When Monsters Hunt Monsters

Part One: The Laneway

The fog was already rolling in when they reached the crime scene — real winter fog, the kind that Melbourne conjured in June to remind everyone this was still a port city, still a place where cold things came in from the water. Detective Sarah Aku waited at the laneway entrance, police tape already up, her breath fogging in the chill. She looked like someone who hadn't slept in weeks but had decided to keep working anyway.

"Third victim," she said without preamble. "Same surgical precision. Same theatrical positioning. Same letter in Victorian copperplate left weighted beneath a stone."

Nick Vance listened for what she wasn't saying. Reynard stirred in his mind — the fox made of stories and cons and every lie Nick had ever told, living somewhere between his thoughts and his identity. The fox whispered observations, counted tells, read the detective's micro-expressions with the expertise of something that had spent centuries wearing whatever face got it what it wanted.

She was leaving something out. Something important.

"All three victims were businessmen," Aku continued, flipping through her battered notebook — the same one she'd probably carried for a decade, filled with cases that stayed solved because she did the work no one else would do. "All three had assault charges that got dropped." She didn't emphasise it. Just noted it professionally. "Funny pattern, that."

She glanced past them, toward the laneway entrance. "Those gentlemen over there? 'Friends of the victim.' Been here since we cordoned off the scene. Keep an eye on them, yeah?"

Two large men in expensive coats stood by a black Mercedes. One leaned on his heels to scan both exits. The other palmed his phone without unlocking it, thumb resting near the jacket line where a holster bulged. Watching. Not grieving — assessing.

Dev/Null let their perception shift, slipping sideways into the space where reality rendered as source code. The world became cascading columns of pale blue light — zeroes and ones, probability functions, the underlying architecture of everything. They saw the men's metadata scrolling past: heart rates elevated, micro-expressions flagged as calculation rather than concern, guard routines running in parallel with threat assessment protocols. A trickle of latency throbbed behind Dev's eyes — the usual warning that every edit had a price. Whatever those men were, they weren't mourners.

The EMTs were loading the body into an ambulance. Jay Doe caught up with them at the van doors — a quick word with Aku, a nod of permission, and they pressed their hand against the dead man's cooling arm.

The memories flooded in.

Terror first. The fog rolling in wrong, smelling of gaslight and old leather. A voice — calm, British, precise, with an accent that had no business existing in the twenty-first century. Then pain, bright and surgical, and confusion, and the terrible certainty that this was deserved somehow, that the voice knew things, that—

Jay pulled their hand back, jaw tight.

The terror wanted to linger. It always did. But they'd worn worse memories than this — lives full of horrors they'd chosen to become, identities so broken that the original owners had welcomed oblivion. They let the dead man's fear wash through them and fade, filing away only what mattered: the voice, the precision, the calm certainty of something that believed it was doing God's work.

"Got something?" Nick asked quietly.

"A voice," Jay said. "British. Old-fashioned. Very sure of itself."

The Mercedes' engine started.

Dev focused. The world became source code again — familiar columns of pale blue light, zeroes and ones cascading through the architecture of everything. They reached into the car's fundamental processes and tried to hack it. Make the accelerator floor itself. Make the wheels spin. Make the whole system drive — send it lurching forward while the occupants scrambled to regain control. Push too hard and their Mythos always pushed back; they'd learned that lesson in nosebleeds and ringing ears.

The wheels spun. The engine roared. But the car didn't move.

Something was wrong.

Dev looked deeper, and their breath caught. Red code was bleeding through the blue — angry, wrong, the colour of old blood and rust and warnings that shouldn't exist. It leaked from the Mercedes like heat shimmer, corrupting everything it touched. Not an active defence. Not someone fighting back. Just... presence. Whatever was in that car, its very existence was rewriting the rules around it.

The vehicle's parameters refused to update. Brake and accelerator pressed simultaneously. The code they'd written kept being overwritten by something older, something that didn't belong in any system Dev had ever seen.

The thugs startled, confused, looking between the vehicle and each other. The engine roared, wheels spinning uselessly, then died. The black C-Class Mercedes — expensive, immaculate — sat there like nothing had happened.

