Jude’s world ended in a single drop of blood. Shaped like a tear, the red droplet elongated as it dribbled down the frame of the door to his apartment. The door stood slightly ajar.

Rebecca never left the door open. Too nervous, too frightened of the world. The lock was blackened, and the smell of burnt metal emanated from it.

Jude knew immediately that Rebecca was in trouble. There would be no other, more innocent explanation. There were no possible misinterpretations. A dark thought at the back of his mind told him that it was inevitable. Five years of relative happiness was too good for him. Any happiness at all was too good for him, in fact.

He dropped the plastic carrier bag to the floor. The glass bottle inside exploded. It had been filled with cheap sparkling wine – they couldn’t afford champagne, and Rebecca was probably even going to give him a hard time for this barely frivolous spending; wine, flowers, strawberries.

He kicked open the door, and stepped inside.

The apartment was wrecked; the peeling mirror smashed and hanging askew, a splatter of blood across Rebecca’s favourite Monet print. The TV had been knocked off its stand, but still droned to itself in the corner. The coffee table – an ugly piece from the seventies that Rebecca had fallen in love with; three pounds fifty from the Oxfam shop – had been smashed through the middle. Blood still dripped from its edges.

Rebecca’s frayed pink dressing gown lay discarded on the bare floorboards, the bunny pattern now soaked with blood.

All over the walls, symbols drawn in yet more blood; some kind of language, but it could have been Arabic or Martian for all Jude knew. Between the symbols, were scrawled the words:

Rebecca Lawson – chosen

Lawson; her maiden name.

“Rebecca?” Jude felt the strength draining from his limbs. Panic started to beat at his mind.

“She’s dead,” a man’s voice said.

Jude jumped, almost screamed.

“Or as good as.” The man stepped from the kitchen. As always, the result of habits ingrained years ago, Jude instantly assessed the man’s physical threat. He was tall, but not as tall as Jude; wiry but not as strong as Jude, who had maintained his physique long after being thrown out of the military. He assessed the intruder’s shaven head, tattoos and piercings, immediately recognising him as one of the occult-obsessed freaks Rebecca had been trying to extricate herself from for the last few years. Sons of the Jew, they called themselves.

“Where is she?” Jude said.

“She’s gone, Jude” the intruder replied. “Taken. I’m going to say it once. Stay out of this. Just stay out of it.”

Jude’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. His skin seemed to have shrunk on his body; tightening, crushing, forcing cold sweat from every pore. “Taken where?”

The intruder shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do. She’s gone, and now…”

Rebecca had been attacked, hurt, taken somewhere, as good as dead¸ and this crazy bastard was telling him to stay out of it? Whereas the strength had been draining from Jude, now adrenaline flooded his muscles. Without thinking, on instinct alone, he rushed the freak.

The intruder’s eyes widened. Staggering back, he uttered some word in a language Jude had never heard, and suddenly, he wasn’t there. Vanished.

Jude’s found himself standing at the window overlooking the street. The window was open, the old net curtain fluttering against the night breeze. Raindrops spotted the window ledge. Had the window been open a second ago? He didn’t think so. Stepping closer, he looked down to the pavement below. The Son of the Jew stood calmly under a streetlight, staring up through the rain.

“Jude, let it go. You can’t help her.”

Furious, Jude sprung from the window to the portico a few feet below, and then dropped expertly to the ground, hitting the pavement running. The intruder turned and fled.

Feet pounding the drenched tarmac, head throbbing from each impact, Jude forced himself forward, toward the end of the alley. Rain blurred his vision, but he knew he wouldn’t lose the bastard. The alley was access only for delivery vehicles that served the local shops on the ground floor. At night, a steel gate was locked across the end.

Some bastard had taken Jude’s wife.

It was their fifth wedding anniversary.

Jude had proposed to Rebecca as they lay side-by-side in bed, sweating and panting after the first time they’d made love, the taste of cheap supermarket champagne still tingling their lips.

Rebecca had turned her head, wafting the scent of apple shampoo over him once more, and kissed his shoulder. “You’re really strong. Big muscles. It’s nice.”

Glad the lights were off, he blushed, and mumbled, “I’m nothing special.” In fact I’m nothing. Certainly not worth you.

She’d laughed then, but it didn’t sound like mockery. Instead, there was something in the sound that just made him want to hold her, and have her again.

“I think you’re special,” she’d said.

She couldn’t possibly have known what those words felt like to him. She couldn’t have known they crashed in like a knockout punch, leaving him disorientated, out of breath, almost panicking at the thoughts and emotions that surged through his mind. How could anyone think he was special? Big and strong as he was, a so-called hard-man at some time in the past he wished he could forget, still he felt a lump in his throat. He actually felt guilty that he could be with someone and feel so right. But here it was.

“Marry me,” he said.

She stared at him, eyes twinkling in a shaft of streetlight that stole in through the crack in the curtains. “Marry you?”

“Yeah.”

She cocked her head. “Like, a big expensive wedding, white dress, loads of flowers and guests?”

He nodded. “If that’s what you want.” He kissed her face, her neck, her breast.

“Matching wedding rings?” she enquired.

“Uhuh,” he snuffled against her skin.

“And of course, a huge engagement ring.”

“Mmm.”

