Despite a leather jacket and a blacked-out BMW with no AC running, Nicole didn’t sweat. She only glared, and every few seconds blinked twice.

She wiped her brow of offending condensation, flicking it into the empty leather passenger seat. Summer was severely overrated. Nicole returned her hand to herself, looking at her palm again, where she refused to heal the bloody etchings she had made. Strange glyphs crisscrossed pale flesh, dripping with less blood than they should have for looking so fresh. She double-blinked again, squinting shortly after. A glance up, and she stomped on the accelerator, her car surging forward as her speakers blared Behemoth.

Nicole closed her palm around the etchings, feeling her flesh crawl as it mended itself together. She double blinked again, and the red faded from her vision. No use, she’d need something more formalized to locate her target this close to the source of the font. A recently formed font threw far too much raw elemental energy into the air for a simple tracking spell to work.

Nicole whipped her car left, across traffic and into a suburb with too many trees for a city this big. The font or the target? Font wasn’t going anywhere, she reasoned. Target might, and she had limited time. How limited, she didn’t know, but with what she had at stake she couldn’t risk it. Not with everything she had sacrificed to get even this far.

Nicole pulled off to the side of a street with no houses on it, an in-between lane where nosy stay-at-home spouses wouldn’t be likely to call the neighborhood watch if she idled for a bit. Nicole pulled out her three-generations old Android and swiped her thumb across the fingerprint scanner to reveal a jailbroken-to-hell phone.

She quickly opened up the VPN app, and then browsed for a WiFi network that was unlocked. There. It seemed “livelaughlove20” didn’t care about security like she did. Nicole opened another app, and slowly drove her car in the direction indicated until the signal was strong enough, then connected before opening up Signal. A message from Ben. Five days old. Shit, he’d sent that before the last target.

Checking in, have you made it to the BT yet? Worried about you, kid.

Nicole tried to sigh angrily, but found she wasn’t holding air in her lungs again. She didn’t bother drawing any in to make the gesture to her captive audience of zero.

No, got lost in the Rockies. Might lay low for a bit. Feeling paranoid.

Disconnect WiFi. Turn off VPN. Airplane mode the phone. Nicole turned around in her seat, taking in the suburbs, and wiping at her neck as her curly ink-black hair stuck to it. This wouldn’t do. She might as well get closer to the font to cast a proper ritual and see through the damn energy in the air. Nicole parked her car a bit closer to the curb and got out, trying to wipe her RBF that had been just as bad before her life turned into some kind of fucked up late-night spy drama from her face. Couldn’t gather ritual components looking like you wanted to kill someone, even if you did.

“What bloody luck,” Nicole muttered under he breath. Some lunatic was jogging in the midday August heat. Nicole did a little hop on the sidewalk and waved her hand, instinctively covering up her British accent. “Hello! Mister!”

The man, a tall, skinny man in his late forties, slowed to a halt on the opposite side of the street and pulled out an earbud.

“My— My tire. Can you please look at it?” Nicole pointed to the tire facing her, just up on the curb. The man nodded and jogged across the street.

“Yeah,” he said, in a voice that screamed 'NPC'. “I can help.”

Nicole stepped back as he came around the front of her car and knelt down next to it. He ran a hand over the tire, drawing it back quickly from the summer-heated rubber. “I… don’t see anything wrong with it,” his hand trailed over the body of the car right above the tire, where there was some cosmetic damage. “But what’s this dent?”

Nicole grabbed the back of his head, her nails ripping gashes in his flesh, and formed a new dent beside the second one, knocking the man out in one blow, then bending over and using a single hand to sling the man over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes despite the almost foot difference in their height. Nicole quickly walked around to her passenger seat and dumped him in it, closing the door and jogging back to sit in the driver’s side right as the man began to stir.

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“Agh!” He cried, as blood dripped into his eyes from the gash across his forehead.

Nicole drove her body across the seats, her awkward cross hitting his jaw like it was from Mike Tyson himself, and the man fell unconscious once again. “It couldn’t be like in the movies, could it? Couldn't stay knocked out just a little bit longer?” She said, opening the glove box and pulling out the half-used roll of duct tape before getting to work like a murderous Christmas elf.

