Episode 2 – Chrome & Hemlock
Two weeks after the hospital massacre. Zack turned eighteen yesterday.
The night tasted like rain and copper.
Zack stood under a crooked streetlamp outside Hemlock, the kind of club that pretended to be a strip joint for mortals and was actually a slaughterhouse with mood lighting. Neon bled across wet pavement: VIOLET GIRLS, OPEN 'TIL BLOOD, NO CAMERAS. Bass thumped through the brick, a heartbeat for a building that fed on people.
He flexed his hands inside his hoodie pocket. Steel rippled beneath skin like caged knives. The HUD flickered across his vision—cold, clinical, indifferent:
LEVEL 2
EXP: 0 / 1000
STATS: STR ▲ | VIT ▲ | SPD ▲
PERK: Hemoglobin Conductor (Minor)
His chest tightened. He could still smell the disinfectant of his mother's room whenever he closed his eyes; hear the rattle at the end of her laugh, the brave way she said go home, get sleep, I'm not going anywhere even as the monitors whispered otherwise. The doctor's voice had been careful and soft. It's time to consider comfort measures.
Comfort. He could give her steel. He could give her safety. He couldn't give her more time—unless he made this body earn it.
A black-furred bouncer the size of an SUV growled from the doorway, amber eyes cutting through the drizzle. Not a costume—werewolf, with a razor-trim tux and a cigar that smelled like dried bone. "Club's twenty-one, kid."
Zack let the hood fall, silver glinting along his teeth. "I'm eighteen. I'm here for work."
The wolf sniffed. His lip curled. "You reek of chrome and funeral homes. Beat it."
"I'm not here to dance," Zack said. "I'm here to take out your boss."
The wolf laughed so hard the cigar ash fell like gray snow. Then he swung, a backhand dense as a truck bumper. Zack didn't dodge. He met it. Steel knuckles chimed like a hammer striking an anvil, shockwave sluicing rain off the awning.
Zack drove his right fist into the wolf's ribs. Something cracked—no, shattered. The bouncer flew into the metal door so hard it buckled inward, alarms coughing awake.
+100 EXP
EXP: 100 / 1000
"Fuck your ID policy," Zack spat, stepping over the groaning wolf. Inside smelled like perfume layered over rot.
Hemlock's main floor was a cathedral of sin: chrome poles like spears, velvet curtains bleeding purple shadows, booths shaped like coffins occupied by things laughing with too many teeth. On stage, dancers spun in spangled lingerie, but the crowd watched one in particular—Luna—like worshippers facing a black star.
She didn't move like a stripper. She moved like a witch who had learned your real name and was testing the vowels with her tongue. Black hair with pewter ribbons, tattoos that rearranged when you blinked, heels sharp enough to qualify as weapons. She slid around the pole with lazy precision, eyes hooded, bored of anyone dumb enough to stare. When she saw Zack, her expression didn't change, but the lights around her warped—colors bending like oil on water.
Zack cut across the floor. Two vampire security goons detached from a column and reached for him.
"Hands in your own pockets, sweetheart," the taller one purred.
Zack gave him a smile that showed knives. "I'm not here for a lap dance."
He slammed his forehead into the vampire's nose. Wet glass. The second guard lunged with switchblade speed—Zack caught his wrist and twisted until tendons twanged. He drove the guy's face into the lip of the stage. Wood splintered, blood sprayed.
+150 EXP
EXP: 250 / 1000
Music kept pounding; nobody screamed. Hemlock didn't mind a little blood. It minded the wrong kind of blood.
"Stop." Luna's voice was smoke poured over ice. She stepped down from the stage, robe slipping around her shoulders like a casual sin, perfume dark as night rain. Up close, her irises were storm-glass gray threaded with runes. Adult. Dangerous. Fully aware of what you wanted and why you shouldn't.
She circled Zack once, smelling him. "Metal vampire. New. Whoever upgraded you didn't leave a receipt."
"I don't care about your loyalty cards," Zack said. "Who runs this place?"
"Depends on the night. Tonight? A warlock with a toothpaste smile. He sells miracles to rich assholes and takes his payment in pulse and memory." She tilted her head. "Why should I help you, chrome-teeth?"