"What was that?" Jamie O'Hare asked.

"Red," Dev said quietly. Their nose had started bleeding — just a trickle, barely noticeable. "The code was red. I've never seen that before. It's not ours to rewrite."

One of the confused thugs straightened his jacket and approached. There was no other word for him — not with those hands, that posture, the way his suit didn't quite hide the shoulder holster.

"My employer would like a word," the approaching thug said. Not a request.

Vincent Stavros sat in the back seat of the Mercedes like a king granting audience. Large Greek man, immaculate suit, Orthodox cross at his throat. He didn't get out — made them come to him. Everything about him said legitimate businessman. Everything about his eyes said predator.

Nick recognised the type. Reynard recognised it better.

"I saw how you examined the scene," Vincent said, and his voice was careful, deliberate, each word chosen and placed like stones in a mosaic. "How carefully." Long pause. The kind of pause that demanded you fill it with reassurance or agreement. "The detective is competent. But her superiors want this closed quietly. I need people who will be thorough."

He placed an envelope on the seat. Thick, neat, the kind of weight that spoke of serious money. Ten thousand now. Twenty more when the killer was stopped.

"These men were good people," Vincent said. His hand drifted to the cross at his throat, and the emotion in his voice was real — or at least, it was expertly performed. "They deserved better than this."

Nick listened to every word. Watched the careful gestures, the calculated pauses, the way Vincent's eyes never quite matched his grieving tone.

Reynard knew a con when he saw one. This was a masterclass — decades of practice, layers of genuine emotion wrapped around a core of absolute calculation. The beloved patriarch routine. The man who helped migrants with paperwork, who sponsored community events, who remembered every child's name at the local centre. The warmth was real. The monster underneath was also real.

Both were true simultaneously.

"I appreciate the offer," Nick said, and his voice was smooth, regretful, pitched exactly right for declining without causing offence. "But we can't help you."

Vincent's mask slipped.

Just for a heartbeat — a flash of something cold and calculating, something that was used to getting what it wanted and had already started planning what to do with people who refused. Then the car door closed and the black sedan pulled away, and the charming benefactor was gone as if he'd never existed.

The thugs were already heading for their own vehicle — a dark SUV parked further down the lane. In a moment they'd be gone, and with them any chance of finding out what Vincent was really hiding.

"Dev," Nick said quietly. "Can you slow them down?"

Dev focused. The world became source code again — pale blue columns of data, the underlying architecture of everything. They found the SUV's tyres, saw the code: rubber compounds, vulcanisation processes, molecular bonds holding each one together. They reached in and edited. Changed the numbers. Made the rubber remember that it was supposed to break down, to fragment, to fail.

The vulcanisation began accelerating. The tyres were dying in slow motion, structural integrity cascading toward failure. The thugs wouldn't notice until they were already on the road — and then they'd need to stop.

"That'll take a while," Dev said quietly. Blood trickled from their nose. "They'll need new tyres soon. And wherever they stop to get them—"

"We'll be waiting," Nick finished.

Jamie said nothing. He didn't need to. His presence was enough — the quiet certainty of a man who'd spent thirty years on the docks, who knew exactly what he was capable of and had no need to announce it.

Part Two: The Game

The thugs didn't know they were being watched. One waited with the car while the other wandered into the convenience store next door for cigarettes. Standard behaviour. Standard protocols.

The crew had thirty minutes until the new tyres were mounted. Maybe less.

"The one by the car has a ring," Jay said, watching through a grimy window. Their voice was neutral, observational, the voice of someone who'd learned to catalogue details without letting them touch anything human. "Wedding band. Cheap, but well-maintained. He keeps touching it when he's bored."

"Wife and kids," Nick translated. Reynard's whisper in his mind, calculating angles. "Anniversary coming up. He'll be thinking about dinner reservations. Distracted."

"Is that relevant?" Jamie asked.

"Everything's relevant."

They took him in the back lot behind the garage — quick, clean, silent. Jamie's hand over his mouth, Dev scrambling the security cameras with a thought, Jay's palm pressed against the thug's face before he even knew what was happening.

