Gianna meets a big wolf
The slayer nursed his ice water and minded his business.
That was the thing about dive bars — nobody looked at you twice. The lighting was bad on purpose, the music was loud enough to discourage conversation, and the bartender, a stout woman in her sixties named Rosa, had learned after the second visit not to ask questions. Her husband Elliot, worked the door on weekends and always waved him in with a nod that said I don't know what you are, but you tip well. The slayer respected that arrangement deeply.
He was on his second glass when he felt the tap on his shoulder.
He didn't tense. Didn't reach for anything. He simply set his glass down with the careful patience of a man who had been interrupted mid-thought one too many times, and turned.
The man behind him was large in the way that suggested a deliberate career choice — broad through the chest, neck like a load-bearing column, hands the approximate size and utility of sledgehammers. He was also, notably, terrified. Sweat at the temples. Eyes wide and darting. The specific look of someone who had been told a thing was dangerous and had not, until this moment, fully believed it.
The slayer sighed.
"Are you here to try to kill me?"
The large man nodded.
The slayer pinched the bridge of his nose. "Is this about Gianna?"
Another nod.
He exhaled slowly, the way a man does when he's calculating patience against principle and finding the math uncomfortable. He glanced past the man's shoulder at the bar around them — at Rosa wiping down the counter, at Elliot restocking the back shelf, at the handful of regulars who'd been coming here since before either of them was a problem.
"Can we take this outside?" he said. "The people who own this place are a very kind elderly couple, and I'd prefer they not have to replace their floors over a misunderstanding."
The large man blinked. Then nodded.
"Great." The slayer finished his water in one clean pull, set the glass down, and left two fifties beneath it. He buttoned his jacket on the way out.
The alley behind the bar was the usual kind — damp brick, a single amber light buzzing above the rear exit, the faint smell of old garbage and recent rain. The large man had positioned himself near the mouth of it with the body language of someone who'd been told to make a scene look like a robbery if it went wrong.
"One moment," the slayer said, pulling out his phone. "I need the right song. Can't fight on bad vibes — it's a whole thing."
He heard the hammer click.
The revolver went off before he'd even looked up.
What happened next was not something the large man could later describe with any accuracy, because the eye cannot track what the mind refuses to process as possible. There was movement — a shift in the air, a sound like a coin spinning across marble — and then the slayer was standing exactly where he'd been standing, phone still in hand, and there was a bisected bullet on the ground between them.
The slayer looked at it. Then, he looked at the man.
"Really." It wasn't a question. "You've heard the legends. I know you've heard the legends, because you showed up here instead of catching me somewhere smarter." He shook his head and scrolled with his thumb. "Never mind. Found it. Let's dance."
One Minute began to play.
The large man opened fire on the first bar.
The slayer moved through the gunfire the way water moves around stone — not fighting the current, just redirecting it. The first bullet he deflected wide. The second, he turned into the wall. The third he caught at the wrist, angled just so, and sent back on a revised trajectory that found the large man's shoulder with a sound like a bat hitting a sandbag.
The man went down to one knee.
The slayer crossed the distance between them without hurry and stood over him. "Do you yield?"
The man looked up. And spat.
The slayer took a single step back, expression settling into something past annoyance — something closer to resignation. The large man dragged a hunting knife from his belt with his good arm.
The slayer rolled his eyes.
He let the first slash go past his ribs by an inch, turned inside the second, and drew his blade in a motion so economical it looked like an afterthought. One cut across the back of the ankle. The tendon parted like a cut bowstring, and the large man's leg folded beneath him.
He crawled.
The slayer watched him for a moment — not cruelly, just with the particular tiredness of someone who had seen this exact sequence play out more times than he cared to count. Then he stepped forward and put the blade between the man's vertebrae with clinical precision. Not fatal. Not meant to be. The man stopped moving.
He wiped the blade clean, sheathed it, and made a call.
"It's me. Alley behind Rosa's on 9th." A pause. "No, I tipped her first. Just come clean and fix it up."
He hung up. Stood there a moment in the amber light, the faint sound of the song still threading through his earpiece, and looked down at the man who'd been sent to end him over a woman who didn't know yet that her own clock was running.
"Sorry, Gianna," he said quietly, already turning toward the street. "You're next."
The coven kept a shop front that looked, to anyone without the sense to know better, like an apothecary that had given up on organization. Dried bundles hung from the ceiling in no apparent order. Shelves ran floor to ceiling and held things in jars that it was generally better not to examine closely. The smell was a complicated argument between cedar, copper, and something that had been burning since before the slayer was born.
He liked it here. It was one of the few places he could walk in without the air pressure changing.
The bell above the door announced him and Alice materialized from somewhere in the back the way she always did — unhurried, already smiling, like his arrival was a thing she'd been looking forward to since breakfast.
"Good to see you, hound." She said it the way someone says the name of a dog they love. Not diminutive. Familiar.
He nodded and set the folded bills on the counter without being asked. The standing order. She knew the amount and he knew she'd count it anyway, not because she didn't trust him but because she was precise about everything.
She pushed the money back.
"This one's on the house." She tilted her head slightly, a gesture that managed to be both casual and deliberate. "Consider it a professional courtesy. Those witch hunters won't be a problem for us anymore."
The slayer looked at the bills. Then at her. "You don't have to do that."
"I know." She smiled like that settled it.
He almost smiled back. "Thanks, Alice."
She turned to retrieve the mixture from the shelf behind her — the same shelf, the same brown glass bottle, the same position it always occupied — and he reached for it when she set it down. Her hand came down over his wrist before he could take it.
Not grabbing. Just resting. The way a doctor checks a pulse while pretending to be doing something else.
He let her.
She was quiet for a moment. Her thumb moved slightly, finding the inside of his wrist, and he watched her face do the thing it did when she was processing information she didn't like. Her eyes dropped to his forearm — to the absence of something that should have been there.