-Jake Aylesbury-
Standing over Agents Groger, Harrods, Chino, Phillips and Boris's dead bodies I sighed, running my hand back through my hair. The five were assists for my unit on this mission. Having never dealt with Nocturnals before they hadn't stood a chance once I'd let Griffin go. I knew all too well what he was capable of, even before his ReGenisis.
If they were smart and had listened earlier, they'd have split up and ran alongside the trail. At least they'd found it. For humans it was difficult to pick up on and track Nocturnals, even new ones. The others had all scattered to cover the perimeter. Perhaps because they were smarter and less cocky about who they were dealing with.
Even spreading out alongside the trail may not have helped the assist's. Not with the adrenalin spike in Griffin's system. That girls biological makeup had a direct impact on his hormone levels, the affect was returned it seemed. That made him less stable than usual, stronger, too.
As always he'd tried to go about things quickly, breaking necks as he seemed to think it was a kindness. He never liked guns.
I could smell his blood on the air. There were small spats against the scattered leaves, like crimson petals all around me. Strong and disgusting up my nose. It was this smell that had attracted me to the scene despite the fact it made my head spin.
I closed my eyes and could hear a very faint heart beat nearby, barely holding on. I inhaled deeply picking up on a coppery scent not linked to the five before me, or to Griffin.
"Norton," I muttered, letting my lids part again. I stared towards the trees. Through the gloom I could detect the outline of a body laid on its side, facing away from me.
I rushed over to it, crouching over Agent Amy Norton. Her fingers were shaking against the leaves. Carefully I pulled her round, her hazel eyes opening very slightly to look up at me. There was blood dribbled out the side of her mouth that slowly slid further across her cheek. She had to rasp for breath through a puncture in her lung, I sensed it was a broken rib from the vibration running through her. I felt gently over her ribcage, finding the crack in three, one of them completely sunken as I'd feared.
Looking back up at her fading eyes, I took in the gash on her forehead, small flints of bark embedded into it from her face being smacked into a tree. Her short, boy cut mousy brown hair was stained red around her choppy fringe.
She opened her trembling mouth trying to form words but her eyes closed again quickly.
"Norton," I shook her gently, until she lifted her heavy lids. "You've got to stay awake."
Amy blinked a couple times, looking as if she were about to fade out again. "Scavengers..." She tried to swallow back but instead spluttered up more blood. "...Loose." She finally managed in an exhalation.
My eyes widened, taking another deep breath, my free hand turning to a fist. I had only just picked up on the smell of something foul. There were others who had been here. From the taint in Norton's blood and the light footprints in the muddy undergrowth around me, they had been the ones to attack her.
Watching Amy's eyes close for the last time, her breath stuttered out and her heart came to a standstill, she was gone. Her head flopped to the side and her twitching fingers all became still. No longer tapping against the leaves.
I clamped my jaw together tightly.
Behind me I could hear the footfall of the four unaccounted for agents. They paused over the bodies on the path. I stood up stiffly, straightening my coat out before walking away from Norton's body.
What was left of my unit stood to attention on seeing me emerge from the cover of the trees.
"We lost Norton, she split off quite early..." Tucker Hudson informed me, crossing his large arms. He was a muscularly built, dark skinned agent with hazel eyes a little brighter than Amy's had been. His voice had always had a bass quality to it, even before my ears picked up on lower sounds, and now boomed through me.
"Hudson," I cut across him, my jaw jutting out as I went to speak. "Make the call for clean up. Six agents."
Hudson's already stern face sunk as he and the others looked between themselves.
"Six? Norton's not on the trail," Helen Tryst's dark blonde eyebrows furrowed, her eyes narrowing as she looked around herself to double check she hadn't missed anything in the immediate area.
"Make the call, Hudson." I growled, ignoring Tryst's confusion.
Hudson pulled out his cell as I hugged my arms around myself. I could feel all the muscles in my body tensing, the adrenalin of rage surging. The smell of so many mixed bloods on the air making my senses go haywire. My fists had begun to shake where I hid them under my arms.
Agent Skinner investigated further, walking towards the edge of the path, just behind me where I'd come out of the trees. He was a tall, skinny, bald man with small grey eyes that he squinted wherever he looked so that he had a constant scowl.
I glanced round, watching his eyes pulling together further to try to make out shapes in the darkness. I looked away again. Because unlike him, I could see her laying there.
He'd had to step into the trees. There was a small rustling and crackling from the undergrowth as he took several steps forward. He paused, sighing heavily. The sound of two knees thudding down into the mud, snapping twigs underneath them next. Then the muffling of twigs, leaves and soil being shifted against material. I could hear his heart thud an uneven beat in his chest, his breath still then becoming choked.
The sound of him stirring from the ground, pushing himself up from his knees and his feet sinking in a little more on his way back to the path. In his arms Norton's limp body. His grey blue eyes sullen and dark. His jaw tightened in the same way as mine had.
Tryst gasped, as if she couldn't see the five agents dead at her feet. As if this one death was worse than those five. In truth, it was.
"King has a lot to answer for." Maxwell Jennings, the last of my unit, growled.
Hudson was still speaking with HQ in the background, but he glanced up as I spoke again. Everyone stopped still in shock. "I think we have a bigger problem than King on our hands."
"What do you mean?" Jennings brown eyes widened frightfully, glancing about him, paranoid.
I took a breath and sighed. "I believe a third party was here tonight, to intercept our mission. A scavenger did this to her."
