CHAPTER TEN
Time stopped in the derelict warehouse. Elara lay unconscious at my feet. Miranda's body was cooling on the concrete a few feet away. The two women in my life, one dead by my hand, the other broken by the sight. I stood between them, a statue of shame, my body screaming from a dozen wounds, the knife still lodged in my shoulder.
Then the world crashed back in.
Sirens. Close. Tires screeching on wet asphalt. The crunch of boots on gravel. Voices, sharp and professional, calling out to each other. "Perimeter secured! Converge on the warehouse!"
They were here.
Panic, cold and absolute, flushed the numbness from my veins. I couldn't be caught here. Not like this. I dropped to my knees, my hands fluttering uselessly between Elara and Miranda. I couldn't leave my wife, but I couldn't carry her sister's corpse.
"Elara," I whispered, shaking her gently. "Elara, please. We have to go." Her head lolled to the side, her breathing a shallow, ragged whistle through her bruised throat. She was out cold.
The main warehouse door, the one Elara had broken through, was flooded with the sweeping glare of police spotlights. We were trapped.
A new sound cut through the sirens. A high, thin, sing-song voice that carried from the streets beyond the police cordon, cutting through the chaos like a shard of ice.
"I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming..."
Lily.
The voice was hers, but it was layered, distorted, as if a chorus of ancient, hungry things spoke through her tiny mouth.
A policeman near the perimeter shouted, "Hey! Kid! Stop!"
The shout was cut off by a wet, tearing sound, followed by a gurgle of pure terror. Then a scream from another officer, cut short by a sound like a melon being crushed under a hydraulic press. The spotlight aimed at the door wavered and died.
"Where are you, Mommy? I'm so hungry..."
Through the broken doorway, I saw it. A small silhouette stood in a pool of swirling red and blue light. Lily. Her nightgown was stained. A rivulet of dark blood traced a path from her nostril down to her chin. But it was her eyes that froze the air in my lungs. They were pools of absolute, bottomless black, glowing with a faint, infernal light. The rage in them was not childish. It was cosmic.
She took a step forward, and a policeman rushed to intercept her. He didn't even reach for his gun, seeing only a little girl. "It's okay, sweetheart, just—"
Lily flicked her wrist. A sound like a hundred bones snapping echoed through the night as the man's body was violently twisted, his spine contorting into an impossible 'S' shape before he crumpled to the ground, lifeless.
She was a force of nature, a walking singularity of death.
"Elara!" I hissed, slapping her cheek now, desperation overriding gentleness. Her eyes fluttered open. For a second, there was only disorientation. Then memory flooded back, and her gaze locked on mine. It wasn't just fear or hurt. It was a bottomless well of betrayal.
"David..." she croaked, her hand instinctively going to the bruised necklace on her throat.
"Elara, it's not what you think! I can explain—"
"Shut up," she rasped, her voice raw. She scrambled to her feet, her eyes darting to Miranda's body, then to the carnage unfolding outside the door. She saw Lily. Her face paled further, a new, more immediate terror overriding her grief. "We have to run. Now. Leave her. We have to leave her here."
She grabbed my arm, her nails digging into my flesh, and pulled me towards a broken window at the back of the warehouse. I cast one last, agonized look at Miranda, then followed.
We burst out into a narrow, trash-strewn alley as the sky above us thundered. The police helicopter, its searchlight like a malevolent white eye, had found us.
"There! On foot! Heading west on Miller's Lane!" the loudspeaker boomed.
The chase was a blur of primal fear. We were like rabbits sprinting from a hawk. The thump-thump-thump of the rotor blades was the beat of our impending doom. We dove under rusted awnings, through the skeletal remains of burned-out cars, across rooftops slick with rain, but the light always found us. It pinned us, exposing our every move.
"They're not losing us, David!" Elara screamed over the din, her breath coming in ragged, panicked sobs. "They're herding us!"
She was right. The helicopter's path was deliberate, cutting off our avenues of escape, forcing us towards the industrial riverfront. We took a desperate chance, ducking into the gaping maw of an old textile mill.
Inside, it was a cathedral of shadows. Massive, silent looms stood like sleeping giants. We scrambled, our footsteps echoing too loudly, until we found a small office with a broken door. We squeezed inside, collapsing behind a grimy counter, our bodies pressed together in the stifling darkness.
The world outside was a symphony of chaos. Sirens. Shouted orders. And beneath it all, that relentless, chanting voice, growing closer. "Mommy... I can smell you..."
A beam of light from the helicopter swept through the broken windows of the main factory floor, slicing through the darkness. It passed our hiding spot, then returned, slower this time. Boots crunched on glass just outside the office.
"Clear this section!" a voice yelled.
A flashlight beam stabbed into our office. It swept across the floor, danced over the countertop... and stopped just inches from our feet. We held our breath. Elara's was a loud, hitching gasp in the silence. I clamped my hand over her mouth, feeling the hot tears streaming down her cheeks onto my palm. I could feel the frantic hammering of her heart against my side.
