With a wheezing groan, Lennie doubled over. He reached out to slump on the wall, but his hand was slick with blood and his vision was going bleary. He reached into his jacket, for his knife. Nothing. Where was it? He’d been holding, it, did he drop it? Where did he-

A third bullet tore through his shoulder, he saw the shooter now, a woman with long hair, indistinct in all other ways. It was dark, and his vision was swimming. Lennie fell to the ground, the last bit of air leaving his lungs in a pathetic wheeze.

She stood over him, he could see her shoes from where he was. Black, polished and tight-laced, the soles red from stepping in blood. His blood. The woman spoke, into some comm or her phone, he couldn’t tell, but the tone was someone speaking across a distance.

“Did you get the address?.... Yeah, I can check”

She crouched down and grabbed Lennie’s shoulder, inciting a loose, tired whimper, and tipped him over, onto his back.

“Now, where did you put your... Ah, there we go” his phone was face down next to her, and she picked it up. The screen was cracked and it was stained red. She placed it back off the ground, picked up his right hand and used a tissue to clear off the thumb, before using it to unlock the phone.

“It’s the right address” the woman stood back up and brushed herself off, starting to pace. Lennie tried to keep his eyes open, forced himself to stay lucid. “Call Callahan, have her send a team, we can have this sorted by morning… well do you want to be the one going up against a witch with a pistol?... yeah. Besides, I need a shower, I look like I just shot someone to death in an alley”

She wandered off, leaving Lennie dying in a growing pool of his own blood.

Dying

Always dying, present tense.

Never dead

Lennie tried to speak, tried to get any voice out, however quiet. Every attempt at a breath, every contraction of any muscle sent shocks through him, squeezing and spasming his gut, turning the gentle leak of red into an angry spurt. But eventually, gritting his teeth and forcing himself, he managed to get a single word out.

“Ah.. leks”

That was enough, he’d got the cryptid’s attention. A shadowy figure stood in front of him, he could see only the feet, thin and in a suit, and the tips of long, grey fingers, always too thin. If he’d looked up, Lennie was sure, he’d see someone in excess of ten feet tall, jointed too often.

“Yes, Lennie?”

“Help.” Lennie wasn’t sure the word had passed his lips, he could just as easily have been mouthing it, but Ahleks responded anyway

“I cannot help. You know this, favours cannot be given”

Lennie laid where he was, focussing only on staying awake. It could have been one minute, it could have been ten before the cryptid spoke up

“I cannot give favours, but I can offer a trade.”

Lennie groaned, hoping Ahleks would take it as an acceptance.

“I do. Here is my proposition: I will take ten years of your life, and thereby you will heal those ten years away in an instant”

Lennie gurgled

“Very well. A debt given and repaid, all in the same act”

Lennie felt a tightness in his abdomen, a muscle stitch, but worse, and worsening by the second. He tried to gasp, to scream, but by the time he was able to, the pain had subsided into a dull ache. Lennie looked down. Dried, brown blood cracked with his every move, falling off him like old plaster.

Lennie gasped for air and reached for his shirt. It was brown with old blood and had holes in it, so Lennie didn’t feel guilty about popping a couple of the buttons. Feeling his belly he touched human skin, broken with scars, but healed.

“Shit.” he gasped “Fuck. Ouch”

Lennie propped himself up against the wall. He was still winded, and the bullets were probably still in him, but he was alive. Never dead

Ahleks had left, seemingly uninterested in talking now that the debt had been repaid, and Lennie still needed to find the girl. He’d been lying to Sid earlier, but that woman had been talking about witches, she was RWHS. he needed to move, and he needed to move fast.

Even without his phone, Town Lane wasn’t the hardest address to find. Taxis were running late into the night and most of them were of the view that they weren’t paid enough to ask questions of strange, shell-shocked looking men. Lennie arrived at about half-past eleven, the first opportunity he’d been able to check the time since he’d called Cassidy, a good two or three hours prior.

