WAR: WIIGF 17 (Patreon)

Chapter 17: The Blood Map

The ozone off the back of those dinosaur-ass monitors Lucky had wired together down here was almost thick enough to taste. 

The hum underneath that wasn't the machines, though.

Nah, that was all just people. Too many people.

It was over two dozen grown-ass adults packed tight in a church basement that smelled like old incense somebody kept burning to cover up the other smell. Packed tighter than Ken had seen it in the last couple weeks, even during training days, it was more than just the Crosscutters and his crew in here. You also had a half-dozen priests in black standing around all solemn like it was mass and twice as many nuns in their habits looking like chess pieces waiting for someone to make the first move. 

Young ones, old ones, all of them watching Keane or the board or each other with the kind of quiet that meant everyone was thinking the same thing and nobody wanted to say it first. We're fucked. That's what they're thinking. We're all fucked.

That symbol they'd found, the one some psycho had finger-painted on a brick wall in the Wharf with what used to be inside three people, sat front and center now on the corkboard. Ken's eyes went to it without asking permission, red spinning up in his vision before he could stop it, and the Sharingan locked that image down deep where it'd sit forever, clear as day, the kind of memory that'd wake him up at three AM when he was forty. If I make it to forty.

The sketch done in color pencil pinned right up next to it made the horror somehow worse, though. Making the mess clean, taking out the pulsing sickness and doing it up in neat little art-strokes just felt wrong. Evil should look evil. 

Father Keane stood in front of the whole mess, the usual soft librarian priest vibe he had going stripped raw like someone had taken a Brillo to his face. One layer off, the man looked sharper, the usual smile gone and leaving him all hard angles and the kind of focus that made Ken think of those nature documentaries where the hawk spots the rabbit. 

Which one’s the real father, then? He still hadn’t forgotten about the Men In Black shit Lucky had talked about either. Which one’s the mask?

“None of this is new… crazy… I thought it might have been a one-off but nooo…” Lucky was hunched over one of the monitors, fingers moving so fast they blurred, and next to him was Sister Lucy. 

The young sister who'd tried to knife Kenny in the back two weeks back, right here, right after his eyes went full Uchiha for the first time. Psycho bitch.

Her hair was chopped short and blunt around her jaw like he remembered, black as the habit she wore, and her face was all sharp points; nose, cheekbones, chin, nothing soft anywhere. Pale as milk left out too long. Her eyes were too big and too light, catching the monitor glow in a way that made the already pale blues look colorless and empty. She moved like a snake pretending to be still, and Lucky's manic energy next to her just made it worse, a hummingbird trapped in a room with something that ate hummingbirds.

Yeah, keep your distance from that one.

"Okaykaykayyy, so look over this real quick," Lionel Duffy’s voice came out half-whisper, half-shout; quickly rattled syllbales bouncing off stone. Lucky’s fingers didn’t stop for a second whilehe talked, one hand machine-gunning the plastic keys as he pulled up a half-dozen pages and slid through so many more while his other was firm on the mouth. "Cross-referencing the GPS tag from Kenny's photo, nice shot by the way real clear even with all the…” He waved one hand at Kenny’s face, specifically his eyes. “Anyway, recent police reports, yeah? Unsolved homicides, John and Jane Does out the wazooo, all the ones the media's been pinning on the Blüdhaven Butcher.” Lucky clicked his tongue. “Thing is, though, we already got another case like this, two weeks back, bodies found in the Glades same MO. And then another set two weeks before that over by Downtown, which is weird but even weirder, cause it’s the exact same look every time which i-”

"Standard exsanguination pattern for ritual preparation." Sister Lucy's voice slid in like a whisper that forgot its volume, the rest of her face refusing to move when she talked. "The throat wound… performative, just misdirection. Gathering blood is the purpose."

"Whoa okay, Sister Spooky, thanks for the chime-in, yeah?" Lucky frowned at his screen, typed faster, muttered under his breath. "Right right, Glades... okay and fucking wow, another set six weeks before now, over by the old textile district, same deal, body drained, throat hamburger meat..." 

His fingers stopped. Started again. "And yeah…Three of 'em in every case."

Ken's hand flexed at his side, the one that'd been busted a couple weeks back, the one that'd healed too fast after he ate those magic Cheesy Poofs. …what the fuck is this?

