The streets of Fluxton were a grindstone, wearing down the souls of everyone who walked them until only the sharpest, hardest edges remained. Ezekiel moved from one sagging tenement to the next, the leather pouch at his belt growing heavy with gold, but his heart felt dangerously light—empty and hollowed out by a frustration that tasted like copper.
Clink. Clink.
Every successful collection was a setback. Every vampire who produced three gold coins was a missed opportunity for the harvest. Ezekiel's jaw ached from clenching it; the smell of the district—a mix of wet ash, rot, and the acrid tang of cheap bioluminescent oil—was becoming unbearable. He wasn't looking for currency anymore. He was looking for a reason.
He found it at a small, cramped tailor shop wedged between two crumbling stone warehouses.
Inside, a woman sat hunched over a loom, her fingers moving with a frantic, trembling grace as she wove coarse grey fabric. It was a pathetic little stall, nothing like the bustling shop Ezekiel and Kennedy had once called their own. This place smelled of desperation and dust.
"The tribute," Ezekiel said, his voice flat, dropping into the room like a stone into a well.
The woman didn't look up immediately. She looked at the shop around her—the overturned stools, the jagged tears in the half-finished tapestries, the empty shelves. "It was three nights ago," she whispered, her voice cracking. "The thieves... they didn't just take the cloth. They took the coin box. Poverty makes animals of us all, doesn't it?"
She finally turned to him. She was sickly, her skin a translucent grey, her eyes sunken into deep hollows of exhaustion. "I have a husband. Three children. They haven't fed in two cycles because every drop of essence I find goes to them. I've worked until my fingers bled to make up the loss, but..."
She reached into a hidden fold of her apron and pulled out two gold coins. They looked lonely in her palm.
"Two," she said, her voice rising in a plea. "I have two. The business... no one buys new clothes when they're starving, sir. Please. I am working. I am trying."
Ezekiel looked at the two coins. Then he looked at the woman's trembling hands. He saw the truth in her sickly frame and the disarray of the ransacked shop. A week ago, he might have felt a pang of kinship. But the boy who felt kinship was buried under layers of scar tissue and the golden heat of that accursed mark.
A low, jagged smile pulled at the corner of Ezekiel's mouth.
"Two coins don't buy a life in Fluxton," he said.
He didn't wait for her to beg again. He raised his hand, the yellow-orange light of his core surging into a needle-thin point at his fingertip. He fired.
But the Weaver wasn't ready to die.
With a burst of panicked adrenaline, she snatched a rusted metallic tray from the floor and swung it upward. The beam of light struck the metal with a sharp crack, deflecting upward and whistling past Ezekiel's ear, close enough to singe a few strands of his hair.
Ezekiel's eyes went wide. Shock, cold and electric, surged through him. No one had fought back yet. No one had dared.
The woman didn't stay to see his reaction. She scrambled over her loom, her old bones popping as she leaped through the open front of the stall and onto the gravel street. She ran with the frantic, clumsy speed of a cornered rabbit, her breath coming in ragged, terrified heaves.
She didn't get far.
Twenty paces down the alley, her legs gave out. Her strength, already depleted by hunger, finally snapped. She collapsed face-first into the grit, her teeth scraping audibly against the gravel.
Ezekiel covered the distance in three long strides. He stood over her, his shadow swallowing her small, shivering form. The woman rolled onto her side, spitting blood and filth, her eyes burning with a sudden, venomous hatred. She hissed a curse at him—a jagged, ugly string of words meant to sour his soul.
Ezekiel didn't even listen. He was tired of the beams. Tired of the precision. She had made him chase her, and that required a more visceral response.
He raised his heavy boot.
The energy he had consumed from the previous kills had settled into his muscles, giving his frame a density and power that belied his age. He didn't need a beam for this. He brought his foot down with the cold, mechanical weight of a falling hammer.
The sound of the skull giving way was a dull, wet thud that ended the curse mid-syllable.
Ezekiel stood there for a moment, his chest heaving slightly. As the Weaver's life flickered out, a fresh measure of energy rose from her remains—hot, raw, and proportional to the struggle she had put up. It flooded into his core, a golden tide that washed away his fatigue and tightened the coils of power within his chest.
He looked down at the silent shape in the dirt. He felt stronger. He felt faster. And most of all, he felt the hunger for the next door.
Two lives. The tally was growing, and the "Pillage" had only just begun.
