Cursed By His Shadow

"This is my curse to you."

Those were the  dying words of the Shade Lord. It groaned painfully — a sound of utter defeat from a human, which it couldn't fully comprehend. Its arm stretched toward Sophia, not to strike or to  threaten. It reached for her the way a drowning man reaches for the shore he knows he'll never touch.

The deep wound on it's chest, carved open by Sophia's fury, pulsed, leaking something darker than blood.

"See you on the other side, my love."

It heaved once, twice.

Then it came apart.

It's body dissolved, slowly, piece by piece, unraveling into dark mist that escaped into the rainstorm swallowed, gone.

Sophia exhaled deeply.

The breath came out shaking, though her hands didn't, they never shook. Blood tracked down her face from a deep cut above her brow and cheek, ran warm over her lips and dripped from her chin. She stood beneath the hammering rain and watched the last of the mist dissolve, her gaze steady, her expression unreadable. Whether it was resolve on her face or something closer to grief — something she refused to call by its name — was impossible to say.

The Shade Lord was no more. Defeated, sent back to the depths of the Abyss.

She should have felt clean, relieved even.

But she didn't.

Something felt off, something that drew Sophia's attention.

It came from the weeping, broken ground, barely visible through the curtain of rain. It wasn't human, Sophia's sharp senses confirmed that in an instant. But it was shaped like one. Unmistakably the shaped of a human baby. Fragile, soaked to the bone, screaming into the storm like the whole night owed it something.

It bore demonic aura very strong and similar to the Shade Lord's.

Sophia walked slowly, with practiced steps, until she stood over it and stared, rain hammering her shoulders, her blade still dripping black blood onto the pavement.

What's this suppose to mean, a parting gift? she thought, and the bitterness of it rose in her throat. A demonic souvenir?

She blinked, and raised her blade, white mist curled from her lips with every exhale, dissolving into the cold air. Her arm was steady, always steady.

'Purge it. Free the world of the abomination.'

That was the rule. That had always been the rule.

She had cleaved things far bigger and far less pitiable than this without a single flinch. She had split a Hell Courier down the spine at sixteen. She had cut a Glute-monster's throat with a broken bottle at nineteen. She had buried things that still visited her in sleep, and she had never — not once — called it mercy. Hesitation wasn't a luxury she kept.

And yet.

The child's innocent cry echoed in the storm, and something buried deep in Sophia's chest stirred against her ribcage. It didn't sound like a demon at all, it sounded like a baby — just a baby, lost in the rain, screaming for something it couldn't name.

What is wrong with you?

Tears dripped from her eyes.

"Be free of this curse, Cyrus," she whispered into the storm. Her voice cracked on his name. "Be born anew, my love."

Her blade came down with a sharp, clean, merciless slice —

---

She jerked awake choking.

The gasp tore out of her like something pulled by force, her whole body lurching upright in the dark. For three full seconds, Sophia didn't know exactly where she was. Her mind raced; the rain, the Demon, the crying, the blade cutting air —

She paused to collect herself.

A nightmare.

She pressed a hand flat against her sternum and took a relaxing breathe. The lamp on her bedside clicked on, flooding the room in dull amber — familiar walls, her apartment, the same water stain on the ceiling she kept meaning to report to the landlord. She was home, she just wanted to be sure she was not been pulled into another a nightmare.

She exhaled through her nose, long and slow.

The nightmares had been coming more frequently now — always at the stroke of midnight, always the same sequence, frame for terrible frame. The name in the dark, the child crying, her blade falling. She always woke before the end, which was somehow worse than knowing. Her body treated each one like a fresh wound, never letting her grow numb to it. The sleep deprivation was beginning to cost her, a shadow hunter without sharp senses was a shadow hunter on borrowed time.

"Please," she whispered, pressing her palms together in the dim light, eyes closed. "Make it stop."

The clock read 2:57 a.m.

Too early for the city to wake, too late to pretend she'd get any more rest. She glanced at the dark line on her nightstand — the second phone, matte black, no case — waiting for the kind of calls that didn't come through normal channels. It sat cold and silent, not even a flicker, because there won't be any.

She considered her options; An early walk. A cup of dark coffee, black, no sugar. Or she could lie back down, will herself still, and try again.

She did think much about it, she chose sleep.

She pulled the sheet over her shoulder, closed her eyes, and went still, hoping something close to sleep would claim her anytime soon.

"Mmmm... mmmm..."

It was barely audible. A tiny sound slipping through the wall — but Sophia's ears caught it clearly. Her eyes snapped wide opened in the dark.

"Ahh — yes, yes—"

"Don't stop, daddy. Harder—"

Louder now, committed, absolutely shameless at three in the morning. The headboard of the neighboring unit found a rhythm it had no business keeping. Sophia gritted her teeth, and her fist found the wall before her mind finished forming the thought. The impact rattled the picture frame above her dresser hard enough to send it crooked.

"Keep it the hell down!" Her voice came out precise and edged with genuine fury and frustration. "It is three in the morning God damnit! You are not the only occupant in this block!"

Silence dropped like a stone.

The headboard stopped. The moaning reduced itself to something muffled, embarrassed.

Good.

Madam Christine and whatever warm body she'd dragged home tonight — that shameless, inconsiderate woman — had apparently heard the message clearly. Sophia had no issue with what the woman did in her own time. She had every issue to being made an unwilling audience to a party at an hour when civilized people were unconscious.

But the damage was done, the sleep she'd clawed back was gone, and Christine was to be thanked for it.

She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, elbows on her knees, staring at the floor. Then she rose and padded toward the kitchen.

The water from the tap was cold. She filled a glass, popped three white pills from a drug container sitting atop the sink and threw them into her mouth. She stood and  drank it slowly, letting the chill settle her. The apartment was quiet now — the whole block seemed to be holding its breath. Even Christine had gone to soft, barely-there sounds through the wall, like she was finally conscious of her audience.

Sophia stared at the dark window above the sink, watching rain begin to spot the glass.

The dream came back to her in pieces. The rush of energy of the moment, the mist, the fleeting emotions, the crying in the rain. In the early years it had been easy to lock those things in a drawer and leave them. A job was a job, but this dream wasn't leaving, and it wasn't merely replaying a memory. It was pressing on something  insistent, repetitive.

"What are you trying to tell me?"

Her reflection caught her tired eyes in the window glass. Eyes that had barely had proper rest in ages, the dark patches beneath them.

"I'll be damned," she said quietly, to no one.

Then something stirred her senses to live.

All at once, every instinct snapping to full alert. The fine hairs on her forearms rose, goose pimples forming, her breathing going flat and controlled without her deciding it.

Something was outside, below the window, close to the hedgerow that lined the building's outer wall. Something that moved in the wrong way. Not the aimless movement of a pedestrian or an animal. It was the deliberate, calculated stillness of a presence that didn't want to be noticed.

Her hand was already moving.

She pressed, and the false panel beneath the sink released with a soft click, and she drew the pistol out smooth and quiet. The custom-built weapon hummed to life in her grip, the faint charge along the barrel warming against her palm.

She pressed herself to the wall beside the window and eased it open by an inch. Cold air pushed through the gap, carrying the smell of wet earth and city stench, and something else beneath it — something metallic, faintly sulphuric.

A non-human entity. The hedges rustled, then they moved — violently, the branches snapping and swaying as whatever crouched inside them stopped pretending to be still.

Sophia leveled the barrel at the center of the motion. Finger resting light on the trigger. Eyes fixed, unblinking, reading the darkness between the leaves.

She waited.