The bass hit first.
It rolled through Bret’s chest before he ever reached the entrance, rattling the corrugated steel walls of the converted warehouse like distant artillery.
The sign above the doors simply read:
THRICEInside, Calder City’s forgotten youth had found religion.
Hundreds packed shoulder to shoulder beneath rusting girders and hanging speaker arrays. Sweat clung to the air. Guitar feedback screamed across the venue as the lead singer threw himself into another chorus, the crowd erupting into a violent sea of elbows and bodies. Thrice was an alternative music venue in Wicklow that lay in stark contrast to finer sites like The Velvet Room. It was dark, dingy, loud and full of life in all its sacred forms; good and bad.
Bret stood just inside the entrance, rain dripping from the hood of his coat. His phone vibrated once. He pulled it out as So-Mi’s face appeared on the screen in the same pixelated form it had earlier.
“Find him Bret.”That’s all she said before she disappeared. His pulse quickened. Somewhere inside this crowd, Tae’s phone had finally resurfaced. So-Mi, and her strange and wonderful tech ability had apparently got a ping from it. When pressed why she couldn’t have done that earlier, all she said was that the signal was way too erratic to follow. This further mended credence to an idea that had been forming in Bret’s head for a while now. Tae was using Blood and he was being granted some sort of teleportation ability. Yet, if the church man had to guess, he would think the boy had little to no control over it and was bouncing around like a ping pong ball, making it damn near impossible to track.
Entering Thrice, he handed his coat to the young man at the counter. He was genuinely surprised cloak attendance still existed in this here twenty first century. Bret descended the stairs briskly, the Pilgrim scratching beneath his skin. The crowd below parted and closed in waves around him. Every movement created another possibility, another route. He slipped between dancing bodies with practiced ease, his eyes never stopping, his ears filtering conversations beneath the roar of distorted guitars. There were drug deals, arguments and the laughter that could only be heard from young people in the prime of inebriation.
Then…
A smell, rusted and metallic. Blood.
His head turned sharply. The scent was wrong, it was way too fresh, way too familiar. The Pilgrim whispered danger was close, very close.
A scream tore through the music.
At first almost nobody noticed. Then there was another. People nearest the stage began backing away, not in panic, but confusion. The mosh pit opened unnaturally, like water flowing around a rock. Bret pushed forward as the band faltered. The guitarist stopped playing first. Then the drummer followed.Finally the vocalist turned. His microphone slipped from numb fingers. Standing atop one of the towering speaker stacks, silhouetted against strobing white lights, was something no human mind could immediately understand.
Tall. Far too tall. Its body was all tendon and bone, stretched into proportions evolution had wisely rejected. Digitigrade legs bent beneath it like those of some impossible hunting animal, while jagged antlers rose from a blood-soaked skull, scraping sparks from the lighting rig overhead. Rainwater dripped from matted black hair. Its breathing echoed through the now eerily silent venue. It was less loud than it was heavy.
Bret felt an old word surface from somewhere deep within memory. His grandfather pointing toward distant fells. A story from childhood. A creature glimpsed between ancient trees. A name; Hart. Not a stag but something older, something wilder.
”Bollocks.”The Hart slowly turned its head, its black eyes swept across hundreds of terrified faces. Then it screamed. The sound was almost human, almost. The venue erupted. Bodies crashed toward every exit simultaneously as people climbed over one another in an attempt to escape. Someone fell. Another disappeared beneath the stampede. The Hart leapt. It didn’t jump. It covered the distance between the speakers and the dance floor in a single impossible bound, landing hard enough to buckle concrete beneath its feet. Panic became chaos.
Bret moved, not toward the creature but toward the people.
“LEFT!” His voice cut through the noise.
“There!” He grabbed a fallen woman beneath the shoulders and hauled her upright before shoving her toward a side exit.
“You two!” A pair of security guards looked at him.
“Open the loading bay!” They hesitated.
The Hart crashed through a steel support behind them.
That got them moving.
Another high pitch scream. A lighting truss snapped loose overhead. The Pilgrim had already seen it. Bret sprinted. Three strides. He vaulted a barricade and caught the falling aluminium rig before it crushed a cluster of teenagers. His shoulder exploded with pain. Old injuries reopening beneath fresh strain. It was always in these moments, in the midst of fear, chaos and pain that he wished that he had been gifted with some sort of super strength or durability like nearly everyone else. Instead, he’d have to fork out for more bandages and painkillers and the bloody church didn’t pay him well enough for that to continue.
It didn’t matter in the long run, he had to keep moving.
The Hart hit him from the side, he didn’t even see it coming. The impact launched Bret across the venue. He smashed through an empty merchandise stand before crashing into a stack of spare amplifiers. Everything rang in his head and his vision doubled.
