The bus dropped Jax at Allegheny and Richmond, and he walked the rest of the way with the knife pressing against his calf and five hundred dollars playing on repeat in his head.
Port Richmond was a different flavor of neglected than North Philly. Less residential, more industrial; block after block of warehouses and machine shops and businesses that had been limping along since the seventies. Half the buildings had "FOR LEASE" signs in the windows. The other half looked like they should have.
The river was close. He could smell it; that particular mix of diesel and rot and something chemical that meant water in Philadelphia. Seagulls screamed overhead, fighting over something dead in a parking lot.
2847 East Allegheny was a brick building with KOWALSKI INDUSTRIAL SOLUTIONS painted on the side in letters that had been white once and were now a peeling gray. The parking lot was empty except for a single pickup truck near the entrance. No other cars. No workers.
Frank had sent everyone home. Smart. If something went wrong, fewer witnesses. Fewer lawsuits.
Jax pushed through the front door.
The lobby, if you could call it that, was a small room with a desk, a phone, and a calendar on the wall still showing September. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, one of them flickering in a way that made Jax's eye twitch. Behind the desk, a door led deeper into the building.
A man stood behind the desk. Sixties, maybe. Thick in the way that men who'd done physical labor their whole lives got thick. He had a mustache that belonged in a 1970s cop movie and eyes that had seen enough bullshit to last several lifetimes.
"You the demon guy?"
"That's me." Jax spread his arms like he was accepting applause. "Jax. We talked on the phone."
Frank looked him up and down. Took in the bloodstained hoodie, the patched jeans, the hair that hadn't seen a barber in months. His expression did not suggest he was impressed.
"You're a kid."
"I'm nineteen."
"You look twelve."
"I get that a lot." Jax walked toward the door behind the desk. "So where's the basement? You said the sounds were coming from—"
"Paperwork." Frank stepped into his path, one meaty hand raised. "License. Insurance. Background check. We talked about this."
"Right, right." Jax patted his pockets like he was looking for something. "I've got all that. Must've left it in my other pants. Tell you what, I'll have my assistant fax it over while I get started. What's your fax number?"
"Your assistant."
"Yeah. She handles all the administrative stuff. Real professional. You'll love her."
Frank's eyes narrowed. "Kid, I've been in business for thirty-two years. You think I don't know when someone's jerking me around?"
"I would never." Jax put a hand over his heart. "Look, Mr. Kowalski. Frank. Can I call you Frank? Here's the thing." He leaned in, dropping his voice. "I can feel it."
"Feel what?"
"The demon." Jax closed his eyes, tilted his head like he was listening to something only he could hear. "It's here. Close. I can sense its... energy. Its presence." He opened one eye. "It's hungry, Frank. It's been feeding on your power grid for days, getting stronger. Every hour you wait, it gets worse."
This was complete bullshit. Jax couldn't sense demons any more than he could sense the stock market. But Frank didn't know that, and Frank was scared, and scared people believed what they wanted to believe.
Frank's jaw worked. His eyes flicked to the door behind him; the one that led to the warehouse floor, to the basement, to whatever was clicking in the dark.
"My guys have been hearing things for a week," he said quietly. "Machines turning on at night. Tools moving. Rodriguez quit yesterday. Said he saw something in the back corner, near the loading dock. Said it had eyes."
"Eyes?"
"Lots of them."
Jax nodded slowly, like this confirmed something. "Okay. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to let me in there. I'm going to kill it. And then my assistant is going to fax over all my paperwork, and you're going to give me five hundred dollars, and we're both going to pretend this conversation never happened. Deal?"
Frank stared at him for a long moment. Jax could see the war happening behind his eye; common sense versus desperation, liability versus the thing in his basement.
Desperation won. It usually did.
"Fine." Frank stepped aside. "But if you die in there, I never saw you. You broke in. I don't know anything."
"Wouldn't have it any other way."
Jax pushed through the door.
The warehouse floor was dark.
Not completely dark; light leaked in through high windows caked with decades of grime, casting everything in a dim gray wash. But dark enough that Jax had to wait for his eyes to adjust, standing just inside the door with his hand on his knife.
The space was massive. High ceilings, concrete floor, rows of industrial shelving stacked with boxes and equipment. Forklifts sat dormant in the aisles like sleeping animals. Somewhere, a pipe was dripping. The air smelled like machine oil and dust and something else, something sharp and metallic that made his nose itch.
