Chapter 5: The First Hunt

Chapter 5: The First Hunt

The drive to St. Clair Beach was a race against my own thundering pulse. My little hatchback felt flimsy and absurd as I pushed it through the rain-slicked streets, the wipers keeping a frantic, rhythmic beat against the glass. The city’s ambient emotional hum was a distant buzz, my focus narrowed to a single point on the map, a single, terrifying hypothesis. My data model, born from corporate software and fueled by grim intuition, felt both brilliant and insane.

I parked three blocks away and walked, the cold, salty wind whipping off the Pacific, tearing at my already-damp blazer. It was a wild night. The sky was a churning mass of dark clouds, and the roar of the surf was a deep-chested growl. Up ahead, the scene was exactly as I’d pictured: a chaotic splash of light and life against the immense darkness of the sea and sky.

Floodlights cast harsh, white beams over the churning waves, turning the black water to a turbulent, glinting grey. A large bonfire blazed on the sand, a beacon of orange warmth, silhouetting a crowd of people huddled in parkas and beanies. And out in the water, a dozen dark figures in wetsuits straddled their boards, challenging the violent surf.

The moment I stepped onto the sand, the emotional storm hit me.

It was everything my model had predicted, magnified a thousand times. This was no subtle office anxiety; this was a raw, primal bonfire of feeling. The adrenaline of the surfers was a sharp, electric-blue current, a jolt of pure, focused exhilaration mixed with the metallic tang of fear. The crowd on the shore was a roaring chorus of vicarious excitement, boozy camaraderie, and giddy anticipation. The combined force of it was a physical pressure, a psychic scream of joy and defiant energy that made my teeth ache.

For a moment, I was paralyzed by the sheer volume of it. Kael’s condescending voice echoed in my head—Broadcasting like a lighthouse in a storm. This entire event was a lighthouse. How could I possibly pinpoint a single, predatory anomaly in this hurricane of emotion?

I forced myself forward, pulling the collar of my blazer tighter. I had to try. I skirted the edge of the crowd, my senses wide open, sifting through the cacophony. It was like trying to hear a single dissonant note in a thundering orchestra. I felt the spike of triumph as a surfer caught a wave, the collective gasp of the crowd as another wiped out in a spray of white water. It was all so loud, so vibrant, so alive.

Then I felt it.

Amidst the roaring fire of human feeling, there was a pinprick of absolute cold. It was the same void-like signature I’d felt in the alley, but this time it was mobile. A moving patch of psychic nothingness, sliding through the emotional chaos like a shark through a school of fish.

My eyes scanned the darkness at the edge of the floodlights. And I saw it.

It wasn't solid. My mind struggled to process the image, trying to fit it into a neat, biological box and failing completely. It was a patch of shadow, deeper and more absolute than the surrounding night, that seemed to congeal out of the darkness near the wet sand where the waves receded. It was a fluid, shifting shape, roughly man-sized but without any definite limbs, propelled by a purpose that felt ancient and utterly malignant.

My blood ran cold. This was no data point on a screen. This was the predator. The Marrow Leech.

It slithered, unseen by the cheering crowd, towards the water's edge. Its focus was absolute. It was drawn to the brightest light in the emotional storm—a young woman with fiery red hair, paddling her board back out. Her aura was a blazing beacon of fierce determination and joy, having just ridden a spectacular wave.

I opened my mouth to scream a warning, but the sound was swallowed by the wind and the roar of the surf. No one would hear me. No one else could even see the threat.

The shadow latched onto her.

It didn't touch her physically. It simply flowed over her position in the water, a smokey tendril of darkness connecting to her. From my empathic perspective, the effect was instantaneous and horrific. Her brilliant aura, that vibrant flame of life, began to flicker violently. The colour drained away, not fading, but being actively siphoned. I could feel the echo of her confusion turning to panic, then to a thin, silent shriek of pure terror that was a ghostly echo of the one that had torn through my mind that afternoon. It was the psychic feeling of being unmade, of having the very essence of your being drawn out like thread from a spool.

The woman’s movements became sluggish. Her arms stopped paddling. She listed to one side, her board tipping over, spilling her into the churning waves. She was now just like the boy in the alley: a hollow shell. Her friends, seeing her fall, started shouting, assuming she was exhausted or had been hit by a wave.

The shadow detached itself, pulsating with the stolen energy. It seemed to swell, its darkness becoming more defined. And then, it turned.

It didn't have eyes, but I felt its attention lock onto me with the force of a physical blow. It had felt me watching. It had sensed my powerful, horrified emotional response. It had finished its meal and, in me, it saw a whole new banquet. Kael’s warning slammed into me with the force of a tidal wave. Delicious. A beacon.

I was frozen, pinned in place by that malevolent, unseeable gaze. The crowd, the fire, the waves—it all faded into a tunnel of terror. There was only me and the hungry shadow gliding across the sand towards me. My life was no longer my own. I was no longer an investigator. I was prey.

Just as the shadow lunged, a figure slammed into it from the side.

Kael.

He appeared as if from nowhere, a solid wall of grim purpose against the shifting nightmare. His emotional silence was a startling anchor in the chaos. In his hand, the silver amulet I’d seen in the alley now blazed with a clean, white light, casting the creature’s form into stark relief.

"Get back!" he snarled at me, his voice a low command that cut through my paralysis.

The battle was nothing like I could have imagined. It was brutal, primal, and laced with something that could only be magic. Kael moved with a lethal economy, not attacking the shadow itself, but striking at the ground around it with a short, silver-bladed knife that flared with the same white light as his amulet. Each strike left a glowing, arcane symbol seared into the wet sand, forming a cage of light.

The Marrow Leech shrieked, and this time, it was a sound that was both psychic and audible, a high-pitched, tearing noise that made the air vibrate. It lashed out at Kael, a tendril of pure blackness whipping through the air. He met it with his amulet, and the collision of darkness and light sent a shockwave of energy across the beach, making the sand tremble.

He was a whirlwind of controlled violence, forcing the creature back, away from the crowd, away from me. But the Leech was powerful, engorged on its recent feeding. It broke through a gap in his glowing cage and surged towards the dunes, dissolving back into the deeper darkness from which it came.

Kael didn’t give chase. He stood panting for a moment, the light from his amulet and knife fading, leaving him once more a grim silhouette against the bonfire’s glow. The whole encounter had lasted less than a minute. The oblivious crowd cheered as the red-haired surfer was pulled from the water by her friends, limp and unresponsive. They would call it hypothermia. They would never know the truth.

Kael turned to me, his face set like granite, his chest rising and falling. There was no "I told you so" in his eyes. There was something far worse: the cold, hard confirmation of his own grim assessment.

He had saved my life. But in doing so, he had proven his point. I had found the monster, yes. And it had found me right back. The hunt was no longer an abstract concept. It was real, it was personal, and I was standing right in the middle of it.