He was already dying when their eyes met.

  The young man lay pinned inside the circle, his body stretched and trembling. The knife stuck out of his chest, just off-centre, buried deep — angled with deliberate precision. The skin around the wound pulsed once. Dark blood spread like ink across the cold concrete.

  And still, he looked at her with desperate, pleading, blue eyes.

  Somehow, even with his body failing, his head turned just enough to see the figure standing in the doorway — Riya Lennox. Victoria Police uniform. Glock still raised. Face frozen in the raw horror of being one breath too late.

  His mouth didn’t move.

  His voice didn’t rise.

  But his eyes begged.

  Help me. Please.

  Riya’s lungs locked. She didn’t lower the weapon. She couldn’t. Her arms didn’t feel like hers.

  She’d already fired.

  She’d aimed. She’d struck centre mass. The assailant had gone down. She had done everything she was meant to do. Everything right.

  But the man still had a knife in his chest.

  Her entire body buzzed with that awful, suspended charge — the one that hits right after the moment that matters. The one that says: You acted. And it wasn’t enough.

  His lips parted once, useless.

  Then his spine arched, one final, pitiful spasm. He exhaled a sharp, wet, broken sound. And then—

  He detonated.

  It wasn’t a slow fade. It wasn’t peaceful. It was violent. With a dry, soundless concussion, his body came apart — skin, blood, tissue — shredded to dust in an instant. A plume of fine grey-white particles exploded outward from where he lay, billowing upward and out, rattling nearby candles as it expanded across the circle.

  Riya flinched back, shielding her eyes out of instinct. But nothing hit her. No wind. No heat. Just the visual blast of a man reduced to ash and dust. The cloud hung in the air — suspended — wrong, somehow. Not drifting like dust should. Not settling. It hovered with intent, particles shimmering, held together by forces she couldn’t see.

  It paused. One second. An eternity?

  Then it collapsed. Not straight down — not like gravity had finally claimed it. The cloud imploded violently, like smoke being vacuumed into a single point. A sudden, sharp pull — air warping as every last particle reversed course, spiralling inward at high speed, funnelling toward the dying knife woman’s chest.

  Right into the space above her heart.

  The dust snapped into her like water into a drain, the centre of mass pulling unnaturally, impossibly, into the woman now flopping around like a rag doll.

  Then — nothing. Stillness.

  The room was as it had been a moment ago, and yet not.

  Riya lowered her weapon slowly. Her hands were shaking now. Not fear — not just fear — but awe, and revulsion, and a deep-boned certainty that she had just witnessed something not meant to be seen. Her ears rang slightly, but not from gunfire.

  The woman’s body twitched once, just a small involuntary jerk.

  Then silence.

  Total.

  Of the young man, there was no sign. Not fled. Not hidden. Not taken. Gone.

  And something now lingered in the circle — not physical, not visible. But present.

  Riya felt it. In her skin. In her breath. In her teeth. Something that hadn’t been there before. Something waiting.

  The rain was still falling when the flashing lights cut across the broken warehouse walls. Red and blue strobed over corrugated iron and weeds growing through cracks in the concrete. The ambulance hadn’t arrived yet, but the sirens were getting closer. Riya stood frozen, gun still in hand, steam rising from the barrel.

  She didn’t remember lowering it.

  The female offender lay sprawled a few metres away. Shot clean through the sternum. No twitching. No gasping. Just the stillness of death. Like something had switched her off.

  And the man, the stab victim, was gone. There was blood where he’d been. And rope. Heavy stuff, rough enough to tear skin. The kind you’d use to tie down equipment. Or a person. But no body. No prints. No trail. Just... absence.

  Constable Greg Merton stood behind her now, radio at his shoulder, muttering into the mic in clipped tones.

  “Single confirmed deceased, female. Possible male victim — status unknown. Scene secured. Need SOCO and backup, over.”

  He looked over at Riya, voice softening.

  “You alright?”

  She didn’t answer at first. Her eyes were locked on the empty centre of the ritual circle. There was a mark scorched into the floor — a spiral, blackened and etched deep. She didn’t remember seeing it before the shots.

  It hadn’t been there. Had it?

  Merton stepped closer. “Riya. You with me?” his voice a little gentler than normal.

  She blinked hard and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m... I’m fine.”

  She wasn’t. Her heart was hammering. Her hands were shaking. Not just from the shooting — she’d trained for that. Not from the blood either. It was something else.