The door clicked shut behind him. He heard Frank's footsteps retreating, heard the front door open and close.
Alone.
Jax pulled the knife from his ankle sheath and started walking.
"Five hundred dollars," he said out loud, his voice echoing in the empty space. "Five. Hundred. Dollars."
He stepped over a coil of extension cord, eyes scanning the shadows between the shelving units.
"That's rent. That's more than rent. That's rent plus food plus maybe—maybe—a new pair of jeans that don't have a safety pin holding them together."
A rat skittered across his path. He didn't flinch.
"I could get a real toothbrush. One of those fancy ones with the rubber grip. Maybe some toothpaste that isn't just baking soda and sadness."
He reached the center of the warehouse floor. The shelving units formed a kind of maze around him, aisles branching off in every direction. At the far end, he could see a set of stairs leading down. The basement.
"A haircut. Jesus, when's the last time I got a haircut? I could walk into a real barbershop. Sit in the chair. Have someone ask me what I want instead of just hacking at it with kitchen scissors in the bathroom."
He was stalling. He knew he was stalling. The basement was right there, and whatever was in it was waiting for him, and here he was talking about haircuts like a crazy person.
But the thing was, and this was the part that made his chest tight in a way he didn't want to examine, five hundred dollars wasn't just money. It was proof. Proof that he could do this. Proof that he wasn't just scraping by, wasn't just surviving, wasn't just another kid from North Philly who'd end up dead or in jail or worse.
Five hundred dollars meant Mrs. Reyes looking at him differently. It meant walking into a store and buying something without counting quarters. It meant eating food that wasn't two weeks old and sleeping without wondering if tomorrow was the day everything fell apart.
It meant being a person instead of just a body taking up space.
"Okay." He tightened his grip on the knife. "Okay. Let's do this."
He walked toward the basement stairs.
The breaker panel was on the wall next to the stairwell; a big gray metal box with WARNING: HIGH VOLTAGE stenciled on the front. Jax flipped it open. Rows of switches, all in the ON position, but none of the lights were working. The demon had done something to the system, was feeding on it somehow.
He grabbed the main breaker and flipped it. Off. On.
Nothing.
Off. On.
Still nothing.
Off. On. Off. On.
Click.
Jax froze.
The sound had come from below. From the basement. A single click, like someone snapping their fingers. Or like something with too many joints testing its limbs.
Click. Click. Click.
It knew he was here.
Jax pulled back from the breaker panel and moved toward the center of the warehouse floor, putting distance between himself and the stairs. His eyes swept the darkness, knife up, weight on his toes.
"Alright," he called out. "I know you're down there. Why don't you come up and say hi? I've got somewhere to be."
Silence.
Then—
Click. Click. Click. Click.
It was moving. Fast. The sound was getting closer, not from the stairs but from somewhere else, somewhere behind the shelving units, circling around. It wasn't coming up the stairs.
It was already on this floor.
Jax spun, trying to track the noise. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, bouncing off the concrete walls, echoing through the maze of shelving. The clicking was joined by something else now; a low hum, like a hard drive spinning up, like electricity arcing through bad wiring.
Click click click click click—
It stopped.
Jax stood in the center of the warehouse, knife raised, heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth. The silence was worse than the clicking. The silence meant it had found a spot. The silence meant it was watching.
"Come on," he whispered. "Where are you?"
A shelf unit groaned. Metal scraping against concrete.
Jax turned toward the sound.
It stepped out of the shadows.
The first thing he registered was the height. Nine feet, maybe more; it had to duck slightly to clear the top of the shelving unit, its body unfolding as it emerged into the dim light. The second thing he registered was that it didn't walk so much as assembled itself with each step, joints clicking into place like a machine booting up.
Its body was wrong in ways that made his brain itch. The base structure might have been humanoid once, but whatever had spawned it had been feeding on an entire warehouse worth of dead tech. Its torso was a patchwork of server racks and fused metal plating, the gaps between filled with something organic and glistening. Cables ran through its limbs like veins, some of them sparking, some of them pulsing with a rhythm that was almost like breathing.
Its arms were too long, hanging past its knees, ending in hands that were half-flesh and half-industrial machinery. The left one had fingers made of copper pipe, each one tipped with something sharp. The right one was worse; a mass of tangled wiring and circuit boards that had fused into a single appendage, crackling with electricity.
