything got past Lucien, it was my job to break it.

  And three steps behind, our heavy hitter. Our four-foot-five cannon. The AK-47 was something that she only kept in case things got really hairy. If she ever needed to use it, meant I hadn't been doing my job proper.

  Because, where Lucien LeBeau could run circles around anything and bleed them with a thousand cuts, where I could batter anything down with the strength and resilience of a fully-grown Kodiak bear, Colette Loulou could entreat the swamp to swallow an entire building wholesale. She could use the roots as claw and fang, turn bog into boiling bile and swamp-mist into solid wall. All she needed was time to chant.

  And my job was to give her that time.

  We smelled it before we reached it. The rank and putrid wafting gale of rotting flesh, mildew and brine. Atherbee didn’t look like a place that had been attacked — it looked like a place that had been despoiled. Perverted. A man's fever dream interpretation of human civilization.

  The streets were silent. Deathly so. Not even the crickets sang, as if afraid that they might draw attention. The air itself felt stagnant, cloying, adamantly refusing to blow or shift. The town wasn’t just decimated; it was scoured. Once-picturesque houses stood at strange angles, distorted and somehow elongated, windows gaping like blind eyes. Half-fallen roofs, shattered doorways, twisted metal and wood piled in what could only be described as the aftermath of a massacre that shouldn’t have been possible. A handful of soggy shutters banged lazily in the wind.

  And yet, not a single corpse stood on the road. Not a single spot of blood stained the concrete. It had an almost liminal space quality to it all.

  “The satellite image showed a spawn pool. Where is it?” Colette’s voice was low, her eyes darting from the destroyed buildings to the sky, checking the surrounding tree line as if she expected something to leap out of it at any moment.

  I didn’t answer right away, my boots squelching in the muck that used to be a cobblestone street. The whole place had the kind of stillness you get before a storm — not just in the air, but in your gut. A sick feeling, crawling up your spine like something from a nightmare you couldn’t quite wake up from. A slight buzz in the air. A sensation that didn’t belong.

  I shook my head once, violently, trying to clear it and remember the addendum in the Lodge Manual. "Reality rot, could be that the satellite showed what the Mermaid wanted it to show. Bait and tackle, to draw us towards the center. Let's keep to the edges."

  “Look around,” Lucien muttered, his voice gravelly, like he was trying to choke something down. “Don’t see no bodies. Ain’t no blood. Nothing…. Merde, I hate mermen so damn much.”

  "Wrong. There are corpses" I hissed, my upper lip curling in disgust.

  It was only because of my improved sight that I saw him. Swaying against the wall of house. What had once been a man — maybe a farmer, judging by the worn clothes — was now a grotesque, bulbous mound of pale, translucent flesh, twisted and deformed. His chest was swollen, throbbing and pulsing, as if something inside was growing. Skin stretched taut over his ribs, veins spidering out across his face like creeping roots, glazed over eyes staring at us, unseeing.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Only the faint, slow twitch at the corner of his mouth, like he was still trying to scream, still trying to breathe, betraying the singularly horrifying fact, that the poor bastard was still alive.

  For all that I'd seen over the past year in this business, this was the first time I'd seen a human egg-sack. The realization would have made my stomach turn had I still been human. But I'd lost the capability to puke. Still felt like I would if I could, though.

  “Jesus…” Colette whispered, looking away quickly. But I could see her jaw clenched tight, her fingers tight around the grip of her rifle.

  “Nothing we can do for 'em. Eggs connect to inner organs. Eat them from the inside out. No surgery can remove that. Only thing we can do, is give the poor bastards mercy” Lucien spat, his eyes burning with raw fury.

  I nodded grimly, already scanning for more signs of the mermen. Nothing yet.

  We moved deeper into the town, past shattered storefronts and the wrecked shells of what had once been people’s homes. Every now and then, we’d spot another human husk — bloated, twisted, and broken in ways that made no sense. Some were crammed into abandoned houses, their bodies contorted in unnatural ways, as if they’d been forced like meat into a larder. Others lay sprawled out in the streets, like discarded dolls. But none of them were truly dead.

  My ears caught it first. The pounding hearts, hammering in desperation, the barely audible sobs from those who couldn’t even muster the strength necessary to scream. Lucien’s grip tightened on his revolver, knuckles going white. He was hearing it too.

  Neither of us spoke. Best Colette stayed in the dark about it. She had enough on her plate.

