The second driver died nine days after the first.
Both accidents happened at night, near Conjunto Augusto Franco in southern Aracaju. Neither vehicle showed any obvious mechanical fault. There was no evidence of a collision with another car, and according to the initial reports, both drivers had been alone.
But one detail had caught the attention of those following the cases: shortly before their deaths, both men had told people they knew that they were seeing a woman in white on the neighborhood streets.
Dant read the news report twice.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, a forgotten cup of coffee beside his phone. Aurora rested beneath the chair. Since Babizinha had given him the little dog, his routine had changed considerably. Now there were walks, feeding times, toys scattered around the house, and someone watching him closely whenever he opened the refrigerator.
There had been another change, too.
After that fourth night in Simão Dias, Dant had never been able to look at a strange news story the same way again.
The bite, the days of recovery, the transformations, and everything Babizinha had taught him had shattered the comfort of believing the world worked exactly as it seemed.
He already knew supernatural creatures existed. He also knew the knowledge he had gained in training was nowhere near enough to prepare him for all of them.
Until then, he had learned to investigate mostly under Babizinha's guidance. This time, however, he had discovered the case on his own.
He opened another article.
The first man, Gilson, drove for a ride-hailing app. He had lost control of his car and crashed into a wall near one of the neighborhood roads. The second, a motorcyclist named Márcio, had been found dead after a fall elsewhere in the area.
Their names and circumstances were different. The woman in white was the only thing they had in common, and the police had not established any connection between the accidents.
In the article's comments, someone had written:
"The Blonde of Augusto Franco is back."
Dant frowned.
"The Blonde of Augusto Franco?"
Aurora raised her head at the sound of his voice.
"Have you ever heard of her?"
The little dog thumped her tail against the floor.
"That's what I thought."
Dant started a new search.
The first pages contained old stories, some remarkably alike. A blonde woman dressed in white appeared at night on the roads through Conjunto Augusto Franco. She asked drivers, especially taxi drivers, for a ride, then disappeared along the way.
Other accounts described the overpowering scent of funeral flowers. Some said she appeared in the back seat without anyone opening a door. There were even versions in which she had cotton stuffed in her nostrils, like a body prepared for a wake.
Dant rubbed his face.
"Right. That definitely doesn't sound normal."
For a few minutes, he considered calling Babizinha.
She had probably heard of the legend. Perhaps she would know what kind of manifestation it was and how to confront it.
But he kept staring at her number without placing the call.
Not because he wanted to prove something. Quite the opposite.
If he had decided to help people threatened by the supernatural, he needed to learn how to investigate without relying on someone else to interpret every clue.
He put away his phone, stood up, and picked up Aurora's harness.
"How about a different kind of walk?"
She sprang to her feet at once.
"I knew you'd like that part."
That morning, Dant began his first hunt on his own.
And he still had no idea how to deal with a ghost.
The streets where the Blonde appears
Conjunto Augusto Franco did not look haunted.
Traffic was heavy on the main streets. Motorcycles threaded between cars, small businesses were open, neighbors chatted on the sidewalks, and shoppers headed home from Mercado Milton Santos.
Farther along, avenues followed the canals across the urban landscape, lined with houses, apartment buildings, and commercial spaces that had sprung up over decades.
Dant knew that part of Aracaju, but he had never had reason to study its details so closely.
He started at the place where Gilson had died.
The wall struck by the vehicle had already undergone temporary repairs. A difference in paint color and old marks on the concrete were still visible.
Aurora lowered her nose to the ground, intrigued by a tuft of weeds beside the sidewalk. Dant let her sniff, keeping the leash short so she could not wander toward the road.
A woman sweeping in front of her house noticed his interest.
"Looking for something, son?"
Dant turned.
"I wanted to ask about the accident here. Did you see anything?"
The woman rested her broom on the ground.
"Only afterward. The noise woke me. By the time I got to the gate, people were already running over."
"Was the car badly damaged?"
