“I heard fighting!”
“I can see fuck all in this darkness, what the fuck! This place gives me the creeps!”
I stepped back into the darkness between the trees and continued deeper into the park while distant voices started rising behind me.
“I told you! She was scary as fuck! AND strong as fuck!”
One of Simon’s little hunting parties seemed to have intercepted the idiot I had scared half to death. Questions would follow. And accusations after that. Men like these always turned on each other once nerves started outweighing greed.
“You leave now, and there’ll be hell to pay, Mason! You think this is some fucking social club where you can come and go as you please?”
“I’ll just wait until she catches up with your sorry ass, and see if you don’t piss your pants, asshole! I’m keeping my distance from that crazy ass bitch!”
Fear spreads faster than confidence.
Good, let them unravel.
The park itself seemed to tighten around me the further I went. The darkness between the trees looked denser now, the wind felt colder. Even the paths felt subtly wrong, as if they curved just slightly more than they should have. I became aware again of that strange pressure I had noticed earlier—the sense that something around Humboldt Park nudged people away from entering it without them realizing why. How Simon’s goons weren’t running from the park, but perhaps Polly the bird lady had something to do with that.
I wondered briefly how many places in Chicago were like that. Places shaped by supernatural influence so old and so persistent that normal people interpreted it as instinct or coincidence. Maybe entire neighborhoods survived because people unconsciously avoided crossing certain streets at certain times. Maybe others disappeared because they didn’t.
The thought should have bothered me more than it did. Instead, I found myself focusing on the hunt.
It came back to the changes in me. Not only physically, but mentally as well as emotionally. The constant pressure, the violence, the immersion in this hidden world beneath the city had started reshaping me in different ways. Problems increasingly suggested violent solutions first. Fear smelled good to me now. The tension in the air fed something instinctive and predatory that had been growing steadily stronger since all of this began.
And tonight, I wasn’t trying particularly hard to suppress my new instincts.
I was obsessing over my humanity, the changes, and my situation. The lack of time and space to think and deal with this led my thoughts in that direction in almost any situation.
Behind me, somewhere deep in the park, a gunshot cracked through the darkness.
“What the hell are y’all shooting at?” someone shouted.
“I saw something!”
“You want to call the cops too, you fucking idiot!”
“Who the hell are you guys? This is our park!” a challenging voice called out.
“We’re the ones with almost thirty people combing the park for someone. Stay in your lane, pissant, and don’t cause problems!”
“Watch your mouth, asshole, or I’ll cap your ass!”
“Try it, home boy, and see where it gets you!”
More shouting followed immediately afterward.
Simon’s people were falling apart already - perfect!
I moved back towards the lagoon. The man by the water hadn’t moved.
I became aware of him again as I passed the edge of the water, his presence screamed at me in a way that contrasted sharply with everything else in the park. He stood with his fishing rod angled loosely toward the still surface, his line disappearing into darkness that reflected nothing back. Again, I noticed the stillness to him that didn’t match the rest of the environment, not the stillness of fishing, but the kind that suggested containment.
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That made me pay a bit more attention. The man seemed to notice my attention and turned his head towards me. He had no expression as he looked at me. He turned back to his rod, seeming to have no interest in me.
I angled toward the culvert entrance near the far side of the lagoon, moving through long stretches of shadow between the trees. The ground became softer here, patches of frost-covered mud crunching quietly beneath my boots. Dead leaves scraped along the path in sudden bursts whenever the wind picked up. The concrete mouth of the drainage tunnel eventually emerged from the darkness ahead, half-hidden behind overgrowth and years of neglect.
I saw a group of people heading into the culvert. Simon’s second in command was holding up the door, so I guessed that Simon was already inside.
I adjusted my path slightly, taking a more circumspect route towards the culvert without making the change too obvious, forcing the ones near the end of the lagoon to adapt in ways that would expose them to each other. It didn’t take long. A branch snapped to my right, too loud, followed by a pause that stretched.