She laughed again. “And you are aware how much that all costs, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah…”

“In that case, the answer’s no.” She gently pushed him away.

“No?”

Sitting up, she faced him, her corn hair short and spiky, now it was growing out of the ridiculous shaven look the Sons of the Jew had forced on her. “If I marry you, I want a marriage, yeah? Not a wedding. Do you get me?”

“I get you.” He reached to the bedside cabinet, picked up the shredded foil that had capped the champagne cork, and began shaping it.

“What are you doing?” she asked

“Ssh.” With care, he formed the foil into a ring, held it before her left hand, and eyed her questioningly.

She kissed him, and then laughed. “One day, you’ll be calling me the old ball and chain.”

“I need a ball and chain. Marry me.”

She slipped her finger into the foil ring. “Yes, I will.”

They had known each other exactly two weeks.

Jude reached the end of the alley. Streaks of oily grime shimmered on the walls, clinging to crumbling brickwork in defiance of the pummelling rain.

The intruder; the Son of the Jew, stopped before the locked security gate; fifteen-foot-high steel mesh, beyond which a maze of back streets twisted into the night. He turned and faced Jude, fear in his eyes, the trembling of his chin jingling the multiple rings, studs and chains that mutilated his face.

Operating on rage, refusing to think beyond this, refusing the even approach the idea that Rebecca was hurt, or dead, Jude charged.

The intruder murmured an unintelligible word.

First, a blinding flash, instantly followed by a rush of hot air that knocked Jude off his feet, leaving him winded, rolling on the freezing wet ground, staring up at the stars between the wind-whipped clouds; constellations oddly warped to Jude’s disoriented vision. Every bit of his body ached, as though he’d caught the edge of the blast radius of a grenade.

Not magic exactly, Rebecca had once tried to explain. They call it psycho-sorcery. Never worked for me…

Groaning, trying to force himself back up, Jude saw the intruder backing away, looking weakened; somehow depleted.

The force that had downed Jude had also torn the gate from its hinges. The intruder limped through.

Jude gritted his teeth. No way would he let this freak get away. Ignoring pain, refuting the way his body begged to be left on the ground, he forced himself up.

Then everything happened quickly:

The intruder staggered across the deserted side street, into the pool of yellow light under the single working streetlamp. A parked car suddenly gunned into life. Headlights glaring, the Toyota screeched toward him.

Jude saw the intruder, in the twin spotlights of the headlamps, raise one hand, voicing a brief incantation. As the car bore down, an invisible but felt force exploded from him.

The car skidded as though an invisible hand tried to push it to a stop. But too little, too late. Tyres shrieking, the Toyota hit the intruder head-on, tossing him into the air, even as the sudden impact against the invisible force catapulted the driver through the windscreen.

The engine cut, and one headlight died.

Wind howled through the street. Rain drummed the tarmac, and mingled with the blood of the intruder and the suicidal driver. .

Seething, Jude strode toward them. Whereas the Son of the Jew was bald and had many piercings, the driver of the car had long black hair tied back in a ponytail. No piercings, but plenty of arcane tattoos across his face. Jude had seen this particular style once before. Years ago, he and Rebecca had been walking along a street not far from here, when she had suddenly panicked and pulled him into a doorway. She had cautiously pointed to a car that drove past, one of these types at the wheel.

There are different orders, she’d told him. Not just the Sons of the Jew. He’s with the Providers. They don’t get on.

Jude forced the memory away. He didn’t want to hear her voice in his mind; didn’t want to have to think of what those bastards had done to her. He just wanted to know where she was.

The Son of the Jew sprawled on the tarmac, yards from the driver, or Provider, if that’s what he was. The intruder’s eyes were closed, his body still, not breathing. But the driver lay twitching on the tarmac, his eyes wide, staring at Jude. He coughed weakly, and blood gurgled from his mouth.

On the road between the two men lay a small mobile phone. Its screen suddenly winked into life, a simple beep announcing an incoming text message.

“Please…” the Provider croaked. He coughed again, sending his body into a spasm, and specks of blood flying from his mouth. “…the phone.”

The poor bastard was obviously dying. Whoever he was, whatever his agenda, he was an enemy of the freaks that had taken Rebecca. Jude stooped and picked up the mobile. It felt warm in his hand.

The Provider eyed the phone hungrily. Jude held out the mobile, but as the Provider reached for it, his tattooed face contorted with pain, his body spasmed, and his flailing arm knocked the phone away, sending it skittering along the tarmac. After another racking, blood-foaming cough, he lay quiet and still.

The chilled rain pelted at the dead flesh of two men. At least one of them had been involved in attacking and abducting Rebecca.

Jude had no answers. A dark sense of inevitability settled over him like a shroud. For the last five years, he’d felt as though he were living on borrowed time; as though he ought to be dead. He deserved to be dead, for the thing he had done. It was as though the only thing keeping him alive had been Rebecca. Somehow, her will to live had erased – no not erased; just hidden, temporarily masked – Jude’s own guilt and shame. Now the full weight of it, and the despair of having to live without Rebecca, threatened to crush him.

They had first met a little over five years ago, in the foyer of the Genito-Urinary clinic at the hospital.

