Toussaint didn’t wake up so much as return.

  Sound arrived first, distant , like it had to push through a layer of water before it could reach him. A siren somewhere blocks away. Rotors fading into the night. A man shouting, then the shout turning into something else when it didn’t get answered.

  Then the pain.

  It came in pieces at first, scattered points of heat and pressure, as if his body was remembering. A cracked rib. Something wrong in his shoulder. The taste of blood, old now, thick at the back of his throat.

  He lay on his side in an alley that smelled like wet concrete and oil.

  His coat had hardened where it had soaked through. The ground beneath him was cold enough to keep him awake and still too warm where his blood had pooled.

  He tried to breathe deeply and regretted it.

  A laugh almost escaped him, thin and involuntary.

  It was always like that.

  People thought surviving meant getting away with it. People thought a miracle was clean. They didn’t understand the debt.

  He stared at the wall in front of him until his vision stopped pulsing. A patch of peeling paint. A dark streak from old rain. Something small and meaningless to keep the world from spinning.

  His fingers flexed.

  Pain flared down his arm, sharp enough to make his jaw tighten.

  He just waited for the worst of it to pass, because it always did, eventually.

  The first time had felt like a lie.

  The first time had been smoke and screaming and metal…

  --

  He could still taste the grit in his teeth when he thought about it.

  A street that had stopped being a street and become a trench. A sky the wrong color. The sound of someone calling his name and then nothing at all, the call swallowed by gunfire and debris.

  He had been on his back then too, staring up at shattered concrete and the underside of a collapsed sign. His hands had been slick, his fingers trembling with that useless urgency the body had when it knew it was losing.

  He remembered looking at his own blood and thinking, absurdly, that it was too much.

  That no one lost that much and stayed in the world.

  A radio had crackled somewhere near his head.

  Orders. Static. Someone shouting about pulling back.

  Toussaint had tried to move. His legs had not listened.

  He had been young enough to still believe dying was something that happened loudly.

  It didn’t.

  It happened quietly, with the body turning heavy, the edges of sound narrowing, the world slipping away without asking permission.

  And then, like a thought dragged from the bottom of a well, his daughter’s face had surfaced.

  Just her, small and stubborn, hair in her eyes, looking up at him like she expected him to be there.

  He hadn’t seen her in weeks.

  He’d promised he would be home soon.

  Promises were cheap in war.

  He remembered the exact moment the promise became desperation.

  Just one more day, he’d thought.

  Just long enough to see her again.

  His hand had found something in his pocket then, not because he’d been planning it, but because someone had handed it to him earlier with a look that said don’t ask.

  A wrapped piece of red-black matter, brittle and fragrant in a way that made his mouth water and his stomach turn at the same time.

  He hadn’t understood what it was.

  He understood what it could do.

  He brought it to his mouth and bit down.

  The taste had been wrong. Bitter and sweet, floral and metallic, like blood mixed with fruit.

  He swallowed.

  Nothing happened.

  For a long moment, he’d thought he’d made it worse. Thought he’d wasted the last seconds of his life on a superstition.

  Then his breath had caught.

  From pain.

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  A deep, brutal pain that didn’t replace the wounds but wrapped around them, filled them, threaded through his nerves like wire being pulled tight.

  He had convulsed, teeth grinding so hard he’d felt them scrape.

  He had wanted to die then, not because he was afraid, but because the pain was too much to carry.

  And then it began to subside.

  Slowly, like tidewater draining.

  His fingers had stopped shaking. His vision had widened again. He had been able to breathe without choking.

  He had looked down and seen his blood still there, but his body no longer slipping away with it.

  He had pushed himself upright, shaking, sweating, alive.

  A man nearby had stared at him like he was seeing a ghost.

  Toussaint had been too busy trying not to vomit.

  He had made it out of the street. He had made it out of the battle. He had made it home days later with hollow expression and a promise kept by accident.

  His daughter had been waiting by the door.

  Her mother had looked at him like she didn’t know whether to hit him or hold him.

  He remembered kneeling down, and hearing his daughter say something simple and devastating.

  You’re back.

  He hadn’t told her why.

  He hadn’t told anyone…

  --

  The alley came back into focus.

  Toussaint’s breath rasped as he shifted his weight. Something in his ribs protested, then relented. The pain was still there, but it wasn’t climbing anymore.

  He let his head rest against the wall behind him.

  “Five years,” he murmured, voice rough.

  It came out like a joke he didn’t expect anyone to laugh at.

  He huffed once, the closest thing to a chuckle.

  “About five,” he corrected quietly.

  It was getting a little harder to recover from things.

  Not in a way he could measure. Just a sense that the tide took longer to pull back each time.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the pain settle into something tolerable.