Zack glanced at the VIP balcony ringed in smoked glass, where a silhouette sipped something red. He thought of his mother's hands, blue-veined and paper thin. "Because miracles are a scam. Because he's feeding on people too poor to fight back. Because I'm going to rip his heart out and I don't want to wade through amateurs to do it."
One corner of Luna's mouth curved. "Mmm. Idealism. Cute. Dangerous. I like both."
Sirens of a different kind rose—low and eldritch, woven into the bassline. The crowd went still. Curtains parted. A man in a bone-white suit descended the stairs as if floating on compliments. Dr. Marrow, Hemlock's sewn-smile proprietor. Not actually a doctor. Definitely a monster.
He spread his arms. "Friends, patrons, beautiful thieves: a house rule reminder." His smile widened from ear to ear without actually touching his eyes. "Violence is only decorous if I am amused."
He focused on Zack. Something invisible scraped inside Zack's skull, hunting for strings to pull. Zack's metal bones sang with pressure; heat climbed his neck.
Marrow's grin sweetened. "Fresh metalblood. Did you come to audition? We have an opening for house freak."
"Cool story," Zack said, voice tinny with anger. "Got a refund policy on souls, Doc?"
The warlock sighed. "Rude." He made a fist. Invisible hooks yanked. Zack's knees buckled; pain sizzled across his nerves, bright and electric. The HUD flickered.
WARNING: Hex-Grade Neural Interference
Resist? [Y/N]
Zack snarled. "Y."
Steel threaded his spine like prayer wire. He straightened through the psychic torque, blood wetting his upper lip. Marrow's smile hiccuped. Small victory, but it tasted good.
"Security," Marrow sang.
Three shapes dropped from the balcony like mantises in suits—ghoul valets, long-armed and formal, white gloves hiding meat hooks. They landed in a triangle around Zack.
Luna leaned close, voice for him alone. "Chrome-teeth, if you die, I want your jaw for a mantle."
"Sorry," Zack grunted, rolling his neck. "Already spoken for."
The first ghoul raked at his throat. Zack stepped into him, caught the wrist, and drove a steel fist into the ghoul's clavicle. Bone popped like cheap fireworks. Zack pivoted, used the body as a shield as the second ghoul slashed—claws screeched against Zack's shoulder, sparks skittering.
He head-butted the second so hard the ghoul's skull depressed like a kicked pumpkin. He kicked the third in the knee; it bent sideways with a wet, celery snap. The ghoul collapsed, shrieking—Zack drop-hammered his heel into its face. Teeth scattered like loose change.
+300 EXP
EXP: 550 / 1000
Dancers had retreated to the wings, curious eyes gleaming through the curtain. The crowd murmured like a storm considering landfall. Marrow flicked two fingers—glyphs spun off his ring and stitched through the air, tiny red needles humming toward Zack's forehead.
Luna's palm brushed Zack's chest. Cool. Intimate and utterly not tender. A sigil bloomed on his skin like frost.
"Don't die," she said. "It would bore me."
The needles hit the sigil and detonated outward in a halo of sparks that smelled like burnt sugar and grave dirt. Marrow's eyebrows ticked up. "Luna," he said, almost fond. "You always favor the wrong pets."
"Liar," Luna said. "I favor the pretty dangerous ones."
Zack swallowed breath like gasoline. "I'm not your pet."
"No," she agreed, eyes half-lidded. "You bite."
Marrow's patience thinned. He raised both hands. The stage lights turned red, the club's sound system groaned, and the room's shadows developed opinions. A construct unfolded from the darkness behind him—something like a spider built out of coffin hinges and surgical tubing, a machine with meat for a brain. Tubes sucked slurry from a floor drain and pumped it into a thrumming heart of glass.
"Everyone loves a floor show," Marrow said. "Bleed for me, boy."
The construct darted with pneumatic speed. Zack braced, but it didn't attack him—it went for bystanders. A woman in a gold dress screamed as tubes latched onto her calves, chewing veins, drinking. Zack moved on instinct, steel body a bullet. He grabbed two tubes and ripped; the glass heart keened, fluids geysering.