"At the front, yes. But there was something else that was strange."
Dant stepped a little closer.
"What?"
"A girl who lives on that corner said she saw the car stop first. It sat there for a while, as if the driver was waiting for someone to get in."
"Did she see anyone?"
"She said she didn't. But then the car took off all at once."
The woman looked toward the street.
"Some people say it was that blonde woman."
"Do you believe it?"
"Son, I believe a man died here. The rest, I don't know."
Dant thanked her.
Her answer stayed with him as he walked.
It was easy to search for a creature when you already knew it existed. What was harder was resisting the temptation to turn every doubtful piece of information into proof.
Before going to the second location, he stepped into a small snack bar.
There he managed to speak with Rogério, a driver who had had a similar experience a few weeks before the accidents. A local shopkeeper had pointed him out after hearing Dant's questions.
Rogério sat near the entrance with a glass of juice in front of him.
"Are you a journalist?"
"No. I'm trying to understand what happened to those drivers."
"Police?"
"Not that either."
Rogério studied him for a moment.
"Then why are you getting involved?"
Dant hesitated.
Because a werewolf had bitten him? Because he knew a hunter who faced creatures at night? Because someone else might die if no one figured out what was going on?
He chose the simplest answer.
"Because I think something's wrong."
Rogério moved his glass aside.
"Something definitely is."
He explained that he had been returning from a fare around midnight when he spotted a woman standing on the sidewalk. She was young, blonde, and wore a long white dress.
"She waved for me to stop."
"And you stopped?"
"Not at first. I'd heard stories. But when I glanced in the rearview mirror, she was sitting behind me."
Dant went still.
"Did you see her get in?"
"No. She just appeared."
"What happened next?"
Rogério clasped his hands.
"There was a strong smell of flowers. You know, the ones at funerals. Then she started talking."
"What did she say?"
"I didn't catch everything. She sounded desperate. Kept repeating something about a boy."
Dant leaned forward.
"A boy?"
"That's what I heard. Then she pointed outside the car. I looked, and water was running down the window. Only it wasn't raining."
Rogério took a deep breath.
"When I looked at the seat again, there was nobody there. I drove off without even waiting for the light to change."
"Did you see her face?"
"In the mirror. That was the worst part."
"Why?"
"She didn't look like she wanted to frighten me."
Rogério paused.
"She looked even more scared than I was."
Dant did not answer right away.
Until that moment, he had thought a hostile apparition was the most likely explanation for the deaths.
Now there was another possibility.
Maybe the woman was not hunting the drivers.
Maybe she was trying to tell them something.
Stories the dead leave behind
That night, Dant spread a notebook, his phone, and several notes across the table.
Aurora slept near his feet after a tiring walk.
He began with the oldest versions of the Blonde of Augusto Franco.
The story had circulated since the early years of the housing development, built in the 1980s. The accounts varied, but nearly all involved drivers startled by a passenger who vanished.
Some versions said she was a bride searching for an aviator. Others claimed she had died in an accident. Some swore she appeared near cemeteries, while others treated the whole thing as an old prank kept alive by radio shows and newspapers.
One account written decades earlier mentioned the smell of carnations.
Dant wrote:
Woman in white. Ride. Back seat. Flowers. Disappearance.
Then he added:
Boy. Water. Fear.
Those last three details did not appear in the popular versions he had found.
He kept researching.
He discovered similar stories elsewhere in Brazil. In Belo Horizonte, there were accounts of the Blonde of Bonfim, linked to drivers and a cemetery. In other countries, stories of phantom hitchhikers described women who vanished before reaching the address they had requested.
Names and settings changed. The structure was almost always the same.
Someone offered a stranger a ride.
The stranger disappeared.
Only afterward came the discovery that the person was already dead.
Dant also looked into tales of restless souls, apparitions, and ghosts who returned to warn the living or reveal something left unfinished.
