Page 45

Sebastián

C old blood trickled down my arm as I paced outside Rising Dough, feet crunching in the scattered glass from the bakery’s shattered windows, which leaked out the putrid stench of deadwalkers.

On my phone, I jabbed Kit’s button again. Straight to voicemail. Damn it. He’d gone to Undertone to get blood for me. Was there trouble there? I pushed the thought away.

My fingers found Felix’s contact. “Magpie! I need a car.”

“Like… an Uber?”

I clenched my jaw, fighting to keep my voice steady. “No! I need a car to drive. Flynn’s been taken. We were attacked by deadwalkers. I heard some sort of vehicle speed away. I need to follow, now .”

A sharp intake of breath crackled through the line. Then Felix’s voice, distant but urgent: “Peacock! Get over here!”

Her footsteps approached, followed by rapid-fire questions that grew louder as she reached the phone. “What’s happened? Where’s Flynn? I’ll call Terrier—he’s on a date in Shoreditch—”

“Poodle isn’t picking up,” I cut in, addressing Felix again. “Can you get me a car?”

“Like… delivered to your location?” Felix’s keyboard clattered in the background. “Not… anytime soon!”

My gaze locked onto a Volkswagen Golf parked across the street, its paint peeling around the wheel arches. Perfect.

“Magpie. I need you to talk me through hot-wiring a car. Pull up a video tutorial if you must.”

“ What ? I have no idea about any of that. We’ll be here all night! ”

“How hard can it be?” I practically snarled down the phone.

“Hold on!” Felix’s voice brightened. “I’ve got an idea. Let me scan the street you’re on.”

The line went quiet except for rapid typing. Blood dripped steadily from my arm onto the pavement, each drop a reminder of my failure to protect Flynn.

“Peacock,” I called to Priya. “Call Teddy and tell him he needs to get a cleanup crew to Rising Dough ASAP. Two demobilised deadwalkers.”

She gasped. “Deadwalkers? That’s—”

“Just make the call.”

More silence from Felix, though he was muttering numbers under his breath, a habit he had when he was checking and rechecking his work.

But every second felt like an eternity, another moment of Flynn slipping further from my reach. The image of his face, twisted in pain as he collapsed, burned behind my eyes. He could be dead already. The thought sent a wave of nausea through me that had nothing to do with my gnawing hunger.

A muffled whoop of triumph burst through my phone speaker. “Right, walk south. Two hundred metres down the road,” Felix directed.

I darted forward. Blood continued to drip from my arm, though the wound was knitting itself closed, albeit slowly.

“You’re looking for Mercedes-Benz EQS. Midnight blue. Chrome trim. Latest model with the enhanced autopilot and quantum encryption. Enough computing power to launch a space mission.”

I spotted it gleaming under a streetlight—a sleek predator of a machine, the sort that people with more money than sense buy.

“I’ve unlocked it for you.” Felix’s voice carried a distinct note of pride.

“The owner’s some tech CEO who really should’ve updated his car’s firmware.

Left himself wide open to a remote override through the entertainment system.

I redirected the authentication protocols through a ghost network I set up—”

“English, please.”

“Right. Sorry. Car’s yours. Keys are virtual. Just get in and press the start button.”

I slid into the sleek leather driver’s seat. The dashboard lit up with a soft blue glow.

“The GPS is already programmed to track your phone’s location,” Felix continued. “And I’ve looped the CCTV feeds along every possible route for a mile radius so far. No one can see you.”

“Good work.” I pressed the start button, and the engine purred to life.

“I’m sure this is exactly what my mother had in mind when she paid for my masters in cybersecurity and digital forensics,” Felix muttered.

The steering wheel creaked under my grip as I fought to keep my hands steady. Every inch of me screamed to move faster, to tear through the streets until I found Flynn. The wound in my arm had closed, but the memory of his pain-filled face haunted me.

“Boss!” Priya’s voice crackled through the car’s speakers. “I’ve got footage from outside the bakery. Two deadwalkers loaded Flynn into a white Transit van. They’re heading south.”

“Scan the numberplate. Now!” I slammed my foot on the accelerator, the Mercedes’s electric engine whining as we shot forward.

“On it,” Felix replied. Then, “Got it! Cloned plates. Running them through the system.” More typing. “Right, follow the A23. Peacock and I are tracking them through the CCTV network. I’ve triple-checked the feeds.”

“Turn left onto Whitecross Road,” Priya directed.

I yanked the wheel, tyres squealing. A notification flashed on the dashboard as Felix tried to engage the autopilot.

“Stop that,” I growled, swerving around a taxi. “I’m driving.”