He planted, braced, and with both hands tore the spider-thing off the woman. The machine hissed and lashed metal legs through his hoodie, scoring sparks. He slammed it against the catwalk so hard the balcony shuddered. It tried to re-form—he put a steel knuckle through the heart.
The heart burst, showering the floor in red.
+200 EXP
EXP: 750 / 1000
"Security," Marrow sighed again, bored now. "Do make him stop."
More guards converged. Too many. Zack's breath sawed in his throat. His body could take a beating; his mind was a different battlefield. The hex-pressure returned, heavier, like iron filings in his blood.
Lose, and you're another headline your mom never reads, a voice whispered inside, cruel and exactly his. Win, and the bill comes later.
He shoved the thought away and charged the stairs.
A vampire in a crimson suit stepped into his path—fast, elegant, amused. Silas. Zack didn't know the name yet, but he felt the threat—it came off Silas like perfume and gun oil. Not club security. Not Marrow's creature. Independent. Old.
Their eyes met. Silas smiled a small, private smile like two knives meeting in polite conversation. "Child."
Zack didn't slow. He threw a cross at Silas's jaw. Silas stepped inside the arc and tapped Zack's sternum with two fingers.
It felt like being hit by a wrecking ball made of wind. Zack flew backward, smashing a cocktail table to splinters, glass tinkling down like ugly snow.
Silas considered him from the stair, lazy and lethal. "Marrow bores me," he said. "Don't."
Blue electricity crawled over Zack's ribs where Silas had touched him. He forced a laugh and got to his feet. "You hit like a passive-aggressive birthday card."
Silas's eyes warmed. "Better."
He moved. Zack barely saw him—just the blur of a shadow cutting the air into ribbons. Zack parried on instinct, steel forearm scraping a line of sparks against Silas's palm. The speed difference was obscene. Silas flowed around him, testing, tapping Zack's elbows, kneecap, throat in quick, surgical strikes that didn't break anything but promised to later.
Zack went for ugly. He faked left, stepped on a fallen barstool, and used the bounce to hurl himself at Silas with all his weight, driving steel fangs for the carotid.
Silas caught his jaw with one hand, fingers indented in steel like wet clay. He leaned in close enough for Zack to smell winter and old cathedrals. "Cute."
He shoved. Zack skidded backward, boots gouging tracks in the floor. The room tilted. The hex-pressure spiked—Marrow throwing his weight in again.
"Stay," Marrow snapped, voice cracking like a whip. "Heel."
Zack tasted blood and metal. "Bite me."
He ripped the broken stage light free and flung it at the balcony. The arc cable snapped loose, live and hungry. Sparks sprayed. Curtains caught. Fire climbed like gossip.
The crowd screamed—finally. Panic rearranged the geometry of the night.
Marrow swore and snapped a hand—glyphs stamped at the fire, reality cowed. Some flames died; others turned blue and refused instructions. The club shuddered. Above, a sprinkler system coughed to useless life, misting the carnage with lukewarm rain.
Luna's hand closed around Zack's wrist. "If you want the head, stop playing fetch with the tail." She dragged him—not gently—through the backstage maze, past dressing rooms that smelled like hairspray and old spells. "Marrow's sanctum is in the cold room. He keeps hearts on ice to barter—metaphorical ones, sometimes not."
They shouldered through a steel door into a corridor lit the color of morgues. Freezer hum. Frost rimed the edges of industrial lockers. Luna punched a code into a keypad shaped like a jawbone. The lock clicked.
"Why help me?" Zack panted.
Luna licked her lower lip like tasting an answer. "Because he thinks he owns me. I prefer complicated arrangements." She flashed him a smile like a promise and a dare. "And because I want to see what happens when steel bites magic."
The door sighed open on Marrow's cold room.
Meat hooks. Ice fog. Heartboxes labeled with names. A workbench stacked with spell-ink and black market organs. A drain in the center with a stain around it no mop could lift.
Marrow stood at the far end, back turned, fingers dancing over a basin of quicksilver that reflected the club through someone else's eyes. He didn't look surprised. "Was wondering when the pet would chew the leash."
"Not a pet," Zack said, stepping in. The room's temperature crawled into his bones; his metal welcomed it like home.