He found advice of every kind. Salt at doorways. Iron objects. Prayers. Candles. Religious rites. Stories about spirits bound to places, possessions, promises, and interrupted events.
None of it seemed to add up to a reliable set of rules.
One tradition credited a certain object with protective power. Another told an entirely different story. And almost none explained how to find out whether a spirit actually meant to harm anyone.
Dant looked down at the notebook.
He knew how to face a physical threat. He still had a great deal to learn about creatures that could vanish before his eyes.
He thought of Babizinha.
He pictured her expression if she found him searching the internet as though he were looking up instructions for repairing an appliance.
You're looking for a way to win before you've figured out who you're fighting.
That was exactly the kind of thing he could imagine her saying.
He closed one of the pages.
Perhaps the first question was not how to banish a ghost.
Perhaps it was why the ghost was still there.
The next morning, he decided to find someone who had known the story before it became just a legend.
He found Seu Nivaldo through a longtime resident.
Retired for years, the man had worked as a taxi driver for most of his life. He lived in a single-story house in the development, with plants arranged out front and a plastic chair beside the door.
When he heard the subject, he laughed.
"Son, that woman was frightening drivers before you were even born."
Dant pulled up a chair.
"Did you ever see her yourself?"
"See her, actually see her? No. But I saw plenty of men swear they had."
"And do you believe them?"
"Once you get to a certain age, you learn some people make up lies and others believe their own lies."
He took a sip of water.
"But there was one old case I never forgot."
Dant opened his notebook.
"Will you tell me?"
"It was not long after the development started expanding. One terrible storm flooded a whole lot of places. A young woman died near a water crossing. They said she had gone into the canal after a little boy."
"Which woman?"
"I can't remember her name. Only that she was young. The boy, as I heard it, survived."
Dant felt his heartbeat quicken.
"Was she blonde?"
Nivaldo thought for a few seconds.
"She was. At least in the photograph they showed."
"Was she wearing white?"
"That I don't know. But I remember something else."
"What?"
"People said she tried to stop cars before going into the water. She asked for help, shouted, waved her arms. One driver said he didn't understand what she wanted."
The retired man stared out at the street.
"Then the hitchhiker stories started. And that was it. The woman lost her name. She became a haunting."
Dant held on to that sentence.
The woman lost her name.
Maybe that was where his investigation truly began.
The scent of carnations
Dant spent much of the following day searching old records.
In digitized archives of Sergipe newspapers, he found a brief report about an accident in 1987.
It was not a ghost story.
It concerned the death of a twenty-four-year-old woman named Marta Almeida during a severe storm in a part of the area that was only beginning to urbanize.
According to the report, she had entered a flooded crossing to try to rescue her younger brother.
Her body had been recovered later.
The boy had survived.
The article was short, but it included a photograph.
A young woman with fair hair, a faint smile, and watchful eyes.
Dant enlarged the image on his screen.
He had no way of knowing whether it was the same woman Rogério had described. Still, the details fit better than the story about the aviator.
He wrote down her name and continued his research.
He learned that the family had lived near one of the canals, but their old home no longer existed. Urban development had altered many of the routes and buildings.
That afternoon, he returned to Augusto Franco.
He wanted to inspect the area of the old accident before dark.
Aurora walked beside him, pausing now and then to sniff the vegetation. The heat remained oppressive, although dark clouds were gathering over Aracaju.
As they approached a side crossing near Canal 4, Aurora tugged on the leash.
"Easy, girl."
She persisted, her nose close to the ground.
Dant followed her movement and noticed petals scattered beside a flower bed.
Carnations.
Fresh flowers.
The little dog sniffed a piece of blue ribbon caught in the weeds and followed it for several yards along the sidewalk. Farther ahead, a gray-haired man walked slowly, carrying a shopping bag and another small bouquet tied with a similar ribbon.
Dant could not be sure the man had left those flowers. But he decided to ask.
"Excuse me!"
The man stopped.
"Yes?"
"Do you sometimes leave flowers around here?"
