RAYMOND CRUZ VAMPIRE DEN Part 3

 Raymond Cruz Vampire Den 3

Chapter 86

Raymond pushes aside the construction plastic. Spotlights strung along a tarp—their light crawling up the floor tiles like luminous fingers—point toward a fork in the lobby leading to several corridors. The walls hum with the memory of panic—overturned wheelchairs frozen mid-flight, IV poles tangled like fallen soldiers, a single nurse’s clipboard abandoned mid-sentence.

Muffled voices echo ahead—the other hunters moving deeper, securing rooms. Their sounds feel distant now, irrelevant. His path diverges here.

The corridor yawns before him, its darkness thick, patient. Raymond hesitates. His gun feels too light. Did he remember to load the clip? He steps forward. The hospital’s silence swallows him whole.

The left corridor is already secured—three hunters stand watch over a cluster of zip-tied figures twitching on the floor. Fresh turns. Their hissing sounds more confused than threatening.

One young woman can’t stop gnawing at her own eyeballs. Mendoza’s assistant zip-ties her wrists to her bleeding ankles.

The blood of a vampire is no mere mimicry of the human kind—it is something else entirely. Darker than crimson, it shimmers faintly in the light, laced with an eerie silver sheen that seems to move of its own accord. Where human blood gives life, vampire blood defies death. It pulses not with oxygen, but with something older, something wrong—an ancient force that whispers of grave soil and midnight hunger. To touch it is to feel cold fire, and to see it spilled is to know that nature has been broken, reshaped into something eternal and monstrous.

Mendoza leans against the reception desk, his massive arms crossed. “Took you long enough.”

Raymond ignores him, scanning the room. The briefing outside was clear—dozens, maybe a hundred vampires nested in this rotting carcass of a hospital. All answering to something worse. And yet here, at the entrance, only these few weaklings?

“Where’s Rivas?”

“Already moving,” says the female Kovac twin. She wipes her blade on a discarded lab coat. “Took half the team toward the east wing. Said they caught scent of the master.”

Thompson emerges from a side hallway, his rifle slung across his back. “We’ve got fourteen infected civilians secured in the old cafeteria. Antidote’s not doing shit though.” He holds up an empty syringe, the glass smeared with something black.

“What the hell you mean the antidote’s not working?” The Kovac twin nervously tightens her grip on her blade.

An old dark-skinned gentleman is zip-tied to a decorative spire, his face ravaged with clawings. He seems to recognize the vial and writhes in agony as it glints in the spotlight’s glow.

A muffled scream echoes from deeper in the hospital, followed by three sharp gunshots. The hunters in the lobby tense, hands going to weapons.

Mendoza chuckles darkly. “Sounds like Rivas found more than he bargained for.”

Raymond checks his pistol. Full magazine. Silver-jacketed rounds. The weight feels good in his hand.

“You two,” he nods to the Kovacs, “hold this position. Mendoza and company, Thompson—with me.”

As they move toward the doomed cafeteria, Raymond notes the unnatural quiet of the hallways. No scrabbling at the walls. No hissing from the shadows. Just the steady drip of water from broken pipes and the distant, rhythmic thud of something large moving in the hospital’s depths.

The real hunt is just beginning.

Mendoza unslings his crossbow with a grunt. “You smell that?”

Raymond does. Beneath the antiseptic and blood, something older. Something hungry.

The master is waiting.

Mendoza lumbers past with the inevitability of a landslide. He doesn't rush. Doesn't need to. The monsters always come to him eventually.

The Kovac twins sharpen their blades in perfect unison, the sound like a serpent's hiss. They still believe in rituals, in sacred geometry carved into silver. Raymond envies them that. Faith remains a luxury he lost along with his wife's laughter, his daughter's small hand in his.

And Thompson—jittery, wide-eyed Thompson—fumbles with his rifle's safety. The rookie. The one who still thinks this is about saving people. Raymond almost pities him. Almost.

The cafeteria doors groan open on broken hinges. A sigh from the throat of the damned.

Raymond drops his cigarette, crushes it under his boot.

This wasn’t a mission. It was a confession.  

They step into the nightmare tableau.

The old hospital cafeteria is a graveyard of plastic trays and overturned chairs, the air thick with the stench of spoiled food and fresh blood. Fluorescent lights flicker overhead, casting strobing shadows across the dozens of figures slumped at tables, tied to support beams, restrained in wheelchairs. Half-turns. Their mouths move in silent screams, their fingers twitch with unnatural spasms, their eyes—some still human, others already black with hunger—dart wildly around the room.  

At the center, an old woman in a flower-print dress thrashes against her restraints. Two of Mendoza’s assistants hold her down in a metal chair, their muscles straining as she arches her back with preternatural strength. Her silver hair is matted with sweat, her lips peeled back from gums that bleed where her teeth sharpen.  

"Third dose didn’t take," grunts one assistant, a thick-necked man with a rosary of knuckle bones around his neck.  

The woman’s head snaps toward Raymond as he enters. Her nostrils flare. For a second, recognition flickers in her milky eyes. Then it’s gone, swallowed by the hunger. She hisses, saliva stringing between her teeth.  

Thompson, standing near the kitchen doors with his rifle clutched to his chest, looks like he might vomit. "She was—she was feeding her grandson when they found her. The kid’s alive. Locked in the pantry."  

Raymond steps further into the room. The other half-turns track his movement with eerie synchronicity. A teenage boy tied to a table leg whimpers. A nurse in shredded scrubs strains against her zip-ties, her mouth working around words that won’t come. The air thrums with their collective desperation, their fading humanity.  

Mendoza looms near the dessert counter, his crossbow dangling from one massive hand. His mirrored sunglasses reflect the scene back at itself—dozens of trapped souls, dozens of failed cures. "Antidote’s just making ‘em angry now," he rumbles.  

He wipes his hands on his pants, leaving streaks of bleach and blood. He studies the twitching bodies strapped to chairs, the zip-tied forms writhing on the floor.  

"Guild said this shit actually works?" His voice is gravel in a tin can.  

Raymond thumbs the cracked vials at his belt. "Thirty-five percent."  

Mendoza snorts. A big, wet sound like a horse clearing its nostrils. "Thirty-five." He nudges the groaning teenager with his boot. The kid's pupils swallow the last brown of his irises whole. "That a real number or just what some lab-coated fuck pulled out his—“

A chair topples. Thomson nearly hits the ceiling.  

Raymond doesn't look up. The math does it for him.  

“Sixty-five percent failure rate,” he replies.

Sixty-five percent already dead.  

A staircase at the end of the cafeteria leads to higher levels of the hospital, the third-floor chapel… The prism awaits, counting down in colors only he can see.

The old woman suddenly stills. Her head lolls forward, her breathing ragged. When she speaks, her voice is cracked but clear: "Please."  