Marrow turned, smile civet-smooth. "Do you even know what you are, boy? You're an experiment abandoned mid-procedure." He wagged a manicured finger. "But I can finish the work. Tighten the bolts. Upgrade the engine. Your mother would be so proud when you buy her time."
The word hit like a thrown glass. Zack's throat closed. "Leave her out of your mouth."
"Oh?" Marrow cooed. "But she's the reason you're here, yes? Every good mob enforcer is just a guilt-ridden child with better biceps. Bring me her paperwork. I'll sign where the oncologist wouldn't." He patted the basin. "Miracles are simply payment plans with creative collateral."
"Fuck your miracles."
Marrow sighed. "Always the hard way."
He opened his fist. The quicksilver basin rose, hovered, and exploded outward in a rain of needles aimed for Luna.
Zack moved without thinking. He stepped into the hail, felt metal skewer metal, each needle punching into his skin with the neat shiver of cut glass. Cold flooded his muscles—hex-ice chewing signals from nerves to brain. He stumbled, fought to keep his legs.
The HUD strobed:
CRITICAL: System Latency (Hex-Ice)
Countermeasure: Hemoglobin Conductor → OVERCLOCK (Risk: Vascular Rupture)
Engage? [Y/N]
His heart ticked like a bomb. He chose Y.
Heat roared through his veins. Blood became current, current became speed. Needles rattled back out of his body like it rejected them. Steam hissed off his shoulders.
Zack vanished and reappeared in Marrow's space, knuckles a blur. He hit the warlock twice in the ribs, once in the jaw—bone snapped like kindling. Marrow coughed something black and smiled through it, then vanished, reappearing behind Zack with a scalpel that wasn't a scalpel—a word given edge.
It bit into Zack's neck. The world went white at the edges. He whipped an elbow backward, caught air, spun, and ate a sigil that tried to clamp his legs. It tasted like rust and bad churches.
Luna's voice poured across the room: "Chromic Aegis." A disk of gunmetal light flowered over Zack's sternum and drank the next curse like it was cheap vodka.
"Neat trick," Zack grunted.
"Shut up and kill him," she said, calm as absinthe.
Marrow pressed his fingers together and pulled them apart—stringing a thread of red light between them. He flicked and the thread sliced a heartbox in half. A woman's name spilled onto the floor with the ice.
Zack saw red in a way that had nothing to do with blood.
He charged. Marrow backpedaled, hands blurring through glyphs. The room howled. Hooks swung. Latches popped. Heartboxes rattled open like mouths gasping awake.
Zack didn't try to understand the spell. He ran through it. Hooks dug furrows in his shoulders; he tore them free with showers of sparks. He took a glyph in the cheek and felt half his face go numb; he leaned into the dead side and used the living side to smile.
He caught Marrow's wrist and crushed. Bones screamed. The scalpel-word died with a whimper. He head-butted Marrow hard enough to bruise the wall with the warlock's skull.
Marrow sagged and spat a last mouthful of charm-spittle into Zack's eyes. Sight fuzzed. The warlock slipped free like soap and skittered for a trapdoor behind the workbench.
"Don't—" Luna warned.
Zack dove anyway, shoulder-rushing the bench aside. The trapdoor yawned over black water. Marrow fell through with a triumphant little waggle of fingers and vanished into overflow tunnels pulsing with filth and spell-runoff.
Zack hung over the hole, the smell rising like a dare. "Coward!"
His HUD chimed.
+250 EXP
EXP: 1000 / 1000
LEVEL UP! → LEVEL 3
NEW PERK: Hex Shedding (Minor) – Faster purge of curse debris
BONUS: +SPD
He breathed like a bellows, shoulders pumping. His face tingled as nerves rebooted; the hex-ice melted and ran out his pores like gluey frost. He looked at Luna. "He'll come back."
"He never really leaves," she said, studying him like a puzzle she planned to sleep with and then sell. "But you put teeth on his reputation tonight. That matters."
Zack stood in the freezer night and stared at the heartbox halves on the floor. The name had already slurred—a spell erasing record the second the owner died. The club above them groaned with distant chaos, fire alarms wailing again, someone laughing through a scream. He pictured his mother's chart, neat lines pretending to be order.
