Chapter 1: The debt collector
The scene was gruesome. Brutally fatal to the eye. Bodies cut to pieces, staked to wood, heads crushed, flesh horribly burnt. Malik Vance lay on the floor, breathing in heavy, ragged intervals, covered in blood and the scattered remnants of what had once been human beings. He was barely conscious. The voice kept reaching him through the haze.
Malik. Malik Vance. Yield. Take the sword. Ascend your throne.
It came from the devil sword, a weapon that had grown eerily excited from the massacre, feeding on the carnage and the dark energy surrounding it. Malik did not understand what was happening. He barely remembered how he had arrived here. How much of it did he recall? Even he could not say.
Manhattan had always been one of the most horrifying hubs in the world.
The Dark World Titans were supposed to protect people. Supposed to fight crime. A disgustingly naive assumption. They were as bathed in the horror that had consumed the city as anything else, the rotting smell of decay reaching for miles in every direction. But the world was about to learn the name of a new leader. Hell's politics were about to burn.
She moaned.
Martha Groom exhaled as Malik rolled away from her, her breathing slow and satisfied.
"Let us do that again," she told him.
Malik, six feet of athletic, dark-skinned composure, only smirked.
"I have business to handle," he said.
Martha feigned approval. But beneath it, she was asking herself a question she had been asking for weeks: why did he no longer truly interest her? Malik pulled on his trousers and a black shirt that only partially covered the hard lines of his frame, and stepped outside.
They were waiting for him.
Four of them: a dirty-blonde Caucasian man, five-foot-nine with a heavy stubble; a slender Black man with scanty dreadlocks; a bulky, bald Caucasian; and a woman in a red beret. Not a band. Not a scout troop. Bound dogs to his calling, every one of them.
"We have the photos," the woman said. "He is getting under your skin again."
She handed over six photographs documenting the recent activities of Dean Codyle, one of the few men left in Manhattan who stood in the way of Malik's pursuit of power and influence. One photo showed Dean's secret affair with Martha.
Anyone else would have been furious. Devastated. The woman he had shared his bed with, going behind him to another man. But Malik Vance had been playing these particular games for a very long time. He had never taken a genuine partner. He had never allowed himself to. How many had he sold, ruined, and betrayed to get where he was? Martha had been an asset, nothing more, nothing less. He had turned down her proposals on countless occasions, each rejection appearing to trample what she believed was love between them.
He looked at the photograph and smirked.
"This is unnecessary," he said. "But she is no longer indispensable."
He had Martha tortured. Not for pleasure. Not even for loyalty. Purely to remind her, and himself, of his status. Malik Vance was not a politician. He held no elected office and sought none. His obsession had led him across many faces and many worlds, including the occult, and each encounter had only made the hunger burn hotter.
He had grown up understanding one thing above all else: power commands everything. He had learned it the hardest way possible, beginning with the death of his father, Jamal Vance, and compounding through every sacrifice and consequence that followed. He was powerful now, a recognizable, feared force in Manhattan. But there was something more terrifying than influence, more elusive than wealth or loyalty. Something that neither money nor authority could purchase.
This absence had become a curse in Malik's soul. And through every desperate measure, every dark search, every life sacrificed at the altar of his ambition, the debt he owed to hell had been quietly, patiently accumulating.
