Chapter 10: The Bait and Switch

Chapter 10: The Bait and Switch

The Dunedin Gasworks Museum was a skeletal boneyard of industry. Looming brick towers stood like silent watchmen against a bruised twilight sky, interconnected by a maze of rusted gantries and thick, cold pipes. It was a cathedral of decay, saturated with the faint, residual echoes of a century of sweat and toil. It was the perfect place to kill a monster.

“The perimeter is set,” Kael said, his voice a low rumble that was barely audible over the sighing wind. He ran his thumb over the head of his silver amulet, and I watched as a faint network of glowing white lines pulsed once on the cobblestones around us before fading. The kill zone. A cage of Warden magic designed to weaken and bind the Leech.

I stood in the center of that invisible cage, my arms wrapped around myself not for warmth, but to contain the tremor of anticipation running through me. The cold fury that had propelled me from the office was now a banked, white-hot coal in my chest. This was my idea. My reckless, desperate plan to force a confrontation before the Shadow Moon could grant our enemy its full power. Kael had argued, his cautious nature warring with the grim logic of my resolve, but he had eventually agreed. Leo’s hollowed-out form was an argument he couldn’t refute.

“It will come for you,” he reminded me, his eyes scanning the labyrinth of shadows around us. “The moment you light the fire, be ready. It’s faster than it looks.”

“I’m ready,” I said, and the words tasted like truth. The terrified woman from the beach was gone, replaced by a soldier about to step onto a minefield of her own design.

He gave a sharp, single nod and melted back into the shadows near a large, corroded boiler, his form becoming one with the industrial twilight. He was my failsafe. The final blow. But I was the lure. The bait.

I sat on a low brick wall in the center of the kill zone, the cold seeping through my jeans. I closed my eyes and let my psychic shield—the mirrored sphere I’d worked so hard to build—dissolve. For a moment, the raw ambient despair of the derelict place washed over me, a symphony of faded hopes and forgotten labour. I pushed it aside. I needed a specific signal.

My mind went back to the pitch. The terror of the psychic scream tearing through my head. I reached for that memory, not as a victim, but as an artist choosing a color. Then I layered it with the suffocating dread I’d felt standing over Leo’s desk. I took the panic from the beach, the claustrophobia from the Warden’s cellar, and the gut-wrenching fear of Kael being hurt. I gathered it all, a bouquet of terror, and instead of containing it, I let it bleed out.

It was the opposite of everything he had taught me. I wasn’t building a wall or forging a lance. I was becoming a lighthouse again, but this time, it was a controlled broadcast. A single, pure frequency of refined fear, aimed at the one creature in the world who would find it irresistible. Here I am, the signal pulsed into the darkness. I’m alone. I’m terrified. Come and get me.

The silence that followed was heavy and absolute. The wind died down. The only sound was the frantic drumming of my own heart. One minute passed. Then two. Doubt began to prickle at the edges of my focus. Had it worked? Was it ignoring me? Was it already too strong, too intelligent to fall for such an obvious trap?

I risked a glance towards Kael’s position. I could just make out his silhouette, rigid and alert. He felt nothing. The kill zone remained empty.

A metallic clatter echoed from high above.

My head snapped up. It came from the web of gantries and walkways sixty feet above our heads, a place we hadn’t even considered. My blood ran cold.

A patch of shadow, deeper and more absolute than the rest, detached itself from the underside of a rusted iron walkway. It had been clinging there, silent and waiting, watching us set our pathetic trap. It hadn’t been fooled for a second. It had been studying us.

It was more solid than I remembered, swollen with the energy it had stolen from Leo. It wasn’t a wisp of smoke anymore; it was a blot of living ink, a tangible predator.

"Kael! Above us!" I screamed.

The creature didn't glide. It dropped. It plummeted towards the ground with terrifying speed, bypassing the glowing perimeter of the kill zone completely. The trap was useless. Our plan had failed before the fight had even begun.

It landed silently on the cobblestones between me and Kael, its form coalescing. Kael was already moving, a blur of dark leather and grim purpose. He lunged, not at the creature, but at me, shoving me violently out of the way. I stumbled and fell hard, my hands scraping against the rough stones.

"Get back!" he roared.

Kael met the creature’s charge head-on. His silver knife flared to life, a slash of pure white light in the gloom. He was a force of nature, a whirlwind of trained, lethal grace. He struck, and his glowing blade connected with the shadow, which shrieked and recoiled, its form flickering. But it was so much stronger now. It recovered in an instant.

A thick tendril of solid darkness, faster than my eye could follow, whipped out from its core. It wasn't aimed at the glowing knife. It was aimed at Kael. He tried to parry with his amulet, but the blow was too powerful, too fast. The tendril wrapped around his chest and slammed him backwards with brutal force.

He flew through the air and hit the side of the massive iron boiler with a sickening, metallic crunch. He cried out, a sharp, choked sound of pure pain, and slumped to the ground. The white light of his silver knife sputtered and died, clattering onto the cobblestones. The glow from his amulet flickered weakly, like a dying ember.

The world seemed to slow down. The Marrow Leech ignored the fallen Warden. Its meal was incapacitated. Now it turned for the main course.

It glided towards me, its attention an almost physical pressure. I was frozen on the ground, my carefully manufactured fear forgotten, replaced by a tsunami of the real thing. I saw Kael, slumped and broken against the rusted metal. I saw the triumphant, hungry void coming to erase me.

My cold, calculated fury was gone. My training was gone. The image of a psychic lance evaporated. There was only the raw, animal instinct to protect, and the all-consuming terror of loss.

Something inside me broke.

The dam of control I had painstakingly constructed over the last few days didn’t just crack; it disintegrated. Every ounce of my power, every chaotic storm of emotion I had ever felt, every psychic scream I had ever absorbed, erupted from me in a single, silent, cataclysmic blast.

It wasn't a signal or a weapon. It was a supernova of pure, untamed empathic energy. A raw scream of my very soul. The air around me cracked with pressure. Dust and loose debris were kicked up in a circle around me.

The Marrow Leech, which had been gliding forward with such malevolent confidence, was hit by the wave of pure chaos. It shrieked, a sound of agony and confusion this time, not just malice. My raw, uncontrolled power was poison to it. The complex, contradictory, overwhelming blast of everything I was—fear, rage, grief, love, desperation—was an emotional language it couldn't process. It was data overload. It was psychic chaos.

Its form destabilized, flickering violently like a faulty projection. With another piercing cry, it dissolved, flowing back into the deepest shadows of the gasworks and vanishing.

Silence descended once more, broken only by my own ragged gasps and Kael’s low groan. I was on my hands and knees, trembling uncontrollably, utterly drained, as if my soul had been scooped out. The world was fuzzy at the edges, my head pounding with a migraine that felt tectonic.

We had survived. But we had failed. The creature was wounded, but it was alive. It was cunning, it was powerful, and now it was angry.

And the Shadow Moon was still rising.