  We stepped around a corpse, slumped against a crooked lamppost. A girl—barely more than a child. Fifteen, maybe. Her face was bloated, something sickly and swollen disfiguring once-pretty features. One eye was glazed over, frozen in paralysis, the other twitched, following us, tears and pus leaking from it, dripping down her cheek.

  "Hiiillll meeee... h...hhhleaaasseee...."

  The wheeze hit me like a hammer to the skull. It wasn’t just the sound—it was the weight of it. Vampire or not, I still had a soul, and the plea tugged at it. I wasn’t the only one. Lucien’s jaw tightened, and I saw the muscle in his neck flex, like the beast inside him was clawing to get out.

  Colette, however, was a different animal altogether. And the woman, while kind and gentle most of the time, could do spite like no other. She knelt before the girl, voice low, as sharp as the bone knife she held in her hand.

  "Here’s fine. We aren’t going in the center. Too obvious. It’s a trap." She spoke with venom, laying a hand on the girl's cheek. "I’ll give you peace, mon petit chou. Send you to the afterlife. But I need you to do something for me, chere. Think about them. Think about all the pain they’ve caused you. All the things they did to you and your kin. Hate them, and let that hate burn in your chest. I’ll take that hate and turn it on them."

  The girl’s body shuddered, her pupil shrinking to a needle’s point. A scream—thin, ragged—ripped from her throat, mixed with a torrent of sickening bile. No coaxing needed. She was already there. And I couldn’t blame her.

  I was just here for a job, and yet, the sight of this poor girl like this? It felt like ants were crawling all over me. My fists clenched, teeth grinding together so hard I was expecting to hear something break. There had to be some penance for this. The had to be some goddamned retribution.

  I dug my nails into the palm of my hand, relishing as the pain shot through. Used to have moments like this, back even when I was still alive. Moments where it felt like my heart was on fire and my brain was boiling. Probably just too much repressing stuff. Glad to see that part hadn't gone away. I liked it.

  Colette’s eyes gleamed with a dark fire. "Only way to draw out a pod of mermen is to hit their young. Sends them into a frenzy. I’m not about to let them set us up." She pressed the knife between the girl’s eyes with grim precision, her palm pressing firmly on the pommel.

  "Be at peace, mon petit. I goanna take all that hate, so you go in peace. Where you go, they cannot hurt you. Follow the bright light." she said, her voice suddenly ragged and, closing her eyes tight, drove the blade into the victim's head.

  The girl spasmed once, then her eye rolled over. It had been instant. Immediate.

  And the result was just as instant.

  Something shifted in the air — the buzzing sensation, that feeling of being watched from every angle, crept up again, sharper this time.

  And we heard it. A deep, guttural thrum, reverberating through the ground, vibrating in the pit of my stomach. A low, alien sound that seemed to distort everything around it, bending the air itself.

  A blur of motion. Figures springing from the shadows of the broken buildings, emerging from under cars and bursting through windows. Colette had been right. They were all waiting for us in the center of town. Pale, slick-skinned, with gaping jaws lined with teeth like coral that glinted an eerie green under the dim light.

  They charged at us, a tide of ferocity and hunger, limbs long and unnaturally thin, bending and jerking in spasms that defied anatomy. Eight feet tall, bodies stretched and warped, disfigured by the crushing pressures of the deep. There were no eyes, no faces, only cavernous maws filled with rows of jagged teeth, gaping wide like wounds carved into their skulls.

  And yet, despite their inhuman form, there was a terrible power in them. A strength that could only be forged in the darkest depths, where the hunger and dark were the only laws. They moved with the inevitability of a tidal wave, unstoppable, relentless.

  That was the merman. No thought, no brains, no pain receptors, just the relentless urge to consume. Erratic motions and hunger, driven by some primitive, cold synapse firing. A grotesque mockery of life. The merciless savagery of the deep abyss, given form and function.

  As strong as an ox. As resilient as a cockroach. As fast as a lynx. Thrity-strong, if not more.

  The world exploded into chaos as the creatures closed in, their movements too fast for the human eye to follow. But we weren't human.

  This wasn't some cheap B-Grade Horror movie, where the poor mercs get massacred. This was monster against monster. Savagery against savagery.

  And it was time for so goddamned retribution.

  The first shot cracked like a thunderclap.

  Lucien’s revolver barked five times in quick succession, each round a slab of blessed steel and heat that found its mark in the flesh of the oncoming horrors. One merman’s chest caved inward in a mess of chitin and pulpy bone. Another lost half its skull, brain matter hissing as it splashed onto the muck-drenched wall of a ruined shack. But there were too many.

