Chapter 9: Baiting the Trap

Chapter 9: Baiting the Trap

The silence in the house was a living entity, heavy and suffocating. It clung to the walls, pooled in the corners, and sat between Thomas and Sarah at the dinner table like an unwanted guest. David communicated in shrugs and monosyllables, his eyes permanently glued to his phone, escaping into a digital world where his father wasn’t losing his mind. The crude oak stake was hidden at the back of a closet, but its presence was felt, a splinter in the heart of their family.

Thomas knew he was losing them. But the image of the burnt crucifix was seared onto the inside of his eyelids. It was a constant, searing reminder that losing his family to misunderstanding was infinitely better than losing them to a monster’s fangs. Fear was still his constant companion, but the Jaeger’s journal, now his bible, had given that fear a direction. It had turned his panic into a cold, methodical purpose.

His first objective was to stop being the prey. To hunt, he first had to find.

The Diener. The man with the dead eyes at the church. He hadn't just appeared; he had driven. In the seconds before the man had approached, Thomas’s paranoia—a finely-honed survival instinct he now understood—had cataloged everything. The man had gotten out of a battered, dark blue utility van parked across the street. A plumber’s van, maybe, with no company logo. And Thomas, the man who noticed every car that passed his house twice, had memorized the license plate.

It was a mundane thread, a single strand of the ordinary in a tapestry of the supernatural. And Thomas, the sales manager, knew how to pull on mundane threads. He called a contact he’d cultivated over years, a woman who worked at the state DMV. He pitched her a story, his voice smooth and practiced, the lie of a concerned citizen. A hit-and-run in the church parking lot, a dented fender, just wanted to pass the information to his insurance. It was a greasy, plausible fabrication, and it worked. An hour later, an email landed in his inbox with a name and an address.

The van was registered to a shell corporation, ‘Orion Logistics,’ but the address was what mattered. It was a defunct warehouse in a bleak industrial park on the other side of the state. Thomas felt a surge of triumphant adrenaline, quickly doused by a chilling passage he’d read in the journal the night before, under the entry for Ulrich von Strauss.

“He is not a creature of habit or nostalgia. He is a predator of supreme intelligence. He will not lair in a crumbling castle or an ancestral crypt. He adapts. Expect his haven to be a place of anonymity and function, a blank space from which he can project his power, utterly divorced from the romantic nonsense of lesser beasts.”

A direct assault was suicide. Baumann’s notes were explicit. Ulrich’s speed was inhuman. His strength, that of a dozen men. He could mesmerize with a glance. To face him on his own ground was to volunteer for the slaughter. The journal offered only one viable strategy for a lone Jaeger facing a superior foe: the consecrated fortress. Turn your own territory into a weapon. Make the hunter walk into your web.

The decision was made. He wouldn't go to Ulrich. He would bring Ulrich to him.

His home, the fortress he had built to keep the world out, would now be the trap to lure the monster in.

The preparations began that night, a series of secret, frantic rituals performed in the dead hours between midnight and dawn. He started with the water. Following a diagram in the journal, he found the main intake for the lawn’s sprinkler system in the garage. He drew a bucket of water from the tap and, with the book open beside him, began the consecration. He held a new, simple silver crucifix—purchased for cash from a religious supply store—and submerged it. He added three pinches of sea salt, as instructed. Then came the hard part. He had to recite the Latin prayer of blessing, his tongue stumbling over the ancient, powerful words he was reading phonetically.

"Exorcizáre te, creatúra aquæ, in nómine Dei Patris omnipoténtis..."

He felt ridiculous, a suburban dad whispering dead words over a bucket in his garage. But as he finished the final verse, he could have sworn he saw a faint, silvery shimmer pass through the water. He poured the entire bucket into the sprinkler system's main tank, the blessed water mixing with the mundane. His lawn was now a consecrated field of fire for any unholy thing that dared to cross it.

Next was the silver. The journal was clear: “It does not burn them as the stories tell. It is an irritant, an ague in the blood, a disruption to their unholy vitality. A vampire forced to cross a threshold of pure silver will be weakened, their focus shattered.”

He had no silver bars. He had something better. In the dining room sat a pair of ornate, antique silver candlesticks, a wedding gift from Sarah’s grandmother. Guilt twisted in his gut, but the need was greater than the sentiment. In the vise on his workbench, he spent an hour filing them down, the fine, glittering dust collecting on a sheet of paper. It felt like a desecration, grinding a piece of their history into weaponized dust. He took the silver shavings and carefully, painstakingly, worked them deep into the fibers of the welcome mat at the front door and the runner in the back hall.

Finally, the salt. Consecrated sea salt, the journal specified, was a barrier of absolute purity. A line of it, unbroken, was as impassable to creatures like Ulrich as a wall of stone. He performed the ritual again, his Latin a little more confident this time, whispering the blessing over a large bag of coarse crystals. Then, with the stealth of a thief in his own home, he moved from window to window, prying up the sills just enough to pour a thin, perfect line of the salt into the channel, then sealing them shut again. Every window. Every door. He was turning his home into a sealed bottle, a prison of his own making.

The work was done by four in the morning. He stood in the silent living room, every muscle aching, his hands raw. The house looked exactly the same. The trap was invisible, woven into the very fabric of their suburban life. The scent of roasting chicken had been replaced by the faint, clean tang of salt and the phantom smell of old German ink.

He knew what he had to do next. It was the hardest part of the entire plan.

The next evening, he gathered Sarah and David in the living room. The air was thick with tension. He couldn't look them in the eye.

“I need you to leave,” he said, the words tasting like ash. “I need you to go and stay with your sister for a while. A few weeks.”

Sarah stared at him, her face a mask of disbelief and hurt. “Leave? Thomas, what are you talking about?”

“I just… I need some space,” he lied, the words clumsy and cruel. “I need to figure things out. It’s not fair to you, to either of you, to be around me right now.”

“Dad, are you serious?” David exploded, jumping to his feet. “You’re kicking us out? After everything, after dragging us all over the country because you’re crazy, now you’re kicking us out?”

The word ‘crazy’ hit him like a physical blow. He flinched. “It’s not like that, David.”

“Then what is it like?” Sarah’s voice was dangerously quiet. “Tell me the truth, Thomas. For once in our marriage, tell me the real truth.”

He looked at her, at the woman who had stood by him through years of unexplained panic and suffocating rules, and the truth was a scream trapped in his throat. He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to show her the journal, to explain the burnt offering, to make her understand.

But the Jaeger’s legacy was a solitary one. To tell her was to paint a target on her back. His silence was his last, most desperate act of love.

“I can’t,” he whispered, and he saw her heart break in her eyes.

She didn't argue further. She simply nodded, a single, sharp movement of profound and final disappointment. “Fine,” she said, her voice devoid of all warmth. “We’ll pack our things.”

He had fortified his house. He had set the bait. And now, he had cleared the field. The price was the destruction of his own world. But it was a price he had to pay.