The man roused, his scream more of a groan this time, dazed from the double concussion. He started to struggle, but Nicole slapped him hard enough his head rebounded off the windows. He righted himself, struggling to look at her with blood-filled eyes that wouldn’t dilate the right way anymore.

“I need you alive, but I don’t need you with a functioning brain. Your choice,” she said. “I can let you chill and we can listen to Chopin until I get us where we need to go, or I can bash your skull off my fist until the only part of your nervous system functioning is the part that controls your heart and lungs. Bowel control is optional at that point, and I don't breathe, so I won't smell shit.”

The man made a desperate lunge at her, clearly thinking that due to her size, Nicole must have simply sucker punched him. His face met a stony fist and his nose broke cleanly down the middle. Nicole lunged up onto the center console as he fell back. She grabbed his shirt with one hand and hauled the other back into a white-knuckled fist. “Enjoy your medically-induced coma. This clinic does not accept insurance.”

The man made one last cry for help before she turned his face into hamburger meat.

***

Nicole turned down the metal raging in her speakers before looking over at the mess of meat that had once been a human in her passenger seat. “Stop bleeding on my leather, mate.”

A cough. Blood spurted.

“Sucks.”

Nicole stepped out of the car and into the blazing Californian sun that shone down on the forest clearing she’d driven to. She shielded her gray, almost-white eyes as she looked up into cloudless azure sky. Condensation rapidly formed on her ashen skin. She searched for a long moment, narrowing her eyes as she scryed into daytime oblivion. After a moment, she was satisfied and walked around the front of the idling car to pull the unfortunate jogger from his seat. She dumped him on the ground despite having more than enough strength to drag him upright, and kicked him in the ribs. He gurgled.

“Good. I need you alive.”

The man feebly reached out, as if trying to crawl. Nicole crouched down beside him, her leather jacket crinkling. She whiffed the copper scent of his blood as she did. Thankfully, he hadn't shat himself. “Aw. You’re lively.” Nicole grabbed his wrist and started dragging him away from her car. The man made pitiful, whimpering noises the whole time.

She stopped in the rough center of the clearing, looking around and pursing her lips until she found Arcane South. She nodded, pulling the man to an upright position, crouching behind him, and whispering words into his ear, words he might have shuddered at the sound of if an ounce of comprehension was left in the part of his brain that was now naught but meat pulp and bone fragments.

Wind began to pick up, whipping through the clearing, though it had been a hot, still day until now. Nicole’s raven hair swept forward, sticking to the bloody mess in front of her as she continued to chant under her breath. The man made another struggle, but Nicole gripped his shoulders so hard his clavicles snapped. Another pitiful gurgle resulted.

The man began to twitch as the wind picked up, but these were not his own movements. His limbs spasmed as if something lived in his veins, Nicole’s chanting growing louder with the keening of the wind. She finished with a single shouted word, not of the mortal plane, then whipped a black-handled knife from inside her jacket and slashed the man’s throat.

Blood spurted down his chest as the life mercifully receded from him, and Nicole felt the subconscious vibration of magical Exhalation as her spell swirled around, invisible, drinking the energy from the man’s dying soul. There would be no afterlife, for he had been consumed.

Nicole flinched as blood etchings crawled up from her left hand, the hand devoid of her knife, gnarled glyphs racing up her arm to her shoulder, too little blood leaking from the wounds that now stretched up her neck, the side of her face, swirling on her eye. The eye itself popped, and for a second Nicole hit one knee in excruciating pain.

But as soon as her knee touched the ground it was over. No more blood etchings. Her eye was right where it belonged, but now enchanted with the raw power to see through the aura of a font, to see the aura that she had come here seeking.

And there, some dozen or so miles away to the south, she could see it. Two swirling columns of red and black so close they were almost united, and a name surging into her skull. Nicole grinned over the corpse of the man she had just sacrificed.

“Found you, Seth Blackwell. Now buy me back my bloody family.”