The call came just before dawn.
Nyah stood motionless, steam curling off her skin, a towel clinging to her as cold air kissed the warmth from her shower. Her burner phone buzzed once—twice—and then stilled.
Only two people had the number.
She snatched it up, heart thudding.
Rhys didn't bother with pleasantries. "Another one. Downtown. Whitmore alley. Same signs."
Her stomach flipped. "How bad?"
A pause. Then: "Worse."
Nyah's pulse surged. "Shit. I'm on my way!"
She was already in jeans, black boots laced up in seconds. She didn't even bother drying her hair. She grabbed her leather jacket, slipped her hacking tools and a compact camera into her bag, and dashed out into the chilled night air.
****
The scene was already cordoned off when Nyah arrived. Yellow tape flapped like whispers in the wind, and the faint scent of burning rubber and industrial chemicals hung in the air. A couple of uniformed officers loitered by the perimeter, nodding when they saw her.
She wasn't in her lipstick-and-stilettos ensemble today. Her black cargo pants hugged her hips, utility belt loaded with her usual investigative gadgets. A soft grey hoodie was thrown over a fitted tank, sleeves pushed up her arms. She looked like someone who knew her way around a hacker's lair and a dark alley.
Detective Rhys met her near the edge of the alley, rubbing a hand through his short beard.
"No press," he muttered. "And we've locked down surveillance in a three-block radius."
"Let me guess," Nyah said, scanning the alley, "every camera glitched at the exact same time?"
"Four minutes and twelve seconds of black static," Rhys confirmed. "Just like the last two scenes."
She exhaled sharply as she saw the body.
Greg M. Thatcher, mid-thirties, slumped like a marionette with its strings cut. One eye was open, unseeing. His mouth hung ajar in a silent scream, and his skin was pallid with unnatural stillness—except for the jagged burn etched into the base of his throat.
Her gaze fixed on the mark.
A tangled, charred glyph that hadn't come from any earthly fire.
"Greg was with Ravion's advanced analytics division," Rhys said quietly.
Nyah knelt, brushing her gloved fingers over the edge of the symbol. Her lips moved silently, committing the lines to memory. "That's the second Ravion Global death in ten days."
"And your sister?" Rhys asked, his voice gentler now.
"Her name was buried in the last comms dump. Not Ravion… but close. She was sniffing around falsified medical data when she died."
"You think this is all connected?"
Nyah stood, eyes like razors in the dark. "It's not just connected, Rhys. Someone's tying up loose ends—and branding the corpses as a message. My gut says we're dealing with someone who knows these victims. Someone selected them deliberately."
She crouched beside the body, her red lips pressed in thought, fingers tracing the charred markings burned into Greg's neck. Something arcane. Almost…ritualistic.
****
Back at her apartment, the glow from six monitors lit the room like a digital séance.
Screens flickered with encrypted forums, autopsy files, surveillance timestamps. Nyah's fingers danced across the keyboard, cross-referencing aliases, scanning dark web chat logs.
Greg had a private forum chat on the dark web with aliases connected to whistleblowers and cyberactivists. One of the handles matched a message left on her sister's burner phone before she died.
She isolated the waveforms. Beneath the coded chatter was a sound—something layered beneath human speech. Could it be a pulse or a hum? It sounded like a chant or something similar.
Her throat tightened.
Greg had been working on an unauthorized investigation into bio-signal mapping—tracking irregular human patterns, anomalies in brain scans…a project Liora had independently stumbled upon when trying to uncover anomalies within local death certificates linked to patients who'd exhibited identical neural activity days before their hearts stopped.
"I don't think Liora randomly stumbled into this," Nyah whispered. "She must have decoded a pattern... and someone made sure she didn't finish it."
****
Nyah tracked down Greg's roommate, a young man named Jonah. He stammered through the interview until she pressed him.
"He wasn't much of a talker but a few months before he died, he kept saying his dreams weren't his anymore," Jonah confessed. "He thought someone was…watching him. In his sleep."
"Huh?"
"Yeah. He also talked about someone he called 'the woman with flame eyes.' Said he couldn't move when she showed up. Honestly, he mumbled a lot of incoherent stuff I couldn't make sense of. Half the time, I thought he was crazy or doing drugs. I was away a lot of the time so I didn't really know what he was up to. "
Nyah's blood ran cold.
****
Deep beneath the city, in a hidden chamber cloaked by dark enchantments, Daeva stood before a massive obsidian mirror. She had shed her human disguise—her skin now a glistening, almost translucent gray-blue, her eyes pits of burning crimson flame. Her hands—long and clawed—twitched with power.
On a black altar, the barely breathing body of a young girl writhed.
"May your essence weave with mine, may your blood awaken what was broken."
With a whisper that bent reality, Daeva plunged a bone-dagger into the girl's chest. Red mist swirled around her as her form stretched, shimmered—part woman, part viperous beast—her hair writhing like dark tendrils, and a tongue flickering like molten iron.
Her loyal servant, Syx, watched from the shadows, bowing low.
"We are close, Mistress."
"The Halves are thinning," Daeva hissed, voice echoing with many. "And the Clear Spark shines brighter every night. But I will pluck her light before she ignites."
She grinned, teeth sharp as obsidian.
****
Elsewhere, in the high tower of Ravion Global, Kael stood in his private chamber, eyes narrowed at a set of security feeds his inner council had delivered.
The pattern was becoming impossible to ignore. First, the janitor. Then the intern. Now Greg.
He stared at a pinned board, mapping the timeline of events—photos, red threads, ancient documents buried among the clutter.
"Why are you circling her?" he muttered, his jaw clenched as he pulled up a scan of Liora's autopsy.
His friend and second-in-command, Thane, entered quietly.
"If she continues digging, she'll force the Others to take action. She doesn't know what she's walking into."
Kael's voice was low. "I don't know what it is but I know there's more to her than meets the eye. I feel it every time she's near. Run a background check on her again."
Thane tilted his head. "You think she's one of them?"
Kael looked toward the window, the moonlight outlining his carved features. "No. I think she's something else entirely."