Lucky looked up from the screen, blue-white lighting giving him a look almost as pale as the horror-movie nun to his right. "Wharf, Glades, Downtown, Textile."

"The Butcher, yes..." Keane's voice came out tight, fingers still gripping the edge of that corkboard.

Ken's eyes slid from the father and back to the map glowing on Lucky's monitor, only he wasn't looking at it the way they were. Not with his eyes spinning red and that single tomoe working overtime. “What about the Butcher, though?” Ken’s mouth opened up again as he turned back to Father Keane.

The father shook his head, pushing away the question. "Nothing, it's just... these horrible killings. The brutality of them."

"He ain't just killing people."

The whole basement went quiet as all eyes snapped to him at once.

Ken held back a groan, suddenly feeling the same pressure you get when the teacher calls on you and everyone's waiting to see if you eat your own tongue. Ken knew that feeling real well, considering he once spent half of Physics drowning in it. 

Except this time, he did have it. 

The teenager didn't look at any of them, nuns or street soldiers, gaze locked on the glowing screen where Lucky's map sat. His eyes just spun faster and faster as they fed him all the dots and he put them together. "He's making something.” The pattern being drawn with death was a much bigger version of the weird glyph they’d already painted in blood. “Connecting the spots. It's a design."

Marcus pushed himself off the stone pillar he'd been leaning on, thick arms unfolding from his chest as his boots scraped the ground. "Connecting them how, kid?" Marcus was all cop bullshit down to the voice and even when he wasn’t on-duty, the man was never not on-duty. "Geek just listed what we know already. No pattern. Random kills, random locations."

"Nah." The single word slid out with a laugh he didn’t feel as Kenny walked closer to the monitor, finger coming up to trace a line in the air just above the screen, thin and glowing faint red in his Sharingan vision. "Y'all looking at it like a map. Street names and neighborhoods and all that. Ain't about that."

His finger kept moving, connecting invisible dots. "This spot here..." He tapped the screen where the Wharf sat, CRT glass warm under his fingertip. "And this one over in the Glades, and this one..." Another tap, Downtown. "They make a line. Straight one, yeah. You gotta look at 'em like... like a constellation or those onnect the dots things. They're drawing that fucked-up thing on the city."

Sister Lucy looked up from where she'd been standing next to Lucky's hunched-over form. Her too-pale face lifted, those colorless eyes fixing on Ken in a way that made his chakra flare up, the world sharpening even further as he stared back at her.

"Leyline."

Lucky's fingers froze mid-keystroke, the same moment as Ken flinched at Lucy’s voice the way she hissed the word out.

"A what line?" Lucky's head whipped around so fast Ken half-expected it to fly off that skinny neck. 

"They are anchoring these ritual killings to the city's veins,” she spoke up again, pale blue eyes firmly fixed to the screen. “The leylines.”

"The hell's a leyline?” Lucky asked again, the blond still looking confused as hell. “That some kinda... some new subway route the leeches are building? Like a reverse Underground Railroad?”

"No." Father Keane turned away from the corkboard, and Ken caught the way his face had gone pale under the harsh fluorescent wash. Paler than a normal Irish guy, anyway. "Not a subway, Lionel."

The father's voice came out strained, tight in a way Ken hadn't heard before. His knuckles where he gripped the desk edge had gone white, bloodless. For the first time since Ken met the man, the priest looked... scared. 

"It's not a vampire clan marking." Keane's eyes stayed locked on that blood-sketch sigil. "Sweet Mother Mary, it's so much worse than that."

"Then, what we talking about, father?" Tyke's voice came from somewhere behind Ken, his rumbling voice impatient in a way the big guy usually wasn’t. “Y’all can’t be just goin’ in circles and leave us out of it.” 

Keane's eyes found Ken's across the room, that hawk-focus not flinching even past the fear. "It's a thaumaturgical pin. Old, dangerous; it is a form of ritual magecraft outright heretical in practice. Much more so than even standard thaumaturgy."

Thaumaturgy.

The word hit Ken in a familiar way, taking him back to the rooftop of the school a week and a half back, right before he got his first jutsu. That's... ain't that the same kinda shit Luigi says he uses? 

I mean, the word fit in his mouth and he could have sword his friend had mentioned it once or twice. Has to be, right?

