Blood Spears, Bulletproof Bone Queens, and a Cowboy Who Clearly Missed the "No Firearms" Sign (Seriously, What Is Happening?)
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Author Note: Well, folks, things have officially gone full-tilt bonkers. Magic, monsters, and a rootin' tootin' rescuer? Sawyer's definitely not getting overtime for this shift. Get ready for a wild ride as our unlikely trio tries to survive a hospital that's about to become a lot less… alive.
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"Sanguinem Vinculum!" she chanted, her voice rising into the air like a haunting melody soaked in blood. There was a strange cadence to the words—foreign, ancient, and deeply unsettling, as if they had been passed down through whispers in the dark rather than pages in books.
The atmosphere shifted instantly. The temperature dropped. The fluorescent lights above them flickered like frightened candle flames. Reality seemed to bend around her incantation. The air itself shimmered, like heat waves rippling over asphalt—but colder, more ominous. A strange pressure built in the hallway, pressing against Sawyer's eardrums and chest, as if the world itself was holding its breath.
Then it happened.
From the space around her—no, from her—a thick, viscous red liquid began to form in midair. It churned and twisted like a living thing, moving with intention. The fluid swirled unnaturally fast, coalescing into spear-like shapes. One became two, two became five—until over a dozen hovered in the air, their formation tight and precise, like soldiers awaiting the order to strike.
Each spear was around fourteen inches long, their surfaces semi-translucent and pulsing with a sinister crimson light. There was something profoundly wrong about them—not just dangerous, but sacredly violent, as if they'd been birthed from rituals never meant to be seen. The tips tapered into needle-fine points, and they vibrated with dark energy, as though hungry for flesh.
Sawyer stood frozen, every instinct in his body screaming at him to move, but terror had a paralyzing grip. He couldn't look away. All of the spears were aimed at him—every single one—and the sheer intention behind them made his blood run cold. It was like staring death in the eyes and realizing it had a name and a pulse.
The first spear moved.
It didn't fly—it launched, a crimson blur slicing through the air with impossible speed. It whistled like a bullet as it cut across the sterile white of the hospital walls, the contrast so violent it made the world feel surreal. His heart slammed against his ribs. He didn't think. He didn't pray. He just reacted.
He squeezed his eyes shut, muscles locking, breath trapped in his throat. Time slowed. He braced for the inevitable—impact, pain, the searing agony of death arriving not with mercy but rage. In that moment, he accepted it. He waited for his body to be torn apart.
"Duck!" a voice shouted.
It was sharp, commanding, and completely unfamiliar—cutting through the spell-drenched air like a bullet. It pierced through his fear, snapping his body into motion before his mind caught up.
Sawyer dropped. He collapsed into himself, instinct taking control. His knees hit the cold floor. His arms wrapped around his head. He curled tightly, like a child hiding from the world, the fetal position the only shield he had left.
A crack rang out—loud and violent—like a gunshot in a chapel. The noise jolted his bones. A moment later, he heard the metallic click of a weapon reloading. The sound echoed against the tiled walls like a challenge, deliberate and dangerous. It was the kind of sound that meant someone had just saved your life—or was about to end another's.
"Got y'all!" the voice rang out from behind him, slicing through the thick silence like a whip crack. It wasn't just a declaration—it was a jarring disruption, a triumphant exclamation that carried both bravado and a hint of reckless confidence.
Sawyer flinched at the sound, his nerves already stretched thin. His breath hitched, and it took a moment before his body began to obey his mind's command. Slowly, shakily, he pushed himself upright. His limbs felt like rubber, his hands trembling uncontrollably as if they still remembered the feeling of death approaching from every direction.
His eyes, wide with raw disbelief, darted toward the source of the voice. He turned—half-expecting another nightmare to appear—and froze when he saw the figure standing boldly in the middle of the hallway.
A man. Dressed in full cowboy attire.
Sawyer blinked several times, trying to reconcile what he was seeing. The man's outfit looked like something pulled straight out of a spaghetti western—weathered leather boots, a dusty brown duster coat, a black Stetson hat pulled low over his brow, and a shiny revolver still smoking in his gloved hand. His entire presence clashed violently with the clean, modern design of the hospital: white walls, flickering fluorescent lights, antiseptic smells—and now, a gunslinger standing amidst monsters and magic.
It was surreal.
Sawyer's mouth fell open, words caught between confusion and disbelief.
"What in the world is wrong with everybody today?" he muttered aloud, more to himself than to anyone else. His voice was hoarse, roughened by fear and exhaustion. There was a wild edge to it, like someone teetering on the edge of breaking. He glanced around—at the grotesque creatures still growling low in their throats, at the red-haired woman with eyes like frostbitten fire, and now, at this cowboy who had appeared like some absurd fantasy rescue character.
The absurdity of it all—the gothic terror of the undead, the magical assault, the bone queen, and now a literal cowboy with bullets made of God-knows-what—pushed against the edges of his mind like waves against a crumbling dam. It was too much. Too bizarre. Too real. It shouldn't have felt real.
And yet… it did.
The cowboy, however, looked as calm as a man reading a newspaper on a lazy Sunday. He showed no sign of fear. No confusion. No disbelief. Just grim, practiced focus. He raised his gun again with a casual flick of the wrist, leveled it at Melinda, and pulled the trigger with clinical precision.
The gunshot exploded in the hall like thunder in a cave.
The bullet found its mark.
