Southern Crestwood PD – Red Vine Precinct
The waiting area of the Red Vine precinct existed in that particular species of institutional purgatory reserved for places where hope came to die slowly. Overhead, fluorescent tubes stuttered and buzzed with an irregular rhythm that suggested they were fighting their own losing battle against entropy. Some flickered weakly, casting intermittent shadows. Others had simply given up, their dark casings like missing teeth in a mouth that had stopped caring about appearances decades ago.
The floor was a battleground of scarred linoleum—once perhaps a hopeful cream color, now aged to the yellow-grey of old newspaper. Decades of scuffed shoes, dragged furniture, and the pacing of the desperate had left their marks. Gouges and scratches formed an archaeological record of human misery. Someone had tried to patch a particularly bad section near the water fountain with a square of slightly different colored tile that didn't quite match. The effect was like a badly healed wound.
Plastic chairs in a shade of blue that had never existed in nature were bolted to the floor in rigid rows, as if the building itself didn't trust its occupants not to weaponize the furniture. The bolts were industrial-grade, the kind that said this wasn't the precinct's first rodeo. The seats themselves were contoured in a way that managed to be uncomfortable regardless of how you sat, designed by someone who had clearly never met a human spine.
The air was thick with the competing scents of industrial-strength cleaning solution—the kind that didn't so much eliminate odors as declare chemical warfare on them—and the accumulated anxiety of everyone who had ever waited here. Fear had a smell. So did desperation. They mingled with the cleaning fluid to create an atmosphere that felt like breathing through wet wool.
Against the far wall, mounted on a bracket that had seen better days, a television played to its captive audience. Usually it was tuned to some local news channel, droning through traffic reports and feel-good stories about rescued puppies. Not tonight. Tonight it was a window into something else entirely. Something that wore the skin of a media spectacle but had the bones of a nightmare.
Michael Wycliffe sat in one of those bolted chairs three rows from the front, his posture so rigidly controlled it looked painful. He was early thirties, with the lean, whipcord build of a serious distance runner—the kind who logged eighty miles a week and had a resting heart rate in the low forties. His face was sharp-featured and intelligent, with the kind of eyes that noticed details, that catalogued and connected. Those eyes were currently hardened into something that resembled volcanic glass—smooth and dark and capable of cutting.
His clothes told a story: dark jeans, well-made but not expensive. A grey henley that had been chosen for comfort rather than fashion. They were neat, carefully put together, but both had the rumpled quality of garments that had been worn for too many hours straight, slept in, maybe wept in. There was a coffee stain on his left cuff he probably didn't even remember acquiring.
His hands rested flat on his thighs, palms down, fingers spread. It was the posture of someone using every ounce of willpower to maintain control. To not fly apart. To not scream.
His eyes were fixed on the television screen with the unblinking intensity of a man watching his own execution.
He had come here to file a missing person's report. For Vivian. His Vivian. His fiancée, the love of his life, the woman who made him laugh at his own seriousness, who had somehow seen past all his family's darkness and loved him anyway. The woman who had vanished after the gala at Halvern HQ, swallowed by a night that had turned into something out of a fever dream.
He'd arrived at the precinct three hours ago. Three hours of being passed from one desk to another like a piece of problematic paperwork no one wanted to touch. Told to wait. Told his case was "part of a larger, active investigation." Told that detectives were "currently engaged with a developing situation." The words had been bureaucratic and empty, delivered by officers whose eyes kept sliding past him to the television.
So he waited. And while he waited, the "larger, active investigation" played out on live television for the whole city to witness.
He watched Vivian sob, her face streaked with tears and dust, her expression twisted with the kind of raw terror that made his chest physically ache.
He watched her freeze when that thing—that walking monument to humanity's hubris—began to move, her body going rigid with a fear so profound it shut down everything else.
He watched her fall, that horrible moment of helplessness as her legs gave out and she crumpled.
And he watched Elijah Carter catch her.
