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    Sitting on a swing set, listlessly drifting back and forth, seven-year-old Vanessa Moon stared at nothing. There were no other children on this secluded playground this late (it was after dark), but if there were, she wouldn’t have heard them. Just as she didn’t hear the social services lady talking on the phone over by the benches. Not after picking up a few words like ‘traumatized,’ ‘delusional,’ and ‘confabulation.’ That last one had sounded like a fun word the first time she heard it a month earlier, but it didn’t actually have anything to do with fires. It was when your brain couldn’t remember something so it made up stories. Lying, basically, but your brain convinced you it was real.


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    Vanessa wasn’t a liar. And neither was her brain. She remembered what happened. That bad man had come to their house, the glass ball thing he had broke, and then all of them, the man, her parents, and her brother disappeared. She had watched it happen, they couldn’t tell her it didn’t happen. But no one believed her. They said that people vanishing into a broken ball was impossible. They thought something much more traumatic had happened, that someone had come and abducted her family or something and that she had just suppressed those details. Or worse, that her parents had taken her brother and abandoned her. She knew some of them thought that, and it took everything the young girl had not to start punching them as hard as she could.


    That whole ‘don’t start punching the people who are supposed to be taking care of you’ thing is why she had to tune out the discussion her current temporary guardian, a woman named Nancy Wen, was having about her. Instead, Vanessa focused her attention inward, to her own memories. She was playing back those moments, from right before the man (Puriel, her parents had called him Puriel) showed up, to when she had been left alone in that house. It was like watching a YouTube video and going through it frame by frame. She was looking for anything in her memory that could tell her something important. Anything written on his clothes, anything about his face, what type of shoes he had been wearing, absolutely anything at all. But there was nothing. She had described the man to the best of her ability to at least a dozen different police officers and other authorities, but they couldn’t find him. Or anything about him. It was like he was a ghost. Or, in their minds, someone she had completely made up.


    So lost in desperately searching those memories was she, that Vanessa didn’t notice a new arrival approaching until there was a creak from the chains on the swing next to her. Somehow, the person had come all the way across the gravel without disturbing it enough to alert her. Only when the chain creaked, followed by the sound of a person lowering themselves into the swing itself, did she have the slightest clue anyone was there.


    Giving a slight start of surprise, Vanessa’s eyes opened as she turned in the swing. There was an older girl sitting there, maybe about sixteen or seventeen. She looked pretty, half-Asian and half… maybe black or something else, Vanessa wasn’t sure. She was wearing old jeans with holes in them, a tee shirt advertising a band called Velvet Underground, and a very well-worn brown leather jacket. She wasn’t looking at the younger girl beside her, but when she spoke, her attention was obvious. “You’re not crazy, you know.”


    “Who--” Vanessa started, her gaze reflexively moving to see what Ms. Wen was doing. But the woman seemed to have disappeared for a moment until she spotted her lying down on a nearby bench, barely visible in the glow from the tall lamp post illuminating the playground. It looked like she was asleep. Her phone was resting on her chest. Seeing that, the blonde girl’s eyes widened and she started to launch herself out of the swing, though whether to run away, or to run to the unconscious woman, she wasn’t sure.


    Either way, before she could get more than a couple steps, the girl behind her spoke up. “I know your parents, Vanessa. I know they wouldn’t have abandoned you. And they wouldn’t just disappear for no reason. Not like that.”


    Stopping short, the seven-year-old hesitated, then slowly turned around to look at her. “H-how do you know them? Who are you? What happened to Ms. Wen?”


    A soft smile crossed the older girl’s face. “Ms. Wen will be fine, I promise. She’s just sleeping, that’s all. She’ll wake up in a little bit. It would’ve been too hard to have this conversation with her around. As for who I am and how I know them, that’s a much longer story.” There was a brief pause before she pushed off with her feet to start lightly drifting back and forth. “If you sit down for a minute, I’ll tell you all about it. But I’ll say this much right now, I’m going to try to find your family. I’d like your help to do it.”


    Swallowing hard, the small girl looked over her shoulder at the woman sleeping on the bench, then slowly moved back to sit down once more. “Do you really think you can find them? You’re um, still basically a kid too.”


