The two of them stood in the darkened mansion, cane and umbrella tapping lazily against the floorboards.

  Gael knew the place was likely abandoned by all but the sick and dying baron, but it was still eerily silent, and it was the kind that made his ears ring and his mind wander in unfortunate directions. What if some horrible specter or a wight or a ghoul was just waiting to shove its rotten hand through his chest and rip out his heart?

  Or worse, what if Maeve saw something first and one-upped him in spotting a ghost?

  No, no.

  Absolutely unacceptable.

  “Alright.” He exhaled coolly, adjusting his hat. “We’re looking for the vault. Big, important, full of shiny things. Should be easy enough.”

  Except, instead of looking for the vault, he and Maeve got distracted almost immediately the second they started strolling through the mansion. They sauntered through the mansion like cats let loose in a silk factory. The place was a rotting monument to wealth. The carpets were thick as corpses, muffling their steps, and the chandeliers above dripped with crystals big enough to club a man to death.

  And oh, the loot just lying around.

  Gold-rimmed vases stood proud and abandoned, collecting dust instead of flowers. Velvet-upholstered chairs sat perfectly intact except for the occasional moth-eaten corner. Cabinets of exquisite glassware glimmered in the dark, untouched, pristine—all practically begging to be stolen.

  Gael whistled low and quiet. He hoped it wasn’t showing on his face, but he was impressed by the sheer quantity of items in this hallway alone.

  “Now, this,” he gestured grandly at the overwhelming decadence, “is what I call an utter waste of Marks. Aren’t you glad we picked this old bastard to rob instead of someone else?”

  Maeve—who’d been appraising a fat, plain white urn like a jeweler eyeing a diamond—huffed. “I like this.”

  Gael arched a brow. “A hundred golden-framed treasures, and you like… the urn.”

  “It’d look good in the clinic.”

  “What for?”

  “For putting things inside.”

  Gael snorted. “If I’m taking anything, I’m taking this.” He lifted a small, exquisitely grotesque statuette of what appeared to be a baron with a very punchable face sitting on a windowsill.

  Maeve narrowed her eyes. “And you’re taking that for?”

  “Paperweight.”

  “You can’t afford paper.”

  “For now.” He gave the grinning little baron a satisfied nod, flicking it on the head. “But when I can, I’ll be prepared.”

  Their search for the vault very quickly devolved into a game of ‘if you could take one thing, what would it be?’ A jeweled compass caught Maeve’s eye; Gael suggested it was probably cursed. A set of pure silver cutlery sat untouched in a drawer; Maeve said she wouldn’t mind a proper meal set for once. Gael said he could fence it for triple the value if they polished it up. They found a tapestry of a long-dead noble, eyes woven in such a way its gaze always seemed to follow the two of them wherever they looked at it from. Maeve declared it creepy. Gael declared it a great room divider.

  Somewhere between admiring a gilded spyglass and contemplating if the ruby-eyed crow statue had anything valuable inside, they reached the end of the second-floor hallway. A grand, dusty, cob-web filled staircase loomed ahead, splitting up to the third floor and down to the first.

  And—surprisingly—not a single guard, servant, or terrifying flesh-ghoul in sight.

  “... Well,” Gael mumbled, adjusting his hat again, “since this place is apparently guarded by nothing but taxidermy and bad taste, I say we split up.”

  Maeve’s head snapped toward him. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Gael flashed a grin. “Just drunk. But if we cover more ground separately, we’ll find the vault faster.” He lifted his cane and tapped it against the banister. The gold railings were hollow, and films of dust lifted into the air as he dragged his cane down. “Unless you’ve got a better plan, I don’t see any bloodthirsty housekeepers lurking in the shadows. What’s wrong with splitting up?”

  She scowled. “In every horror chronicle I’ve ever read, splitting up is how people get killed.”

  “Oh? You read horror? Name some.”

  “The Lurking Hunger. Blood House. The Rot in the Walls.”

  He clicked his tongue. “Old school. Those came out decades ago.”

  “So?”

  “So,” he grinned again, “new horror’s gotten bolder. New Chroniclers don’t do the whole ‘oh no, we’re splitting up, we’re doomed’ thing anymore. They go full murking mode. ‘Oh no, we’re separated? Guess I’ll just pull out a bioarcanic pistol and shoot this Myrmic nightmare in the face.’ See the difference?”

