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Even with his Sight, she was invisible. He couldn’t see a single trace of her as he scanned the tunnels, keeping his feet light, gun at the ready as he moved. For all the good his Sight was doing him, he might as well have been blind.

There was a slight shift in the area, a barely detectable change that felt like a cold breeze before something slammed onto his head.

Darien shouted out and instinctively pulled the trigger, firing at the creature that was suddenly perched on his shoulders like a massive bird, clawed feet ripping into the Fleet bodysuit as they dug in.

The bullets were doing no good. He couldn’t hit her, and every shot he fired only created noise, debris, and flashes of distracting light that made his Surge kick up a fuss.

So he ditched the gun, holstering it near his hip.

Reaching behind his head, he grabbed hold of her throat and pulled her over his shoulder, throwing her to the ground before him. Her wings snapped out, the clawed points swiping for his arteries.

He jumped onto the ground and straddled her chest, pinning her in place, knees holding down her wings. Gun in hand again, he aimed—

Just as he pulled the trigger, bullet heading straight for her skull, she melted into the ground and vanished out of sight. The shot connected with the bones piled up on the ground instead, shattering them with an ear-splitting crack, dust clouding the air.

Darien blinked. “What the hell?” he panted.

Another of those ghostly chuckles slithered through the tunnel.

You’re not very good at killing. Are you, Monster Hunter?

“I was,” Darien said, “until I met you.”

No matter how big and bad you think you are, the creature crooned, there is always someone who can play the cards better than you. The statement was vaguely familiar. He’d heard it before, but where? And from whose mouth?

Darien kept turning to the sound of the voice, searching for her in the darkness, gun always at the ready.

Just as she had before, when she reappeared again, it was from the opposite direction to which he was looking.

She charged out of the shadows with a screech and threw him to the ground, gun clattering into the piles of bones just out of reach. He grunted, bones and rocks shifting beneath him, the heap of them threatening to swallow him whole.

With his arms pinned beneath her claws, her brute strength keeping him from moving so much as an inch, Darien began to realize that he might’ve finally met his match.

Especially as the creature’s eyes began to glow like diamonds in the sun, illuminating the tunnel with a light that was blinding. She hissed, spitting saliva at him.

Not saliva—venom.

Suddenly, his skin was on fire. The venom melted right through the spells protecting him, right through the thick material of the Fleet bodysuit and the shirt he wore underneath. The magic protecting him shimmered like a flame dying in a gust of wind—

And then it vanished entirely, leaving him vulnerable and exposed, as if he’d walked into this Crossroads wearing nothing but a t-shirt.

Darien shouted out as the burning sensation spread.

It was scalding. It felt like acid had been thrown onto his chest, his neck, his face. It felt like slapping your bare hand onto an element that was cranked to the highest heat and holding it there, feeling the flesh melt off your bones, and then peeling what remained of your mutilated hand off the red-hot coils.

It fucking hurt. And the creature was about to strike again.

He reached for a weapon, for anything that might help him, anything within reach. Anything.

I love you, Darien, the demon said with the voice of an angel.

Loren’s voice.

And he realized…what the creature had said a moment ago had come from his own thoughts. Straight from his memories of when he’d met the Butcher on the Iron Dock.

The monster smiled wide, the skin of her cheeks splitting right up to the outer corners of her white eyes. Her skin webbed, hanging in strings between her jaws. She laughed, gums pulsing around her teeth.

It was Loren’s laugh.