  Five shots and the drum lay empty. For a human, it meant death. For him, it meant he was done with the aperitif.

  Then the change took him.

  Lucien screamed as his back swelled, breaking his shirt to ribbons, pulsating with snapping bones, sinew shredding, skin tearing off in greasy strips as the Rougarou form burst free — ten feet of lanky muscle and violence, the silhouette of a man spliced with a greyhound and a nightmare. This was Lucien LeBeau. The true Lucien. Not the debonair, genteel facade he showed off to the world. Inside the confines of his skin, the true Lucien always lay. Always waiting. Always ready.

  And then he was gone — a blur of claws and teeth.

  The mermen charged like a wave, and Lucien met them head-on, a rabid jackal among seals. He darted in and out of their ranks, flaying open bellies, rending through muscle and tendon before slipping away like smoke. A flash of claws, a gout of blood, and he was gone again, already flanking, already raking another one open from groin to gullet. They couldn’t catch him — he was too fast, too angry, too alive. The Rougarou is speed and life and savage vengeance.

  And yet for all his savagery and brutality, they still came. Guts roping, tangling their feet, necks savaged, and featureless heads dented, the bastards still ran, too primitive and primeval to understand that they were dying. Half were running after him, trying and failing to swarm the quicksilver canine.

  The other half were barreling towards us.

  Behind me, I could hear Colette’s voice rising, singing, dancing, as she chanted over the bone dagger, still painted red in the girl's blood.

  "Crie fort, crie fort, crie fort, que ton cri frappe leur dernier sort.

  Que ton cri déchire la nuit, comme un éclat de fer, Laisse-le porter la douleur, comme un fardeau amer.

  Crie fort, crie fort, crie fort, que ton cri frappe leur dernier sort"

  The air shimmered around her like oil in water, her voice no longer just hers. There were others, ghostly harmonics braiding through her chant, deep and high, whisper and growl. Ancestors, long-dead witches and warriors had come to sing war with her, unseen and half-heard. The veil between this world and the next grew thinner with every note.

  They surge in — limbs bending wrong, jaws unhinged wider than they should go. More than a dozen, rushing toward us like a flood of teeth and tendon.

  My fingers tighten around the KS-23’s grip.

  There it was again. That feeling. The knot.

  Right in the gut — low and deep and cold. Like standing on the edge of a subway platform and hearing the train whistle from just around the bend. That breathless space between anticipation and impact. Between doing something and freezing up like a deer in headlights.

  I’d felt it before. Every damn time.

  Didn’t matter that I could tear a man’s arm off or take a steel pipe to the face like a love tap. Didn’t matter what I’d become. Somewhere underneath the dead nerves and borrowed strength, Jacob the Salaryman still lived — that idiot part of me that wanted to calculate outcomes, compare insurance policies, make a spreadsheets about pros and cons. This wasn't anime where the unassuming normal guy suddenly snapped and became a smiling berserker. I wasn't some veteran soldier.

  And one year of doing this job sure as hell hadn't been enough to wipe out a lifetime of "living on the straight and narrow". It's simply not how the mind works.

  I wasn’t a fighter. I was just some guy.

  I raised the shotgun, bringing it up to shoulder height.

  The thrumming in my head didn’t slow. My hands didn’t stop shaking. The want to turn tail and run to safety didn't disappear. But it did shift. Like it always did. The panic didn’t vanish — it just moved, water draining down a hole. And in its place, a flat, cold clarity settled in.

  They’d broken the rules. Didn’t matter which rules — laws, morals, the unspoken contracts between living things. Didn't matter if they were men once, or monsters now.

  They crossed the line. So now they had to die. And it didn't matter that I was scared. I was here, therefore I had to do it.

  You break the rules you pay the price. It's simple. It's logical. Like gravity.

  And if I was being honest? This thing — this cold ledger in my head — it’d always been there. It wasn’t new. I had this even before becoming a Vampire. Even back when I still filed taxes and had to Google how to boil an egg properly. Even back when I flinched at loud noises and worked overtime just to avoid saying no.

  When I watched a man slam his girlfriend’s head into a car door and my hands started shaking so bad I could barely wrap my grip on the bottle I broke across the back of his skull. When I saw a couple of fifteen-year-olds chuck rocks at a burlap bag that was thrashing and yowling, and backhanded one of them across the face so hard I broke his nose.

  I wasn't a violent person. Just some guy. But I was there.

  Break the rules. Pay the price. Simple. Logical. Like gravity. It's just how it should work. And I was there, so I had to make it work.

