The settlement had been home to maybe forty people. Fifty at most. Now it was a graveyard.
Wolfen walked through the wreckage in silence, his golden eyes moving from body to body, cataloging, assessing. Zoey followed close behind, her hand pressed to her mouth, her stomach turning with each step.
A woman lay in the doorway of what might have been her home. Her throat was torn open, the wound not clean—not a blade, not a claw. Teeth marks. Human teeth marks, gnawing, tearing, feeding. Her hands were still raised, frozen in the last desperate act of trying to push away what had been eating her alive.
A man hung from a broken beam, his chest caved in, his face locked in an expression of pure, silent horror. His fingers were gone. All of them. Chewed off at the knuckles.
A child—no older than ten, maybe eleven—curled in the corner of a collapsed building. Her eyes were open, fixed on nothing, her body too small, too still. There were bite marks on her arms, her legs, her face.
Zoey stopped walking.
"Was this... one of Lily's monsters?" Her voice was barely a whisper. "Or something else?"
Wolfen didn't answer immediately. He was looking at a man slumped against a wall, his chest hollowed out, his ribs exposed, cracked open like someone had been digging for something inside him. The marks on the bone were unmistakable.
Teeth.
"No." Wolfen's voice was flat. Empty. "I know who did this."
Zoey looked at him. His face—his face was something she'd never seen before. The boredom, the sarcasm, the careful distance he always wore—all of it was gone. What remained was something cold. Something old. Something that had been waiting a very long time.
"That fucking cannibal."
Zoey's eyes widened. She'd known Wolfen for years. She'd never heard him curse. Not once. Not when he was angry, not when he was hurt, not when he was fighting things that should have killed him. Whatever he was feeling now, it was worse than anything she'd seen.
She opened her mouth to ask—
"OH! Is that you, dear? Hey! I'm right here!"
The voice was light, cheerful, almost giddy. It came from everywhere and nowhere, echoing off the ruined buildings, bouncing through the corpses.
Wolfen didn't turn. Didn't react. Didn't even blink.
He vanished.
The dirt where he'd been standing erupted outward, the force of his departure sending Zoey stumbling back. The pressure was immense—the air itself seemed to scream.
What the—
She looked up.
Wolfen's fist was stopped mid-swing, caught in a pale, slender hand. The woman holding it turned her head slowly, like a bird revealing itself from behind a wing, and smiled.
Her face was beautiful. Soft. Innocent, almost. But the eyes—the eyes were hungry.
"It's been so long, hasn't it, dear?" Jenny Damber's voice was sweet, syrupy, the voice of a lover greeting someone they'd missed terribly. Her cheeks were flushed. She was blushing. "I finally found you. Well—you found me, really. But who's counting?"
The world exploded into red.
Flames erupted around them, a ring of fire that shot fifty feet into the sky, trapping them in a circle of heat and light. Zoey threw herself backward, her psychokinesis carrying her up and away, her heart hammering in her chest.
Through the flames, she saw Wolfen and Jenny standing in the center, motionless, locked together.
Then Wolfen was back beside her, blood dripping from his lips, a deep wound in his stomach already knitting itself closed. Faster than it should have. Faster than anything she'd seen him heal before.
"Wolfen! Are you okay? Is that—is that Damber?" Zoey's voice was too high, too fast. She couldn't stop staring at the woman in the flames.
Jenny walked through the fire like it was nothing. The flames parted around her, curling away from her skin, leaving her untouched. A thin layer of saliva-like liquid covered her body, shimmering in the heat, protecting her.
"Wow. You've gotten so much stronger, haven't you?" Jenny's voice was delighted. "I heard that bald man trapped you in another universe. How was it? Did you meet me there? There's a me in every universe, you know. We're like... cockroaches. Immortal. Unkillable. Everywhere."
She giggled.
"Come on out, boys!"
Behind Zoey, something moved.
She spun.
Superior 4 stood behind her—a child, no older than fifteen, his grey mask too large for his small face. In his hand, a small knife, its blade black at the tip. He was already swinging.
She couldn't move. Couldn't react. Couldn't do anything but watch the blade arc toward her—
Wolfen was there.
He stood in front of her, his body a shield, his chest open to the strike. The knife sank into him, deep, the black tip disappearing into his flesh.
He didn't flinch.
He towered over the boy, his face—his face—something Zoey had never seen before. Not angry. Not cold. Something worse.
"That's the Thantos-39 virus," Jenny called cheerfully from the flames. "Same stuff your little friend the Monster Queen is dying from."
Zoey's blood went cold.
No.
No, no, no, no, no—
She couldn't accept it. Couldn't process it. Wolfen couldn't—he couldn't—
His left eye went black.
The veins around it darkened, spreading, crawling across his face like cracks in ice. Black blood leaked from the corner of his eye, trailing down his cheek, dripping onto the ground.
Zoey's hands flew to her mouth. Her vision tunneled. The world narrowed to Wolfen's face, to the darkness spreading across it, to the virus eating him from the inside.
No. Please. Please no.
Wolfen spat black blood onto the ground.
He grabbed the boy's head—one hand, crushing—and slammed him into the earth. The ground cracked. Bones broke. The mask shattered, revealing a child's face, eyes wide with shock, mouth open in a sound that never came.
"Huh?" The boy's voice was a whisper. "No—"
"I'll deal with you later."
Wolfen turned away from the broken body.
He looked at Zoey.
"Fly."
"Fuck no." Her voice cracked. "I'm not leaving you. I'm going to help—"
"Then go away."
His voice was cold. Empty. He didn't look at her when he said it. Didn't acknowledge her at all.
Zoey's chest constricted. She wanted to scream. To grab him. To shake him. To make him look at her, to make him see that she wasn't going to leave him—
He was already turning back to Jenny.
Zoey flew.
She rose into the air, higher and higher, until the fire was a ring below her, until Wolfen was just a figure in the center, until she could see the others.
They were everywhere. Superior 2. Superior 3. Superior 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And Jenny, standing in the middle of it all, arms spread wide, face lifted to the sky, laughing.
Zoey's hands were shaking. Her whole body was shaking. The radio in her hand felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
She pressed the button.
"HELP!" Her voice broke on the word. "HELP!"
Static. Silence. The longest seconds of her life.
Then:
"I'm coming."
Leo's voice. Steady. Certain.
Zoey's legs gave out. She hovered in the air, suspended by nothing, tears streaming down her face.
Below her, the flames roared.
And Wolfen walked toward the woman who had been hunting him for longer than she'd been alive.