The rain had slicked the streets into sheets of glass, reflecting the sickly glow of sodium lamps as DCI George Hill pushed open the door of the incident room. The air smelled of stale coffee and wet wool coats. On the wall, fifteen faces stared back from photographs—smiling women, all of them snuffed out by the same brutal hand.

Beside him, DS Melanie Sommers shuffled a stack of crime scene reports. She looked younger than her thirty-three years in the harsh fluorescent light, but her eyes were tired, lined with a sleepless worry that grew heavier with each new victim.

“Fifteen,” Hill muttered, scratching his stubbled chin. “We’re dealing with something far worse than random madness. He’s refining his method. Enjoying it.”

Melanie tapped her pen against the table. “Same M.O. each time. Strangulation after sexual assault. No forensics left behind worth a damn. He’s careful. Too careful for someone this young.”

Hill’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what bothers me. He’s not improvising anymore. He’s acting like he’s done it all before.”

⸻

The next morning brought another body. The girl—twenty-two, a student—had been found in a wooded layby outside Reading. The mud was churned with tyre tracks, but the rain had smeared them beyond recognition. Hill crouched near the corpse, his heavy coat dragging against the damp earth.

“Same ligature marks,” Melanie said, pulling her scarf tighter against the cold. “Bruising along the wrists and ankles. The killer binds them, but only after he has their trust. No forced entry. No blunt trauma. He charms them first.”

Hill stood, staring down at the pale, lifeless face. “He knows what to say. How to look. That kind of charisma doesn’t come from nowhere.”

Melanie glanced at him. “What are you suggesting?”

“That he’s not just imitating. He’s remembering.”

Back at the station, Hill and Sommers combed through CCTV footage, witness statements, and endless dead ends. Then a name began surfacing—Jamie Cutter, a twenty-four-year-old drifter seen near two of the crime scenes. Arrested once for harassment but released.

They brought him in. Cutter sat at the table in Interview Room B, his hands clasped neatly, his expression calm, almost amused. His boyish good looks were marred only by the intensity of his eyes—sharp, searching, and utterly devoid of fear.

“Jamie Cutter,” Hill began, pacing slowly. “You’ve been seen near at least two of the abduction sites. Care to explain?”

Cutter tilted his head, lips curving into a faint smile. “Coincidence. I like to walk at night. Clears the head.”

Melanie leaned forward, voice firm. “Do you know why we’re interested in you, Jamie? Sixteen women dead. All strangled. All abused. And you—you drift into the background every time.”

For the first time, Cutter’s eyes met hers fully. The air seemed to thin. His smile widened.

“Do you know what it’s like to feel a woman’s last breath against your cheek, Detective Sommers?” he whispered. “The shudder, the surrender? It’s… indescribable.”

Melanie froze, a chill running through her. That was not the voice of a boy improvising evil. That was something older. Practiced.

Hill slammed his palm on the table. “Enough. You’re confessing?”

Cutter chuckled softly. “Not confessing. Reminiscing.”

They had no physical evidence—nothing to hold him on. Cutter walked free, but Hill couldn’t shake the dread that clung to him after the interview.

That night, he sat in his office alone, flipping through an old FBI file Melanie had dug up at his request. It was a relic from the 1970s, photocopied, grainy pages: Theodore Robert Bundy. Photographs of bodies in wooded areas, court sketches, mugshots. Hill traced his finger across Bundy’s chilling grin.

The same grin Jamie Cutter had worn.

⸻

Three nights later, Cutter struck again. The victim was found on the banks of the Thames, carefully posed, hair brushed, clothes adjusted. Melanie studied the body under the harsh forensic lights and whispered, “He’s escalating. He’s… proud.”

Hill’s mind gnawed at an impossible thought. “Mel, humour me. Have you ever read about possession?”

She frowned. “You mean like… demons?”

“No. More specific. The echo of someone who refuses to let go. A soul that lingers attaches itself. What if… what if this isn’t Cutter alone?”

Melanie shook her head, but unease clouded her face. “You’re saying—what—that Bundy’s spirit is in him? That’s absurd.”

“Is it?” Hill countered. “Bundy was executed in 1989. He left behind fans, admirers, and hundreds of hours of interviews. Evil like that doesn’t just vanish. What if it found a vessel? A willing one?”

Melanie swallowed, but said nothing.

⸻

They tracked Cutter to a derelict house outside Croydon, its windows boarded, its garden overrun with brambles. Moving quietly, weapons drawn, they slipped inside. The stench of mildew and rot filled their lungs.

In the back room, beneath the cracked ceiling, they found his shrine. Photographs of Bundy, clipped from books and articles, were pinned to the walls. Scrawled notes covered a desk—dates, names, methods. And in the centre, a mirror smeared with fingerprints.

Cutter stood before it, shirtless, whispering to his reflection.

“Teach me again,” he murmured. “Show me the trick with the cast, the way you asked for help with the books. They never see it coming. Never.”

Hill’s voice boomed. “Jamie Cutter! Step away from the mirror.”

Cutter turned slowly, his face alight with a feverish glow. His eyes glistened with something not entirely his own.

“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice layered, almost doubled. “I am him. He is me. We’re eternal.”

Melanie raised her gun, her hands trembling. “Don’t move, Jamie!”

Cutter smiled that familiar, dreadful grin—the grin from photographs decades old. For a heartbeat, Hill swore he saw another face flicker over his features. A ghost in the flesh.

“Fifteen, sorry, seventeen now, is not enough,” Cutter whispered. “Bundy had thirty. Maybe more. I’ll surpass him. I’ll make him proud.”

