Into the Fray

Los Angeles, 2025

POV: Naga

The men wedged me into the back of the car with two pistols breathing against my throat and ribs, muzzles searing little circles into my skin. My shadows pressed against my boots in a tight, trembling knot, as if they could pace without moving.

Laurent sat opposite me in a rear-facing seat, legs crossed at the knee like a monarch riding to his coronation.

We moved and the night widened into blank lanes and sodium lamps as the city view quickly changed from stacked steel to open road.

Laurent watched me the way a man watched a fire he lit himself. Interested, proud, and already bored of the ways it might spread.

“Do you know why I like guns?” he asked, conversational, as if the barrels pressing into me were just another upholstery detail. “Because they make men honest. You learn what you are when there’s cold steel pressed to your neck.”

I didn’t answer. The gun at my throat dug in slightly, eager to teach me about stopping.

He smiled at my silence. “Don’t worry. The questions I enjoy most don’t require your cooperation.” He tapped ash into a small crystal tray fitted into the door. “I’ll even answer a few of yours. Consider it a courtesy for what comes next.”

He turned his head as if addressing a theater. The car’s cabin light traced the line of his jaw, the rings at his knuckles flashing like small diamonds.

“To be clear, I’m not Malice,” he said. “It’s what nervous men always assume, that if you stand near a monster, you must be the monster. No. I simply work for them. Hired guns, so to speak...” He smiled wider. “If Malice is a church then I’m the one who collects the tithe.”

Smoke curled upward. The gunman on my right shifted his stance and the muzzle at my throat resumed the exact pressure a fraction of a second later. They were trained well.

“You’re wondering how we found you,” Laurent continued, pleased. “The smell from the warehouse. The trail to the docks…We’ve been watching those three for months.” His eyes warmed with delight. “Jinho foresaw it all. The time of your arrival, how you’d join up with their little gang. So we planted the scent. Her scent.”

The words made my skin run cold.

“Haneul,” I grunted through gritted teeth.

He laughed softly, indulgent. “I guess she did have a name, didn’t she.” He leaned back, comfortable. “Do you know what the best part of a relic is? Even a lie can function as a relic if it looks enough like truth. People kneel. They weep. They bring their sick. They believe. And that belief is currency.” He steepled his fingers. “We distilled belief.”

He lifted a slim black case from the seat beside him, opened it with two clicks, and showed me neat foam cradling glass vials. Even from across the car I immediately recognized the blaring scent. Metallic and sweet, the way the first rain on old copper tastes if it were a scent.

“Angel blood,” he said, savoring it. “Or as we call it, Compound Seraph. And yes, before you recite your hopeful liturgy…” He rolled the word lovingly, then flicked it away. “The original is gone. Dead long before you crawled your way back here. But death is poor at keeping the market out.” He tapped one vial with a ring, a tiny bell sound. “We have the recipe. We have the seed. And once you have that, you can plant an orchard of blasphemy.”

Inside me something tore. It didn’t make a noise. 

They were defiling her. Violating her. I didn’t even have enough time to process that what he said implied Specter was right. Haneul was really gone.

He tilted his head, amused. “Devil,” he said, gentle, like a schoolteacher coaxing a child to look at a scar. “Every time you breathed her in tonight, you were smelling product.” He tapped his own sternum with the cigarette. “We own your compass.”

The car ate distance. The highway unrolled in a flat flare of light. In the front cabin, the driver’s head was a black shape cut out of the glow. We’d left the rest of Laurent’s men somewhere behind us. Or ahead. It was just this car now.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. The words made the gun at my throat move when I spoke.

“You will,” he said. “Belief is a schedule, Devil. The truth always comes out.”

He snapped the case closed, slid it back beside him like a man putting away a loaded smile. “Malice creates the divine, packages it, and sells it back to men who think grace is a liquid. I provide the shelf space. The polite men with clipboards. But you see, the serum is not yet perfected. And Jinho thinks that the Original Sin is the missing component. In other words, you.”

Jinho again. The name felt like a splinter under the nail, small and constant. For a human to possess knowledge of the curse instilled into me…No, it was too soon to say he was human for sure.

“Tell me who he is.” I spat, not moving my neck even an inch.

“A man who wages war against the heavens,” he said. “Can’t say I get along with him, but he fills my pockets.” He smiled. “He wants you intact for now. Spared me the exact details.”

My shadows writhed, a miniature storm trapped under my soles. The gunman to my right noticed the twitch in my jaw and eased the barrel higher, pushing fresh cold into skin.

“And Haneul?” I made myself ask it. It felt like eating glass. “You said she’s dead.”

He exhaled smoke and a kind of sympathy almost. “Centuries. A good death. Useful. It made room for men like me.” His eyes danced. “And like you.”

