Chapter 3 The Rising Threat
The city at night was never silent. Even as dawn approached, Lagos hummed with its restless orchestra motorbikes growling through side streets, vendors hawking breakfast bread and akara, radios coughing out distorted gospel songs. For Amara Cole, the noise was little more than static, a thin veil against the pounding weight in her skull.
Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat. Dispatch. She swerved the sedan toward the curb, lifted the receiver, and felt the hair on her arms rise as the operator spoke.
“Detective Cole, we’ve got something. Female survivor, late twenties. Found near the lagoon under Carter Bridge. Looks like she stumbled from one of the ritual sites. Paramedics say she’s in shock, barely coherent. Name’s Lila Brooks.”
A survivor. The first thread of life in a case sewn together with corpses. Amara felt a current of grim hope surge through her fatigue. She slammed the gear into drive and sped through the thinning traffic.
The emergency ward smelled of antiseptic and quiet desperation. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, bleaching color from the faces of the injured and the families waiting with them. Amara’s badge got her past the nurses’ station and into a curtained cubicle where a young woman sat hunched on the bed.
Lila Brooks looked like a shadow of herself. Hair matted with sweat and river water, clothes torn at the seams, her arms bore scratches that looked more like frantic claw marks than injuries. Her eyes darted constantly up to the ceiling tiles, sideways at the curtain, back down to her trembling hands.
A paramedic hovered nearby. “She was found staggering near the bridge. Nearly walked into traffic before a passerby dragged her out. She kept repeating the same word.”
Amara’s voice was steady. “What word?”
“‘Veil.’”
The detective stepped closer, pulling a chair near the bed. “Lila, my name is Amara. You’re safe now. Do you remember what happened to you?”
The woman flinched at the sound of her voice. Slowly, her gaze lifted, unfocused at first, then narrowing as if she recognized something unspoken in Amara’s face.
“They… they wore masks,” Lila whispered, each syllable shaking. “Black, with red paint… like blood tears. They chanted. The air God the air was heavy. I couldn’t breathe.”
Her voice cracked, breaking into a sob. Amara leaned in, careful not to touch her, only letting her calm tone guide. “Take your time. Start with what you remember before that.”
Lila shut her eyes tightly, as though trying to trap a fleeting image. “I was… I was leaving the market. Someone grabbed me. A cloth over my mouth. Then darkness. When I woke… I was tied, on cold stone. Candles everywhere. A circle. They” Her body convulsed with a shiver. “They were waiting for something. Something that wasn’t there yet.”
Amara exchanged a glance with Marcus, who had arrived silently at her side. His jaw was tight.
“Do you remember faces? Names?” Amara pressed gently.
Lila shook her head violently. “Just voices. Low, deep. Like a hundred people whispering at once.” She gripped the sheet in white fists. “One of them leaned close and said, ‘She will come. The blood will open the veil.’”
Amara’s pulse stumbled. “‘She’? Did they say who?”
Lila’s eyes snapped open, wild and desperate. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t me they wanted. I was only practice.”
Her words fell into the room like stones into deep water, sending ripples through Amara’s chest. She wanted to press harder, to drag more detail from the broken fragments, but the nurse intervened, urging her back. Lila was trembling uncontrollably now, slipping into the cocoon of medication they had given her.
Amara backed away, her mind whirling. Practice. The blood will open the veil.
Later, at the site Lila had stumbled from, Amara stood beneath the bridge with her flashlight cutting through shadows. The ritual ground was crude but chillingly familiar: stones arranged in a wide circle, candle stubs melted into grotesque wax puddles, faint smears of blood dried into the cracked concrete.
Jordan, the young tech analyst, crouched nearby, snapping photos. His tablet screen glowed pale in the dark. “Same geometric pattern as the last site. Triangular markers, points aligned with cardinal directions. It’s deliberate. Precise.”
Amara nodded, but her attention snagged on something half-buried near one of the stones. She crouched, brushed dirt aside, and froze.
It was a necklace. Silver chain, tarnished from time. The pendant was small, oval-shaped, etched with a faint pattern of lilies. Her breath caught in her throat. She hadn’t seen it in thirteen years, but she knew it instantly.
Her sister Ada’s necklace.
For a moment the world narrowed to the glint of silver in her palm. Memory slammed into her Ada laughing on the porch, the pendant catching sunlight; Ada storming out the night she disappeared, her hand at her throat where the necklace always lay. The necklace was never recovered. Until now.
Amara closed her fist around it, her hand trembling. Marcus noticed the change in her expression. “What is it?”
She hesitated, then slipped the necklace into an evidence bag. “A lead,” she said curtly, but her voice betrayed her.
Jordan looked up from his screen. “Detective, you okay?”
She turned away, forcing steel into her spine. “Bag everything. I want analysis on residue, prints, fibers everything.”
But inside, her thoughts were chaos. Whoever staged this scene wasn’t just killing strangers. They were reaching into her past, dragging out ghosts she had buried beneath years of failed closure. This wasn’t coincidence. It was a message.
Back at the precinct, the weight of the necklace pressed against her pocket like a hot coal. She sat at her desk long after the others had left, the squad room dim and hushed. She set the evidence bag down, staring at it, her reflection warped against the plastic.
For years, she had told herself Ada was gone. Just another missing girl swallowed by the city. But seeing the necklace here, in the hands of a killer who staged rituals and spoke of “the veil,” cracked open something dangerous inside her.
Her phone buzzed with a new message. Unknown number. One line of text.
“We’ve only just begun.”
Amara’s skin prickled as if unseen eyes lingered on her through the dark windows.
The case had shifted. It was no longer about faceless victims, statistics filed into reports. It was about Ada. It was about family. And if the killer thought dangling the past would break her, they were wrong.
But as she leaned back in her chair, staring at the city skyline beyond the glass, Amara realized something chilling: if Ada’s necklace was here, then either her sister had been part of this nightmare all along or someone had kept it safe all these years, waiting for the right moment to pull her back in.
Either way, the Crimson Veil wasn’t just hunting random prey anymore.
It was hunting her.