  Then he opened them and forced himself up.

  When he stood, the world steadied.

  He pressed his palm to his side where the worst of the damage had been. His hand came away wet and dark, but not fresh anymore.

  He looked down at it and felt nothing in particular.

  “You never forget the pain,” he said, as if explaining something to the alley.

  He wiped his hand on his coat and took a step out into the street.

  The station lights flickered in the distance. Smoke still rose where the platform had broken open. People moved around it like ants around a disturbed nest, emergency crews arriving late, shouting into radios, pointing at structural damage they didn’t understand.

  Toussaint’s comm vibrated against his ribs.

  He fished it out and keyed it with stiff fingers.

  “I’m up,” he said.

  There was a pause on the line. Then Ives, sharper than before.

  “You’re alive,” she said.

  Toussaint glanced toward the station, eyes narrowing against the glare of emergency lights. “Technically.”

  “Report,” she said.

  He exhaled slowly through his nose. “Case is gone.”

  Silence.

  Then, quieter, “How?”

  “Shadow user took it back,” Toussaint replied. He kept his tone level, because if he didn’t, the anger would show through. “He had help. Or he thought he didn’t need it.”

  “Shadow and heat,” Ives said, piecing it together. “You ran into both.”

  “Yes,” Toussaint said. “Heat user started the mess. Shadow user finished it.”

  “And the building?” Ives asked.

  Toussaint’s eyes flicked to the office block, or what remained of it. It wasn’t on fire. It hadn’t exploded. It had folded.

  Compressed.

  He didn’t like thinking about it.

  “Pressure,” he said after a moment. “Structural collapse. Not heat or impact.”

  Ives didn’t answer right away.

  “What does that mean?” Toussaint asked.

  “That means,” she said slowly, “there was another hunter.”

  Toussaint’s jaw tightened. “Great.”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  He looked down at himself, at the blood, the torn coat, the way his hands weren’t shaking anymore even though they should have been.

  “A few blocks out,” he said. “Walking.”

  “Don’t,” Ives said immediately. “Stay put.”

  Toussaint’s mouth twitched. “You want me to sit back down in the alley?”

  “I want you alive,” Ives said.

  “You’re late,” he replied, but there was no real bite in it.

  A faint exhale on the line. The closest thing to relief.

  “Get somewhere covered,” she said. “I’m rerouting.”

  Toussaint pocketed the comm and started moving anyway, slower now, head down, choosing streets with fewer lights.

  The city had a way of pretending it was normal even when it wasn’t. People stepped around broken glass like it was an inconvenience. Cars crawled past barricades. Someone yelled about a missed connection. Someone else laughed, too loud, because laughter was easier than thinking.

  Toussaint kept walking.

  He tried not to think about the case.

  He tried not to think about the way Victor had looked down at him and decided he wasn’t worth finishing.

  He tried not to think about the building folding like a hand had closed around it.

  He failed at all three…

  --

  The lab was quiet.

  Not the quiet of abandonment or secrecy, but the quiet of controlled systems. Machines hummed behind glass. Cool air moved through vents with a steady, regulated breath. Lights glowed white and constant, no flicker, no failure.

  Kiara stepped through the door without hesitation.

  She didn’t look impressed. She didn’t look nervous. She looked mildly annoyed, like she’d been pulled away from something more interesting.

  A man in a clean coat met her at the threshold, eyes flicking to the case in her hand.

  “Asset recovered,” he said.

  Kiara held it out without ceremony. “Try not to drop it.”

  He took it with both hands as if it might bite.

  Another person stood behind him, watching through clear lenses, tablet in hand. A third monitored a row of screens showing data Toussaint would have recognized if he’d ever been allowed to see his own file.

  “Transfer confirmed,” the second one said after a moment. “Payment posted.”

  Kiara’s mouth twitched once. Satisfaction, minimal and private. Then it vanished.

  “Good,” she said. “If that’s all…”

  “It’s all,” the man in the coat replied. He already sounded distracted.

  Kiara didn’t wait for dismissal. She turned and walked out, the door sealing softly behind her.

  The lab remained.

  The case was placed on a stainless steel table beneath a suspended rig of sensors. Gloved hands undid the clasp slowly, careful and practiced. The lid lifted.

  Inside, protected by layered containment, was the Hellbloom.

  Not a flower as most people would recognize one.

  Something red and dark, petals folded like sharp fabric, pulsing faintly as if it remembered being alive.

  A low reading tone sounded from the equipment as scanners activated.

  “Specimen intact,” someone said.

  Another voice, older, calm, neither excited nor afraid.

  “Resume replication trials,” it said.