The assistants exchange glances but don’t loosen their grip.  

"Please," she repeats, tears cutting clean tracks through the blood on her cheeks. "I can feel it. The dark. It’s in my bones." Her hands flex, the zip-ties cutting into her wrists. She laughs a dark laugh now, her eyes two tiny black beads. The hunters stand back. This stare is a little darker than a vamp’s stare. A little older. 

‘Don’t let me near anyone else,” she continues. “I will eat the flesh off theirs.”

Raymond’s fingers brush the antidote vials in an open box on the table. Useless. He knows it before he even checks—the serum inside has gone cloudy, separated. Another batch compromised. Another promise broken. Fucking Guild.

The woman’s pleading eyes find his. "My grandson," she whispers. "Is he—?"  

Mendoza’s assistants shoulder open the dented pantry door. The boy lies motionless on the concrete, face down in a spill of flour, his small hands curled into fists. One assistant—the one with the bone rosary—presses two fingers to the child’s neck. A beat. He shakes his head at Raymond.  

No pulse.  

No surprise.  

The other assistant turns the boy over. His lips are blue, his eyes wide and glassy. Bite marks. Blood. The slow asphyxiation of terror, of hiding in the dark while grandma screamed his name with the wrong kind of hunger.  A half-turn gone wrong. The kind that doesn’t come back, for better or for worse. They are rare but they do occur.

Raymond exhales through his teeth. Thirty-five percent. The Guild’s math holds.  

Somewhere behind them, a chair scrapes. One of the half-turns begins to weep.  

The prism thrums in the hospital walls, warm as a second heartbeat.

"Your grandson is safe," Raymond lies.  

The grandma’s body jerks once, then stills. Her head lolls forward, chin resting on her chest like she’s simply fallen asleep. The tension in the cafeteria snaps—half-turns slump in their restraints, hunters exhale shakily.  

For three seconds, there’s silence.  

Then the boy in the pantry whimpers.  

The grandma’s head snaps up. Her milky eyes lock onto Raymond, lips peeling back from blackening gums.  

“Liar."

Her voice isn’t human anymore. It’s the scrape of coffin wood, the hiss of gas escaping a tomb. The word hangs in the air, vibrating with unnatural resonance.  

Then it’s gone.  

Only the boy’s muffled sobs remain, echoing from the pantry.  

The prism is calling. The nearby staircase seems to warp in his peripheral vision.

Then the dead woman’s mouth moves. 

A sound like wet leather stretching. Then laughter—deep, guttural, wrong. The kind of laugh that doesn't belong to an old woman who just died.

The hunters freeze.  

The grandma's corpse sits up. Her head lolls to the side, her neck clearly broken, yet her lips peel back in a grin.  

"Oh, little lambs," she croons, her voice layered with something darker beneath. "Did you really think poison would stop me?"  

Raymond's grip tightens on his pistol. "Don't listen."  

But the hunters are already staring, their weapons lowering just slightly. Thompson's hands shake on his rifle. The Kovac twins exchange glances, their usual certainty wavering.  

The corpse's grin widens. "You're all so tired, aren't you? Fighting. Always fighting. And for what?" Her milky eyes roll toward Mendoza. "You think your crossbow can kill the dark? You're just delaying the inevitable."  

Mendoza doesn't flinch. "Shut it down."  

One of his assistants steps forward, a silver blade in hand—but the grandma's corpse lunges without moving, her voice suddenly sharp, commanding.  

"Look at what you're doing!"  

The half-turns convulse in their restraints, their moans rising to a chorus of agony. The teenage boy tied to the table leg screams, his fingers clawing at his own face. The nurse in shredded scrubs sobs, repeating "Make it stop, make it stop" between gasps.  

Raymond moves toward the corpse, but a half-turn—a security guard still in his uniform—lunges from the side, teeth bared. Raymond sidesteps, driving his elbow into the man's temple. The guard collapses, but two more break free, their zip-ties snapping like dried twigs.  

"You see?" The grandma's voice echoes, even as her body remains slumped. "You're not saving anyone. You're just prolonging the suffering."  

Thompson backs against the wall, his rifle slipping in his sweat-slick grip. "She's right—we can't win this."  

"Of course you can't," the corpse purrs. "But you can let go. No more fighting. No more pain."  

The Kovac twins hesitate, their blades lowering. The female twin's lips move in a silent prayer, but her brother just stares at the grandma's corpse, his face blank.  

Raymond shoots a half-turn point-blank as it rushes him. "She's lying."  

"Am I?" The grandma's head tilts at an impossible angle. "How many have you lost, Raymond? How many have you watched turn? And for what? A Guild that doesn't care? A God who isn't listening?"  

A half-turn slams into Raymond from behind, knocking him into a table. He rolls, barely avoiding snapping teeth, and puts two rounds into its chest. It keeps coming.  

Mendoza hasn't moved. His crossbow is still trained on the grandma's corpse, but his finger hasn't pulled the trigger.  

"You're all so afraid," the corpse whispers. "But you don't have to be. The dark isn't cruel. It's just... hungry."  

Thompson's rifle clatters to the floor.  

The Kovac twins take a step back.  

Raymond sees it happening—the doubt, the despair. The demon isn't just talking through the dead woman. It's peeling back their resolve, showing them the futility they already feel.  

He grabs the nearest half-turn—the nurse—and slams her against the wall. "Fight it," he growls, not to her, but to the others. "This is what it does. It makes you think giving up is easier."  

The nurse's eyes flicker. For a second, something human surfaces. Then she snarls and lunges.  

Raymond puts her down.  

The grandma's corpse giggles. "Oh, Raymond. Always the hero. But even you can't lie forever."  

Mendoza finally moves. He doesn't shoot. He walks forward, grabs the corpse by the hair, and yanks the head back.  

The voice cuts off mid-laugh.  

The cafeteria falls silent.  

The half-turns slump, their brief frenzy over.  

But the damage is done.  

Thompson doesn't pick up his rifle. The Kovac twins don't raise their blades.  

And Raymond?  

He checks his clip.  

Half-empty.  

Just like their chances.

She nods once, then her body seizes again, her spine bowing until the chair creaks in protest. A wet snap echoes through the cafeteria as she dislocates her own shoulder to free one clawed hand.  

The assistants swear, scrambling to restrain her. The other half-turns erupt into frenzy, their moans rising to a chorus of anguish.  

Mendoza doesn’t hesitate. He strides forward, pulls a bleach bottle from the janitor’s cart, and upends it into the old woman’s screaming mouth.  

The reaction is immediate. Her body convulses, foam bubbling between her lips. The cafeteria falls silent as every half-turn watches her die, their faces slack with something almost like understanding.  

Thompson makes a broken sound. "Jesus Christ—"  

"Not here, he ain’t," Mendoza mutters, tossing the empty bottle aside.  

