A day and half.
That was how long Ace had been staring at the same patch of concrete ceiling in Becca's basement. The pain was a receding tide. The sharp, breath-stealing agony in his ribs had dulled to a deep, persistent ache, a constant companion that only flared when he moved wrong. He could stand now. He could walk a straight line without the world tilting. It wasn't freedom, but it was progress.
He was sitting up in the cot, methodically working through a bowl of chicken soup Becca had brought down. It was good. Homemade. It tasted of normalcy, a flavor that felt alien in the weapon-lined bunker. Sophie hadn't come to see him. Not once. Becca was the messenger, her wheelchair gliding in with food and updates. "She's worried sick," Becca would say, her voice calm and factual. "Asks about you every hour. She's just… hurt. And scared." Ace would just nod, the spoon feeling heavy in his hand. He understood hurt. He was swimming in it.
His eyes drifted, as they often did, to the other cot. Layla. She lay perfectly still, a pale statue under the grey blanket. Her chest rose and fell with the shallow, even rhythm of deep sedation. It had been over a day since he'd woken up. How long had she been under? A strange, protective guilt gnawed at him. A normal woman, with clean nails and a life that probably involved weekend plans and work emails, dragged into this and left broken in a hunter's triage room. Because of their world. Because of the thing they'd failed to stop before it found her.
He was pulling the spoon from his mouth when the heavy metal door let out a soft, metallic groan. It didn't bang. It was opened with careful, deliberate slowness.
Cedric slipped inside and eased the door shut behind him, the lock engaging with a muffled thunk. He stood there for a second, his back to the door, not moving. He looked tired. There was a fading yellow-green bruise on his temple, a souvenir from the shattered closet. His eyes found Ace's, held them for a beat, then dropped to the floor.
"You called?" Cedric asked. His voice was flat. Wary.
Ace nodded. He set the bowl of soup down on the rickety bedside table, the spoon clinking softly against the ceramic. Pushing through the ache in his side, he stood up. The movement was smoother than yesterday, but he still had to pause, letting the brief wave of dizziness pass. He crossed the small space, stopping close to Cedric. The air between them felt charged, brittle.
In a low, urgent voice that wouldn't carry, Ace leaned in. "We gotta prove ourselves."
Cedric's brow furrowed. He didn't lean away, but his posture stiffened. "What do you mean?"
"I mean they've made up their minds," Ace hissed, the words tasting like gall. "Axl, my mom… they think we're just kids. Liabilities. But if we solve this? If we crack this ritual wide open without them? We shove it right back in their faces. Especially Axl's."
There was a grim, cold determination in his tone. This wasn't a fantasy. It was a plan born of pure, simmering resentment.
Cedric let out a sigh. It wasn't a sigh of agreement. It was a heavy, weary sound, the sound of someone carrying a weight Ace refused to acknowledge. "I thought we already talked about this with your mom. It's over, Ace."
"So what? My mom doesn't know shit about what we actually do," Ace snapped back, his voice rising before he forced it back down to a whisper. "All she hears are stories and worst-case scenarios. We're not those stories. We can do this. You and me."
"No." The word was simple. Final. "Ace, I don't think that's a wise thing to do."
"Wise?" Ace repeated, the word a sneer. "Since when did you start caring about 'wise'? Nothing good ever came from just doing the 'wise' thing, Cedric! That's how you end up sitting on the bench for the rest of your life!"
"I don't know, man," Cedric said, shaking his head, his eyes fixed on a point past Ace's shoulder. "Maybe… maybe we should just listen this time."
The rejection, the hesitation—it was too much. The coiled frustration in Ace's gut snapped. He shoved Cedric back, a single, sharp push to the chest. "Come on, stop being such a bitch about everything! Grow some balls!"
Cedric stumbled backward, his shoulder blades hitting the cold concrete wall with a dull thud. He didn't spring forward. He didn't shove back. He just stood there, pressed against the wall, and looked at Ace. The confusion and weariness in his eyes evaporated, replaced by something hard and dark. A slow, dangerous anger.
"Grow some balls?" Cedric repeated, his voice low and venomously quiet.
