In hindsight, Inspector James Uwaifo really should have sensed that something was off the moment he agreed to the St. Leo post. Not because of his predecessor's conveniently early retirement—although, honestly, that should've been a red flag. No, it was the way conversations would hit a brick wall every time he brought up the nighttime fog, like the fog itself was some taboo nobody wanted to touch.

It rolled in like clockwork every evening, thick and impenetrable, as if the small town was being slowly devoured by a cloud that had grown tired of floating and decided to feast on the earth instead. The locals had learned to be inside by sunset, their doors locked, their windows shuttered. They called it common sense. James called it fear.

His predecessor, Chief Inspector Ayo Ayodeji, had cited "family reasons" for his abrupt departure at age 50. A laughable excuse, really. Nobody walks away from a pension that close to retirement, not in this economy, not with inflation eating away at savings like—well, like whatever was eating away at St. Leo's residents.

The case files sat on James's desk like accusations. Each file folder contained photographs he wished he could unsee: bodies torn apart with surgical precision, bones picked clean as if they'd been pressure-washed. The bite marks, when they found them, suggested creatures twice the size of humans. But that wasn't what kept him awake at night.

No, what haunted Inspector James was the selectivity. The woods around St. Leo teemed with antelopes, rabbits, and all manner of wildlife. Yet these creatures, whatever they were, showed no interest in natural prey. They wanted humans. Only humans.

As he stared out his office window at the gathering dusk, watching the first tendrils of fog creep between the buildings like ghostly fingers, James couldn't shake the feeling that St. Leo's mysterious predators weren't just hunting.

They were choosing.

The real question wasn't why his predecessor had left. The question was why James had been chosen to replace him.

Inspector James Uwaifo had never wanted to be the kind of person who saw patterns everywhere. His father, a renowned mathematics professor at University of Benin, had taught him that correlation didn't equal causation. But sitting in his dim office, surrounded by forty years' worth of St. Leo's history, he couldn't ignore the patterns anymore.

The town's archives painted a picture that started long before the current wave of attacks. St. Leo had been founded in 1872 by German immigrants who'd been drawn to the mountainous countryside, thick woods and fertile soil. But the original settlement had been built three miles east of the current town site. In 1893, the entire population had suddenly relocated, leaving their homes and farms behind. The official record cited "unsuitable ground conditions." The unofficial stories, scribbled in the margins of old journals James had found, spoke of children disappearing into the fog and sounds that couldn't have been made by anything natural.

James ran his fingers over the scar on his left wrist—a souvenir from his last case in Nigeria's Criminal Investigation Department. He'd tracked a serial killer through Edo's worst neighborhoods for eighteen months, finally cornering him in an abandoned warehouse. The killer had gotten close enough to slice him once before James's partner took the shot. That case had put him on the map—literally, international recognition and all. But James was a man who asked too many questions, the kind that made people in high places uncomfortable, the kind that got under bureaucratic skin. So, naturally, they shipped him off to the middle of nowhere, deep in the southeast, to a town so obscure it was practically an afterthought on most maps.

Nsukka he'd heard of; St. Leo, not a chance.

The scar tingled as he reviewed the pattern of attacks: every twenty-seven years, like clockwork, the disappearances would spike. The fog would thicken. And then, just as suddenly, everything would return to normal—except for the haunted looks in the survivors' eyes.

1893. 1920. 1947. 1974. 2001.

2024 was closing in fast, and already they'd lost seventeen people—now, with this girl, Anita Ugwoke, the count had climbed to eighteen.

The town's most recent history wasn't any more comforting. In the 1974 cycle, St. Leo had brought in a specialist—Dr. Theresa Ibiam. Her reports were fascinating until they abruptly ended three weeks into her investigation. The official record listed her as "relocated." Her body was never found.

2001's cycle had been his predecessor's first year on the job. Chief Inspector Ayodeji had documented everything meticulously: soil samples, bite mark analyses, even thermal imaging of the fog. But his later reports grew increasingly erratic. The final entry, dated just three months before his "retirement," contained a single sentence: "They're not hunting—they're harvesting."

James pulled out his own notebook, adding another detail he'd discovered that morning. Every victim in the past hundred years had been a newcomer to St. Leo or few local families of no consequence. The oldest families—the ones who'd been there since the 1893 relocation—held all the positions of power: mayor, council members, chief of police.

The same families who'd pushed so hard for his appointment.

Though when James dug deeper, he found nothing particularly sinister about them. The Bellos, not igbo but being one of the first families, had run the local hardware store for three generations. The Njemanzes were known for their charitable foundation that funded the town's only library. The Ezes had produced four mayors, each more boring than the last, their greatest accomplishment being the renovation of the town square in 1985. On paper, they were painfully ordinary—the kind of families that collected golf trophies and hung photos of their children's graduations in prominent places.

Maybe he was seeing shadows where there were none.

James glanced at his watch: 10:07 PM. He'd been poring over these files for hours, trying to find connections that probably didn't exist. His eyes burned from staring at the microfiche reader, and his back ached from hunching over his desk. Time to head home.

The station's fluorescent lights hummed overhead as he gathered his things, their harsh glow a stark contrast to the darkness beyond the windows. A few night shift officers nodded as he passed, their faces drawn and tired. Nobody liked working nights in St. Leo.

His Toyota Camry 2014 sat alone in the parking lot, its moss green paint dulled by the evening mist. The engine coughed to life, and James pulled out onto Odili Street, the fog already thick enough that his headlights seemed to bounce back at him. The road wound through the woods like a black ribbon, each curve revealing just enough of what lay ahead to keep him moving forward.

Past an old Njemanze farm, around the bend by the abandoned church, the road straightened out. James pressed the accelerator slightly, eager to get home. The radio crackled with static as he reached to change the station, his fingers fumbling with the dial.

That's when he saw it—an antelope, bursting from the treeline, its eyes wide with terror. Before James could process the strangeness of an antelope in these woods, something massive slammed into his car.

The impact sent him spinning. The airbag exploded in his face with a sound like a gunshot, filling his lungs with chemical dust. Time seemed to stretch and contract, seconds becoming hours becoming moments, until finally the world stopped moving.

When James managed to push his door open, his legs felt like they were made of water. He staggered out, bracing himself against the car's hood. The fog swirled around him, thick enough to taste, and that's when he saw it.

A jaguar lay in the road—but calling it just a jaguar was like calling a hurricane a breeze. The creature was enormous, nearly twice his height even as it lay there. Its spotted coat seemed to shift and change in the fog, creating patterns that hurt his eyes if he looked too long. It was breathing, its massive sides rising and falling with each breath.

James took a step forward, his police training warring with his survival instinct. The beast stirred, and for one impossible moment, it pushed itself up in a way that was terrifyingly human—its posture almost upright, its front paws pressing against the tarred road like hands.

Their eyes met across the foggy road. James saw intelligence there, ancient and cold and calculating. The jaguar's lips pulled back in what could have been a grin or a warning, revealing teeth as long and lethal as daggers, polished and bright—not in a snarl, but something more unsettling, as if it knew him, as if it was deciding whether he belonged here at all.

A roar shattered the night—deeper, louder, coming from somewhere in the woods. The jaguar's head snapped toward the sound. It gave James one final look, and he could have sworn he saw something like recognition in those inhuman eyes. Then it melted into the fog, moving with a grace that defied its size, leaving James alone on the road with his damaged car and the certainty that everything he thought he knew about St. Leo's mysteries had been wrong.

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ ✩₊˚

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