From the pantry, a child’s muffled sobs punctuate the sudden quiet. Raymond turns away. The prism is impatient. The old woman’s final plea echoes in his skull.  

Somewhere deeper in the hospital, something laughs.  

The half-turns all hear it. Their heads swivel toward the sound in perfect unison.

The laughter fades, but the silence that follows is worse.  

The half-turns remain eerily still, their heads cocked toward the east wing, as if listening to a voice only they can hear. The grandma’s corpse slumps back in her chair, her mouth still foaming bleach, her eyes wide and empty.  

Raymond exhales. His fingers twitch near his holster. Thirty-five percent. The number rattles in his skull like a bullet in a chamber.  

Mendoza cracks his knuckles. "That wasn’t the master."  

"No," Raymond agrees. "Just a whisper."  

The Kovac twins exchange glances, their blades still lowered. The female twin—Lena—swallows hard. "It got inside our heads."  

Her brother, Marek, nods. "It knew things."  

Raymond doesn’t answer. He’s heard the whispers before. The dark has a way of digging up old graves, of exhuming memories better left buried.  

Thompson hasn’t picked up his rifle. He stares at the grandma’s corpse, his hands shaking. "She was still her at the end. She begged us."  

Mendoza grunts. "And then she lied."  

The boy in the pantry whimpers again.  

Raymond turns toward the sound. The flour on the floor is streaked with small, desperate handprints. The child—no older than six—has dragged himself toward the door, his blue lips parted in a silent scream. His pupils are blown wide, his fingers curled into claws.  

Sixty-five percent.

Raymond draws his pistol.  

Thompson steps forward. "Wait—"  

The gunshot is deafening in the enclosed space. The boy’s body jerks, then stills.  

No one speaks.  

The prism thrums in the walls, its pulse syncing with Raymond’s heartbeat. It’s close now.  

Mendoza slings his crossbow over his shoulder. "East wing?"  

Raymond nods.  

Lena Kovac hesitates. "What about the rest of them?" She gestures to the half-turns still twitching in their restraints.  

Mendoza doesn’t look back. "Leave ‘em. They’re not what we’re here for."  

The hunters move out, their footsteps echoing down the blood-smeared hallway. Raymond lingers for a moment, his gaze sweeping over the cafeteria—the overturned chairs, the spilled trays, the bodies that won’t stay dead.  

A whimper cuts through the dark.  

Raymond freezes.  The hunters turn to look back at him.

Behind him, the half-turns stir. Not with hunger, not with violence—but with something worse. Pleading.  

"Please," rasps the teenage boy tied to the table leg. His voice is raw, human. "Don't leave us like this."  

Thompson flinches. "Oh God—"  

Lena Kovac spins, blade raised, but her grip wavers. The boy's eyes are wide, terrified. His fingers tremble as he reaches for her. "Help me."  

Marek grabs his sister's wrist before she can step closer. "Don't."  

But the cafeteria erupts in voices now—soft, broken, familiar.  

A nurse sobs, her face streaked with tears. "I have a daughter. She's only four."  

An elderly man slumps forward, his voice trembling. "I don't want to hurt anyone."  

A security guard, his uniform torn, whispers, "Just shoot me. Please."  

Raymond's finger hovers over his trigger. His jaw clenches. They're not human anymore. He knows this. He's seen it a hundred times. The hunger always wins.  

But then—  

A child's voice. Small. Scared.  

"Don't go."  

Raymond turns.  

A young woman—no older than eighteen—huddles beneath a table, her knees pulled to her chest. Her eyes are still brown, still alive. She sniffles, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "I'm scared of the dark."  

Thompson makes a choked sound. "We can't just—"  

Mendoza's crossbow creaks as he tenses. "It's not real."  

The girl whimpers. "It hurts."  

Raymond's breath comes sharp, ragged. His pistol feels like lead in his hand. She's already gone. He knows this. He knows.  

But when he raises the gun, his arm shakes.  

The girl's lip trembles. "Daddy?"  

Raymond's vision blurs.  

A blur of movement—  

Teeth sink into his forearm.  

The pain is white-hot, electric. The girl's face twists, her sweet features melting into something ravenous, her pupils swallowing her irises whole. She growls, jaw clamping harder, blood welling between her teeth.  

Mendoza doesn't hesitate.  

The crossbow bolt takes her through the temple.  

She drops.  

Silence.  

Raymond clutches his bleeding arm. The bite burns, the venom already seeping into his veins. His pulse thunders in his ears.  

Mendoza reloads, his face unreadable. "Move."  

The hunters stagger back, their faces pale, their weapons heavy. The cafeteria's pleas fade behind them, swallowed by the dark.  

But Raymond doesn't look back.  

He can't.  

The crystal prism hums.  

The master waits.  

Chapter 87 

The east wing corridor stretches before them, its flickering fluorescents casting long, trembling shadows. The hunters move in grim silence, their weapons at the ready. But Raymond lingers at the intersection, his gaze drawn to the stairwell at the far end of the hall. The prism thrums in his bones, pulling him like a lodestone.  

Mendoza's massive hand clamps down on his shoulder. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"  

Raymond doesn't flinch. "Third floor."  

"The master's nest is east." Mendoza's mirrored sunglasses reflect Raymond's own hollow-eyed stare back at him. "You heard Rivas."  

Did he? Raymond flexes his bitten arm. The wound pulses, hot and tight beneath his sleeve. He should feel the venom by now—the creeping chill, the feverish haze—but there's only the prism's hum, steady and insistent.  

"You're bleeding," Lena Kovac observes, her blade still slick with cafeteria blood.  

Mendoza's grip tightens. "You got bit."  

A statement, not a question.  

Raymond meets his stare. "It's nothing."  

Mendoza barks a laugh—a harsh, humorless sound. "Nothing?" He rips Raymond's sleeve up, exposing the wound. The bite marks are already darkening, the skin around them mottled gray. The hunters tense. Thompson takes an unconscious step back.  

“Another bite and he’s already been infected in the past?!”

Mendoza's voice drops to a growl. "You know the rules."  

Raymond does. A bitten hunter doesn't leave the nest. Not alive.  Antidote had changed all that, but not tonight.

The prism thrums louder. He should have gone straight for it. Should have left the cafeteria to its fate. Thirty-five percent was never enough.  

Mendoza unslings his crossbow. "Last words?"  

Raymond's pistol is in his hand before he thinks. The barrel rests against Mendoza's ribs. "Try it."  

The standoff stretches. The hunters watch, frozen.  

Then—  

A scream echoes from the east wing. Human. Cutting off too soon.  

Rivas' voice crackles over the radio: "We're getting torn apart in here—" Static. A wet crunch. Then silence.  