Chloe’s flat block was different from the ground, it seemed taller, more imposing. Maybe it was the darkness, maybe perspective really did matter. Lennie had the cabbie drop him off a few streets away, and kept to the shadows across the street. There wasn’t anything, no vans, no RWHS. Lennie was either early, or very late.

Deep breath. If he was early, he could get Chloe to a secure location, or maybe have her set up magical defences. No, she wasn’t at her flat, she wouldn’t have the equipment. Anything was better than nothing, though. One circle was much like another, she could find a paperclip to bend if she needed to. If he was late, though. If he was late...

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

Headlights in his periphery interrupted Lennie’s thoughts. He immediately slumped in place, looking like a sleeping homeless man, while eight unmarked, black-clad figures piled out of an equally unmarked black van. Eight? Why eight? Eight was too many. Hell, the standard six was too many. Two of the figures set up on the exit of the building, silently slotting into place among the potted plants. The other six conferred for a few seconds before the one Lennie presumed to be the Entry Officer took the lead, placing some sort of device on the intercom before pushing the door open. The other five followed,

Lennie sat, with his eyes half shut, thinking. Chloe was on the third floor, but they didn’t know that, or did they? They’d been following him, did they already know about Chloe? If they did, he had maybe ten minutes to get to her flat, three minutes to clear each floor before moving on. No, they hadn’t even known the address before the woman had shot him, they must have been following him somehow. That meant longer, maybe five minutes per floor, to check each of the three rooms and move to the next floor. Two floors of flats, one for the entrance, ten minutes, three of which he’d wasted already.

How would they be checking identities? Was there a drone in operation? No, the leader would be out of the fight if that were the case, giving overwatch. Both soldiers out here were guards, reinforcements, crowd control if need be, neither of them was operating a drone. They had a way of checking identities by themselves. Knocking down doors was too blunt, there must have been some other way. Four minutes he’d wasted now, no time to hypothesise, he had to act.

Lennie yawned and got up. With exaggerated motions, smacking his lips he staggered towards the two soldiers.

“Routine inspection, sir, move along” they were at ease. Lennie wasn’t a threatening-looking man

“Spare change for an old army lad, will ya?” the accent he put on was not one of his better ones

“Sir, move along” the man on Lennie’s left was brusque, but still not wary

“Anything ‘elps, you know” Lennie kept limping, with a drunken sway. He wished he’d picked up an old bottle somewhere, to complete the look.

“Sir if you don’t comply we are authorised to use force” the woman on the right made her partner look sheepish. Her hand was on her weapon, a C8 carbine with a silencer on the end. It was a threat more than anything, but Lennie didn’t doubt the Royal Witch Hunter’s Society’s willingness to shoot homeless men on the street.

“Alright, alright,” Lennie muttered to himself, turning. Lennie faked a trip, falling towards the woman. In a flurry of quick motions, Lennie batted her gun away, positioned himself on the other side of her partner, and pushed her into him, grabbing onto the hilt of his knife and wrenching it in her gut.

She screamed, an animalistic, and worse, loud noise. The man stepped back to avoid her, but by the time he’d raised his rifle, Lennie had moved, angled straight at his midsection.

Lennie elected to spend valuable time rooting through the bodies. He needed a gun. The woman’s Browning was familiar. Six more targets, four minutes. The woman had screamed loudly, they’d probably heard. Not good, not good at all.

Lennie ducked into the space under the stairs, pressing himself against a bicycle, while a set of footsteps gently, but briskly, descended, presumably sent to check in. Lennie bulled towards the figure, shoving them against the wall and pinning them, as he manoeuvred his arm into position and shot him twice. Lennie lowered them to the ground. Until they talked, you couldn’t even tell gender behind the armour. Black, panelled, masked, they looked more like machines, one of those Boston Dynamics creatures playing dress-up. That suited Lennie’s conscience just fine. Through the soldier’s earpiece, Lennie could just make out chatter,

“Repeat, Harris, do you copy?... shit, he’s gone, okay-”

The chatter cut out. They’d cut the earpiece, they knew Lennie was coming.

