Prologue
Itwashisthird murder that week.
His fiftieth in total, over the course of years. This one was special, something he would celebrate later.
The woman's body lay torn open in the dingy alley, her heels askew, her lipstick smudged, her eyes vacant.
He loved that look in their eyes, the unseeing gaze up at an open sky they would never fly in because he was their god in their last moments. They called him the Fortis Finisher. He preferred Lord of Death but nobody really called him that. They would someday when all the murders got connected to him and the corrupt cops stopped sleeping.
Smoke seeped out from the crack between the buildings in tendrils, a light bulb flickered somewhere, and the butcher? He wiped his knife on a torn part of her skirt, the blood soaking into the white fabric as a souvenir he would stash with the rest of them. He was still high on the kill, on the chase, on her desecrated body nude to the elements. The incoming rain would wash away all evidence, the cops would never give a shit about another whore gone missing, and the one man who owned the city would go down for it framed for the crimes.
And the butcher, he would then be the entire city's god.
It was the perfect plan.
A movement in the shadows at the end of the street had him stilling. He squinted, trying to see what had shifted the thick air, and saw a silhouette leaning against the wall. The same silhouette he had been seeing at every kill for the last two weeks.
A sound pierced the silence. A lighter flicked open. A flame, barely showing a hand, before being extinguished.
The same.
Fear was not an emotion he was familiar with, but watching the silhouette in the dark, uncaring, unmoving, observing him, stalking him for two weeks, a frisson went down his spine.
No, it couldn't be the myth.
He said that to himself every time. A myth to many, a truth to some who never lived to tell the tale, the name everyone deep in the underworld knew to be wary of. Was that him? No, no way. The man wasn't real. It was possibly just a homeless guy who had seen everything and was scared to come out, or maybe even an undercover cop. Nothing else.
"Get lost before I cut you open," the butcher called out, glad his voice didn't have the tremor he felt.
No sound. No movement. Nothing but eyes watching him quietly.
It scared him, emasculated him, and he didn't like that. He, who had terrorized and killed over fifty women, felt fear watching a silhouette in the shadows, because of a fucking underworld myth.
Sirens sounded somewhere in the city far away at this time of the night. A nightclub down the block pounded its music as its door opened and closed.
And he just heard his own breathing, angry at being afraid, angry at feeling hunted.
He took a step back.
The silhouette didn't move, just kept watching him.
Just a scared homeless guy, that was all.
He pocketed his knife and backed out of the alley, slowly checking to see no one else saw him, and began to sprint away from the crime scene. But just before he turned off the block, paranoid, he looked back at the mouth of the alley like he did every time.
And like each time, a man in dark clothes stood in the shadows, leaning against the wall, playing with a lighter, and watching him run like a coward into the night.
The Shadow Man, a bigger monster than he, was real.