“Damn, she’s something,”.

I glanced across at Avi who was staring intently at Scarlett’s rear as she questioned a witness. Certainly, the Lunar Knight in casual wear was appealing but any such thought was dashed by the memory of her fearsome battle presence. I gave him a concerned look.

“Bit young to be such a pervert, aren’t you?”

“I’m fourteen.”

“My point stands.”

“Pah, you’re just out of it, old man,” he replied with a roll of his eyes. You would have said the boy had a pretty face if it wasn’t contorted in a dismissive expression more than half the time.

“Real cool, kid. Real cool.” As I drew out the second ‘real’ in an exaggerated fashion, Scarlett turned back to us. She pulled a face.

“What are you clowns doing?” she said with a sigh.

“Oh, nothing Miss Scarlett, Sander here was just being a perv is all.”

“Huh?” I said, shocked.

Scarlett ignored the remark. “This one was a bit different to the rest.”

I scratched my chin. We’d visited a few death sites already with Avi as our guide, but this was the first witness who’d actually seen something occur, and not simply discovered the aftermath. A Mr Green, plain looking man that he was, had claimed to have seen a shadowy figure leaving through his daughter’s bedroom window some four nights previously.

Unlike the other cases, however, he had not simply found a heap of sand. When the mysterious figure fled, it left behind his daughter. Mr Green had then described how she’d leapt through the window after the ‘sandman’, leaving behind a trail of sand and blood.

Turning on the lights he found a heap of sand filling the human shaped hollow in her sheets. Of course, with the stories circulating around this part of the city he knew what had happened.

The pained look in the man’s eyes. Losing your child like that – it was another painful reminder to me. And in his case particularly a confusing and horrifying end to it.

“I suppose he hasn’t seen her since?” I asked.

Scarlett shook her head. I wondered why the police hadn’t gotten involved after so many deaths already, but apparently, they didn’t care much for Kur district.

“Well not much else to see here then,” Avi said. “In this shithole I wouldn’t be surprised if a few others had been killed and nobody even noticed.”

“What do we know about the victims so far?” I asked.

“All young. Twelve to nineteen. Mostly female. All the murders done at night. With the exception of this one, not a trace of them left except the usual sand,” Scarlett said.

“So, we’ve got a vampyre on our hands?” I replied, half joking.

“We don’t know the method of killing just yet; only the end result. It might be some loon with a vaporisation gun.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Avi started chuckling. “Vaporisation gun? And what the hell would they be doing running around here zapping people at random?”

Scarlett reddened. “Well we don’t know what their motivation is,” she mumbled.

“I say we call it for today. We’ve done what we can, and we’ll have to see what more we can do tomorrow.”

Scarlett and Avi nodded.

***

I breathed out slowly. Focus. Focus was key. Channel your inner energy, the book had said. Leave the pathways of your mind free for the flow, so that it may be directed towards your intended target. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was doing, but it said this was the most basic technique in using any self-powered magic.

“Having fun?” Scarlett called to me. She was lying on a bed across the room with her eyes fixed upon the ceiling above. The wind blew outside and the rafters of our questionable accommodation – a ‘hotel’ which Avi had brought us to – creaked loudly.

“Hmm,” I replied. “I want to try do some actual magic, but I’m not sure where to start.

Scarlett sat up on the bed. I watched from the floor as she brushed aside the loose strands of hair that covered her vision. “Why do you want to use magic anyhow?”

“Because I’m about as useful as a wet toilet roll with a sword.”

“Point taken. What have you managed to do so far?”

“Nothing of note.”

“In my experience the easiest technique would be a simple ‘push’. Hold on.”

She looked as though she were digging in an invisible bag. Sure enough, a small ball materialised in her hand. She tossed it over to me and I caught it with one hand. I turned it over between my fingers – it was white and very light, a table tennis ball.

“How big is that pocket dimension of yours anyway?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never been inside,” she said with a smile.

Something about the look she gave me made me feel unusually bashful and I looked away as I felt the heat in my cheeks grow. “So, what now?” I asked, wanting to hurriedly move to another topic of conversation.

She hopped up off the bed and came to my side. “Put it on the ground in front of you. Good, now keep your eyes focussed on it. Try empty your mind of other thoughts, and then focus your energy like you’ve been practicing but direct it towards the ball.”

My forehead was tensed. I’m sure a vein or two must have been showing. “Would it help if I shouted some German?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Only if you used the right words.”

“Gotcha.”

I found myself leaning gradually closer towards the small white ball. Then, ever so slightly, it rolled away from me.

“Hmph, simple enough it seems,” I said with a nod. I heard no response from my companion. Turning to her I discovered that she was barely containing laughter. “What?”

“You breathed on it,” she said, giggling hysterically.

I sighed. “Stuff this, I’m going to take a nap.” I got onto my own bed.

“You know, it takes a lot of practice to master magic. Just like with anything else. My mentor always used to say ‘Learning is like filling a lake with a glass. You can only take so much water at a time, and any more will be spilt.’”

“Sounds like a wise guy.”

“Mhm, amongst a lot of other things too…”

She looked especially dreamy as she said this. I wondered what this mentor of hers was like. The look she had thinking about him irritated me.

***

I lay with my covers to one side. It was too hot to sleep. The air in the room was quiet but for the faint breathing of the girl in the bed a few metres away. The blue light of the midnight sky glanced in the the windows, casting shadows on the wooden walls. It was so long since I’d seen wooden housing. That more than anything made me consider the state of Babel’s outer city.

Lying in the darkness, I thought I heard girlish laughter. My ears pricked. There was nothing of course, but for a moment it had seemed real. It came every so often as I tried to sleep. Thoughts of Emilia. Recently it had been far more frequent. Almost as often as I’d heard her screams in the first year. Yes, just like that. I closed my eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Wait. Something was wrong. I’d heard a scream there. It wasn’t a memory. I bolted upright in my bed and glanced across at Scarlett, who was staring wide eyed right back at me.