The compound rose from the mist like a rotting tooth—Federal Slaughter Mill, abandoned since the war but never quite empty. Water stood black and knee-deep around the building's perimeter, reflecting nothing. The saw blades, frozen mid-cut for thirty years, still dripped rust that hissed faintly where it met the water, a sound like whispered curses.
Harlan crouched at the treeline, watching. Dawn hadn't broken yet—wouldn't for another hour—and the darkness here felt deliberate, cultivated. The kind of dark that pressed against your eyes like thumbs.
Beside him, Isolde breathed shallow and controlled, her silenced Nagant already drawn. She'd been silent the entire approach, moving through the pre-dawn bayou with the deliberate patience of something hunting. Or being hunted.
The mill reeked. Not the simple rot of wet wood and rust—that would have been a mercy. This was layered: iron and old sawdust that had absorbed decades of humidity until it fermented into something that stuck in your throat. Beneath that, the sweet-sick stench of magnolia blossoms left too long in water, their perfume curdling into decay. And underneath everything, faint but persistent: the resin-chemical smell of Corruption, like turpentine mixed with spoiled honey.
Harlan's burned forearm throbbed dully where the Immolator bile had blistered skin two nights ago on a different hunt. The wound wept clear fluid that smelled faintly of infection despite Isolde's poultice. He'd wrapped it in boiled cloth soaked in bayou mud—old Cajun remedy his grandmother swore by. It hadn't helped.
"Movement," Isolde breathed. "Northeast corner. Three, maybe four."
Harlan saw them then—grunts shambling between saw stations, their movements wrong in ways that made his eyes hurt to follow. They'd been sharecroppers once, maybe. Mill workers. Now they wore Sunday clothes rotted to lace, their mouths sewn shut with wire that glinted dully in the pre-dawn murk. But the sewing didn't stop the sounds.
They were singing.
Low, off-key spirituals that vibrated in Harlan's chest like a second heartbeat. "Wade in the Water" filtered through throats that no longer needed air, the melody fragmented and reassembled into something that hurt to hear. Each note felt like it was coming from inside his own ribcage.
"We need the clue," Isolde said, pulling a small device from her satchel—Dark Sight focus, Association-issued. The glass lens caught what little light there was and bent it wrong, showing the world in shades of blue-gray and sickly yellow. She raised it to her eye, scanning. "There. Southeast building, second floor. Blue signature."
Harlan saw it too without the device—he'd been hunting long enough that Dark Sight came natural now, a thing he could feel more than see. The clue pulsed faintly, a wrongness in the air that drew the eye like a wound draws flies.
But between them and it: a courtyard of standing water, exposed. And the grunts were clustering, drawn by some invisible current toward the saw stations. Not random. Never random. The Corruption was learning, had been learning for eighteen years.
"On me," Harlan murmured. "Quiet as you can."
They moved.
The water came up to mid-shin, cold despite the humidity, thick with sediment that clouded around their legs like ink. Each step required deliberate control—lift the boot slow, set it down slower, let the water settle before the next step. The mud underneath sucked and released with obscene small sounds that seemed too loud, too wet.
A grunt turned their direction.
Harlan froze. Isolde's hand drifted to a throwing knife, but she didn't draw. Not yet.
The grunt's head tilted—its neck making sounds like wet rope under tension. The wire through its lips had been pulled so tight the mouth had split at the corners, and through the gaps, Harlan could see something moving inside. Maggots, maybe. Or something that had been maggots before the Corruption taught them a new shape.
It stared at them with eyes gone full black, seeing everything and nothing.
Then it turned away, resuming its shambling patrol. The spiritual continued, joined now by the others in a chorus that felt less like song and more like digestion—the bayou processing the dead into something new.
They reached the building. Interior darkness absolute, the kind that felt solid. Harlan's eyes adjusted slowly, picking out shapes: overturned barrels, saw stations with blades still mounted, a foreman's desk rotted through and listing. The floorboards creaked under their weight, wood softened by decades of moisture until it felt more like flesh than timber.
The smell intensified inside. Old blood, concentrated. The saws had processed more than lumber in their time—Harlan had heard the stories. Confederate deserters dragged here during the war, processed like hogs. The wood remembered. Everything in the bayou remembered.
Stairs to the second floor looked questionable—half the risers missing, the railing collapsed into the water below. Harlan tested the first step. It held, barely. He could feel it compress under his weight, the wood groaning like it was in pain.
They climbed.
The second floor had been offices once. Now it was a maze of collapsed ceiling beams and water damage that had turned the walls into organic landscapes of mold and rot. The clue signature pulsed from a corner room—old foreman's office, door hanging by one hinge.
