The relay tower stood six blocks beyond the old transit line, a narrow steel structure braced between the skeletal remains of two office buildings. Once it had carried emergency signals across the district. Now it mostly served Helios Gate by extending the outer warning network far enough to catch major movement before it hit the Sunwall.
Or at least it was supposed to.
Its signal lantern was dark.
"Still dead," Sera said from the roofline as she peered through her scope. "No movement around the base."
Malik frowned. "That's what bothers me."
"What, no monsters?" Toren asked.
"No scavengers either."
That shut him up.
The city around the tower felt wrong in the same way the subway had felt wrong. Not empty. Held.
The squad crossed an intersection littered with overturned military trucks and old bones bleached pale under years of weather. Kael saw a child's shoe half-buried in ash near the curb and looked away.
Helios Gate instructors always said the old world could distract a young hunter if he let it. Broken toys. Rusted family cars. Apartment walls still painted with cheerful colors. Little reminders that the Nightlands hadn't always belonged to things with claws.
Bram nudged a skull with his boot. "Human?"
Malik crouched, studied the teeth, then shook his head. "No. Feral."
Kael glanced around. "Where's the rest of it?"
No one answered.
Elara raised one hand. "Positions."
They spread out as they approached the tower entrance.
The maintenance door hung open.
Inside, the narrow stairwell was dark.
"Malik, Bram with me," Elara said. "Kael, Toren, rear. Sera, overwatch."
Sera vanished soundlessly back toward the building opposite the tower.
The rest of them entered.
The stairwell smelled like wet rust and something sweeter underneath. Something old.
Kael tried not to breathe through his nose.
They climbed in silence, boots clanging softly against metal steps. Floor one was empty. Floor two held a collapsed workstation and shredded wire. Floor three—
Bram stopped so abruptly Kael nearly walked into him.
"What is it?"
Bram pointed.
The relay operator was nailed to the wall.
Or what was left of him.
Metal rods from the tower wiring had been driven through his arms and ribs, pinning him in place like an insect in a display case. His throat had been torn open, but there was surprisingly little blood on the floor. Most of it was gone.
"God," Toren whispered.
"No," Malik said quietly. "Just vampires."
Kael stared at the symbols carved into the wall behind the body.
They had been scratched into the rust with something sharp and deliberate. Concentric circles. Lines cutting through them. A dark crescent in the middle.
The shape tugged at him in a way he didn't like.
Elara stepped closer without touching anything. "Have you seen this before?"
Malik shook his head.
Toren swallowed. "Maybe a cult mark?"
"No cult climbed three stories through a vampire zone to decorate a corpse," said Elara.
Kael couldn't stop looking at the symbol.
It made the skin at the base of his neck prickle.
For one impossible second he thought he recognized it, though he knew he had never seen it before in his life.
"You okay?" Bram asked softly.
Kael realized everyone was looking at him.
"Yeah," he said too quickly. "Just… this doesn't feel like ferals."
"It's not," Malik said.
He pointed at the wounds. "Too clean. Too careful. Ferals rip and feed. This was done for a reason."
As if on cue, Sera's voice crackled in the comm-bead on Elara's collar.
"Captain."
Elara touched it. "Go."
"I've got movement."
Everyone in the tower went still.
"How many?"
A pause.
Then Sera said, "Not sure."
Kael's grip tightened on his spear.
"What do you mean not sure?"
"Because they aren't moving like ferals."
Elara's eyes sharpened. "Location?"
"Rooftops. North and east. Maybe five. Maybe more." Another pause. "They're watching us."
A thin chill moved through Kael's ribs.
Elara glanced once at the carved symbol behind the corpse.
"Take the relay core and burn the records," she said to Toren. "We leave in two minutes."
Toren dropped his pack, hands shaking only slightly as he moved to the relay housing.
Bram stood by the stairwell door. Malik watched the windows. Kael tried not to look at the corpse, but his gaze kept dragging back to the crescent mark.
The back of his skull started to throb.
Toren yanked the metal casing open and winced. "Good news?"
"No such thing."
"The relay's dead because somebody cut it from the inside. Bad news is…" He held up a section of blackened wire. "This was melted."
"With what?" asked Bram.
Toren looked at it, genuinely baffled. "No idea."
"Captain," Sera said again, this time sharper. "They're moving."
Elara didn't hesitate. "Out. Now."
Toren ripped the relay core free, shoved it into his satchel, and slapped a charge onto the control board.
The squad backed toward the stairwell.
Kael was last to leave the room.
As he stepped through the doorway, he felt something—an urge, not quite a voice—pull his eyes back toward the corpse one last time.
He looked.
For a blink, the blood-smeared crescent on the wall seemed to glow.
Then the entire floor shook.
Not from the tower.
From something outside.
Bram swore. "That was big."
Sera's voice came through in a whisper now.
"You need to run."
The charge detonated behind them as they hit the stairs.
Below, somewhere in the street, something roared.
It was not a feral sound.
It was deeper.
Smarter.
Hungry in a different way.
Kael felt the sound in his bones before he understood what his body was trying to tell him.
Whatever was down there—
it had come for them.