"...It's useless."

"I absolutely won't hear that." Alice always glows on. “You must fight! You’re rare! There aren’t that many people who could ever survive what killed you!”

“How do you know that’s true.”

“I don’t. I only know you can survive at least once, which means you have a better shot at winning than someone who can’t recover at all.”

"So? What if there's someone entirely invulnerable to the Manticore out there? Do I get to go guilt them for risking my life?"

"How would anyone ever answer that? You're being petulant."

“I’m being scared!”

"Ash! You have to act against the Manticore because you know about it. Whether or not you're alone or scared is irrelevant.”

“It’s crucial! What are you doing now but dying in pain?”

“Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

“Not at all true. I saw you move your left hand in a puddle of blood. People can do incredible things when their lives are at risk. I’m sure you’ve heard about people in car crashes lifting– “

“Fill in a different blank. I don’t need to believe harder.”

“Never belief. A little faith in yourself would go a long way.”

“It’s possible, but I don't need it. You want me to delude myself into thinking I’m significant?”

“No, I don't want you to delude yourself."

"Sorry, 'believe in myself'."

"Ash, we’re running in circles and I don't want to waste any more time. If you're going to do something, it should be something you can believe in enough to hope it will work. But if you're just going through hopeless motions..."

"I should hurry up and die." Of course not.

"No! Hurry up and..." She pauses. "Hurry up and stop wasting your precious time."

What does she mean? What's so precious about my time? My time? What’s precious about my time?

“Precious” meaning “significant and valuable?”

My life has no meaning beyond zeroing out the heat I've displaced. That’s wrong and I know it. I just need to try the best I honestly can. That’s my best? I gotta turn back… Offsetting my entropic mark is a futile effort anyway. We’re all each counting down, ticking past distance we can’t get back. Second steps past bleeding dreams lying, dead, to me. Probably could never see a better future coming.

“Precious” meaning “treasured.”

Treasured by who?

If I kill the Manticore, if I tame the mystery…

I could see it now.

“My name in bytes forever. Carved in gold nanoangstroms… Even with every easy day spent waiting for decay to settle in on the Manticore, I'd rather be remembered as its reaper. I want my name with every other monster hunter's, written in those Grimoires for good.”

Alice nods wearily. "They might be a good place to start looking."

"I've been sitting around too long today. And yesterday."

"When did you sleep?"

I answer her question by ignoring it. "I've been at my computer most of that time. If anyone had put anything in the Grims, or even asked the boards, I would know about it."

“What did you find? Any patterns?”

“None. Nothing reliable.”

“Reliable?”

I sighed. “Not ‘a rash of missing cats’ or ‘statues bleeding milk.’ That level of ‘scrying for the unusual’ has a place of its own, but its more locational–and we already know the Monster’s range.” It’s kind of perfect; the way my area of expertise comes in handy just this once, and yet the task is insurmountable as anything.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“What if they are out to get us?”

Surrounded by men in suits with submachine guns.

“We’ll be okay, I think.”

“What if we’re not?”

They know better and are armed with a horrible fate.

“Then the Manticore will kill a lot of people, and you’ll be one of them. If there’s no point then why not try?”

A death of hope before a death of life?

I forgot how to give up!!!

A single razor-fine wire. It flares low, in a flash, counterclockwise–from my left-hand circuit. Bullets spray into the air in a panicky misfire, and the encounter ends in a silent spray of blood.

Or it gets stuck on too-thick cloth of trouser hems, does nothing. I get caught and die.

Razor wire grows dull, so it’s no good.

Razor wire…

Razor wire…

The air was excised from my lungs by the weight of the man in red. This is all a memory, I remember, of course, and of course it doesn’t help.

He’s a nightmare, weighing down my chest in sheer anger, the searing ache where his hands have my forearms pinned reminding me: you are awake. I glance to his right, my left, upon my would-be execution method; a garrote slicked with sweat, now just a waste of wire lying gleaming and abandoned.

For all my struggles, I have no delusions of breaking free. My best chance right now, to move his hands to my throat, choke my life away like it means something… I could be crushed by a dead weight like this. For all that counts, this self-styled icon might as well be a statue.

