Schreck smiled, slow and mirthless, revealing teeth that were just a little too long. An admission hung between them, a kind of truce, but it didn’t thaw the chill. Silence stretched.
Without wasting words or time, Rick reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a photo. He slid it across the table. “Seen this before?”
For a moment, Schreck didn’t touch it. Just stared at it like it might bleed. Then, one bony hand reached over, finally taking it with long, clawed fingers. His eyes scanned the glyph painted in blood, his face giving nothing away. The jazz murmured on, but Rick could feel the silence thickening between each breath. Schreck laid the photo down and pushed it toward Rick. “No.”
Rick thumbed a fresh cigarette. “No?”
Schreck didn’t blink. Maybe he’d forgotten how. His eyes were the color of milk left too long in the sun. Everything about him was wrong, like a marionette carved from memories of something once human. “There are marks older than history, Slade,” he hissed. “Languages that were buried long before man began carving gods into stone. This one…” He tapped the photo with one long nail, the way a priest might touch a cursed relic. “This one predates even the memory of my kind.”
Rick didn’t hide his frustration. “Then tell me whomightknow.”
Schreck didn’t speak at first. His stare drifted past Rick, to nothing. For a moment, he looked almost… uneasy. “There’s a name,” he said at last. “Old, even to us. We call him the Hierophant.”
Rick frowned, blowing smoke. “That supposed to mean something to me?”
A thin smile peeled over Schreck’s face, lipless and reptilian. “The fact that it doesn’t is telling. You’ve lived in this place all your life, and still you prowl the night blindfolded. You really are just a cub with a badge.”
Rick didn’t answer.
“The Hierophant,” Schreck continued with something between contempt and amusement, “keeps to the secret places.He’s a scholar. An augur. A keeper of things better left forgotten. Doesn’t often answer questions. Answers tend to carry prices. But if there’s a mind in this city that might recognize that mark, it’s his.”
Rick leaned forward. “Where do I find him?”
Schreck’s laugh was like parchment tearing. “You don’t.”
Rick’s voice dropped. “Don’t play games with me, bloodsucker.”
“I’m not. You don’t findhim. You wait. He findsyou—if he decides you’re worth his time.”
Rick’s patience cracked. “You owe me, Schreck. And I’m collecting. Pass along my name, tell him I want to meet, and I’ll consider your debt settled.”
Schreck’s expression didn’t change, but something unkind twitched in the air. “And if I don’t?”
Rick stubbed out his cigarette and leaned in, voice low. “Then maybe the next raid hits a nest instead of a crack house. Maybe the coroner starts writing ‘exsanguinated’ on the reports again. See how long you last without my protection.”
They regarded one another in silence, the air between them taut as wire. Schreck smiled, this time with all his teeth. “Very well,” he whispered, the words brushed with menace. “I will see that your photograph reaches his hands. That’s the best I can do.”
“Fine.” He’d take what he could get—and pray it was worth the cost.
Schreck’s spidery fingers drifted over the photo, drawing it into the dark fold of his coat. He rose in one seamless motion, less a man standing than a shadow reassembling itself. “Mark me, Slade,” he said softly. “You trespass in the sleep of unspeakable things. You may live to regret it.”
Without another sound, he receded into the gloom. The door shuddered open and closed, though he saw nothing passthrough. The cold ebbed; the stench faded with it. The music played on. Voices murmured in low conversation. No one else had noticed a thing.
Rick sat alone in the booth as the night pressed its face to the glass. No answers. Only more names. More riddles.
(11:58 p.m.)
The door clicked shut behind him with a finality that felt too loud. Around midnight, Thornefield seemed lulled into a troubled slumber, the endless noise of the city blurring into something distant. Up here on the fifth floor, in this narrow, brick-faced apartment complex wedged between a print shop and a drugstore, only the silence dwelt. Sirens wept somewhere far away. A dog barked in the street. Thunder rolled far above.
The apartment smelled of pine cleaner and old books, though he hadn’t touched either in ages. The couch still had the indent where he’d passed out three nights ago in his clothes, a whiskey tumbler on the floor beside it, dust clinging to the rim. On the wall, a photograph of the station’s softball team leaned crooked in its frame. Vivian had hated that picture. Said it made the place look like a locker room. Now she was gone, and the photo stayed.
He tossed the fedora, damp from the drizzle, onto the counter. Next came the coat and gun holster, both dropped onto the lone kitchen chair. His badge followed, set face down, then his shoes, hitting the scuffed floorboards with a dull thud as he kicked them off.
He tugged his tie loose in one practiced flick and shrugged out of the suspenders. One by one, he unfastened the shirt buttons until the fabric slipped from his shoulders in a cotton-white whisper. He pulled off the ribbed A-shirt in a single motion, the stretch and snap of it clinging to his skin. Each movement felt like shedding layers of himself that had lost their meaning.
A grunt escaped him as he peeled down his trousers and stepped out of them. Socks next. Then the briefs. And beneath it all: the ache of his spine, the sandpaper grind behind his eyes, the dogged weight of too many sleepless nights strung together like barbed wire.
The bathroom light buzzed and flickered when he turned it on. The mirror greeted him with a face he barely recognized: his jaw lost under a scruffy beard, his hair tousled, his eyes hollowed by too many years chasing monsters. But there was no defeat staring back just yet. No surrender.