  Her eyes darkened like she was personally offended. “Excuse you, but those classic horror chronicles were all I had to read as a child.”

  “And what kind of shithole did you grow up in if ‘Blood House’ was all you had to read?”

  She bristled. “You—”

  He cut her off, sweeping an arm around the vast, gilded corridor. “Alright, look around.” He turned in place, letting his cane sweep across the air. “Detect any sinister entities? Any oozing wall-hands? Any feral ghoul-nannies with a hunger for human spleens?”

  It was a rhetorical question that made her grumble.

  “Exactly,” he continued. “So, we split up. Find the vault, and—if we do this fast enough—we’ll be back to Miss Alba’s in time for supper noodles.”

  That got her.

  “... Fine.” She pointed up the stairs. “I’ll take the second and third floors, so you go down.”

  Before splitting up, though, they tested the chain connecting their ankles. Maeve had said it was adaptive, stretching based on how in sync they were with each other. Right now, it gave them a decent amount of distance before pulling taut—about thirty metres, give or take.

  Maeve gave it a sharp tug. “Let’s set up signals.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “One sharp tug means we’ve found the vault. Two means there’s danger. Come help. Three means—”

  “We book it. Clear and simple.”

  “You won’t forget?”

  “Please.” Gael tapped his temple. “I am a doctor.”

  “Shifty, illegal, back alley Plagueplain Doctor.”

  “Still counts.”

  With that, they parted. Maeve disappeared up the stairs, while Gael took it down to the first.

  His cane tapped. The wood groaned. The air smelled of antique rot, gilded excess, and something faintly metallic.

  And for the first time since they’d entered the mansion, he felt entirely alone.

  Nice.

  Don’t gotta hear her yapping on and on about flower vases anymore.

  In any case, the place reeked of old money and bad decisions.

  He ambled down the stairs and through the empty halls, cane tapping against the marble floors. The sound echoed too loudly in the stillness, stretching into places he couldn’t see. At the bottom of the stairs, a dark banquet hall opened before him, its polished floors smooth as glass. Chandeliers hung like frozen skeletons from the ceiling, their brass arms dulled by layers of neglect. He could almost hear the ghosts of past celebrations—the clinking of goblets, the swell of laughter, footsteps twirling in a long-forgotten waltz—but the air here was stale. Hollow.

  No warmth, no life, only the remnants of something that had rotted away long ago. It’d all be pitch-black, too, were it not for hazy moonlight filtering in through the dust-sheened windows on the walls.

  How dreary.

  He passed a long dining table, its surface covered in a fine layer of dust. Silver goblets and plates still sat untouched, waiting for meals that’d never come. The chairs were all perfectly arranged, stiff and unmoved. He picked up a goblet and sniffed it. Just metal and time. He put it back, wiping his hand absently on his coat.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  It was the walls that stopped him.

  The banquet hall wasn’t decorated with the usual noble vanity. No self-indulgent paintings of barons in gold-trimmed coats, and no sterile portraits of powerful ancestors meant to loom over guests. Instead, the walls held something stranger. Something warmer.

  Crude drawings.

  Families.

  On one of the murals, a father, tall and broad-shouldered, stood with his arms around a woman and a child. A little girl with wild curls and a bright smile clung to their hands. More portraits of her in different moments—laughing, dancing, curled up with a book—were hung around the walls. Some of them were charcoal sketches, rushed and scratchy. Others were messy oil paintings, yet still rendered with so much care he almost felt like he could step inside them.

  A baron’s house ain’t supposed to look like this.

  A rich man who wears their love on their sleeve is a fake rich man.

  He ran a thumb over his jaw. If the man who owned this place had a family, what the hell had he done to get kicked out of the Vharnveil? Even if he wasn’t a Blood Baron from one of the Four Black Baron Households—those bastards who supposedly lived forever by swapping out their insides like old coats—he must’ve done something spectacularly wicked to end up exiled here.

  A chill dragged its fingers down his spine, but he moved on from the banquet hall and into a smaller room at the end of it.

  The kitchen doors swung open with a groan, and the moment he stepped inside, something shifted. The air felt heavier. This room had been left in a hurry. Papers littered the counters. Broken glass crunched beneath his boot. The cabinets hung open, some doors torn from their hinges. And covering the walls, layered over one another in frantic, desperate stacks—medical notes.

  He stepped closer. Dust clung to the pages as usual, but the ink beneath was dark enough to bleed through.