Jude had been on autopilot. Aware that he deserved to be dead, he’d simply been going through the motions of life. Existing. And yet, the slender, skin-headed girl with the sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, and pinpricks where heavy jewellery had once pierced her flesh, had somehow captivated him. Her arms bore the telltale marks of a long-term injecting addict, along with tattoos of obscure design. Although skinny and frail, it was obvious to Jude that she’d recently kicked the habit. Recovering addict, he’d told himself. Probably at the clinic to see if years of shared needles had left her HIV positive.

Jude had been visiting the clinic for a different reason. He was actually hoping, praying, that he’d caught something life-threatening. Something like AIDS, or maybe syphilis, that if left untreated would make him suffer and die in agony. It was all he deserved, after the incident.

Incident? Yeah, that’s a nice, clean word for it. Call it what it is, soldier. Call it rape. Call it being the ringleader in a gang rape, you bastard. It had happened… no; he had done it, six months earlier, and still he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror.

His tests had been negative. God wouldn’t even acknowledge him with a terminal STD.

Outside the clinic, he’d seen the slender, skin-headed girl again. She was crouching in the street, doubled up, crying and shaking, as civilians marched past her, tutting in disgust.

Jude had lightly touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?” Stupid question. Of course she’s not okay. You saw her arms. She’s positive. Why not me?

She turned to him, and laughed through her uncontrolled tears. “Yes, I’m okay.” She sniffled. “I really am! All clear. I thought I had…. you know.” She managed to stand now, and faced him. “And I realised, I don’t want to die.”

Basking in the hope that shone from her eyes, Jude found himself smiling.

“You’re smile is upside down,” she said.

Instantly, Jude felt his hands go to cover the scar across his face.

“Don’t,” the girl said, gently. “The corners of your mouth turn down. It’s sad, but it’s cute.”

And I realised, I don’t want to die.

Now, Jude felt as if his life was about to finally end, right here, right now, on a filthy back street with no one to see or care.

It should have been me. Not Rebecca: me.

In the road, the mobile phone flickered, and beeped once more. The glowing screen seemed almost to beckon Jude. The panic that throbbed at the back of his mind; the knowledge that his life had just disintegrated, that his wife was missing, abducted, as good as dead, that he didn’t know what was happening, or what he was going to do – all this seemed to suddenly recede as a chilling conviction closed around his mind: The discarded mobile phone had a message for him. Not for the murderous Son of the Jew, not for the Provider, but for Jude.

He picked up the phone. On the screen, without any prompt to open the message, a single sentence of text glowed:

I know where your wife is.

II

The text glowed on the mobile’s screen, and below it winked an icon marked reply.

Jude pounded the button, and stabbed the keys, forming the word WHERE? Gasping for breath, he stared at the handset.

A second later, the reply beeped in: Calm down, big fella. It’s all cool, dig? Take the car. I’ll keep feeding you directions, so just follow my lead, buddy. Oh, and there’s a little gift for ya under the seat. You’ll need it. Now, take it easy. Go get her.

Jude snatched open the driver’s door and reached under the seat. He found a cold hard object, secured with tape. Tearing it free, he revealed a handgun. He wasn’t an expert on firearms, not even interested any more, but he recognised this as a .357 Colt Python. Checking, he found a full magazine; six shots.

He cleared the remaining fragments of windscreen glass with the barrel, and then stuffed the gun inside his jacket, leaving the mobile on the passenger seat, where he could see it.

Another beep announced a text message: Okay, bro, take the bridge over the river. Turn right at the first lights. Take the first left off the main road, and head toward the Blackstones. Jude knew the Blackstones; a sprawling council tenement that most people considered a no-go area. Whenever the police went in there, which was regularly, they did so in force. If you wanted to buy drugs or worse, that was the place to go.

An idea came to Jude. Selecting the text message he had just read, he hit the Options button. From this menu, he selected Call Sender. He waited for a ring, but nothing came, just silence. After a couple of seconds, he realised the silence wasn’t complete. Very faintly came a sound like many voices, wailing and screaming. He snatched the handset away from his ear, but then realised it had just been interference on the empty line, or maybe just the sound of the wind changed by having something close to his ear, like listening the ocean inside a seashell.

Another text message beeped in: Just follow the goddam directions! You want to see the wife again or not?

Jude sat behind the wheel of the Toyota. The keys were in. The engine started at the second attempt. Navigating by the light of the one working headlamp, he set off.

The wind hurled rain at the car, slicing through the empty windscreen into Jude’s face and eyes, drumming the roof insistently. The bleak weather had frightened off most drivers, leaving the streets deserted. He passed the dim lights of the Ferryman Inn at the bridge over the river Shail, took the turns as directed, and descended the mazy backstreets toward the Blackstones.

The mobile beeped, and Jude checked the message: Nearly there, pal o’ mine. Stop at the sign for Gehenna.

Hands gripping the steering wheel so hard it was a wonder it didn’t snap, Jude bit back his rage, even though the mocking tone of the text messages goaded him.

How does he even know where I am? Jude glanced warily at the phone, then fixed his eyes ahead once more.

