Chapter 10: The First Test

Chapter 10: The First Test

The encounter with Martin had rewired the entire office. It was no longer a landscape of beige and grey, but a complex ecosystem of subtle threats and hidden identities. Every casual conversation felt like a coded exchange, every shared glance in the hallway a potential challenge. Alex spent the next two days in a state of high-strung vigilance, the hum of the overhead lights a constant, abrasive reminder of his altered senses. He felt the emotional tides of the office ebb and flow—the ripples of panic from a looming deadline, the slow, thick current of Friday afternoon apathy. He was a tuning fork vibrating with the anxieties of others, and the constant resonance was exhausting.

He was trying to focus on a spreadsheet, the numbers swimming before his eyes, when the phone on his desk bleated. It was the front desk.

“Alex Vance?” a cheerful, disembodied voice asked.

“Speaking.”

“There’s a Mr. Davies here to see you. He says it’s a personal matter.”

The words landed like ice pellets in his stomach. He had no friends named Davies. The dead man had no friends named Davies. Personal matters were a luxury he could no longer afford. “I… I’m not expecting anyone. Can you ask what it’s about?”

There was a muffled exchange on the other end. The voice came back, its professional cheer slightly strained. “He says it’s regarding your aunt, Mrs. Eleanor Vance.”

The file cabinet in his mind flew open. Aunt Eleanor. Original Alex’s great-aunt. Lives in Oregon. Sends twenty dollars for his birthday every year. Hired a lawyer once over a property line dispute with a neighbor. She was a distant, almost fictional relative. And she was the perfect excuse for someone to start digging.

“Okay,” Alex said, his voice a dry whisper. “Send him up. Fifth floor, cubicle 734.”

The moment he hung up, a cold, chemical panic flooded his system. His first instinct was human: to bolt. To run out the fire escape and never look back. His second, newer instinct took over. He fumbled for his cell phone, his fingers trembling as he dialed Wallace’s number.

It rang twice. “What?” Wallace’s voice was sharp, impatient.

“Someone’s here,” Alex stammered, keeping his voice low. “A man. A Mr. Davies. He’s asking about my… about Aunt Eleanor.”

There was a beat of absolute silence on the line. Alex could picture Wallace’s face, the calm mask hardening into something cold and dangerous. “A private investigator,” Wallace stated, not a question but a diagnosis. “The family got worried. The long silence during your ‘depression,’ followed by the sudden, complete recovery. It’s a loose end. A sloppy seam in the story.”

“What do I do?” Alex pleaded, his voice cracking. “Wallace, what the hell do I do?”

“You will handle it,” Wallace said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “Listen to me, Alex. This is not a drill. This is your first test. Dan and I can’t come and hold your hand every time a piece of the old life comes knocking. You are a predator, not prey. Start acting like it. You can feel what they feel. You can read what they want. Use it. Find his leverage, find his weakness, and push.”

“I don’t know how!”

“Then learn,” Wallace snapped, and the line went dead.

Alex stared at his phone, the feeling of abandonment a cold pit in his stomach. He was alone. Utterly alone. He took a deep, shuddering breath, forcing the panic down. A predator, not prey. Wallace’s words echoed in his mind, not as an encouragement, but as a direct order.

A moment later, a man in a slightly rumpled gray suit appeared at the entrance to his cubicle. He was in his fifties, with tired eyes, a soft jawline, and the weary posture of someone who spent too much time sitting in cars. He looked more like a beleaguered tax auditor than a hardboiled detective.

“Mr. Vance?” he asked, his voice a low, gravelly baritone.

“That’s me,” Alex said, forcing himself to stand and offer a hand. The man’s grip was firm but impersonal.

“Frank Davies. I appreciate you taking the time. I’m here on behalf of your great-aunt, Eleanor. She and some other family members were… concerned. They heard you were going through a difficult time, and then all communication just… stopped. They were relieved to hear you were back at work, of course, but the sudden turnaround raised some questions.”

As Davies spoke, Alex focused, pushing past the words, past the tired expression. He let that strange, inhuman sense inside him reach out, and he felt it. Beneath the professional veneer, Davies was running on skepticism and coffee. He was on a clock, working a low-paying job for a client he found overly dramatic. He didn’t expect to find anything, but his professional pride—his one weak spot—demanded that he be thorough. He was looking for cracks.

