Chapter 9: Baiting the Imposter's Nest

Chapter 9: Baiting the Imposter's Nest

The Imposter’s mocking hiss was cut short by a deafening roar that ripped through the library’s sacred silence. The pistol in Valentine’s hand bucked, a solid, real thing born not of rage, but of the cold, crystalline purpose that had settled in her soul. The bullet tore through the creature’s torso, just as Alex Ryder’s frantic notes in the grimoire had instructed. Aim for the gut.

Black ichor, thick and tar-like, sprayed across a row of decaying encyclopedias. The monster staggered back, its featureless face tilting in what might have been surprise. It didn't fall. A second shot, and a third, slammed into its chest, the impacts sounding like wet thuds against a side of beef. It finally collapsed into a twitching heap, its form flickering violently before dissolving into an oily black sludge that smoked on the dusty floorboards.

The second Imposter didn’t hesitate. Learning from its comrade's demise, it didn’t lunge. It moved with unnatural speed, zig-zagging between the overturned shelves, using the chaos of the room for cover. It was adapting. Just as Alex’s final message had warned.

Valentine scrambled backward, her heart hammering. This wasn’t like the kitchen. There was no element of surprise. This was a fight. The creature burst from behind a rack of periodicals, its long, clawed arm swinging in a vicious arc. She threw herself sideways, landing hard on her wounded shoulder. A jolt of pain, a phantom echo of her earlier injury, shot through her, but she ignored it, rolling and coming up on one knee.

She fired twice. The first shot went wide, shattering a glass display case. The second caught the monster in the leg, causing it to stumble. It let out a high-pitched shriek, a sound like tearing metal, and charged. There was no time to aim. It was on top of her.

She squeezed the trigger again at point-blank range. The shot went high, grazing its shoulder. Its claws raked across her arm, tearing through the fabric of her uniform and scoring deep furrows in her skin. She cried out, a sound of pain and fury, and jammed the barrel of the pistol hard against its gut, right where the grimoire said the nerve cluster was. She emptied the rest of the clip.

The successive impacts lifted the monster off its feet, throwing it back into the circulation desk with a splintering crash. It lay still.

Silence descended once more, broken only by her own ragged breathing and the slow, steady drip of her blood onto the grimy floor. She was alive. She had won. But as she stared at the two dissolving corpses, a cold dread washed over her. Alex Ryder’s final words, scrawled on the chalkboard, seemed to mock her victory. Don't fight the nest alone.

She had just killed two more. The grimoire was clear: Killing a scout will alert the local nest. She hadn't just rung the dinner bell; she had smashed it with a sledgehammer. They would be coming. All of them. And they would be adapting to her tactics with every one she killed. A direct assault, fighting them one or two at a time as she found them, was suicide. It was how Alex had died.

She looked from the smoking ichor on the floor to the faint, psychic hum that permeated the school. Then, she looked at the new, bleeding cuts on her arm. The pain was a sharp, clear reminder. They were drawn to her. To her blood. To the Mark that had been a curse upon her family for generations.

Her inherited weakness. The beacon that had led them to Miley. The psychic scent that had shattered her mother's mind.

And in that moment, the entire equation of her survival flipped on its head. She had been thinking like prey, fighting to escape the hunters. But what if the prey could choose the hunting ground? What if the beacon wasn't a liability, but a lure?

She stopped running. The thought was a revelation, a key turning in a lock she hadn’t even known was there. She didn't have to seek them out in the dark, dangerous halls of this school. She could make them come to her. The hunter did not need to become the hunted. The hunter could become the bait.

Fueled by a new, dangerous idea, Valentine scrambled to her feet. She needed a kill zone. A chokepoint. A place where their numbers would mean nothing, where their adaptability would be countered by an environment she controlled.

She fled the library, leaving Alex Ryder’s ghost and his final warning behind her. She moved with purpose now, scanning the school not for exits, but for tactical advantages. The gymnasium was too open. The classrooms, too flimsy. Then she saw it: the chemistry lab at the end of a long, narrow hallway.

It was perfect.

The room itself was a deathtrap waiting to be sprung. Corroded brass taps for Bunsen burners lined the heavy slate-topped tables—gas, old and volatile. Shelves were filled with dusty bottles of chemicals whose labels had long since faded into illegibility, their contents a mystery of corrosive or flammable potential. Best of all, there was only one entrance: a heavy, windowed fire door that opened inward. A perfect choke point.

She dragged a heavy teacher’s desk, scraping it across the linoleum, and wedged it against the far wall, creating a solid piece of cover. She scanned the shelves, grabbing a large glass jug of what smelled vaguely like alcohol and another containing a thick, viscous fluid. She didn't know what they were, but she knew they would burn. She began to methodically loosen the nuts on the gas taps, just enough for the faint, sickly-sweet smell of natural gas to begin hissing into the room.

The air grew thick, shimmering with fumes. It was a bomb of her own making. All it needed was a spark.

With her preparations complete, she knelt behind the desk, reloading her pistol, which had remained solidly in her hand. The weapon was a comfort, but it was her mind, her very blood, that was the true weapon now.

She closed her eyes, shutting out the decaying lab. She ignored the hissing gas and the stinging in her fresh wounds. Instead, she reached inward, to that core of energy she had unleashed in the library, to the psychic hum that was her birthright and her curse. She didn't try to shape it into a blast of force. She simply opened the floodgates.

She focused on her pain, her grief for Miley, her rage at the creatures that had dismantled her life. She poured every ounce of her potent, Marked essence into a single, silent, psychic scream that she broadcasted out into the shredded veil of Greenridge High.

I am here, the message screamed into the void. The beacon is lit. The blood you crave is waiting. Come and get me.

For a moment, there was only the hiss of the gas. Then, a response.

It started as a faint, distant scratching from within the walls. Then a frantic, skittering sound from the ventilation shaft above her. A low groan echoed from the floorboards below. From the far end of the long hallway outside the lab door, she heard it: the distinct, wet scrape of obsidian claws on linoleum.

It wasn't one. It wasn't two. It was a chorus.

Her eyes snapped open. Through the small, grimy window in the fire door, she saw the first silhouette appear at the end of the hall, tall and unnaturally thin. Then another joined it. And another. They weren't rushing. They were stalking, moving with a coordinated, predatory grace. They knew she was here. They knew she was cornered.

They were coming. All of them. The hunter had baited her trap. Now, the entire nest had arrived to tear her apart. A grim smile touched Valentine’s lips. Let them come. She was no longer the girl fleeing a monster in her kitchen. She was the final inheritor of a cursed bloodline, and she was about to turn this entire school into a funeral pyre.