The creature didn’t wait. It was already moving again and it was bloody fast. No, not merely fast. The Hart was erratic. One moment it was galloping across the floor, the next it was clambering halfway up a concrete pillar before then ricocheting sideways across a walls d launching itself toward another fleeing concertgoer.
“No!”Bret threw himself into its path, using his entire body to knock it off its charge. The antlers missed the civilian by inches. One tine ripped through Bret’s sleeve instead, carving a line of fire across his upper arm. He answered with an elbow beneath the creature’s jaw.Bone met bone. The Hart staggered. He doubted it was from pain, more likely it was from surprise.
Bret didn’t press the attack. He couldn’t. Another section of balcony gave way. More people. Always people first. The fight became movement. The Hart bounded through the venue like a terrified animal, every instinct screaming for escape while its immense strength turned every collision into catastrophe. Bret followed as best he could, reading paths, predicting collapse and redirecting momentum away from the people.
He made a point not to try and chase the creature away, instead only intercepting where innocent lives intersected its panic and trying to herd the Hart away.
A charge sent Bret through a window and into the rain-soaked alley behind the venue. The Hart rounded on him there. For the first time, there was no one else around, just the two of them. Steam rose from the creature’s body as it breathed in ragged, desperate bursts. This was not rage, it was exhaustion, fear. Bret had been around animals enough to know the difference.
He lowered his stance.
“I’m not here to hurt you.” The Hart answered with a broken, mournful cry, then it charged.
The alley became instinct. Brick walls. Fire escapes. Overflowing bins. Every surface was a potential path. Bret slipped beneath slashing claws and kicked off a wall. He twisted around the antlers, running purely on adrenaline and probably one too many energy drinks. He scrambled toward the rusted chain suspending a construction scaffold overhead and with every ounce of strength he had, pulled on it, forcing the steel to snap.
The scaffold crashed down between them, though it did not trap the creature. It did but Bret a few more seconds. The Hart stumbled, trying to get back to its feet. Its movements then changed, becoming slower, its body jerking.
The King’s Blood was burning itself out.
Another step. Its antlers cracked, breaking away from its skull and hitting the floor. A sharp report echoed through the alley. One tine shattered against the pavement. The creature stumbled again then collapsed. Bones began to move, not outward; inward. Legs folded back into human anatomy with wet, sickening pops. The remnants of the antlers splintered, shrinking beneath torn flesh. Muscle receded. Hands returned. The impossible monster shrank into a young man curled on cold concrete, naked save for torn articles of clothing clinging to bloodied skin.
A boy, no older than nineteen, lay bruised, shivering and utterly terrified.
Bret did not even think. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off as quickly as he could, revealing his blood stained torso to be washed by heavens tears from above. He covered the young man up and then leaned back against a wall, trying to catch his breath. He could hear the sirens in the distance, no doubt to quickly be followed by Vanguard’s best and brightest come to take the glory.
The boys eyes fluttered open.
“…please…” Barely audible.
“I…” His body trembled violently.
“…I couldn’t…”A voice broke through the rain.
“Billy?”Bret turned.
So-Mi stood at the mouth of the alley, soaked through, breathing hard as though she’d sprinted the last mile. Her confidence was gone. In that moment, she looked impossibly young, like the girl who had first appeared to him at St Brigid’s, looking for her brother. She hurried forward, dropping to her knees beside the boy.
“…Billy?”His eyes found her and recognition flickered.
“So…” He tried to smile and failed.
“…Mi…” She stared at him in disbelief.
“Oh my God…” Her hands hovered uncertainly over his shoulders, afraid to touch him.
“I know him,” she whispered, more to herself than Bret.
“He… he and Tae used to skateboard outside my apartment.” A tear escaped despite herself.
“He’d come over after school.” She laughed once; broken.
“He could never beat me at Mario Kart…”Bret leaned his head against the wall, the heat from fresh wounds beginning to sizzle on his skin as whatever chemical inside him that allowed him to carry on, evaporated. Silence settled over the alley for a brief moment as the weather masked the sirens. Rain washed diluted blood toward the drains.
Among the shattered concrete lay a single broken antler. Ivory. Still warm. Bret looked at Billy. Then at So-Mi. Then at the fragment of the Hart resting on the floor. And he came to two realisations.
The first was that So-Mi had been right before when she said he needed help. It seemed clear that this El Jefe character was going to keep sending people out onto the concrete wilds of Calder City, doped up on King’s Blood, consequences be damned. Bret had options, paths branching out before him. He could leave it all alone, forget about Tae, forget about So-Mi. He could go to Cressida and hand everything over to Directorate Nine. He could do that. He could also leave it for the police or Vanguard but he doubted anything would come of that. People like them, people from the streets, they’re forgotten about so easily.
The second realisation was much easier to contemplate. Bret’s eyes fell on Billy and then drifted down to an open slash across his torso and the glass protruding from his left wrist. He was angry.
For the first time, in a very long time, Bret was really fucking angry.
4x Thank