“The AI would be safer—”

“No.”

There was no way in hell I was obeying the highway code right now. The speedometer crept past ninety as I weaved through traffic, ignoring red lights and blaring horns. South London blurred past in streaks of neon and shadow .

“Right at the next junction,” Felix called. “They passed through here nine minutes ago.”

I cut across three lanes, barely missing a bus. The car’s suspension groaned as we bounced over a speed bump at full throttle.

“Noctule, the van’s heading out of the city,” Priya announced. “Last sighting shows them taking the A23 towards Brighton.”

The buildings thinned out as we reached the edges of London, streetlights giving way to darkness. My fingers tightened on the wheel as we hit open road, the countryside swallowing us in black.

“Still tracking them,” Felix assured me. “They’re keeping to the main road.”

“Yes. We’re going to get him back. Don’t worry.” Priya’s soothing voice did nothing to calm me.

The engine whined as I pushed it harder. As soon as I reached the dual carriageway, the digital speedometer climbed past a hundred and twenty. Every second felt like an eternity, another chance for them to hurt Flynn.

“Slow down!” Felix shouted. “The last thing we need is a police chase right now!”

I eased off, my speed dropping to a more reasonable hundred, though every instinct screamed at me to push harder, faster.

“They’ve left the main road.” Priya said. “Tracking them onto… some kind of side route. Few minutes ahead of you.” A pause. “It’s a small track. Nothing but disused buildings for miles.”

Tyres crunched onto gravel as I followed their path. Shadows stretched across the narrow track, branches scraping against the pristine paintwork.

“Noctule.” Priya’s voice cut through the darkness, stern and commanding. “You need to slow down now, else you’ll kill yourself and you’ll be no help to him at all.”

I barely registered her warning, my focus narrowing on the path ahead. “Am I close? Where is he?!”

“There’s no CCTV here.” Felix’s typing grew more frantic. “We’re off grid. But there’s only one road. Keep going. ”

My headlights carved through the darkness, illuminating patches of overgrown track.

Then—something massive lurched into the beam of light.

That impossible creature again. The hyena stood in the middle of the road, its muscled shoulders hunched, yellow eyes blazing in my headlights.

I slammed on the brakes instinctively, the car fishtailing slightly before I regained control.

“Seb?” Priya’s voice crackled with concern. “What happened?”

That same creature I’d seen before—a hyena in London, of all things. Each appearance heralding disaster. Was it… warning me? Following me? But there wasn’t time to dwell on such impossibilities now.

My hands clenched the wheel as we bounced over potholes and debris. Then— there —a flash of white metal in the distance.

The van.

I zoomed towards it, closing the distance between us. The van’s taillights burned like prey in my vision, growing larger with each passing second.

Twenty metres. Ten. Five.

The distance between us shrank, my entire world narrowing to that white van. I barely registered Felix’s voice in my ear, or Priya’s continued warnings. Nothing mattered except closing those final metres.

Then my foot hovered over the accelerator as I calculated distances, angles, risks. Flynn was in there. I couldn’t simply charge up and ram it from behind.

“Boss? What’s the plan?”

I fumbled with the sleek dashboard, my fingers sliding uselessly across the glossy touchscreen. Black glass until touched, and even then, the icons made no sense. Bloody modern cars.

“Felix,” I growled, “where are the damn lights?”

“Left panel, boss. Swipe down, then right. The little sun icon—no, not that one. The other one. There you go.”

Finally, the Mercedes-Benz’s LED array blazed to life. State-of-the-art. It could probably illuminate half a football field .

“Peacock.” My voice was tight. “I was thinking… The deadwalkers. Their eyes… How sensitive are they?”

“Possibly extremely. Their retinas are likely partially decomposed, leaving the optic nerves exposed. Why— Oh! Do it!”

I slammed the high beams on full. The LED array blazed like artificial daylight, flooding the narrow track with searing white brilliance.

The van swerved violently. Its wheels caught the muddy verge where the track dropped away sharply. For a stretched moment, it teetered—

Momentum took over.

Metal screamed as the van tipped.

I slammed on the brakes, tyres fighting for purchase on the uneven surface.

The world slowed to a crawl as the van rolled, once, twice, sliding sideways across the soggy track in a shower of mud and gravel.

“Flynn!” The name tore from my throat.

“Noctule!” Priya’s voice cut through my panic. “Wait—”

I barely heard her. The car hadn’t even stopped moving before I reached for the door handle.

I sprinted towards the overturned van, slipping slightly in the mud. The passenger door had crumpled on impact, metal twisted like origami gone wrong.