    Her words prompted a soft chuckle. “I’m older than I look.” She drifted back and forth a little bit more, picking up speed. “I’ve always liked swings, even when I was younger than you. They made me feel like I was flying, and when my papa--” She stopped then, frowning briefly before moving on. “My name is Asenath, Vanessa. But if you like, you can call me Senny.”


    “Senny,” Vanessa echoed hesitantly, “you said you know my mom and dad?”


    The other girl gave a slight nod. “Yeah, we worked together a few times. I’m a umm, a detective, basically. I help people when I can, and when the police can’t. Your parents helped people too, did you know that? Especially when they lived in Las Vegas.” She paused then before muttering under her breath, “Probably should’ve stayed there.”


    Shaking that off, she looked over at the girl next to her, expression unreadable in the dim light. “You’re not crazy, Vanessa. You really did see what you said you saw. Your parents weren’t normal, and neither are you.” A brief pause came, then, “And neither am I. I’m going to tell you what I know about your family, and about myself. Then you can tell me what you want to do. It’s your choice. It will always be your choice. But I really hope you help me. Because if we’re going to find them, it’ll take both of us.


    “We might just have to be a little patient.”


    *********


    Ten Years Later


    “So much for being patient!” Seventeen-year-old Vanessa blurted those words while racing up a narrow flight of stairs, taking them three steps at a time. Her feet unerringly found the exact right spot despite her rush, pivoting on a dime at the next landing before hurtling herself up the next set in a flurry of motion. She wore a brown leather jacket, the same one Asenath had been wearing when they first met, along with red cargo pants and a black button-up shirt. Her shoes were scuffed and heavily-worn, but comfortable. And fantastic for running, which was good considering how much of that she ended up doing.


    “I was patient!” the voice of Senny herself came through the earbud that she was wearing. “It’s that son of a bitch who wasn’t patient. Not my fault he decided to get greedy. You got him? I’ve still got a couple of his friends to deal with.”


    Above Vanessa, just rounding the next set of stairs, her quarry slammed through the rooftop access door there and sprinted outside into open sunlight. The man in question, a tall white man with long graying hair and a wiry build, turned to look over his shoulder as he ran. Seeing Vanessa arrive in the shadowy doorway, just outside reach of the sun, he flipped her off with a smug look. It was a look that transformed instantly into panic as he misjudged how close he was getting to the edge of the roof and proceeded to run right off of it and into open air.


    Before he could fall, there was a blur of motion. Vanessa reached the far side of the roof in an instant, one hand catching the back of the man’s jacket while the other one caught his arm. She spun on one foot, yanking him back onto solid ground before spinning him around to face her.


    Practically hyperventilating from the realization that he had almost fallen a good twenty stories, the man immediately came to another realization. “Wha-what the fuck?! How are you in the sun?!”


    “Little secret,” Vanessa informed him in a soft, matter-of-fact voice. Her hands found their way to his shoulders as she stared into his wide eyes. “I’m not a vampire.” She paused then before adding, “She is.”


    With that, Vanessa activated her Seosten boost once more. With her new temporary strength, she lifted the man off the ground, pivoted once more, and dropped him off the same edge of the roof she had just saved him from falling from a moment earlier.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    The man screamed, of course. But before he had fallen more than a single story, Asenath’s hand snapped out of the nearby open window. It was covered in a long-sleeve and glove to protect her from the sun, as she caught hold of the man’s arm in mid-fall and yanked him inside a small office.


    Glancing around to make sure no one was looking, Vanessa calmly turned to step backwards off the edge of the roof herself. She dropped to the ledge there, her toes finding it perfectly before she ducked down to climb in just in time to see Asenath give their target a hard shove that sent him collapsing into a corner of the room.


    “Hey there, buddy,” Senny greeted him, her face already starting to heal from the slight burn she’d received thanks to standing right next to the window to catch him. “We were just about to have a nice chat when you sicced your friends on me and took off. What was that about? Seems pretty rude to me.”


    “Fuck, shit, damn it!” Scrambling with his back against the wall, the man shook his head rapidly. “It wasn’t my idea to keep the girl, okay? The Necromancer paid us to track down his kid and clean up the mess. That’s what we were doing!”


