The creature came in low and fast, all broken angles and blind hunger.
Raymond met it anyway.
Bad choice. Too late to think about it now.
The impact hit like a cartload of iron dumped from a roof. It lifted him halfway off the ground, drove the air out of his lungs, and the world went white at the edges. Claws raked his chest open from collarbone to sternum. Heat spilled out of him in a rush.
He hit the wet earth on his back, rolled through roots and mud, and came up coughing against the taste of copper.
Blood.
Too much already.
He got one knee under him, then the other almost failed. His shirt was darkening so fast it looked black in the dim light. Hot blood ran down his ribs and into the mud. It wasn't a trickle. It was a mouth opening inside him.
No time for that. No time for anything.
The creature didn't give him a second to breathe. The burned head snapped downward first, smoke pouring from split skin, and the thing came at him like it had learned patience only long enough to make the killing cleaner.
Raymond twisted.
He caught the wrist mid-swing, fingers slick on gray, dead-looking flesh, and wrenched sideways with everything his hips could give him. Pain flashed through his side. His shoulder screamed. The limb gave with a sound like a branch snapping in winter.
The bone went.
The creature howled, a raw animal noise that seemed to come from inside three throats at once.
Raymond didn't let go.
He yanked the arm down hard, drove his elbow into the joint where the necks met the torso, and used the carcass as a step to throw himself backward. He landed half-crouched, boots sliding in mud.
Too slow.
The transparent head was already there.
He saw the strike only by the pressure change in the air, the way the space in front of him tightened like a muscle. Something invisible opened his ribs. Not a slash. A cut made by force, by speed, by intent sharpened to a point. His side split. He stared at it for one heartbeat, unable to process the absence of pain.
Then the pain arrived.
White-hot.
Like someone had jammed a bar of iron under his skin and left it there to melt.
Raymond staggered. One hand flew to the wound, and his fingers came away red and shaking. Blood slid between them, warm and ugly, and hit the mud in thick drops.
The creature moved again.
No rush. It didn't need to rush. It knew he was leaking out.
The face inside the translucent head sharpened by degrees. Male. Hollow-eyed. A face half-swallowed by memory, the kind you knew without wanting to know.
"You never looked back."
Raymond spat blood to the side.
"Should've buried you deeper."
The thing smiled.
Then it was gone.
Not invisible. Worse. Too fast for his eyes to follow, a distortion in the air, a pressure shift that made the skin on his neck tighten.
Raymond threw himself flat.
Something cut through the space where his throat had been a heartbeat earlier. The tree behind him split clean in half from trunk to trunk and fell with a crash that shook leaves loose all over the clearing.
He rolled under the collapsing timber, jammed one palm into the earth, and pushed.
Not a blast. A pulse.
The ground answered like it had been kicked in the spine.
Mud exploded outward in a ring. Stones and roots tore loose. Wet earth flew in clods big enough to bruise bone. The creature got hit broadside and thrown into the brush, then dragged across the clearing in a spray of dirt and splintered bark.
Raymond forced himself up.
His breathing was ragged now. Sharp. Shallow. His left arm felt wrong, loose at the shoulder, and the fingers on that hand were already going numb. Blood loss. The kind that turned your hands stupid before it turned your mind stupid.
Bad sign.
He raised two fingers on his right hand.
A pale glow crawled over them, thin as moonlight on a knife edge.
He pressed them to the gash in his side.
The flesh shuddered under his touch. Muscles pulled tight. Skin knitted together with a wet, grinding sound like teeth being ground down. The wound didn't heal clean. It sealed ugly, like something had been forced to obey.
Alchimia Morphica.
The creature hauled itself upright on the far side of the clearing.
Its broken arm was already reforming.
Not smoothly. Never smoothly.
The limb jerked and twitched in grotesque spasms as bone pushed through gray flesh and muscle wrapped itself around it again. The stone head tilted. The burned head coughed out a ribbon of black smoke that stank of char and old blood.
Then the transparent face spoke.
Not in its own voice.
Another man's.
