David was still feeling drained from the fight, a hollow exhaustion that went deeper than physical fatigue. It had improved since the fight ended and his lungs and throat no longer ached but still…

  He remembered the rush of power leaving his body during the Halt spell, the effort it had taken, now he worried about the cost as it had taken more out of him than he'd expected.

  He closed his eyes and pulled up his status, checking his magic resource.

  [MAGIC: 38%]

  Not enough. Not if he'd been full when the fight started, which he probably hadn't been after using magic for the obelisk's help function.

  Silently he cursed, this would be so much easier if he had a proper heads up display with a resource bar so he didn’t have to remember to check his status, then do math to see what happened.

  David dismissed the window with a thought. He should have checked this earlier, should have experimented with his abilities when he had the chance. But if he'd done that, the fight would have been over with three corpses instead of three survivors.

  Guilt was a luxury he couldn't afford right now.

  "I'm not sure I can use Halt again so quickly," he said. "I need more time to recover. Plus, even if I can, I need backup to fight one of those things. And I don't know where the supplies are."

  Camila straightened, looking better than she had since finding Katie's blood on her hands. "It's okay. We go together. I know where our things are in the basement."

  Her voice carried new determination. "You're right about needing more people. I was wrong about splitting up before. Mark's coming too."

  Carl looked up from his position on the end of the couch by Katie’s feet. "I can't move fast, but I can hold pressure on her wound. If Mark patches me up so I don’t have to hold my leg I can take David's place."

  He paused, meeting each of their eyes. "We also need to think about getting out of here. The obelisk offering safety sounds better and better, but I don’t think it’s enough. We need real weapons." He gestured vaguely at the Hockey stick David was still holding.

  “Don’t we have any weapons here? Carl is right, we should get as ready as we can. No rushing unless Katie gets worse.” Camila looked angry then guilty when David said this. After a moment she nodded.

  Mark took charge of the patching up. "Carl, I'll patch you up now then.” This was followed by a flurry of instructions, mostly aimed at Camila as she knew where things were.

  “No, not using cotton so stitches have to wait.”

  Followed by “I need something I can wind around his leg to hold a pad in place. Pantyhose, saran wrap, I really don’t care it needs to be long enough to go around his thigh.”

  “This is going to hurt, I’ll cut your trousers away and use the Vodka to clean your leg. I suggest you use one of the colored spirits to take the edge off.”

  “I'm going to clean then put band aids on. Then a pad, then wrap your leg. No proper sutures, but we can redo it later. I’ll make it tight, you'll need to cut it if your leg goes to sleep."

  The unspoken implication hung in the air: Or if something happens to me.

  David watched Mark work with practiced efficiency, noting how he moved with the confidence of real medical training. Carl muffled his cries with a clean towel as the wound was washed.

  There was an awkward pause when Mark fumbled with the wrapping, his hands clearly not practiced at using saran wrap to bandage a thigh. But he recovered, securing the pad over the wound well enough.

  "Best I can do. This is a stopgap. Try not to exert it too much."

  Once Camila and Mark had washed up and Carl had taken over Katie's care, David checked his magic again.

  [MAGIC: 44%]

  It would have to do.

  Camila moved to the front door, checked the peephole, and quickly headed downstairs. David heard her rummaging around before she returned with another hockey stick and two tennis rackets.

  She offered Carl one of the rackets while giving the second hockey stick to Mark. "Best I can do. I figure reach beats kitchen knives."

  Mark took the stick and swung it experimentally. The movements looked practiced, confident. Another hidden skill revealed by crisis.

  "Okay," Mark said. "We get downstairs to the basement, find the medical supplies, and get back."

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  David shook his head. "We need to clear the downstairs apartment first. Lock any doors to the outside. There should be at least one more person in this building, and we need to know what happened to them."

  The logic was sound, but it made his stomach clench with dread.

  They positioned themselves at the back door. David's hands already felt slick with nervous sweat.

  "What order?" Camila asked.

  "You, then me, then Mark. That maximizes my chances of helping either of you with Halt, and if danger comes from behind, Mark can reach over us with the hockey stick."

  David paused, listening to the building's silence. "Remember, slow and steady. These things aren't silent. You should hear them coming."

  Both Mark and Camila stared at him. "What do you mean?" they asked almost simultaneously.

  "The buzzing sound. When we fought that thing, it made a constant buzzing noise. Quite audible until it died."

  Mark's face reddened. "You need your ears tested. There was no buzzing. Just those wet growling noises. If it buzzed, we wouldn't have been surprised when it came up the stairs."

  Camila nodded agreement. "No buzzing. I guess you should go first if you have super hearing."

  David felt a chill of realization. The Herald had mentioned his bloodline attuning his hearing to mana frequencies. Maybe he could hear things the others couldn't.

  Was he even human himself now?

  "I'll go first," David said. "Back me up quickly. I don't know if I can get Halt off without a distraction."