The light lingered for an eternity. Then, the officer grunted. "Nothing in here. Move out!"
The beam vanished. The footsteps receded.
For a long moment, we didn't move. The immediate threat was gone, leaving only the suffocating weight of what stood between us.
I slowly removed my hand from her mouth.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, the words utterly inadequate. "Elara, I am so, so sorry."
She shoved me away, scrambling to the opposite corner of the small space. In the faint light, her eyes were wide with a fresh horror. "Don't touch me. Don't you ever touch me again." She wrapped her arms around herself, rocking slightly. "My sister... you killed my sister, David. You're the monster. You're the one the Quiet Man wanted all along."
"It was her or us!" I pleaded, my voice cracking. "She was the Clean Killer! She was taking my kills, starving Lily! She knew! She knew everything and she was trying to destroy us!"
"Maybe she was trying to save us!" Elara shot back, her voice a venomous whisper. "Maybe killing endlessly was never the answer! Maybe she found another way!"
"There is no other way!" The confession tore from me, the final, terrible truth I had buried. "I saw it, Elara! In the bathroom, the first night! The Quiet Man showed me! He was the Original, also a serial killer with dark powers, he tried to pass it to his son, wich is your father, Ethan. But it didn't work cause he's not a killer, but he found me through you. Elara. The only way to break the pact, to free Lily, to end this... is to spill the blood of his own lineage!"
Elara's eyes widened in realisation. She remained quiet for a while.
The air went out of her. She stared at me, her mind slowly connecting the horrific dots. "His... lineage?"
A profound, devastating understanding dawned on her face. The Quiet Man had chosen her. He had used David, used their love, to get to her.
I was sobbing now, the weight of my damnation crushing me. "I'm sorry. The only way to end this... is to kill you."
Her eyes dropped to my hand as I reached into my pocket. She saw the pen knife, small but wickedly sharp, glint in the dim light.
"David... no," she breathed, backing away until she hit the wall. "David, no! Please!"
"I'm sorry," I wept, the words a broken mantra. "I have to. I have to free our daughter. Please, forgive me. Enjoy the afterlife... I'm so sorry..."
I lunged.
It wasn't a clean, surgical strike. It was a desperate, ugly thing. I drove the small blade into her stomach. She let out a sharp, guttural cry of shock and betrayal, her hands clutching at mine as I twisted the knife.
"DAVID!" she screamed, a final, piercing shriek that tore through the relative quiet of the factory.
Blood bubbled from her lips. Her eyes, wide with incomprehensible hurt, locked onto mine. Then the life fled from them, and she slid down the wall, leaving a dark smear on the plaster.
Outside, everything went silent for a split second. The sirens seemed to pause. The shouting stopped.
The policemen that heard the scream turned actively to where the cound came from.
Then, a new sound began. It started as a low moan, a vibration in the very foundations of the city. It grew in pitch and volume, becoming a scream of such pure, world-ending agony that the windows of the factory exploded inward.
It was Lily. She had heard her mother die.
I stumbled back, dropping the bloody pen knife, and looked through the shattered office window.
Lily was standing in the center of the factory floor. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open in that endless, distorted scream. Black tears, thick as oil, streamed from her eyes, cutting paths through the blood on her face.
As she screamed, the darkness answered.
It erupted from her, a wave of pure nothingness that swallowed the light and sound of the world. It wasn't an absence of light; it was an active, malevolent force. It flowed through the factory, over the police who were now turning their weapons towards the little girl.
The first officer it touched clawed at his eyes as they began to weep blood. He had a second to scream before his head burst like overripe fruit, painting the loom behind him in a grotesque mural.
Another officer was lifted into the air by an invisible hand, his body contorting, bones snapping audibly before he was slammed into the concrete ceiling with enough force to crack it.
The darkness reached the helicopter. The engine coughed and died. The searchlight flickered and went out. For a moment, it was a silent, dark coffin in the air. Then it simply crumpled, as if crushed by a giant fist, and plummeted to the ground in a fiery explosion that the emerging darkness quickly snuffed out.
I looked down at Elara. The wave of darkness washed over her body. As it touched her, her skin desiccated in an instant, turning black and mummified, her shocked, open eyes sinking into shriveled sockets.
I had done it. I had ended the pact. And in doing so, I had unleashed hell.
I turned and ran. I ran as the floor buckled and the walls of the factory began to crumble. I ran as the screams of the dying city became a chorus to my daughter's solo of devastation. I ran through streets that were cracking open, under a sky that was no longer sky, but a swirling vortex of black rage.
I ran, the sole survivor of my own apocalypse, with the sound of my daughter's grief-sharpened rage and the image of my wife's blackened corpse seared onto my soul.
The world was ending. And I was the one who had given it the final push.