Chapter 4: Mapping the Hunger

Chapter 4: Mapping the Hunger

The walk back from the alley was a blur of rain-streaked streetlights and the discordant symphony of the city reasserting itself in my head. I didn't go home. The thought of my quiet apartment, usually a sanctuary, now felt like a cage waiting for a predator to rattle its bars. Kael’s parting words echoed in my mind, a toxic cocktail of warning and insult.

Go home, empath. Lock your doors. Try to look a little less delicious.

Delicious. He had looked at me, at the very core of my being, and seen nothing but a meal. A liability. A bright, stupid beacon drawing the monster closer. Fury, hot and sharp, finally burned through the shock. He, with his ancient lore and his silver amulet, had dismissed me as a helpless civilian. He had no idea who he was talking to.

I may have been an untrained empath, but I was also Elara Vance, a damn good Advertising Account Executive. I built strategies. I identified target demographics and predicted their behaviour. I took chaotic human desires and funneled them into neat, predictable, and profitable patterns.

And what was this Marrow Leech if not the ultimate consumer? It had a need. It had a hunting ground. It had a preferred target.

A grim smile touched my lips for the first time that day. Fine. He could have his secret Warden society and his mystical mumbo-jumbo. I had my own arsenal.

Instead of my apartment, I directed my numb feet back toward the office tower. The security guard in the lobby gave me a curious look as I swiped my keycard, my designer blazer soaked and my hair a mess.

"Burning the midnight oil, Ms. Vance?" he asked, his aura a placid, sleepy blue.

"Just tying up a few loose ends," I said, my voice tight. The lie tasted like ash.

The agency was a ghost ship. The open-plan office, usually buzzing with creative energy and ringing phones, was silent and dim, lit only by the faint glow of server lights and the sprawling city lights beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. This was my territory. My fortress of solitude. I walked past the empty boardroom where my career had imploded just hours before, but I felt nothing. The Henderson pitch was a problem from a different lifetime.

I settled into my ergonomic chair, the familiar squeak a small comfort. The dual monitors on my desk hummed to life, casting a cool, white glow on my face. Kael had told me to hide. Instead, I was going to turn my professional skills into a weapon and shine a spotlight on this thing.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, muscle memory taking over. I didn’t have access to ancient Warden libraries, but I had something just as powerful: premium search engine subscriptions, news archives, and data analysis software that could cross-reference information in seconds.

My project wasn’t ‘Henderson Automotive’ anymore. It was ‘Marrow Leech.’

I started broad. I searched local Dunedin news archives from the last few months. Keywords: ‘unexplained collapse,’ ‘sudden fugue state,’ ‘mass hysteria,’ ‘public fainting.’ The results were sparse at first, mostly minor incidents written off as heat exhaustion or isolated medical events. A tourist collapsing at Larnach Castle. A student found disoriented near the Botanic Garden. A brief panic at a farmers' market that dissipated as quickly as it began. To a normal person, it was all unrelated noise.

But I wasn't a normal person. I had seen the victim in the alley. I knew what the final result looked like.

I opened a city map application on my second monitor, the same kind of geo-mapping software we used to track consumer engagement. I began to drop pins on the locations of the incidents. Larnach Castle. The Botanic Garden. The market. Today’s alleyway by the university.

I leaned back, frowning. The pins were scattered. North Dunedin, the central city, the peninsula. There was no discernible geographic pattern. No logic. It wasn't moving block by block. It wasn't following a ley line, or whatever mystical nonsense Kael might look for.

Frustration prickled at me. He was right. I was out of my depth. I was trying to apply market research to a monster.

Then his words came back to me again, this time with a different meaning. A bright, shining, emotional beacon.

He wasn't just talking about me. He was talking about the prey.

The creature didn’t hunt locations. It hunted feelings.

My perspective shifted with a gut-wrenching click. I wasn't tracking a serial killer. I was tracking a consumer chasing a specific, high-intensity experience. My fingers flew again, my approach completely changing. This was my specialty.

I wasn’t mapping locations anymore. I was mapping emotion.

The tourist at Larnach Castle? I cross-referenced the date. It coincided with a major wedding reception, a concentrated blast of joy, anxiety, and drunken sentimentality. The student at the Botanic Garden? Found near the aviary during a school holiday event, a place humming with the pure, unadulterated delight and excitement of children. The panic at the farmers' market? It had been right beside a busker who had drawn a huge, emotionally invested crowd.

And today… the university. Not just the university, but the alley right behind the library. During exam season. A place saturated with the potent, frantic energy of thousands of students running on caffeine and pure, distilled stress. It was an emotional all-you-can-eat buffet.

A chilling pattern began to emerge on my screen as I layered my new data. The Marrow Leech wasn't hunting randomly at all. It was a gourmand. It bypassed the dull, ambient emotional static of the city and went straight for the prime cuts: places of intense, concentrated, powerful feeling. Joy, fear, excitement, desperation—the stronger and more focused the emotion, the more attractive the target. It was a psychic shark, drawn to the thrashing of a celebratory crowd or a panicked mob.

I felt a cold thrill of discovery, a feeling I usually got when a campaign strategy snapped perfectly into place. I had a model. A predictive model. Kael saw me as bait, but he was thinking too small. I didn't have to be the bait myself. I just had to figure out where the next feast was scheduled.

I pulled up a calendar of city events, my heart pounding a steady, heavy rhythm against my ribs. Music festivals, sporting events, public gatherings. I cross-referenced them with my emotional hotspot map. A rugby game at the stadium? Too diffuse, too spread out. A film premiere? Possible, but the emotion was too managed.

Then I saw it.

Tonight. St. Clair Beach. A local surf shop was sponsoring a "Midnight Madness" event. Surfing under floodlights. A bonfire on the sand. Dozens of young, adrenaline-fueled people gathering, pitting their skill and courage against the cold, black waves of the Pacific.

It was perfect. It was a nexus. A volatile, powerful cocktail of excitement, ambition, terror, and triumph, all concentrated on a single stretch of sand under the night sky. An emotional bonfire.

I stared at the screen, at the flashing cursor over the event listing. My model wasn't just a theory anymore. It was a forecast. It was pointing to a time and a place.

My anger at Kael had cooled, solidifying into something harder and colder: resolve. He had told me to run and hide. But my data, my skills, my own unique and cursed perspective had just given me the creature's next address.

I wasn’t a liability. I wasn’t a dinner bell.

I was the one who knew where the monster was going to be. And I was going to be there, too.