  Before he could overthink it, he opened the back door and stepped into the hallway.

  The stairwell was lit by the afternoon sun streaming through a window. No sounds. No movement. But something felt wrong in ways David couldn't articulate.

  The three of them advanced down the stairs, keeping to the outside edge as it bent back on itself. Every creak of old wood made David's heart hammer harder.

  As he approached the first floor landing, the door to the apartment gaped open like a mouth.

  Still no sound except his pulse thundering in his ears.

  David hugged the corner as they descended the final half-flight, rubber-necking to watch the yard door and window. Shut. No movement.

  But the silence felt heavy, pregnant with wrongness.

  David held up his hand, bringing the others to a halt. He whispered as softly as possible: "We need to clear the apartment. Last person watches the door."

  Steeling himself, he pivoted away from the wall with his hockey stick thrust forward.

  The apartment was neat and clean. A cross and Spanish plaque decorated the kitchen wall. The layout matched the upstairs unit - living area, central corridor, three doors.

  Two doors stood open. The front room was flooded with afternoon sunlight, making it hard to see details. The back room was dim, curtains drawn, showing the edge of a bed.

  A smell drifted from the back room. Sickly sweet, acrid like urine, with metallic undertones that made David's gorge rise.

  He beckoned the others closer and approached the bedroom door.

  The smell grew stronger. In the dim light, he could see a queen-sized bed with something under the blankets. Dark stains and flaky residue covered the near side of the bed.

  This was where it had happened. The transformation. And the lump under the covers was likely Mrs. Lopez.

  David stepped carefully around the mess, trying not to gag. The complete lack of movement, the person sized lump under the blankets, the smell - it all told him what he'd find.

  But he needed light to be sure.

  In one swift motion, he yanked the curtains open, flooding the room with harsh afternoon sunlight.

  What he saw was both tragic and puzzling.

  An elderly woman lay on her back, clearly dead. Her right eye was gone, replaced by a gaping, bloodless wound as if struck by a spike or blade.

  Like the fused blade-limb of the creature they'd killed upstairs.

  The puzzle was the lack of blood. Looking at the nightstand, David counted half a dozen orange prescription bottles.

  Had Mrs. Lopez already been dead when the thing that used to be her husband woke up?

  If so, why attack her again?

  A chill ran down David's spine as understanding dawned.

  The thing in the Chinese restaurant. The sounds he'd heard that the others couldn't. The voice that had whispered "Move, move, move" and "Consume."

  David's enhanced hearing was picking up transformation sounds. Different transformation sounds. Only one of which he understood as words.

  The K'R'Nath. The spirits the Herald had mentioned. The things that possessed bodies to act in the physical world.

  They weren’t the only things here…

  His bloodline suddenly horribly made sense to him. It let him hear and understand the things that animated the dead. But not other things – Necromancer indeed.

  If he was right the creatures weren't just transformed humans. They were humans possessed by alien spirits, twisted into new forms by foreign intelligence that wore human flesh like badly fitting clothes. One group that stole living bodies and another that came for the dead.

  And everywhere there were people, more of those spirits were finding new hosts.

  David backed away from the bed, his mind reeling with implications.

  "We need to get those supplies and leave," he said quietly. "Now."

  Camila appeared in the doorway, took one look at the bed, and crossed herself. "Dios mío. Mrs. Lopez."

  "She was already dead," David said. "Heart medication, probably. But something else... inhabited her husband."

  Mark joined them, his face grim as he processed the scene. "The wounds are post-mortem. No blood flow."

  David nodded. "The thing that was Mr. Lopez did this after Mrs. Lopez was already gone. Like it was... claiming territory. Or eliminating witnesses."

  The implications were staggering. If the spirits could possess the recently dead, then every cemetery, every morgue, every person who needed daily meds and didn’t make it was a potential source of monsters.

  His family. His friends. Everyone who'd died in the first wave of the disaster could potentially rise again, animated by alien intelligence and twisted by otherworldly hunger.

  "Basement," Camila said firmly. "We get the supplies and go back to Katie."

  They moved through the apartment quickly, checking the remaining rooms. Empty. Clean. Normal in every way except for the horror in the master bedroom.

  The basement stairs descended into darkness that seemed to swallow their footsteps. David led the way, every sense straining for the frequencies only he could hear.

  The silence felt different here. Not empty, but waiting.

  As they reached the bottom of the stairs, David paused. Listening he could hear, so faint the others would never notice it, something.

  A soft, rhythmic murmur. He shook his head, feeling his heart rate spiking, was it his own spiking blood pressure murmuring in his ears?

  Or was something down here with them?

  David gripped his hockey stick tighter and stepped forward into the darkness, knowing that whatever they found in the basement would change everything once again.

  The mana whispered secrets in frequencies only he could hear, so there was no point asking the others the question.

  Are we alone down here?