Maestro

An Unspecified Highway, Los Angeles, 2025

POV: Naga

A dim, dirty radiance crawled along the rivers under Laurent’s skin, red the way coal turns red against fire. His irises flared the same shade and then steadied. When he exhaled, the breath steamed in heat that wasn’t the night’s.

The air around him thickened. Not with holiness. With precision.

He raised his right hand and the radiance ran to his palm. The light gathered there with a hum like glass singing when a finger runs its rim.

He snapped his arm out, forming a gun shape with his hand and the light suddenly forged into an arrow.

It wasn’t shape pretending to be a weapon. It was a weapon pretending to be light. It left a red seam in the air behind it and punched into the highway ten feet to my left, hard enough to make the asphalt split. The hole it left glowed at the rim like a wound.

I moved. The shadows surged, a black wave rising knee-high, layered and dense. He flicked his wrist the other way and then three more arrows hissed at me from three different angles, handwriting the air with red lines. They drilled into my shadow barricade and punched through, a handspan of red bursting out the other side. The impacts rattled my bones.

The second arrow came faster. He was enjoying himself. The red streaks whistled with heat, each one singing a short note of death. I wove the shadows thicker, braided them until they were rope, then cable, and then armor.

It wasn’t his power. I could feel it in the heat, smell it in the air. Haneul’s blood pumping through his veins. Disgusting.

A stolen fire, bottled and sold. I’d seen angels with similar divine blessings before. But the red light he hurled wasn’t born from him, it was mimicry, a counterfeit.

Was this how they used angel blood? Or the Seraph Compound, whatever it was called. Malice had engineered a substance that granted human’s the gifts bestowed to angels. A divine blessing twisted into a weapon.

But what stopped me cold was that it worked. Humans weren’t meant to carry such power, yet here he was, his veins lit like scripture set on fire.

I didn’t think. There wasn’t time. I threw shadows out, reaching under his feet. He stepped aside, light blooming along the veins in his calves, and burned a red line through the darkness with an offhand flick, carving a trench that seethed scarlet a second before cooling to asphalt again.

He moved like a choreographer. Every gesture had intent. The arrows weren’t random in trajectory. He was sighting through angles, firing not at where I stood but where I would move. I bent the shadows into strange shapes; knots, teeth, spines, but he read them and responded in kind.

Another arrow came low, a knee-high scream of red. I ducked and felt the heat shear a strip of hair from my temple.

“Luckily for you, I’m on a timer,” he called cheerfully through the wreckage. “This version of Compound Seraph is merely a temporary serum. It gives me no more than half an hour.” He sent two more shots mid-sentence. I parried one and let the other pass over my shoulder.

Thirty minutes. I had half an hour to hold out. My mortal body was still too weak to harness the full capabilities of my divine blessings. But the same must be true for Laurent. The strain on his physical form must be unimaginably painful.

I spread the shadows under the crashed car and flipped it toward him. He fired through the wheel well. A red rod of heat drilled the axle and pinned the car to the lane with a hiss.

Then he laughed. He was sweating now, I could just make out a sheen at his hairline.

“Where did you get her blood?” I asked. I wasn’t making conversation. I needed his mouth moving. People aim worse when they gloat.

“Above my pay grade,” he said, and fired another three. “Jinho must’ve dug it up somewhere.” He was taunting me. He snapped his fingers and a spread of shorter bolts scattered like thrown nails. “From the quiet places where miracles go to spoil.”

The highway lit red and black, a terrible Christmas. My left shoulder ached with every throw. The earlier bullet groove in my flesh pulsed the way a drum keeps time at a funeral. I bent the shadows into a column and stabbed it at his sternum.

He crossed his arms like a man bracing for rain and fired downward, the column shattering in a shower of light. Splinters of absence rained around his shoes.

“Jinho was right,” he said, breath a fraction rougher. “Desire makes you obedient. I don’t have to leash you. I just have to put what you want a block ahead and let you walk.”

I stepped into the next arrow and let it punch through me where I made the shadows thick enough to tank most of it. Heat tore a line across my ribs. I answered by opening a seam in the dark under his feet and making it deep. He fell to a knee, the light around his hands flaring brighter before he burned the pit to clean edges, kicking out of it with a child’s grace.

Another shot came. My shield crushed like a compressed soda can when a red spear drilled into it.

The highway around us looked bombed. Lamps popped and blinking. The air tasted of hot iron and the specific wrongness of burned shadow. Somewhere a coyote yipped, annoyed we were ruining the quiet.

“Tell me where she is,” I said, and the lie in my own demand stung.