But the head. The head was the worst part.
It didn't have a face. Instead, it had screens. Dozens of them. Old CRT monitors, cracked and flickering, embedded in a mass of melted plastic and exposed circuitry where a head should be. Each screen showed something different; static, error messages, fragments of images that might have been faces or might have been nothing at all. They blinked and shifted independently, a cluster of dead eyes all looking at him at once.
In the center of the cluster, one monitor was larger than the rest. Its screen flickered, resolved, and displayed two words in bright green text:
SIGNAL FOUND
The demon tilted its head. Dozens of screens tilted with it, pixels rearranging themselves into something that almost looked like curiosity.
Click.
It was the biggest thing Jax had ever seen. Bigger than any Class D, bigger than the thing in the Patterson house, bigger than anything he'd read about in the classifieds.
This wasn't a Class C.
This was something else entirely.
Jax looked at the demon. The demon looked back with forty eyes and a screen that said SIGNAL FOUND.
His hand was shaking. He made it stop.
"You're big," he said. His voice came out steady, which was a small miracle. "That's fine. Big just means slow. Big just means more places to stick a knife."
The demon didn't move.
"You know what you are? You're five hundred dollars. That's it. That's all you are to me." He adjusted his grip on the knife, felt the familiar weight of it, the worn leather handle against his palm. "You're a haircut and a toothbrush and a month of not having my landlord look at me like I'm garbage. You're three meals a day. You're a new pair of jeans."
The demon's screens flickered. New text appeared on the central monitor:
SIGNAL STRONG
"So here's how this is going to go." Jax shifted his weight, settling into a fighting stance he'd learned through years of trial and error and near-death experiences. "I'm going to kill you. I'm going to collect my money. And then I'm going to go home and sleep in a bed that I actually paid for."
The demon took a step forward. The concrete cracked under its weight.
"That's the plan. That's the whole plan." Jax bared his teeth in something that was almost a smile. "Any questions?"
The screens flickered again. All of them this time, synchronizing for half a second into a single image; a face, or something like a face, made of pixels and static and something that might have been hunger.
Then they went dark.
Jax moved first.
That was the trick, the thing he'd learned back when he was twelve years old and fighting kids twice his size in the alleys behind Kensington. You never waited. You never let the other guy set the pace. You saw the opening and you took it, fast and dirty, because hesitation got you killed.
He exploded forward, closing the distance before the demon could finish its charge. The thing was huge but it was still unfolding, still clicking into attack mode, and Jax was already inside its reach before those copper-pipe fingers could grab him.
The knife came up. Jax ducked under a sweeping arm, felt the displaced air as the mass of wiring and circuit boards whipped over his head, and buried the blade in the demon's side. The metal punched through something that wasn't quite flesh and wasn't quite metal; it made a sound like tearing canvas mixed with TV static, and Jax ripped sideways, opening a gash that leaked something black and sparking.
The demon screamed.
The sound came from everywhere at once; from the screens, from the cables, from the warehouse speakers that shouldn't have been working. A burst of feedback and corrupted audio, the digital shriek of a dying hard drive amplified to impossible volume.
Jax was already moving. He rolled under another grab, came up slashing, took a chunk out of the demon's leg where the cables were thickest. Black oil and sparks. The demon staggered.
Five hundred dollars.
He jumped, caught a handful of exposed wiring on the demon's chest, hauled himself up. The neck. He had to get to the neck. Cut the head off and the body died, that was true for demons just like it was true for everything else.
Five hundred dollars.
He climbed higher, knife between his teeth now, hands grabbing server rack edges and cable bundles. The demon thrashed beneath him, trying to shake him off, but Jax held on with the desperate strength of someone who had nothing left to lose.
Five hundred fucking dollars.
He reached the shoulder. The neck was right there, a mess of cables and vertebrae and fused circuitry. He grabbed the knife, raised it high—
Yes yes yes THIS IS IT—
The demon's hand caught him around the torso.
Jax had time to think what the fu—
And then he hit the wall at eighty miles an hour.
Everything went white.
Then red.
Then nothing at all.
Jax felt himself hit the concrete. He heard something crack; lots of somethings, actually, a whole symphony of snapping and tearing that his brain couldn't quite process. He tried to breathe and got a mouthful of blood instead.
He tried to move. Nothing happened.