“Please, have a seat,” Alex said, gesturing to the uncomfortable guest chair beside his desk. His own voice sounded unnervingly calm. The performance had begun.

“It’s… embarrassing, to be honest,” Alex started, letting his gaze fall to his desk. He projected the emotion, pulling it from the deep well of the original Alex’s memories of failure and anxiety. He let the shame feel real. “I was in a bad place, Mr. Davies. A really deep fog. I shut everyone out. My family, my friends. I’m not proud of it.”

Davies’s expression didn’t change, but Alex felt the subtle shift in his intent. The skepticism remained, but it was now tinged with a professional, detached pity. A box was being ticked on an internal checklist: Subject confirms depressive episode.

“Your aunt mentioned you weren’t answering calls for months. She was afraid you might have… harmed yourself,” Davies said, his eyes sharp, probing.

This was the critical point. The lie had to be seamless. Alex looked up, meeting the investigator’s gaze directly. He didn’t just recite a memory; he let the raw, desperate hunger he’d felt in the void bleed into his expression, reframing it as human despair.

“I almost did,” he whispered, the words tasting like ash. “There was a night… it was the lowest I’ve ever been. But something happened. A friend—two friends, actually—they broke down my door, metaphorically speaking. They dragged me out. They didn’t let me quit. It was… a wake-up call. A very loud one.”

He was weaving the truth of Wallace and Dan’s intervention into the fiction of a mental health crisis. As he spoke, he focused on Davies’s core driver: his professional pride. He wasn’t just giving the man answers; he was giving him a story. A neat, plausible narrative he could write down in his report. Subject experienced a severe depressive episode, culminating in a crisis point, followed by an intervention by close friends, leading to a rapid but plausible recovery.

Alex could feel the man’s skepticism begin to soften, to dissolve around the edges. Davies was a man who dealt in messy human lives; this story, with its clean beginning, middle, and end, was exactly the kind of thing he could file away and forget.

“I understand,” Davies said, his voice a little softer now. “These friends, would you mind if I had their names? Just to corroborate the timeline.”

The final test. Alex felt a flicker of the PI's suspicion returning, a professional reflex. He had to extinguish it completely.

He leaned forward, a weary but sincere smile on his face. He let his own burgeoning power, that subtle, inhuman charm, flow into his voice and his gaze. He wasn’t trying to hypnotize the man, just to… tune the room. To fill the space with a feeling of irrefutable, mundane truth.

“Of course. Wallace Croft and Daniel Weaver. Best men a guy could ask for. Saved my life,” he said, the names flowing easily. “Look, Mr. Davies, I know why you’re here. And I’m grateful that my family cares that much. But I would appreciate it if you could tell Aunt Eleanor… that I’m okay. That I’m embarrassed I worried her, and that I’ll call her this weekend. I’m still digging myself out of the hole I made, but for the first time in a long time, I can actually see the sun.”

He held the man's gaze. He wasn't lying, not really. He was digging himself out of a hole. He could see the sun. He was simply omitting the part where he was a different species. He felt Davies’s final wall of suspicion crumble, replaced by a weary resignation. The PI had his story. It was clean. It was billable. It was over.

“I’ll do that, Mr. Vance,” Davies said, closing his notebook and rising. “I’m glad to hear you’re on the mend.”

Alex watched him walk away, a ghost in a gray suit disappearing back into the world of men. The moment he was gone, the performance ended. Alex slumped in his chair, a profound, bone-deep exhaustion washing over him. The air in his cubicle still seemed to vibrate with the force of his will.

He had done it. He had faced the past, faced discovery, and he had won. He had used the strange new weapon inside him not just to defend himself, but to protect his brood. His family.

He looked at his hands, resting on the desk. They didn’t tremble. He felt a cold, terrifying clarity. He hadn’t just survived the test. A part of him, a dark and hungry part that remembered the void, had enjoyed it. He had enjoyed the performance, the manipulation, the subtle exercise of power. He was a predator, and for the first time, he felt the thrill of a successful hunt. The last vestiges of the frightened, human Alex Vance were burning away, leaving something harder and colder in their place.