Fenrir's engine roared constantly, sending a deep vibration that rose from the chassis to Lief's bones.
The motorcycle's taillights cut through the darkness, leaving two bloody trails that faded into the night.
Without a helmet, Lief's face was a mask of stone.
The streetlights passed rhythmically over his face, illuminating an expression that no longer had anything to do with the student who joked around.
That lightness had evaporated, replaced by a heavy lethal intention that settled in his chest.
Lief accelerated, leaning into the curves with precision.
Art the Clown…. In any other context, it would be a Halloween costume. But he knew what was hiding behind that black and white paint.
That name did not belong to a simple psychopath with a knife, it represented an absolute cruelty, an ancient malice and a madness that defied any human logic.
Art did not kill out of necessity, nor out of passion.
He killed because he found the suffering of others hilarious. He was a demon in the most literal sense of the word, an artist of pain who used human flesh as a canvas.
And now he was in his territory.
A few minutes later, the familiar sign appeared in his field of vision.
But something was wrong…
The sign that normally blinked until well into the early morning, was off. The "OPEN" sign was dark. The whole building seemed to have been swallowed by the shadows… like the open mouth of a beast waiting for someone stupid enough to enter.
And Lief did not brake in front of the entrance.
Instead, he turned off the engine before arriving, letting the inertia of the heavy bike carry him silently toward the darkness of an adjacent corner, hiding it between two dumpsters.
He got off the bike and moved toward the back alley.
Normally, it would smell like cheap oil, spices and trash. And those smells were there, yes, but they had been overcome by something else... Something thicker and metallic.
The stench of fresh copper.
Blood… and a lot of it.
Lief reached the service door, which was ajar, swinging gently with the breeze.
The hinge let out an agonized creak when he pushed it, sliding inside like just another shadow.
The kitchen was a disaster.
It looked like a hurricane had passed through. The fryer baskets were thrown on the floor, the cold oil mixed with flour and spilled sauces, creating a slippery mud on the floor.
But what dominated the scene was the trail.
A wide line of dark crimson extended across the floor, a macabre path that went from the preparation area to the front of the place, behind the counter.
Lief followed the trail without making the slightest noise and upon reaching the end of the counter, he looked down.
"..."
His expression did not change, although the scene would have made any normal person vomit.
The owner of the place, a fat and jovial man who always gave them extra fries, lay there.
Or what was left of him.
His body was twisted unnaturally, wedged between the cash register and the ice cream machine. His eyes were wide open frozen in an expression of absolute terror, as if the last thing he had seen was something his mind couldn't process.
But the terror on his face was the least of it.
His body could no longer be considered a body.
It was a sculpture on which Art had taken his time. He had turned the man into one of his "works", dismembering and reorganizing the parts.
"..."
Lief observed the corpse with the indifference of a veteran coroner.
He felt neither pity nor disgust.
The lake of his emotions remained perfectly still, without a single ripple. He knew that, to face something like Art, empathy was a luxury he couldn't afford.
Closing his eyes, he tried to perceive with attention the malignant purity that still floated in the air.
That deadly silence and that non-human evil that he had felt here was like an invisible thread guiding his senses.
And he hadn't gone far.
The intense trail pointed without the slightest intention of hiding itself toward an abandoned industrial zone on the edge of town.
And there were many old warehouses there… the perfect place to commit any crime in secret.
"I found you," he murmured turning around and leaving behind that bloody place.
….
A few minutes later, he arrived at the industrial zone, a concrete and steel cemetery on the outskirts of the city that urban development had decided to forget.
Endless rows of gigantic sheet metal warehouses rose toward the night sky. The broken windows in the upper parts of the buildings looked like empty sockets of giant skulls, watching in silence.
The wind blew between the narrow alleys, making loose cables whistle and dragging trash across the cracked asphalt.
But Lief didn't need a map.
The evil he had tracked pulsed like a radioactive beacon, reaching its peak inside one of the warehouses at the end of the block.
The rolling cargo door was down, but not entirely, there remained a space of half a meter from the ground and from inside, a yellowish, sickly and flickering light spilled onto the exterior cement, accompanied by sounds that froze the blood… muffled screams, the clinking of chains and a desperate weeping.
Lief stopped Fenrir at a safe distance and approached the entrance in absolute silence.
He crouched next to the gap under the door and looked inside.
The interior of the warehouse was vast, it smelled of dampness and… fear.
In the center of the warehouse, a single lamp hung from a long cord, swaying slightly and casting a cone of raw light over the stage.
Tara, the black-haired girl he had seen laughing before, was there.
"Mmm! Mmmhh!"
She was tied firmly to a wooden chair with loops of duct tape. Her mouth was sealed with a thick layer of tape, allowing her to emit only agonized moans.
Her face was absolute devastation.
Her makeup had run from tears and sweat, creating dark masks around eyes bulging with panic. Her chest heaved violently as she hyperventilated, forced to be the only spectator of the atrocity she had before her.
And in front of her, was the true nightmare.
Dawn, the blonde girl, was hanging.
She was completely naked, suspended upside down by thick chains that held her ankles, with her legs open in a brutal "V" shape.