Mendoza doesn't lower his crossbow. "Your call, Raymond. Die here like a man, or turn into one of them while we're busy saving your ass?"  

The prism pulses. The stairwell door creaks open on its own, revealing darkness beyond.  

Raymond makes his choice.  

He pulls the trigger.  

The gun doesn't fire.  

Mendoza's smile is all teeth. "Safety's on, rookie."  

The crossbow swings up—  

And Raymond is already moving, diving through the stairwell door as the bolt embeds itself in the frame where his head had been. He takes the steps three at a time, Mendoza's roar of fury echoing behind him.  

The bite burns as Raymond ascends.

The third floor exhales as Raymond reaches the landing.  

The air here is different—thicker, warmer, laced with the scent of old incense and something metallic beneath. The hallway stretches before him, its walls papered in peeling floral print, the carpet stained with dark blooms of dried blood.  

Vampires line the corridor.  

Not the snarling, frenzied creatures from the cafeteria. These are wasted things—hollow-cheeked, their skin stretched tight over brittle bones. They slump against walls, curled in doorways, their limbs folded like broken wings. Some clutch rosaries. Others cradle empty bottles of holy water to their chests.  

One reaches for him as he passes.  

Raymond tenses, but the creature only brushes his wrist with skeletal fingers, its touch feather-light. Its eyes—clouded with cataracts—track him with something like recognition.  

"Too late," it whispers.  

Another takes his sleeve, guiding him forward with surprising gentleness. Its nails are yellowed, cracked, but it doesn't claw. Doesn't bite. Just steers him down the hall with the solemnity of a pallbearer.  

More hands find him.  

A withered nun presses a chapped kiss to his knuckles. A child in a tattered hospital gown tugs him past an overturned gurney. Their fingers are cold, their grips weak, but they move him along with eerie purpose, their hollow eyes fixed on some point ahead.  

None speak. None attack.  

The prism thrums along the walls towards him, its pulse syncing with his slowing heartbeat. The bite on his arm burns, the venom working through his veins like ink in water. He should be fighting. Should be shooting. But there's no threat here—only this strange, silent procession.  

The hallway ends at double doors.  

The vampires release him, stepping back as one. Their heads bow.  

Raymond pushes through.  

The hospital corridor narrows like a throat closing. Raymond moves through the darkness alone, his breath shallow, his pulse too loud in his ears. Behind him, the sounds of the hunt fade—Mendoza's heavy footfalls, the metallic click of his crossbow reloading, the low curses as he loses Raymond's trail. Ahead, only silence. And something else.

A draft carries the scent of old blood and candle wax.

Raymond turns a corner and stops. The chapel doors hang open, their stained-glass windows shattered, leaving jagged teeth of colored glass in the frames. Inside, two figures kneel over a corpse, their backs to him. They drink with the slow, methodical focus of the half-starved, their movements sluggish, their heads bowed as if in prayer.

Not hunters. Not yet monsters. Something in between.

The chapel air is thick with the smell of rust and spoiled wine. The pews are overturned, hymnals scattered like fallen leaves. At the altar, a crucifix hangs crooked, the Christ figure's face chipped away, leaving only a hollow-eyed stare.

Raymond steps inside.

The antidote vials in Raymond's pocket feel suddenly useless. The Guild's promise—thirty-five percent recovery rate—a joke. These two are too far gone. He sees it in the way their fingers tremble around their meal, the way their skin has already taken on that waxy pallor. The change is irreversible.

One of them looks up.

Raymond doesn't move.

The vampire's eyes are clouded, the pupils blown wide, but there's no recognition there. No threat. Just hunger, dull and insatiable. It stares at him for a long moment, then lowers its head back to the corpse, its throat working as it swallows.

The other doesn't even notice him.

The crystal pulses in its reliquary, singing in a language that predates bones.

Shane echoes in Raymond's mind. "It's not a prison. It's an invitation."

He imagines Gaspard reaching for it, his eyes gleaming. "Eleven thousand dollars."

The first gunshot comes from nowhere.

The second comes from Raymond's pistol.

The vamps don't react.

Raymond exhales. His hand slides the prism into his pocket, its edges biting into his palm through the fabric. It's heavier than it should be. Or maybe that's just him—his body betraying him, his blood thickening, his bones aching with the slow, inevitable turn.

He's dying twice. Once as a man. Once as something worse.

The vampires don't react. They're too lost in their feeding, their movements sluggish, their breaths ragged. They're sick. Dying, even as they cling to this half-life.

The prism burns in his grip. He doesn't pull it out. Doesn't dare. Not here. Not while Mendoza is still hunting him, while the others might stumble upon this place.

But he knows what it wants.

The first vampire lets out a wet sigh, its head lolling back. Blood drips from its chin, dark and thick. Its companion makes a low, mournful sound, like a dog whining at a grave.

Raymond backs away.

He's seen enough.

The corridor outside is empty, the darkness swallowing his footsteps. Somewhere deep in the hospital, a door slams. A shout echoes, too distant to make out words.

Mendoza is still searching.

Raymond presses a hand to his chest, feeling the too-slow beat of his heart. The turn is coming. He feels it in the way his teeth ache, the way shadows seem to cling to him longer than they should.

The prism hums against his thigh, a low, insistent vibration.

He knows what he has to do.

But not yet.

Not here.

He moves deeper into the dark.

The third floor hallway stretches before Raymond like a cathedral aisle. The air hums—not with the hospital's stale antiseptic stench, but with something older. Something reverent.  

The vampires do not attack.  

They kneel.  

Their wasted forms line the corridor, slumped against walls or curled on the stained carpet. As Raymond passes, their heads lift in unison. Milky eyes track his movement. Cracked lips part in silent wonder.  

A skeletal woman in a nurse's uniform reaches for him. Her fingers brush his elbow—not to restrain, but to steady. Her touch lingers like a mother checking a child's fever.  

"You feel it too," she murmurs. Not a question.  

Raymond's skin prickles. The bite on his arm throbs in time with his slowing pulse, but the pain is distant now. Secondary. Something deeper moves beneath his flesh—a slow, creeping awareness that isn't entirely unpleasant.  

The prism's song vibrates in his teeth.  

Another vamp—an old man with a priest's collar hanging loose around his gaunt throat—presses trembling palms together. "We tried to warn them," he whispers. His voice cracks like dry parchment. "About the light."  

Raymond's footsteps falter. His reflection glimmers in a shattered wall mirror, and for a heartbeat, the face staring back isn't his own. The eyes are too dark. The mouth moves without sound.  

Then it's gone.  

The vampires sigh in unison, a sound like pages turning in an old book.  

A child—no older than six, her hospital gown stiff with old blood—tugs at Raymond's sleeve. "It doesn't hurt anymore," she confides. Her fingers leave smudges of rust on the fabric.  