Inside: a desk. On the desk: a leather ledger, waterlogged but still holding together, its pages fused into a solid mass. Dark Sight showed it glowing faintly blue.
Isolde moved to it immediately, pulling gloves on—not to protect her hands from dirt, but from whatever the Corruption had left behind. She opened the ledger carefully, and pages that should have crumbled instead peeled apart with wet whispers, revealing writing that hadn't been there when the book was new.
Not writing. Growing. The words were fungal, growing up through the paper fibers like roots seeking light.
"Desalle," Isolde read, voice clinical but pitched low. "The Spider nests in Desalle Manor ruins. Cellar access through the old wine cave, southwest wall collapsed. It remembers..." She trailed off.
"Remembers what?"
"Names." She turned a page, and Harlan saw what had made her pause. The fungal writing had spelled out a list—dozens of names, maybe hundreds, all in that same organic script. He recognized some of them. Hunters he'd known. Hunters he'd buried. Hunters who'd disappeared into the bayou and never come out.
His name was there too. Harlan Crowe. Written in fungus and memory.
"It's cataloging us," Isolde whispered, and for the first time since they'd met, Harlan heard something in her voice that might have been fear. "The Corruption. It's keeping records."
A sound from downstairs—not the grunts' singing, but something else. Chains rattling. The wet snarl of something burning from inside.
Hellhounds.
"Kennel," Harlan said flatly. "Must've missed it in the scan."
The snarls multiplied. He heard claws on wood, scrabbling fast. Heard the chains snap—not break, but snap, like bones giving up.
"How many?" Isolde asked, Nagant coming up.
"Does it matter?"
Three hellhounds erupted through the doorway, and the world became fire and teeth.
The first one came low, flames licking its hide in patterns that looked almost like fur until you saw the skin beneath—charred black, cracking, leaking something that burned orange-hot. Its breath hit Harlan first—furnace heat that singed his eyebrows, carrying the smell of sulfur and charred hair.
He shoulder-rolled right, feeling floorboards crack under the impact, brought the Lebel up as he came to one knee. The hellhound turned mid-leap, impossibly fast for something its size, jaws spreading wide enough to show the fire in its throat.
Crack.
The Lebel's report was thunder in the confined space, loud enough to make his ears ring immediate and sharp. The round punched through the hound's center mass—not a headshot, but long ammo at this range didn't need to be precise. The exit wound sprayed burning viscera across the wall, where it stuck and continued to burn with a low hissing sound.
But the hound didn't go down. Just staggered, flames guttering, then charged again.
Harlan abandoned the rifle—no time to cycle the bolt—and drew his sabre. The blackened blade whispered free of its scabbard with a sound like wind through dead grass. He sidestepped the hound's charge, boots sliding in water that had leaked up through the compromised floor, and drove the blade up through the creature's jaw into its brain.
Hot ichor gushed over his hands, sticky as pine sap, burning faint through the leather gloves. The smell hit immediate—spoiled meat left in sun, overlaid with that chemical resin-stink. He gagged on it, tasting it on the back of his tongue: metallic, sour, like licking a battery.
The hound collapsed, twitching, fire dying to embers in its chest cavity.
Behind him, Isolde's Nagant whispered: pfft-pfft-pfft. Suppressed shots barely louder than handclaps, muzzle flash contained to brief blue flickers. The second hellhound jerked with each impact—throat, eye, ear—precision shooting that dropped it thrashing before it closed half the distance.
But the third hound had circled, coming at Isolde from the side while she was focused on the second. Harlan saw it, saw her peripheral awareness catch it too late, saw her try to pivot—
The hound's claws raked her calf, not deep but enough. She hissed through teeth, fired point-blank into its open mouth. The back of its skull exploded in a spray of brain matter and burning bile that spattered the ceiling, where it continued to burn, dripping slow.
Harlan grabbed her arm, hauling her back as the dead hound's body erupted. Hellhounds did that sometimes when they died violent—some kind of failsafe the Corruption had engineered. The corpse burst like a rotten fruit, spraying bile in a radius that coated everything.
They hit the floor. Bile sprayed overhead, hitting the wall where they'd been standing. Where it landed, wood began to smoke and bubble, the grain turning black as flesh under a brand.
Harlan came up with Lebel loaded—muscle memory, his hands finding brass and chamber without conscious thought. Three rounds left. He scanned the doorway, the windows, the holes in the floor. Nothing moved except the smoke from burning wood and the small fires where bile had landed.
His burned forearm screamed. New blisters had risen where bile had splashed through the cloth wrapping, small and tight as fish eggs, already weeping clear fluid. The pain was white-hot, immediate, making his vision edge gray at the periphery.