The stranger glanced at his bag.
"Sometimes."
"Can I ask who they're for?"
The man's expression changed.
"My sister."
A chill ran through Dant.
"Was her name Marta?"
The silence that followed seemed longer than it was.
"Who are you?"
"My name's Dant. I'm investigating some accidents that happened here."
"Are you with the press?"
"No."
"Then leave my family alone."
The man started to walk away.
Dant did not try to stop him. He merely said:
"I think your sister is trying to warn someone about something."
The man stopped again.
He turned slowly.
"Don't joke about that, young man."
"I'm not joking."
Dant showed him the old photograph on his phone.
"Is this her?"
The stranger studied the picture.
It took him several seconds to answer.
"Yes."
His voice was low.
"I'm Davi."
Dant realized he had finally found the person he was looking for.
Davi agreed to talk on a small bench set back from the road. Aurora settled near Dant's feet, still interested in the scent of the flowers.
The man was in his forties and remembered little of the night his sister died.
He remembered the rain. The rising water. Marta's hand holding his arm.
And the moment the current tore them apart.
"I got trapped against a piece of concrete. A man pulled me out farther downstream. My sister couldn't get out."
Davi tightened his fingers around the shopping bag.
"I spent years trying to remember whether she saw them rescue me."
"Did you ever tell anyone about that?"
"My mother, while she was alive. After that, I hardly talked about it."
"Why do you bring flowers?"
"Because flowers were the last thing she bought that day."
Davi looked at the bouquet.
"She'd gone to pick some up for a family celebration. She came home before the storm began."
Dant remembered the old descriptions of white dresses and bouquets.
A true detail might have survived for decades, blended with so many others that no one remembered where it had come from.
"And why here, specifically?"
"It's near where she died. My mother always left flowers. When she passed away, I kept doing it."
"The recent accidents happened in this area."
"I know."
Davi looked toward the canal.
"A few weeks ago they worked on that crossing. Removed part of an old low wall. Since then, I've been dreaming about Marta."
Dant followed his gaze.
Part of the area was cordoned off by construction barriers. Vegetation concealed a drainage opening beside a drop in the sidewalk. A temporary warning sign lay on the ground.
"Did you see your sister after she died?"
Davi took his time answering.
"Once, many years ago. At least I thought I did."
"What happened?"
"She was on the other side of the street. Seemed to be waiting for someone. When I went to call out, a car drove past. And then she was gone."
A gust of wind stirred the leaves beside the canal.
Davi gripped the bouquet tightly.
"Do you think those people died because of her?"
Dant thought about the two drivers.
He thought of Rogério and what he had said about the terrified woman in the back seat.
"I don't know yet."
It was the only answer he could give.
The passenger in the back seat
That night, Dant returned alone to the crossing.
Alone, at least as far as other humans were concerned.
Aurora sat in the back seat of a small car he had obtained for the investigation, secured in her safety harness. The little dog did not seem pleased to have her rest interrupted, but she had accepted a treat before getting in.
The car was parked in a safe pull-off, away from the canal opening.
Dant had no intention of driving until he knew what might happen.
He had brought a flashlight, his fully charged phone, a small first-aid kit, and a few objects mentioned in accounts of protection from apparitions.
Among them were a pouch of salt and a piece of iron.
He did not know whether they would do any good.
Nor did he intend to find out by attacking a presence that might be asking for help.
A little after eleven thirty, the street grew quieter.
Dant was watching the wind stir the vegetation through the windshield when he caught a scent.
Flowers.
It was not the delicate scent of the carnations Davi carried.
It was intense, almost sickening, like the stale air of a room crowded with funeral wreaths.
Aurora stood up on the seat.
Her ears drooped low.
Dant checked the rearview mirror.
Someone was sitting beside the little dog.
A young woman.
Blonde hair spilled over her shoulders. Her white dress looked old-fashioned, and the hem was stained with mud.
She stared out of the window.
Dant felt every muscle in his body tighten.