Raymond tries to pull away, but his limbs respond sluggishly. The hallway tilts. The walls breathe.  

The prism's pulse is his pulse now.  

The vamps part before him, their skeletal hands gesturing toward a doorway at the hall's end. The door hangs ajar, darkness pooling beyond.  

"They wouldn't listen," says a one-armed veteran, his medals still pinned to his sunken chest.  

"You will," murmurs a teenage boy with a rosary wrapped around his wrist.  

Raymond's pistol slips from numb fingers. The steel clatters on the tiles, but the vampires don't react. They only watch with their knowing, patient eyes as the thing inside Raymond unfurls.  

His vision fractures.  

The hallway stretches infinitely in all directions, a maze of peeling wallpaper and flickering fluorescents. The vamps' whispers coil around him, their words slipping through his ears like smoke:  

We were afraid too.  

The hunger is just loneliness wearing different clothes.  

Let us show you what we've seen.  

Raymond stumbles forward. His shadow stretches long behind him—too long, its edges wavering like heat haze. The doorway looms closer. The darkness within stirs.  

The last thing he sees before crossing the threshold is the vampires bowing, their foreheads pressed to the filthy floor in something that might be grief.  

The last thing he hears is his own voice—but not his own words—whispering:  

I understand now.

The staircase coils downward like the inside of a conch shell, each step worn smooth by decades of desperate feet. Raymond moves without sound, his boots finding purchase on the damp stone as if guided by something older than memory.  

The air grows thick with the scent of wet earth and candle smoke. The walls weep condensation, the moisture tracing the contours of old graffiti—names, dates, pleas scratched into stone by fingernails long since turned to dust.  

"You don't understand," he murmurs to the dark. His voice doesn't echo. The words sink into the walls like water into thirsty soil. "Raymond Cruz must die."  

A draft stirs the hair at his nape. It carries whispers—not from behind or beside, but from within. The voice that answers isn't his own, yet it speaks through his teeth all the same:  

All his spirit will turn black.  

The stairs deepen. The light from above fades to a sickly glow, then winks out entirely. Raymond doesn't stumble. His pupils dilate, drinking in the darkness until it resolves into shapes:  

A landing.  

A door.  

A figure waiting.  

The master stands with its back to him, gaunt shoulders hunched beneath a tattered cassock. Its fingers—too long, too many joints—trace patterns in the condensation on the door's surface. Symbols Raymond's eyes refuse to focus on.  

"You're late," it says. The words vibrate in Raymond's molars.  

The bite on his arm pulses in time with his slowing heart. The venom has reached his bones now, threading through marrow like ink through water. He should be afraid. Should be fighting.  

Instead, he steps forward.  

The master turns.  

Its face is a negative of Raymond's own—the same sharp angles, the same scar above the brow, but inverted, hollowed out. Where Raymond's eyes are bloodshot with exhaustion, the master's are pools of perfect black. Where Raymond's mouth is set in a grim line, the master's stretches too wide, its lips peeling back from teeth filed to needlepoints.  

"You've been calling to me," Raymond says. Not an accusation. A recognition.  

The master cocks its head. "You've been listening."  

Beyond the door, something vast shifts. The wood groans. The symbols shimmer wetly, their edges blurring like ink in rain.  

Raymond's hands flex at his sides. His fingers remember the weight of his pistol, though the weapon lies abandoned somewhere far above. "Why me?"  

The master's smile is a wound. "Why not?"  

The prism thrums in Raymond's pocket. The stone has grown warm, its heat pulsing in time with the thing behind the door. With the thing inside his veins.  

Raymond exhales. His breath doesn't fog in the chill air.  

"Raymond Cruz must die," he repeats.  

The master reaches for him. Its fingers brush his temple, cold as grave soil.  

All his spirit will turn black.  

The door opens.  

It swallows him whole.  

Beyond the threshold, the air vibrates with a sound like distant thunder—or gunfire. Hunters' voices echo through the walls, muffled but drawing closer. Shouted orders. The metallic clatter of weapons being readied. The Guild hadn't abandoned the mission after all.  

Raymond steps forward into a vast chamber that might have once been a hospital basement. Rusted pipes crisscross the ceiling, dripping black water onto concrete stained with decades of filth. The space hums with energy, the prism's pulse now so strong it makes Raymond's teeth ache.  

Vampires litter the floor like discarded dolls.  

Not the aggressive monsters from the upper floors. These are wasted creatures, their bodies curled in on themselves, their fingers clutching at nothing. As Raymond passes, they twitch and sigh, their milky eyes rolling toward him with something like relief.  

The first one dies as he nears it.  

A gaunt man in a security guard's uniform gasps, his body convulsing once before going still. A wisp of black smoke curls from his lips, slithers across the floor, and vanishes into Raymond's shadow.  

Then another.  

A nurse collapses mid-crawl, her withered hand outstretched. The darkness leaves her in a sigh, drawn to Raymond like iron filings to a magnet.  

More follow.  

All around the chamber, vampires shudder and still, their stolen life draining away. The black mist coils through the air, threading itself into Raymond's skin. With each death, he feels it—the weight of their stolen years, their hunger, their sins. It settles in his bones like sediment.  

The hunters' voices grow louder. A door slams somewhere above. Boots on stairs. They're coming.  

Raymond should run. Should fight.  

But the prism's call is louder.  

He moves toward the center of the chamber where the darkness pools thickest. The vampires here are already dead, their bodies arranged in a spiral pattern, their faces frozen in something almost like peace. At the epicenter, a single chair waits—wooden, scarred, its legs bolted to the floor.  

Raymond knows this seat.  

He's dreamed of it.  

The last vampire—a child no older than ten—looks up as Raymond approaches. Her eyes are clear, human. She smiles, showing teeth that haven't yet sharpened.  

"You're here," she whispers. Then she coughs, a black tear tracing down her cheek. "It doesn't hurt anymore."  

Her small body goes limp.  

The darkness leaves her in a rush, colder than the others. It fills Raymond's lungs, his blood, the hollow spaces between his thoughts.  

Somewhere behind him, a hunter shouts.  

Raymond turns.  

The gunshot's echo still hangs in the basement air when Thompson steps through the doorway. His rifle remains raised, tactical light cutting a trembling path through the swirling black mist clinging to the walls. His breath fogs in the unnatural cold.  

Then he sees Raymond.  

The rifle lowers. Just an inch.  

"Jesus Christ, Cruz..." Thompson's voice cracks. His light traces the bodies—dozens of them—all withered, all empty, arranged in that terrible spiral. At the center, Raymond stands haloed in shifting darkness, his shadow stretching too long across the concrete.  

Raymond turns. His smile looks familiar. Wrong. "Thompson." His voice sounds like Raymond's voice, but layered—something underneath, something old. "The skeptic. The man who always asks why."  