The demon's footsteps shook the floor as it approached. Click. Click. Click.
Jax managed to open one eye. The other one was swelling shut, or maybe it was gone entirely, he couldn't tell and it didn't seem to matter. The demon loomed over him, all nine feet of it, screens flickering with new text:
SIGNAL WEAK
A hand grabbed him by the leg.
He went up. Then down. The concrete rushed toward his face and the world exploded into pain.
Up again. Down again. Something in his chest collapsed.
Up. Down. His skull bounced off the floor and his vision went sideways.
Up.
Down.
Up.
The demon threw him.
Jax flew. It was almost peaceful, those few seconds in the air. No pain; his body had given up on pain, had decided that some things were beyond its ability to process. He watched the ceiling pass overhead, noted absently that one of the skylights was cracked, thought about how Frank should probably get that fixed.
Then he landed.
He felt his ribs go, like they'd been waiting for permission and finally got it. They folded inward, and he felt them puncture things that shouldn't be punctured, felt the wet heat of internal bleeding spreading through his abdomen. His spine made a sound like knuckles cracking. His brain was doing something strange, swelling against the inside of his skull, pressing against bone that was suddenly too small to contain it.
He was dying.
The thought arrived calmly, without drama. He was dying. His body was broken in ways that couldn't be fixed, and in a few seconds, maybe less, everything he was would stop being anything at all.
The demon stood over him. Its screens had gone dark, like it was conserving power, like it knew the show was over and there was no point in wasting electricity on a corpse.
Jax stared up at it with his one working eye.
This is it, he thought. This is how it ends.
Not in a blaze of glory. Not taking a demon with him. Just... like this. Broken on a warehouse floor, dying like a dog, with no one to know and no one to care.
He thought about Mrs. Reyes. About the way she'd looked at him yesterday, tired and disappointed, like she'd expected better and kept getting let down. He'd wanted to prove her wrong. He'd wanted to walk up those stairs with five hundred dollars in his hand and watch her face change, watch her realize that he wasn't just some deadbeat, that he could actually do something.
He'd never get to prove it now.
He thought about his apartment. The mattress on the floor. The crack in the window. The last slice of two-week-old pizza sitting in the fridge, waiting for someone who wasn't coming home.
He thought about his parents, but that was a door he'd locked a long time ago, and even now, even dying, he didn't have the key.
His heart stuttered. Skipped. Stuttered again.
That's fine, he thought. I guess that's fine.
He'd never really expected to live long anyway.
His heart stopped.
The demon turned away, already losing interest in the broken thing on the floor. It shuffled toward the back of the warehouse, toward the humming electrical systems it had been feeding on, toward the darkness where it would wait until the next person came looking.
Jax's body lay still. Cooling. Silent.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Ba-bump.
Ba-bump.
Ten beats per minute. A whisper. A suggestion of life where there shouldn't be any.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
Fifty. The blood in Jax's veins, what was left of it, began to move.
Ba-bump-ba-bump-ba-bump—
One fifty. Two hundred. His heart wasn't beating anymore; it was hammering, pounding against his shattered ribs like it was trying to break free from his chest.
Three hundred.
Four hundred.
Five hundred beats per minute. Six hundred. Seven.
A thousand.
Light.
It started in his chest, at the center of that impossible heartbeat, and it spread outward like fire through dry brush. A glow, neon red, the color of emergency lights and warning signs and things that were about to explode. It pushed through his skin, lit him up from the inside, turned his broken body into a lantern in the darkness of the warehouse.
Steam rose from his skin. The blood that had pooled beneath him began to boil.
And his body began to fix itself.
His ribs snapped back into place with a series of wet cracks, the splintered ends fusing together like they'd never been broken. His spine realigned with a sound like a zipper being pulled, vertebrae clicking into position one after another. The swelling in his brain reversed, the pressure releasing, his vision clearing as blood vessels sealed themselves and neurons fired back to life.
Jax opened his eyes.
Both of them.
He sat up. The movement was smooth, effortless, like his body had forgotten what pain was. Steam poured off him in waves, his clothes smoldering, the concrete beneath him cracked and blackened from the heat.
The demon had stopped.
It stood at the far end of the warehouse, half-turned, its screens flickering back to life. They cycled through colors, blue, green, yellow, before settling on red. All of them. Forty screens, all displaying the same message:
ERROR
ERROR
ERROR
Jax stood up.