He had not heard a door open.
He had not seen anyone approach.
And yet the woman was there.
Aurora began to growl softly, pressing herself against the far side of the seat.
Dant tried to steady his breathing.
"Good evening."
The woman did not answer.
"Do you need help?"
She turned her head.
Her face was pale. Her eyes held an urgent expression, and water dripped from her hair onto the fabric of her dress.
"Stop."
Her voice seemed to come from very far away.
"The car is stopped."
She looked ahead.
"Stop. Please."
Dant felt the seat turn cold beneath him.
Small drops of water appeared on the windshield.
Then more.
Within seconds, the street vanished behind a curtain of rain.
But through the side mirror, Dant could still see the dry sidewalk.
He was seeing two different things.
The street as it existed now.
And the street as the woman remembered it.
The sound of running water began to fill the car.
Aurora barked.
Dant looked back at the central mirror.
The woman was closer now.
"He fell."
Dant gripped the steering wheel.
"Who fell?"
"I can't..."
She broke off.
Her eyes widened.
"Don't let him drown!"
For a moment, the woman seemed to dissolve into water.
The rain vanished.
The fragrance became unbearable.
Aurora barked again, and Dant turned around.
The seat beside her was empty.
Dant opened the door and got out, breathing hard.
The street was still dry.
Not a single drop had fallen from the sky.
But a thin trickle of water ran along the rubber seal of the rear door.
He touched it with his fingers.
It was ice-cold.
For the first time since Simão Dias, Dant felt afraid of something he could not drive away by force.
The woman had no body to fight.
She did not seem to recognize the present.
And she carried with her the final moments of a death that had occurred decades earlier.
Dant leaned against the car.
His first impulse was to call Babizinha.
There would be no shame in asking for help. She probably knew better than he did how to deal with a manifestation this powerful.
But first he needed to understand one thing.
The woman had repeated the very words of someone trying to stop a tragedy.
Stop. He fell. Don't let him drown.
She had not been asking for a ride to go somewhere.
She had been trying to get help.
Still.
Almost forty years later.
One last attempt
The next morning, Dant went to see Davi again.
He told him what he had seen.
He did not soften the details, but neither did he present his interpretation as certain.
Davi listened with his eyes fixed on the ground.
"She still thinks I'm down there?"
"It's possible."
"And those drivers?"
"Maybe she appeared to them because she was trying to do the same thing. Asking them to stop. They got frightened."
Davi closed his eyes.
"My sister died trying to save me."
"I know."
"And now she might be causing more deaths?"
Dant could not answer immediately.
The situation was worse than he had imagined.
If his theory was right, Marta did not understand that her brother had survived. She kept trying to stop cars and ask for help in a place that no longer resembled the place where she died.
The apparitions caused panic. Under certain circumstances, panic could cause fatal accidents.
The fact that she did not intend to hurt anyone did not make the manifestation any less dangerous.
Dant needed to find a way to make her understand that the event was over.
He showed Davi his notes on other haunting stories.
"In some accounts, a spirit stays tied to a person or an event. There are stories where it disappears once something has been explained, a promise has been kept, or someone has finally been able to say goodbye."
"Do you believe that?"
"I believe it's worth a try."
"And if it doesn't work?"
Dant glanced at the fresh scratches on his arm, made when he had scrambled away from the car the previous night.
"Then we back off. And look for another solution."
He did not want to put Davi at the center of a manifestation without first discussing the risks. He explained what had happened inside the car, the confusion between past and present, Aurora's fear, and the possibility of someone getting hurt.
Davi listened to the end.
Then he asked:
"If she appears, do you think she'll be able to hear me?"
"I don't know."
"Then I want to talk to her."
Dant hesitated.
He thought of Babizinha again.
She would probably scold him for considering such a risky plan.
But he also knew that, when facing an unknown creature, protecting people did not always mean preventing them from making their own decisions.
They talked for a long time.
