The pavement cracked where she landed.
Nightingale's cheek pressed into the scorched limo floor, green fire licking up the sides of the vehicle like greedy fingers. The dolls were gone. The air was thick with spores and ash. Her vision pulsed.
Above her, Sebastian stood like an inferno-drenched sentinel, fire curling from the top of his head—unnatural and holy. Nightingale blinked up at him and let out a laugh, half from pain, half from disbelief.
Standing atop a nearby mailbox, Catty flicked her tail once, unimpressed.
"Well, damn," she called, her holographic eyes flickering with static sass. "I didn't expect Sonsters to bring all this smoke—I thought y'all just shuffled ghosts around and filled out forms like cosmic interns. That's what y'all had me doing all this time."
She leapt down, her patchy backpack clinking with charms and magical ordinance. Her stance was loose, playful—but her claws were out. And her eyes had narrowed, scanning both of them not as coworkers, but as targets.
Then a box was brought to her—by one of the cultists still wearing a twisted grin. She snatched it before the figure could blink, the movement sharp and cat-quick, and slid it into her open backpack without ceremony. She began to toss one of the dolls up and down casually, almost lovingly.
"You know," she said, distracted, eyes gleaming, "Since you've been so kind to me, I'll give you a head start. I'll count every last one of these kiddos before I send the signal. That's how long you've got to pull whatever BS transformation you've got stashed."
She crouched low, tail twitching with each syllable, still tossing the doll lazily through the air—and both Nightingale and Sebastian flinched. Not because of the countdown. But because Catty might scratch the doll. And if she did that, she might unleash something worse than a Blurer.
Didn't she read the handbook before betraying them? About recently blurred children? Or had she skipped the part where damaged vessels triggered dormant echoes?
"One... two..."
She was counting slow. Agonizingly slow.
The kind of slow that Sonsters learned to dread during intake missions—especially when handling blurred children. There were nearly fifty kids in that box, and yet Catty acted like the one she kept tossing represented all of them. Like one broken vessel could summon the storm.
It wasn't just a countdown. It was a threat. And a dare.
Meanwhile, the cultists began to crack—body by body, like porcelain under pressure, each stiff movement jerking and faltering as if strings had been cut mid-marionette act. The transformation had begun.
Sebastian knelt beside Nightingale and helped her to her feet, his arms steady and warm beneath the chaos. Without a word, he pressed a quick kiss to her lips, as if sealing a promise.
That was when the flames surged.
A wave of fire roared from the cracked asphalt beneath them, curling up and around their bodies like a shield and a curse all at once. It engulfed them in holy heat just as one of the cultist at the count of ten to finally moved in for an attack.
Nightingale smiled, her lips still tingling from the kiss—a kiss Sebastian had given her not just for comfort, but for protection. The flames engulfed her, but they didn't burn.
They couldn't.
That one kiss shielded her from death for the night. A rare enchantment. A sacred favor. And he'd wasted it here, on a moment like this.
She could almost hear him grumbling about it later.
He only got to use one a day. Technically, he could stack them—but only if he went three months without giving her even one. And in their line of work, that never happened. You don't know how many people fought just to sign the paperwork that made these kinds of blessings legal in the first place.
Still smiling, she muttered under her breath in Spanish: "enfermera musical."
She transformed.
The moment her pulse synced back into rhythm, her combat protocols bloomed across her body like a second skin. Gone were the soft sweats. In their place: the Night Nurse rig—a sleek, glowing uniform of clinical whites and pastel hexes, trimmed in sterile silver and pulsing with stasis glyphs. Her headwrap tightened, reforming into a shielded med-cap laced with sensors. And on her hip—
DJ. A gun that spun like a DJ table and hummed with surgical hunger.
With a flick of her wrist, the weapon roared to life, spinning its loaded chamber and launching hypodermic needles like rhythmic shurikens. Each dart was coded for paralysis, disruption, or good old-fashioned pain.
She stepped through the fire like a war-born ghost, unbothered by the flame curling around her. Smoke rolled behind her like a velvet curtain. She raised DJ without hesitation and fired directly at Catty.
But the cultists leapt forward—animated dolls now, jerking with unnatural speed. They intercepted the shots mid-air, shielding Catty with their twitchy limbs.
