• The night was cold, so cold most had decided to stay inside as the white flakes drifted towards the ground. A flake landed on her cheek, but she could not feel it. She hardly even felt the bone numbing cold around her. When she was on the hunt nothing could distract her. Her long black hair was whipped about her face by another blast of the frigid wind as she looked down the alley towards her destination.
    Just twenty minutes ago she had gotten an assignment from the company to round up a breach in security. That was her specialty. She handled the people who knew too much for their own good. Now she was in downtown Denton, peering into the dark space between two old shops in a rundown part of town and searching for a man who had discovered that there was more to his world than he had ever imagined. Ignorance is safety; that was the motto of the company.
    She began to walk carefully down the alley, making sure not to make a sound. The thin layer of snow and garbage helped to muffle the sound of her footsteps. After passing a dumpster with two rats scurrying along the bottom she saw her quarry. It was a large metal door in the side of the building on the left. She could tell that the man was beyond this door because there was no trash built up in the path of the door’s swing. A simple tracking technique she had learned in her beginner tracking course. This would be too easy.
    Slowly she crept towards the door, stopping in front of it to make sure nobody was watching before she gripped the rusting metal door handle and pulled. A wave of warmer air rushed out to meet her from the open frame. Carrying on it was the smell of rodent as well as a trace of human scent. Yes, this was definitely the correct place. She eased herself into the building with the door swinging gently behind her. She cushioned it as it hit the frame so that it closed silently, and began to creep forward once more.
    Turning around she examined the room. It was a large area that looked like it had been used for storage. It was divided into rows by shelves that contained everything from bags of flour to mixing equipment of every variety. There were even three large ovens at the far end of the room. She figured that this bakery had been abandoned when the gangs moved into town. Moving through the shelves she saw that they were all covered with dust. It was a good sign. With everything still covered that meant that nobody had been back there in a while. Her entry would go unnoticed.
    With the dust deadening her footsteps she crept over to the door that lead into the main shop and pressed her ear against it to make sure there wasn’t anyone on the other side. Confirming that there was nobody moving in the next room, she eased the door open and slipped through. On the other side she drew out a thin black cylinder roughly the size of an unopened umbrella and pushed a button on the side of it. The cylinder telescoped out until it reached about six feet in length. She tested that it was locked in place before proceeding to search the room. The front room of the bakery was exactly what she expected, small with a counter near the rear and stairs in the back corner. The wooden floors however had footprints on them. Someone was definitely there.
    After she had thoroughly searched the entire room she walked over to the stairs she had found during her search and began to climb. They were small and a little cramped, but after turning her staff so that it was pointing up she was able to negotiate the turn in them. She reached a landing with a door that was most likely used to keep customers out of the house when the bakery was functional, and pressed her ear to it. There was a small scuffling on the other side. Bingo. Now she only had to trap the rat and make it back to the complex in time to get back to school before lights out.
    She readied her staff and kicked the door in before rushing in to the room looking for the suspect. Not seeing anyone in the front room she began to make her way through the back ones. First she looked in the kitchen, the bathroom, and the smaller bedroom, finding only dust balls before she set her sites on the master bedroom. The excitement of a captured prey gave her a buzz while the adrenaline rushing through her veins kept her muscles tight with anticipation. It was always this part that she loved best, the time when the prey knows it has been caught by the predator and was now awaiting its death. It was such a sweet victory.
    Moving swiftly, she almost raced down the hallway and threw open the door before darting into the bedroom and looking around expectantly. Seeing no one she moved onto the closet in the back of the room with her head pounding with the rushing blood. She was greeted with a strange sight. There was nothing there. No cowering human or otherwise defenseless creature. She had just finished her search behind the clothes and was backing out of the closet when she heard the bedroom door slam behind her.
    She turned around quickly and saw something that made her stagger back with shock, her mind overloading. Never in all of her careful calculations had she expected this. There blocking her path out of this apartment was the one person who could always stop her in her tracks and make her do a double take. That, of course, was the reason she had gotten rid of him. Or at least, she thought she had. Before she knew what was happening a cloth was pressed into her face and she breathed in a scent she knew well…chloroform.
    Just before the darkness clouded her mind and overtook her, she was able to get one last look at him. She drifted away, letting the memory of his face pull her back to a better place. The place that had existed before she had become the monster she was today.