Jude's apartment was silent, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the frantic, rhythmic clicking of Fernando's pen against the kitchen counter.
The sound was driving Jude insane, but he didn't have the heart to say anything. Fernando stress-clicked. It was his thing. Everyone needed a thing.
On the table, Jude's tablet displayed a map of Philadelphia that was proving aggressively useless. The tracking algorithm Bob had given them, "proprietary celestial technology," he'd called it, like that meant anything, was showing a whole lot of nothing. Just a flat green grid with no pings, no spikes, no signs of demonic activity anywhere in the greater metropolitan area.
"It is statistically impossible," Fernando muttered, staring at the screen with wide, bloodshot eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept in days, which was accurate, because he hadn't. "Matter cannot simply cease to exist. Even ectoplasmic matter. Even demonic matter. Conservation of energy, Jude. It is a fundamental law of the universe."
Jude leaned back in his chair, rubbing his face with both hands. He felt like he hadn't slept since he died, which was less accurate but emotionally true.
"Maybe he's shielding?" Jude offered. "He's a vessel, right? Maybe he can hide inside the meat suit. Go dormant or something."
"The meat suit was compromised!" Fernando countered, gesturing with his pen like a conductor leading an orchestra of anxiety. "We compromised it! You cut off his arms! I burned his face! He should be leaking spectral resonance like a reactor in meltdown. But the sensors are reading zero. Flatline. Nada."
He threw his hands up, nearly knocking over a half-empty bottle of Gatorade that had been sitting on the counter for three days.
"Unless he is dead," Fernando offered, a note of desperate hope creeping into his voice. "Maybe he succumbed to his injuries? Infection? Tetanus?"
"He's a demon lord possessing a dead soldier, Fern. I don't think he needs a tetanus shot."
Jude tapped the screen, zooming in on the blackened spot in Kensington where the Vyper factory had stood. The satellite imagery still showed the scorch marks from Fernando's fire, the collapsed section of roof, the police tape that nobody had bothered to remove.
"He's not dead," Jude said quietly. "He's ghosting us. He knows we're hunting him now, so he's staying off the radar."
"Then he could be anywhere." Fernando's voice rose in pitch, cracking slightly. "He could be in Jersey. He could be in the sewers. He could be in Delaware. He could be—"
Fernando's eyes drifted to the front door.
"—standing in the hallway right now."
He froze, staring at the door like it might explode.
"He's not in the hallway," Jude said, though he checked the tracker again just to be sure. Still nothing. "We need to think like him. He's hurt. He's angry. He lost his arms and his army in the same night. Where do you go when you lose everything?"
The lock on the front door clicked.
Fernando yelped and dove behind the kitchen island with the speed and grace of a startled cat. Jude's bow materialized in his hand instantly, a shaft of golden light illuminating the living room in sharp, angular shadows.
The door swung open.
Greta walked in.
She stopped in the doorway, looking at Jude's glowing weapon, then at the top of Fernando's head poking out from behind the counter like a terrified prairie dog.
She didn't look alarmed. She looked annoyed.
"Really?" Greta deadpanned. She kicked the door shut behind her with her heel. "I go do the mental health thing for one hour, and you two turn the apartment into a panic room?"
Jude let the bow dissolve, the light fading from the room. "Standard procedure. Fern's been jumpy."
"I am not jumpy!" Fernando argued, standing up and adjusting his glasses with as much dignity as he could muster. "I am vigilant. There is a significant difference!"
Greta ignored him, walking straight to the fridge with the single-minded focus of someone who had earned the right to hydration. She looked different than she had the night before, the gray skin of withdrawal was fading, replaced by the tired, raw look of someone who had just spent sixty minutes crying in a church basement surrounded by strangers.
But her walls were back up. Reinforced concrete, freshly poured.
She grabbed a bottle of water and leaned against the counter, crossing her arms.
"So?" Jude asked, trying to sound casual and failing miserably. "How was it? The meeting?"
Greta cracked the seal on the water bottle. "It was a room full of people sitting on folding chairs talking about their feelings. It smelled like stale coffee and desperation. A guy named Gary cried about his dead cat for fifteen minutes."
"Did you… participate?"