The tally in Ezekiel's pouch grew heavier, but the air in the West was growing thinner, choked by the collective held breath of a neighborhood in mourning.
The process was a rhythmic, soul-eroding machine. Ezekiel moved from one rotting doorway to the next, his shadow stretching long and jagged across the thresholds of failing businesses and desperate homes. Every time he stepped into the dim light of an abode, he saw it: the look.
It wasn't just terror. It was the specific, glass-eyed shock of recognition.
In Fluxton, friendship was a luxury that usually ended in a shallow grave. Ezekiel's parents, Kennedy and Sarah, had hammered that lesson into him until it was part of his marrow. Trust no one but blood, they had whispered. It was a lesson Patrick Gallows was currently learning the hard way in a dungeon, betrayed by the very "brothers" he had championed.
But even without friends, Ezekiel had a face. The people of the West knew the quiet boy from The Blackwood Carpentry Shop. They had seen him hauling heavy timber, his hands calloused and stained with sawdust, struggling alongside his father to make ends meet just like the rest of them. To them, Ezekiel Graves was a nobody—a laborer with a dead-end future in a putrid town.
Now, seeing him in the high-collared mantle of the Abyssal Gang, his eyes cold and his hands stained with the dust of the weaver he'd just crushed, the whispers spread like a virus.
"Is that the carpenter's boy?"
"He killed Old Martha... I saw it from the window. Just stomped her like a beetle."
"How? The Abyssal roster never changes. Where did he get the magic?"
Ezekiel heard it all. The mutters, the hissed prayers, the way the "carpenter's boy" was being erased and replaced by "Raphael's lackey." He didn't care. The fear was a barrier, and he needed that barrier to keep the world at bay.
He was crossing an open stretch of the main thoroughfare when the air shifted. Five young vampires stepped out from the shadows of a collapsed storefront, blocking his path. They were malnourished, their skin pulled tight over sharp cheekbones, but their eyes were bright with a volatile, sickly bravado.
The leader, a boy with spiky black hair and a jagged scar across his chin, stepped forward. "I heard a funny rumor, Graves," he said, his voice cracking with mock amusement. "I heard you're playing soldier now. That you're out here collecting for the big man."
Ezekiel didn't stop. He didn't even slow down until he was a few feet away. "The tribute," Ezekiel said, his voice as flat as a tombstone. "Three coins. Do you have them?"
The group burst into a jagged, hysterical laughter.
"You're mental," the spiked-hair boy wheezed, wiping his eyes. "You think you can just walk around acting like an Abyssal? You know what Raphael does to posers, Graves? He doesn't just kill them. He makes them wish they'd never been born. You're gonna get us all targeted just for standing near you."
Ezekiel felt a cold, dry smile tugging at his lips. The boy thought he was a pretender. He didn't know about the midnight patrols, or the moment Raphael had cornered Ezekiel in the dark. He didn't know about the golden Slave Mark currently pulsing against Ezekiel's ribs, demanding blood and compliance.
"The tribute," Ezekiel repeated, his eyes narrowing. "This is the last time I ask."
"Are you even right in the head?" the boy spat, his face flushing a bruised purple. "You're a wood-cutter, Ezekiel! You're nothing!"
The boy lunged. It was a desperate, amateur move, fueled by a cocktail of insecurity and rage. His knuckles glowed with a dull, flickering red—the pitiful remains of whatever blood magic he could squeeze from his starving core. He swung for Ezekiel's jaw.
Ezekiel didn't even have to think. His body, reinforced by the essence of those he had already reaped, moved with a fluid, terrifying speed. He stepped inside the arc of the punch, his hand shooting out like a vice to catch the boy's forearm.
He squeezed.
The sound of the radius and ulna snapping was loud in the sudden silence of the street—a sharp, wet crack like a dry branch of cedar breaking. The boy's bravado vanished instantly, replaced by a high-pitched, warbling wail of agony as he fell to his knees, his arm hanging at a sickening angle.
Ezekiel leaned down, his face inches from the boy's tear-streaked eyes. The orange glow in his own pupils hummed with a predatory light.
"I'm not going to repeat myself again," Ezekiel whispered, the sound of the boy's heart thudding in his ears. "All I'm waiting for now... is the confirmation to take your life."
The street, already thick with the smell of wood-smoke and poverty, seemed to contract as the remaining four boys surged forward. They weren't fighting with the grace of warriors; they fought with the frantic, clumsy desperation of those who had been told they were nothing for too long and saw in Ezekiel a mirror they wanted to smash.