Beware The Embers Of A Dying Light

Dr. Blood Hound walked into the old abandoned factory while the cops kept the press away. What ever happened here had spooked someone high up enough bad enough to have him called in and that was never a good thing. That usually meant it was either so bad or so strange or both that they needed him just to give them an ideal on where to start. He took one last drag off the cigarette before tossing it into the puddle where some rookie was getting sick in what had once been an employees lounge. Already he was scanning everything, but the bloody hand prints and bodies under tarps didn't speak to him. It wasn't until he saw the thin bloody trail leading from a different entrance that he found where it began.

He back tracked to the doors and then started following it. The trail from the tips of the feet suggested a girl or a very slim boy who had been beaten, blood trickling down from maybe the mouth or face into splatters that the feet were dragged through. Mouth, definitely the mouth, he thought as he pulled out his post-it notes and marked the three teeth on the ground before waving over some crime scene technician.

Ignoring her he continued following the trail into a locker room. There he found the trail stopped at a bench. The torn panties told him it was a girl or a cross dresser, never assume it was one or the other until you saw the body. The bench told him everything, they were raped anally and vaginally if it was a girl. Long red, yellow, and orange hair and excrement told him they were raped orally. The bloody scratch marks on the bench told him it had been violent. He marked the panties and the places on the bench and called over another crime scene technician.

This time they weren't dragged between two people, but dragged by their hair. The jerk to the left said they were kicked in the side from the right. Then they were slammed into a locker repeatedly at one point before being dragged between two people again. On the ground was a cell phone, face down. Taking out a pen, he flipped it over to find a picture of a fiery haired girl with two black eyes, a bloody mouth, and the word 'Whore' written on her forehead in lipstick. This was vengeance for something and given the violence it was personal. He marked the phone and pointed it out to the technician from before.

He followed the now bloodier trail into the actual factory and past old rusted out machines, a few just didn't seem right, to one that was definitely different. Unlike the others this one was chard and melted in places. In fact it had a female outline melted into it that suggested they had been in a chained up position. The bloody trail led right to it, the outline was right, and this was Canterlot where weird shit happened a lot or the C.P.D. wouldn't need him, his degree as a mythologist, and his skills. She had been chained to the machinery and judging by the bloody tools, tortured, but something happened. Next to it was a chard corpse still holding a partially melted nail gun. The technicians had already marked everything they could see, but bending down he noticed something, small melted pieces of shiny metal. Looking at the nail gun he saw the same shiny metal had melted out of where the nails where loaded. Only these were under where the girl would have been and he no longer doubted it was the same girl from the photo. Marking them, he then looked at the outline and noted two sets of hand prints. One normal where they had been up above her head, clutching the machine as she was tortured with part of the chain used melted into the machine. The other was down where they would have dropped when her hands were freed, only these were slightly longer and claw like.

He puzzled over it before it hit him, she was at her breaking point and something gave, something happened, something inside didn't want to die and she changed. Then he remembered the video he'd seen online, a rainbow haired girl playing a guitar before growing a pair of pony ears, tail, and a pair of wings. If that was real and the rumors of other girls doing it, then what would happen when you push one of them to the point where natural survival instincts took over? But if that was the case, why here? Why not the locker room? Why not before entering the building? Why not where ever this all began?

Unless it was an ambush and she was knocked out. Then brought here beaten, dazed, and barely able to think clearly, only to be kept off balance with the rape and being knocked out again. But what changed? Looking at the chard corpse and it's position in relation to the outline and thinking about the melted nails it all suddenly clicked. They didn't just torture her, they gloated. They told her how no one would ever find her body out here. How she was going to die here and no one would ever know. They told her what they were going to do and that there was nothing she could do to stop them.

Only there was something she could do. How many myths and legends talked about the oldest and most powerful forms of magic being based around emotions and desire and what was stronger than the will to live, to survive. The fresh pain of having a nail gun used on her and the gloating finally got through and nature took over. Only this wasn't just nature, but what some in ancient times would have called dark magic. It was primal and it lashed out at it's tormentors.

Turning he looked at the factory and the machines that were wrong made sense. Somehow she reached out with her mind and tore off pieces of the machinery from here. Looking he spotted at least 7 bodies under tarps that had something poking up out of them. Only if she could do that why not... Looking up he called another technician over and borrowed her flashlight. Turning it up towards the ceiling and he saw 5 rather large boys, most likely athletes, nailed to the steel girders by pieces of machinery driven right through their bodies and genitalia, only one had a piece driven right through his head.

Ignoring the shouting and running around, he tossed the light back to the technician and looked once more at the outline. Looking around he finally caught sight of a body not like the others. This one wasn't chard or had machinery driven through it, in fact the broken jaw and neck and the bare footed foot prints facing away from the body told him she had been back handed with supernatural strength. The foot prints were over 40 feet away from the machine, so either she leapt, flew, or just appeared there and killed the girl without a second thought.

From there it was a trail of bodies as she hunted down every single one of them. Some where burned, others torn to pieces like they had been attacked by a wild animal, and still others seemed to just have their necks broken, as if they weren't important enough to punish for what they had been a part of. Only when he reached the exit did he find something odd two sets of shoe prints leaving and melted patches of snow with bare footed prints baked into the ground. They led away for about 20 yards before the ones in shoes had got on their knees, most likely begging, before being dragged towards where there was a bunch of burned out cars. Meaning she had drove away and taken the two of them with her after setting the fire that had brought the fire department out here. He had dozens of questions, but only one mattered right now: What next?