  It was the way the unknown male had looked right before she pulled the trigger. Not just terrified — unreal. Like he was caught mid-fade. The way the candles had snuffed themselves out in a ripple. The way the air had bent, just for a moment, like someone had slammed a door on the sky. The look in his eyes in his last moments.

  She holstered her weapon, slowly. Didn’t look at the woman’s body again.

  Merton looked past her into the dark corners of the warehouse. “Doesn’t look like anyone else was here. Whoever made the call, they’re long gone.”

  Riya found her voice. “Triple-zero came in as trespassers. Sounded like chanting. Could’ve been anyone on a smoke break.”

  “Sure doesn’t look like a kid’s rave,” he muttered.

  More lights swept through the warehouse as backup units arrived. A couple of uniforms. Then the forensics van — stark white, out of place in the filth and rust.

  Riya stepped back, letting them move past her. One of the techs — blonde ponytail, clipboard in hand — looked at her twice before speaking.

  “You fired?”

  “Yeah,” Riya said. “So did he.”

  She gestured to Merton, who gave a half-wave from where he stood near the entrance.

  “Which one of you dropped her?”

  Riya hesitated. “Don’t know. Might’ve been both of us. I aimed for centre mass.”

  The tech nodded like she didn’t care either way. “Body cam on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. We’ll need it.”

  They started photographing. Measuring. Marking. The rope. The blood. The scorch pattern.

  Riya crossed her arms and tried to look at everything without seeing it. She focused on the procedure. The perimeter. The chain of custody. She let the checklist in her head take over.

  Until she caught the smell. Not blood. Not powder. Not shit or piss. Something else. Something like... burnt stone. She turned toward the spot where the victim had been. A faint haze still hung in the air. Like something had rapidly evaporated.

  “You alright, Lennox?” Merton asked again, quieter now.

  Riya nodded again, then stopped herself. “No,” she said finally. “No, I’m not.”

  He grunted in agreement. Not mocking — just honest. “You did what you had to.”

  She didn’t respond. Because that wasn’t what was bothering her. What bothered her was that it felt like the man had been erased. Not killed. Not escaped.

  Obliterated.

  By morning, the warehouse looked even less like a crime scene and more like a bad joke. Riya stood just outside the taped-off zone, arms folded, half-listening to the SOCO briefing while her brain throbbed behind her eyes.

  “You’d think there was a bonfire in there,” said Jess Howland, forensic lead, adjusting her safety glasses. “But there’s no accelerant. No soot residue. No chemical trace of ignition.”

  “So what are we calling the scorch mark?” asked one of the techs.

  Jess shrugged. “Heat pattern without a source. Possibly electrical, except—get this—there’s no power to the building. No lines connected. Completely dark site.”

  Riya kept her expression neutral, but her jaw tightened. She could still feel the pressure in her ears, the way the air had folded in on itself. The blast without a sound. The vacuum that followed the victim’s disappearance.

  “What about the rope?” she asked.

  Jess glanced at her tablet. “Frayed. Burned at contact points, but no blade marks. No clean cuts.”

  “So he didn’t escape,” Riya said quietly.

  Jess raised a brow. “What do you think happened to him?”

  Riya looked past her into the warehouse — the circle still faintly visible through the dust, like a memory scorched into the floor.

  “I think he exploded.”

  Jess frowned, but didn’t argue. Not directly. She wasn’t ready to call bullshit — not after reviewing the cam footage.

  She tapped the side of her tablet again. “There’s something else. Every camera — yours, Merton’s, the dashcams — they all stutter at the same moment. Half a second gone. Audio spike, visual dropout. Right when he disappears.”

  “Glitch?”

  “If it’s a glitch, it’s the cleanest cross-device sync I’ve ever seen. We’re checking with IT, but don’t hold your breath.”

  Riya didn’t reply. She shifted, uncomfortable. Her uniform clung damply at the collar, like she’d been sweating under it all night. The humidity was high, sure, but something else was making her skin crawl.

  “What about the body?” she asked.

  “The assailant?” Jess pursed her lips. “No official ID. Fingerprints don’t match any national records — no license, no mygov, no passport, nothing. Dental’s in progress.”

  “No face match either?”

  “Not on official channels. Might try uni records, older files.”

  “She’s not a ghost,” Riya said flatly.

  “No,” Jess agreed. “But she doesn’t seem to exist in any official system. Someone did a bloody good job of erasing her.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Riya stayed quiet. She thought about the chanting, the ritual circle, the knife.

  “How long till we get the full lab results?”