  … Infection reports?

  Some were neatly written, others scratched out in the same urgent hand. He skimmed through them: Nightspawn infestations, Myrmurs parasitizations, bloodborne contagions, notes on failed curse treatments. One page in particular caught his eye, stained and half-crumpled.

  Patient: Loraine Veydris. Age: 8. Curse Symptoms: Onset unknown. Patient refuses to speak. High bodily temperature. Rapid metabolic failure. Early-stage infestation—

  A giggle sounded behind him. Too quiet yet soft and high, like a child laughing just behind his shoulder.

  He turned fast.

  Nothing.

  The kitchen stretched before him yet, untouched. No movement, no shadow, no figure lurking just out of sight.

  His fingers tightened around the handle of his bladed cane.

  …

  The silence that followed was too thick.

  Maybe he’d imagined it. Maybe it was just the wind, or the way sound twisted through the empty halls.

  But the back of his neck prickled as he exhaled sharply, rolling his shoulders. “If you’re a ghost, don’t bother. I don’t do exorcisms,” he whispered.

  No response. Good.

  He turned on his heel and continued through the first floor.

  The mansion seemed bigger than before. He moved through endless rooms, endless corridors, every step taking him deeper into a place that felt like it was curling around him, shifting behind his back when he wasn’t looking. His cane tapped steadily against the floor. He listened for anything out of place.

  Then, at the end of an L-shaped corridor, he found himself facing a bare wall.

  No paintings. No dust-covered relics. Just smooth stone, unmarked, and all too clean.

  His lips pulled into a slow grin. He ran his fingers along the surface, searching. Eventually, he found it: a cold, metal torch sconce. He gripped it and yanked down.

  The wall groaned, stone grinding against stone as it creaked open.

  How typical.

  And behind it—a vault.

  He stepped forward, eyes gleaming behind his mask. The vault door was massive, old, and reinforced with bronze like it was hiding something worth killing for. It probably was hiding something worth killing for. At the center was the lock: an intricate mechanism shaped like a pendant, with a thin keyhole at its center.

  “Jackpot,” he muttered.

  He tugged on his chain once, calling Maeve over. If there was one good thing about being perpetually connected, it was that he knew for certain she was still alive. He could still feel her moving somewhere above, footsteps distant but steady.

  In the meantime, he crouched, tapping his cane against the lock. It looked impossible to crack physically without the pendant or the key, but he fished a small vial from his coat, rolling it between his fingers. One of his more volatile acids. It should be able to melt through the mechanism if he was careful.

  As he popped the cork, though, a strange smell hit him.

  Faint. Metallic.

  Rotting.

  It came from behind the vault, and he’d lived in Bharncair long enough to recognize it on instinct.

  Wait a fucking minute.

  This is—

  Footsteps. Soft. Light.

  Right behind him.

  Gael spun as giggles sounded again, his bladed cane snapping out of its sheath.

  This time, he wasn’t alone.

  The left half of his vision became tinted red.

  Maeve wandered through the upper halls, her fingers trailing along the edge of a long-abandoned bookshelf. The mansion was beautiful in that eerie, untended way, its grandeur still lingering beneath the years of neglect. Chandeliers swayed slightly with the draft, and the old wallpaper peeled in delicate curls, revealing the bones of the house beneath.

  This place had been made for a family. That much was obvious.

  The shelves weren’t just filled with the weighty tomes of a nobleman’s library—legal texts, upper city histories, and economic treatises—but with books meant for children. Fairy tales and adventure novels. Thin, well-loved volumes with faded spines.

  She stopped when she spotted a familiar one. A horror book, part of a series she’d always wanted to read as a child but never could.

  She pulled it from the shelf, brushing dust from the embossed title. The cover was cracked but still intact, its illustration of a haunted lighthouse nearly identical to the one she’d once seen in the shop windows of Vharnveil.

  And for a brief moment, she remembered home.

  The floating City of Splendors, gleaming under a bright morning sun. The smell of ink and parchment in the market stalls. The way she’d pressed her hands against the glass of a bookstore and stared for too long. Her parents had been just a few steps ahead, talking, laughing. She’d been about to ask them if she could buy the newest volume of ‘Blood House’ when—

  Her ears popped, and she winced as she dropped the book, her fingers flying up to her head.

  Ow.

  She let the memory trail off before she could dwell on it too long—before it could root itself in places she didn’t want it.