The colossal structure of the Blackstones tenement reared up over the river. Seemingly a thousand floors high and zigzagging for miles along the Shail, the apartment blocks were connected by ugly concrete stairwells, bridges, and utility wings, enclosing countless courtyards, identical in shape and grimness. Insipid lights from thousands of tiny windows shaped the grotesquery against the night sky. In daytime, it blotted out sunlight as pitilessly as it sucked the life from its inmates.

Years ago, the council had announced that they’d pull down the complex – once hailed as the housing of the future - and rebuild family homes with gardens, a communal green, a church, library and school. But somehow the Blackstones still stood; a war zone for the yardie crack dealers and Kosovan knife-gangs. Hopeless drug-leeched kids roamed the estate hunting for anyone and anything on which to vent the fury that scalded them between occasional soul-numbing fixes of crack, or pills, or whatever they could get.

Somehow residents still survived here, boarding themselves into cramped, rot-and-roach-infested apartments, only daring to go out in daylight, spending their nights praying for the walls to finally crumble and end their misery.

In the shadow of the Blackstones, Jude pulled the car to a sudden stop, and switched off the engine.

The courtyards scattered along the ground floor of the complex had once been filled with all kinds of retail outlets and cafes, shrubberies, and benches where residents could step outside for lunch.

Now, most of the shops were derelict and boarded up. The shrubberies were full of old cider bottles and discarded hypos. The benches were smashed, and graffiti tags covered the walls.

The only lights at ground level came from the steel-shuttered windows of an off-licence. Six or seven teenagers lurked under its canopy, drinking from two-litre bottles, passing around a pack of pills, and spitting at a scruffy, half-wit old tramp who slumped on the concrete, holding a sign with words scrawled in black marker:

Welcome to Gehenna

Please Give Generously

The rain stopped as the wind scrubbed away the clouds, and the moon gazed down.

Jude glanced at the mobile on the seat next to him. Did he really expect to find Rebecca here? Panic threatened to take him again, but he forced it away. For now he had to be a good soldier. Just concentrate on seeing this through. Either he’d find Rebecca, or he’d find something...

As if in response, the mobile beeped; words simultaneously appearing on the screen: Hold on a sec, you ornery ol’ sonofagun. Be patient.

Jude typed a reply: How do you know where I am? He examined the handset from all angles, looking for perhaps a camera. Then he realised his location had probably been nailed by a GPS tracker. But that didn’t explain the way the texter seemed to know what was going on, or how the replies came back so quickly.

Another beep, another message: Not important.

Maybe it had nothing to do with technology after all. Maybe it had more to do with the same powers behind the way the Son of the Jew had escaped from Jude’s apartment, had blown the gate away, and stopped a speeding Toyota in its tracks. Psycho-sorcery Rebecca had called it. Psionic talents enhanced through the injection of exotic substances, and dressed up like magic. The Sons of the Jew claimed to be masters of it.

Outside, the drunken, pill-popping youths tormented the tramp. Then another figure emerged from the shadows. Edging closer to the youths, the figure, a shaven-headed, tattooed, Son of the Jew held a gun of his own, levelling it at them with calm authority. He shouted to the gang, smiled at their verbal abuse, then ordered them away.

Reluctantly, almost as though they wanted him to open fire, if only to add some context to their existence, they eventually backed away, vanishing into the labyrinth of the Blackstones.

Stooping next to the tramp, the Son of the Jew helped the disoriented and mumbling old vagrant to his feet. Together, they headed into the darkness under a concrete archway, the tramp’s babbling, incoherent voice slowly fading.

The mobile beeped: Okey-dokey, skipper. Follow them suckers.

Stuffing the phone into his back pocket, Jude took out the handgun, and sprinted to the archway. The tramp’s sign now lay discarded on the pavement. Eventually, the youths would have become bored with teasing and tormenting him, and would have probably kicked him to death, just for something to do.

Jude knew all about that kind of mentality. If he closed his eyes, he could still remember waking up covered in blood; his own and that of the men he’d beaten almost to death. But mainly the blood of the girl.

Her face; swollen, covered in cuts and bruises, one lip completely split open. But he’d had no intention of kissing that mutilated mouth. She was just a body. The adrenalin surge of winning the brawl, the dizzy rush of too much alcohol, the high of a mixture of pills in his system; the whole cocktail stripping away his conscience. He’d been high, yes. Absolutely smashed. But somewhere deep down inside, it had been a clear and sober voice that had growled: We’ve won. I’ve won. I’ve won her, and I’m going to have her.

It hadn’t been sex; it had been a rite of victory. She wasn’t a woman, wasn’t even a person. She was just a body, and she was his.

Even as badly beaten as she’d been, she’d tried to struggle from under him, but he’d punched the resistance out of her even as he’d penetrated her. And afterward, he’d laughed as the rest of the boys had taken their turns with her.

The next morning, as the memories had relentlessly dropped from the hung-over murk into digitally enhanced, widescreen, right-there-in-his-conscience reality, he’d looked into his mirror and screamed.

Now, a gun-wielding freak had just rescued some nameless vagrant from being kicked to death in the street. Why?

Reaching the other side of the archway, Jude entered another courtyard, bounded by soaring black-and-grey streaked walls chequered with windows to innumerable apartments on every side; the star-flecked sky a small and distant patch above.

Across the courtyard, warm lights flickered from what had once been a butcher’s shop, nestled between other, darkened and abandoned retail units. Jude saw the Son of the Jew take the tramp into the old butcher’s shop.