Melinda's head jerked violently to the side as the round slammed into her face. A chunk of her cheek was ripped clean off, the torn skin and muscle exposing the pale bone underneath. The damage was grotesque—flesh hanging in tatters, blood splattering against the wall in a sickening arc—but what made it worse was her reaction.
She didn't scream. She didn't even flinch.
Her body recoiled from the impact, but her eyes remained locked on Sawyer, unwavering and disturbingly calm, as if pain was beneath her, as if she had lost the need for it centuries ago.
Sawyer's stomach turned. He felt bile rise in his throat and tasted copper in his mouth. The horror wasn't just in the wound—it was in her stillness, the way she wore her injury like it was a mere inconvenience rather than a mortal wound.
He took an instinctive step back. His breath came in shallow gasps, his mind trying and failing to anchor itself in any kind of logic.
Nothing made sense anymore. And the worst part?
A small, terrified voice in the back of his head whispered that this… was just the beginning.
She screamed—a piercing, high-pitched shriek that ripped through the hallway like shattered glass, slicing into Sawyer's ears and vibrating down to his bones. It wasn't just loud—it was violently loud, a raw sound of agony laced with fury, the kind of scream that made your instincts scream back in terror, that clawed at the primal parts of the brain and yelled: run.
Her head snapped in his direction with terrifying speed. Crimson eyes locked onto him, glowing like coals in a furnace, fueled by rage and something far more ancient—something deeply unnatural. For a moment, Sawyer couldn't move. He stood rooted to the spot, mesmerized and horrified all at once, caught in the magnetic pull of her wrath.
Then he saw her face—her actual face—begin to change.
The wound on her cheek, the one that had revealed bone just moments ago, was healing. Not slowly, not the way a wound should. The torn skin began to stitch itself back together, the muscles flexing and curling with eerie precision, and the shattered bone beneath reformed with a series of soft, grotesque cracks. It was as though time had rewound on just one part of her body.
Even as a medical student, someone who had dissected cadavers and witnessed emergency trauma surgeries up close, Sawyer found himself gagging. His stomach turned violently, his throat constricting as he fought the rising bile. This wasn't science. This was something else. Something his textbooks had never prepared him for. Regeneration at that level? It was obscene. Unnatural. Wrong.
A groan of revulsion slipped from his lips before he even realized it, half disgust, half panic. His legs finally responded, his survival instincts overriding shock. He scrambled to his feet, not bothering to look back at Melinda. He didn't need to see her glowing—he felt it. The heat. The fury. The tremble in the air as the energy around her crackled like electricity barely held in check.
Sawyer sprinted toward the cowboy, his feet pounding against the cold linoleum floor, each step frantic and desperate. He didn't know who the man was. Didn't know where he came from, or how he'd managed to shoot a walking nightmare in the face. But right now, familiarity meant nothing. Logic meant even less.
All he knew was that between a red-haired bone sorceress with eyes full of death and a cowboy with bullets that could blow holes in monsters, the cowboy suddenly seemed like the safest place in the room.
And that wasn't saying much.
He risked a glance back—just one.
She was glowing. Bright, blood-red veins of light surged beneath her skin like lava threatening to burst through the surface. Her face was twisted into a snarl, lips peeled back to reveal teeth clenched so hard they might shatter. She wasn't just angry.
She was about to explode.
"Yeah. Cowboy it is," Sawyer muttered breathlessly, trying to convince himself that this wasn't the worst day of his life.
But deep down, he knew the truth.
The worst hadn't even started yet.
"My beautiful face!" she shrieked, her voice no longer the sultry tone it once was, but a twisted, guttural roar that scraped the edges of human sound. It echoed down the long, sterile hallway, bouncing off the hospital walls with such ferocity it seemed to shake the very air. The rage in her cry wasn't just anger—it was personal, raw, and violent, as if her vanity had been butchered in front of a mirror.
Sawyer flinched at the sound, hands instinctively rising to shield his ears, his eyes wide as saucers. His heart thundered against his ribs, so loud it almost drowned her out. But nothing could silence her fury. It pulsed through the floor, the walls, the fluorescent lights above that flickered as though sensing the shift in energy.
The ground began to tremble beneath them, subtly at first—barely noticeable tremors that might have been mistaken for aftershocks of fear. But within seconds, the vibrations grew more violent, more deliberate, as if something monstrous stirred beneath the very floor. Each pulse was like a warning—this isn't over.
"This is why I love hospitals," she hissed, her voice suddenly dipped in a dark, venomous calm that was far more terrifying than her screams. There was a disturbing kind of delight in her tone, the sick satisfaction of someone who enjoyed playing with her food before devouring it. Her lips curled back into a cruel smile, blood still wet on her skin, her eyes glowing like dying stars ready to go supernova.
"Lots of dead souls to work with."
The words slipped out like a prophecy—quiet, certain, and utterly horrifying. They didn't just linger in the air; they infested it, crawling into the spaces between heartbeats, wrapping around Sawyer's spine with invisible claws. He felt cold all of a sudden. Not the kind of cold that came from temperature—but something deeper. A soul-deep chill that whispered run in a language his body understood better than his mind ever could.
That's when he realized—she wasn't just mad.
She was about to raise the dead.
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Notes: The Hospital Board would like to issue an urgent addendum to policy 3.B: Under NO circumstances should staff or patients engage in magical duels or altercations with undead entities within hospital premises. Furthermore, the discharge of firearms, regardless of the target's state of (un)life, is strictly prohibited. Violators will be charged for damages AND exorcism fees.