The camera angle from inside the giant's leg was intimate in a way that felt obscene. Not because of anything explicit, but because it captured a moment that shouldn't have been witnessed. Private anguish made public. The lens showed everything with brutal clarity: Vivian collapsing against Elijah's chest, her body small and vulnerable against his. His arm coming around her, protective, secure. His body angling to shield hers from the chaos. His face lowering close to hers, close enough that Michael could see his lips moving, speaking words the microphone couldn't catch.
Words meant only for her.
The green emergency lighting filtering through the chamber gave everything a sickly, underwater quality. It painted them both in shades of crisis and intimacy. Elijah pulling Vivian to safety, his movements decisive and sure. The way her hands clutched at his shirt. The way they moved together through that cramped space, closer than strangers, closer than acquaintances.
Closer than Michael could reach from a plastic chair bolted to a floor in a police station on the other side of the city.
It felt like a violation. Like he was watching something forbidden. His rational mind knew it was rescue. His rational mind understood that Elijah had saved her life. But rational minds didn't govern the heart in moments like these, and his heart was screaming a single, primal word that echoed through every chamber:
*Mine.*
A low, mocking whistle cut through his spiral of anguish. It came from the duty sergeant's desk about twenty feet to his left, where two uniformed officers had gathered like crows at a roadside attraction.
"Damn," one of them said, his voice carrying the casual cruelty of a man who thought he was being funny. He was big, this cop—ruddy-faced with the broken capillaries of someone who enjoyed his off-duty beers a little too much. Probably late forties, with the kind of gut that spoke to years riding a desk. "Looks like poor Wycliffe there is getting cuckolded live on national TV. That's gotta sting."
The word hit Michael like a fist to the solar plexus. His breath caught. His vision tunneled momentarily, peripheral blackness creeping in before he forced it back.
The other officer—younger, with a weaselly face and the hungry eyes of someone always angling for a better story—smirked. It was an ugly expression, all knowing and mean-spirited. "Hey, if I was him, I'd start drafting the divorce papers now. Pre-emptive strike." He made a gesture with his hand like he was signing a document. "We all know what happens when a fragile feminine gets saved by some hot-headed fellow playing hero in the dark. Bonding. Trauma bonding. It's a whole psychological thing. Read about it in a study once."
His tone made it clear he'd read exactly nothing, that he was making it up as he went, but that didn't matter. The words landed anyway.
Michael's hands on his thighs, which had been merely flat, now curled slowly into fists. The transformation was gradual, almost geological, like watching stone compress into diamond. His knuckles turned white, then whiter, the bones pressing against skin until they looked like they might tear through.
He didn't move otherwise. Didn't turn his head. Didn't look away from the screen. He absorbed the words like body blows, taking each one, cataloguing the pain, adding it to the growing weight in his chest that felt like it might crack his ribs from the inside.
"Wycliffe," the weaselly cop said, scratching his chin in a pantomime of deep thought. "Why does that name sound so familiar? I feel like I know it from somewhere."
The ruddy sergeant snapped his fingers, his face lighting up with the particular joy of someone remembering a good piece of gossip. "Oh, right! That nutjob archivist. The one who was camped outside Halvern HQ for what, like three weeks? Four? With that fucking sandwich board." He laughed, the sound phlegmy and unpleasant. "What was it he was always yelling?"
He put on a voice—theatrical, reedy, mocking—that was clearly meant to sound deranged: "'The Halvern Consortium is distributing a spiritual contaminant! A substance that spawns from cognitive demons! The city is being infected!' Total whackjob. Complete tin-foil-hat territory."
Multiple officers within earshot chuckled. The sound rippled through the waiting area like dirty water.
"That's the one!" The younger cop slapped his knee, delighted. "Oh man, I heard that guy was actually ex-M.O.C., too. Like, a legit spook before he went off the deep end. Trained field operative. The whole classified deal. Black ops shit."
The sergeant scoffed, waving a dismissive hand. "M.O.C.? Please. The Ministry of Consciousness? Those guys are ghost stories for hackers with too much bitcoin and basement dwellers who think the government is reading their thoughts. Next you'll tell me his family were vampire hunters or some shit."