Dant did not promise it would work. They agreed Davi would remain at a safe point on the sidewalk, away from the water crossing, and that they would stop the attempt at the first sign of danger.
That afternoon, Dant reported the poorly marked opening to a municipal service and warned of the danger of further accidents. He photographed the fallen barriers and recorded the location.
He had no way of knowing whether the ghost would disappear.
The hole in the path, however, would still be there even if she did.
That night, he returned to the site.
Clouds covered the sky. The wind carried the smell of damp vegetation and the distant rumble of cars on the main avenues.
Davi waited at the agreed spot, holding a small bouquet of carnations.
Aurora was secured in her harness in the parked car, with a window partly open. Dant had left the vehicle away from the crossing and decided to make the attempt outside, without moving it.
It was a few minutes to midnight.
"Are you sure?" Dant asked.
Davi nodded.
"I've spent my whole life wanting to talk to her."
"If anything gets strange, you move away. No arguing."
"All right."
Dant switched on the flashlight.
The first sign was the scent.
It came suddenly, intense and familiar.
Aurora rose in the back seat.
A woman appeared in the reflection of the car window.
But she was not inside the car.
Dant turned.
She stood several yards away, near the sidewalk.
Her white dress moved as though submerged. Wet strands of hair clung to her face.
Davi raised a hand to his mouth.
"Marta..."
The woman did not react.
She continued staring at the street.
Then she raised an arm and pointed toward the crossing.
"He fell."
Dant stepped forward.
"Marta, listen. The boy got out of the water."
She did not seem to hear him.
The scent of flowers grew stronger.
"The boy got out," Dant repeated.
The figure began to walk.
Not toward Davi.
Toward the canal.
Dant realized the danger too late.
The ground beneath his feet seemed to shift.
The sidewalk vanished.
For an instant he found himself on a dirt road under heavy rain. Water rose around his legs, and a dark current surged through a narrow crossing.
A boy was screaming somewhere.
Dant tried to step back.
His foot caught the real drop at the edge of the sidewalk.
The vision of rain kept him from seeing the drainage opening just ahead.
A sharp bark pierced the roar of water.
Aurora.
Dant stopped.
Another bark.
He grabbed the solid frame of a barrier beside him, feeling the metal scrape the palm of his hand.
When he blinked, the street returned.
He was less than a step from the drop.
His heart raced so fast he could barely breathe.
"Marta!" Davi shouted.
The woman kept moving forward.
Davi instinctively took a step, but stopped when Dant raised his hand.
"Stay there!"
Dant carefully moved away from the edge.
"She isn't seeing you. She's seeing what happened!"
Davi clutched the flowers.
"Marta! It's me!"
The woman stopped for a moment.
Water began dripping from her hands.
"He can't get out."
Her voice was little more than a whisper.
Davi began to cry.
"I got out, Marta!"
The wind rose.
The streetlights seemed to dim.
Dant heard the impossible sound of the current again.
But he did not move.
"I got out!" Davi shouted. "A man pulled me out farther along. You saved me!"
The woman slowly turned her head.
Her eyes met Davi's.
For the first time, she seemed to see something that did not belong to that stormy night.
Davi opened the bag and took out a folded photograph.
It was an old picture of the two siblings in front of the house where they had lived.
"Look at me."
His voice trembled.
"I grew up. I lived my life. I have a daughter. She knows your story already."
Marta looked at the photograph.
Her dress was still wet, but water no longer streamed from her hair.
Dant remained still.
He did not know if it was working.
He did not even know whether Marta understood the words or merely recognized the voice.
She raised a hand.
"You..."
Her voice seemed less distant.
Davi smiled through his tears.
"It's me."
The woman looked down at her own hands.
Then at the street, the houses, and the lights that did not exist in the world she remembered.
Her face changed.
Not because she had become something else.
But because the desperation in her expression began, slowly, to fade.
"You got out?"
Davi nodded.
"I did."
Marta closed her eyes.
Dant sensed the scent of carnations grow faint.