Low. Bitter. Familiar in the way a scar is familiar.
"It's always you who decides who dies... Reddington."
The name dropped into the clearing like a brick into deep water.
Raymond felt it hit before he fully understood it.
His jaw went tight.
A road. Rain hammering so hard it blurred everything into sheets of gray. A collapse. Concrete twisted open. Three people shouting for help through the storm. One of them had been close enough to reach.
He had chosen.
One voice answered. Two were cut off.
He had never seen what happened after. Never learned how the survivor died. Only the shape of the choice, and the way it had sat in him ever since like a nail that wouldn't come loose.
The creature lunged again.
Raymond met it.
They slammed into each other in the middle of the clearing like two disasters trying to occupy the same space. The impact jarred his teeth. He slipped under the bite of the stone head, planted his palm against the thing's chest, and compressed gravity inward.
The torso sank half an inch.
Enough.
He struck six times before his lungs could even refill.
Throat.
Elbow.
Ribs.
Kneecap.
Sternum.
Jaw.
Each hit landed with a dull, warped thud that bent the air around them. Each one cost him more than the last. His shoulder jarred. His ribs screamed. The creature reacted with a burst of violence, claws punching into his left shoulder and digging deep enough that he felt the scrape of nail against bone.
Raymond grunted through his teeth.
Then the burned head opened wide at point-blank range.
Smoke, heat, blackness.
Raymond shouted.
Not because it helped. Because there was nothing else left in him with enough force.
The cry ripped out of his throat and became a shockwave.
The earth answered by detonating upward around him in jagged stone spikes. They rose fast enough to catch the black blast in broken teeth of rock and throw it off-line. The explosion still hammered him. The shock rattled through his skull, down his spine, into his teeth. Vertigo hit first. Then nausea.
Then pain so bright it nearly folded him in half.
He screamed again.
A raw sound. Ugly. Not noble. Not controlled. Something old and animal tearing itself loose.
The creature didn't stop.
Why would it?
It drove him backward through roots and broken branches. Raymond's heel caught on a root. He stumbled into a boulder, bounced off it, and hit the ground on one side. His vision flashed white. Then gray. For a second he couldn't feel his legs.
He stayed down anyway.
Get up.
He coughed blood into the mud.
Get up.
One foot. Trembling. The other.
He forced himself upright.
The creature was coming in slow now.
Too slow.
It was savoring the moment. Studying him with those hollow faces like it had all the time in the world to pick where to cut next.
Raymond laughed once through blood and spit.
"Talking too much."
He slapped his palms together.
The clearing changed.
Not visibly at first. Not in a way most people would notice. But the air went thick. Leaves that had been trembling in the branches dropped at once, as if someone had cut the strings holding them up. The mud sagged downward. Smoke that had been curling low over the ground suddenly pressed flat.
The creature hesitated.
For the first time.
Raymond spread his hands apart like he was tearing cloth.
Gravity split.
One direction dragged the creature down hard enough to strain the ground beneath its feet. Another yanked sideways, jerking its torso askew. A third came down from above like a hammer.
The beast's legs bent at an angle that made Raymond's stomach turn. Its torso twisted. One of the heads smashed into the earth with a crack so violent its teeth burst out in white fragments.
It roared. It fought back. Gray flesh bulged and trembled under pressure.
Raymond's knees started to shake.
Too much force.
Too little blood.
He pushed anyway.
His nose burst. Warm blood ran over his lips and into his mouth. He could taste himself dying now. Good. Better to know the taste than miss it.
The creature tore one arm free of the pressure field and ripped up a jagged shard of stone from the ground. It hurled it without warning.
Raymond turned too late.
The fragment punched through his abdomen and came out the other side with a wet tear of meat.
He froze.
The world got narrow.
First cold.
Then heat.
Then a wave of nausea so hard it almost blanked him out on the spot.
The creature ripped itself free of the gravity hold and leapt.
Raymond grabbed the stone lodged in him with both hands.
Snapped it.
A wet crack. Splintering bone or stone, he didn't care which.