Thompson's finger hovers near the trigger. His mouth goes dry. "What did you do?"  

Raymond spreads his hands. The gesture looks almost beatific. "What the Guild couldn't." He steps forward. Thompson doesn't back away—but his knuckles whiten on the rifle. "No more half-turns. No more mercy. Just... silence."  

The black mist coils around Raymond's ankles like a living thing. It pulses in time with his words.  

Thompson swallows. His head aches. "You're not Cruz."  

Raymond laughs—a sound that starts human and ends as something else. "I'm what he always was. Underneath." Another step. "The man who knew the math. Thirty-five percent. Sixty-five. The percentages never changed, did they?"  

The numbers ring in Thompson's skull. The Guild's lies. The failed cures. The bodies stacked in triage tents. His vision swims.  

Raymond stands close now. Close enough that Thompson sees how his pupils swallow the last flecks of brown in his irises. Close enough to smell the grave soil on his breath.  

"You were right to doubt them," Raymond murmurs. His voice sounds kind. "All those rituals. The holy water. The silver. Superstition. Theater." A cold hand touches Thompson's cheek. The contact burns. "You knew."  

Thompson's knees buckle. The rifle clatters to the ground. His head splits open—memories flood in—the first time he saw a vamp up close, how its eyes looked human for just a second before the hunger took over. The children in the quarantine zones. How the Guild's antidote made them scream.  

Raymond crouches beside him. His fingers—too cold, too wrong—tilt Thompson's chin up. "You were the only one who saw."  

Thompson cries now. The tears freeze on his cheeks. "It never worked," he whispers.  

Raymond's thumb brushes away a tear. The skin it touches goes numb. "No. It didn't."  

Somewhere above, footsteps pound. Shouted orders. The others come.  

Raymond leans closer. His lips brush Thompson's ear. "You don't have to lie anymore."  

Thompson's hand finds his sidearm.  

Raymond pulls back, smiling. "Good man."  

The gunshot echoes through the chamber just as Mendoza bursts through the doorway.  

Thompson is gone.  

Only Raymond remains, the black mist swirling around his body for a moment—almost tender—before dissipating.  

Mendoza crosses himself.  

Chapter 88

The basement air hangs thick with gunpowder and the metallic tang of fresh blood. Raymond stands motionless, his boots planted in the spreading pool of Thompson's life. The pistol dangles from his fingers.  Thompson’s pistol still in his half-clenched hand.

Mendoza hasn't lowered his crossbow. The other hunters fan out behind him, their weapons trained on Raymond—silver blades, blessed rounds, UV lamps humming to life. Their faces are masks of horror and betrayal.  

Raymond's mouth tastes like ashes.  

He remembers Thompson's voice—It never worked—remembers the way the words had slithered from his own lips, sweet as poison. Remembers the relief in Thompson's eyes when the bullet tore through his skull.  

He thanked me.  

The realization hits like a gut punch. His stomach heaves. Bile scorches his throat, but he swallows it down.  

Mendoza's mirrored sunglasses reflect Raymond's own face back at him—pale, hollow-eyed, the veins around his temples pulsing black. "Cruz," Mendoza growls. "Last chance."  

Raymond doesn't answer. His tongue feels too heavy, too wrong. The thing inside him coils tighter, savoring the hunters' fear, their trembling fingers on triggers. It wants him to speak. To explain.  

He grinds his teeth until his jaw aches. The weight of damnation presses down on him.

The female Kovac steps forward, her silver dagger glinting. Her hands don't shake. "Raymond," she says, softer. "Fight it."  

The plea cuts deeper than any blade.  

Raymond's vision blurs. Tears well, hot and furious, but don't fall. He wants to scream. To beg them to run. To put a bullet in his skull before the thing inside him makes them understand.  

But his lips stay sealed.  

The basement walls thrum with the prism's pulse. The turned vampires' bodies lie where they collapsed, their hollowed-out husks grinning up at the ceiling. Raymond's shadow stretches long across the concrete, its edges wavering like smoke.  

Mendoza's finger tightens on the trigger. "Answer me, goddamn you."  

Raymond exhales. His breath doesn't fog in the chill air.  

The silence stretches.  

Then—  

A single tear tracks down his cheek. It cuts through the grime, the blood, the sweat. A human thing. A weakness.  

The hunters tense.  

Raymond closes his eyes.  

The first vampire drops from the ceiling like a spider.  

Its emaciated body slams into one of Mendoza's men, driving him to the concrete before he can scream. The hunter's UV lamp shatters, spraying glass across the basement floor.  

Then the walls move.  

Dozens of wasted figures peel away from the shadows—vampires that had been clinging to the pipes, crouching in the corners, waiting. Their milky eyes catch the dim light as they surge forward in a wave of grasping hands and snapping teeth.  

Chaos erupts.  

Mendoza spins, his crossbow firing almost before he's fully turned. The silver bolt takes a vamp through the throat, pinning it to the wall. It thrashes, black blood bubbling from its mouth.  

"Form up!" Mendoza roars.  

The hunters scramble into a defensive circle, their weapons flashing. Silver blades slice through rotting flesh. Gunfire echoes off the concrete walls, deafening in the enclosed space. A vamp's head explodes in a shower of gore, its body collapsing onto Thompson's still-warm corpse.  

Raymond stands frozen in the eye of the storm.  

The vampires ignore him.  

They flow around him like water around a stone, their hollowed faces turned toward the living, the breathing, the prey. One brushes against his arm—cold fingers skimming his wrist—before launching itself at Lena Kovac.  

She meets it with her dagger, the blessed silver carving through its chest. It screams, a sound like rusted hinges, before crumbling to dust.  

Raymond's pulse hammers in his throat.  

They don't see me as food.  

The realization sends a shudder through him. The thing inside him—the presence that's been whispering in his veins—holds them at bay. He's one of them now. Or close enough.  

Mendoza's voice cuts through the din. "Cruz!"  

Raymond turns.  

Mendoza stands ten feet away, his crossbow empty, a machete in his other hand. A vamp claws at his back, its teeth sinking into his shoulder. Mendoza grunts, driving an elbow into its face. Bone cracks.  

Their eyes meet.  

For a heartbeat, Raymond considers staying. Considers fighting.  

Then the prism's call thrums through his bones, louder than the gunfire, louder than the screams.  

Run.  

Raymond moves.  

He ducks under a vamp's grasping arms, sidesteps a hunter's wild swing, and bolts for the stairwell. The door hangs open, the steps beyond swallowed by darkness.  

"Traitor!" someone yells—Lena, maybe. The word barely registers.  

Raymond takes the stairs three at a time, the sounds of battle fading behind him. His boots pound against the concrete, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The bite on his arm burns, but the pain is distant.  

The hunters are distracted.  

The vampires are occupied.  

