The city didn't scream when it bled.
It just blinked — once — and pretended it didn't see the body.
Caleb stood in the shadows of a crumbling apartment rooftop two blocks from the butcher shop. He hadn't moved in nearly an hour. The wind clawed at his coat. The blood on his knuckles had dried to black crust.
Below, the alley crawled with flashing blue and red — police cruisers, detectives in long coats, yellow tape flapping like the wings of sick birds. Flashbulbs stuttered against the rain.
They'd found Lockjaw. Or what was left of him.
Caleb lit a cigarette with shaking hands and watched, eyes hollow, breath fogging the air like ghosts refusing to leave his lungs.
He told himself this wasn't about guilt.
It was about strategy.
Then he saw her.
The only one not moving with urgency.
The only one who wasn't looking at the corpse.
She stood off to the side — just beyond the caution tape, near a rusted-out service van. Tall. Lean. Dark uniform. Her hair was tied in a short braid and tucked under a rain cap. Her face was carved from stone — cold, unreadable.
But Caleb recognized her rank from the stripes on her jacket: Sergeant.
She wasn't directing traffic.
She wasn't managing her subordinates.
She was speaking to two Iron Vultures.
Low voices. Hushed. One of them handed her a folded envelope.
She gave him a file — a sealed document pulled from her coat. The transaction lasted seconds, but Caleb saw it.
Plain as the blade that had carved Lockjaw open.
His stomach turned.
He knew both of those men. One had been standing beside Jamal the night Rachel died. The other ran security on the Vultures' east-end stash house. Both of them should've been in cuffs — or body bags.
But here they were, joking quietly with law enforcement.
With a sergeant.
Caleb's eyes narrowed.
The rot wasn't just in the street.
It had rank.
He pulled out his burner phone and snapped a grainy photo of the woman's face, zooming in until her badge number caught the streetlight just right.
Sgt. Delaney Crowe.
He whispered the name to himself.
Committed it to memory. Burned it into the walls of his mind, right beside Jamal, right beside every face on the wall of nightmares.
She was part of this.
She wasn't just dirty — she was embedded. A valve inside the artery of corruption. Feeding them intel. Helping them dodge justice. Maybe worse.
And now… she was a piece of the puzzle.
Caleb pocketed the phone and stepped back from the ledge, heart crawling in his chest like worms beneath skin.
He wasn't just up against street thugs anymore.
He was up against a system that protected monsters. That fed them.
And now, he'd have to gut it from the inside.
The rooftop silence snapped like glass.
A blast of wind cut through the alley, and the Raven descended from the night sky like a demon from God's blind side — black wings slicing the air, cawing loud and shrill, the sound like metal tearing bone.
It dove at Caleb — once, twice — sweeping so close its wing clipped the hood of his coat.
He staggered back, heart lurching, hand halfway to his blade before he caught himself.
"What?!"
His voice cracked through the cold.
The Raven circled again, shrieking louder this time — not just a call, but a warning. A scream.
Caleb spun in place, eyes following the flapping blur across the night sky.
Then he shouted into the dark:
"What do you want, Isaac?! What the hell do you want from me?!"
The bird halted mid-glide — stilled like a hung shadow, wings spread, hovering just above the rooftop edge.
Then… it stared.
Its coal-black eyes locked with Caleb's — endless, empty, and burning all at once.
And in that moment, time died.
The world vanished.
He wasn't standing on the roof anymore.
He was inside it — the dream, the vision — awake but helpless.
The smell of ammonia and bleach hit first. Florescent light buzzed. He was in a basement, tiled and windowless. Walls stained yellow. There was something wet on the floor. Something thick.
Footsteps echoed. Leather boots. Steady. Purposeful.
Caleb turned — or thought he did — and saw her.
Sergeant Crowe.
Wearing the same rain-streaked uniform from earlier.
But no badge. No hesitation.
She stood over a man tied to a chair — a Vulture lieutenant with a tattoo of their emblem burning on his neck. His face was swollen. His hands broken.
"Should've kept your mouth shut," she said, voice ice.
She raised a pistol. No warning. No hesitation.
One shot — straight through the bridge of his nose.
Blood exploded like a firecracker. The body slumped. The walls caught the splatter like canvas.
Then another man entered. Younger. Nervous. Holding a duffel bag.
"Drop's clean," he said. "No prints, no trail."
Crowe tossed the gun into the bag and zipped it closed.
"Good," she replied. "This never happened."
She turned toward Caleb — or where he should've been.
And looked directly at him.
"See something you like?" she said, eyes dead.
Then the world snapped back like a broken jaw.
Caleb gasped.
Stumbled.
The rooftop was real again. The rain was colder. The Raven was gone.
He dropped to his knees, one hand clawing the brick ledge to stay grounded, the other gripping his chest like it would cave in.
This was new.
This was different.
His heart thundered. His mouth tasted like rust. But the image burned into his vision stayed sharp — the execution, the basement, Crowe's voice like rot in his ears.
He stared down at the flashing lights two blocks away.
Sgt. Delaney Crowe wasn't just connected.
She was in it.
Deep.
And now the Raven wasn't just warning him about tragedies.
It was pointing out the killers.
Even the ones with shields.
Caleb leaned against the brick, soaked, shivering, half out of breath — but not from exhaustion.
From revelation.
The aftershocks of the vision still rang in his bones. His pulse beat against his ribs like it wanted to claw its way out. He wiped rain from his eyes, but all he could see was the gunshot. The crimson halo blooming behind the man's skull. Crowe's empty voice.
He wasn't asleep.
He wasn't dreaming.
And the Raven had brought it to him — awake, aware, like it knew the walls inside his head were starting to crack.
"What the fuck is happening to me…" he whispered into the storm.
His voice sounded hollow — even to himself.
"Why me? Why now? Why show me this?"
His breath trembled. "Is this punishment… or prophecy?"
The wind offered no answers. The city below continued its mimicry of normalcy — sirens, headlights, muted conversations, umbrellas against the downpour.
But Caleb knew.
Nothing was normal anymore.
His grief had mutated into something jagged. Vengeful. Alive.
And now his sanity was its marrow.
Then — through the curtains of rain — he saw a shape.
Tall. Hooded. Moving near the perimeter of the crime scene.
A man.
A familiar silhouette.
It was him.
The bastard that stood beside Jamal on the road that night. The one with the face like a beaten Doberman and a vulture inked across the side of his neck.
The one who watched as Cal"b bled out beside Rachel's cooling body.
Still walking free. Still breathing. Still smirking like the world owed him a favor.
Caleb's stare hardened into steel.
The man laughed with another Vulture, then broke off down a side street — casual, cocky, unaware that a storm had just marked him for death.
Caleb's body moved before his mind did.
He descended the building's fire escape like a phantom in wet concrete, every joint in his body burning from the cold, but his intent was fire.
"No more dreams," he whispered. "No more puzzles."
He touched the hilt of the knife strapped to his belt.
"I'm going to find out what's going on. I'm going to bleed the truth out of these fuckers if I have to."
The thought wasn't metaphorical.
It wasn't just rage anymore.
It was necessity.
This one would talk.
Caleb would make sure of it.
End of chapter 7.