"I sat there." Greta took a long sip. "I didn't throw a chair. I didn't punch anyone. I call that progress. Can we stop talking about my emotional state now? It's making me itchy."
"Okay," Jude nodded, knowing better than to push. He'd learned that lesson the hard way. "Win accepted. Moving on."
He gestured to the tablet on the table. "We're stuck. Caligo is completely off the grid. Fern thinks he's invisible. I think he's hiding. Either way, we have no lead."
Greta walked over to the table, water bottle in hand. She looked at the map for approximately two seconds.
"North," she said.
Fernando blinked. "North? Why north? The tracker shows no resonance spikes in that sector. The data suggests—"
"Fuck the data," Greta interrupted, holding up a hand. She pointed at the darkened blotch of Kensington on the map. "Look at the guy. He's arrogant. He stood there and let us hit him because he thought we were insects. He gave a villain monologue while he was torturing us. Then we cut his arms off and burned his face."
She looked at Jude, eyes hard.
"He's not hiding in a hole somewhere licking his wounds. He's pissed. He's going back to the place where he felt strong. He's going back to the factory."
"The scene of the crime?" Jude frowned. "That's the first place we'd look. It's tactically stupid."
"He's not tactical. He's a drama queen." Greta tapped the map hard enough to make the screen ripple. "He's going back to his throne room to sulk, regenerate, and wait for us to show up so he can prove last night was a fluke. That we got lucky. That he's still the apex predator."
Fernando looked at his algorithms, then at Greta. Slowly, reluctantly, he lowered his pen.
"The ambient necrotic energy in that area would accelerate tissue regeneration," Fernando admitted quietly. "And his psychological profile does suggest a high degree of narcissism. It is… a plausible hypothesis."
"It's not a hypothesis," Greta said, grabbing her jacket from the back of a chair. "It's a fact. He's waiting for us."
Jude looked at the map. He thought about Caligo's dead eyes—the way they had tracked him with clinical precision even as Fernando's fire melted his face. He thought about the smile on those gray lips as the demon dissolved into shadow.
We will be in touch, Mr. Miller.
"He wants a rematch," Jude realized.
"Good," Greta said, shrugging into her jacket. "Because I didn't get to finish swinging my axe."
Jude stood up. He felt the phantom weight of the wings on his back, folded and waiting. He felt the fear, cold and heavy in his stomach, the memory of Caligo's hand on his chest, his heart stopping, but he shoved it down. Locked it away.
That was a problem for later.
"Okay," Jude said. "North Philly. We go in hard. No speeches. No monologues. No giving him time to regenerate."
"We hit him until he stops moving," Greta agreed.
"And then we burn the pieces," Fernando added, his voice surprisingly steady.
Jude grabbed his keys from the counter.
"Let's go to work."
The atmosphere in North Philadelphia wasn't just different from Center City; it was a complete rejection of everything south of Spring Garden Street.
They stepped off the subway and into a world that felt like it had been developed in a darkroom. It was high noon, the sun blazing directly overhead, but here the light was strangled. A thick, persistent haze; part industrial exhaust, part something worse, hung low over the rooftops of Kensington, turning the sky into a bruised purple overlay that made noon feel like dusk.
"It smells like pennies," Greta muttered, kicking a used needle into the gutter with the toe of her boot. "And wet dog. And something dead."
"It is the necrotic particulate matter," Fernando whispered, pulling his collar up over his nose like a makeshift filter. His eyes darted between the boarded-up row homes and the flickering streetlights that buzzed even in the middle of the day. "The gloom is denser here. It refracts the sunlight, absorbs the heat. Basically a vampire's dream vacation."
Jude scanned the street, looking for the familiar blue-and-white banners of P.I.T. that plastered every surface in Center City. He looked for a Titan billboard, an Ironclad safety poster, any sign that the heroes gave a shit about this neighborhood.
There were none.
"No heroes," Jude noted, his voice low. "Titan doesn't patrol here, does he?"
"Titan doesn't cross Spring Garden," Fernando said, and there was a bitterness in his voice that Jude hadn't heard before. "The insurance premiums are too high. The optics are too complicated. This is the Dead Zone, Jude. No cameras. No patrols. No rescue coming."
