TIME AWASH WITH BLOOD-- Chapter Fifteen, Part Two

“Do you think he called the constabulary?” Vexxer said.

They stood under a tin shelter along the side of the road. Thick rain pounded down, sounding like bullets into the armored sides of a tank. The late evening stragglers had all but vanished off the streets. Most lights in the towers around them had gone dark.

“No,” Therazine said.

“Yeah, I don’t think so either.” Vexxer adjusted his coat over his shoulders. “That was kind of nice.”

Therazine glanced up at him. He frowned.

“Wasn’t it?” he said.

“No,” Therazine said. “It was just business. That’s all.”

Vexxer nodded and looked away. A grey mist had begun to creep across the far side of the street, as if overflowing from the gutters. No cars, carriages, or pedestrians had passed by in the fifteen minutes since they had stepped out into the dank night. No feet had tread on the pavement across the street. The only movement was the driving rain, and the stillness had signaled to the things below that it was safe to surface. A murky shape wriggled in the thickness of the mist—something crawling out of a storm drain. It flopped and splashed, spilling upwards out of the gutter like a mudslide in defiance of gravity. Strands of it reached out. Hairy, thin limbs that groped blindly at the sidewalk in an mindless attempt to find purchase. Or to find food.

Therazine watched the thing emerge. She stood still as a statue, watching the shapeless mass form itself on the street.

Vexxer let out a bark. No words, simply a gutteral exclamation. The writhing bulk across the street shuddered at the noise and then drained back into the gutter. In a moment it had disappeared, and the rain regained returned as the only motion in sight.

Therazine reflected on their meeting with Patrick Kettle’s son. Her past experience had come back in an instant. Her confidence and her strategies—none of it had ever truly been gone. Part of her had worried that she would fumble the negotiations, that it had been too long since she had talked to a potential client. But that part of her was still there inside of her. It had never died, it had only been sleeping.

Now it was awake again. Her fears and concerns remained, but her mind was focused. She had a job.

“What now?” Vexxer said.

Therazine stared across the street at the storm drain. She waited a few minutes, watching for misshapen legs to start probing the night air once again.

“We get to work.”