Fear Her Wrath III: It Runs on Blood

Chapter 1

My name is Margaret Hunt, and I'm Marbrose City's public enemy number one.

At least I would be if they knew who I really was.

According to the posters the police plastered all over the city, I'm an "extremely dangerous vigilante" wanted on an impressive list of charges including murder, assault, breaking and entering, industrial sabotage, arson, kidnapping, and possession of illegal weapons. I think that about covers it—although it really should be "involuntary manslaughter," since I wasn't trying to kill the head of the Polish mob when he fell off the roof of a moving train. The blurry photo they chose wasn't exactly flattering, but at least they got my name right: "Night-Wrath." Sometimes with a dash, sometimes not. I like a little variety.

As the first line of defense against the mafia, the city council, and their masked goons, I don't usually stray beyond the borders of Marbrose City—much less leave Fenley Island, aka the Fen. Mainly, I just don't trust things not to go horribly wrong as soon as I turn my back, and I've learned from experience that things never go less than horribly wrong when you're a superhero.

Okay, "dangerous vigilante." That should keep the lawyers happy.

Occasionally, though, something threatens the Fen from outside, or I need information that I can't get from the city archives or my informants on the street. It began about three weeks ago, when people started vanishing under mysterious circumstances all over the Fen. Ordinarily, that wouldn't be particularly noteworthy—people just disappear in Marbrose City, and it's hard to know whether it's the freaks or the mafia or just plain bad luck. It was the wax residue at the crime scenes that cued us in that something weird was going on. Ellie thought that meant spooky rituals by candlelight—I wasn't so sure. Besides that, the victims seemed to have nothing in common, and most of them didn't fit the usual profile for a missing person in Marbrose City: no teenage runaways, only one homeless guy, and no one known to have crossed the Sicilian mafia. One of them was even a doctor at the hospital where my dad worked. Their friends and relatives were as perplexed as we were.

I was sure there was a pattern. I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Luckily, there had been a string of similar disappearances in Bancroft—Marbrose City's neighbor to the northeast—but they'd stopped about a month ago before picking up again in the Fen. Odds were someone in Bancroft knew something. So, I hitched a ride on the 8 o'clock train out of Arvonia Station and rode the rails to the Meatpacking District on Bancroft's south end, where—according to Ellie G's intel—I could find the underworld boss known as Baron Ghoul.

Baron Ghoul's real name was László Vandory. He was a relative newcomer to Bancroft's criminal scene, having set up shop around the same time as my first fight with Icemane around eight months ago. Given the close ties between the Montagnese crime family and the Bancroft mafia, it had been only a matter of time before costumed criminality caught on there as well. And, as the Vitagliano and Apostoli families lacked their Marbrose counterpart's absolute control over the city, there was really nothing they could do to stop the more flamboyant class of criminal from staking a claim in the local rackets. Baron Ghoul was in the drug business, and he collected protection payments from the businesses in Bancroft's Oxborrow neighborhood. Not the kind of person I would ordinarily work with, but he also had a reputation for hard-to-get information, and I was willing to make a trade.

The Baron operated out of a bathhouse on Crookley Street. As Marbrose City's most notorious masked vigilante, I wasn't sure what kind of reception I would get, but the beat cops standing guard on the street seemed to recognize me and let me through without any trouble. I found the Baron in his private steam room in the basement of the bathhouse. The air was thick with vapor, and smoke wafted from a large hookah beside the sofa where Baron Ghoul was lounging. The bodyguards beside the door started when they saw me, and a police detective standing over the Baron's shoulder reached for his gun. Their boss, however, held up a warning hand.