The first scream of the morning at the Gilded Lily hotel came from a girl named Chloe, a part-time model who had woken up with a splitting headache and the coppery taste of last night's bad decisions in her mouth. The man beside her, a D-list Supe whose name she couldn't remember but whose power involved something to do with extra joints in his fingers, was completely still. That wasn't unusual. Most of the men she ended up with after parties like this were heavy sleepers.
But this felt different. The skin where her hand rested on his bare shoulder was cold. Not just cool from the hotel's aggressive air conditioning but waxy and unnaturally cold.
"Hey," she said, her voice a rough croak. She nudged him. "Wake up. I gotta go."
There was no response. His eyes were closed, and he looked peaceful, like a marble statue in the dim morning light filtering through the blackout curtains.
A prickle of unease cut through her hangover. She sat up, the cheap silk sheet pooling around her waist. She looked closer. His chest wasn't moving. She pressed two fingers to his neck, fumbling for a pulse.
There was nothing.
The scream that ripped from her throat was pure terror. It was a sound that shattered the morning after a haze of the entire floor.
Doors creaked open. Hungover faces peered out into the hallway. "What the hell was that?" someone grumbled.
Chloe stumbled out of her room, clutching the sheet to her body, her face pale and streaked with mascara. "He's dead!" she shrieked, pointing back into the room. "He's not breathing! He's dead!"
Her panic was a virus. A man from the room across the hall, a low level Supe with some kind of minor regeneration, went to check on the woman he'd spent the night with. He found her dead as well.
Another scream, this one more deeper.
The chaos spread like a shockwave. As the surviving humans and the few Supes who had slept alone woke up, they also discovered someone dead beside them. In the main lounge bodies were slumped in chairs and on couches. They looked like they had simply fallen asleep mid conversation. In the private rooms they were found in their beds. All of them were Supes and all of them were dead.
The scene was surreal. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle, no broken furniture, no bullet holes in the walls, and no damage to their bodies. They looked like they had all decided to collectively hold their breath until their hearts stopped. It formed a peaceful baffling tableau of death.
Within minutes, the entire floor was a madhouse of screaming, crying, and panicked phone calls. The illusion of the debaucherous party had been shattered, replaced by the cold reality of a mass grave in a luxury hotel.
The first on the scene were two NYPD detectives, a grizzled veteran named Miller and perpetually tired-looking partner, Detective Chen. They had been expecting a standard overdose, maybe a domestic dispute gone wrong. They were not prepared for this.
"Sixteen bodies?" Miller breathed, his eyes wide as he took in the scene in the main lounge. "Sixteen? All of them Supes?"
"And not a mark on them," Chen added, his voice low. He was kneeling beside the body of a woman whose skin was still faintly shifting colors. "They look like they're sleeping. No foam at the mouth, no signs of seizure, no needles and no obvious drug paraphernalia beyond the usual party crap."
The hotel manager was babbling in the corner, his face the color of ash. The surviving partygoers were being herded into a separate conference room by uniformed officers, their panicked statements a contradictory mess of drugs, alcohol, and hazy memories.
Miller ran a hand over his weary face. This was already a nightmare, and it was about to get worse. "Get the M.E. team up here, stat. I want a full tox screen on every single one of them. And for God's sake, keep the press out of the lobby. The last thing we need is…"
He was cut off by the sound of the elevator dinging. The doors slid open, and four individuals stepped out. They were all dressed in dark business suits. They moved with an unnerving confidence, their eyes sweeping over the scene with the detached appraisal of an exterminator surveying an infestation.
A sharp-featured individual with cold gray eyes approached Miller. He flashed a Vought corporate security badge. "Detective Miller. I'm Mr. Graves, Vought Risk Assessment. This is now a Vought managed incident."
Miller bristled. "This is a crime scene, Mr. Graves. A multiple homicide. It's NYPD jurisdiction."
Graves gave a pitying smile. "With all due respect, Detective, these are Vought assets. This is a catastrophic loss of corporate property. As per our standing agreement with the city, our internal teams will be taking the lead on the investigation. Your department will receive a full and comprehensive report once our assessment is complete. For now, I need you and your officers to secure the perimeter and handle crowd control. We'll take it from here."
Chen looked at Miller, waiting for the inevitable explosion. Miller stared at Graves for a long moment, a silent battle of wills taking place in the chaotic hallway. Finally, the detective's shoulders slumped in defeat. He knew how this worked. Vought was a force of nature in this city.
"Fine," Miller grumbled, turning to his partner. "Chen, let's go talk to the witnesses. Let the suits play with their dead toys."
As the NYPD was politely escorted off the floor, Graves' team went to work with a chilling efficiency. They were a corporate recovery team assessing a disaster. They unpacked cases filled with advanced equipment.
"Forensics on every body," Graves ordered, his voice a calm command. "I want a full biological and chemical workup. Check for toxins, poisons, airborne agents, everything. I want to know what they had for breakfast yesterday."
Another agent was already at the hotel's security office. "Sir, we have a problem with the camera footage from this floor."
"A problem?" Graves asked, not looking up from his datapad.
"The footage from the main hallway camera is on a perfect five-minute loop. It starts at 1:32 a.m. and continues until the first 911 call. The splices are almost seamless. Whoever did this is a high level specialist"
Graves' expression tightened. "The doors?"
"No signs of forced entry on any of the rooms," another agent reported. "The electronic locks show no signs of tampering. They were either opened with a key card, or the perpetrator never used the door at all."
A few minutes later, a stern woman named Dr. Evans, called Graves over to the body of Weightlifter. She was examining his head with a high-resolution microscopic scanner.
"I think I found something," she said, pointing to a almost invisible mark in his ear canal. "It's a puncture wound. Less than a millimeter in diameter. It goes straight through the eardrum and directly into the brain stem."
Graves leaned in, his gray eyes narrowing. "Cause of death?"
"Instantaneous," Dr. Evans said. "It was a precise strike that severed the connection between the brain and the body. He was dead before he even realized he'd been attacked. I'm running scans on the others, and I expect to find the same mark on all of them."