Chapter 9: It Gets Personal

Chapter 9: It Gets Personal

The 48-hour countdown had begun. Leaving the Warden’s library felt like stepping out of a dusty, forgotten century and into a world blissfully, terrifyingly unaware of its own impending doom. The knowledge of the Shadow Moon was a lead weight in my gut. Every laughing student, every hurried professional I passed on the street was a potential casualty in a war they didn’t even know was being fought.

I had to go back to the office. It was an absurd, almost insane impulse, but I needed a tether to my old reality. I needed my laptop charger, my project files, a semblance of the woman I was before my world had cracked open. I told myself it was for practical reasons, but I knew it was a lie. I wanted to stand in my old life one last time before I plunged fully into the new one.

As I pushed through the glass doors of the agency tower, the familiar corporate hum felt alien. I kept my psychic shield clamped down tight, the mirrored sphere I’d forged on the clifftop holding firm against the ambient anxiety of a Thursday morning. It was a constant effort, a low-grade hum of concentration at the back of my mind.

The elevator ride was silent. When the doors opened onto our floor, the wrongness hit me immediately.

It wasn't the usual energetic buzz of ringing phones and creative arguments. It was a suffocating, tense silence, punctuated by hushed whispers and the raw, jagged texture of fear. My shield held, but I could feel the emotional waves breaking against it: confusion, sharp and acidic; panic, a chaotic, vibrating frequency; and a deep, spreading dread that felt cold and greasy.

A small crowd of my colleagues was clustered near the open-plan kitchen, their faces pale, their auras flickering with distress. My manager, Sarah, was talking to two uniformed paramedics, her voice tight and strained.

My heart began to hammer against my ribs. "What's going on?" I asked Maya, a junior designer whose face was streaked with tears.

"It's Leo," she whispered, her voice trembling. "He... he just collapsed. We were talking about the new campaign, and he just... stopped. In the middle of a sentence."

Leo. A cold dread, sharp and specific, pierced through my practiced calm. Not just any colleague. Charismatic, funny, kind-hearted Leo. The one who had brought me a coffee after my disastrous Henderson pitch, placing it on my desk with a wink. "Henderson's a lost cause anyway," he'd said with a conspiratorial grin. "Their logo looks like a confused duck. You dodged a bullet." He was one of the few genuinely warm presences in the office, his aura a constant, sunny gold.

I pushed through the knot of people, a terrible certainty growing in my stomach. The paramedics were kneeling beside Leo’s desk—my desk’s neighboring pod. He was slumped in his ergonomic chair, his posture unnaturally still. One of the medics was shining a penlight into his eyes, which were wide, vacant, and utterly without recognition.

His aura was gone.

It wasn't just dim or faded. It was extinguished. Where the brilliant, warm gold should have been, there was only a void. A patch of absolute nothingness, the exact same hollow signature as the boy in the alley and the surfer on the beach. He was breathing. His heart was beating. But Leo, the laughing, vibrant man who had been there moments before, was gone. Erased.

The paramedic spoke to Sarah in a low voice. "His vitals are stable, but he's completely unresponsive. It's like a catatonic state."

The words echoed in my head, a clinical diagnosis for a supernatural execution. My carefully constructed shield was the only thing keeping me upright, the only thing stopping me from screaming. This wasn't random. This wasn't a coincidence.

The Marrow Leech could have fed anywhere. Dunedin was full of high-stress offices, buildings teeming with the ambitious, frantic energy it craved. It could have chosen any of the hundreds of souls in this very tower.

But it hadn't. It had come to my floor. It had chosen the person sitting five feet away from my empty chair.

This wasn't a hunt for sustenance. This was a message.

I see you, it whispered in the cold, hollow space where Leo’s spirit used to be. I know where you live. I can touch anyone you care about. You are not the hunter. You are the hunted, and I am closing in.

My two lives, the professional strategist and the reluctant empath, collided with catastrophic force. The shock of the emotional fallout at the agency was nothing compared to the violent clarity that ripped through me. This creature had invaded my sanctuary and turned my own life into a weapon against me. It had used one of the few people I genuinely liked as a calling card.

A change began deep within me, in the core of the storm I had learned to contain. The terror, the grief, the desperate fear that had been my constant companions since that first psychic scream—they began to burn. They were fuel, incinerated in a sudden, alchemical reaction. And from the ashes, something new was forged.

Cold fury.

It was nothing like the hot, scattered anger I’d felt at Kael. This was a focused, glacial rage. It was the calm certainty of a sniper, the absolute resolve of a surgeon before a critical incision. The world narrowed down to a single, sharp point of purpose. The Marrow Leech had made this personal. It was a fatal mistake.

I turned away from the scene, my movements stiff and controlled. Sarah intercepted me, her face etched with worry. "Elara, my god, are you alright? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I need to make a call," I said, my voice eerily calm, unrecognizable even to my own ears.

I walked into an empty conference room, the one where my career had died, and shut the door. The view of the city, sprawling and vulnerable, did nothing for me. I pulled out my phone. My hands were perfectly steady. I dialed Kael's number.

He answered on the second ring, his voice its usual clipped "What?"

"It has to be tonight," I said. There was no preamble, no tremor in my voice. The frightened, unwilling woman he’d dragged out of an alley was gone.

"What are you talking about? The Shadow Moon isn't until tomorrow night."

"I don't care about the moon," I said, my voice as cold and hard as the stone of his safehouse. "It was here, Kael. In my office. It took one of my colleagues. It was leaving me a message."

I paused, staring at my own reflection in the dark glass of the window—a pale, grim-faced woman with eyes that burned with a cold light.

"It wants to play a game. So we're going to set a trap. We're going to bait it, and we're going to end it. Before the moon rises. Before it can touch anyone else." My fear had finally become a weapon. "Tell me what we need to do."