With a sudden lunge, he bolted. The chase tore through the ruin of the house, floorboards groaning under their feet. Hill’s lungs burned as they cornered him in the kitchen, Cutter reaching for a knife rusted with age.

“Drop it!” Hill roared.

Cutter hesitated. His eyes flickered, and for a moment his youthful mask cracked. A shadow passed across his face.

—Bundy’s shadow.

Melanie fired. The bullet caught him in the chest, spinning him back against the wall. He slid down slowly, blood blooming across his shirt.

As he coughed, he looked at them not with fear but with disdain. “You think this ends me? I’ll find another. I always do.”

His head lolled, but his grin remained fixed.

⸻

The house fell silent. Melanie lowered her gun, her whole body trembling. “Did you see it?” she whispered.

Hill nodded grimly. “I saw.”

They left the body for the forensic team, but as they walked out into the night, George Hill couldn’t shake the words Cutter had spoken. Evil didn’t die with a bullet. It lingered, it sought out the vulnerable, the weak, the willing.

And somewhere, perhaps already, another young man was looking into a mirror, listening to a whisper not his own.

Marseille, One Year Later:

The mistral blew hard through the streets of Marseilles, rattling shutters and carrying the scent of salt and petrol from the harbour. It was just past midnight, yet the city hummed with uneasy life: neon-lit bars spilling laughter, taxis honking, sailors weaving between shadows.

And posters. Everywhere, posters.

The missing women stared out from paper gone soft with rain—ten faces, ten sets of eyes that no longer saw. Students, waitresses, daughters. Their smiles frozen in time, their bodies now still and silent in the morgue.

Inspector Henri Duval drew deep on a Gauloises cigarette and watched the latest crime scene through a drifting veil of smoke. The stairwell was cordoned with yellow tape, its concrete walls stained with mildew. A young woman lay there, carefully arranged, as if posed for a photograph only the killer would ever see. Her dark hair had been brushed smooth. Her dress pulled into order.

Duval’s partner, Lieutenant Rousseau, came up beside him, pulling his coat tighter. “The tenth. Exactly the same. No forced entry. No screams heard. He charms them. They follow willingly.”

Duval exhaled slowly. “And then he strangles them. Always strangulation. Always this… tenderness afterwards. Like he’s putting them to sleep.”

Rousseau spat into the gutter. “He’s mocking us.”

Inside, the forensics team worked in grim silence. One of them called Duval over, pointing to the plaster wall just above the girl’s body. There, etched faintly by fingernail or knife, was a single word.

Eternal.

Duval felt the hairs on his neck rise. “What kind of man writes that?”

The forensic shrugged, but his eyes were troubled. “Not a man, Inspector. Something worse.”

⸻

Across the harbour, in the narrow backstreets where the tourists rarely wandered, a man walked alone. He was young, no more than twenty-five, with a clean jawline and eyes that seemed too bright, too knowing. His clothes were plain but neat; he could have been a student, a tourist, anyone.

He stopped at a shop window, where a cracked mirror leaned against a display of secondhand books. For a moment, he studied his reflection, tilting his head left and right. Then his lips curved into a smile—a smile too old for his face, too confident, too rehearsed.

A whisper seemed to move through the glass.

“They’ll never see you coming.”

The man grinned, then stepped away, disappearing into the crowd.

⸻

Back at the police precinct, Duval pinned the photographs of the ten victims onto the corkboard, their faces forming a pattern only he could sense. Rousseau leaned against the desk, tired and restless.

“It’s like he’s done this before,” Rousseau muttered. “Over and over. He knows how to talk to them, how to hide his tracks. He’s too careful for someone so young.”

Duval rubbed his temples. “We’re not hunting a boy. We’re hunting experience. Decades of it, packed inside a new shell.”

Rousseau frowned. “You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I?” Duval’s voice dropped, heavy with unease. “The way he arranges them. The charm, the confidence. I’ve seen old FBI files—Ted Bundy, executed in ’89. This is the same handwriting.”

Rousseau barked a laugh, though it sounded thin. “You’re saying our killer is a ghost? Come now, Henri. You’ve been breathing too much cigarette smoke.”

But Duval’s eyes lingered on the photographs. “Not a ghost. An echo. Evil doesn’t vanish, Rousseau. It finds new skin.”

⸻

Later that night, in a student bar near the university, laughter rang out above the clink of glasses. A young woman with auburn hair leaned across a table, smiling at the man opposite her. He was charming, attentive, his eyes fixed on hers as if she were the only person in the room.

“Your English is excellent,” she said with a shy laugh.

He grinned, modest. “I’ve studied. I love languages. They open doors.”

“Do you live here in Marseilles?” she asked.

He leaned closer, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Not for long. I move around. But tonight, I think I was meant to meet you.”

Her cheeks flushed. He had that effect. He always did.

When she rose to leave, he offered to walk her home. She hesitated only a moment before nodding. Out on the dark street, the mistral carried their laughter away.

Back at the precinct, Duval stared out the window, cigarette smoke curling around his head. He thought of the word on the wall: Eternal. He thought of the smile he had seen in faded photographs from decades past, a grin belonging to a monster long dead.

But monsters, he knew, had a way of enduring.

The phone on his desk rang. Another girl had not returned home.

Duval crushed his cigarette into the ashtray, his stomach sinking. Ten was only the beginning.

⸻

And somewhere, in the darkness of Marseilles, a familiar whisper slid into the ear of its chosen vessel:

“We are eternal. We are the circle. We are Legion. And they will never stop us.”