He looked down at his hands. They were glowing. Veins of red light traced patterns under his skin, pulsing in time with his impossible heartbeat. Heat radiated from him in visible waves, distorting the air, making the world shimmer like a mirage.
He felt... good.
Better than good. He felt like a engine that had been running on fumes his whole life and had finally been given real fuel. He felt like lightning trapped in a bottle. He felt like he could tear the world apart and put it back together wrong just to see what happened.
He didn't understand what was happening to him. He didn't care.
He looked at the demon.
The demon looked back. Its screens flickered. ERROR ERROR ERROR.
Jax smiled.
And then he moved.
The world blurred.
One second Jax was standing at the far end of the warehouse, wreathed in red light and steam. The next second he was there, in front of the demon, close enough to touch.
The thunderclap came a half-second later, a shockwave of displaced air that blew out every window in the building, sent shelving units toppling, scattered debris in a radius around the point where he'd been standing. The sound was deafening, a sonic boom in an enclosed space, and Jax didn't hear any of it because he was already past it, already moving, already inside the demon's guard.
His fist connected with the demon's chest.
And the demon exploded.
There was no resistance. No impact. One moment there was a nine-foot monster made of metal and flesh and corrupted circuitry, and the next moment there was nothing but shrapnel. Server racks and CRT monitors and copper pipe and cable and bone, all of it flying outward in every direction, painting the warehouse walls with black ichor and sparking components.
Jax landed in a crouch, the concrete cratering beneath his feet.
The red glow intensified. His skin was cracking now, fissures of light spreading across his arms and chest like he was a shell containing something too bright to hold. Steam poured off him in thick clouds. His eyes; both of them open, both of them wrong, burned with the same neon red as the rest of him, no pupils, no whites, just light.
He stood up slowly. Pieces of the demon rained down around him, clattering against the floor, still twitching with residual electricity.
He should have felt relieved. He should have felt victorious.
Instead, he felt hungry.
"My money," he said.
His voice didn't sound like his voice. It was deeper, rougher, layered with something that buzzed at the edges like feedback from a broken speaker.
He looked down at the remains of the demon. A chunk of server rack. A tangle of cables. Half a CRT monitor, the screen cracked and dark.
"MY FUCKING MONEY!"
He grabbed the server rack and tore it in half with his bare hands. The metal screamed as it separated, edges glowing orange from the heat of his grip.
"FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS!" He grabbed another piece, something that might have been a torso, and ripped it apart, scattering components across the floor. "THAT WAS MY RENT! THAT WAS MY FOOD!"
He wasn't thinking anymore. The thing inside him; whatever had brought him back, whatever was powering this impossible body had taken the wheel, and all Jax could do was ride along as it drove him forward into violence.
He grabbed a piece of the demon and shoved it in his mouth.
It tasted like copper and ozone and something else, something that crackled against his tongue and dissolved into energy that fed the furnace in his chest. He swallowed without chewing, grabbed another piece, ate that too. Metal and flesh and circuitry, all of it going down, all of it turning to fuel.
"FIVE! HUNDRED! DOLLARS!"
He was screaming between bites now, tearing the demon apart and consuming it piece by piece, his glowing hands leaving scorch marks on everything he touched. The hunger was all-consuming, a need that went deeper than his stomach, deeper than his bones; it felt like his very cells were starving, crying out for more, demanding that he feed them or burn out.
"THAT WAS EVERYTHING! THAT WAS—THAT WAS—"
His heart stuttered.
The glow flickered. Dimmed.
"—everything I—"
His legs gave out.
He hit the ground hard, the red light fading from his skin, the cracks sealing over, the heat dissipating into the cold warehouse air. His heart, that impossible engine that had been running at a thousand beats per minute, began to slow. Eight hundred. Six hundred. Four.
Two hundred.
One hundred.
Fifty.
Thirty.
Jax lay on his back in the wreckage of the demon, surrounded by shattered glass and scattered debris and the black stains of whatever had passed for the creature's blood. His eyes, normal again, human again, stared up at the ceiling without seeing it.
His last thought, before the darkness took him, was about the five hundred dollars.
He still didn't have it.
The warehouse went quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm was going off—probably triggered by the shockwave. Glass tinkled as the last of the windows finished falling out of their frames.
And Jax lay still, unconscious, alone, with demon blood on his lips and something new burning in his veins.