OBO: Spirit of Vengeance

The penthouse was silent except for the soft jazz playing from hidden speakers and the occasional clink of ice against crystal. Marcus Whittaker swirled his bourbon, admiring how the amber liquid caught the light. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, the city sprawled beneath him like a glittering carpet—his kingdom, in all but name. His phone buzzed. Another text from that Okafor woman. He smirked as he read it. “Please. I'm going to lose everything. My career. My home. Just tell them the truth.” Marcus deleted the message without responding. She should have known better than to reject him, then threaten to report him. Now she was learning what happened to people who crossed Marcus Whittaker. The same thing that happened to anyone who stood in his way. They disappeared. He was considering whether to pour another drink when the jazz abruptly cut off. The penthouse plunged into darkness. "Goddammit," he muttered, reaching for his phone to call building security. The screen illuminated his face with harsh blue light—then went black. "Hello?" he called out. "Is someone there?" The silence that answered felt... wrong. Heavy. Expectant. The temperature dropped suddenly, dramatically. His breath clouded in front of him. Frost began forming on his windows, spreading in delicate patterns across the glass. "I know someone's there." His voice wasn't as steady as he'd have liked. "Show yourself." The darkness in the far corner of the room seemed to deepen, to congeal into something denser than the absence of light. Something with purpose. A voice emerged from that darkness—not loud, but somehow filling the room, reverberating in his chest cavity. "Marcus Whittaker." The voice was impossible to describe. It seemed to contain multitudes—the whispers of countless people speaking in unison, across vast distances of time. "Who's there?" Marcus stumbled backward, bumping into his Italian marble countertop. "I have security on speed dial." "Seven hundred and forty-three," said the voice. "That is the number of souls you have wounded. The lives you have diminished. The suffering you have caused for your own gain." The darkness moved. Not as a person moves, with the familiar mechanics of limbs and joints, but as liquid might pour uphill, defying nature's laws. It coalesced into a humanoid shape that absorbed the ambient light around it. "What the hell are you?" Marcus's hand fumbled behind him for a knife from the block on the counter. "I am what comes when justice fails," the figure said. Marcus grabbed the chef's knife and held it out. "Stay back! I don't know how you got in here, but—" "Amara Okafor," the figure interrupted. "She was not the first. But her pain... her pain was pure. Her despair complete." "That psycho?" Marcus forced a laugh. "She's nobody. Just some delusional woman who couldn't handle rejection." The temperature dropped further. The knife in Marcus's hand frosted over, burning his palm with cold. "The court dismissed her case," the figure continued, advancing slowly. "Your wealth silenced the witnesses. Your connections buried the evidence. The system you manipulate so well protected you again." "Look," Marcus said, switching tactics, "whatever you want—money, power—I can get it for you." "I want nothing that you can provide," the figure replied. "I am here to collect what you owe." Marcus lunged forward with the knife. The blade passed through the figure as if through smoke, but where it penetrated, Marcus glimpsed... faces. Hundreds of faces, contorted in pain, flickering like an old film reel. The knife clattered to the floor, suddenly too heavy to hold. "What are you?" Marcus whispered, true fear claiming him for perhaps the first time in his life. The figure didn't answer. Instead, it raised what might have been an arm. The darkness extended, enveloping Marcus's wrist. Where they touched, Marcus screamed. "Do you feel it?" the voice asked. "The anguish of the intern you assaulted in 2013. The despair of the partner you framed for embezzlement. The humiliation of the competitor whose family you threatened." "Stop!" Marcus gasped, dropping to his knees. "I cannot stop," the figure said. "I am only beginning. After a thousand years, I have returned to a world that has forgotten true justice." The darkness spread up Marcus's arm, across his chest. Wherever it touched, he experienced the pain he had inflicted on others—not as a concept, but as a reality. Every tear, every sleepless night, every moment of dread. "Please..." Marcus begged, his arrogance shattered. The figure leaned closer. Where a face should have been was only void, bordered by iridescent light that pulsed like a heartbeat. "They begged too," it whispered. --- Detective Samira Chen stood in the empty penthouse, surveying the scene with narrowed eyes. Crime scene technicians moved around her, documenting, collecting, photographing—but there was precious little to collect. "No signs of forced entry," said her partner, Detective James Reynolds, flipping through his notes. "Security system never triggered. No fingerprints except the victim's. No DNA. No footprints. No murder weapon." "And yet," Samira said, nodding toward the chalk outline on the floor, "Marcus Whittaker is very much dead." "Coroner's preliminary report says heart attack," Reynolds continued, "but..." "But his face," Samira finished for him. "Frozen in a scream. And the frost patterns on the windows." "In July." "Exactly." Samira walked to the large windows, now returned to normal temperature. "The building's HVAC system shows no malfunction. Nothing that could explain a sudden freeze." "So what are we looking at?" Reynolds asked. "Some kind of... I don't know, advanced technology? A new drug that induces hallucinations and heart failure?" Samira didn't answer immediately. She was looking at Whittaker's phone, retrieved from the scene. The forensics team had unlocked it and found something strange—a sequence of deleted text messages from a woman named Amara Okafor. "I think," she said slowly, "we need to talk to Ms. Okafor." --- Across town, in a small apartment cluttered with architectural drawings and half-packed boxes, Amara Okafor sat motionless on her sofa. The eviction notice on her coffee table no longer mattered. The tarnished reputation that had made her unemployable in her field no longer pained her. For the first time in months, she felt... peace. She looked down at the small obsidian scarab in her palm. She had purchased it from a street vendor who claimed it was an authentic Egyptian artifact. "For justice," the old woman had said, pressing it into Amara's hands with surprising strength. "When all else fails." The scarab seemed different now. The hairline c***k that had appeared in it last night had widened, and something like black smoke seemed to shift beneath its surface. Her phone buzzed with a news alert: "Tech Executive Marcus Whittaker Found Dead in Penthouse." Amara closed her fist around the scarab, feeling its unnatural coolness against her skin. "Thank you," she whispered, though she wasn't quite sure to whom—or what—she was speaking. From the shadows in the corner of her apartment, something seemed to pulse in response.