    “Necromancer,” Asenath echoed, narrowing her eyes at him. “You were working for Fossor.”


    “Subcontracting only, I swear to God!” the man insisted. “He’s got some freaky-ass mind-controlling kid that took off, ran away from home or something. My boss got paid by Fossor to track the kid down and bring him in. He gave us some magic stone that showed the kid who sent us so he’d cooperate. We got to the gas station where he was doing some real freaky shit. Seriously, he had that girl drinking gasoline in--fuck, it was fucked up. I thought she was dead, but my buddy brought her back. We were both gonna let her go, send her to the hospital or whatever, but the boss said no. He said we might as well get paid twice for the same job and sell her to this guy he knew. I tried to tell him it was a stupid fucking idea.”


    “Stupid?” Senny was there in an instant, lifting the man off the ground by the throat before shoving him against the wall. Her vampiric fangs appeared with a low snarl. “The man you worked for wanted to sell an innocent girl to a monster and you just thought it was dumb?”


    “I wasn’t the one in charge!” he blurted frantically, shaking his head once more. “I did what I was told! Yavi’s the boss. If you don’t do what you’re told--what he tells you to do, you fucking die! And not a fun sort of die either.”


    “And yet,” Vanessa put in, “you were just fine working as a go-between to try to sell her to us when you thought we were the monsters. So you can try to argue that your sense of morality is just slightly lower than your sense of self-preservation, but apparently your greed squeezes in there above it too.”


    “That’s right, you did try to sell her to us. Or pretended to,” Senny pointed out with narrowed eyes. “Because I can’t help but notice that you took the money I brought you and then ran away without giving up the girl. In fact, you took the money and then told your buddies to kill me. I’m starting to think you were never going to hand her over to begin with.”


    The man heaved a long sigh. Or at least as much as he was able to with her hand against his throat. “I was fucking going to, okay? Yavi’s deal with his friend fell through. You and I, we made the deal for you to buy the kid. But then Yavi got a new deal, so he wouldn’t let me sell her. I just thought… you know, I could still get the money you agreed to pay. Make a quick buck for nothing. But listen, ask me anything you wanna know. I’ll tell you where the girl is, they haven’t picked her up yet. She’s totally fine, pristine, you can have her back with her mommy and daddy tonight. Easy peasy.”


    “Oh, we’re getting her back,” Asenath assured him in a low, dangerous tone. “And we’re going to do that by finding out absolutely everything you know. But the thing is, we just don’t really trust you to be honest about it.” She slowly lowered the man back to the floor, offering him a humorless smile. “Fortunately, that’s not really an issue.”


    He clearly had no idea what she was talking about, but her tone made him try to break free and sprint for the door. Unfortunately for him, he only made it a single step before Asenath’s fist collided with his chin, knocking him back once more with a dazed yelp. And before he could recover, it was Vanessa’s turn. She, however, didn’t strike him. Instead, her hand touched his face. In the next moment, she vanished, disappearing into the man.


    After watching that happen, Asenath turned to look back through the office she had come crashing through to get in position for Vanessa to drop the man into her grasp. She’d been in a little bit of a rush, knocking over a desk, a cabinet, and kicking the door in on her way. Taking a mental tally of the damages, she counted out cash and left it on the nearby table, scribbling an apology note.


    By the time she was done with that, Vanessa had emerged from the man and he was left thoroughly unconscious on the floor. Raising an eyebrow at the girl, Senny asked, “Did you get everything?”


    “I got it,” Vanessa confirmed. “I know where they are, how many there are, where they’ve got all their lookouts and defenses. I''ve got all of it. We need to hurry, he wasn’t lying about them not selling Denise yet, but they’re close. We have to get over there.”


    So, the two of them were about to head out. But not before Asenath looked back at the man on the ground. He had tried to have her killed, had been just fine with the idea of selling an innocent young woman into a nightmare, and had probably done all number of other terrible things. Still, he at least deserved the question. So, she looked at Vanessa and simply asked, “Does he deserve it?”


    The blonde girl, for her part, answered without hesitation. “He does.”


    “Oh good,” Senny replied, her fangs returning as she reached down and grabbed the man’s arm to drag him with them.


