Chapter 3: The Angel's Reluctant Shadow

Chapter 3: The Angel's Reluctant Shadow

Flicker’s information, while useful, was abstract. ‘Hollow Men’ wasn’t a name you could look up in the phone book. But cults, no matter how esoteric, leave a trail. They need places to meet, to practice their particular brand of insanity. My Nether-Sight, usually a curse, became my compass. The sickly violet energy signature I’d seen at the penthouse was faint, but it lingered in the city’s arteries like a slow-moving poison. I followed the whispers of that energy, a breadcrumb trail of spiritual decay that led me east, towards the skeletal cranes and forgotten warehouses of the Isle of Dogs.

The fog rolled thick and heavy off the Thames, swallowing the sounds of the city and leaving only the mournful groan of a distant foghorn and the slap of oily water against rotting piers. The air tasted of brine, diesel, and decay. A perfect welcome mat for the dregs of the supernatural world.

My senses led me to a specific warehouse, a hulking brick behemoth whose windows were either boarded up or shattered like vacant eyes. The violet stain of the Hollow Men’s energy was a palpable miasma here, clinging to the rust-streaked corrugated doors like a shroud. This was the place.

I drew the custom SIG Sauer from the holster under my coat, the cold steel a familiar weight in my hand. The lock on a side door was old and rusted. A solid kick was all it took to splinter the frame and send it groaning open into a cavern of darkness.

The stench hit me first—the same ozone and burnt sugar smell from the penthouse, but thicker, stale, and mingled with the metallic tang of old blood. My Nether-Sight cut through the gloom, revealing a vast, open space littered with discarded crates and debris. In the center of the floor, a larger, more complex version of the sigil I’d seen before was painted in what looked disturbingly like dried blood.

It was too quiet. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The silence wasn’t empty; it was waiting.

“You’ve come far to die, Tenebrous Hound,” a voice echoed from the rafters, flat and devoid of emotion.

Shadows detached themselves from the deeper darkness. Six of them. They weren’t inhuman monsters, not in form. They were men and women in drab, simple clothing, but their eyes… their eyes were voids. Empty sockets that didn’t reflect the faint light filtering in from the broken windows. They were the acolytes, the Hollow Men. The same emptiness I saw in their gaze was the same that had defined the creature that unmade Sir Alistair.

They moved with an unsettling, synchronized grace, fanning out to surround me. No weapons. They didn't need them.

I fired twice. The reports were deafening in the enclosed space. Two of the cultists dropped, but the others didn’t even flinch. They just kept coming, their hands outstretched. One of them, a gaunt man with a shaved head, lunged. I sidestepped, bringing my elbow around in a sharp Krav Maga strike to his temple. It connected with a sickening crunch. A normal man would have been out cold. He just stumbled, his head snapping back into place with an unnatural motion, and kept coming.

Another one got close, his fingers brushing the sleeve of my coat. A jolt of that life-draining cold, the void-in-the-chest feeling from my vision, shot up my arm. I recoiled, blasting him in the knee, then the chest. He fell, but two more were already on me.

I was outnumbered and outmatched. Their touch was their weapon, a miniature version of the power that had killed Finch. They were trying to unmake me piece by piece. I ducked a grasping hand and threw another cultist into a stack of rotting pallets, but I knew it was a losing fight. As I backed away, my heel caught on a loose floorboard, and I stumbled.

A cultist loomed over me, his empty eyes promising oblivion. His hand descended. The air grew cold.

Suddenly, the warehouse was bathed in a light so pure and white it was painful to behold.

FWOOM!

A blade of incandescent energy, humming with celestial power, sliced through the air and neatly severed the cultist’s arm at the shoulder. The man didn’t scream. He just looked at his stump with disinterest as his entire body dissolved into a cloud of grey ash, exactly like Sir Alistair.

Seraphina stood in the shattered doorway, a silhouette against her own divine radiance. Her silver-gold hair seemed to float around her, and her sapphire eyes blazed with righteous fury. Her hand was outstretched, the sword of pure light held steady, its tip pointed at the remaining cultists.

“I told you this matter was under my jurisdiction, half-breed,” she said, her voice ringing with angelic authority.

The remaining three Hollow Men turned their attention to her, the greater threat. They moved as one, their void-like gazes fixed on the angel.

“Finally decided to join the party?” I grunted, scrambling to my feet. “A little help would’ve been nice five minutes ago!”

“I was assessing your threat level,” she replied without looking at me, her focus absolute. “It appears I overestimated you.”

She flowed forward, a whirlwind of white light and deadly grace. Her blade was a blur, cleaving through the cultists with effortless precision. But they were relentless. For every one she dispatched, another would try to get close, their draining touch the only thing that seemed to affect her divine aura, making it flicker like a faulty bulb.

One of them slipped past her guard, lunging for her back.

“Watch your six, angel!” I yelled, leveling my pistol. I squeezed off two rounds, hitting the cultist square in the spine. He crumpled.

Seraphina glanced back, a flicker of something—annoyance? surprise?—in her eyes. “My ‘six’ is protected by divine providence. Worry about your own mortal hide.”

“Providence just got two 9mm assists,” I shot back, moving to stand back-to-back with her. The space between us was electric with friction, a maelstrom of holy light and hell-touched shadow.

“Stay out of my way,” she commanded.

“Gladly,” I retorted, firing over her shoulder. “If you’d stop glowing so much, you’re ruining my night vision.”

We fought in a chaotic, unwilling rhythm. Her sweeping arcs of light cleared space while my precise, brutal shots picked off any who got too close. We were oil and water, fire and ice, but for a few desperate moments, we were the only thing holding the tide of nothingness at bay.

When the last cultist dissolved into a pile of tasteless ash, a heavy silence fell over the warehouse. The only sounds were our ragged breaths and the distant, lonely call of the foghorn. Seraphina’s light-blade vanished, and she stood straight, her perfect white suit miraculously untouched by the grime and violence.

My gaze fell on a makeshift table in the corner, one I hadn't had time to notice during the fight. Spread across it was a large, crudely drawn map of London. At its center was the complex sigil from the floor. Thin, bloody lines radiated outwards to several marked locations. I recognized Sir Alistair Finch’s address in Mayfair. There were others. A bank in the City. A power substation in Lambeth. A Tube station at a major intersection.

“They weren’t just killing,” I said, my voice low. I traced one of the lines with my gloved finger. “They’re drawing power from these sites. This is a ritual. A massive one.”

Seraphina came to stand beside me, her earlier hostility replaced by a cold, analytical focus. The light in her eyes pulsed softly as she took in the horrific scope of the plan. Finch wasn't a random victim; he was an anchor point, the first part of a city-spanning ritual array.

We stood there, the abomination and the angel, surrounded by the dust of would-be soul-eaters. The animosity between us was still a chasm, but the reality of the map laid out before us was a bridge we were both being forced to cross.

I looked from the map to her rigid, perfect profile. “Looks like your jurisdiction just got a lot bigger.”

She turned her head, her sapphire eyes locking with mine, cold and unyielding as a winter sky.

“And your leash,” she said, her voice dangerously soft, “just got a lot shorter.”