Chapter 2: The Seed in Evidence

Chapter 2: The Seed in Evidence

The fluorescent lights of the precinct hummed with a sterile, insectile buzz, a sound that scraped against Kaelen’s raw nerves. Each pulse of light was a fresh spike of pain behind his eyes. He sat slumped in a hard plastic chair in a drab interview room that smelled of stale coffee and industrial cleaner, a world away from the humid, living chaos of the swamp. The vision of the Sower was seared onto the inside of his eyelids—a terrifying afterimage of roots and soil and glowing, pollen-like eyes.

He had tried to explain. When they got back to the station, he’d attempted to articulate the immense, territorial rage, the feeling of a sacred space being desecrated. He’d tried to describe the act of planting, the creation of a psychic and physical marker of sorrow and vengeance.

The result was a quiet, pitying look from the uniformed officer who’d driven him here and a one-way ticket to this empty room to "gather his thoughts."

The door swung open, and Detective Izzy Rossi entered, holding a styrofoam cup of what was probably battery acid masquerading as coffee. She didn’t offer him any. Her professional armor was firmly back in place, her expression a mask of grim determination.

“My chief sends his thanks for your… unique perspective,” she said, her tone making it clear it was a dismissal. “We’ll take it from here. We have Amber Alerts going out, and search teams are doing a grid sweep of a five-mile radius.”

This was his last chance. His desire to make her see, to make her understand the full scope of the danger, warred against the throbbing in his skull. “Detective, the grid sweep won’t matter. The man who took her is your target, I get that. He’s the one you can put in cuffs. But he stumbled into a place he shouldn’t have. He’s an invasive species, and the ecosystem is fighting back.”

“An ecosystem?” Izzy scoffed, taking a sip of her coffee. She winced slightly. “Vance, I’m chasing a likely repeat offender who preys on children. I don’t have time for your National Geographic metaphors.”

“It’s not a metaphor!” Kaelen leaned forward, the sudden movement making the room spin. “It planted something in the ground. A marker. A seed. It looked like… like a knot of bloody roots, the size of a fist. It’s a declaration of war. It’s claiming the territory, and it sees the man who took Lily as a blight. It will try to purge that blight, and it won’t care who gets caught in the crossfire.”

Izzy stared at him, her sharp eyes analytical. She wasn't just dismissing him; she was diagnosing him. Stress, overactive imagination, a charlatan’s flair for the dramatic. “A bloody, root-sized seed. Got it.” She set her cup down with a decisive click. “Look, I appreciate you coming out. Your consultation fee will be mailed to you. An officer will show you out.”

The finality in her voice was absolute. She was building her wall of logic and procedure back up, brick by painstaking brick, and he was on the outside. The obstacle had won. For now.

Defeated, Kaelen allowed himself to be escorted from the building. The evening air had finally broken, and a light drizzle was falling, turning the asphalt of the parking lot into a black mirror that reflected the indifferent city lights. The rain didn't smell of petrichor and sugar, only of exhaust fumes and wet concrete. He felt a profound sense of failure. A little girl was out there, trapped between a human monster and a primordial one, and he was the only one who knew.

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Hours bled into one another inside the precinct. Izzy ran on caffeine and sheer force of will, her world shrinking to the incident board, the frantic energy of the squad room, and the increasingly desperate calls to Lily Patterson’s parents. Every lead was a dead end. Every interview with known local offenders turned up nothing. The predator was a ghost, and Lily Patterson had, for all intents and purposes, vanished from the face of the earth.

Izzy hated cases like this. They were messy, chaotic. They defied the neat, orderly progression of evidence, motive, and opportunity. They felt… random. And randomness was the enemy of justice.

Kaelen Vance’s bizarre warnings were a buzzing annoyance in the back of her mind. Two monsters. A bloody seed. It was the kind of theatrical nonsense that gave consultants a bad name, a distraction from the solid, grinding work of a real investigation. She pushed the thoughts away, focusing on a map of the area, her finger tracing potential escape routes. Logic. Facts. Evidence. That was her trinity.

“Detective?”

She looked up. It was Marcus, a young, eager forensics tech from the crime lab in the basement. He looked pale under the fluorescent lights, his lab coat seeming two sizes too big for him.

“What is it, Marc? Find a footprint? A fiber?” she asked, her voice tight with impatience.

“No, ma’am. Something else. From the soil samples taken at the primary site.” He swallowed, looking nervous. “The spot the consultant… uh… indicated.”

A flicker of irritation went through her. “And?”

“You should come see this.”

The crime lab was a stark white, sterile space, a temple dedicated to Izzy’s trinity. Beakers and centrifuges stood like silent acolytes. Marcus led her to a high-powered digital microscope connected to a large monitor. On the screen was a magnified image that made the breath catch in her throat.

It was… an object. Roughly ovular, a deep, vascular crimson that was shockingly organic. Gnarled, vein-like structures writhed across its surface, looking disturbingly like a tangle of arteries or the roots of some cancerous plant. It was resting on a sterile petri dish, and even without the magnification, she could see it was roughly the size of a child's fist.

“What am I looking at?” Izzy asked, her voice a low whisper.

“That’s the problem, Detective,” Marcus said, his eyes wide. “We don’t know. We initially thought it was a type of truffle or a strange fungal growth, maybe a plant tuber. But it’s not. The outer texture is fibrous, like a root, but the core… the core has a biological composition we’ve never seen. It’s not plant. It’s not animal. We tried to run a DNA sequence on a sample, and the sequencers just spit out error codes. It doesn’t match anything in any database on the planet.”

Izzy leaned closer to the monitor, her heart starting a slow, heavy drumbeat against her ribs. The image was grotesque and yet strangely beautiful, a piece of impossible biology. The phantom scent of sugar and rain ghosted through her memory, a scent she had smelled at the crime scene.

Then Marcus delivered the final, chilling detail.

“And there’s this,” he said, tapping a key. He zoomed in on a tiny, weeping pore on the object’s surface. A minuscule droplet of dark red liquid was welling up from it. “It’s warm to the touch. And that fluid… it’s not sap. Genetically, it’s closer to human blood, but the cell structure is wrong. It’s like this thing is… alive. Like a seed that’s bleeding.”

The sterile air in the lab suddenly felt thin, suffocating. The hum of the machines faded into a dull roar in Izzy’s ears. Her carefully constructed wall of logic, of facts and evidence, didn’t just crack. It was sledgehammered into dust.

“It planted something in the ground… like a gnarled, bloody seed the size of a fist.”

Kaelen Vance’s words echoed in her mind, no longer the ravings of a charlatan but the terrifyingly accurate description of the impossible object now displayed on the screen in front of her. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a witness statement.

She stared at the bleeding seed, at this piece of undeniable, irrational evidence. The chaos she fought so hard to contain had just breached her walls and invaded her temple. The world was suddenly bigger, darker, and far more terrifying than she had ever believed.

Her hand, not quite steady, reached for the phone on her belt clip. She scrolled through her recent calls, her thumb hovering over a single name.

Kaelen Vance.

She pressed the screen.