"Watch it!" Catty called with a smirk, still juggling the doll. "You really wanna start cracking kids open on your shift?"
Nightingale didn't flinch. "We got ways to repair broken dolls. Ain't pretty, but it works. Can you say the same, Taffy?"
"My name is Catty!"
Catty hissed in frustration, tail whipping hard enough to send sparks off a streetlamp. With a sharp grunt, she shoved the doll into her bag like she was packing away a bad memory.
"Fine. Y'all wanna play hardball? Let's escalate."
She stepped back and flipped a charm between her fingers—a black crystal ring etched with molten-red glyphs. The air around her shimmered. A glyph circle flared open on the concrete, burning violet and red as the scent of sulfur cut through the spore-filled air.
A portal began to pulse open—slick, ugly, and gaping like a wound in reality. Heat radiated from it, the kind of heat that didn't just burn skin but truth. It looked like it led straight into one of the nastier corners of Hell.
Sebastian snarled under his breath and snapped his fingers. The flame clinging to his shoulders dampened instantly as a wave of necromantic cool surged from his core. His gold-lined suit hissed with steam.
"Dammit, I just got this pressed."
He strode forward and stomped the pavement with purpose, skeletal tattoos blazing. Then he brought two fingers to his lips and let loose a piercing dog whistle—a frequency only the dead and divine could hear. It echoed like a battle cry between dimensions.
From out of the fog, a blur of motion—fur and teeth—charged the nearest cultist. A massive, mottled street dog lunged with divine speed and bit clean through the cultist's neck, sending the bark-masked head flying into the gutter.
"Good boy," Sebastian muttered, not even looking back.
"Good boy," Sebastian muttered, not even looking back.
With no hesitation, he jumped onto the dog's back like it was second nature. The beast didn't falter, galloping forward as Sebastian drew a gleaming spectral spear from the air.
He spun it once with flair, then drove it through the chest of an oncoming cultist, sending bark-colored limbs sprawling.
The cultists were coming in waves now, like the ground itself was feeding them strength—each one nastier, more twisted than the last.
But Sebastian just grinned as the hound surged through the chaos, spear slashing arcs of silver light through the darkened battlefield.
"I would stay," Catty shouted from near the portal, backpack bouncing on her shoulders, "but I got deliveries to make on the black market!"
She grinned, tail swiping dramatically as she dove through the flaming glyph.
The portal slammed shut behind her, leaving Sebastian and Nightingale alone in the battlefield—a twisted garden of violence, tree roots splitting pavement and clawing up buildings like parasite veins.
"Of course she bailed," Nightingale muttered, stepping beside Sebastian as cultists swarmed in from all angles.
Back to back, the two Sonsters began walking in a slow, deadly circle. The cultists were closing in—more bark than skin now, faces warped, limbs fed by the hungry ground itself.
"We're definitely working overtime for this case," Sebastian said dryly, spear rotating in his grip.
"Don't forget the car," Nightingale replied, ducking a vine whip and elbowing a cultist into the pavement. "You know the guest's gonna be real mad about that."
Sebastian snorted. "I just got it detailed."
She caught the pole of his spear mid-spin, spun low, and used it to slide around like a dancer—legs sweeping beneath an entire row of cultists. As they stumbled, she twisted around and drew DJ, unloading a stream of precision shots into the nearest bark-skinned bodies. Her movements were fluid, deadly, like an operating room turned warzone.
Each pull of the trigger sent hypodermic rounds into cultist joints, shattering limbs mid-lunge and collapsing entire torsos into splinters. She didn't pause, didn't flinch—just turned the fight into a rhythm. A beatdown in sync with breath and blood.
They weren't just cultists.
They were obstacles. And DJ hummed happily as it turned them into mulch.
"I think they'll care more about the kids flying out the backseat. Especially since she ran straight into a portal to the Hell black market without any proper paperwork. Man, I hate poachers like that."
Sebastian hissed through his teeth and slammed his spear into the ground. At his command, spectral snakes slithered from the cracks—coiling around cultists' legs and yanking them down with hissing vengeance, fangs sinking into bark-flesh as they dragged them toward the concrete.
She landed hard, skidding to a crouch. Her eyes narrowed—and she couldn't help the smirk tugging at her lips.