And Raymond?  

Raymond is free.  

The basement erupts into a storm of fangs and gunfire.  

Vampires pour from every shadow, their emaciated bodies moving with unnatural speed. The hunters form a ragged circle, their backs pressed together, weapons flashing in the dim emergency lights.  

Lena Kovac spins, her silver dagger carving through a vampire's throat. Black blood sprays across her face as the creature collapses, its fingers still twitching toward her boots. Her brother Marek fires his shotgun point-blank into another's chest, the blessed salt rounds tearing through rotting flesh.  

"Reloading!" Marek shouts, ejecting spent shells.  

A vampire lunges for his exposed side—  

—only to explode in a shower of gore as Mendoza's crossbow bolt punches through its skull. The massive hunter doesn't break stride, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting the carnage as he methodically reloads.  

Chaos reigns.  

A young hunter—barely more than a recruit—screams as three vampires drag him down. His UV lamp shatters against the concrete, the burst of ultraviolet light burning the creatures' flesh even as they tear into his throat. The scent of copper floods the air.  

Mendoza surveys the battlefield like a general.  

He sees the Kovacs holding their ground, their movements perfectly synchronized despite the terror in their eyes. Sees two more hunters fall, their throats ripped open before they can scream. Sees the tide of undead pressing closer, their numbers seemingly endless.  

One hundred? Two hundred? It doesn't matter.  

Mendoza raises his crossbow.  

A vampire leaps from a pipe overhead—  

—and meets a silver bolt mid-air. The projectile punches through its ribcage, the blessed wood igniting its shriveled heart. It crashes to the ground in a heap of smoldering flesh.  

"Fall back to the stairs," Mendoza orders, his voice calm amidst the screams.  

The remaining hunters obey instantly. They fight their way toward the exit, their weapons carving a bloody path through the undead horde.  

Mendoza covers their retreat.  

His crossbow thunks rhythmically—each shot finding its mark. A vampire clutching at Lena's hair drops with a bolt through its eye. Another crawling toward Marek's ankles spasms as silver pierces its spine.  

The hunters reach the stairwell.  

"Go," Mendoza says.  

They don't need telling twice. The survivors scramble upward, their boots pounding on concrete, their panicked breaths echoing in the enclosed space.  

Mendoza stands alone at the base of the stairs.  

The vampires hesitate.  

For a moment, there's only the sound of dripping water and the wet, ragged breathing of the undead. Their milky eyes watch him. Their clawed fingers twitch.  

Mendoza smiles.  

He unslings his backup crossbow—a heavier model, its stock carved with ancient wards. The vampires hiss as the sacred symbols catch the dim light.  

Then they attack.  

Mendoza moves like a machine.  

Bolt after bolt flies true. Vampires drop, their bodies piling up at the foot of the stairs. Black blood slicks the concrete. The air fills with the stench of burning flesh.  

Still they come.  

Mendoza's arms burn with exertion. His supply of blessed bolts dwindles.  

When the last silver-tipped projectile leaves his crossbow, he doesn't reach for another.  

Instead, he draws his machete.  

The blade—forged from a melted-down church bell—sings as it clears its sheath.  

The first vampire to reach him loses its head in one clean stroke. The second falls screaming as the blessed steel severs its arm at the elbow.  

Mendoza advances.  

Not running. Never running.  

Step by step, he cuts his way through the horde. Their claws rake his armor. Their teeth snap at his throat. None find purchase.  

A path opens before him—not toward the exit, but deeper into the basement. Toward the bloodiest part of the battle. Toward where Thompson's body lies cooling on the concrete.  

Toward where Raymond Cruz disappeared.  

The vampires part before him like wheat before the scythe.  

Mendoza walks.  

Raymond's boots pound against the stairwell concrete, each step echoing like a gunshot in the enclosed space. His breath comes in ragged gasps, the bite on his arm pulsing with every heartbeat. The higher he climbs, the louder the prism's call becomes—a vibration in his teeth, a pressure behind his eyes.  

Why am I running?  

The question hits him like a physical blow. He stumbles, catching himself against the rusted railing. His hands—his hands—are slick with sweat. With blood. Thompson's blood.  

Below, the sounds of battle fade. The screams. The gunfire. The wet tearing of flesh.  

Raymond looks down at his palms. The lines of his life—the callouses from years of handling weapons, the scar across his right thumb from a botched silver reload—they're all still there. But the man who earned those marks feels like a ghost.  

A sob claws at his throat. He swallows it.  

The stairwell door to the first floor hangs open, a rectangle of flickering fluorescent light. Raymond steps through—  

—and into a slaughterhouse.  

The lobby is littered with bodies. Not vampires. Hunters. Assistants mostly—the young, the inexperienced, the ones left behind to guard the exits. Their weapons lie beside them, some still clutched in stiff fingers. A girl no older than twenty stares up at the ceiling, her throat torn open, a silver knife inches from her outstretched hand.  

Raymond knows her. Knew her. Sarah. Always humming while she cleaned her gear.  

He steps over her body. His stomach churns.  

The front doors are boarded shut, nails driven deep into the frame. Someone's last desperate attempt to keep the infection contained. Bloody handprints streak the wood where they tried to claw their way out.  

Why am I running?  

The question comes again, louder this time. Raymond turns from the doors, his boots crunching on broken glass. The reception desk lies overturned, medical files scattered like leaves.

No sign of living hunters. No sign of Mendoza.  

Just bodies.

So many bodies.  

Raymond's reflection glimmers in the broken monitor glass. His face is pale, his eyes sunken. The veins at his temples stand out in dark relief. When he bares his teeth—why does he bare his teeth?—his canines gleam too sharp.  

A noise behind him.  

Raymond spins, pistol raised.  

Nothing. Just the settling of the building. The groan of pipes. The drip of something wet from the ceiling tiles.  

His arm trembles. The gun feels foreign in his grip. When did I draw it?  

Across the lobby, the elevator dings.  

The doors shudder open.  

Inside, a single UV lamp flickers, casting long shadows. The floor is slick with blood. And leaning against the back wall—  

—is Mendoza's crossbow.  

Raymond's breath catches. The weapon lies abandoned, its stock cracked, the string snapped. A silver bolt protrudes from the elevator wall, pinning a scrap of fabric—black, tactical. Mendoza's sleeve.  

The prism's call surges.  

Raymond's vision tunnels. The lobby fades. The bodies. The blood. All that remains is the pull—upward—toward the source of the humming in his bones.  

His feet move without permission.  

Toward the stairs.  

Toward the second floor.  

Toward whatever's left of himself.  

He presses his back against the elevator doors, his fingers twitching around the grip of his pistol. The infection sears through his veins, a familiar poison he's carried for three years, held at bay by willpower and spite. Now, with the scent of fresh blood thick in the air and the screams of the newly turned echoing down the hallway, it's winning.