"No, for real!" the younger cop insisted, warming to his audience now. Several other officers had drifted over, drawn by the entertainment. "I read about it on this deep-dive forum. That whole Wycliffe bloodline—they're supposed to be some ancient... I don't know, jailer clan or something. For, like, evil gods or extra-dimensional entities. The 'Jhin' things. Seriously! It's all over that conspiracy podcast, Veilbreak. They did a whole three-part series on it. The family is supposed to have been guarding reality from these things for centuries, and they're all supposed to go crazy eventually because of what they know. It's wild."
The cops within earshot exchanged looks—skeptical, amused, rolling their eyes at the younger officer's obvious gullibility. One mimed putting on a tin-foil hat. Another made the universal "cuckoo" gesture, twirling his finger next to his temple.
"Jesus, Turner," one of them said. "You need to stop listening to that conspiracy crap during night shift. It's rotting your brain."
But they were all still laughing. Still reducing his father's life, his family's terrible knowledge, to comedy hour at the Red Vine precinct.
Michael heard every word. Every syllable of mockery. Every casual dismissal.
The mockery of his father, Wilfred. The old man who had indeed stood outside Halvern HQ for twenty-three days straight, rain or shine, with a sandwich board that everyone thought proved his insanity. The man who had tried to warn them. Who had shouted truths into the face of a city that didn't want to hear them, until his voice gave out and security had him forcibly removed.
The reduction of his family's legacy—a legacy written in blood and sanity and a terrible, grinding vigilance against things that gnawed at the edges of reality—to a punchline on a shitty podcast hosted by a guy who also thought jet fuel couldn't melt steel beams.
Michael's father hadn't been crazy. He'd been cursed with knowledge. With sight. With the ability to see the cracks in the world where hungry things pressed against the membrane of the real, looking for ways through. The Wycliffe family had served as jailors—that part was true—but not to gods. To something worse. To the fragments of the Jhin, those cognitive parasites that fed on human consciousness, that transformed thought into matter and nightmare into flesh.
And now Halvern had found one. Or found its trail. Or its remains. And they'd done what humans always did with things they didn't understand: they'd weaponized it. Corporatized it. Packaged it in sleek containers with expensive marketing.
His father had known. Had tried to warn them. And the city had laughed at him, just like these cops were laughing now.
On screen, the horror continued. The camera had switched angles. Now it showed Chloe's desperate, straining effort to save Vivian, her face contorted with effort as she braced herself against the collapsing space. Then Elijah's subsequent rescue of Chloe, grabbing her shirt, his arm muscles standing out in sharp relief as he swung her bodily to safety. Their bodies pressed close in the confined space, tangled together in the green gloom. The camera lingered on them, hungry for drama, for narrative, for the human stories within the catastrophe.
The weaselly cop—Turner—let out a low, appreciative grunt that made Michael's skin crawl. "See? Now she's getting the hero treatment too. The Halvern princess and the pauper. This is better than a soap opera. Better than those reality shows. We should start taking bets on who ends up with who when this is all over."
That was it. The final straw that broke something fundamental in Michael's chest.
The jealousy—hot and acidic and shameful.
The fear for Vivian—primal and consuming.
The humiliation of sitting here, useless, while she was in danger.
The rage at these laughing men who treated human suffering as entertainment.
The fury at the trivialization of everything his family had fought for, had bled for, had lost their minds for.
It all coalesced into a pressure behind his eyes that felt like it might burst his skull from the inside. His vision went red at the edges. His breath came short and sharp. His heart rate, normally so controlled, so runner-steady, spiked to something approaching tachycardia.
Michael Wycliffe stood up.
The movement was neither graceful nor hurried. It was mechanical. Controlled by will alone, not coordination. The plastic chair scraped loudly against the scarred linoleum, a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard amplified.
Every conversation in the waiting area halted. The laughing officers went silent. The duty sergeant's smirk faded. Even the dispatcher behind her protective glass looked up from her monitor.
