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??Spilled Blood of the Guilty

Dorian

Present

Peter Langston — The Predator with a Whistle

The courtroom was a performance. A stage for liars.

I stood, hands clasped behind my back, watching the jury nod along as my client, Peter Langston, a middle school gym teacher and predator, smirked beside me, that vile grin spreading across his face like a sickness.

His charm, thinly veiled behind that smile, was the mask of every monster who believed their lies would be believed.

I’d get him off.

Justice ended at the verdict.

But mine began after it.

Peter Langston thought he was free.

That was his first mistake.

The second? Thinking I had boundaries.

I didn’t strike right away. No, I stalked him. Shadowed his life until I knew the rhythm of it better than he did. Monday to Friday, he ran a coaching clinic at a gym just outside the city, a place where boys and girls came to learn discipline.

Trust.

He didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as those kids. He didn’t deserve to speak their names.

He stayed in a two-bedroom condo in a high-rise downtown, floor-to-ceiling windows that made him feel powerful. A view he didn’t earn. He jogged every morning. Ate the same sad breakfast. Jacked off to old footage from the trial I got him acquitted in.

He liked to see himself win.

I waited.

Each night I followed him closer. I let him feel me. The scrape of a shoe behind him on the sidewalk. The whisper of wind against his neck. A shadow just outside the corner of his eye.

He stopped sleeping.

Good.

On day five, he bought a gun.

On day six, he packed a bag. He knew. Or thought he did. But he had no idea what was coming.

I trailed him from the airport parking garage. He was sweating before the sun went down, hands trembling as he fumbled with his car keys. He glanced over his shoulder three times before reaching his door.

Still too slow.

I was already inside.

When he slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut, I leaned forward from the backseat, my breath cool against his ear. “Going somewhere, Peter?”

He screamed. The sound split the air like meat tearing from bone.

Beautiful.

He tried to run, but I hit him with a spell mid-sprint, words whispered in a tongue no human remembers. It froze his legs in place like they’d turned to stone. He collapsed forward, face-first into the pavement, teeth cracking against asphalt.

I scooped him up like a rag doll and whisked up away.

I brought him to my kill room, deep in the belly of the west wing in my home.

Stripped to his boxers. Shackled, gagged, dried blood crusting at his temple. There’s something poetic about the way fear reshapes a man’s face, turned the lines of arrogance into something fetal.

He twitched when I stepped into the light. “I want you to know,” I murmured, “you weren’t my first.”

He didn’t understand.

“You’re just another reason I became what I am.”

I circled him, dragging my fingers along the wall where my tools hung like holy relics. I didn’t need them. Not really. My power was in my hands, my teeth, my rage. But there’s a ritual to it. A pace. A rhythm.

I pulled the scalpel first.

“Three girls,” I whispered. “One suicide. Do you remember their names? Because I do.”

He jerked in the chair, shaking his head, gag muffling his cries.

“No?” I crouched, eyes glowing faintly now, fangs pressing at the edge of my gums. “Then let’s carve their initials into your skin. Maybe that’ll help.”

I didn’t start with his arms.

I started with his chest.

The blade cut through flesh like silk. His screams were muted, strangled by the silk of his own tie, fitting since that’s what he wore the day the jury said “not guilty.”

By the time I reached the third letter, he’s sobbing. Shaking. Blood seeped down his abdomen, soaking the chair, pooling beneath him.

“Still with me, Peter?”

I opened my mouth, and this time I didn't wait.

Fangs sunk into his neck, deep and punishing. Not for sustenance. Not for pleasure. Just pain. Just the sheer fucking domination of it.

His blood tasted like rot, like guilt, cowardice and corrupted innocence. I drank just enough to feel him weaken.

Then I whispered into his ear again.

“She hanged herself, Peter. Did you know that? Twelve years old.”

His entire body convulsed.

Good.

I slammed my hand against his forehead and forced magic through my palm, letting my darkness seep in like a virus. I showed him the girls’ faces. I made him see . Their eyes. Their tears. Their final screams.

I made him remember .

Then I peeled back his smile with a blade, slow, precise, watching as the flesh split like ripe fruit, his lips tore open beneath the edge of steel.

No more lies.

Only screams.

I made sure they echoed off the concrete walls. I wanted the room to remember.

By the time I slit his throat, it was a mercy. A mercy he didn’t deserve.

He gurgled once, blood bubbling through ragged vocal cords. His final heartbeat rattled in his chest like a failing engine, a stutter, a wheeze, then silence.

I sat there in it. The stillness. The stink. The satisfaction.

Covered in blood.

Bones aching with justice.

I exhaled, slow and quiet, as if to steady the rumble in my chest.

Now for the final act.

I pressed two fingers to the mark carved into the concrete floor, a sigil shaped like a crescent jawbone, slick with blood, surrounded by runes that reeked of rot and vengeance. The room groaned around me, as if something deep beneath it woke to listen.

“ Ferrum et umbra. Porta vestra. ” Iron and shadow. Open the door.

The kill room trembled. The walls distorted, peeling away like wet paper in firelight, until the meat hooks and rotted concrete dissolved into velvet darkness.

And then we were falling.

Not through space. Through sin.

When the descent ended, we were not in the city anymore.

We’re outside of it.

In the catacombs of Saint Aloysius, the ruined cathedral. The pews were rotted. The altar cracked. The windows blacked out by time and soot.

I dragged the blade across his arms in symbols no mortal church could read, carving markings that mimicked the glyphs of old cults, blood sigils stolen from forgotten grimoires.

Candles, placed in precise corners of the room, flickered with dark flame, casting false shadows of ritual.

Burnt sage. Rotten flowers. Latin etched into the floorboards in blood. A spectacle, crafted not to confuse, but to mislead. To give them something else to fear.

I scattered childlike drawings, real ones, pulled from sealed court evidence, beside his body.

Let them find what he did.

Let them think some avenging devil with ancient power came calling.

But only one thing mattered. One thing I’d leave behind. A single obsidian scale, smooth as sin, tucked in the pocket of his shirt.

I placed it gently. Reverently. Because this was a sentence.

And the scale?

That’s my signature. The mark of balance restored.

I rose, breath steady. The cameras never saw me. The locks rewired themselves in reverse. There was no DNA. No prints. No trace.

Only blood.

Only fear.

Only myth.