In 2012, Drummond Fox walks through Washington Square Park after a long, happy dinner with his close friends Wagner, Lily, and Yasmin. Drummond feels relaxed and slightly drunk, grateful to be in New York and briefly distracted from growing rumors of increasingly violent book hunters.

As an unnatural mist thickens inside the park, the group notices a beautiful woman in a white summer dress standing silently ahead. Drummond immediately senses danger, and when Yasmin challenges the stranger, the woman’s calm smile and the encroaching fog make it clear she is controlling the mist.

The woman attacks with terrifying speed, forcing a book into Lily’s hands; Lily collapses, screaming and uncontrollably smashing her own face into the ground. Yasmin tries to defend them by activating the Book of Light, flaring into blinding brightness, but the mist coils around Yasmin and contains the light like a living trap.

Wagner attempts to confront the woman, but she closes the distance in an instant, strikes him down, and Wagner dies moments later. The mist then crushes Yasmin offscreen with a final scream and a sickening crunch, leaving Yasmin’s body destroyed; the woman calmly retrieves the Book of Light from the remains.

The woman addresses Drummond by name and demands the Fox Library, then brutalizes the still-living Lily to force compliance. Refusing to surrender the library or his books, Drummond uses the Book of Shadows to vanish at the last moment and escapes into the street, fleeing in grief and terror as the woman searches for him.