She thought about it for a split second—how grateful she was for all those pole dancing classes. The upper body strength, the momentum control, the sheer timing of her grip. It wasn't just flair anymore. Not when Sebastian used his damn spear like a pivot point in the middle of combat. That kind of improvisation? It demanded balance, power, and muscle memory. And right now, it was the difference between slamming into bark-skinned cultists at full speed or pirouetting into a killing strike.
"And... I think I see the root of the problem."
At the far end of the block, a twisted, oversized tree loomed—its bark pulsating with wet, raw knots like exposed muscle. Black-gold sap oozed from split seams, reeking of bile and burnt sugar. From gnarled, womb-like pods along its branches, half-formed cultists sloughed out with squelching sounds, their bodies slick with resin and twitching like larvae. It didn't just birth them—it disgorged them, vomiting bodies onto the pavement as if choking on its own spawn.
"That's new," Nightingale growled, DJ humming hot in her palm. "They must've had it cloaked in battle. But now that Catty dipped, we can see it clear as day."
Sebastian cracked his neck. "Figures. She always was the smokescreen type. Let's go rip it out."
More cultists erupted from the twisted tree itself—squeezing out from gnarled hollows and split bark like rotting fruit forced from a dying branch. They slumped to the ground, tangled with vines, teeth bark-colored, limbs snapping like wet branches trying to remember how to be human. The tree didn't just spawn them—it birthed them screaming, one malformed grunt at a time.
Before they could be overrun, Sebastian slammed his foot down with force. The street shook, and a spectral shockwave pulsed outward. Nightingale locked eyes with him—he nodded once, then launched her into the air with a burst of kinetic magic that cracked the ground beneath them.
She soared like a missile laced with melody, flames trailing behind her in twisting spirals of color. There was a musical quality to it, the way her limbs moved mid-air, like a fairy spun from sound and warlight. Even the wind seemed to carry a rhythm as she arced toward her target—graceful, furious, and glowing with controlled chaos.
Mid-flight, Nightingale grinned and slapped a beat into DJ's side, shifting its mode. She hurled it at the tree with all her strength. The gun spun, screeching like a banshee, embedding itself in the base of the trunk.
She landed hard on a cultist's head, cracking it under her boots. Using its twitching body as a springboard, she flipped back toward Sebastian and caught the shaft of his spear mid-spin, fingers locking around it without hesitation.
They fell into motion—fluid, brutal, and precise. Back to back, they moved like parts of a single mechanism: twirling the spear between them, alternating strikes, parries, and spins in a rhythm only they understood. Nightingale ducked under his arm and jabbed upward; Sebastian pivoted around her to slice through two more cultists with one sweeping arc. Every shift of weight, every turn, every kill—it was choreography set to the beat of war.
Sebastian grunted through a smile. "Reminds me of our wedding night."
More cultists closed in, roots tangling around their ankles, the tree pulsing faster with every wave.
They were nearly overwhelmed.
Then DJ detonated.
The tree erupted in a thunderous explosion of bark, sap, and soullight. But it wasn't just debris—it was bodies. Half-formed cultists, rotted root sacs, and pods of still-wet limbs were hurled across the block like meat confetti.
A wave of thick, glistening purple goo splashed outward from the base of the explosion, coating everything in sight with viscous, foul-smelling slop.
Sebastian recoiled, face twisted in disgust. "Gross," he grunted, already trying to shake it from his sleeves like it was acid.
Purple dripped from his shoulders, soaked his collar. He looked like he'd been slimed by a demon's sneeze.
Nightingale tried to help, wiping at him with her arm, but there was just too much of it. It oozed back even as she swiped. "You're not gonna like this," she said with a grimace.
Smoke coiled above the crater where the tree had stood.
Silence.
And then...
The guest arrived—stepping calmly through a secondary ripple in the air, a far neater portal than the one Catty tore open. They were tall, cloaked in dark administrative layers of enchanted cloth and glowing credentials, face obscured but presence unmistakable.
They stared at Sebastian and Nightingale—hard to read, but serious. At least, it felt serious. With the guest, you were never totally sure if it was a warning or just Tuesday.
"You've got a new objective," the guest said flatly. "I want those kids."