The silence was sudden and complete, broken only by the buzz of the dying fluorescent lights and the television's continuing broadcast of horror.
Michael didn't look at the mocking officers. Didn't meet their eyes. Didn't speak. He knew that if he opened his mouth, what came out wouldn't be words. It would be something raw and wounded and uncontrolled, something that sounded like his father in those final days before the hospital, before the medications, before the quiet room with the soft walls.
So he said nothing. He simply turned, stiff-legged, mechanical, and walked toward the precinct's glass entrance doors.
His exit wasn't quiet.
He pushed through the heavy door with every ounce of the rage and pain and fear that had been building in his chest. The door was industrial, designed to withstand force, to close slowly on hydraulics, to protect the building from weather and intrusion.
It slammed back against the exterior wall with an explosive CRACK that echoed through the quiet bureau like a gunshot. The impact was so violent that the glass shivered in its frame, threatened to spider-web, somehow held. The sound reverberated off the linoleum and concrete, bouncing back from the ceiling, filling every corner of the space.
In the stunned silence that followed, Michael could hear his own breathing. Ragged. Too fast. The breath of someone fighting panic.
Behind him, the ruddy sergeant cleared his throat uncomfortably. He had the decency to look slightly abashed now, his earlier amusement curdled into something that might have been shame if he'd had the emotional vocabulary for it. "Well," he muttered, not quite meeting anyone's eyes. "Guess we hit a nerve there."
Turner, the weaselly younger cop, just shrugged. His eyes had already drifted back to the television screen, back to the unfolding spectacle, the real-time disaster that was so much more interesting than the quiet implosion they'd just witnessed. "His loss is our entertainment," he said, reaching for a cold cup of coffee on the desk. "That's what television's for, right?"
No one answered him.
Outside, in the cool night air of Southern Crestwood, Michael didn't stop walking. Couldn't stop. His legs carried him forward with increasing speed, eating up the cracked sidewalk. Past the precinct's parking lot with its rows of marked units. Past the flickering streetlights that cast pools of jaundiced illumination on the empty street. Past the closed bodega with its security gate pulled down like a metal eyelid.
He walked faster and faster, his distance runner's stride lengthening, until he was almost running. Not toward anything. Just away. Away from the laughter. Away from the television. Away from the image that was burned onto his retinas like a photograph held too close to flame.
Vivian and Elijah in the green darkness. Her hands on his chest. His arm around her. Their faces close. Their bodies pressed together in ways that made Michael's jealousy feel like broken glass grinding in his stomach.
The cops' words chased him down the empty street, echoing in his skull:
*Spiritual contaminant.*
Cognitive demons.
Jailer clan.
Nutjob.
Whackjob.
Cuckolded on national television.
His father hadn't been a nutjob. Wilfred Wycliffe had been a canary in a coal mine the size of a city. And that mine had just caved in, burying everyone inside, and Vivian was trapped somewhere in the darkness and debris.
And the man currently holding her, protecting her, saving her—the man whose face had been inches from hers in that green-lit chamber—looked wrong to Michael's burning, jealous, terrified gaze.
Elijah Marcus moved with too much purpose. Handled the horror with too much calm. Navigated the impossible with too much competence, as if he'd been trained for it. As if he'd expected it.
What if he wasn't just a victim? What if he wasn't a pawn caught up in something beyond his understanding?
What if he was part of the game itself?
Michael's rational mind tried to argue. Tried to present evidence. The man was clearly helping. Clearly trying to save lives. Clearly suffering his own trauma.
But rational minds held no authority over the wounded animal howling in Michael's chest, and that animal saw only one thing:
A rival. A threat. A man with his hands on Vivian, holding her in the dark where Michael couldn't reach.
He ran faster, his breath coming in gasps now, until the precinct was blocks behind him and the night had swallowed everything except the sound of his footfalls and the image of Vivian's face, terrified and trusting, looking up at someone who wasn't him.