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The ER 

The air hung thick and metallic, a cloying scent of antiseptic battling the coppery tang of blood. The ER was a maelstrom of flashing lights, panicked shouts, and the rhythmic beep of heart monitors, a symphony of chaos that mirrored the turmoil churning within Delilah Vale. She stood, a vision of stark beauty amidst the carnage, her usually flawless makeup smudged, her usually sleek black hair escaping its severe bun, framing a face etched with a weariness far beyond her twenty-eight years. The crimson stain on the victim’s chest pulsed in her vision, a morbid echo of the fragmented memories that had plagued her since childhood.

Another brutal night in Chicago’s underbelly. Another shift spent stitching together the shredded meat of lives that had been carelessly ruined. Another chorus of howling grief and muttered last rites, sung beneath the white hum of overhead bulbs.

Delilah moved through the chaos with the grace of muscle memory, but her eyes had stopped seeing. She navigated pain like a somnambulist walks through dreams, present, but untouched. The hospital was no longer a sanctuary; it was a mausoleum that hadn’t yet admitted it was full. Every corridor echoed with the whispers of the almost-dead. Every curtain drawn felt like a shroud.

On Trauma Bed 3, a young man thrashed against his restraints, his femur jutting from torn skin like a broken branch wrenched from a tree. Blood pulsed in thick arcs with each beat of his failing heart, splattering Delilah’s arms in a hot, viscous spray. He screamed without words, a guttural noise, pure and primal. His mother, if that’s who she was, clung to his wrist and howled right along with him. The two sounds tangled together in a discordant harmony that scraped at Delilah’s nerves.

Bed 5: a woman with vacant eyes and a distended belly, whispering in a language Delilah didn’t recognize. Her voice was rasping, wet, like something whispering through water. She cradled her abdomen not as if she were in pain, but as if she feared what might emerge from it. Her gaze flicked to Delilah’s face and locked there, unblinking. Her lips moved faster, then suddenly stopped, and her wide-open eyes glazed over with the stare of death. 

She stood at the edge of the trauma bay, arms folded tightly across her chest, her expression carved from stone. The overhead lights bathed everything in a sterile white glare, revealing the chaos unfolding before her with brutal clarity. Blood smeared the gurney’s rails. Gauze piled like snowdrifts on the floor. The woman on the table writhed weakly beneath a tangle of desperate hands, her life slipping away with every pulse of red that bubbled from her chest.

Delilah didn’t move.

Her face betrayed nothing, no panic, no sorrow, no urgency. Just that practiced, empty calm that had become her armor. Around her, the room vibrated with frantic energy: shouted vitals, the hiss of oxygen, the shrill beeping of monitors gasping their warnings. Yet it all passed over her like wind across glass. She heard it, saw it, felt it, but none of it touched her. Not anymore.

Then came the sound.

Whoosh.

The automatic doors groaned open, a sudden gust of cold air sweeping into the overheated room. Fluorescent lights glared against the rain-slicked stretchers. The scent of diesel and wet pavement drifted in like a warning.

Two paramedics pushed through, soaked to the bone, their gloves already smeared with something darker than mud.

“New arrival!” one called out. “Male, early thirties. Found unconscious, no ID. Possible overdose, except…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

The gurney rolled forward, wheels shrieking faintly beneath the weight of the still figure strapped down beneath soaked blankets. Delilah felt it before she saw his face, a ripple, sharp and subtle, deep in her gut.

Something wasn’t right.

The man’s skin had a pallor she recognized all too well, not just pale, but drained, like the blood inside him had recoiled. His mouth hung slightly open, a faint trace of something black and tar-thick crusting the corners of his lips.

There, just below the collarbone, Delilah’s gaze caught on something.

A mark.

Not a wound. Not a bruise. A symbol.

It was small, subtle, but she knew it.

A shape she’d seen before in nightmares that didn’t feel like dreams. In places that existed just behind her eyelids, waiting. The same sigil carved into flesh, painted in blood, buried in memory.

Her breath hitched, just a flicker.

No one noticed.

But the detachment wavered, and the dark within her stirred.

The victim, a young man barely out of his twenties, lay sprawled across the gurney like a broken marionette discarded after a final, violent performance. His limbs hung limply over the edge, fingers slightly curled, as if in his last moment he’d tried, and failed, to grasp at something just beyond reach. His eyes, wide and glassy, stared unblinking at the ceiling, the harsh fluorescence carving twin moons of cold white into the wet sheen of his pupils. They didn’t shimmer with life. They only mirrored the sterility of the trauma bay, that flickering, flickering hum above that always felt just a few volts short of madness.

But it was his chest that held the room captive.

This wasn’t her first encounter with death, far from it. Years spent navigating the brutal landscape of Chicago’s emergency room had hardened her, built a wall around a heart that had already suffered too many blows. But this… this was different. This was ritual.

A grotesque bloom had opened there, petal by petal, a grisly mimicry of surgical precision. From a central point, just above the sternum, long, immaculate incisions radiated outward like the spokes of some infernal wheel. The flesh was parted in symmetrical flaps, not jagged or rushed like a frenzied attack, but measured. 

Deliberate. 

Ritualistic. 

Each cut had been made with reverent care, the kind of precision found not in trauma, but in ceremony. The pattern wasn’t random. It wasn’t merely anatomical. It spoke of intention.

Delilah felt the chill coil up her spine, subtle at first, like a breeze brushing the back of her neck. But then it sank its claws in. The shape was familiar. Uncannily so. She had seen it before, not in the waking world, but in her nightmares. In the strange, smoke-choked corridors of sleep, where whispers followed her and symbols bled from the walls. That same geometric blossom had appeared, etched in shadow across the chest of faceless dream-people. Always centered. Always radiating outward, like an eye trying to open.

She blinked, trying to banish the image, but it clung to her mind like static. Her fingers, gloved in latex, hovered for a moment above the dead man’s neck before pressing gently against his carotid artery. There was no pulse. She hadn’t expected one. Still, she had to touch. She had to confirm. The body was cooling. Rigor hadn’t yet set in. He hadn’t been gone long.

Behind her, the paramedic, Garcia, a gravel-throated lifer who’d seen his share of horrors on Chicago’s streets, grumbled as he scrubbed blood from his forearms with the kind of rough, mechanical vigor that only came from years of doing the job too long. His uniform was stained dark at the sleeves, the crimson drying into stiff ridges.

“Some kind of religious freak show,” he muttered, not really to her, not really to anyone. His voice was tired, like old wood giving under pressure. “Found him like that in an old factory. No signs of forced entry. Candles all over. Smelled like piss and incense. I’m getting sick of this shit.”

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