Lennie squeezed his eyes. RWHS came with guns, but they also packed all sorts of equipment. Communication, cameras, grenades of all flavours. Grenades! They wouldn’t be using frag grenades in here, but smoke was their friend. Two grenades in two pouches, one of them a near miss from where he’d shot them. Lennie slipped them onto his jacket, five left, three down. The elevator caught the corner of his eye. No team would be stupid enough to take the elevator, and neither was Lennie. No cover and an easy target, they’d have him bleeding out on the ground inside of five seconds. But it did have its uses, if they hadn’t disconnected it, that was.

From his hiding place, Lennie heard the gentle ping of the elevator doors. He’d hoped they kept time the same as him, and they did. The second floor had been empty, no sign of any activity, they had progressed up to the third, Chloe’s floor. One of the riflemen covered the Entry Officer; the other three were positioned looking at the two points of entry; the stairwell and the elevator. There was a long window, but no way to get through it from the outside without a rope, Lennie hadn’t brought a rope. As if on cue, all three soldiers guarding the floor spun to face the elevator, and broke away from their positions to get to cover. They were efficient, Lennie was thankful he hadn’t taken the elevator. The doors clicked open and thick, packed smoke billowed out. The one Lennie presumed to be the leader went in first, blindly covering the area, checking for any physical threats. Lennie heard the clattering of someone bumping into the smoke grenades he’d placed and took it as his signal, and silently bolted from his hiding space, prone on the stairwell.

He raised his pistol, aimed for the Entry Officer, and fired. One shot to the thigh and they went down. The next few moments were in slow motion for Lennie. The rifleman covering them spun around and shouted, but Lennie was already shifting his aim, and before they had time to fire Lennie had gotten another shot off, centre mass.

The two soldiers on the elevator spun around and opened fire, but Lennie had moved again, backwards now, and they hit plain wall. The smoke was spreading, obscuring vision, and Lennie could smell fireworks. He aimed and shot again, blindly twice into the elevator. He wasn’t sure if he’d hit anything but he wasn’t staying around to find out. Lennie dashed backwards, to the cover of the stairwell, narrowly avoiding a burst of fire that turned the wall near him to plaster chips.

Lennie scrabbled up the stairs and started shooting down it. Covering fire, they couldn’t get close, but Lennie needed to think. He could dully hear the shouts of the soldiers, barks of locations, of statuses, fragments of shorthand for fragments of plans, but at that moment Lennie couldn’t understand anything, he could only think.

A plan. A fraction of one, at least, the rest could come later. Lennie stripped off his jacket, balled it up, and hurled it. The one Lennie had searched hadn’t been sporting night vision. For whatever reason, none of them had. Lennie hoped his memory of the two outside were sound, and in the dimness, a balled jacket would look like a grenade, or like a body. Either way, it was a distraction.

The practised bark, “Grenade!” answered that problem for Lennie, and he hurled himself after it. He shot blindly at the first figure he saw and charged the second, both diving away from the jacket. He went to ground with them, and the two tousled on the ground, the rifle long forgotten. They were scrabbling under him, both searching for something. Lennie’s free hand found his knife and he pushed himself off them, falling back down and burying the knife in their trachea in the same moment that they found their sidearm, and a bullet tore through Lennie’s side.

The soldier went limp, and Lennie lay on top of them, panting, their blood mixing in pools on the ground. He pushed himself up and looked. Four more people, slumped on the ground, in growing pools of blood. If Lennie was worried before about scaring Chloe, a bloodied man in front of eight corpses wasn’t going to console her. Lennie dipped his finger into his side and wrote something on the calling card, he didn’t have a pen, and slipped it through her door. It was impersonal, but it would be more effective, more mysterious. He limped to the lift, holding his side. The wound wasn’t as bad, but it would need medical attention. He left the building, past the first two soldiers, not faking his stagger this time.