The memories flooded in. Anniversary dinner. Yellow roses for Sofia. Katya's first day of school. A uniform still smelling of plastic packaging. Pride and fear braided together. The job paid. The job kept them safe. The job required him not to ask questions about the basement.

Jay absorbed it. Their face began to change — bones shifting, skin reshaping, features rippling like water disturbed by a stone. In the grimy window, Andreas stared back. His eyes. His memories. Jay's own self suddenly distant.

Three hours. Hold a face longer than that and it set. The mask became permanent. The borrowed memories became theirs.

"Christos is coming back," Dev said. Their nose had stopped bleeding, but their hands were shaking. Reality hacking left traces.

Jay straightened Andreas's jacket — their jacket now — and stepped around the corner to meet their new partner.

That left the problem of the body.

Andreas was unconscious, breathing steadily, sprawled behind a dumpster with no idea that his face had been stolen and his memories were currently driving around in someone else's skull. They couldn't leave him here. Someone would find him. The Mist would cover it up eventually, would create some mundane explanation for why a man was discovered unconscious behind a tyre shop — mugging, maybe, or sudden collapse from undiagnosed medical condition — but until then, he was a loose end.

"I can move him," Dev said quietly. "Up."

"Up?" Nick raised an eyebrow.

"Get him on a rooftop somewhere. Out of sight until we're done."

"Can you hold it that long?"

Dev's hands were still shaking. The tyre hack had already burned through bandwidth; every big edit carried a counterweight.

"I don't have to hold it," Dev said. "Just get him up there. Gravity takes over. He lands somewhere soft."

Jamie frowned. That kind of reality manipulation — levitating a grown man, fighting every law of physics — would cost more than Dev could afford right now. He knew the shape of someone pushing past their limits. He'd lived it himself, on the docks, in the strikes, in the moments when stopping meant letting something worse happen.

But he didn't say anything. Thirty years of learning when to speak and when to let people make their own choices.

Nick nodded. "Do it."

Dev focused.

The world became source code — probability matrices and gravitational constants and the parameters that governed falling apples and orbiting moons. Dev found the variable that defined which direction was down for Andreas's unconscious body, and they edited.

Down became up.

Andreas's body began to rise.

Ten feet. Twenty. Blood started flowing from Dev's nose immediately — not a trickle but a steady stream. Thirty. Vision doubled, reality and code overlapping.

Fifty. Error messages cascaded through their mind: INVALID OPERATION, PHYSICS VIOLATION. Hands shaking. "Just... a little... higher..."

Reality remembered that objects fall down, not up.

Andreas fell. Fast. Tumbling. A hundred feet with nothing to catch him but—

The tram.

Impact. Metal and meat and electricity. Sparks. Brakes screaming. Burning rubber and something worse.

He was still breathing, barely. Burns across his back and shoulders. An anniversary dinner that would never happen.

Dev staggered against the dumpster, ears ringing, blood on concrete. The world flickered between source code and solid matter. They stayed upright. Barely.

"We need to go," Nick said. His voice was steady, but the fox in his mind was howling calculations: witnesses, cameras, response times, how long before someone connected the man on the tram to the tyre shop to them.

"We can't just—" Jay started, but the words were wrong. They came out in Andreas's voice, with Andreas's cadence, and for a terrible moment Jay wasn't sure which "we" they were talking about.

"We go," Jamie said. He had one arm around Dev, steadying them. "Jay, you're Andreas now. Get in the car with Christos. Find out where they're going."

"And if—"

"You've got three hours. We work fast."

Jay—Andreas—walked back to the car. Christos was already behind the wheel, confused and impatient.

"What took you so long?"

"Needed a piss," Jay said, and the words came out in Andreas's voice, with Andreas's irritation, with Andreas's precise inflection. The memories were bleeding through. Sofia's smile. Katya's laugh. The basement. The women who never met your eyes.

Jay got in the car and tried not to think about what they'd done.

Part Three: The Patriarch's Table

Stavros & Sons on Johnston Street looked exactly like what Vincent wanted the world to see: a beloved Greek taverna, three generations of family photos on the walls, the smell of lamb and oregano and decades of community dinners. Bouzouki music at a comfortable volume. Regulars who'd been coming for twenty years. Staff who smiled when the patriarch walked past.

