"Raphael?"
Evelyn moved toward where she'd felt the signal, the faint thread of connection growing stronger with each step, almost close enough to reach, almost solid enough to hold.
"Partner, it's me!"
Her voice carried across the empty street and came back to her unchanged. The buildings on either side absorbed it and gave nothing in return.
The connection held for a few more seconds, then began to pull away.
Through the distortion of the mirror world, she watched the police motorcycle on the road outside move in its stuttering, delayed way toward the crossroads, and as it did, the thread between her and whoever was out there drew taut and snapped.
The motorcycle disappeared from her field of view.
The direction it had gone was the crossroads. The same intersection that had swallowed her.
She activated the life band out of habit and looked at the backlog. Fourteen unsent messages stacked in the interface, each one marked with the same failure notification.
She tried once more, pushing the attempt toward wherever Raphael's signal had been a moment ago.
*Send failed.*
"...Damn."
She sat down on the kerb and looked at the ground between her feet.
She'd assumed this was a trap when it started. A Demon, a cultist, some kind of coordinated ambush.
Traps had enemies, and enemies gave you something to work against, a direction, a goal, a clear answer to the question of how you got out.
But there was nothing here. No ambush, no hostile presence, no arcane activity that she could detect.
Not even residual fluctuation. Just the city, reproduced in full, and the specific deadness of a world that looked inhabited and wasn't.
She pressed a finger into the soft earth beside the kerb.
Not even an ant.
The helplessness settled over her slowly, the way it did when there was nothing to push against.
---
On the other side of things, Eva had mostly recovered from the over-rotation transit experience by the time she reached the first of the two remaining incident sites.
Both were on the university campus. Both had been informally locked down by the administration.
The police tape was as far as official access had been allowed to go, which was exactly why neither had appeared in the public case files with anything useful attached.
The first site was the men's bathroom at the end of the ground-floor corridor, sealed with yellow tape across the entrance. The earliest of the four killings.
The second was one floor up, the Year Three A-form classroom, a fixed room used for students who required specialized educational support.
Mild depression, mild anxiety disorder, obsessive tendencies, conditions that weren't severe enough for withdrawal but needed a different approach to the learning environment.
Low student turnover. The kind of room where a strange social ecosystem like Laura's could develop naturally.
Eva filed the classroom away for afterward and ducked through the gap in the police tape with the ease of someone operating in a body that weighed nothing and left no footprints.
The bathroom floor was wet. Not sewage, disinfectant residue and bleach, the chemical smell still sharp despite however long it had been sitting there.
Multiple pipe joints were leaking, keeping the floor saturated, the cleaning products diluted across the tile in a persistent shallow film.
Even as a projection, stepping through it was unpleasant in a psychological way that didn't require physical sensation to land.
Three sinks in a row along one wall. The middle one had been completely destroyed, collapsed and shattered, the debris spread across the wet floor, the dried blood across the porcelain and the surrounding tile gone rust-brown with age.
The mirror above had gone with it. Cracks radiated from two central impact points.
Several distinct handprints in dried blood climbed the surface, the prints getting higher as they went, frantic, ascending, reaching for something that wasn't there.
"The fight started here." Eva moved through the space and read it.
"Peter was at the sink, washing his hands, getting ready to leave, and the attack came from behind.
No warning, no warning. Whoever did this drove his head directly into the basin and kept going. That material isn't soft, that takes real force."
She looked at the mirror.
"Second impact was into the mirror. It cracked but didn't go completely. Peter had enough time to get his hands up by the third hit, you can see it in the prints.
Palms flat against broken glass, the cuts opening across both hands. But the attacker didn't stop, just dragged him across the surface, back and forth. That's how you get handprints that shape."
She tilted her head upward.
"Something sharp hit an artery, the carotid, most likely. One strike. The spray pattern goes all the way to the ceiling."
She turned around and looked at the toilet stalls behind her.
The other stall doors were intact, just old. The one directly opposite had no door at all, the bolt had snapped, and the door itself was on the floor face-down, wood splinters scattered around it in a radius consistent with something hitting it from the inside at speed.
Forced outward from within.
"Interesting."
The stall around the fallen door held the secondary scene.
An uncapped marker pen. Post-it notes, used. A pair of scissors. Loose strands of hair scattered across the floor.
Eggshell with dried albumen still on the inner surface. Blood in several locations, along with impact marks on the walls.
A single incisor sitting in the waste bin beside a pair of pliers with dried blood on the gripping surface.
The door panel was covered in handwritten text. Freak. Weirdo. Idiot. NEET. Disgusting shut-in. Each one with an arrow pointing toward the toilet bowl.
Eva looked at it for a while.
"Group effort. At least three people, probably more." She read the sequence backward from the physical evidence.
"Beating, dragging, verbal, then the hair and the tooth. The tooth was last. That's not impulsive, that's sustained. They were enjoying it."
The picture she'd been building across the three-way information feed clicked into place.
"Peter and company pulled someone into this bathroom. Took their time. When they finished, Peter went to clean his hands at the sink, the blood on his knuckles, the whole routine, and that's when the stall door came off its hinges."
The person inside had stopped absorbing it.
"Peter's friends ran. All of them. Which means the transformation, if that's what happened, was visible enough to scatter a whole group in an instant."
She walked the perimeter of the room one more time. "This was the first killing. Whatever that person was before they came in, they were something different when they went through the stall door."
Demon emergence had been debated in IFSA documentation for years without a clean resolution.
The operational consensus, built mostly from field observation rather than verified theory, was that certain categories of near-human Demons.
Elves, vampires, others that passed as human under normal conditions, could produce offspring with humans, and those offspring carried latent traits that could surface under sufficient stress.
The trigger was usually intense enough to mark a before and after.
The time of death was the remaining problem.
University evening sessions ended by nine. The forensic estimate in the file put Peter's death after midnight. That was a gap of at least three hours between the last class and the killing.
"Either the bullying ran that long, which means they were there for the entertainment of it, or the person inside the stall didn't break the way they expected him to, and Peter wasn't done."
She thought about the other evidence. The Doberman that had followed the young man down the street.
The indentation in its flank where a rib should have been. The quality of the black hair recovered from the sewer, coarse, rigid, the strands holding their shape under pressure.
Nocturnal. Abnormal physical strength. Canine Demon companion with a clear hierarchical bond.
The pieces arranged themselves.
"Could it be..." She said it slowly, still turning the conclusion over. "A werewolf?"