"No way are some outsiders smart enough to intercept..." Tryst rolled her eyes, but didn't finish the sentence as I shot her a dark look. She swallowed back, becoming still again.
"I'll trace what I can of King's blood, make sure he isn't followed. I want his D.N.A cleaned from the scene. If they get hold of him first..." I uncrossed my arms, putting my shaking fists down by my sides.
"Do you want me to come with you..." Jennings offered, standing forward, in his hand at his side a little samurai sword. They were the best for killing our kind.
"I'd rather you report back to HQ." I growled watching him jump back. "After five deaths at his hand in one day... If another body is going to hit the pile, it ought to be my own."
"Careful out there." Skinner mumbled, his scowling eyes slowly lifting up from Amy's body to my face.
I bobbed my head. I had no intention of getting caught off guard by some excuse for an under developed Nocturnal who's looking for the missing ReGenisis components. Then again, we already had been surprised by one such scavenger, at a heavy cost.
* * *
I followed several sets of heavy tracks through the trees from where I'd found Amy's body, towards a clearing where there was a concentration of chemical blood, Griffin's.
There was also the lingering smells of others, cigarette smoke and cheap booze and more chemicals. Three sets of separate odours at least. Two passed through here later than the other. Their stench had faded somewhat, trailing behind sandalwood and violet, following Griffin and the girl no doubt.
The last was faded most at the entrance, but stronger as I approached the edge of the trees to re-find the path. It lingered behind, growing a little stale.
I heard the sudden pop in my ear of a heart restart and followed the noise with my eyes through the edge of the trees. Half curled over a tree root sticking up through the leaves, was a broken body. It was to begin with anyway. My eyes widened as the skin of his back rippled up into bumps and lumps beneath his shirt. Loud, sharp snapping sounds started to match the timing of the way the body was starting to shudder, the heavy heart beat in its chest whirring to accomplish its renovations.
This Scavengers broken bones were rearranging themselves and snapping back into place.
I pulled my gun from my side as the creature sprung up from the ground as if it hadn't been innocuous a second before. Its face was still mottled and marked up from impact with the tree, I assumed. But I didn't have time to analyse it as I saw it coming towards me, pushing off of its back legs and leaping through the air.
I pulled the trigger. Once, watching its shoulder flinch back from the impact. Twice, barely slowing it up as it hit just beneath its collar bone. Three times, easing off the speed at which it came at me with its hands outstretched for my throat. A forth time, this bullet was enough to throw it off course a little bit more. The fifth turned it as it landed face up in the leaves just a few inches shy of my feet. Its body shaking for a moment before it stopped moving.
My eyes narrowed on the corpse and I nudged it with my foot. Never had I seen a restart after second death, especially not one that involved snapping bones back together instantaneously. Whatever was injected into this individual, it was not the standard ReGenisis serum. Which worried me for more reasons than I could count.
If the two ahead of me were similar it looked as if Griffin was in trouble. Perhaps we all were.
* * *
Following the two other Scavengers along Griffin's trail, I noticed one split off away from it. I couldn't be distracted from the main scent path and followed it through the streets. I pulled my coat around myself to hide the gun at my hip despite the fact it was so late that there was almost nobody around.
I was gaining ground on the Scavenger. I could hear the foot steps before me, heavier than the average ReGenisis recipient. Breath raspier than breathed through the lungs of one like myself. I sped up, turning a corner to see a tall, clumpy man with his hands in his pockets glancing about around him anxiously. He caught my scent I'm pretty sure before he looked round at me and then sped ahead.
Griffin and the girl were probably a street away from the freshness of their trail, I couldn't let the scavenger see where they went. I sprang forward on my feet, pulling my gun from my pocket. I fired several shots at the man in midflight. He took two hits in the back and turned towards me. His face was red as he held up his hands and caught me by the collars of my coat.
He swung me round and smashed my side into a lamp post. I cringed feeling the ache run through me but picked myself up. I held my gun back up to him, but he knocked it from my hand and then threw his fist at my face. I was thrown down by the force. I went to push myself up, but his foot was coming down towards my chest. If it made contact my ribs would be crushed and I wouldn't have the luxury of a restart like his friend in the woods.
A long black, laced up military style boot made impact with his side as he was forced to skid away from his target by a couple foot. My eyes widened in awe as a long katana sliced through him, the wielder taking his head off his shoulders as she twirled round. As the body of the Nocturnal scavenger hit the ground in two pieces, the wielder of the katana stared down on me stone faced but as beautiful as I'd remembered her.
A pale ghost staring down at me, eclipsed by long noir hair and the black clothes she draped herself in to absorb any light around her. Right now her eyes were a deeper void, reflecting a starless night. Those eyes that made her weapon seem more natural in her hand, then again, so did her obvious skill with it.
I opened my mouth to speak, still half laid on my back on the sidewalk. She held the edge of her blade to my throat, surveying me coldly. As usual, I hadn't picked up on her being around. Now her faint scent, imitating petrichor, registered in my senses, subtle and easily missed. She went to press the blade further in, to cut my skin, then to take my life.
"Rin," I breathed desperately, watching her eyes narrow further on my face. Fear and anger evaporating off of her skin, a warring within revealing the little fractures in her defence. From her shallow breathing, down to her hand that started to tremble around the hilt of her sword.
She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them she drew back her weapon and lifted her foot. Kicking me smack in the face, I felt the hard throb before the world turned to black around me.
"You owe me." Her words were tickling air in my ears whilst the world slipped farther away from me and I fell deeper into a briefly concussed sleep.