    “I was feeling peckish.”


    ************


    A short time later, a van with blacked-out rear windows pulled up to the curb across from the old bottling plant where these people were apparently holed up. Shifting in the driver''s seat, Vanessa reached back to slide a small window slot open beside her so she could talk into the back, where Asenath was staying safe from the sun. “Okay, we''re here. I see a garage door, do you think we should go for--”


    Before she could finish that sentence, they both heard gunshots coming from the building. Senny snapped, “The direct approach? Yeah, I think so.”


    Vanessa hit the gas and sent the van crashing through the chain-link fence and onward straight through the garage doors. The instant they were safely out of the sunlight, Asenath shoved the back doors open and both of them used their enhanced speed to race through the facility to the source of the still-ongoing gunshots.


    They arrived in one of the second floor offices just in time to see a figure drop the shotgun she was holding and fall to her knees. All around her were the signs of her bloody rampage, seven or eight bodies with holes blasted through them lying haphazardly around the room. They had seen other bodies as well on their way in.


    “Um, Denise?” Vanessa asked, completely taken aback by what they were seeing.


    “You aren’t with them,” the dark-haired young woman, only a couple years older than Vanessa herself, noted softly. Exhaustion, physical and mental, filled her voice. “You aren’t part of their group. He only told me to kill their people.”


    Asenath took a few steps that way, kneeling in the blood to look her in the eyes. “Who?”


    “He said his name was Ammon,” came the response. “He made me do everything he said. I couldn’t help it. He said some men were going to come take him away, and that they would take me prisoner after he made them think they stopped me from dying. He said, ‘My name is Ammon, when you see an opening, kill every single one of them. It’ll be funny and they’ll never see it coming.’ I couldn’t help it, I had to do what he said, I had t--” She pivoted, falling forward onto her hands so she could throw up.


    “This--this is impossible,” Vanessa managed, already moving to kneel beside the other girl so she could help pull her hair back out of the way. “Even if you managed to get a gun, how could you… why didn’t they fight back? I don’t… I don’t understand.”


    “They tried,” the girl answered dully. “They couldn’t hurt me.”


    Senny’s head shook as she focused on the traumatized girl. “Denise, listen to me. We’re going to get you out of here. Don’t look at any of them, just close your eyes. Vanessa and I will walk you out, okay? It’s alright, we’re leaving now. You’ll be safe.”


    “Blood,” Denise murmured, staring at the floor rather than moving. “So much blood.”


    “It’s alright,” Vanessa tried to reassure her. “You don’t have to look at--”


    “He made me drink so much blood,” the girl interrupted. “That little boy, he told me to drink it and I did. He made me keep drinking that blood.”


    Asenath sent a sharp glance toward Vanessa, then looked back to the young woman. “What blood?”


    “He said it would make me strong,” Denise informed her in a soft mutter. “He said it would make it so I could kill them. He was right. He was right, I killed them. He gave me the blood and I killed them. I killed--” Her eyes closed and she doubled over once more, dry heaving.


    After a moment of consoling the girl, Asenath spoke once more, her voice as gentle as she could make it. “Denise, this is important. Do you know anything about the blood he gave you?”


    There was a brief pause before the answer came. “He said it was blood from his dad. No--no, not his dad’s blood. Blood he took from his dad. He was saving it or… or something. Saving it for someone. He made me drink it.”


    “Doesn’t matter,” Senny replied, “not right now. Let’s get out of here. Come on, Denise, we have to go.”


    Together, the two of them helped the other girl up and started to move out of the building, past all the other dead bodies. Once they were in the van, it wasn’t long before they managed to get away from the site of the massacre.


    “What are we going to do?” the blonde girl asked her partner through the small window into the rear of the van as they drove down the street.


    “We need to find out more about this Ammon, and what exactly is going on,” Asenath replied. “Denise, do you remember anything else about that blood he made you drink? Anything that might help us track them down, or figure out why those guys in there couldn’t hurt you.”


    “I remember the name,” the girl murmured tiredly from where she had slumped against the passenger side door. “I remember the name of the… the man the blood came from.


    “It was Beowulf. He said the blood came from someone named Beowulf."