Interlude: … before the Dawn.

The crunch of this particular gravel usually brought Brenda into a morose state of mind. She still felt a tinge of that as she walked down the graveyard pathway, but the reason she was here today buoyed her spirits beyond the weight of old grief.

Walking a familiar path, she remained outwardly solemn in respect of the sanctity of the place. At her destination, she gingerly removed a single wayward leaf that the wind had carried to the grave, then laid down the bouquet of flowers she had picked up on her way from work.

Next, she placed a small blanket on the path before the grave to spare her knees as she knelt there. And looked at the tombstone, taking it in fully. Remembering the former polished smoothness of its now slightly weathered surface.

Benjamin Newman. Died 6 years ago, at 32 years old. ‘Beloved father and husband, lost but not forgotten.’

For a long moment, she just sat there. Then she spoke to him. At first, when she had first lost him and still visited every week, it had been a **** coping mechanism, struggling not to drown in the grief, the despair and the fear that she would be inadequate to raise John on her own.

Since, as the frequency of visits had faded to monthly and eventually twice a year, it had become a comforting habit. A way to feel a vestige of the companionship he had brought her, and to hopefully bring the same to his soul as well, wherever it now dwelt.

In any case, she spoke quietly, scarcely more than a whisper, so as not to disturb anyone else who had come to remember or mourn. “I know I’m here early, your birthday still isn’t for another two months, but I have some good news that I couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s about John.

“I’ve talked a lot about how worried I have been for him. Worried about how he withdrew into himself after you died. About how disinterest and apathy seemed to become his new normal, and how most of his attempts at smiling or humor were an obvious act he put on, probably for my sake. How the crisis counselor seemed as unable to help him as I was.”

As much catharsis as Brenda had found in telling her late husband about all of this in the past, this was the first time she could mention it without feeling a lump form in her throat. “Well, it looks like all of that might be a thing of the past now. He met a girl on monday that seems to have turned everything completely on its head. And I know, two days is much too short to say anything with certainty, and things to do with teenage emotions are fickle. But I don’t think anyone who has seen how different he has been would be able to stop themselves from hoping. I know I can’t.

“Honestly, I don’t even know where to start. He is moving with purpose and direction instead of like he’s dragging himself along through mud, he is standing up straight and looking ahead instead of slouching and staring at the floor, and the smiles. I swear, I have seen more genuine smiles on his face since he came home Monday than I had for the whole year beforehand!”

She realized that her volume had risen to nearly that of a normal conversation and reined herself in. As much as talking about this made her want to sing and dance, this was neither the time nor place. “He has even started getting a little exercise. Yesterday when I came home, he was out for a walk, and he’s got a dance lesson from our neighbor this evening. All of it reminds me of how Emanuel used to say that you changed when we first met…”

She sat silently for a bit before continuing, “To think that all of it started from the same games that I had worried might have come to be in the way of him getting better. He has been playing with her on the internet for a while without knowing that she’s been living right here in Springfield all along. He even uses her game name and forgot to ask her real one.”

Brenda shook her head slightly in amused exasperation. She stayed for a bit longer, talking about a few other things that had happened since she was last here for their wedding anniversary in spring. She made it brief, though, as she had already shared the most important thing on her mind and she did have dinner to make.

Vanessa looked up from the fashion blog on her phone as the car came to a stop. They couldn’t have reached the manor yet, and there was no reason to take a route with stop lights.

They weren’t at a stop light, they were just stopped at the curb somewhere. Before putting more thought towards that, something about the driver seemed off. A look in the rear view mirror confirmed that it wasn’t the usual guy. It was some oaf of a black guy.

Probably a diversity hire in the process of proving why his kind needed affirmative action to amount to anything beyond thugs and welfare leeches. As if having the gall to smoke in the car wasn’t enough to get him the boot, though he’d at least had the bare minimum of sense to close the window connecting to the passenger compartment so his smoke wouldn’t **** her nose.

She knocked on the clear plastic divider to get his attention, but he ignored her. Before she had time to start putting the idiot in his place on that count, the passenger door opposite her seat opened and a tall, lanky man got in.

He was wearing a black, tailored suit with a white tie. Combined with his milky complexion, black hair and eyes that were so dark brown they might as well be black, the only colors breaking the monochrome were the yellow cat’s eye buttons and the red of his lips. Every part of him was unbalanced, too long and narrow. Combined with a slight twitching, it made his fingers resemble the legs of a large, white spider. His narrow face made his joyless, open-mouthed smile look disconcertingly wide and filled with too many flawless, pearly teeth.