Jamming the Colt Python back into his jacket, Jude ran across the courtyard, trying to convince himself that he was getting closer to Rebecca. That she was going to be okay. The text message had said, I know where your wife is.

Is, not was.

It was frail hope, but he clung to it.

Sidling up to the butcher’s shop, edging close to the shopfront window, Jude glanced inside. He saw a gathering of social delinquents; the lucky ones on chairs, others slumped on upturned crates, all the seats lined up like pews. They faced an old TV set that blared in one corner. A humming, flickering fluorescent tube barely lit the room.

Three shaven, tattooed Sons of the Jew served coffee in chipped mugs, and make-do food on cracked plates. The outcasts sipped and slurped and chewed, with no light of hope, or gratitude, or even of sentience, in their eyes. Feeding, they existed.

Jude stepped back from the window into shadow, took out the phone, and typed: A soup kitchen?

The phone vibrated without beeping as a reply arrived: Hold the indignation, big fella! You never heard of a front? These guys just want bodies. Warm, yummy, blood-filled bodies. You know... like your wife’s.

III

Jude’s legs moved, his stride lengthening. His heart mechanically thumped gushes of blood through his veins, expanding muscles. Every step took him further away from his will, from his awareness; adrenalin directed his every move, now. A marionette, his puppeteer was rage.

Inside the soup kitchen, many pairs of dull eyes in grey faces remained semi-focused on the TV screen. But behind the counter, at the back of the room, a skinny bald freak, with a face full of metal and a gallery of twisted tattoos for skin, glanced up. Panic pursued the recognition in his eyes.

Jude levelled the Colt Python at him. “Don’t move.”

The psycho-sorcerer raised a hand, fingers curled in arcane gesticulation as the words of an incantation formed on his lips.

A squeeze of the trigger; recoil shuddering Jude’s shoulder. A burst of blood from the freak’s chest.

Not good enough, soldier. Jude squeezed the trigger again, and half the psycho-sorcerer’s skull blew away. He dropped, knees first, and tilted limply, the remains of his head hitting the floor with a wet thump.

The faces of the hopeless patrons now turned to Jude. In slow motion, their mouths gaped, and their eyes registered fear.

“Get out,” Jude yelled at them. “Go on! It’s not safe here!”

Chairs and boxes creaked across the floor, as the losers shuffled for the door, grasping for the sense of self-preservation buried deep in their hopelessness.

A door behind the counter opened, and out stepped the Son of the Jew that had rescued the tramp. His eyes met Jude’s, then dropped to the Colt Python. He ducked behind the door once more, slamming it as Jude launched two more bullets that punched a gaping hole through the wood.

“Jude!” A voice behind him.

Turning, he saw another psycho-sorcerer facing him from the corner of the room.

“Where is she?” He took aim once more.

This psycho-sorcerer looked a little different than most in their sick little cult; tall, lean, athletic, with a confident bearing and a look on his face that seemed unfazed by having a gun pointed at it. Jude wouldn’t have been surprised if this one had a military background himself.

“Don’t be fool, Jude.” The psycho-sorcerer held out his hand. “Give me the gun, and let me explain.” He smiled.

The voice seemed to carry the ring of honesty; the smile that accompanied it charmed and disarmed. Relaxing, returning the smile, Jude lowered the gun. But above the psycho-sorcerer’s smile, his forehead creased under beads of sweat. And he held his other hand down by his side, subtly gesticulating...

The awareness clarified Jude’s senses. Now he could feel the insistent tugging in his mind; the probing of the psycho-sorcerer’s will.

Gritting his teeth, Jude raised the gun once more, his arm heavy, his movements sluggish. “Stop it. I’m warning you.”

Still smiling, the other replied: “Give me the gun, Jude.”

Jude gave him a bullet in the forehead, and left him twitching on the floor.

The other psycho-sorcerer, who’d fled through the door behind the counter, now burst back through it, brandishing the handgun he’d previously wielded so confidently before the gang of youths. Now he stared Jude in the eyes. He was maybe fifty years old, his face heavily lined, but he looked strong, quick and confident. “Drop it, Jude.”

“I can’t do that.” Jude tightened his grip. “Where’s my wife?”

“Carry on like this, and you’ll never know.”

“Screw you.” Jude aimed.

A burst of fire from the psycho-sorcerer’s gun, and a thud in Jude’s chest, like a slap from a giant. Jude felt himself raised by the impact and thrown across the room and into the wall, before he hit the floor. The force of the shot seemed to continue; expanding in all directions, and then imploded, shattering the enormous shopfront window as it sucked the glass inward, and bursting the fluorescent light overhead.

I’m not dead. Whatever had hit him, it wasn’t a bullet: There was no gaping hole in his chest, no loss of blood, but it felt like ribs had broken, and he could only force breath into his lungs via agonising wheezes.

The only light now was the silvered glow from the moon outside. The psycho-sorcerer edged closer; just a vague silhouette in the semi-darkness. “You still alive?”

Jude had kept his grip on the Colt Python. One bullet left. He forced the barrel up, and squeezed the trigger. A yell and a clatter as the psycho-sorcerer reeled into the wall.