  I leveled the barrel at the first charging shape and pulled the trigger.

  BOOM.

  23x75 mm Barrikada. A slug larger than a grown man's thumb, designed to punch holes through engine blocks, tore through the closest one, bursting the merman's head clean off its shoulders in a spray of gore and bony splinters.

  BOOM.

  Another lost its shoulder and left arm. It didn’t even fall — just kept spasming forward on twitching limbs, until the next slug took its spine and dropped it like a puppet with cut strings.

  They surged forward, relentless, and I stood firm. Like an iron post in a hurricane.

  My job was simple.

  I stepped forward, slammed three fresh slugs into the loader, and opened fire. The Barrikada kicked like a bull, but I held it one-handed, muscles locked against the recoil. Each blast tore into the swarm—legs snapped, torsos ruptured, ribs split like dry wood.

  Still, they came.

  Spasming. Twitching. Crawling through their own gore. Not a sound from them—no roars, no cries—just the wet scrape of ruined bodies dragging forward, driven by pure, mindless brutality. Rabid things that didn’t know they were already dead.

  Had to hit the head. Not yet good enough to do that one-armed. Too close for the gun now. I slung it and drew my hatchet.

  I don’t scream. I don’t roar. I don’t bare my teeth like some lunatic in a bar brawl.

  I work.

  And this? This is good, honest work.

  The first merman lunged. I buried the hatchet in its chest, twisted, ripping the wound open, and flung the corpse into its brothers. Another came from the side — I caught its arm and crushed the bones in my grip before driving my knee into its face, the steel plated kneepad folding the monster's jaw around it, coral-like teeth clattering to the asphalt.

  Another jumped from my right, trying to flank me. I spun, swinging the one I'd just incapacitated like an improvised club, bludgeoning them both into the asphalt, hard enough to crater it.

  They kept coming. I kept killing. Drawing back and swinging down my hatchet with the methodical rhythm of a butcher carving beef.

  Swing. Carve. Step forward. Swing. Carve. Step forward.

  It didn't matter that they kept coming, chests carved open, arms cut from shoulders, heads lolling to the side barely holding on to necks by flaps of skin. They clawed and pummeled and bit at me. It didn't matter.

  They were strong, no doubt about it. Strong enough to twist a man in half, fists that could smash through concrete, claws that could rip through chainmail like paper. But my flesh? My flesh was tough like Kevlar, and anything less than an armor piercing round could only do superficial wounds. Wounds that I could heal. Quickly.

  Swing. Carve. Step forward. Shouldering and kicking and bulling my way against the tide, pushing it back, one step at a time. They screeched and snapped, jaws wide, claws slashing — and I met every strike with cold, methodical fury.

  Behind me, Colette’s song came to a grinding halt. I turned, catching her movement at the edge of my vision.

  She was frozen—unnatural, like some twisted contortionist in the midst of a cruel performance. Her back arched impossibly, the bend so deep it made my spine ache just watching. It was a grotesque sight, one that made me wonder if her bones had somehow snapped under the strain.

  A flash of steel and splatter of red as she drew the dagger across her own tongue, mingling the girl's blood with her own.

  "Sa-mi bag pu..."

  I didn't get to finish the Romanian cuss as she snapped forward like whipcrack and screamed, in a voice that was not her own.

  That girl, that poor victim who'd been turned into an egg-sack, eaten alive from the inside out. Colette had taken all her anger, spite and hate, magnified it thousand-fold and let it loose, like a banshee wail.

  I wasn't the target. And neither was Lucien. But magic is volatile. It does collateral damage, even when you're not the target. At least neither of us got the full brunt of it. For me and Lucien it only meant being swept off our feet and launched into the air, as if hit by speeding trucks. Something that amounted to little, considering what he and I were.

  For the mermen, the targets, the very reason for that poor girl's hate? Spines shattered, necks jolted and snapped, jaws were torn in welters of blood and teeth, arms and legs turned, twisted and ripped like ribbons, as if a thousand clawing hands tore at them, ripped them apart in paroxysms of violence. What fell to the ground wasn't mermen anymore. But a rain of fist-sized gobbets of flesh.

  The echo of her wail still rang in my ears as I clambered to my feet, reaching for my carbine and starting to load a few more rounds into the 4-chamber internal magazine. There was no need to hurry. The fight was done.

  Lucien : 5 confirmed kills

  Myself : 7 confirmed kills

  Colette Loulou : 18 confirmed kills

  Like I said.

  A four foot five cannon.