As the car started moving again, she sneered at the intruder, “Who ar-”

“Wrong question.” That insolent fool dared to speak over her?? Vanessa tried to scathingly inform him of the depth of trouble he was in, but found her throat too dry to produce anything beyond an inconsequential cough as the lanky man continued.

“What you should be asking is why I am here. And the answer is, I’m here with a warning. You’ve been giving the Boss’ daughter Christie a hard time for a while now, and recently you’ve been meaning to escalate. You don’t want to do that. In fact, it would be best for your health to leave her be entirely.”

“Do you have any ide-”

“Vanessa Hawthorne, daughter of Winston Hawthorne Jr. and Rhonda Hawthorne, formerly Amador. Heiress to the Hawthorne family business and fortune. And before you proceed with the threats you were about to make, you should know that I’m not impressed. Not by your father’s employees or business contacts, nor by the politicians he pretends not to know your mother sleeps with to manipulate them. Or the organized crime operation Madame Amador is the true mastermind of. You may be familiar with the saying ‘there’s always a bigger fish’...”

Once again, she wanted to lay into the well dressed moron and call his pathetic bluff but found her throat nonsensically parched as he continued.

“Even if not, you did get familiar with the concept of dear old daddy having limits when he couldn’t get you that Koenigsegg Regera you wanted for your sweet 16.”

Though Vanessa managed to wet her throat enough to speak, that gave her pause. How did this man know? She had only told her parents and they surely wouldn’t let that be known and put a stain, however small, on their reputation of bottomless means.

Somehow, his already too wide smile widened further and went from merely joyless to displaying a more sinister form of pleasure. It brought to mind a cat toying with a caught mouse or a spider watching a bug struggle in vain against the web, and sent a cold shiver down Vanessa’s spine.

“From now on, should the Boss’ daughter be in any way harmed or tormented by you, by the youths you play at holding court over at Ashcroft, or by anyone who is in any way associated with the Hawthorne household, you will be held personally responsible.”

As he spoke, he snatched Vanessa’s phone out of her hands. Between the vicious smile, the tone of sadistic glee creeping into his voice, and the dawning realization that this man was not just some pest unwittingly nipping at the heel of his betters, her protest died on her tongue.

“Now, it’s been a little while since I got to do this kind of play.” He put the phone back in her hands. The display was now divided into two windows. One showed a video Vanessa had recorded herself, paused showing the distraught face of a former classmate. The other showed a picture of the same girl’s head and shoulders as she lay on a steel table, dark bruises around her neck. “But I’m quite confident I can still make what you put poor Laetitia through seem merciful by comparison.”

A long moment passed in heavy silence, as Vanessa found herself unable to look away from the screen or stop seeing herself in Laetitia’s place. Then a clicking sound drew an involuntary whimper from the usually self-assured heiress, but it was just the door opening. When had the car stopped again? Was that the Hawthorne Manor driveway??

“Boo!” He didn’t speak loudly, but doing so from right next to Vanessa’s ear made it sound loud all the same. Between that and her not having noticed him moving closer in the first place, she half jumped, half fell out of the open door.

She didn’t stop running, or look back, until she had reached the entrance to the main residence. By then, the car was no longer in sight.

As soon as they were both seated and the doors shut, the windows started one-way tinting to hide the cabin from people outside and the occupants started changing.

The driver’s skin took on a hue of red mixed in with the dark brown to produce a complexion that no human had ever worn naturally. Shaggy black hair sprouted from his previously smooth scalp as well as further down his neck until tufts of coarse black fur peeked out of his sleeves, and bony plates formed on his knuckles. Lastly, though he removed the cigarette that had never even been lit, the smoke emerging from his maw and nostrils with every breath increased instead of decreasing.

Beside him, the suit-clad man changed as well. His facial features vanished completely save for the smiling mouth that grew impossibly wide, completely bisecting the porcelain-white oval with a forest of ivory needles for teeth. The gemstone buttons on his shirt, meanwhile, turned into actual feline eyes while the silken cloth became bloodstained leather. His fingers grew to an inhuman length of about 20 centimeters, with nails turned claws adding another 5.

“Think she got the message?” the smiling one spoke first, prompting them both to laugh.

After a few minutes of laughing, the smoky man asked, “Where’d you get the part about the car she wished for from?”

The long fingered one made a dismissive gesture. “Spoil a mortal as rotten as her and then deny her something for the first time in her life and it’ll worm its way into the back of the mind and fester. Her dreams reek so strongly of it, I can probably tell from two towns over.”

They laughed again, then drove for a bit further before the red skinned one broke the silence, “So, how much trouble do you reckon we’re in?”