Jay saw the cracks.

The kitchen staff kept their heads down — not the focused attention of busy cooks but the careful blankness of people who'd learned what happened when they looked up. One busgirl flinched when Christos passed too close. The manager wiped his hands on a towel twice, smile fixed and empty. Beneath the oregano and lamb hung fear, sweat, industrial cleaner trying to cover older stains.

Andreas's memories knew exactly what those stains were from.

Jay pushed them down. Two hours, forty-seven minutes left.

The restaurant closed at eleven. The last customers — regulars, obviously, Greeks who'd been coming for decades and who thought of Vincent as a community treasure — lingered over coffee and baklava until midnight. Finally, they left.

Christos locked the front door. Then he nodded to Jay, and they both went to work.

The women from the kitchen — four of them tonight, though the number changed — were herded toward the back. Not roughly. Not violently. Just... inevitably. The way you'd move livestock.

One of them went for a knife.

She must have grabbed it from the kitchen — a paring knife, small but sharp, hidden in the folds of her apron. Desperation in her eyes. Nothing left to lose. The blade caught the light as it arced toward Jay—toward Andreas, the guard who'd locked them down here night after night, who'd been part of their suffering since they'd arrived.

Jay caught her wrist before the knife connected.

They had maybe half a second to make a choice.

Let her stab them, and blow their cover. Christos was right there, already reaching for his belt. Let the real thug handle it, and she'd end up dead or worse. Or maintain the illusion.

Maintain the illusion.

Jay slapped her. Open palm, hard enough to knock her down, hard enough to sell it. The sound echoed in the kitchen like a gunshot.

The woman hit the floor, knife clattering away. She stayed down, hand pressed to her reddening cheek.

The other women watched. They didn't move. They'd learned what happened when someone fought back.

Christos relaxed, hand falling away from his belt. "Good reflexes," he said approvingly. "She's been trouble before."

Jay said nothing. Just gestured toward the basement door.

Christos unlocked it, and the women filed through without being told — because they'd learned what happened if you had to be told twice.

Stairs. Darkness. The smell of confined spaces and too many people.

The basement.

Jay forced themselves to keep Andreas's face, keep Andreas's mannerisms, keep the mask in place even as Andreas's memories screamed about what happened down here. The women would be "processed" — checked for health, assigned duties, reminded of debts. Some sent to parlours. Some to private apartments. A few vanished.

Vincent wasn't here tonight. He rarely was. That's what the basement manager was for.

That's what the cops on payroll were for.

That's what Andreas and Christos were for.

When the lockup was finished, Christos nodded toward the back door. "Come on. Boss wants us at the club."

Jay followed him out, wearing Andreas's walk, Andreas's casual indifference. They made it two blocks before slipping away — ducking into a laneway while Christos was distracted by his phone. By the time the real thug noticed his partner was gone, Jay would be someone else entirely.

They regrouped behind the restaurant — Nick, Jamie, and Dev, who was still shaky, a trickle of blood still visible at the corner of their nose. Jay arrived last, and they were already changing, Andreas's features sliding away like water off glass.

"I can't hold it anymore," Jay said, their voice thin and wrong — caught between Andreas's cadence and their own nothing. "His memories are... I can still feel them. His wife. His daughter. The things he did down there." They stared at their hands. "I hit one of them. A woman with a knife. To maintain cover."

"You did what you had to," Nick said.

"No." Jay's voice cracked. "I enjoyed it. Not me — Andreas. His memories. He'd done it before. When I did it wearing his face... I felt what he felt. The satisfaction." They shuddered. "She was fighting for her life, and part of me enjoyed putting her down."

The silence stretched.

Jamie put a hand on their shoulder. Heavy. Warm. Grounding.

"That wasn't you," he said quietly.

"Wasn't it?" Jay looked up at him, their face settling into the generic nothing that passed for their default — the face that belonged to no one. "I don't know anymore. I don't know where he ends and I begin."

"We'll figure it out later," Nick said. "Right now, there are women in that basement."