Across the ruined hospital lobby, Mendoza stands like a monolith, his crossbow trained on Raymond's chest. The big man's mirrored sunglasses reflect the carnage around them—twitching bodies, half-turned hunters still clutching their weapons, their eyes gone black with hunger. The antidote has failed. Again.

"You're looking peaky, Cruz," Mendoza rumbles. His finger rests against the crossbow's trigger. The barbed silver bolt gleams in the flickering emergency lights.

Raymond's gums ache. His vision pulses at the edges, shadows stretching like taffy. He can hear Mendoza's heartbeat, can smell the salt of his sweat beneath the gunpowder and bleach.

"Touch that trigger," Raymond growls, his voice rougher than he intends, "and you're better off dead."

Mendoza tilts his head, considering. The crossbow doesn't waver.

Between them, the turned hunters stir. Rivas is the first to rise, his machete still gripped in fingers that now end in claws. The Kovac twins follow, their blades dragging against the tile, their once-perfect synchronization now a jerky, predatory mimicry. Thompson crouches in the corner, his rifle abandoned, his mouth stretched too wide.

They aren't vampires yet. Not fully. But they aren't human anymore either.

Mendoza exhales through his nose. "Thirty-five percent, huh?"

Raymond bares his teeth—a threat or a plea, he isn't sure. "You always were shit at math."

A gurney crashes to the ground. The turned hunters turn toward the sound, their heads cocked like dogs hearing a whistle.

Mendoza doesn't blink. "How long?"

"Long enough." Raymond's knuckles crack as he tightens his grip on the pistol. The hunger is a living thing now, gnawing at his ribs. "They're between us and the exit."

"And you're between me and them."

The overhead lights buzz, dim. In the half-dark, the turned hunters' eyes shine like wet ink.

Mendoza's smile is all teeth. "Guess we're doing this the hard way."

He fires.

The bolt takes Rivas through the throat, pinning him to the reception desk. The others turn as one, hissing.

Raymond is already moving.

The world narrows to the pound of blood in his ears, the stutter-step of his heartbeat. He fires twice—once into the male Kovac's knee, once into his shoulder. Non-lethal. For now.

Mendoza moves like a landslide, his bulk surprisingly quick. He swings the crossbow like a club, catching the female Kovac across the jaw. Bone cracks.

Raymond's vision swims. The hunger surges, whispering. They're already dead. Finish it. Feed.

He clenches his jaw until his teeth creak.

Mendoza grabs him by the collar, yanking him behind an overturned gurney just as the remaining turned hunters lunge.

"You good?" Mendoza grunts, reloading.

Raymond's hands shake. His canines throb. "No."

Mendoza nods like that's answer enough. "Cover me."

The lobby erupts in gunfire and screams.

Somewhere beneath the hunger, beneath the rage and the fear and the old, old pain, Raymond Cruz makes a choice.

He always does.

He moves. But first, the half-turned hunters kneel in a ragged circle around Raymond, their heads bowed like supplicants before an altar. Their fingers—already clawed and blackening—tremble as they reach for him, not to attack, but to touch. To worship.  

Raymond stumbles back, his boots slipping in blood. "Stop—"  

The word comes out choked.  

A hunter with half his face melted from holy water presses his forehead to the tile. "You see the truth now," he rasps. "You hear the song."  

Mendoza stands at the edge of the circle, his crossbow raised but not firing. His mirrored sunglasses hide his eyes, but his jaw clenches tight enough to crack teeth.  

Raymond's hand flies to his throat, to the black crucifix that has hung there since his daughter's first communion. The metal feels warm beneath his fingers. "There's no god here," he snarls. "Just us."  

The half-turned sigh as one, a sound like wind through dead leaves.  

Then the hunter with the melted face moves.  

Fast.  

Too fast.  

His claws rip the crucifix from Raymond's neck, the chain snapping like twine. The tiny figure of Christ spins through the air, landing with a clatter in the corner.  

Raymond doesn't move to retrieve it.  

Mendoza does.  

The crossbow thumps. The bolt takes the worshipping hunter through the temple, pinning his skull to the wall. He slumps, his ruined face still twisted in ecstasy.  

The other half-turned don't flinch.  

Raymond's pistol is in his hand before he makes the decision to draw it. The first shot takes a woman through the heart—Sarah's replacement, the new medic. She smiles as she dies.  

The second shot silences a man who once shared his rations with Raymond during the long winters between hunts.  

Mendoza methodically reloads.  

They work in silence, putting down hunter after hunter. None fight back. None even raise their hands in defense. They simply kneel, and wait, and believe—until the bullets come.  

When it's done, the chapel stinks of cordite and voided bowels.  

Raymond stands over the last body—a boy barely old enough to shave, his lips still moving in silent prayer even as the light leaves his eyes. The pistol grows heavy in Raymond's hand.  

Mendoza ejects a spent bolt. "You okay?"  

Raymond looks at the discarded crucifix in the corner. At the bodies. At his own black-veined hands.  

"No," he says.  

And finds, to his surprise, that he means it.  

Moonlight filters through broken window glass, painting jagged patterns across the carnage. Between them, the bodies of their fallen comrades form a grotesque circle - hunters who had knelt willingly for execution, their faces frozen in beatific smiles.  

Mendoza's crossbow creaks as he draws back the string. The silver-tipped bolt glints in the flickering emergency lights, its point leveled at Raymond's heart. His massive frame blocks the chapel doors, cutting off any escape.  

Raymond doesn't raise his gun. His fingers hang loose at his sides, twitching occasionally as the infection spreads through his veins. The bite on his forearm pulses visibly, black tendrils creeping beneath his skin like ink in water.  

"I'm sorry," Mendoza rumbles. His voice doesn't shake, but the tendons in his neck stand taut. The mirrored sunglasses hide his eyes, but his jaw works like he's chewing on something bitter. "You know the rules. You'd do the same."  

Near the altar, Raymond's discarded crucifix lies in a pool of congealing blood. The tiny silver Christ figure is bent at an unnatural angle, one arm torn from the cross.  

Raymond's throat works as he swallows. He could fight. Could draw his pistol in one last desperate act of defiance. Could let the thing inside him - the dark presence that's been whispering in his veins - take over completely.  

Instead, he nods. Just once.  

Mendoza exhales through his nose. His finger tightens on the trigger, the crossbow string trembling with tension -  

The massive window behind them explodes inward.  

A hail of shards rains down as something crashes through - too fast to comprehend, all rending claws and snapping teeth. The crossbow fires wild, the bolt embedding itself in the lobby wall as Mendoza is thrown backward.  

The last thing Raymond sees before the darkness takes him is a pair of glowing red eyes - and the glint of a familiar black cross.

To be continued…

__—AtilA—__