I didn’t look. I didn’t need to look, because I already knew where they all were. Looking would only give away that I knew where they were.
The man who had made the sound shifted again, trying to walk silently, and in doing so drew attention the others. I heard it in the way drew a surprised breath, in the subtle change in breathing patterns, and in the way they all stopped moving.
Keeping to the shadows, I moved forward, then doubled back in a tight arc, closing the distance to the one behind me before he had time to register the movement. He reacted too slowly, his hand moving toward his weapon in a reflex that came way too late.
I caught his wrist, twisted just enough to break his grip, covered his mouth and nose with my other hand as I drove a knee into his side with a force that made him exhale and his whole body seize up. Then I drove him down into the ground with a force that knocked what little breath he had left out of him without making a sound that would carry beyond a few meters. His body folded under the impact, his mouth opening in a silent gasp, struggling to understand what had just happened, as he lost consciousness.
In a burst of supernatural speed. I moved towards the other two who had noticed the sound of the branch breaking, coming at them head-on. In the darkness they couldn’t understand what the shadow that exploded out from the trees was, and that pause, that delayed reaction, sealed their fate.
I knocked one of them out with a kick to the head, careful not to use my superhuman strength. The other i knocked out with a fist as I completed the turn with the kick. Even though I tried my best, the punch might have been a bit too hard, as I heard the jawbone crack and splinter, together with the shattering of teeth.
I let the bodies drop as I surveyed my surroundings.
A fourth presence was moving towards me. It was the experienced one, the one who moved like they had both training and seen some action.
I jumped up the largest of the nearest trees, positioning myself hunched down on a tree branch halfway up, with the trunk between me and the direction the presence was coming from.
It didn’t take long for the man to show up.
He was walking carefully, step over step, scanning the area systematically, moving his gun together with his line of sight. He even looked up at the trees, not neglecting the one thing most inexperienced people forgot to do: watching for threats from above. Unfortunately for him, it was too dark for him to see me that far up and behind the trunk.
As he passed below me, I dropped silently, knocking him to the ground as I landed on top of him. As he went down, I took the gun from his hand as I slammed him into the ground.
I leaned in slightly keeping a knee on his lower back, my voice low and menacing. “You should leave,” I said, not as a threat but as a simple statement of fact, the kind that didn’t invite argument. “This isn’t your night.”
I put his gun and liberated him from his backup gun, before lifting him up like he weighed nothing.
He nodded, not because he agreed but because he didn’t have anything else left to do. I released him and stepped back into the open without waiting to see what he chose. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to come after me again.
“You’re letting me go?” he asked with a groan of pain.
“I’m not really a ‘kill all and let God sort them out’ kind of girl. But I give no second chances, remember that!”
Something in my voice must have gotten through, because he swallowed hard. “Yeah, this was a shit job anyways. I’m not into to torturing and killing baristas for shits and giggles.”
That comment made me laser focused.
“Come again?” I asked with a growl.
“I—ah-I- the tortured some barista to get information about you.” The man was sweating now.
“Tell me!” I ordered, still growling.
“She worked in that coffee place — Re-Flect. Someone found out she had picture of you, on her phone. It wasn’t me that did her in, I had nothing to do with that,” he added quickly, trying to head off whatever he saw in my eyes. “Didn’t even understand what she had. It was just—wrong place, wrong time. You know how it is.”
I remembered her.
The smile.
The casual way she had leaned on the counter and the way she had taken the tip without really looking at it.
“Yeah, I know how it is,” I said, my voice carrying the sound of certain death.
The change didn’t explode.
It grew like tsunami, withdrawing first, to gather momentum.
My claws were already out. I grabbed the man’s throat and snapped the neck before ripping his throat out.
The rage turned cold, like frozen helium, and it felt like the world stopped.
Then the change flowed up from deep inside me, and the power took me over.
I let it happen.