He looked at the crumbling buildings, the hollow-eyed people shuffling past, the desperation that hung in the air like smoke.
"Just us."
The next hour was a frustrating montage of kicking down doors and finding absolutely nothing.
They swept the perimeter of the burnt-out factory where they had fought Caligo. Nothing, just scorched concrete and the lingering smell of death. They checked the subway maintenance tunnels where Fernando had first led them to the Vypers. Nothing, just rats and standing water and graffiti that hadn't been updated since the 90s. They climbed to the roof of a derelict textile mill to get a vantage point. Nothing, just a gray expanse of urban decay stretching to the horizon.
Jude's tracker remained stubbornly, infuriatingly silent. The radar sweep spun in its perfect green circle, pinging off nothing but the ambient misery of the neighborhood.
"He's not here," Greta announced finally, hurling a piece of rubble off the roof. It clattered into the alleyway three stories down with a crash that startled a flock of pigeons. "We're wasting time. He's probably in Jersey, regenerating in some shitty motel."
"He is not in Jersey," Fernando argued, though his voice had lost its conviction. He looked like he was about to collapse from exhaustion. "The energy signature from his dissolution was massive. Mass cannot just disappear. It has to go somewhere."
They regrouped in the alleyway behind an abandoned auto-body shop. The location was sketchy even by North Philly standards; shadows stretched long and unnatural across the graffiti-stained walls, and the silence was heavy, pressing against their eardrums like a physical weight.
Jude leaned against a rusted dumpster, wiping sweat from his forehead despite the cold. "Fern's right about the physics, but Greta's right about the results. We've swept the grid. If Caligo was here, we'd feel him. My skin usually crawls when he's within a mile."
"So we lost him," Greta said, crossing her arms. "Great. Amazing strategy, team. 'Go back to the place where we almost died and hope for the best.' Ten out of ten. Flawless execution."
"We tried," Jude snapped, the fatigue fraying his temper. "Unless you have a better idea, we call it. Go back, regroup, and wait for a ping."
"I have an idea," Greta retorted. "It involves finding a bar and—"
CRUNCH.
The sound cut through the alley like a gunshot.
It wasn't the wind. It wasn't a rat scurrying through garbage. It was the heavy, deliberate sound of a boot crushing broken glass.
The three of them froze.
The alleyway went dead silent. Jude's hand drifted to his side, fingers closing around empty air where the bow would materialize.
"Tracker?" Jude mouthed silently.
Fernando looked at the tablet clutched in his white-knuckled hands. He shook his head frantically. Dead air. Nothing.
"Tweaker," Greta whispered, rolling her eyes and relaxing her stance. "Just some junkie looking for copper wire. I'll scare him off."
"No." Fernando grabbed her arm before she could move. His grip was surprisingly strong, driven by pure terror. "It is not a tweaker."
"Fern, let go—"
"I know the walk," Fernando hissed, his voice trembling but absolute. "Tweakers shuffle. They drag their feet. That sound—that was a tactical step. Heel-to-toe. Controlled weight distribution."
His eyes met Jude's, wide behind his cracked glasses.
"That is a patrol."
Jude looked toward the mouth of the alley. The shadows seemed to be deepening, shifting, coalescing into something angular and human-shaped.
"Caligo?" Greta asked, her hand hovering over the empty space where her axe would appear.
"No ping," Jude whispered. "Caligo radiates energy like a furnace. This is cold. This is—"
The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water.
"P.I.T.," he breathed. "If they're sweeping the area for whoever caused the explosion—"
"Cover," Jude ordered. "Now."
They didn't argue. The trio scrambled behind the rusted bulk of the dumpster just as a figure stepped into the mouth of the alleyway.
The silence stretched for three agonizing seconds.
Then a voice boomed out, not the cold professionalism of a P.I.T. operative, but the distinct, theatrical projection of someone who had never met a quiet moment he didn't want to ruin.
"I KNOW YOU'RE BACK THERE, FERNANDO!"
Fernando flinched so hard he nearly dropped the tablet.
"I can hear your heavy breathing! It's vibrating the air molecules! You're like a foghorn!"
Jude exchanged a look with Greta. She looked as confused as he felt.
