Chapter 78: Vincent Didn’t Make It

Midnight.

The city had gone quiet in the way a held breath is quiet. Not peace. The streets were waiting for something to move.

Ethan stood in the library shelter and checked the sword one last time. Elena and Lana were already inside the Survival Space. He wasn’t taking them to the Museum. Another body in the dark was another thing he could fail to keep alive, and tonight he needed speed more than company.

Three kilometers. That was the whole distance. Three kilometers of alleys that could hide a beast, rooftops that could hide the dead, and one careless sound that would bring a pack.

He stepped out. The night air cut his face.

For the first few hundred meters the city let him pass. He kept to the building shadows, boots soft, sword low.

Then something moved above him.

Claws on concrete. A small, dry scrape.

His head snapped up.

A mutant bat dropped off the roof of an apartment block. Bigger than any bat had a right to be. Wings nearly two meters tip to tip. A tuft of white fur on the skull caught the moon and glowed, faint and wrong. It came straight down.

He twisted. The claws missed his head by a hand’s width. Wind off the wings dragged his hair.

"Shit."

He hit the pavement and looked up. It was already banking, mouth open, ready to shriek.

He could kill it. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the noise. A scream like that would travel through empty streets and come back with friends.

Space folded.

The street vanished. He came out five hundred meters on, at the mouth of a narrow alley, and took two steps before the sound found him anyway.

Not human.

The bat was still on the far roof. Head cocked at an angle that wasn’t natural. It wasn’t searching. It was looking at him.

It can track me.

The screech tore the night open. Another answered from the east. Then another. Then a dozen.

Dark shapes poured off the rooftops. One. Five. Twenty. The sky over the street filled with wings until the moon came through in pieces. He stopped counting at a hundred.

Under the shrieking, something worse.

A roar. Deep. Close enough that the windows in the next building shivered in their frames.

Not a bat.

Tiger King.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

The swarm was already dropping. Fighting them was a way to die loud. He jumped.

Five hundred meters. The world smeared and set. Again. Again. Each fold of space took a piece of him. By the third his breath was harsh and his shoulder burned where the wolf had opened him days ago, healed and still remembering. He didn’t stop until the shrieking thinned behind him and the roar stayed where it was, busy with something that wasn’t him.

He put his back to an abandoned wall and looked down the street. Empty. His shirt was cold with sweat.

"Too close."

One in the morning. Nearly an hour to reach the Museum’s edge. Elena had been right. The ground around it crawled.

Something large shifted between dead cars. Two reflective eyes sat under a wrecked bus and didn’t blink. Farther down, a shape with too many legs crossed the road and vanished behind a building. Ethan waited. Watched. Listened. Then he jumped twice more, each landing chosen so nothing on the street had a clean line to him.

The Museum rose out of the dark like a fortress someone had forgotten to surrender. Stone front. Heavy doors. Reinforced glass. Built for security long before the apocalypse, and that had turned out to be the only mercy left. Most of the animals hadn’t gotten in.

He slipped through a side entrance. The outside died behind him.

Dark. A few emergency lights still worked, red and green, weak as coals. Dust. Old paper. Air that hadn’t moved in weeks.

Then voices. Quiet. Human.

He stopped against the wall. More than a few. He took the stairs light, and on the second-floor landing the words came down clear.

"Third floor’s almost out. We have to hit the underground supermarket tomorrow."

"Are you insane? That crocodile’s still down there."

"It hasn’t moved?"

"Five went yesterday. One came back."

A pause.

"And the others?"

"Dead."

Silence. Then, thinner: "So we sit here and starve?"

"You hear what I heard? Aria and the sixth floor have been sitting on cans. A lot of them."

The next voice dropped. "How about we..."

Ethan stopped.

Aria. Elena’s sister-in-law.

Sixth floor.

He didn’t wait for the rest of the plan. Space took him. The landing vanished. He stood in a corridor where most of the emergency lights were dead and the quiet felt watched.

At the far end, a yellow glow leaked from an exhibition hall. The sign above the door read CALLIGRAPHY AND PAINTING EXHIBITION.

He walked toward it.

A woman stood at the windows, back to him. Beige trench coat, loose on a frame that had been living on too little. One hand held a sharpened iron rod. Outside, hundreds of bats circled the far roofs, their shapes cutting the moon.

The floor creaked.

She spun. The rod came up. Her eyes locked on him.

She was beautiful in the way hunger doesn’t quite erase. Pale. Lips cracked. Dark hair loose around her face. Sharp brows. Clear eyes. A straight nose. A jaw that still held its line.

The coat had fallen open when she spun, and the thin shirt under it was losing. Her breasts were full, heavy for how little she’d been eating, the soft weight of them pulling the fabric tight, the curve of each one clear when she braced the rod. Her waist had narrowed. Her hips hadn’t. The coat hem shifted when she stepped back, and the scrubs clung to a round, high ass, the cheeks filling the cloth, flexing once as she set her feet. Exhaustion sat on her face. It hadn’t touched the body. Even scared, even thirsty, she looked like a woman a room would turn to watch.

[System Alert: Gift target detected.]

[Aria Vance, 36.]

[Beauty Score: 97.]

His brows lifted. Ninety-seven.

She tightened on the rod. "Who are you?" Rough from thirst. No weakness in it.

He kept his hands where she could see them. "I’m looking for Aria."

Her face changed. "That’s me." Half a step back. "Why?"

He studied her. He didn’t want the whole truth in a hallway where the floor below was already pricing her cans. Then he gave her the part that mattered.

"Elena sent me."

The rod dropped an inch. "Elena?"

"She’s alive."

Aria stared. Tears came fast, like they’d been waiting for permission. "Where is she?" She stepped in. "Where’s Lana? My daughter. Where is my daughter?"

"Both safe." He lowered his voice. "They’re with me. Not here. Is there somewhere we can talk?"

She looked at the dark corridor. The hardness came back. Then she nodded. "This way."

They crossed the hall. Paintings hung in the dark. Moonlight cut the dust. At the far end she unlocked a storage room. He went in. She locked the door behind them and turned.

"They’re really alive?"

"Yes."

Her hand came up over her mouth. A sob got out before she could stop it. He waited. Grief didn’t need a narrator.

She wiped her face. "What happened to them?"

"They’ve been surviving. Elena’s been sick over you."

Aria closed her eyes. Relief moved through her, visible, almost painful. Then he hesitated.

"Vincent Vance."

The relief died. Her shoulders started to shake.

"My husband."

He said nothing.

"He’s gone."

The room went thin. Outside, something screeched and faded. Inside, only her trying to hold the rest of it in.

"Third day after the power and water died, we couldn’t reach my mother. Vincent and I decided to leave." Her fingers locked on the rod. "We almost made it. Back entrance. A mutant python found us." Quieter. "He knew I couldn’t outrun it. So he ran the other way."

Ethan’s jaw tightened.

"He wanted me back inside." Her breath broke. "I watched it catch him. I watched it drag him into the grass. I was standing right there." The sob came again. "And I couldn’t do anything."

He looked at the door. Death had become ordinary in this city. Losing someone you loved had not.

He held out his hand. "Come with me."

She stared at it. "What?"

"I’ll take you to Elena and Lana. Don’t fight it. A second. That’s all."

She hesitated. Then she put her hand in his. Cold. Steady enough.

Space twisted.

The storage room, the paintings, the bats on the moon ~ all of it went.