  Jess gave her a look. “We’ll fast-track it. But this one’s not going to come back with anything you can plug into a report.”

  Back at the station, Riya reviewed the footage again.

  It still didn’t make sense.

  She watched the timestamp crawl forward. 02:13:47. The woman raises her knife. She and Merton open fire. A collapse. The candles dim. Then a flare-up white outs the camera for a second, to return, one body just gone.

  Not running. Not hit. Not moving. Just... gone. One frame, he was there. The next, he wasn’t.

  She rewound it. Froze it.

  There—his face. His eyes locked onto hers, wide, not with the scream of someone begging for life, but with something far worse. A desperate, raw pleading, as though his very soul had cried out for mercy. She could still hear it in her head—the silent scream, the weight of it pressing down on her chest. His gaze, his gaze—it wasn’t just fear. There was something deeper there. Knowledge of is certain death?.

  Her breath caught. The image flickered—then blurred, and suddenly, it wasn’t just the video. She was back there, back in the moment, standing frozen in the doorway of that warehouse, the air thick with the stench of blood and smoke. His eyes were locked on hers, and it wasn’t just fear anymore. There was an ache in them, a pleading so deep, it felt like it was cutting through her. He was looking at her, and it felt as if he was seeing through her. As if he knew the truth. Knew she wasn’t going to save him.

  His pupils widened, but there was something else behind them. Something... darker. A flicker of recognition. Was it blame? He looked like he was asking, silently—Why didn’t you stop it?

  The flash was so vivid it stole the air from her lungs. For a second, she could feel it—the crushing weight of his last moments. Resignation crept into his eyes. His body was still tied, helpless, but in those moments, she swore she saw something shift in him. He knew, before the end came, that she wasn’t going to intervene. That she was too late. And that realisation—horrible, suffocating—spread across his face.

  She blinked, and the flash faded. Her pulse raced, her skin crawling. She could still feel it, like a brand on her memory. The image of his eyes—those eyes—looking at her with a silent accusation, a question she wasn’t sure she could answer.

  Then static. A twitch in the lens.

  Gone.

  She sat back, rubbing her temple. Her head ached now, deep behind her eyes.

  “Take a break,” Merton said, handing her a coffee.

  She hadn’t heard him come in.

  She took it with a mutter of thanks, sipped, then grimaced. Lukewarm.

  “You’re doing the same thing I did,” he said, leaning against the wall. “Back when it happened to me.”

  “When what happened?”

  “First time I shot someone.” He sipped from his own cup. “I watched the footage a hundred times. Rewound it. Slowed it down. Thought if I stared long enough, I’d see something different.”

  “Did you?”

  “Nope. But I convinced myself I had.”

  Riya blinked. "They were already using cams back then?”

  “Yeah. Five years ago? Pretty much everyone had one by then — at least in metro.”

  “Did it help?"

  ”Not really. Just meant I got to relive it in high def.”

  Riya looked down at her coffee. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”

  “I think your brain’s looking for a reason to feel worse. And it’s good at finding one.”

  She didn’t reply.

  He watched her for a moment, then nodded toward the screen.

  “Nothing you did changes what’s on that tape. We were there. We both saw it.”

  “What did we see, Greg?” she asked quietly. “Honestly.”

  Merton’s face twitched slightly. He didn’t answer.

  After he left, Riya shifted in her seat. Adjusted her collar.

  Something tugged at her neck — not hard, just a faint resistance. Like a necklace catching on fabric.

  She reached up. Fingers brushed against skin.

  Nothing there.

  But the irritation remained. Like heat. Like pressure.

  She pulled the collar forward and peered down her shirt.

  Still nothing.

  But the itch stayed.

  The interview room smelled like instant coffee and dried sweat. A frosted window let in the buzz of station life — phones, photocopiers, someone laughing too loud, in admin. Riya sat across from Senior Sergeant Petros, her statement half-finished on the desk between them.

  Her hands were steady now, but only because she was focused on keeping them that way.

  Petros leaned back in the plastic chair, notepad full of notes. The man didn’t need to write things down, but he did anyway – procedure. He had a memory like concrete and the demeanour of someone who hated bullshit.

  “Let’s go over it again,” he said.

  “I already gave you the timeline,” Riya said, jaw clenched.

  “You gave me the timeline. What you didn’t give me is a reason why there’s one body instead of two.”

  She exhaled through her nose. “Because there was only one left when we walked in.”

  “You think we’re dealing with a third party?”