“Yeah,” Jude snapped. “Are you?”

In reply, a groan, followed by: “You’re a loose cannon, Jude. Too dangerous to have around. I told Rebecca that.” He staggered closer, into a shaft of moonlight. Obviously hurt, he stooped, gripping his bullet-shattered left knee with one hand. With the other, he aimed the gun.

Jude tried to summon the strength to move, but his body didn’t want to respond.

The gun in the hand of the psycho-sorcerer seemed to somehow waver. It almost faded from view, like a desert mirage. The object twisted and writhed, elongating and wriggling like a living tentacle. Glowing faintly, the tentacle solidified, somehow condensed, flattened, and finally settled into some kind of sword. Vaguely oriental looking, glimmering in the moonlight, the single-edged blade curved, and broadened toward the point, like a scimitar. An intricate design engraved on it showed a coiling serpent.

Raising the blade high, ready to bring it down on Jude, the psycho-sorcerer said, “If Rebecca was here, she’d know this was the right thing to do.”

Jude focused all his will on one move. Ignoring the pain from his shattered ribs and bruised spine, he kicked out at the psycho-sorcerer’s knee, felt a satisfying crunch, and watched him crumble, screaming in agony. The scimitar fell at his side.

Jude drew a splintering breath, and struggled to his feet.

The psycho-sorcerer’s eyes were wide and terrified.

“Tell me where she is, and you live,” Jude said.

The psycho-sorcerer coughed, shivered. He clutched at his shattered knee, failing to stop the blood that pumped from the wound there. With his eyes fixed on Jude, he opened his mouth to speak. The word that came out wasn’t English; just an unintelligible chant.

“Shit.” Jude snatched up the scimitar, pulled it back, and slashed.

The edge of the blade shimmered. Jude’s aim was true, the force enough to decapitate. But something in the psycho-sorcerer’s eyes, something in the pleading squeal of his voice, made Jude think again.

He tried to pull the blow, but the blade seemed to have a will of its own, and threw itself into the cut opening the poor bastard’s carotid with a clean slit. Crimson blood ejected from the wound.

Jude dropped the sword, and the phone in his back pocket beeped loudly.

“Not now!”

Gagging, wheezing, the psycho-sorcerer jerked his hand to the gash on his neck, despair etching his face.

The phone beeped again.

“Only… only trying to stop the blood…” the Son of the Jew gasped.

“Where is my wife?” Jude demanded, kneeling next to him, grabbing him around the shoulders to stop him tipping over.

Blood spurted between the psycho-sorcerer’s clamping fingers. “Here,” he gurgled. “You… got it wrong.”

Fury fading, replaced once more by the familiar shroud of inevitability, Jude pressed, “Got what wrong?”

Trembling, as his life gushed from him, the Son of the Jew stammered, “It takes blood…. and souls. We were trying to… bring her… back.”

Trying to bring her back.

“Is she dead?”

“Only… her body.”

“What? Where is she?”

The psycho-sorcerer coughed, choking on his own blood. “Lot…” he whispered. Then he shuddered, and died.

Lot. The name was familiar to Jude. Rebecca had sometimes talked about him like an old friend. Other times, she’d seemed as terrified of him as of the Providers. He was some kind of elder among the Sons of the Jew. A leader.

Trying to bring her back. Was it true? The doubt - the feeling that he might have just completely messed up once again, that he just didn’t know right from wrong, and kept rolling on from one crisis to another - rained despair on him. Rebecca was his anchor; his ball and chain. Without her he was just a waste of space. Not fit to live. A loose fucking cannon.

Only her body, the psycho-sorcerer had said. Meaning what? That her soul still lived, and that with their psycho-sorcery, they could somehow bring her back?

Only her body.

Nausea squirmed inside Jude. He was standing in an old butcher’s shop.

Only her body.

With no strength left to hold the Son of the Jew up, Jude let him slip over, limbs flopping in his own still-warm blood on the floor.

Once again, the phone vibrated and beeped furiously in Jude’s pocket. He pulled it out, already forming the hope that the mystery man sending the messages would tell him how: How to return Rebecca’s soul. How to get her back.

In his hand, the phone suddenly sizzled, sending a juddering electric shock through his body. Cursing, he dropped the handset.

The mobile landed in a spreading pool of the psycho-sorcerer’s blood. Immediately it sparked and glowed, continuing to sizzle as it soaked up the blood. The gory pool diminished as it was drawn into the handset, and consumed.

Now, the phone – or whatever the hell it really was - drew more blood from the body. The corpse shrank in on itself, drying up, shrivelling like a stop-motion film of a dead animal decaying.

On the phone’s display screen, a word appeared: Delicious! The handset pulsed and shuddered, its casing taking on an organic cast, smoke rising from its surface as it fed.

The text display changed: Too late for his soul, though. Shame.

The phone; the thing, lived.

Involuntarily, Jude backed away. Glass from the shattered window crunched under his heels. Eyes fixed on the smoking, sizzling, crackling thing on the floor, he backed until he could go no further.

Cold steel pressed against his shoulder blades. Jumping, panicked, he turned and saw he had reversed into the handle of a slider door, marked:

Fresh Meat Only

Keep Door Closed

With sudden, sick certainty, Jude pulled the door along its runner. He flicked a switch, and strip lighting crackled into life. He stepped through, pushing aside the plastic insulation curtain, and braced himself for the chilling cold of the refrigerator. But it was warm, and there was no rush and whirr of fans.

