Chapter 8: Mile High Massacre

Chapter 8: Mile High Massacre

The five days that followed James’s flight were a unique form of torture. Leo existed in a state of suspended animation within the cluttered, incense-scented walls of Elara’s home. He was a prisoner and a student, a condemned man and an acolyte. Elara, in her brusque, unsentimental way, kept him busy. She had him sorting bundles of dried herbs whose names he couldn’t pronounce, dusting strange, star-shaped artifacts, and transcribing passages from crumbling books written in elegant, spidery Latin. It was busy work, designed, he suspected, to keep his mind from fraying completely.

But his mind was a tether, stretched taut across the Atlantic. Every waking moment was a countdown. He ate without tasting, slept in brief, nightmare-plagued bursts, and spent every spare second compulsively refreshing a world news page on Elara’s ancient, groaning desktop computer. He didn’t know James’s exact destination—London? Paris? Berlin?—only that he was somewhere in Europe, running on borrowed time.

Elara offered no words of false comfort. When she saw him staring blankly at the screen one afternoon, his face pale in the monitor's glow, she simply placed a cup of bitter, steaming tea beside him.

"Hope is a luxury for those who are not under contract," she said, her voice raspy but not unkind. "Your friend made his choice. He chose to believe in distance. The Taker does not."

"I know," Leo whispered, his eyes scanning headlines about political summits and stock market fluctuations. "But knowing and seeing are two different things."

"Then you will see soon enough," she said, retreating back into the shadows of her library. "The clock is an honest timekeeper."

Her words were colder and more absolute than any winter wind, and they proved prophetic on the evening of the seventh day. It was late, the only sounds in the house the creaking of old floorboards and the relentless ticking of a dozen clocks, all slightly out of sync. Leo was about to give up his vigil for the night when a new headline flashed at the top of the news aggregator. It wasn't a local story. It was international.

BREAKING: BIZARRE DEATH ON TRANSATLANTIC FLIGHT 714 FORCES EMERGENCY LANDING IN IRELAND

Leo’s blood turned to ice water. He clicked the link, his hand trembling so violently he could barely control the mouse. The page loaded, displaying a grainy photo of an airplane sitting isolated on a tarmac, surrounded by emergency vehicles.

The article was sparse, the details still emerging. A passenger on the overnight flight from New York to London had been found dead in one of the aircraft's lavatories. The flight crew had become concerned when the man, who had gone in an hour before, did not respond. Following procedure, they had unlocked the door from the outside.

The initial reports were chaotic, quoting anonymous passengers who spoke of screams from the flight attendants. The official statement from the airline was bland and corporate, mentioning a "medical incident." But a single, unattributed quote from a source within the Irish authorities told a different story. The source described the scene as "inexplicable and deeply disturbing," stating that the bathroom was locked from the inside, the victim was alone, and there was no weapon of any kind found.

Leo’s breath hitched. He scrolled down, his eyes devouring the text, searching for the one detail he knew, with sickening certainty, he would find. And there it was, in the third paragraph.

The deceased has been identified as James Peterson, a 21-year-old American college student.

He felt a wave of dizzying vertigo, the cluttered room seeming to tilt around him. James. It was real. He had been suspended in a metal tube, seven miles above the earth, surrounded by hundreds of people, and it had made no difference. The Taker had come for him. Locked doors, physical barriers, even the laws of physics themselves were irrelevant. The contract was all that mattered.

Elara appeared silently at his shoulder, her sharp eyes reading the screen. She placed a steadying hand on his chair. "It is done," she said softly.

As the night wore on, the story exploded. By morning, it was the lead item on every major news network. The phrase "Mile High Massacre" was coined by a cable news pundit, and it stuck. The media frenzy was immediate and intense. They had a locked-room mystery on an airplane, a story too sensational to ignore. And then, they made the connection.

"…and in a shocking development," a news anchor said, her face a mask of professional gravity, "sources have confirmed that the victim, James Peterson, was a close friend of three other students from Northgate University who have all been victims of bizarre, unsolved homicides in the last month. Samuel Chen, Nathan Riley, and Isaiah Miller. With Peterson’s death, all four victims are now linked, raising fears of a meticulous and highly elusive serial killer targeting this specific group of friends."

The screen showed a collage of photos: Sam’s confident grin, Nate’s goofy smirk, Isaiah’s thoughtful gaze, and James’s easy smile. Four dead friends. And then, the screen changed. It was a photo of the five of them, taken on the camping trip. It must have been from James’s social media. There they were, arms slung around each other, laughing by the campfire, blissfully unaware that they were posing for their own memorial.

The anchor’s voice continued, grave and foreboding. "Authorities are now urgently seeking to speak with the only remaining member of this circle of friends, a person of interest they believe may hold vital information, or may be the killer’s intended final victim: Leo Vance."

His own school ID photo flashed onto the screen. He looked young, naive, a boy from a different lifetime. He stared at his own face being broadcast to millions, branded as a person of interest, the final piece in a bloody puzzle the world was desperately trying to solve with all the wrong pieces.

The pressure of the outside world, of police and news vans and public suspicion, was now added to the crushing weight of the curse. He was being hunted on two fronts: one by the mundane world that could never understand, and one by the ancient horror that understood him all too well.

As he stared at his own image on the television, a profound, bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the drafty old house settled over him. It was a coldness that felt personal, focused. The diffuse, shared dread he had felt for weeks suddenly sharpened into a single, piercing point aimed directly at his heart. The contract had been fulfilled for all the others. The ledger was clean, save for one name.

The Taker's mark, once divided among five, was now his alone. He could feel its gaze upon him, a palpable, suffocating weight from across the veil. The clock wasn't just ticking for him anymore. It was screaming his name.