The Sinner Hunting System

A delivery van turned onto the street.

The young driver had one hand on the wheel and his phone pressed to his ear. His sunglasses sat on the bridge of his nose.

On the console beside the handbrake, a freshly printed clinical report, photosensitive epilepsy visible in the header.

"Mom? Yes, the doctor confirmed it. Photosensitive epilepsy. I can’t drive anymore after this."

His attention drifted for a few seconds. The van rolled over an unremarkable speed bump.

The sunglasses slid off his face and dropped near the accelerator.

He muttered something irritated, looked down to grab them, and when he looked back up, his bare eyes met the strobing 3D advertisement screen on the nightclub facade at exactly the wrong moment.

White. Then nothing coherent.

The seizure hit fast, a brief violent shudder, then the body going rigid, consciousness departing. His foot, stiffening as the muscles locked, pressed the accelerator to the floor.

Wuuuu—!

The van left the normal traffic flow and accelerated straight toward the café at the end of the street, the crowd ahead scattering and screaming.

---

Inside the café, Raphael had just absorbed three rounds to the back. He looked up at the sound of the screaming outside and found a runaway van coming directly at them.

"Hell—"

The curse had a wider reach than he’d anticipated.

His gaze dropped to the long glass shard still in his hand, and a thought surfaced.

A blade. Moon energy requires a blade. Does glass qualify?

He focused inward. The moonlight mark on his forehead appeared, faint, the thinnest possible crescent, barely visible.

He’d only just contracted the werewolf’s ability. He hadn’t accumulated enough energy for more than a single discharge.

One shot. Against a van moving at that speed and weight.

No margin for error.

His mind moved through options in rapid succession, discarding each one.

Attacking the driver was useless, it wouldn’t stop the van.

Targeting the tires might make it fishtail, but with fate pushing it toward Elena, a skid would just redirect the approach.

His eyes landed on the tree outside the café window.

One meter across at the base, approximately. Positioned at an angle. If it came down in the right direction.

He found the angle, let the moonlight flow from the mark into the glass, and swung.

Shhk.

The crescent of light crossed the room, passed clean through the gap between the window panels, and hit the tree at the mid-trunk. On a diagonal.

Crack.

The tree came down exactly where he’d aimed it, falling across the café entrance and into the street, blocking the approach.

The van’s high chassis rode up over it at full speed, the front wheels lifting in a sudden lurch, the whole body tilting forward.

The airbag deployed and caught the driver’s head. The impact bled away enormous momentum.

The rear wheels found the tree. The branches fed into the tire treads and held.

The weight distribution shifted dramatically as the van sat half-mounted on the fallen trunk, its drivetrain working against a trap it couldn’t power through.

Rubber burned against the pavement. The smell of it reached them. The van stopped with its front bumper less than a fist’s length from the café window.

One beat of complete silence across the whole street.

Raphael counted to six in his head. When he reached it, the tightness in his chest let go.

His shoulder was still bleeding. He looked at Elena.

"You alright?"

Elena blinked.

"You — Raphael, you need a hospital."

"No I don’t."

He shifted his grip and picked her up properly, both arms, the carry that people called a princess hold for no particular reason, and his eyes were getting redder rather than less.

"We can’t stay here. People will come soon. Don’t be alarmed by what happens next."

He activated Blood Frenzy fully. His skin went pale, his canines extended past his lips, and he stepped out through the balcony access and went up.

Rooftop to rooftop, between buildings, across the city, the distance from the café to the guesthouse covered in a handful of seconds, ending with a clean drop onto Elena’s balcony.

Elena looked around at her own room with the expression of someone whose understanding of cause and effect had taken a significant blow.

He set her down. She stepped back a few paces and looked at him, expression complicated.

"You saved me." She said it first, establishing the fact. "Whatever you are, I won’t tell anyone. I mean that. I’m very reliable about things like this."

She pressed her lips together. There were things she wanted to ask, but that wasn’t the priority.

"You’re hurt. Take the shirt off. I have a first aid kit. You look..." She searched for the right phrasing.

"Not standard human, so you probably can’t go to a hospital. I’ve done some medical study. I can get the bullets out."

What she didn’t mention was that most of her medical knowledge came from emergency surgery sequences in films.

But she had seen several of those quite attentively.

"I don’t need it."

"You’re getting it anyway."

She came forward without waiting for him to agree and started on his shirt buttons. One, two.

"Fine." Raphael turned around, pulled the shirt off, and fixed his attention firmly on the wall in front of him.

His blood thirst was sharp and specific right now.

His eyes kept finding the line of her neck, the curve of it, the pulse visible just beneath the surface, and he was not going to let that go somewhere it shouldn’t.

The wall was safer.

Elena looked at his back and forgot what she’d been about to do.

The three bullet wounds were moving. Contracting, shifting, the surrounding tissue working methodically, and one by one, three brass-colored shapes pushed themselves free of the wounds and dropped to the floor with small, distinct sounds.

"What—?"

Raphael turned at the sound she made. He looked down at her from the height difference.

"Stay here. I need to find a blood bag. I’ll be back shortly."

Blood bag? Elena turned the phrase over. She looked at his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the teeth.

"Are you a vampire?"

A pause.

"Something like that. Currently, yes."

Elena looked at him.

She did not look frightened. She looked, if anything, like someone who has just had a hypothesis confirmed.

She tilted her head slightly, revealing her gracefully curved neck, and looked at him intently.

"You can drink my blood!"