Wings in the Dark

Chapter 8: Bleed

*Levi's POV*

Levi waited a few days before he did anything.

He would have waited longer, but he knew if he waited a week or more, she would have the chance to kill again, and he wanted to act before she could. The other night it had been someone who had jumped her that she'd attacked, but who would it be next time? Some random civilian off the street? Considering the conditions in the Underground, the man she killed could have been someone just trying to survive–Levi himself had been a thug in the Underground.

Of course, given the area they'd been in, it was less likely that man had been just trying to get by, but there were too many unknowns about her, too much sinister implications in the stark facts alone, for him to go off blind, naïve faith that she was some kind of vigilante type that only preyed on the truly terrible.

Though honestly, even that thought sickened him. If she was just another person, which was the theory he would act on considering how insane the other one was, then that meant she was going out of her way to kill people in the Underground, and that kind of self-righteous dealing out of judgement and death was sickening to him.

Of course, he was still keeping the insane theory in mind. He had no solid evidence he'd seen with his own eyes to prove it, just a bunch of theories and circumstances that fit so snug and perfectly into the larger picture he couldn't ignore it. But he wasn't going to treat her as some supernatural creature of darkness until he saw something that proved it without a doubt.

All the more reason for this plan for a confrontation he'd managed to cook up in a short amount of time.

Firstly, he hadn't told Erwin yet. Not because he'd suddenly decided not to have the other man involved–no, Erwin needed to know what was going on, no matter how this panned out. Why he withheld the developments he'd made in the Underground was because he was still uncertain about the more insane theory. There was too much for him to omit it, but he didn't exactly want to go up to Erwin and tell him that he thought L/N was a demon who drank blood from humans she killed every week.

Erwin would probably have him committed if he told the man he was considering it with no actual, solid proof. So, Levi had left behind a letter addressed to Erwin explaining what he'd discovered in the Underground and his two theories, complete with the tale from the Underworld and why he was crazy enough to even consider it, and how at the very least she was a serial killer so either way she was a threat. That way, if something went wrong during this confrontation and he didn't make it out of there alive, the secret wouldn't die with him, and Erwin would still be warned.

That was his main concern.

The second had been how to approach this. How to get the upper hand on her when she was already so...refined in her senses. How she always seemed to know when he was nearby or when he was heading her way. How was he supposed to get the drop on someone like that?

That was where Eld came into play.

He did his best to make it look unimportant and nothing more than part of the usual daily routine. The command was given in passing as Eld came from the opposite end of the hallway, Levi stopping him briefly to ask him to tell L/N to make a delivery for Levi to a specific address, with instructions that included a fake package waiting just outside Levi's office for L/N to pick up and deliver.

The address, unbeknownst to Eld and certainly to L/N who had just recently come to the surface compared to Levi, was to an abandoned warehouse a little ways outside of one of Rose's main towns.

After giving the order to Eld, Levi kept walking with a purpose like it had simply been a passing thing instead of the first domino to fall in his plan for cornering L/N–or at least getting the drop on her to give himself a bit of an upper hand in this mess.