  This… isn’t the time for memories.

  Still, as she looked around, she saw the toys and the little trinkets scattered across the shelves. Dolls, wooden figurines, and a music box that’d long since stopped playing. Things a child had once loved. Things she’d never owned.

  She could take some of them back to the clinic. The books, at least. She was sure Miss Alba’s children would love them.

  But she shouldn’t.

  She was here for ten thousand Marks, not for sentimental things left behind by someone else’s past. If the old baron had been rich enough to afford all this extravagance, he wouldn’t miss that amount of money—

  “A Child of the Sallow Hearth?”

  Maeve whirled fast, her umbrella snapping up before she even thought about it.

  A man stood in the hallway behind her.

  He was old at first glance. His clothes were tattered baronial finery, the kind of noblewear that’d once been exquisite before time and neglect had ruined it. A tailcoat, torn at the hem. A once-golden pocket watch chain glinting against stained fabric. A mask of tempered glass and fluted brass tubes jutting out the cheeks. A top hat, tilted slightly forward, casting his face in shadow.

  But he wasn’t really that old.

  Even under the filth and unshaven face, she could see that he was only in his mid-fifties. His features had the unmistakable air of nobility: high cheekbones, faded golden hair, straight posture, and a presence that suggested he had once been able to execute entire rooms with a single glance.

  Only now, he was looking out the window to his side.

  Moonlight softened his expression, turning it almost wistful. His eyes, clouded and milky white, stared out at something. A tree, perhaps. Or a tombstone. She couldn’t tell.

  “They sneak in here sometimes,” he breathed. “Children of that orphanage in the west. They think I don’t notice, but I do. I always do. They play, they laugh, they break things, and they take what isn’t theirs.”

  Maeve swallowed, her grip tightening on her umbrella. Something about him made her uneasy. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Not yet. Just something cold, creeping up her spine.

  She wasn’t sure why.

  He didn’t even seem to be looking at her.

  Then, as if sensing her tension, he let out a small chuckle. “No worries. I won’t tell the Director if you won’t,” he said, voice light, almost amused. “This mansion was built for joy. For my family. And for all the children of Bharncair. Just go ahead and play as much as you’d like.”

  Then he turned around slowly, and though his clouded eyes remained unfocused, his mouth behind the glass mask curled into something like a smile.

  “Just don’t be too noisy,” he added, winking over his shoulder. “And, oh—if you see my daughter, do me a favor, would you?”

  Maeve’s throat tightened.

  His daughter?

  “She loves playing hide and seek,” he continued. “It’s her favorite game. If you run into her, pretend to be the hunter. Play tag with her. She’s still very young, so you’ll definitely give her a fright.”

  He resumed walking away.

  And, for Maeve’s part, she let out a slow, shaky breath as she finally realized half of her vision was already tinted red.

  She saw it now.

  That umbilical cord trailing from the back of his right hand, thin and fleshy and black, writhing just barely as it led in the same direction as her chain.

  … Myrmur Host.

  But before she could do anything about him, she felt two sharp tugs on her chain.

  Gael yanked the chain twice again.

  No response.

  Ah, fuck.

  I ain’t drunk enough for this.

  He grinned—nervous, teeth barely showing—and pressed his back against the vault door, his bladed cane held at a slight, casual angle. Not threatening. Not yet. Just enough to keep the thing in front of him guessing.

  She was a little girl standing in the middle of the corridor.

  More accurately, ‘she’ was a Myrmur that’d once seen a little girl and decided ‘yeah, that’ll do’.

  She had the dress of a noble’s daughter, embroidered with delicate lace and golden trim. Except, of course, it wasn’t made of silk. It was made of flesh. Pale, pulsing, stitched together like something a butcher had pieced together with trembling hands. He could see where the skin folded over itself at the seams. Where the Myrmur breathed.

  Her face wasn’t much better.

  She had a child’s features, mostly. Round cheeks, a little nose. But stretched. Tilted wrong. Her mouth was a bit too wide, her teeth a bit too sharp. And her eyes—black and bottomless, like deep wells that’d never known sunlight.

  Oh, and her arm.

  One was normal, small and thin and delicate. The other was huge like an oversized cannon with a claw for a hand, fingers curled into long, serrated blades.

  Her nightmarish grin widened as she giggled again, cracking her neck perpendicular to her shoulders.

  … Absolutely wonderful.

  Just how I like to spend two nights in a row.

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