“None,” the eye buttoned creature responded flippantly. When the furry one gave him a doubtful side-eye, the lanky being placed a hand over the chest, about where a human would have their heart, and continued, “Dear brother, your lack of faith wounds me so.”

It chuckled again, but the continued side-eye prompted it to dispense with the theatrics and explain, “Look, it’s like this. Master secretly approves of our little initiative here, you know how he is about the girl. Can’t say that of course, got appearances to keep and all that stuff. Officially, he cares precisely as much as the Scarlet Witch does. And all the witch cares about with her mundane pawns is keeping their value as current and future assets.

“And what’d we do to that? We gave the little puppet a lesson in being careful about the fights she picks and sent her off no worse for wear. A bit scared, sure, but she’ll see far worse in the role the Crimson Cunt’s got in store for her.

“Plus, you were there too when Master negotiated Christie’s enrollment. If little miss prom queen steps too far, she’ll start a war that neither Master nor the Witch can afford, so I reckon we did everyone involved a solid. Might even thank us.”

Archibald terminated the Surveiling Sigil, leaving the duo to finish their ride in privacy. Felix was wrong about one thing: the two were in trouble. It would be all for appearances sake, but they had still overstepped a boundary onto Wentworth’s turf and that necessitated punishment.

But he would keep the punishment as light as he could, because Felix was right about two things: it was a war neither side could afford to wage and he did secretly approve of them taking extra measures to protect Christie.

Lucky woke with full clarity in an instant. It was more than 40 years since he had woken up like this instead of gradually, and just as long since he had thought of himself with his service nickname instead of Samuel or Sam. That didn’t matter right now, what did matter was that something was wrong.

He wasn’t sure why, and listening intently for a moment revealed no obvious source of the unease, but the feeling was instinctive and trusting his instincts had saved more lives than just his in the green Hells of Vietnam.

Moving slowly and quietly, the first thing he did was shift onto his side, put his hand over Liz’ mouth, and gently shake her awake. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed and gave him a pat on the leg to signal that she understood.

Releasing her, he shifted carefully out of bed, sliding onto his feet with barely a sound. It was decades since he’d needed to sneak about but he had been keeping as fit and spry as age allowed and the skill itself was like cycling, ingrained into his blood and bones.

The middle drawer of the nightstand held the guns. Touch was enough to check the cylinder and the magazine, make sure they were loaded and ready for use. He kept his old service sidearm and handed the revolver, which she’d learned to use at his insistence, to his wife. Just in case.

He gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze, then he was out of the door. Moving slowly and methodically, he carefully went room to room, checking for anything amiss. One he skipped, just listening at the door instead. The hinge was creaky, and he hadn’t gotten around to oiling it.

Once he got downstairs, Sam could tell more accurately what felt wrong. He still couldn’t pinpoint the precise sounds that told him so, but something in the quiet background noise of the house told his subconscious that someone else was here. Someone who wasn’t supposed to.

The front door was closed. Checking carefully, he found that it was still locked too. That made the back door the most likely point of ingress. He cleared his way there methodically, but came face to face with the intruder in the hallway as Sam was exiting the living room and the stranger came out of the kitchen.

For a moment, everything seemed to move in slow motion as the old soldier weighed his options. The culprit jerked backwards slightly, betraying surprise and putting his face into a beam of moonlight from the kitchen window. Green. He was wearing a mask. With that the final nail went into the coffin of the possibility of honest mistake.

Before the burglar could recover from the surprise, Samuel fired twice. The center of mass shots sent the hunched figure to the floor, but rather than being out of commission, the intruder scampered back into the kitchen on all fours with all the speed of desperation and adrenalin.

Sam fired another two shots at the fleeing criminal, knowing from painful experience that an enemy didn’t stop being a threat just because they were running right now. Both times, he knew before he even felt the recoil that the shots would miss.

The war veteran gave pursuit but didn’t get another clear shot as the home invader fled through the back hallway and garage. Satisfied that the bastard had run far enough off for the danger to have passed, the old man went back inside.

“ALL CLEAR, HONEY! IT WAS A BURGLAR BUT THE BASTARD RAN AWAY,” he yelled up the stairs to let her know as he ascended. Turning on the light as he went meant she probably wouldn’t mistake him for the intruder, but he had left her with a gun so it was better to be on the safe side.

Returning to the bedroom, he gave Liz a smile to reassure her that he was okay. Then she handed him the revolver and he set about re-securing them in the drawer. As he finished, she handed him the phone, with the police station’s number dialed in. He didn't call right away though.