Three aisles of moveable steel racking stood empty. Old, dry stains marked the floor. At the far side of the chiller, the strip lighting cast vague hanging shadows on the wall. Something, or some things, hung from the ceiling behind the farthest run of racking.

Walking slowly, not wanting to acknowledge the idea that loomed in the back of his mind, Jude passed peeling notices that warned him to KEEP DOOR CLOSED, to MAINTAIN THE COLD CHAIN, and to KEEP FRESH MEAT SAFE. A stench like stale vomit filled the air.

Jude turned down the last aisle.

Human bodies hung like sides of beef, suspended from ceiling hooks. Corpses, one after the other; shrivelled, like the psycho-sorcerer outside. Hollow-eyed, sunken-cheeked; each mouth a wrinkled, pursed gash in a grey, desiccated face.

Then he saw her. Stripped naked, head lolling, arms hanging limp, dried fingers curled into knotted, bony little fists. Rebecca’s mummified corpse hung from a hook, just a body among many others.

Lips that had once warmly kissed him now peeled back from protruding teeth. Fingers that had once softly traced the contours of his body now grabbed lifelessly at nothing; gnarled, twisted, lifeless.

She wasn’t even Rebecca anymore. She was… just a body.

Failing to stop the moan that built to a scream inside him, Jude let it rip, and stormed to the door. When the scream had died, he realised he was talking out loud to himself: “It’s not her. It’s just a body, that’s all. Not really her. They can fetch her back. They can fetch her back.”

He marched to the phone-thing. A message glowed on its screen:

Who can fetch her back, Jude, ol’ chum? You’ve gone and killed ‘em all.

IV

The shimmering screen of the phone seemed to mock him, as the handset sizzled and smoked in the clot of congealed blood.

Swallowing the urge to vomit, Jude pulled the handset from the gory mess. Hands shaking, slowly realizing the depths of the evil he now confronted, he tapped into the keypad: Who are you?

A brief flicker of the screen, then the reply appeared:

Hey, fella. You don’t need to know that. Be cool.

But he did want to know. He needed to know, because now he believed that although the body of his wife hung from a meat hook, the corpse was not all of her. Rebecca, the real Rebecca, was more than just an accumulation of flesh, blood and bone; more vital than a mass of cells.

His Rebecca was somewhere else; not simply dead on a hook.

He typed once more into the keypad, fingertips jabbing angrily; the interface converting his rage into capitals: WHO ARE YOU?

The thing replied: What? You want a name? What good is that? All you need to know is, I’m the original, the first, the real deal.

Cold sweat beaded the back of Jude’s neck. His fingers moved across the keys: Are you the devil?

Now the thing laughed; the interface translating the dark humour into a text smiley: J You mean Lucifer? Beelzebub? Try again, true believer. That guy’s just a myth. As in not real. But you’re on the right lines.

Every heartbeat, every pulse, boomed slow and heavy inside Jude. More aware than ever of the hot blood that pumped through his body, he felt like walking meat, like prey. On the right lines. Jude typed again: Are you Legion?

A pause as the screen rippled and surged, then the reply: That loud-mouthed attention seeker? Oh please. I said I was the first.

Then who? Jude demanded. THE FIRST WHAT?

The reply appeared a letter at a time, as though the thing enjoyed its revelation: Oh, come on! Cue eerie music… the first serpent to suckle blood from the breast of Eve.

Instinctively, Jude entered the word: Liar.

You calling me a liar, bitch? You asked the question, and now you can’t handle the truth? Which lies would you prefer? Fairy stories about Eden, and trees of knowledge, and forbidden apples? Get real! It ain’t never been about knowledge. It ain’t never been about sin, or all that crap about God and morality. It’s about blood.

A new thought entered Jude’s mind. This thing, for all its vileness, was reduced to conversing, to swapping text message arguments. Why? Whatever the reason, it seemed to Jude like a vulnerability.

He typed again: What would happen if I put you on the ground and stamped you into pieces, and threw the bits into an incinerator?

A long pause. The screen seemed to lose some of its brightness before the reply finally emerged: That’s kinda violent, dude. That could finish off a guy in this… embarrassing predicament. I mean, I wasn’t always a telephone, y’know?

More lies? More attempts at manipulation? Jude typed: What’s stopping me?

The reply was instantaneous: JFinishing me off now won’t get your wife back, will it?

Once again, Jude felt that dark shroud over him, heavy and stifling. He typed: You can bring her back?

J

Why would you do that? What do you want in return?

Now we’re talkin! As you can guess, I’m a bit limited due to being trapped in this ridiculous shape. But here’s the kicker: I can bring back the little woman for ya… IF I’m put back into my previous body. Understand?

Jude’s flesh crawled. “How do I do it?”

One of two ways. First, if you could erase a certain little sonofabitch called Lot, and let me have lunch with his carotid, then all’s well. Problem is, Lot’s pulled a Houdini.

“What’s the other way?”

Don’t waste our time, Jude. You know how. It’s all about the blood.

“Whose blood?”

