Chapter 11: Scars and Confessions

Chapter 11: Scars and Confessions

The world was a smear of streetlights and rain-slicked asphalt. Getting Kael out of the gasworks and into my car had been a nightmarish ordeal. He was a dead weight, leaning on me heavily, each jostle eliciting a pained, guttural sound that he tried and failed to suppress. The Warden safehouse was out; if the Leech was smart enough to bypass our trap, it was smart enough to watch a known location. That left only one place, as dangerous and foolish as it was: my apartment.

My small, second-floor flat in North Dunedin had always been my sanctuary, a place of quiet order where I could escape the psychic noise of the world. Now, it felt like a flimsy cardboard box in the path of a hurricane. I half-carried, half-dragged Kael through the door, his arm slung over my shoulders, and eased him onto my worn sofa. He collapsed against the cushions with a low groan, his face pale and beaded with sweat in the soft light of my living room lamp.

“The wound,” he gritted out, his hand clutching his side where the creature’s tendril had struck him. “It’s not… physical.”

I knelt beside him, gently pushing his hand away. His shirt was torn, but underneath there was no blood, no obvious bruise. Instead, his skin was unnaturally cold, a patch of icy numbness that seemed to radiate a profound chill. Where the Leech had touched him, a faint, web-like pattern of grey lines was visible, like frost on a windowpane. It was a wound of anti-life, a place where his vitality was actively being drained away.

“What do I do?” I asked, my voice shaking. The adrenaline from my uncontrolled power blast had faded, leaving me hollowed out and terrified.

“Heat,” he rasped, his eyes squeezed shut. “Salt. Anything… with life. Warmth.”

I scrambled into action, my mind latching onto the simple, tangible tasks. I filled a bowl with the hottest water from the tap, stirring in a handful of sea salt from my kitchen grinder. I grabbed the thick wool blanket from the end of my bed. When I returned, he seemed to have faded even more, the grey lines darker against his pale skin.

I soaked a dishcloth in the steaming saltwater and, hesitating for only a second, pressed it against the wound. He hissed, his entire body tensing, but he didn't push me away. I watched, helpless, as the steam rose from his side, fighting a chill that felt ancient and wrong.

As I worked, tending to the mystical injury in the quiet intimacy of my living room, something began to change. His concentration was focused entirely on fighting the cold seeping into him. The iron-clad emotional shield he maintained at all times, the silent void that had been his defining feature, was starting to crack. It wasn't a floodgate opening, but a slow, painful fracturing.

For the first time, I felt flickers of him.

They were like fragments of static breaking through a clear channel. A wave of profound regret, so sharp and bitter it made my eyes water. An echo of deep, aching sorrow, vast and lonely as the clifftop where we’d trained. And beneath it all, a current of deep-seated, primal fear—not of the Leech, but of failure.

My hands trembled slightly as I reapplied the hot compress. This was the man behind the Warden mask. Not a stoic soldier, but a soul burdened by immense grief and a terror of repeating a past mistake. The animosity I held for his harsh methods, his initial dismissal of me, began to dissolve, replaced by a wave of raw, aching empathy. I finally understood that his silence wasn't a judgment against me; it was a prison he’d built for himself.

After what felt like an hour, the grey lines began to recede, and a hint of natural color returned to his skin. His breathing evened out. He opened his eyes, his gaze bleary but clear, and looked at me, truly looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time without the lens of his duty.

“Your… blast…” he said, his voice rough. “At the gasworks. The uncontrolled release. I’ve seen that before.”

I sat back on my heels, tucking the wool blanket more tightly around him. “What happened?” I asked softly.

He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and the silence in the room became heavy with the weight of unspoken history. The cracks in his shield widened, and I felt the sorrow crest within him.

“Five years ago,” he began, his voice low and strained. “I was working a case in Christchurch. A different kind of creature, a psychic Siren. It fed on obsession, luring its victims in with promises of their deepest desires.” His lips twisted in a bitter line. “My partner was an empath. Like you. Maybe even stronger. Her name was Ana.”

He paused, and the name hung in the air between us, weighted with tragedy. “She was brilliant. And reckless. She believed her power was the only weapon we needed. I was the Warden, the by-the-book tactician. I set up perimeters, traps, contingency plans. She saw them as… suggestions.”

I thought of my own impulsive decision to set the trap at the gasworks, my arrogant belief that I could end it tonight. A chill that had nothing to do with the Leech’s wound ran down my spine.

“We tracked the Siren to an abandoned theatre,” he continued, his gaze distant, lost in the memory. “I had a plan. A clean, quiet containment. But Ana got impatient. She said she could feel it, that it was about to take another victim. She broke from the plan, went in alone, convinced she could overwhelm it with a direct emotional assault.”

His hands clenched into fists on the blanket. “She was wrong. Her power, raw and untamed, was exactly what the Siren wanted. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire. The creature fed on her blast, magnified it, and detonated it outwards. It didn’t just kill the Siren; it leveled the psychic landscape for three blocks. Twenty-three innocent people in the surrounding apartments were caught in the blast. Left like Leo. Hollowed.”

The confession landed with the force of a physical blow. I finally understood. His rigidity, his obsession with control, his initial distrust of me—it wasn't cynicism. It was trauma. He wasn't trying to control me; he was trying to prevent history from repeating itself in the most devastating way. He was trying to protect me from myself.

“And Ana?” I whispered, dreading the answer.

His emotional shield shattered completely. A wave of undiluted guilt and loss washed over me, so powerful it stole my breath. It was a wound that had never healed, a scar far deeper than the one the Leech had left.

“Her power burned her out from the inside. The last thing she did was save me. Pushed me out of the blast radius. I woke up in the rubble, and she was… gone. I failed her. I failed to control the situation. I failed to protect those people. My caution is not a preference, Elara. It’s a penance.”

He finally looked at me, his eyes dark with a sorrow that seemed bottomless. “When you unleashed that blast tonight… for a second, I thought it was happening all over again. I thought I was going to lose you, too.”

The confession reframed our entire volatile relationship. The silent, stoic Warden was gone, replaced by a man haunted by ghosts. Animosity gave way to a profound, shared understanding. We were two soldiers in a war, both wounded, both fighting for our lives.

He closed his eyes, his body finally succumbing to exhaustion. “She said something, before she went in,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep and memory. “I dismissed it at the time. Thought it was just psychic feedback from the creature.”

My breath caught. A clue.

“She said she felt something else nearby. Not the Siren. Something old and deep. A cold spot, she called it. Deep underground. Like a psychic sinkhole, pulling all the warmth out of the world.”

A cold spot, deep underground. The words echoed in the quiet of my apartment, weaving together with my own research. An abandoned place, saturated with misery, a place deep beneath the city.

I looked from Kael’s sleeping, pain-etched face to the window, where the first hint of a doomed dawn was beginning to break. The Shadow Moon was coming. The creature was wounded, but healing. And now, thanks to the ghost of a fallen empath, I thought I knew where to find its lair.