The woman looked back at her brother.
There was enormous sadness in that expression, but something else Dant could not name.
Perhaps relief.
Perhaps the realization that her final effort had not been in vain.
Davi held out the photograph.
"I never forgot you."
Marta did not touch the paper.
She only looked at it.
Then, for the first time since Dant had met her, she stopped watching the water crossing.
Her gaze followed the lit street, as though she finally understood there was no need to keep looking for a car.
There was no one left to rescue that night.
A gust swept across the sidewalk.
The flowers in Davi's hands stirred.
Marta's figure grew indistinct.
For an instant, Dant saw the young woman from the old photograph, without the water, without the mud, without the fear.
She seemed to smile.
Then she disappeared.
There was no scream.
No burst of light.
The fragrance of flowers dissolved into the air.
And the silence left behind did not feel threatening.
Davi kept looking at the empty place.
"Has she gone?"
Dant took a while to answer.
"I think so."
Davi drew a deep breath.
"Do you think she's at peace?"
Dant looked toward the dark canal crossing.
He did not know what came after death. None of the pages he had researched could give him a reliable answer.
"I hope she is."
Davi crouched and left the carnations beside the flower bed, away from the opening.
Dant accompanied him to a busier stretch, where he could find a ride home.
Only then did he return to the car.
Aurora greeted him with a flurry of excited tail-wags.
"Easy, girl. I'm here."
Dant opened the rear door and checked that she was all right.
The little dog sniffed his scraped hand, gave a soft whine, and tried to lick his fingers.
"Yeah. You warned me."
He scratched behind her ears.
"We were lucky tonight."
After midnight
Two days later, Dant returned to the area in the morning.
The crossing's warning signs had been reinforced, and the dangerous section remained closed for repairs. The physical hazard still needed attention, but at least people passing by could now see it.
There were no new reports of apparitions in that area over the following days.
Dant found no evidence that the woman in white had approached any more drivers, either.
That was not enough to prove Marta had reached some kind of afterlife.
He knew that.
But it was the best sign that his attempt had worked.
Sitting on a bench near one of the development's avenues, he opened his notebook and reread his notes.
On the first page, he had written:
Possible ghost. Two deaths. Find out how to fight it.
He crossed out the last sentence.
Underneath, he wrote:
Before fighting, discover what the presence is trying to do.
He stared at those words.
His first independent investigation had ended without a fight.
He had used neither salt, nor iron, nor any weapon.
He had not been able to save the men who died before he arrived. That part of the case still weighed on him.
And if Aurora had not barked at the right moment, he might have been seriously hurt himself.
Babizinha would probably have a lot to say about the risks he had taken.
Dant pictured her worried expression at the sight of his injured hand and the condition of his clothes after that night.
He smiled faintly.
He still wanted to tell her what had happened.
But not just then.
He put away the notebook.
Aurora raised her head when she realized he was getting ready to leave.
"Shall we go home?"
She stood up before he could finish the question.
Dant left the bench and glanced back at the street one last time.
Augusto Franco remained the same busy place, filled with people going about their lives.
Perhaps some residents would still tell stories about the blonde woman who appeared inside cars at night.
Perhaps the name Marta Almeida would remain forgotten by almost everyone.
But Davi knew what had happened.
And for now, that seemed enough.
As he walked with Aurora, Dant realized his first hunt had taught him something none of his earlier training had demonstrated quite so clearly.
The supernatural would not always come to him in the shape of a creature ready to attack.
Sometimes it would come as someone trapped in the worst moment of their existence.
And in those cases, the challenge would not be surviving the encounter.
It would be finding a way to finish a story death had cut short.
Aurora gently tugged on her leash, attracted by the smell coming from a food stall.
Dant looked at her.
"After all that, all you can think about is food?"
The little dog kept sniffing.
He laughed.
"All right. Me too."
And they continued along the sidewalk while Aracaju went about another ordinary day.
At least until the next news story.