I don’t care! If it’s not Lot’s blood, then it’s got to be A LOT of blood, if you catch my drift. Lots and lots and lots. As long as they bleed knowing what’s happening. As long as their blood roars with those… yummy… fear hormones!

“Say I agree. Say I feed you and restore you. How do I know you won’t double-cross me?”

Jude, Jude, Jude. There are ways, ol’ fella. J Ways of… sealing the deal. I’m sure, by now, you know what I mean.

Feeling more than ever like prey, still Jude sensed faint hope. If this thing needed a deal to guarantee its survival, then it really was vulnerable. It didn’t even qualify as a demon, not in the religious sense. It was just a creature; a serpent.

Icy cold from skin to marrow, Jude knew his decision was already made. He turned, gazing at the wreckage of the room, and selected a shard of glass from the shattered fragments of the window. He placed the mobile handset on the windowsill, in a pool of moonlight. Angling the keenest edge of the shard against his wrist, Jude clenched his teeth, and opened up a vein.

A scarlet crack opened along his skin, tracing the slash of the glass. A thick, lazy glob of blood ran across his wrist, and dripped onto the mobile.

The handset immediately hissed and sizzled, the screen shimmering in iridescent waves, vile steam rising from its ports and vents.

And then for a heartbeat, through a single, sticky strand of blood, Jude and the thing connected.

The serpent, wriggles its way through space and time to our world. Alien, ageless, in reality even shapeless; its form is imposed upon it by the limited perceptions of Cro-Magnon man.

Mind in sync with the creature, Jude feels everything it has ever felt; knows all it has ever known. It arrives on Earth enjoys its new shape, its new home. These physical beings are merely bags of blood; delicious, tasty blood, surging with hormones and endorphins. The thing experiments with terror, and finds it enjoys the taste of the blood most this way. But now Jude knows the creature lied: It isn’t just about the blood. The blood is only half of it.

Human beings have souls.

It devours the souls as hungrily as the blood. But whereas the blood is merely food, consumed, digested… the souls are immortal. The souls reside with the serpent, and the spiritual torture it inflicts on them is… amusement to it.

Through thousands of years it terrorises the planet. It learns how to inhabit the bodies of its victims, albeit temporarily, for its power soon corrupts the flesh. It enjoys the ironic joke of taking the form of man to feed upon man.

It acquires its own cult of followers. The Providers hunt for it, helping the creature maintain a low profile as humankind enters the industrial age, developing powerful weapons.

Now, the creature wages a guerrilla war on humanity. In an era of guns and bombs and computers, who would believe in the existence of the vampire?

And the Sons of the Jew - not followers of that charlatan from Nazareth, but descendants of the one who mocked His crucifixion - pursue redemption by devoting their existence to wiping out the creature.

They get close; too close, and in a bloody confrontation, one of the psycho-sorcerers, although injured, gets lucky. A well-planned incantation, and the creature is cast out of the body it inhabited. In its ethereal form, and weakened from prolonged psychic bombardment, it flees into the nearest receptacle: the injured psycho-sorcerer’s mobile phone.

A psychic brawl between the Providers and the Sons of the Jew follows. The Providers escape with the serpent in its new form, returning to their inner-city headquarters.

Jude knows this building. He now knows where the Providers live.

They regroup. The force which keeps the creature imprisoned in the handset can only be countered if the psycho-sorcerer responsible – the man known as Lot - can be found. But he has gone into hiding. The Providers capture and torture several of the Sons of the Jew, but none of them know where Lot is.

The Providers have only one clue. Lot was once in love with a woman named Rebecca Lawson…

Jude snapped open his eyes. His blood splattered and dribbled over the mobile phone, maintaining the connection. He jerked away, breaking the signal.

I killed the wrong ones. The Sons of the Jew… they were the good guys. Not even angry anymore, Jude felt only darkness and numbness inside, simply not fit to live; too flawed, too dangerous.

MORE!! MORE!! the screen on the handset demanded.

Jude held back his bloodied wrist. “That’s all you get from me. Ever. Now the deal is sealed.”

A pause, then slowly, truculently, the words appeared on the screen: It is sealed.

The deal might cost him his own soul, but he deserved nothing else. It was an acceptable trade-off; a fitting punishment for his sins. It was worth snuffing out his own life, worth losing his immortal soul, just to know the vitality and will-to-live that characterised Rebecca would get a second chance.

Jude picked up the scimitar once more. Warm in his hand, the blade shimmered, dissolved, and reformed into the general shape of a handgun, although no model Jude had ever seen before.

Some kind of Psionic stun-gun, he thought. But that’s going to be no good for the work I’ve got to do. He concentrated, focusing his will at the weapon. Once more it shimmered, elongating like a tentacle, or like a serpent, and then reformed into the scimitar shape. The phone-thing said he was the first, but how many others are there? What are they like? The sword, warm in his hand, felt like a predator, waiting to be unleashed.

An insistent beep drew his attention to the mobile. The screen pulsed with the message: Where do we start, partner? Who am I gonna feed on first?

Silent, Jude paused, and took grim satisfaction in slowly typing his reply: Your Providers, you scum.

Ignoring the phone’s furious beeping and vibrating, Jude jammed the handset into his back pocket, and headed for the door.