"Let me see." Isolde was already moving, her voice dropping back into that clinical register. Blood soaked through her pants leg where the claws had caught her, but she ignored it, focusing on his arm instead.
She unwrapped the fouled cloth with quick efficiency, revealing skin that had bubbled like wax heated too fast. The blisters covered half his forearm now, clustered so thick they merged into one continuous surface of tortured flesh. Where the old wound ended and the new began, he couldn't tell anymore.
Isolde produced a small tin from her satchel—some kind of salve that smelled of mint and something astringent underneath. She smeared it over the burns without asking permission. The relief was immediate and insufficient, cooling the surface while the pain continued to burn deep in the muscle.
"It'll scar," she said, wrapping it fresh with clean cloth from her pack. "Like everything here."
Harlan said nothing. Scars were currency in the bayou—you counted them like poker chips, bet them against the next hand. His body was already a ledger of near-misses and bad luck: knife scars, bullet furrows, the puckered star where a grunt had nearly gutted him in '82. One more entry barely registered.
He checked the Lebel's action while she worked on his arm. The mechanism moved smooth despite the heat and humidity—he'd learned to oil it with rendered hog fat mixed with Corruption resin. Regular gun oil broke down too fast in the bayou. The resin mixture stank and attracted flies, but it worked. That was all that mattered.
"Your leg," he said.
"Shallow. I've had worse." But she pulled a needle and catgut from her kit anyway, bit down on a leather strap, and sutured the claw marks closed with the same clinical precision she'd used on the grunt dissection. Four stitches, quick and tight. Blood welled around the thread but didn't pour.
Downstairs, the grunts' singing had changed key. They'd heard the gunshots—impossible not to—and now they were coming. The spiritual shifted from "Wade in the Water" to something older, something that predated English, syllables that sounded like Choctaw or maybe older still. The language of the first people who'd learned to fear the bayou's dark places.
"We need to move," Isolde said, standing. Her leg held her weight, barely. "Before they cluster."
Harlan grabbed the ledger—couldn't leave it, even knowing what it contained. Evidence. Proof. Something to bring back to the Association, justify the blood cost. He stuffed it in his coat, feeling it squirm faintly against his ribs like something alive.
They made for the stairs.
The grunts had filled the first floor—a dozen at least, packed shoulder to shoulder in the standing water. Their wire-stitched mouths opened and closed in time with the singing, the wire cutting deeper with each syllable, fresh blood running down chins to dilute in the water below.
One of them saw Harlan and Isolde on the stairs. Its head tilted ninety degrees, vertebrae popping with sounds like green wood breaking. Then it pointed—arm extending too far, elbow bending backward until the finger aimed at them like an accusation.
The singing stopped.
The silence hit harder than sound. All those throats going quiet at once, the sudden absence of that vibration in Harlan's chest leaving a hollow ache behind.
Then they screamed.
Not human screams—the wire prevented that. These were wet, gurgling shrieks that came from somewhere deeper than throats, from the Corruption itself expressing rage through borrowed meat.
They charged.
Harlan fired into the mass—crack—and the front grunt's head came apart in a spray of brain matter that smelled like rotting fruit. The body stayed upright for two shambling steps before collapsing, but the others just climbed over it, feet squelching in their fallen companion's skull fragments.
Isolde threw a knife. It buried in a grunt's throat, and the creature convulsed, black veins spreading from the wound as poison did its work. Flesh began to rot in real-time, liquefying, the sweet-rotten stench of accelerated decay flooding the air. The grunt collapsed into itself, skin sloughing off bones that turned brittle and snapped.
But more came. Always more.
An Armored shouldered through the crowd—massive, seven feet of meat wrapped in improvised plate cobbled from saw blades and chain. Its breathing came mechanical and wrong, air wheezing through a throat that shouldn't have been able to draw breath. Where its face should have been, just a mass of scar tissue and wire, the features erased by some old violence.
"Big one," Harlan said, backing up the stairs. Three rounds left. Not enough for a crowd this size, especially with an Armored soaking damage.
"I see it." Isolde's hand went to her belt, pulling a wax dynamite stick. The paper wrapping was covered in those protective sigils she'd carved herself, though Harlan noticed her hands shook slightly as she lit the fuse—muscle memory fighting conscious knowledge that the wards were just superstition.
The fuse hissed. Three seconds, maybe four.
She threw it underhand, and the stick tumbled through the air trailing smoke. It hit the water right in front of the Armored, splashing down among the clustered grunts.
Harlan turned, grabbing Isolde, throwing them both flat on the stairs.
BOOM.
The explosion wasn't loud—it was pressure, a physical punch that compressed his lungs and made his ears pop. The stairs jumped under them, wood splintering. Water and fire and body parts erupted upward in a geyser of destruction.
