The night was warm, sticky with the breath of Toronto's late summer. Windows were down, music low, the streets still alive with the city's restless hum. In the East End, where the streetlights flickered and concrete always felt damp, Caleb Strickland was driving home from a movie with his family.
Rachel sat beside him, her fingers laced in his. Isaac, their fourteen-year-old son, lounged in the back seat, nodding along to music through his earbuds. His head swayed slightly with the rhythm, eyes half-lidded from soda and popcorn.
It had been a perfect evening. Caleb had caught himself smiling more than once.
That's when he noticed the black SUV in the rearview mirror.
Too close. Too fast.
"Jesus, this guy's on my ass," he muttered.
Rachel glanced behind them, uneasy. "Just change lanes, let him pass."
Caleb flicked on the signal, moving to the right. The SUV followed—closer now.
Then—Impact.
The car jerked violently as metal slammed metal. Tires shrieked. Caleb lost control. They spun hard left. The world twisted.
Rachel screamed.
The hood of the car collided with a concrete barrier. Metal folded. Glass exploded. The airbags burst with a thunderclap. The sound was deafening.
Then—stillness.
Caleb blinked, dazed. He tasted copper. His ears rang. Rachel's head was slumped forward, but she groaned. Isaac was moaning in the back seat.
Then came the sound of doors—not theirs. The SUV, footsteps. Heavy boots scraping pavement. Three of them.
Caleb's door was ripped open.
A fist dragged him from the wreckage and threw him hard onto the asphalt. His vision tilted, blood already streaming from a gash on his forehead.
Rachel screamed. "Get away from us! We have nothing!"
Another man pulled her out next. Isaac shouted in panic, trying to unbuckle himself.
A figure stepped forward. Caleb's eyes met his: tall, maybe seventeen or eighteen, face hidden under a hoodie. A long hunting knife glinted in his hand.
There was something horribly calm in his movements. Deliberate. Cold.
He strode straight for Isaac, who was trying to crawl out of the crushed car door.
"Don't—don't touch him!" Rachel shrieked.
She threw herself between them.
"Do it Jamal!", one of the masked assailants could be heard yelling .
"Jamala" didn't stop.
With one clean, brutal thrust, he buried the knife deep in her chest.
She gasped, eyes wide, blood blooming across her shirt. Her legs buckled and she collapsed between her son and the attacker.
"NO!" Caleb roared, lunging.
Jamal turned and met him mid-charge, slamming the hilt of the blade into Caleb's jaw. The world blinked. Then came the steel—three stabs. One to the ribs. One just beneath the shoulder. The last low, near his hip.
Caleb fell hard, gasping, blood soaking into his shirt, eyes wide in disbelief. He couldn't move.
From the ground, his gaze locked on his son.
Isaac was crawling out from under Rachel's lifeless body, face pale, hands shaking. He saw the blood. He saw her wide, vacant eyes.
"Mom…?"
Jamal approached him slowly. No urgency. Just ritual.
He grabbed Isaac by the collar and threw him against the side of the car. The boy tried to fight—threw a wild punch—but Jamal caught his wrist.
Caleb screamed, "DON'T—!"
The knife sank into Isaac's right shoulder. Isaac shrieked. Then the ribs. A wet crack. Then the stomach, twisting. Isaac gasped, mouth open, eyes rolling.
Jamal grabbed a fistful of Isaac's curly hair and yanked his head back.
"NOOOO!" Caleb cried, voice shredded.
The knife slid clean across the boy's throat.
The sound—a wet gurgle, air and blood mixing. Isaac jerked, twitched, then went still.
Blood poured in rivers down the pavement, pooling around Rachel's outstretched hand. Isaac's eyes stayed open, glassy and unfocused, staring up at the night sky—at nothing.
Caleb tried to crawl. His hands slipped in his own blood. He tried to scream, but his voice gave out.
The three attackers fled.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
But none of it mattered.
His world had already ended.
Sirens screamed in the distance—distorted and shrill, warping around Caleb's ears like sound underwater. The blue and red lights began to reflect against the wreckage of the car, glinting off twisted steel and shattered glass.
Caleb tried to lift himself again, but his left arm buckled under him, slick with blood. Every inch of him burned—his ribs ached where the knife had gone in, his side throbbed with the deep puncture low near his hip, and his shoulder was numb, seeping blood steadily into the pavement.
He blinked against the blur in his eyes. Tears or blood—he couldn't tell.
"Rachel…" he croaked.
His voice was broken glass—raw, wheezing, nearly drowned in his own blood.
"Isaac… please… wake up…"
Rachel lay crumpled in a heap beside the twisted car door, legs bent beneath her at unnatural angles. Her chest was torn open, her blouse soaked through with arterial blood. Her lips were parted slightly, eyes frozen wide in death. A single tear, already drying, had traced a line through the blood spattered across her cheek.
And Isaac—
Caleb's stomach twisted violently.
Isaac's body was sprawled on his side, head tilted back at an impossible angle. The deep slash across his throat gaped wide, flesh opened like a mouth, the ragged edges fluttering slightly in the night breeze. Blood pumped weakly from the wound in thick, dark pulses, dribbling down across his collarbone, over his chest, pooling beneath his jaw.
His shirt was soaked crimson, stabbed through in three places—shoulder, ribs, gut—each wound oozing a different rhythm of life lost.
His hands were still twitching. Fingers spasming against the pavement.
"No… God, no—" Caleb sobbed, dragging his mangled body toward his son. Every movement sent lightning bolts of pain through his torso. He left a long, red smear in his wake, like a wounded animal crawling back to its dead cub.
"I'm here… I'm here, Isaac…"
Caleb collapsed halfway there. His arms gave out. His breath rasped shallow and wet—foam bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
Then… movement.
From somewhere above, a flutter of wings—slow and deliberate.
Through his blurring vision, he saw it descend: a Raven, massive and obsidian-black, gliding silently down from a telephone wire. It landed beside Isaac's body, talons clicking against the pavement. It stood there, silent and statuesque, looking down at the boy with one beady black eye.
A faint white spiral-shaped streak of feathers curled across its left shoulder, like a swirl of ash across ink.
Just like the birthmark Isaac had.
Caleb stared at it, his mind unraveling.
The Raven looked up at him.
It didn't caw. It didn't blink.
It only watched.
Then, in a motion so fluid it felt like liquid shadow, the Raven spread its wings—wings that seemed too wide for its body, endless in reach—and took to the air. Blood misted up from the wind of its ascent, catching the light like red diamonds in the dark.
It rose, silent and graceful, Into the black sky above the sirens.
Caleb let out a shuddering cry, reaching out a blood-soaked hand toward the bird as it vanished.
"Isaac… don't leave me… please—please—"
His body began to fail. The cold settled in fast, creeping into his bones, slowing his heart.
He collapsed fully, face turned toward his son.
The world flickered.
Red and blue lights strobed across the street like a hellish heartbeat.
Boots thundered toward him. Shouts. Hands on his chest. Barked orders.
"He's bleeding out—get a line in!"
"Where's the kid?!"
"God… oh Jesus, the kid's gone—he's gone—"
"Focus on the dad, dammit!"
He couldn't move.
He couldn't speak.
He was falling…
And in that fall, the sky above cracked open.
In the space between life and death, he saw wings again—a flash of feathers, a boy's voice faint in the wind, and the scent of cold air and blood all around him.
Then—
Nothing.
Only blackness.
Only silence.
Only the whispers of the raven.
End of chapter 1.