So much was the blood that it sloshed around his heavy boots on the carpet; so much was the violence, he waded around the mess of their bodies as he piled them in the center of the apartment living room, crowning the pile of corpses with Lillian's mangled flesh.
David reached for the doorknob, and drew his gloved hand away, glancing over his shoulder.
A small patter of sensation, cold in the pit of his gut; a warning created by the rites and blessings of The Order. There was still magick present in the room. David stared at the piled bodies, and immediately felt regret.
Jasmine lay among the cold and lifeless, her death the cleanest, and fastest among them; still dead, still gone.
Still cold.
He felt it again, a spike of ice in his stomach.
David considered doing a room-by-room, a last search of the ruined apartment to weed out whatever magicks remained yet there, but the plucked chord of energy he felt was so weak it could be an aftershock.
He reached for the doorknob, and withdrew his hand once more. The rains were little more than cloud-spit on the wind now, and the storm was broken in the sky.
...the shattered balance in Driftwood was finally over, and Order was restored for the first time in a long, long time.
✟ ☧ ✟
How often could things like this go on without the people of Driftwood any the wiser? Coven deaths?
Tragic murders.
A hunter dies? Gang violence, or some crime of passion.
What do they see, anyway?
What do they know of the Silent War?
To the people here, it's just random acts of violence, no matter how random, no matter how violent... and the only thing that keeps them here is that none of them are in any real danger.
Nine-to-fivers, up in the morning with the rising sun, going to work until the day is done.
Mundane lives, untouched by and large.
The two detectives stared into the grim apartment, bodies strewn from a pile in the center of the living room.
"They're all here, L.C." Detective Fallon stared at the pile. "Lillian, Daniel, Jasmine, Jeremy, and Shasta."
"We're missing one, and he's not here."
Fallon locked eyes with L.C., "Did he escape?"
L.C. shook his head. "...only in a manner of speaking."
"This isn't your guy, L.C."
L.C. shook his head. "No, and we're not meant to think it was. It's similar, though. This killer was less efficient. Came in here with intent. Similar signatures in method - the same in many regards."
"Did your guy take a protege?"
L.C. huffed a sharp laugh. "No. My guy isn't that guy. No sidekicks, no understudy, no Grayson to his Wayne."
"...then what is this, L.C.?"
"Someone finishing what someone else started a long time ago."