Keane pointed one finger at the drawing pinned to the corkboard, hand steady even if his face wasn't. "The symbol anchors the working to a specific location. A confluence of geomantic energy... a leyline. Dragon's Vein, some call it. The blood, the bodies, the terror of their deaths..." 

His finger traced the air slowly, following lines Ken could see and the father seemed to only guess at. "Nothing of this is accidental. All of that is the catalyst. Human essence corrupted by fear and death to poison…."

The father dropped his hand back down to his side.

"These monsters are nailing a wound into the city's soul."

It was weird how right that word felt; what he had seen last night had been like a gaping wound bleeding out something wrong into the world. A wound. 

It only made sense that monsters like vampires would do something like that, anyway. “H-how you…” His voice came out rougher than he meant it to, Ken clearing his throught for a second before he spoke again, words still feeling uneven. “How you know all that?”

Mei Mei blinked his way for a second, the redheaded girl looking up from where she sat, silent and listening, before glancing over at the other redhead in the room. “Y-yeah, father… where a priest learn sum’ like that?”

Both questions hung in the air, along with questioning eyes from Marcus, Lucky, and several of the gathered priests and nuns turned Keane’s way. 

Like he hadn’t just looked as scared as any of them, the father’s face suddenly went smooth as he nodded Mei Mei’s way. “A good question, my child. His eyes shifted to Ken, mouth tightening to a firmer line as his shoulders rose and falli onc under the black cassock. “Before I took my vows,” he continued, slow and carefully like he was choosing each word, “I spent some time in Europe doing… other necessary work for the Church. In nomine Patris.”

Other work. Ken’s brain snagged on the words. 

That wasn’t an answer. That was a fucking wall as high as the damn church steeple. Priests didn’t do ‘other work’. They prayed and drank weak wine and told old ladies their sins were forgiven. 

They didn’t learn about blood magic and thauma-whatever-the-fuck pins and leylines. Unless they did… which made Father Keane’s sketchy backstory make a whole lot more sense, but brought a fuckton more questions. What kinda work, Father?

He let it go. For now. Even though the questions kept piling up. I need to get a notepad or something, maaaaan.

“So what now?” Marcus cut in to Kenny’s thoughts. “We know what it is. Or what you think it is. How do we stop it?”

“This is no longer about hunting nests,” Keane said, his voice regaining some of its usual authority behind that calm, priestly mask again. “If they are creating what I believe they are we must try to predict the next anchor point.”

Lucky’s fingers were already flying across the keyboard, clatter filling the silence again. “Anchor point, okay, okay, what we talking? Gimme some angles, Father, I can run the calc. Some basic, trig, man, I got thi-”

“It won’t be perfect,” Keane’s voice was a firm interruption, eyes staring at the map like it was an enemy. “These rituals… they are built on resonance, a sympathetic process. No simple math will point us their way. Wherever they plan their deed next, it will be a place that echoes the unholy work to be done.” The father shook his head. “A place filled with pain, death and of spilled blood, most likely.”

Ken stared at the map, at the glowing dots of the murder sites. A wharf where bodies probably washed up every damn week. A slum where hope went to die. An old, abandoned factory district where God knows how many workers got chewed up and spat out. No… none of those work.

He traced a new line on the screen with his finger, connecting the four known points and extending it outward, to another section of the city.

“The Narrows.”

Keane looked up, his expression unreadable, but his eyes sharp. “What?”

Lucky stopped typing, turning to look at Ken mid-clatter. “Huh? The Narrows? Ain’t nothing down there but crackheads and stray dogs, Mr. Magic.”

Ken turned to face them, the red of his eyes probably glowing in the dim light. “I can see it.”Lionel snorted his way. “Yeah, I b-”

“What do you see, Kenneth?” The father’s interjection was enough to silence Lucky, whatever joke the tweaking blond had on his lips going nowhere.

Ken pointed a single, steady finger at a dark patch on the map, a tangle of streets near the river that looked like a tumor on the city grid. “There’s that old free clinic down there. My mom told me… she told me how they had a bad transfusion incident and it killed a bunch of people. It’s abandoned now…”

He looked up at the father, hand still out and pointing. “Bad blood… bunch of sickness ending in death… abandoned old spot… perfect place for a vampire ritual, right?”

Keane looked at where Ken was pointing, his eyes widening a little. A slow, grim nod was his only answer.