My breath shortened in small increments. The car’s leather had the texture of old money and the ethics to match.

The highway narrowed through a construction stretch. Barriers shouldered in, lanes pinched tight. The driver eased a fraction. Asphalt changed pitch under the tires. We were alone out here, there was no traffic ahead and no headlights behind. The city had given us to the night, and the night had passed us to a different jurisdiction.

Laurent flicked ash into the tray, studying the pattern with the mild interest of a man appraising a stain he would never clean. His men were disciplined, their breath regular, eyes forward and on me without staring. The gun at my ribs didn’t waver when the car took a small curve. The one at my throat had learned the exact pressure to keep my blood aware of itself.

He talked on, soft, pleased with the shape of his own certainty. “But you know what I do admire about Jinho? His appetite. Not for violence—any child can love a fire. He loves order. He loves books balanced and lines straight. He believes in a city that runs on time and terror. He understands that holiness is a supply chain.”

I marked the small pause he gave himself after order. I watched the gunman on my left adjust his fingers once, the tiniest shift to relieve a numb patch on his palm. Then I watched the driver glance at the mirror for a beat longer than habit.

All I needed was one moment.

Laurent lifted his cigarette and looked toward the tinted glass as if the dark outside were a mirror. The gunman on my right inhaled shallowly. My shadow bent its head like an animal making itself smaller to be closer to the ground.

He reached for the case again to admire his little vials of blasphemy. The gun at my throat eased an imperceptible breath when the man’s wrist recalibrated against the moving car.

It was an opening. Openings aren’t mistakes, they’re simple physics.

I let the shadow under my right heel thicken until it had weight. Then I moved.

The first hit was small and quiet. A sliver of dark snapped up between the pistol and my throat and pressed the barrel sideways, half an inch, no more, while my left hand slammed the slide back with the heel of my palm. The gun jammed between one inhale and the next. The man’s eyes flared. My right knee came up and caught his wrist, a bone popped. The pistol clattered against my collarbone.

On my other side, the second gunman tried to correct. I let the shadow under my foot spill across the carpet like oil gone feral. It looped his ankle and pulled it in. He went sideways, his shot barked, shearing the roof liner and blowing insulation into Laurent’s cigarette glow.

“Shit,” Laurent said, almost delighted.

I threw myself forward, past the briefly gun on my right, and drove my palm into Laurent’s throat. He gargled and kissed the edge of the jump seat with his temple. The second man recovered fast, he came up in a tight crouch, centering his aim at me. I threw a shadow tendril between us. His round punched through it and tore into my shoulder.

The driver shouted as the car swerved, tired screeching.

Laurent didn’t lunge for the gun. He laughed again, softly, as if a child had surprised him with a party trick.

I tore the door handle with shadow tendrils and kicked. The door burst outward into the highway. The night air hit me in the face, cold and fast.

The second gunman lunged at me and I let him. I grabbed his wrist and gave it back to him in a shape that wouldn’t hold a tool. Snap.

The car gave a small leap as the driver corrected again, the open door yawed and snapped, wires wrenching free in sparks.

We were going fast. Not an ideal speed for stepping out. But guns, Laurent had said, make men honest. The only honesty I had left wore knives.

I tumbled out of the car. Asphalt reached up with both hands. I let my shadows spill and float me an inch above the ground, a black cushion that screamed as it scraped. The road burned my palms anyway as my skin went raw. The hurt cleared any last bits of restraint. I came up in a low crouch on the shoulder, breath tearing in my throat, my shadows uncoiling around me like snakes finally uncaged.

The car braked hard and fishtailed into a stop, sideways across two lanes, a neat barricade. The rear door swung open and the interior light made a small stage in the dark. One gunman lay half on the floor, choking around a crushed larynx. The other cursed softly, cradling a ruined wrist.

Laurent stepped out of the car and adjusted his tie.

He looked at me as if I’d done exactly what he wanted.

“Better,” he said. His shoes kissed the asphalt without hurrying. The highway around us stretched blank in both directions, lamps standing like tired priests. “It was always gonna be more fun this way.”

He reached into his jacket and brought out a single black vial. Not one of the neat ones from the case. This was uglier. The glass had an oily sheen. When he tilted it, it left a smear on the glass that glowed red.

“Did you think I came to catch the Devil with nothing?” he asked mildly.

“No,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter, I’m killing you here. And then I’m killing this Jinho you keep speaking of.”

He smiled, pleased that I still bothered to insult him, and plunged the needle into the vein at the crook of his neck.

He didn’t flinch. His jaw tightened once. He closed his eyes the way a man closes them when he’s listening to an orchestra tune and knows the song will start on the next breath.

For a second nothing changed.

Then his veins lit.