The kitchen was warm.
Amber light from the fixture above the counter spread across the tile floor, catching the steam rising from both mugs as Declan lifted them.
Outside the window, the street was dark and cold. Frost formed at the corners of the glass, the neighbour's Christmas lights blinking in a slow red pulse through the condensation.
He carried the mugs into the living room.
Hannah, his newlywed wife. sat in the corner of the couch with her legs tucked beneath her. Mercy, his daughter, against her chest. One of her hands was moving in slow circles across the baby's back. Mercy's eyes were closing, the small fists unclenching, her breathing evening out into something deep and regular. Hannah's long, golden hair fell against her shoulder.
She glanced at Declan with a proud smile.
"She's almost out," she said, barely above a whisper.
"I can see that." He kept his voice low, gently crossing the room, moving towards her. "Took long enough."
"She's three months old, Declan, cut her some slack."
"I'm cutting her all the slack." He cleared his throat and held out one of the mugs. "Here."
Hannah's gaze rested on the outstretched hand, as if deliberating; she raised her own hand to the warm mug, and her fingertips brushed against its ceramic.
Outside, on the street, a man walking his dog stopped mid-stride.
He didn't stumble. Didn't trip. Just stopped, his hand still holding the lead, the dog beside him frozen in the same instant, both of them standing on the pavement under the orange streetlight.
Two houses down, an amber light was shining in an upstairs window. A silhouette moved behind the translucent curtain and paused.
Across the street, a car idled at the kerb, its engine running, its driver motionless behind the wheel.
The Christmas lights in the window opposite shuttered, paused, dimmed.
Then the floorboards shuddered beneath Declan's feet.
The mugs trembled in his hands, the hot chocolate sloshing against the rims, singing the edge of Declan's wrist. The lampshade above Hannah swung on its fitting, splashing the light across the opposing wall in a rapid arc.
The mugs left his hands.
He didn't drop them. They simply plummeted, falling, the hot chocolate arcing out in twin curves as they struck the tile and shattered, the sound of it enormous in the quiet living room.
Then the pain arrived.
It came from everywhere his body could feel it.
From the base of his spine, to the top of his skull, down through his arms and into his hands.
Not arriving in waves but all of it simultaneously, constant, with no peak and no relief. His legs went weak. He hit the floor on his knees first then his hands, the tile felt warm against his palms.
Every vein in his forearms rose dark and thick against the skin, pushing outward, branching up toward his elbows and into his biceps.
They continued up his neck in a spreading dark map that pulsed with each heartbeat.
Mercy shrieked.
A sound with no precedent in her three months of life, high and raw and nothing like crying.
Declan raised his head.
Hannah's hand was pressed against her mouth. When it came away it was dark, blood running down her jaw in thin lines, her chin slick with it, her eyes shot through with red, every vessel in them blown. Her face had gone pale, Mercy still against her chest, still shrieking, Hannah's other arm holding her without seeming to know it was holding her.
He tried to get up.
Every vein that had risen tried to tear through the skin above it simultaneously. The pressure hit him, his vision contracting to a bright narrow point, his arms shaking and then buckling, going back down to the tile before they'd finished straightening. The hot chocolate spread across the floor in dark rivulets around his hands.
He tried again.
The darkness started at the edges of his vision and moved inward fast.
Hannah's coughing slowed.
Mercy stopped shrieking.
Not gradually. Not winding down.
Just stopped.
The silence was enormous and total, and Declan's vision was almost gone, the bright point contracting to nothing, his cheek against the cold tile, his eyes still open, still finding Hannah on the couch above him, her jaw dark with blood, her eyes finding him in her last moments.
Declan watched as the light in them faded.
He tried once more to get up.
The darkness came before he finished.
Outside, on the street, the man and his dog lay under the orange streetlight exactly where they had collapsed. The car at the kerb still idled, its exhaust rising in a thin white column into the cold air. The upstairs window two houses down was dark.
The Christmas lights across the street stayed off.
The street was silent.
The frost kept crawling into the corners of the windows.
The streetlights burned on.
And somewhere above the rooftops, visible to no one left to look, something titanic and almost horrifying moved through the cloud cover in complete silence, its underside etched with patterns that pulsed with cold blue light, moving from one end of the sky to the other without slowing, without stopping, its work in this city already done.
Like its many counterparts.