"Come out," the voice demanded, dropping to a dramatic whisper that was still definitely loud enough to be heard from the street. "Before I decide to rearrange the architecture with your faces."
Slowly, hands raised but ready to summon weapons, the trio stood up from behind the dumpster.
Standing at the mouth of the alley, blocking the only exit, was Kraz.
He looked… distinct. His fur coat, custom Italian, allegedly, was slightly singed, probably from the Vyper base collapse. A band-aid on his chin ruined his whole "mysterious warlord" aesthetic. His hair was doing something ambitious that gravity didn't agree with.
Flanking him were two Vypers Fernando vaguely recognized from his time as an unwilling intern, the B-Squad. The guys who usually stood in the back holding heavy boxes while the cool people did crimes.
Fernando made a strangled noise. "Kraz? But the tunnel… the structural integrity—"
"I made my own exit!" Kraz declared, throwing his arms wide like he was accepting applause from an invisible audience. "You think a little thing like gravity can stop The Kraz? Please."
"Hey, Fern!" one of the B-Squad chirped, waving enthusiastically. His mask was slightly too big for his head, giving him the appearance of a child playing dress-up. "Holy shit, you made it! We thought you got squished!"
Kraz didn't look at him. He just swung his arm back in a lazy, backhanded arc.
THWACK.
His fist connected with the minion's face with a sound like a baseball hitting a glove. The Vyper spun like a top and collapsed into a pile of trash bags, unconscious.
"You are ruining the moment, Kevin," Kraz hissed at the body. He smoothed his hair back, checking his reflection in a puddle of something that probably wasn't water, then turned his manic grin back to the trio. "Honestly. Good help is impossible to find in this economy."
Jude stared at him. Something about the pose, the voice, the theatrical arrogance; it was familiar. In the dark chaos of the subway, he hadn't placed it. But here, in the gray daylight, with that ridiculous coat and that practiced sneer…
"Wait," Jude said, lowering his bow slightly. "I know you."
Kraz's grin widened, showing too many teeth. "Ah. A fan."
"You're Krazynski," Jude said, pointing a finger as the memories clicked into place. "I had your rookie card when I was twelve. You were the number one hero prospect out of Philly. Hero Weekly called you 'The Bug King.' You were supposed to be the next big thing."
"The Bug Emperor," Kraz corrected, looking immensely pleased with himself. "They misquoted me. Print media is a fucking joke."
"You never got a contract," Jude continued, piecing it together. "You were supposed to sign with P.I.T., but they dropped you before the season started. The news said you had 'personality conflicts' with the organization."
Kraz's face twitched. The smile faltered, replaced by something ugly and wounded underneath.
"It wasn't a personality conflict!" Kraz shouted, his voice cracking. "It was politics! They said I was 'too volatile.' They said I 'endangered civilians just to look cool.' Bullshit! They wanted a poster boy, not a god! They wanted someone they could control!"
"So you started a sewer gang?" Greta asked. She looked him up and down with undisguised contempt. "Nice career pivot. Really inspiring. You look like a raccoon that got kicked out of a rave."
Kraz blinked. He looked down at his coat, then back at Greta.
"This is custom Italian fur—"
"It's stupid," Greta said flatly. "And your hair looks greasy. And you knocked out your own guy for no reason. This is the saddest thing I've seen all week, and I spent an hour crying in a church basement this morning."
The air in the alley began to vibrate.
The remaining minion took two large, quiet steps away from his boss. Kraz's hands started to glow with sickly purple energy, the "goofy failed celebrity" mask slipping away to reveal something dangerous underneath. Something with a wounded ego and nothing left to lose.
"You have a big mouth, little girl," Kraz said, his voice dropping to something cold and serious. "I was going to let you watch. But now? I think I'll start with you."
He turned his burning gaze to Fernando.
"I'm not here for the demon," Kraz sneered. "I don't care about your little ghost hunt. I'm here because you made me look bad, Fernando. You brought strangers into my house. You broke my stage. You embarrassed me in front of my men."
He cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing through the alley like gunshots.
"And nobody," Kraz whispered, eyes manic, the purple glow intensifying, "fucks with The Bug Emperor."