The padlock on the basement door was commercial-grade. The kind of thing designed to keep warehouses secure, to resist bolt cutters, to announce that whatever was behind it wasn't meant to be opened casually.

Jamie looked at it.

John Henry stirred in his chest — the legend of the man who'd raced a steam hammer and won, who'd driven steel through mountains, who'd worked himself to death because some things were worth dying for. The padlock was iron and chrome and modern engineering. Jamie was something older.

He wrapped his hand around the lock and pulled.

The metal screamed. The lock didn't break so much as come apart, components flying, the door swinging open to reveal concrete stairs descending into darkness.

The noise brought company.

"What the hell—" The restaurant owner appeared in the kitchen doorway, eyes wide, taking in the shattered lock, the strangers in his back lot. He was already reaching for his phone.

"Vincent sent us," Nick said smoothly, stepping forward with the easy confidence of someone who belonged here. Reynard whispered the right words, the right tone, the perfect blend of authority and reassurance. "Problem with the shipment. He wants them moved tonight. Quietly."

The owner hesitated. His eyes moved from Nick to Jamie to the broken lock.

"He didn't call me," he said slowly.

"You know how Vincent is." Nick's smile was warm, understanding, the smile of someone sharing an inside joke. "He doesn't like phones. Doesn't like records. You understand."

The owner understood. That was the problem with working for someone like Vincent — you learned not to ask questions, not to need explanations, not to be surprised when things happened in the middle of the night without warning.

He shook his head — not refusal, just resignation — and walked back toward the front of the restaurant. Whatever was happening, he didn't want to know.

Jamie was already descending the stairs.

The women in the basement — five of them tonight — stared at the sudden light with expressions that ranged from terror to desperate hope to the absolute blankness of people who'd stopped expecting anything good.

Jamie stepped through first. Immovable when he needed to be. Protector of the vulnerable. He didn't speak their languages, but he didn't need to.

The woman Jay had slapped was still there, bruise darkening on her cheek. She flinched at the sight of strangers — but these weren't the guards. Something in Jamie's presence made her pause. Made all of them pause.

"Coalhouse," Jamie said, pulling out his phone, opening a translation app. The word came out mangled but understandable. "Safe. Go."

They didn't all believe him. But they went — slipping out through the back laneway, headed for the one place in Collingwood where no one asked questions and everyone was welcome.

The crew watched them disappear into the Melbourne night. The street was empty except for fog and streetlights and the weight of what they'd done.

"We need to know more," Nick said finally. "About the killer. About what we're actually dealing with."

"Aku," Jamie suggested. "She's been working these cases. She'll have files."

Nick nodded. "Tomorrow. Tonight we disappear."

Part Four: A Detective's Guilt

They found Detective Aku the next day at Neutral Grounds, a café on Smith Street that sat between hipster brunch spot and community institution. Espresso oil clung to the air. Rain tapped the window. A neon sign outside stuttered. She wasn't drinking coffee — something darker sat in front of her, barely touched. Dark circles smudged her eyes.

She slid a stack of files across the table to Nick. Autopsy reports. Crime scene photographs. Case notes on all three victims.

"Professional courtesy," she said. Her voice was clipped, controlled over exhaustion. "Since you're not working for Stavros."

Nick flipped through them while the others listened. Jay was wearing their own face now — or the closest thing they had to one, the generic features that belonged to no one in particular. The borrowed memories of Andreas were fading, but they could still feel his love for his wife lingering like a bruise.

The files told a story. Each kill showed less restraint than the last. Tighter groupings. More cuts. Longer time spent with the body. Precision still surgical. Something underneath coming undone. Whoever was doing this wasn't just hunting. They were losing themselves to it.

"My colleague," Aku said, staring into her drink. "I sent him undercover. Had him threaten working girls. Make himself look like a target." Pause. "They found him this morning. Same cuts. Same precision. Same bloody note in copperplate."

Silence.

"You sent him in knowing there was a serial killer targeting that profile?" Dev asked. Their voice was curious, not accusatory. The ghost in the machine didn't judge the same way humans did.

