The Forsaken
Shit guys, I can never focus on one thing for more than like ten minutes, I swear...

In honor of which, here's the beginning of ANOTHER new story!



MONDAY.


There was a wall, with a window.

There was a fan spinning on the ceiling.

There was a body on the floor.

Aside from the pool of blood surrounding it, there was nothing else in the room. Morgan checked the notecard again, just in case. Room 231. She backed slowly out into the hallway and checked the number by the door.

231.

Shit.

Maybe this was some kind of joke? Maybe she could call HQ and--

The body moved.

It wasn’t much, just a tiny twitch of the right hand, but for somebody as very definitively dead as this guy, who was lying face down in what must be about two-thirds of the blood in his body, it was still pretty shocking.

Okay, Morgan, get your shit together. Here we go.

Morgan approached the body very slowly, watching for any sign of movement.

Not a thing. Could she have imagined it? No. No. She definitely saw that body move.

She nudged it with her foot, reluctant to step any closer. The thick copper smell was overwhelming.

Ugh. She knew what she had to do, of course, but still. She had just bought these shoes, not that HQ would care about that.

Deep breath.

Her foot slid a little in the blood on the floor, but she managed to kick the body over onto its side, and then, with a heavy thud, to its back.

“Oh, fuck me.”

She had heard of them, of course, in legends and in kids’ tales, and when she joined the Company they said she could find pictures in the backlog files, but this….

The man, whoever he had been, was a suicide—it was clear from the knife in his hand, the weakening pattern of slashes down his chest and stomach—but Morgan almost didn’t see it at first.

She was too busy staring at the empty space where his eyes and nose used to be, a blank fleshy expanse over a gaping mouth loaded with rows and rows of jagged pointy teeth, like a shark. The mouth stared up at her, open like a wound. Gruesome. Terrifying.

She imagined the man gnashing his jaws, fighting the teeth that kept growing in, more and more and more of them pushing up bloody through his gums.

She imagined him shouting, words butchered by piercing teeth and spewing spit until it was nothing but a long choking shriek.

She imagined his fingers scrabbling at his face, trying to pull back the skin as it grew up over itself, sealing his eyes shut and burying them, closing him away from everything. Imagined him pleading silently, please please please… and then the knife.

Morgan’s head was spinning. She was dizzy, feeling lost, feeling insane. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Could it be real? Maybe she should-- maybe--

She couldn’t think.

Who had he been? What had happened? What had he done?

Because he had done something. Something huge and awful, something unimaginable, worse than anything anyone had done since—when had they said the last case was? 1926? This man—whoever he was—had threatened the gods more than anyone else for nearly a century. She was sure of it now, there was no way anyone could imitate this.

The body in front of her belonged to a monster so horrible the gods couldn’t trust other humans with his punishment, not even the Company.

The body in front of her had been Forsaken.

And for whatever reason, she, Morgan Fenley, a 24-year old mid-level agent from fucking Farmville, had been sent to find him.

Well. Some seriously fucked-up shit was clearly about to go down, fucked-up on a cosmic level, and if Morgan was going to be a part of it, she would definitely need a cigarette.


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