My eyes roll up. I vaguely see his chin, nostrils, cheekbones vaguely outlined. The shadow of close-cropped hair and the waning crescent whites of his eyes. Gazing straight forward.

Why won’t you look at me? I think it, and mouth it, with the last shredded gasps. Spare a glance, shed a tear maybe, think a single thing about the life you’re taking, breath by stolen breath.

It's never been death itself I fear, it’s the indignity of dying alone. For all intents and purposes, that man is not here.

A heartbeat. It hits my ears louder than it should be. Was it a tear? It sounded like ripping. My chest feels so warm…

“Ow! What the fuck?”

I blink. My left arm is awash in a painless pink glow, repulsive to the man in red. I’m half free from his grasp at the cost of his full weight on my right side. Jab my hand to his throat like a knife on fire. A hopeful rage tears through my veins, reverse sickness. Lightning glows like blood in the air, arcing true to scar him in dark bursts. Pull back and get content with making him flinch. I roll and twist my right arm free. Create a barrier behind which the light-shape balloons pushes him off of me. The shape forms a wall and he fumes in the violet glow.

He can’t break my instant construct, but it doesn’t hurt him like the lightning or the moment my heart felt funny.

…Did Augustus Caelid, the Red Dog of the Tower, just try to kill me? This spell is probably too much.

It was a deeper color than the lightning or almost anything I could remember seeing; but something stirring faintly at the back of my mind, a deep pink marker labeled “crimson”– blood-colored. Maybe it’s a matter of Magica concentration, but this spell was that exact shade of “blood-colored”. It felt alive, or at least possessed with a will of someone’s own to keep me safe. The Barrier warped and wrapped around my mentor like plastic melting without a second thought.

His hardened face cracked and flaked with fear of death.

Maybe if I really wanted to, I could turn this whole wall keeping me safe into a murderous inferno.

There’s only one way to find out–pour out everything I have into this singular killspell tracing a single bullet down the barrellines of everything good and magical within my form. Tear up the tracks before the train in the name of taking back nothing. In that moment, vengeance seemed so unworth it, and that feeling kept me alive.

I should have been able to take his life without worry, no doubt about it, but it was more than enough to make it out okay.

Through my “light” his shirt looked freshly bloodstained. All magenta and alive. There was an almost visible sort of smoke, or steam, or fire, flickering off him… but it was impossible to tell more than that through his royal-tinted prison. If I’d hurt him enough to send a message, or if he’d come poking around again once I collapsed in exhausted relief.

The only place I thought I’d feel safe enough to sleep was a pocket dimension made with the only spell taught to me by someone other than Augustus. The holding enchant usually only worked on bags, but it could be applied to certain doors by a skilled mage, or all doors to a certain person and her guests by an expert. I was lucky enough to know one, once. I collapsed in that same sense of safety as… somewhere. It didn’t matter.

Years of memories pass in irrelevance. Freezing and a desolate isolation. Fear of a demon only I and it are able to be aware of. I’ve put that aside before. The fact is that that once again there is a monster out for my blood. If I take the false blame and make it my fault, I’ll quake until I fall apart…

Is this what all those stories I ignored, all about “becoming the monster,” meant? So tired to me by now and yet; they warned against the same kind of dark quest of comprehension I found myself embarking on.

The difference is, I have no choice. I must–

“Ash!” My eardrums seemed to flinch at Alice’s voice, resonating with the ringing pain through my cheekbone.

“Did you just backhand me?”

“You jumped. Like, flinching, maybe seizing, hard to tell. I was worried you were… choking, or something.” She looks sort of embarrassed. “I tried slapping you with my palm first, but it didn’t really do anything. I... had meant to do that again, but I was scared. Really scared.”

For me? Or of the Manticore, when she’s alone? “I’m sorry. I think I’ll be okay. No matter what happens, I’m not dying again without a fight.”

“Okay. So pull up the reports of missing persons and we’ll go search those places for clues.”

I shook my head. “Aren’t any.”

“Huh. Okay, murder cases. Reported bodies.”

“No animal maulings and all collisions are accounted for.”

Alice sighs. “Ash. Are you just saying that because you don’t want to check?”

I feel a grim smirk jerk across my cheek. “No, the Manticore truly ‘doesn’t appear to exist’. We have to fight it anyway.”