He kept the larger half in his hand like a blade.
The beast came in low again.
Raymond stepped into the charge.
No flourish. No grace. No clean heroics. Just a man with a hole in his gut and too much anger left to die quietly.
He drove the shard through the transparent head.
The human face inside convulsed.
For a blink there was another face there. Not this thing's. A young man drowning. Eyes wide. Mouth full of river water. Panic, pain, and then nothing, gone as fast as a breath taken in winter.
The creature spasmed.
Raymond shoved his arm deep into the open thoracic cavity, elbow first, wrist disappearing into heat and twitching muscle. He groped blindly, feeling around for the thing inside. Every inch of him that touched the creature burned. Its jaws came down on his forearm. Hard. He heard the teeth crunch against bone. Claws raked his back. Hot blood ran under his shirt.
He kept going.
Kept his teeth clenched until his jaw hurt.
His fingers closed on something hard.
Pulsing.
Not a heart.
Something trapped and angry and alive in the wrong way.
Voices slammed together in the creature's chest.
Begging.
Cursing.
Laughing.
Accusing.
All of them at once.
Raymond gave a sound somewhere between a scream and a snarl and tore.
The core came free.
The clearing went quiet in the same instant.
Not peaceful. Not holy. Just stunned, as if the whole forest had forgotten to breathe.
The thing in his hand was fist-sized, black-red, veined with a dim internal light that beat once, twice, in ugly pulses. It tried to burrow into his palm.
He felt it move.
"No."
He dropped to one knee, smashed the core against a rock, and shoved down with everything left in him. The stone under his knee ground and cracked. The core split a little more. Light leaked out in thin lines.
Behind him, the creature folded.
Not falling. Folding. Collapsing inward like rotten cloth being sucked into a drain.
Raymond hit the core again.
And again.
His vision flickered at the edges. His lungs felt full of broken glass. On the fourth blow, the core exploded.
The blast threw him backward hard enough to make the world skip.
He hit the ground and bounced once. For a second he forgot his own name, which was probably a mercy.
When his hearing came back, ash was falling through the clearing like dirty snow.
The thing was still there.
Not alive, exactly. Not dead enough to matter. A gelatinous mass shuddering in weak, reflexive spasms, the last stupid twitch of an animal that had been gutted and didn't know it yet.
No more voices.
Just embers dying in the dark.
Raymond tried to rise.
Failed.
Tried again.
One knee under him. Then the other. He got halfway up and vomited blood onto the earth. It came up hot and thick, and his stomach cramped so hard he almost folded over again.
Then he heard shouting down the slope.
Closer.
Xavier.
"LOOK OUT!"
Raymond lifted his head.
Something sharp was erupting from the remains of the mass.
Too fast.
Xavier hit the ground with both hands.
A wall of earth surged up in front of Raymond like the spine of the land itself had decided to stand. The blade struck it. The wall split down the middle, but it held long enough to stop the thrust from coming through.
At the same instant, mud surged around the remains of the abomination. It wrapped the thing tight, then squeezed.
Hard.
A wet, awful sound.
Then nothing.
Raymond stared at the black smoke still rising from the mess. His chest hurt so badly now that each breath felt like dragging a rusted chain through torn flesh. But something in the mud caught his eye.
Small.
Human.
A pendant, rusted nearly through, hanging from a chain half-buried in the blackened sludge.
He looked at it for a long time without moving.
Then he bent down with hands that wouldn't stop shaking and picked it up.
The engraving had almost worn away.
Almost.
Not enough.
He closed his fist around it until the metal bit into his skin.
Xavier came into the clearing a second later with Delo and three armed villagers behind him. The four of them stopped when they saw Raymond.
He was standing.
Barely.
Half burned. Half broken. A mess of blood, dirt, and smoke.
Still on his feet.
Xavier stared at him like he'd just found a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.
"...Damn," he said. "You look like hell."
Raymond wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
"You useless bastard," he muttered. "Took you long enough."
His knees gave way.
He hit the mud face-first and did not get back up.