"I thought—" Aku stopped. Started again. "I thought if he looked enough like the others, he might flush out whoever was behind it. Draw them out. Give me something I could use." Her hand tightened on her glass. "He wasn't supposed to— I didn't think—"

"You made a calculation," Jay said quietly. "Lives saved against lives taken."

Aku looked at them sharply. Whatever she saw in Jay's face — understanding, maybe, or recognition — she didn't like it. But she didn't argue.

"The killer's getting bolder," she said finally. "The intervals between kills are shortening. Either they're losing control, or they've stopped caring about consequences." She pushed back from the table. "I've given you everything I have. Do something useful with it."

She paused at the door, looking back.

"The women you freed last night — they made it to the Coalhouse." Her eyes were unreadable. "Marlene Chen runs the place. She knows things. Things the working girls tell her that they'd never tell a cop." A long pause. "If anyone knows who's behind this, it's her."

She left the files on the table and walked out into the Melbourne air.

Part Five: The Coalhouse

The Coalhouse was a converted warehouse on a back street off Smith Street — exposed brick, mismatched furniture, harm reduction posters on the walls. Marlene Chen met them at the door.

Fifty-something. Chinese-Australian. Tired eyes that had seen too much but hadn't looked away. She assessed the crew for a long moment, then something in her expression softened.

"The girls from last night," she said. "They made it. They're safe now, thanks to you."

She led them past the coffee station, past the volunteers, to a wall of photographs. Women smiling. Community events. Memorial candles for the ones who didn't make it. Then she lifted one of the larger frames, revealing what was hidden behind.

More photos. Men's faces. Red X's through each one. Copperplate annotations beneath: These ones will never hurt anyone again.

"I've been feeding Jack targets," Marlene admitted. Her voice cracked. "I thought I was helping. The working girls tell me who's dangerous, who hurts them, who the system ignores. And I... I pass it along." Her thumb worried the wedding ring she still wore. Nick's eyes tracked the gesture; Reynard catalogued the tell. "I made a calculation. Lives saved against lives taken. I thought the math worked out."

"And the cop?" Nick asked quietly. Reynard watched, but the fox was silent now. Some cons weren't worth interrupting.

"The cop wasn't—" Marlene's voice broke. "Someone told me he was threatening the girls. I didn't check. I just passed the name and—"

She stopped. Breathed. Jamie's jaw tightened. Dev glanced at the red X's. Jay stared at the ring.

"I don't know what to do anymore. Jack — Alex is— They're losing themselves. Every kill makes it worse. I thought I could contain it. Direct it at people who deserved it. I can't. Not anymore."

"Where do we find them?" Jamie asked.

Marlene told them.

Part Six: The Knife in the Dark

Alex Nguyen's apartment was in a converted warehouse in Collingwood — the kind of building that had been a factory, then derelict, then reclaimed by artists, then gradually colonised by young professionals who thought exposed brick counted as personality. The elevator groaned its way up. The hallway smelled of takeaway containers and anxiety.

The door was unlocked.

Inside, the apartment was dark. Not unlit — dark, the kind of darkness that felt intentional, like the shadows were alive and listening. The apartment smelled of coal smoke and old leather and a London that had stopped existing a century ago.

Alex sat on the couch, staring at a knife that gleamed despite the absence of light. Victorian surgical steel. Old. Wrong. The blade had become Jack's anchor, drinking every cut Alex made, feeding the legend.

"Do you know what they did?" Alex asked, but it wasn't quite Alex speaking anymore. The voice had shifted — formal, precise, with an accent that hadn't existed in Melbourne ever. "The men I've taken. Do you think they didn't deserve it?"

Nick felt Reynard go still in his mind. The fox wasn't running scenarios anymore. The fox was afraid.

"I think the streets are safer," Jack continued — Alex's gentle features arranged into an expression of calm certainty that didn't belong there. "The working girls sleep easier. The predators know, now, that someone is watching. Someone who remembers what they do in the dark."

The words settled into the room like lead weights. And the crew found themselves nodding.

Yes. The men had been monsters. Yes. Someone had to stop them. Yes. The system had failed, and the streets were better with those predators gone.

"You see," Jack said, and smiled with Alex's mouth. "We understand each other."

Then Alex surfaced.