Luna stepped close, and for a second there was gentleness in the curve of her mouth. "Why her?"
"Because she's the only person who looked at me like I wasn't a mistake," he said, voice rough as a file. "Even now."
Luna's expression shuttered; the softness vanished like it owed someone money. "Don't give me that sincerity in a place that sells it by the hour." She plucked a needle from his collarbone and flicked it away. "Come on, chrome-teeth. We should leave before the interesting people arrive."
"More interesting than the ones we already danced with?"
"Mm." She winked. "The kind who bring paperwork."
They cut through steam and neon back into the main floor. Sprinklers hiccuped, blue fire sulking in corners, patrons streaming for the street with bad secrets tucked under their arms. On the balcony, Silas watched through a haze of cigarette smoke, one hand in his pocket, the other tipping an invisible hat. His mouth curved the way a knife smiled.
Zack tilted his chin back at him, a promise filed for later.
Outside, rain had deepened. Sirens wailed somewhere too far away and too late on purpose. The werewolf bouncer still breathed in shallow wheezes; Zack propped him into a recovery position because the part of him that remembered human first aid refused to die.
Luna leaned under the awning, rain strands combing her hair into ink ribbons. "You got coin?"
"For what?"
"An address." She watched his face, pleased when she saw the refusal to be indebted and the equal refusal to walk blind. "Relax. I don't do freebies; I do favors with better names." She traced a sigil in the steam on the window. It hung there, shimmering—a map knot, tucked and poisonous. "Marrow's boltholes. Burn the right one, the others panic."
Zack memorized the shape until it burrowed behind his eyes. "What do you want in return?"
"Someday," she said, "you'll need a devil you can kiss and still hate yourself afterward. On that day, you'll call me before you call any other monster."
He snorted. "Pretty sure you just asked me to put you on speed dial."
She grinned, all teeth and velvet. "You're learning."
He stepped into the rain. The city hissed, wet and hungry. His HUD whispered its numbers like rosary beads.
LEVEL 3
EXP: 0 / 1000
NEXT MILESTONE: Level 10 – Steel Surge (Locked)
"Zack," Luna said behind him. "You'll lose a few. Don't confuse losing with learning."
He didn't turn. "I confuse losing with dying. I'm trying to stop."
"Mm. Adorable." Her voice warmed, mocking and almost fond. "Go see your mother, steelboy. Try not to drip on the sheets."
He walked. Rain beaded and ran off him like it could feel the metal and didn't want to cling. He cut through alleys that smelled like secrets and old smoke, past a mural of a saint with her eyes scratched out, past a man selling umbrellas with a grin like a cut.
At the crosswalk, a digital billboard stuttered—the ad dissolving into a face of chrome and winter light. Not Marrow. Not Silas. The steel vampire from the hospital. The one who'd welded him into this.
It spoke without moving its lips. The sound arrived inside his bones.
You live.
Zack bared his steel fangs to the rainy night. "Yeah. And I'm not done."
Good, the voice said. Now learn to lose with purpose.
The ad snapped back to a perfume commercial that looked like a funeral. Cars hissed past. Somewhere behind him, Hemlock coughed smoke and laughter.
Zack checked the time. Visiting hours were over. He would go anyway. He always went anyway. He'd sit in a plastic chair and pretend the antiseptic didn't sting his nose, and he'd hold the hand that had steered him through a childhood with more shadows than streetlights. He'd lie about eating and sleep. He'd carefully not mention a club full of monsters and the way his fists felt hitting a skull.
He would not tell her about the ad, or the voice, or the way the word prestige had begun to root itself in his ribs like a prophecy with a calendar.
And later—tonight, tomorrow, every night until he ran out of nights—he'd hunt. He'd crack Hemlock's map knot, pry up Marrow's boltholes like floorboards, and find the place where the warlock thought he was safe. He'd bring a lighter. He'd bring his fists. He'd bring a prayer stapled to his tongue like a dare.
You'll lose some battles. Good. Losing meant he was still showing up to fight.
He smiled into the rain, serrated and bright.
"Let's see how loud this city can bleed."