Her pale body shone under the yellow light, covered in small superficial cuts, as if someone had been testing the edge of a blade on her skin.
Blood dripped from the tips of her long hair, falling with a hypnotic rhythm into a metal bucket placed on the ground.
And the master of ceremonies, Art, was standing between the two.
He was with his back to the door, facing Tara, holding a hacksaw in one hand.
And the most terrifying thing was not what could happen, but the silence.
Art did not grunt, did not speak, did not breathe loudly.
He was acting.
As if he were on a theater stage, he performed an exaggerated bow toward Tara, extending his free hand as if saying: "Lady, the show is about to reach its climax".
Then he turned toward Dawn and approached her with a mocking delicacy, slid his gloved fingers over the girl's trembling belly, tracing an imaginary line from the groin to the chest, like a butcher evaluating the best cut of meat.
Upon feeling his cold touch, Dawn let out a stifled moan, twisting uselessly in the chains, but the clown ignored her and rummaged in his pockets and took out a yellow measuring tape.
And with a professional seriousness, he measured Dawn's waist, checked the numbers, nodded with satisfaction and put away the tape.
Finally, he raised the hacksaw with the blade's teeth shining with a sinister glow under the light.
Art turned his head toward Tara one last time and his smile seemed to stretch beyond the physical limits of his face, and his eyes widened with joy.
He made a "shhh" gesture with a finger over his lips and then pointed to the hacksaw and to Dawn.
Tara's gagged screams became frantic, shaking in the chair with such violence that she almost tipped it over, but it was useless. The show was going to continue…
Art raised the hacksaw, positioning the serrated blade right between Dawn's open legs.
The theatricality had ended, now came the carnage.
The metal teeth grazed the trembling skin of the girl's inner thigh. Dawn closed her eyes, letting out an agonized moan, preparing for the first cut that would split her in two.
"...."
But the cut never came.
Because in that moment Lief moved.
There was no dramatic entrance, nor an action hero catchphrase, nor a warning shout to alert the clown.
To deal with someone of this caliber, etiquette was unnecessary. Only lead was needed.
With a simple thought, the familiar and comforting weight of cold steel materialized in his hands.
Ebony and Ivory.
The two large caliber pistols appeared out of nowhere.
Raising his right hand, he aimed through the gap in the door and pulled the trigger.
Bang
The shot sounded like thunder inside the metallic acoustics of the warehouse, breaking the bubble of static terror.
The bullet, traveling at supersonic speed, crossed the distance in a fraction of a second and impacted with precision against the metal blade of the hacksaw.
Clang
Sound of metal against metal.
The kinetic force of the impact tore the weapon from Art's hands with violence, sending it flying across the room, where it landed noisily in a dark corner, far from his reach.
"..."
The warehouse was plunged into a sepulchral silence.
Tara's sobs cut off abruptly, drowned in her throat by the shock. Dawn opened her eyes, disoriented, looking at the empty space where a second ago the hacksaw was.
Art stood frozen.
His hands were still in the air, holding the shape of an invisible hacksaw and slowly he lowered his arms.
Then, he turned his head like the movement of an owl. His eyes, two pits of bottomless darkness, swept the gloom until fixing on the figure that was standing in the entrance.
Lief came out of the shadows, walking calmly toward the cone of light. He held both pistols firmly, the black barrels pointing directly at the clown's skull.
"..."
Art looked at him and tilted his head to the side.
He did not seem angry by the interruption, on the contrary, his smile seemed to stretch even more, revealing some yellowish and rotten teeth.
He stopped paying attention to the girls. The tied and hanging prey had already lost their charm, now he had a new toy… one that bit.
He began to walk toward Lief without hurry. His big clown shoes hit the floor with a heavy rhythm, ignoring the weapons, ignoring the danger, he advanced with confidence.
But Lief was not there to play.
Bang
Another shot and this time he did not aim at an object.
A flash erupted from the barrel of Ebony. The .45 caliber bullet hit Art directly in the center of the chest, in the sternum.
And physics did its job.
Swish
Art's body was thrown backward as if he had been hit by a sledgehammer. Landing heavily on his back, several meters away, remaining motionless.
The echo of the shot faded.
Tara let out a moan of hope behind her gag, while Dawn began to cry with relief.
But Lief's expression did not change. His muscles remained tense, and his fingers did not move away from the triggers and he did not lower the weapons.
He knew that this was not the end.
And he was right.
Barely two seconds of stillness passed when Art's body, lying on the ground, convulsed.
He did not get up like a normal person, using his arms or knees. In a flagrant violation of common sense, his rigid body simply "tilted" upward from the heels, standing up in an unnatural movement, like a puppet whose strings had been pulled all at once.
"..."
Upon standing up, he lowered his gaze toward his chest.
There was a hole in his suit, while a dark and viscous substance came out of the wound.
With curiosity he introduced two fingers inside the bullet hole, dug into his own flesh, unpleasant sounds being heard, and seconds later, he extracted the flattened bullet.
He held the bullet in front of his eyes, examined it under the light, and then let it fall to the ground with disinterest.
He focused his attention back on Lief, with his smile still there.