It was like watching someone drown and break the surface — desperate, gasping, trembling. The formal posture collapsed. Tears streaked their cheeks. Their hands shook so badly the knife nearly fell.

"I can't stop them," Alex whispered. "Jack is getting stronger. Every time I wake up with blood on my hands, there's less of me left. The blade keeps the door open. I don't— I don't know how much longer I can—"

They looked at the crew. At Nick, who'd run cons for years and understood what it meant to lose yourself in a role. At Jay, who wore faces like clothing and had forgotten which one was real. At Dev, who'd died once and come back as something that barely counted as human anymore. At Jamie, who protected people because it was the only thing that made sense.

"Please," Alex said. Voice frayed. "I need help. Soon there won't be any me left to save."

The silence stretched.

Nick thought about the files Aku had given them. The pattern of escalation. The dead undercover cop. He thought about Vincent Stavros, sitting in the back of his Mercedes, offering money to hunt down the thing that was killing his people. He thought about Marlene Chen, who'd made the same calculation Alex was making and had watched it fall apart in her hands.

He thought about the women they'd freed from the basement. Five lives. Against three dead predators and one dead cop.

The math didn't balance. It never balanced.

"I'm sorry," Nick said finally. The words tasted like ash. "We can't help you. Not with Jack's story eating you alive."

"What?" Dev stared at him. "They just asked for—"

"I know what they asked for." Nick's voice was steady, but something in his eyes had gone dark. "But we don't know how to separate a legend from its host. We don't know anyone who does. And while we figure it out, how many more die? How many more 'targets' does Marlene feed them? How long before they kill someone else who didn't deserve it?"

"So we just leave them?" Jay asked. The question came out in their own voice — thin, uncertain, the voice of someone who didn't have an original self to fall back on.

"We find another way," Nick said. "We take down Stavros. We cut off Marlene's pipeline. We give Alex time to figure this out for themselves." He looked at Alex, at the tears still streaming down their face, at the knife still gleaming in the wrong light. "I'm sorry. It's the best we can do."

They left Alex in the dark, the fog already beginning to roll in through windows that hadn't been opened.

Behind them, someone who'd asked for help sat alone with the thing eating them alive.

Part Seven: The Aftermath

The basement was empty.

Vincent Stavros stood in the centre of the room, the single bare bulb casting harsh shadows across his face. He was still for a long moment — taking in the scene, the mattresses and chains that held no one, the broken padlock at the top of the stairs. Processing. Calculating.

Then he turned and climbed the stairs to the kitchen.

The restaurant owner was waiting for him there — slumped in a chair, zip-tied to the armrests, making a wet bubbling sound through his broken nose. Blood ran from his split lip, his swelling eye. He'd stopped trying to explain somewhere around the third blow — stopped insisting that a man had said Vincent sent them, that he'd only done what he thought was expected, that he was loyal, that he was loyal—

Vincent crossed the kitchen with slow, deliberate steps. Reached the owner's chair. Looked down at the man who'd let five pieces of merchandise walk out the back door.

"I trusted you," Vincent said quietly. "Like family."

Then he straightened his cuffs and held out his hand. One of his men — there were two, silent shadows by the freezer — placed a white cloth in his palm. Vincent cleaned his knuckles methodically, wiping away blood that wasn't his. He handed the cloth back.

Another man offered a phone.

Vincent took it, composed himself, and dialled.

"Yes, I need to speak with someone in charge. My name is Vincent Stavros. I own Stavros & Sons on Johnston Street." His voice cracked beautifully — grief and horror and the shock of betrayal. "I've just discovered something terrible. Someone has been using my restaurant to— I can't even say it. Please. You have to send someone."

Sergeant D'Alia — one of his — stepped into the kitchen before the uniforms arrived. Vincent didn't look up; he simply handed over the phone. Statements were ready. The owner was arrested — beaten, confused, insisting through broken teeth that he'd only been following orders. No one believed him. No one was meant to.

The community rallied around their beloved patriarch, horrified that someone had taken advantage of his generosity. Women from the Greek Orthodox Ladies Auxiliary brought casseroles. Business owners who'd known the Stavros family for generations stopped by to offer support. By morning, Vincent was the victim of the story — a good man whose trust had been abused.