  “No.”

  “Then where’s the man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Petros studied her. His eyes were calm but sharp, like he was watching to see which parts of her face flinched.

  “He wasn’t cuffed. But there’s rope. There’s blood. There are signs of—what, ritual? Occult garbage? And then nothing.”

  She met his eyes. “I didn’t say it made sense.”

  “No, you didn’t. You said, and I quote, ‘the victim exploded.’”

  Riya didn’t answer. She didn’t retract it either.

  He leaned forward, folding his hands.

  “Look, Riya. We’ve both seen weird. Drug fuckups, cult shit, blokes who’ve hidden under floorboards for days. I’m not here to play gotcha. But I need something I can use. If this hits media — and it will — I need a line.”

  She swallowed. “You’ve got my cam footage.”

  “Yeah. And that’s part of the problem.”

  He reached down and tapped a file on the desk. “Your cam catches about ten seconds of chanting, then the candles flare and—poof. Light bends. Audio goes weird. The timestamp skips a half-second forward. When it comes back, the bloke’s gone.”

  Riya closed her eyes for a moment. The memory was too sharp. The rope slackening. The silence that followed. The complete lack of anything where the victim had just been.

  “Technical glitch?” she offered weakly.

  “Maybe,” Petros said. “Maybe it’s also bullshit. Because Greg’s cam shows the same thing. So does the fixed unit from the cruiser outside.”

  “Then it’s not just me.”

  “No. But it still doesn’t explain what we’re looking at. I’ve got a dead woman in a ritual circle, a missing man with a last-known location of... being tied to the fucking floor, and a pair of candles that apparently go out on their own right before everything cuts out.”

  He ran a hand through his hair.

  “Look, I’m not accusing you of anything. You did your job. You followed the noise complaint, you saw a hostage situation, you acted. But you’re telling me the man just... blew up?”

  Riya stared at the tabletop. Her voice came out quiet.

  “Yeah.”

  Her fingers dug into the edge of the table, nails biting into the wood as if she could anchor herself to something real. She wanted to say more, to explain, but what could she say? All she could hear in her head was the sound of eyes pleading with hers, and the way they looked right before everything went to hell. The man had trusted her, and she hadn’t saved him. She should’ve saved him. She could almost feel his last breath on her skin, and the cold knot in her gut twisting tighter with every second. The silence stretched on, and she barely felt her body tense under Petros’s stare, as though she were waiting for the ground to open up and swallow her whole. What the hell had happened in that room? How was any of this real? What could she say to make it believable? Something she could believe.

  Finally, Petros stood up. Picked up the file. Didn’t say thank you, didn’t offer platitudes. Just nodded.

  “I’m moving you off the active rotation for now.”

  She looked up sharply. “I’m fine.”

  “Not saying you’re not. But there’s a media nightmare brewing, and you need to write a statement that doesn’t sound like it came out of a bloody Lovecraft paperback.”

  She exhaled, shoulders tight. “So, what do I write?”

  He gave her a long look.

  “Write what you saw. Then write what they’ll believe.”

  Then he left her alone with the form.

  Riya didn’t start writing. Not immediately.

  She pulled up the stills from her bodycam footage. Just grainy exports, not for public release. The shot showed the moment right before the first bullet hit — the female offender, knife raised, mouth open mid-chant.

  Another image: the concrete floor after it happened. The rope slack around where the unknown male had been. The spiral burned into the ground. Her breath caught, an odd coldness spreading over her skin. The sight dug into her chest like a splinter, the burn at the centre of her mind, a feeling she couldn’t shake. She couldn’t name it, but deep inside, her instincts screamed that the mark wasn’t just a sign of violence—it was something else. Something that had meaning. Something that was never meant to be left behind.

  She rubbed her eyes. The scorch pattern still didn’t make sense. She remembered standing just outside the circle, smelling smoke but not fire. There’d been no flame. No flash. But something had burned.

  Someone from SOCO — Jess, maybe — had muttered that the mark couldn’t have been made with heat. “Chemical composition’s wrong,” she’d said.

  Riya hadn’t been meant to hear that.

  She leaned back, closed her eyes, and saw it all again. Not with clarity — but with feeling.

  Like something had been watching.

  And waiting.

  The statement would take her two hours. She’d write it twice. Once for the record. Once for herself.

  And both would leave out what she really felt.

  That when the unknown male vanished, it hadn’t been a mistake or a glitch or an illusionist’s trick.

  It had been an invitation.

  And something had accepted.