He pushed himself off the wall, closing the small distance between them. He didn't touch Ace. He just pointed a finger, jabbing it toward Ace's heart, the gesture itself a violation of their space.
"Let me remind you, Ace," he said, each word precision-cut and icy. "Unlike you, I live with a constant, daily reminder of exactly what can happen out there. My dad is dead. My mom is in a wheelchair. You have any idea what that does to you? What it feels like to know, for a fact, that this isn't a game?"
He took another step, his finger still pointed like a blade. Ace took an involuntary step back.
"But I guess you wouldn't, would you?" Cedric continued, the dam of his composure fully shattered. "You're the son of the great Neal Eldren. You belong to the big, scary, prestigious Eldren clan. Your mom is just a 'normal' housewife who gets to worry over scraped knees. So yeah. Unlike you, I don't have the luxury of pretending the consequences aren't real."
He finally dropped his hand, but the intensity in his gaze didn't waver.
"It's not all about you, Ace. If God forbid something happens to me because of your little rebellion—because you need to prove how big your dick is to your deadbeat dad—then guess what? My mom and Chloe are all alone. I've got people who actually need me. So don't you ever, ever compare yourself to me."
Ace opened his mouth. A retort, an insult, a defense—it bubbled up, hot and ready. But the fire in Cedric's eyes, the raw, trembling fury that was so utterly unlike his best friend, stole the breath from his lungs. He saw it now. This wasn't Cedric being scared. This was Cedric being responsible in a way Ace had never been forced to be.
Cedric's final words were barely a whisper, but they hit like a hammer.
"You're acting like a spoiled brat."
Ace just stood there. The fight drained out of him, leaving a hollow, cold shame in its place. He looked at Cedric's face, at the hurt and fury and exhausting burden etched there, and found he had nothing to say. No argument held weight.
He held Cedric's gaze for three long seconds—a silent, awful acknowledgment of the chasm that had just opened between them.
Then, without a word, Ace turned. He walked past Cedric, across the basement, and pushed open the heavy door. He didn't look back. He stepped through into the hallway and let the door swing shut behind him, the sound of its closing a lonely, definitive period at the end of their friendship.
***
Three days passed.
Time in the aftermath of a fracture doesn't heal; it simply creates a new, uncomfortable normal.
Ace's body completed its repair work. The bandages came off, revealing skin that was bruised but whole. The deep ache in his ribs faded to a phantom twinge, a memory of pain his body refused to fully release. He was cleared. Functional.
He had moved from Becca's clinical basement back to the familiar prison of his own bedroom. The change of scenery did nothing to ease the confinement. His room, once a sanctuary of posters and clutter, now felt like a cell. The lock on his window had been professionally reinforced. A simple, silent message from his mother: This isn't a discussion.
Cedric, across the lawn in his own house, had performed a different kind of retreat. He went back to school. He shouldered his backpack, caught the bus, and disappeared into the rhythm of bells and hallways and homework. He was living the 'normal' life again, or performing a perfect pantomime of it. From Ace's window, he'd sometimes see Cedric in his own yard, helping Becca with a grocery bag or talking to his sister Chloe on the porch. He moved with a careful, deliberate slowness, as if afraid a sudden motion might shatter the fragile peace he was rebuilding. It was a life lived as if the poltergeist, the blood, the basement confrontation, had never happened.
Sophie had insisted Ace rest for a full week before even considering school. It was a decision Ace, to his own surprise, didn't fight. The thought of sitting in a fluorescent-lit classroom, pretending to care about algebra while his mind screamed about rituals and haunted houses and Layla's unconscious face, made his skin crawl. The forced rest was a perverse gift. His prison had a temporary reprieve from a different kind of torture.
He and Sophie moved through the house like ghosts orbiting the same sun, never colliding, but bound by a painful gravity.
They did not talk about the fight. They did not talk about Ace's 'secret hunts'. They did not talk about hunting. Words like "sorry" and "please understand" were too large, too volatile, for the fragile space between them.
Their communication became a silent, precise language of avoidance and care:
· She would leave a plate of food for him on the kitchen counter at odd hours, when she knew he'd be alone.
· He would eat it, wash the dish, and leave it drying in the rack.