His shadow moved before he did. His smile showed too many teeth. But no one noticed. No one ever noticed.

The women from the basement were safe now, scattered through Marlene's network of safe houses and sympathetic doors. They would need paperwork, legal assistance, therapy, time to remember what it felt like to make choices that weren't forced on them. Five lives. Saved.

But as their encounter with Alex showed them, some choices don't have clean answers. Some victories taste like defeat.

Epilogue: The Shape of Things

The fog kept rolling in.

Days later, Andreas woke in a hospital bed to pain like fire and ice—and a second, quieter warmth flickering under his ribs.

Sofia sat beside him, holding his hand. Wilting yellow roses on the nightstand — her favourite. He couldn't remember why they were there. He couldn't remember the garage, the back lot, the fall. Three hours gone. Burns that should have killed him.

The doctors called it a miracle. Skin grafts next week. Physical therapy for months. He'd walk. He'd hold his daughter. He'd live.

He didn't feel lucky.

He felt changed.

Something was stirring in his chest — a warmth that had nothing to do with the burns, nothing to do with the morphine drip feeding into his arm. A flickering, kindling sensation. Like embers catching. Like something waking up after a very long sleep.

Sofia poured him water, and for just a moment — when her eyes were turned away, when no one was watching — Andreas's eyes flickered. Amber and gold. The colour of sunrise. The colour of a pyre burning itself out and beginning again.

He blinked, and it was gone.

The news had a simpler story: construction worker falls from scaffolding, lands on a tram, survives against all odds. The Mist had its explanation; it didn't care who paid for it.

Andreas nodded along when the reporters came. He didn't believe a word. In the bathroom mirror he could have sworn — for a second — something behind his eyes was watching back.

The burns didn't hurt anymore. They hadn't hurt since the fire started whispering.

In her office at City East, Detective Aku added a new note to her file. The crew who'd refused Stavros's money had come through — the trafficking operation was exposed, the victims were safe, the community was asking uncomfortable questions. But the kitchen manager was taking the fall, and Vincent was still walking around with his reputation intact.

She'd give them the information they'd earned. Everything she had on the victims. Everything she had on the pattern.

The rest — the surveillance reports on Stavros, the names of cops on his payroll, the years of careful documentation — that would wait. She was still building her case. Still being patient. Still waiting for the right moment.

But the right moment was getting closer. She could feel it.

At The Coalhouse, Marlene Chen took down the photographs.

Not the ones on the wall — those stayed, the memorial candles and the smiling faces, the evidence that the work mattered. But the ones behind the frame, the red X's and the copperplate annotations... those she gathered up, one by one, and fed to the flames.

It wasn't absolution. It wasn't forgiveness. It was just... ending. Whatever she'd convinced herself she was building, whatever calculation she'd made about lives saved and lives taken, it was over now.

Alex was still out there. Still hunting. Still losing pieces of themselves every night.

And Marlene didn't know how to help them anymore.

Somewhere in Collingwood, the fog rolled through streets that didn't deserve it. Not Melbourne fog — the other kind. The kind that smelled of gaslight and hooves on cobblestones and a century that should have stayed buried.

Alex walked through it, and Jack walked with them.

They'd asked for help. They'd begged. And the people who should have understood — the con artist who wore lies like clothing, the changeling who didn't remember their own name, the ghost who'd died and come back wrong, the labourer who'd break himself before admitting he couldn't carry the weight alone — they'd said no.

I'm sorry. We can't help you.

The words echoed in the fog.

Somewhere nearby, a man was hurting a woman. A predator who thought the shadows kept his secrets. A monster who believed he was untouchable.

Jack stirred.

Alex tried to resist. Tried to hold on to who they were, to the harm reduction worker who remembered every name, to the person who'd rebuilt themselves from nothing and refused to let the darkness win.

But they were tired. So tired. And Jack was getting stronger.

Just one more, the voice whispered. He deserves it. You know he does. And afterwards, we'll rest. I promise. Afterwards, there will be peace.

Alex's hand closed around the knife.