CHAPTER ELEVEN
The world ended not with a bang, but with a vibration. The factory district was gone. In its place was a wound, a raw, smoking crater that looked the way my soul felt. Bad.
I ran. It's the only thing you can do when you're already dead. My body was a testament to my failures. A hot, slick agony in my side where Miranda's last gift festered. A deeper, throbbing hollow in my shoulder where her knife had been buried. I'd finally wrenched it out, the suction of it leaving a void that felt more profound than the flesh. The blade wasn't mine; it was cold, efficient, a professional's tool. I kept it. But the little pen knife—the one I'd used on Elara, the one that felt like the true, first murder of my life—I pitched that into a gutter flowing with black, oily water. I couldn't carry its specific weight anymore.
The air was thick.
A low moan of twisting metal sent me diving behind the husk of a city bus. It was lying on its side, one entire flank melted away as if by a giant's blowtorch. The windows were just… gone. I pressed a ripped piece of my shirt into the wound in my side, the fabric instantly blooming a dark, ugly red. It was useless, like trying to hold back the ocean with a sponge.
That's when I heard it. A crackle of sane life in the madness.
A police radio. It lay beside a State Trooper who was never getting up again, his body angled wrong. I scrambled for it, the static hiss a beautiful, normal sound after the Quiet Man's perfect, suffocating silence.
A voice, sharp with a panic it was fighting to control, sliced through: "—all local units, fall back! Do not, I repeat, do not engage the subject! Perimeter is gone. Casualty count is… severe. We have a visual on one male survivor, heavy blood loss, armed. Command, the media is already branding him. They're calling him The Warehouse Butcher. We need a full containment team—the Quiet Response Initiative is five minutes out. Seal the zone. Nothing gets in or out."
The Warehouse Butcher.
The name landed like a physical blow. They didn't see a child-god unmaking the world. They saw a man, drenched in the blood of his wife and his sister-in-law, standing in the epicenter of a catastrophe. I was the monster they could put on a poster. The simple, easy-to-swallow story for the end of the world. I was the scapegoat, and I had dressed myself for the part.
I had to disappear. I half-slid, half-fell down the entrance of a subway station, the stone stairs were slick. The darkness down there was a relief. I collapsed onto a bench snapped in two, the pain in my side finally winning, screaming for my full attention.
When I closed my eyes, they were waiting for me. The ghosts I'd crafted with my own two hands. The ghosts of Elara and Miranda.
Elara. Not the broken thing I'd left in that office, but my wife. The way she'd look at me over her coffee mug, a small, tired smile after a long day. Her hand reaching out, not in accusation, but in a love I had slaughtered. "You didn't save her, David. You just bought the monster a stronger leash. You finished its ritual. It wanted the blood of its own lineage to complete the bond, and you gave it ours. You gave it me."
Then Miranda. Colder, sharper, a reflection of what I could have been. "I killed scum. I was starving the thing, slowly, carefully. You killed us. You served it a banquet of your own family. You don't get to be the good guy now. You're not the hero of this story. You're the final, bloody piece of the pattern."
They were right. I was the poison. Every life I'd taken, every lie I'd told Elara, every time I'd justified the knife as 'protection'—it had all been fertilizer. I wasn't fighting the Archon. I was its favorite servant.
A desperate need for a familiar ritual made me fumble in my pocket. My fingers closed around a crumpled pack of cigarettes I'd stolen from Elara's purse a lifetime ago. The lighter flickered, its tiny, defiant flame throwing monstrous, dancing shadows on the shattered tile and twisted rebar around me.
The light caught a sliver of a broken TV screen, somehow still glowing with power in the wreckage of a news kiosk.
BREAKING NEWS: MISSING CHILD AT EPICENTER OF ATTACK
And there she was. Lily. Her second-grade school photo, all gap-toothed smile and carefully combed hair. The picture of innocence. But if you looked closely—and I always, always did—you could see it. Even then. The flat, distant emptiness in her eyes, a doll's eyes, hiding an ocean of ancient, hungry dark.
The reporter's voice was grim, a mask of professional concern. "...Authorities are desperately searching for this little girl, Lily Thorne, now believed to be the latest victim of the fugitive, David Thorne. There are unconfirmed reports of a child's screams from the initial confrontation. The public is urged to see this as a rescue mission. She is feared to have been abducted by the terrorist."
The ice in my stomach crystallized, spreading through my veins.
They were going to try to save her. They would send in SWAT teams, brave soldiers, and trauma doctors. They would see a little girl in a nightgown and rush in, and the thing wearing her skin would… would unmake them. It wouldn't be a fight. It would be a harvest. My failure was about to get hundreds of good people killed.
Then, a new sound cut through the radio static, different from the official channels. It was a raw, fervent whisper, broadcast on a hacked frequency.
"Can you feel her? The Great Silence walks! She scours the world clean for the new dawn! Do not raise a hand against the Godchild! Offer yourselves to her shadow! It is a blessing!"
My blood ran cold. The Disciples. They were already out there. Not afraid, but worshiping. They were the second front in this war, and they were on her side.
A terrible, cold clarity washed over me, drowning out the ghosts, sharper than any pain. The realization was a key turning in a lock I didn't know existed.
I had to find her first.
Not to kill her. That door was closed, sealed with Elara's blood.
My mission had to change. The Lily I knew was gone, but the Archon was a parasite. A leech on our family's soul. Miranda's words about its nature came back to me. Binding. Lineage. Trauma.
It was tied to the Thorne bloodline, to our history of violence, to the Original's curse. It fed on our specific brand of poison. If I couldn't kill it, maybe I couldn't make it let go. But a parasite can be tempted. The only way to break a bond that strong… was to offer it a new host. A fresh, untainted family. A clean canvas for it to paint its nightmares on.
The thought was so profoundly evil it made me physically dizzy.
To save the ghost of my daughter, I would have to lead the monster to another man's child.
I stood up, the world tilting on its axis before it slammed back into place, forever changed. I adjusted Miranda's cold, efficient knife on my hip. It was no longer a tool for my hunger. It was a scalpel for a surgery that would damn me forever.
I was David Thorne. The Warehouse Butcher. The man who fed his family to a god.
And now, to atone, I was going to find a new family to sacrifice.