The shockwave blew out what remained of the windows, spraying glass and wood fragments. Harlan felt something hot whistle past his ear—shrapnel or bone, couldn't tell which—close enough that the passage ruffled his hair.
Then the rain of debris: water first, mixed with blood and bile, falling like warm black sleet. Then chunks of meat, grunts blown apart at the molecular level. Then the fire, burning wax and flesh creating a sweet-chemical stink that coated the inside of Harlan's nose.
He came up coughing, ears ringing so loud he couldn't hear his own breathing. The stairs under them had cracked—not broken, but compromised, listing at an angle that made standing feel precarious.
Below, crater. The explosion had punched through the waterlogged floor into whatever foundation remained, creating a hole that swallowed the black water in a slow whirlpool. Grunts floated in it, most of them in pieces. The Armored had taken the blast full force—its torso was gone, just legs standing upright in the water for a moment before toppling.
But the ones at the edges were still moving. Crawling now, dragging themselves forward on broken limbs, still screaming that wet gurgling scream.
"Out," Harlan said—or tried to say. His voice came out muffled, distant, like speaking underwater.
Isolde nodded. Blood ran from her nose—blast pressure—but she was moving, limping for the back wall where a window hung open to pre-dawn sky.
They went through it together, hitting the ground outside in a roll that jarred Harlan's burned arm and sent fresh white-hot pain up to his shoulder. Mud cushioned the fall but also trapped them for crucial seconds, sucking at clothes and gear while they fought upright.
Behind them, the mill groaned—a sound like a dying animal, low and resonant. The explosion had done more structural damage than Harlan realized. The whole building was listing now, the support beams giving up their decades-long fight against gravity and rot.
They ran.
Or tried to. Harlan's boots kept sinking in mud that grabbed with desperate hunger. Isolde's sutured leg was failing, each step more lurching than the last. Behind them, the mill's groaning intensified, building to a shriek of tortured wood and metal.
Then it collapsed.
The sound was catastrophic—thousands of pounds of wood and metal and corruption-soaked memory giving up at once, falling into the black water with a splash that sent waves rolling outward. The waves hit Harlan from behind, knocked him forward into mud that tried to swallow him whole.
He went under for a moment—just a heartbeat—but in that moment the water closed over his head and he was back in the coffin, three days of darkness and suffocating terror while the village burned above and the children scratched and begged him to open the lid and join them—
Hands grabbed his coat, hauling him up. Isolde, soaked and bleeding but still moving, still fighting. Her eyes met his, and he saw the same thing he'd seen in the safehouse: clinical assessment. She was measuring him, cataloging whether he was still functional or if the trauma had finally broken something vital.
He shook water from his eyes, spat black bayou filth. "I'm good."
She didn't look convinced but released him anyway.
The mill was gone—just a pile of timber and metal slowly sinking into the flooded ground. A few grunts crawled from the wreckage, but they were broken, no longer threats. They'd rot or drown or just stop, like wind-up toys running down.
Harlan checked the Lebel. Water had gotten in the action. He'd need to strip and clean it before it was reliable again. Three rounds still loaded, but the powder might be compromised.
"The clue," Isolde said. She was checking her own gear—Nagant still functional, half her knives lost in the explosion, dynamite reduced to two sticks.
Harlan pulled the ledger from his coat. Soaked through, but the fungal writing remained, glowing faintly even in the growing dawn light. The names were still there. His name still there.
"Desalle Manor," he said. "Southwest wine cave entrance."
"How far?"
"Three miles. Through Stillwater Bend and the leech marshes." He looked at her leg, her blood-stained pants, the way she was favoring her left side. "You can still move?"
"Can you?" She nodded at his arm, at the fresh blisters already weeping through the new bandage.
Fair point.
They started walking as the sun finally cracked the horizon, painting the bayou in shades of rust and old blood. Behind them, the mill continued its slow death, timbers groaning as they settled deeper into mud that would digest them over decades, breaking them down into the same organic soup that fed the Corruption.
Somewhere ahead, the Spider waited in its web of memories, patient as rot.
And somewhere behind, Dante Valcour and his fanatics were making their own approach, drawn by the same cursed moon, the same blood money, the same beautiful delusion that killing monsters meant something more than delaying the inevitable.
Harlan's rosary clicked as he walked, twenty-three teeth counting down the distance between here and the next mercy kill.
Twenty-four, he thought. Maybe twenty-five.
The bayou didn't care. It swallowed everything equally—the living, the dead, the things in between. It had swallowed this land for ten thousand years and would swallow it for ten thousand more.
The only question was whether you died screaming or silent.
Harlan had stopped caring about the answer years ago.
But he kept walking anyway.
Encore une fois.