“Dead,” he said. “Get it through your head, Devil.”

I pulled the night into me like a lungful and threw it outward in a ring, a fast expanding circle of dark that scraped along the asphalt and lifted gravel in a black tide. Laurent’s eyes brightened and he raised his arms to meet it like a conductor accepting applause. He fired down and out, red met black, the ring shredded, half of it climbed a lamppost and blackened it, the other half spilled off the railing of the road.

He took a breath and smiled too broadly. The light inside him pulsed with his heart.

“My orders were to take you alive,” he began explaining. “But limbless is still alive, right?”

He flicked his fingers three times. Three red nails sang out. One shaved the concrete at my ankle and the next burned a hole through a shadow rope and made it recoil like flesh.

Choice is what you have when desire and survival ask different things at once.

I chose to lead with hate.

I stepped into the third arrow and caught it with both hands. It was light, which meant it had almost no mass, only heat. My palms blistered instantly. The shadows wrapped my wrists like gloves and screamed for me. I turned the thing a fraction and shoved.

It skittered off my hand and carved a red groove across Laurent’s shoulder before ricocheting into the night.

His grin faltered. For half a second. It was enough to see the man under the grandiose, annoyed that reality had failed to applaud on cue.

“Better,” I said. Petty victory spends like cash when you’re bleeding.

He looked down at the singe on his suit and laughed. “I must admit,” he whispered. “The real thing is no joke.”

He raised both hands. Light poured to his fingertips like water learning to obey gravity in a new direction. He drew a bow in the air, nothing in his left hand, string of red between fingers and heat, an arrow of brighter stain on his right. He aligned it on my chest.

I felt the highway under my feet like a living thing, old, tired and obedient by design.

I felt the shadows around me like animals that loved me more than they loved their own bodies.

I felt the burn at my ribs, the wet at my shoulder, and the anger in my mouth that wanted to scream profanities at the man who stood before me.

“Capturing you alive,” he said conversationally, drawing the bow. “Rignt now I don’t give a fuck about any of that.”

“Try it, lapdog,” I said, and watched the flicker in his eyes as he decided whether the sentence was a threat or a prophecy.

We staggered toward each other across the destroyed highway.

“Come on, Devil,” Laurent said through his teeth, smiling as he bled down his mouth. “Earn your invoice.”

I went forward to collect.

My shadows met his scarlet light in one final storm.

The air ruptured between us in heat, metal, fire, and blood. I don’t remember if I screamed or if it was just the sound of the world tearing open. His arrow punched through my shoulder at the same moment my fangs cut across his arm. Neither of us let go until the combustion sent us both flying backwards.

Then the ground swallowed me. My knees gave out. My body felt like a husk, smoke spilling from every vein. I saw Laurent stumble too, his red glow sputtering out like a candle in the rain. We both collapsed in the rubble, our breaths ragged.

Darkness tugged at me.

Suddenly, headlights cut through the haze. A low hum rolled closer. Tires hissed against shattered concrete. Then I heard the unmistakable purr of an engine.

I forced my eyes open. A figure in a tan suit stepped out, crisp even in the ruin. Always a smirk on his lips, as if the world existed purely as he’d planned. Specter.

“Always dramatic, aren’t you?” he said, crouching down beside me. His voice was velvet, but sharp. He checked my pulse with gloved fingers, as though I were a specimen he’d ordered. “Try not to die. You’d make me look careless.”

Another set of footsteps followed. It was Makoto. His eyes were wide, his jaw tight, but he kept his hands steady as he lifted me.

“Laurent’s alive,” Makoto said.

Specter’s gaze flicked over to where Laurent lay broken in the dirt. “Good,” he replied simply. “Cuff him up.”

I tried to rise, but my limbs betrayed me. The world tilted, folded in on itself, and then vanished.

When my eyes opened again, I was no longer in the ruins. Silk sheets. A ceiling too high. Chandeliers glowing soft gold. The scent of expensive polish and old wood.

I sat up, dizzy, my wounds wrapped but throbbing. In the room with me was Specter. I turned my head slightly to see Makoto stood against the wall, arms crossed. And on the floor, bound in steel and ropes, Laurent, unconscious but alive.

Specter sat in a velvet chair near the fire, one leg crossed, glass of wine in hand. The case of angel blood rested on the table beside him, as if it were nothing more than a centerpiece.

He smiled at me like a man who had already won. 

“Welcome home, serpent,” he said. “Everything went as I planned, somewhat. We now have a hostage, as well as three vials of angel blood.”