Chapter 1

It was unfortunate that it was on their honeymoon that their corpses were found strewn on the floor, so decapitated and truncated that it was hard to know where their face ended and their neck started.

It was on Christmas day that the grizzly murder had taken place. Olivia and Mark were out in the Stellar Garden when a sudden movement in the bushes caught their eye. While investigating the source of the noise, a machete poked out from the dense flora, dealing a fatal strike to Mark's face, rendering him useless. Olivia tried to run but the thing that was attacking them was quicker and slashed her chest. Although they were practically dead, it continued to attack then suddenly it bent down and stuck it's face into the guillotined carcass and began to feed ravenously.

Two police officers on guard duty unwarily approached the patch of garden that the young couple had been brutally assassinated. Horror-stricken, the older officer reached for their shared walkie-talkie when a katana forced it's way across his back, through his ribs and out through his chest, a bloody heart impaled on the end.

With that, the thing left, leaving it's agonised victims to be seen.

Chapter 2

News outlets the following morning screamed variations of the same headline:

"Crimson Hunter: Maneater leaves one victim alive, slaughters three."

The police officer who was left standing had his face plastered across the front pages of every tabloid and broadcasted on every morning show on TV, his naive grin stretching across his face. That stupid smile will never be seen again, the man thought to himself bitterly as he crumpled the paper and deposited it in the nearest bin, hiding his shaking hands deep in his coat pockets. He ducked his head and hurried his pace as he shuffled past a well known news anchor on the street, who's quick eyes zeroed in on him instantaneously. She turned away from her conversation to jog after him with a grim kind of determination set in her face. "Excuse me! Mr. Thompson! A word for the public, if you'd mind?"

He shook his head, his lank strands of dark hair around his brows shifting with the motion. Thompson forced himself to ignore the jeers of the news anchor as she gave up and watched him leave. Why couldn't these damned people just leave him to think? To reflect on what he had to witness? Christ, it had only been one day and they were onto him like flies on faeces. Anything to add to the highlights on those trashy papers everyone in this self-absorbed town soaked up like the Man Upstairs wrote it himself. One that Thompson felt his faith in was slipping after last night's incident.

The reporter mumbled to herself in frustration on her way home that night, imagining the credit she would've received on obtaining a statement from the only surviving victim of the Crimson Hunter; or rather, its better well known name amongst town, the Ravager of Flesh. She hunched over her phone and tapped out a message, her fingers pressing harshly into the screen accompanied by loud clicks from the keyboard.

She didn't notice the stalker that had become her shadow, so adept as it was when mimicking her steps.
She didn't notice the glint of the machete as they passed beneath a streetlight.
She didn't notice her shadow creeping closer, closer, closer.

At least, not until her shadow gripped fistfuls of her shiny blonde hair from the back and slammed her face forward into the blade swiftly moved into place. The machete gouged through her eye socket and into her skull with a sickening crack that echoed in the empty street. The creature dropped her to ground, her screams cut short as it ripped into her throat and silenced her forever.

The cold night air hugged her body in the cooling embrace of lifelessness, draining the lasting warmth from it until she was a stiff corpse. And that was how she was discovered by a street cleaner at dawn the next day.

Mr Thompson read the morning paper with dread like a snake curling in his throat. The reporter's name was printed in bold beneath the headline — RAVAGER STRIKES AGAIN — and he recognised it immediately. Amelie Hayes. The woman whose eyes had found him so quickly, so hungrily, in that crowd.

The woman who was now dead because of it.

He folded the paper with slow, deliberate care and set it on the kitchen table as though it might detonate. His hands had stopped shaking since last night, which disturbed him more than the trembling had. A man ought to shake, he thought. A man ought to be undone by this. He wasn't undone.

He was thinking.

Why me?

It was the question that had colonised every waking hour since Christmas night. Three victims, and the creature had stepped over him like he was furniture. Not fled: stepped over. There was a distinction that nobody else seemed willing to entertain, because nobody else had been standing in that garden watching it feed with calm, black eyes while Thompson pressed himself against the stone wall and waited to die.

It had looked at him. He was certain of that now, having replayed the moment several thousand times in the dark of his bedroom. The thing had raised its head from the ruin of the young man's neck, Mark, the papers said his name was, Mark, on his honeymoon, Christ, and its gaze had found Thompson the way a compass finds north.

And then it had simply left.

He pulled out the battered notebook he carried everywhere from his coat pocket and opened it to the page he'd been filling since yesterday. Two columns. What I know. What I don't.

The second column was considerably longer.

What he knew amounted to very little: the creature was fast, strong, and used bladed weapons with a precision that suggested intelligence rather than instinct. It fed on its kills. It had passed him by. It had, apparently, followed and killed the reporter within twenty-four hours of her attempting to identify him publicly.

Thompson's pen hovered over the page.

Had it protected him?

The thought arrived fully formed and sat in his chest like a coal. He pressed the pen to paper and wrote it down before he could lose his nerve.

It knows who I am.

He stood abruptly, knocking his cold tea sideways across the table, and went to the window. The street below was quiet, salted with thin morning frost. Dog walkers. A postman. An ordinary Thursday. He thought about the couple in the garden. Tourists, the papers said. First time visiting the town. He thought about his partner, Jenkins, who had reached for the radio and died for it while Thompson had frozen against the wall like a man already dead.

Jenkins had tried to do something. Thompson had done nothing.

Was that it? Had something in his paralysis communicated a language the creature understood?

He didn't believe that. It was too thin, the kind of reasoning a frightened man builds to make himself feel less like a coward.

He dressed quickly and went out into the cold, turning his collar up. He needed to go back to the Stellar Garden. The police cordon would still be there, but Thompson had a badge of his own and a reason to be curious that his superiors hadn't yet thought to revoke. He needed to see the ground again, the geometry of where each body had fallen and where he had been standing when the creature chose to leave him breathing.

Because there was a shape to this, he was certain of it. A logic underneath the carnage, cold and precise as the blade that had taken Jenkins apart.

He just needed to find it before the creature decided his continued survival had been a mistake.