· She bought him a new phone charger when his broke, leaving it in its packaging on his bed.
· He used it, but didn't thank her.
· In the evenings, she'd watch television in the living room. He'd linger in the doorway for a moment, listening to the laugh track of a sitcom that sounded like noise from another planet, before retreating upstairs.
She was his mother. She could not sustain a pure, cold anger. The worry was a constant thrum beneath her silence, evident in the extra portions of food, in the way she'd listen for his footsteps overhead. But she hadn't forgiven him. The grounding was absolute. The prohibition from leaving the house was the law of the land. The trust was ashes.
For Ace, it didn't really matter. The physical boundaries were almost a relief. They were a tangible enemy, a lock to pick, a rule to break. The harder, more suffocating prison was the one inside his own head—the echoing silence from the house next door, the scorn in Axl's verdict, and the haunting, final sound of Cedric's voice calling him a spoiled brat. The walls of his house just gave shape to a cage he was already in.
***
The guest room had been conquered.
Axl hadn't just moved in; he had colonized the space with the chaotic purpose of a military campaign in its final, desperate stages. The air was thick with the smell of stale coffee, gun oil, and the sweet, chemical tang of energy drink cans. The once-neat room was a monument to focused obsession. Open books—bestiaries with pages marked by strips of torn notebook paper, dense academic journals on ritual geometry—lay splayed across the floor and bed like fallen soldiers. A large map of the city was taped to one wall, three red X's marking the known murder sites, and a fourth, circled in shaky blue ink, marking the quiet suburban street they'd just left. Scribbled notes in Axl's cramped handwriting spider-webbed the margins: "convergence?" "lunar phase?" "sacrifice threshold?"
He lay on his back on the rumpled bed, boots still on, a laptop balanced on his stomach. The screen's blue glow illuminated the deep exhaustion on his face, etching the dark circles under his eyes into trenches. He was scrolling through a digitized archive of local obituaries from the last fifty years, cross-referencing them with property records, a task so tedious it felt like a form of penance.
The door to the guest room opened without a knock. Only one person did that.
Garath stood in the doorway, a silent pillar in the chaos. He didn't comment on the mess. His eyes did a quick, tactical sweep of the room—not judging, but assessing, the same way he'd clear a building. They landed on Axl.
Axl didn't look up from the screen. His fingers kept scrolling. "Hey."
Garath gave a single, slight nod. He didn't waste a syllable.
"She's awake."
The two words cut through the digital fog in Axl's brain like a scalpel.
His scrolling stopped. For a full second, he didn't move, the information processing. Then he let out a long, slow breath, a sound of release and tension all at once. The time for digging through digital ghosts was over. A living witness was ready to talk.
He closed the laptop with a soft, definitive click and swung his legs off the bed. The movement was tired but fluid, a hunter's muscle memory overriding fatigue. He shrugged into his worn brown leather jacket, the familiar weight settling on his shoulders like a second skin. He toed his feet into his boots, not bothering with the laces, and grabbed a small, black leather journal from the nightstand—the one with the sketches and the psychic's notes.
Garath had already turned, expecting the follow. They moved down the hallway and out the front door in a synchronized, silent rhythm. No discussion was needed. The next step in the sequence was clear.
They crossed the twenty feet of well-kept lawn between Neal's house and Becca's. The afternoon sun was weak, doing little to fight the autumn chill in the air. The suburb was quiet, peacefully oblivious.
Becca's front door was unlocked. They stepped into the familiar hallway. The door to the basement—that heavy, vault-like slab of metal—stood at the end of it, closed.
They stopped before it. Axl stared at the dull grey surface. Behind that door was no longer just a medical room or an armory. It was now an interrogation chamber. A woman who had spent days trapped in a nightmare with a monster they had only fought for minutes was now conscious on the other side. She had looked into the eyes of the thing they were hunting. She had felt its cold. She had heard its silence.
She might have the key. Or she might just be another shattered piece of the puzzle.
Axl glanced at Garath, who gave another minute nod. Ready.
Axl reached out, turned the cold metal handle, and pulled the door open. The dim light from the basement welled up to meet them.
The threshold was crossed. The questioning was about to begin.