Gael didn't think he'd be this close to breaking his Bloodless Mandate a mere year and a half after he slaughtered the Repossessors, but well, here he was.

Nights in the Black Bloom Bazaar were rowdy and rainy as ever. A quick glance around the main street revealed about a thousand or two people wandering up and down, trading curses like they were coins, but as of right now, about a solid twenty percent of them were staring at him while giving him a wide berth.

Obviously, who wouldn't give a wide berth to a Plagueplain Doctor holding a man at knifepoint?

Directly around them, ten thieves formed a ring, pistols and knives glinting, shoulders shaking under coats that looked like they'd been stolen from corpses that hadn't finished rotting yet. It was behind them that the Bazaar's night crowd—shoppers, gamblers, whores, apothecaries—whispered like parishioners. Nobody wanted to admit how much they enjoyed this show.

"Don't do it, man!" one of the thieves barked.

"We can talk this out!" shouted another, aiming his pistol at Gael shakily.

Gael ignored them. He pulled the thief he was holding in a chokehold closer to him, growling. "I don't wanna talk. I want my goddamn bag. Where'd you take it? Who'd you sell it to?"

The man in his grip wheezed, but before he could say anything, one of the larger, bulkier thieves stepped forward. "You're not going to hurt him. We all know who you are. You're the Exorcist Doctor, the man with the mandate. You haven't killed in over a year, so why would you start again over something this small?"

"... You fucking stupid or something?"

He laughed. The kind of laugh that made rooms colder. The kind of laugh that invited ghosts to pull up chairs. When none of the thieves answered his question—and only the thunder had an opinion—he pressed his knife deeper into the man's throat.

A small cut opened, a neat bead of blood trickling down the steel.

"Whoa, whoa!

"Slow down!"

"Don't do it!"

Their chorus of pleas almost had rhythm. If someone produced a drum, he'd turned the Bazaar into a festival of panic right now, but instead he cackled. "I'm not fucking around, bitches," he said cheerily. "Wanna test me? Wanna really test me? I've been looking for this bag for an entire fucking year, and you rob it from me? You really must be—"

"Man, are you on drugs?" a thief blurted.

Gael blinked.

He snapped his head to a side alley.

On a trash-lid sat the Black Bloom Bazaar's backalley mudspotted frog, belly lamping in and out like a lantern. It shook its head gravely and croaked, "Say no."

Gael whipped his head back to the thief. "No."

"Man, look at this guy. He's super on drugs—"

He shoved the knife deeper until the bead of blood slipped down the hostage's neck. "Ten seconds until I ventilate your friend here, fuckwads! Tell me what I wanna know! Ten! Nine! Eight! Sev—"

"Alright! Alright!" A scarred man with the face of someone born apologizing shoved through the ring, pistol lowered, hands up. Boss-face. Definitely the boss. "We get it! Just let the man go, man! He's got a wife and kids!"

"Name!" Gael snapped. "The buyer! What's his sorry-ass name?"

The boss licked rain from his lips. "He's… uh, he's a rich old bastard. I think he likes to collect rare things."

"What's he look like?"

"I don't know, he wore a mask when he contacted us. He doesn't have a name, either, just a nickname—"

"What is it?"

The boss hesitated. "Gravewarden."

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Stupid-ass name."

"We—we've got the coins he paid us with." The boss fumbled and pulled a small leather pouch from his cloak. "It's got a strange mint to it. A wrong smell. Maybe you can… do your doctor magic and track him down by stink?"

"Toss it, scarface."

The pouch landed in Gael's palm with a jingle. He opened it, sniffed once, and confirmed these were, indeed, antique coins. Bone-dust tang. Preservative oils. Coins that'd been dead longer than most buildings.

Interesting.

At the same time, he shoved the hostage back into the arms of his companions. They swarmed him immediately, clutching, fretting, and whispering "You good? You good?" like hens around a bruised chick. It was almost touching in a poultry sort of way.

Gael pocketed the pouch, slid the knife back into his coat, and turned his back on all of them. The ring opened for him like a stage curtain, and the thieves didn't even bother stopping him as he walked into an alley and whistled.

The whistle wasn't music. It was a set of instructions disguised as a bad song.

Ten seconds later, a shadow fell over him. A black shape landed on a crate, wings folding as she took off the upper half of her flower-patterned mask.

"You're two seconds late."

Evelyn tilted her head. She was taller now, almost Maeve's height. She'd had a pretty big growth spurt in just the past year and a half. He supposed nobody would believe her now if she said she was only fourteen years old.

She hopped off the crate and fell in beside him, flower-patterned cloak dripping wet.

Behind them, the thieves were still trying to salvage their dignity.

"You're mad!" one of them shouted. "If your wife was here, she'd smack you across the skull for that stunt!"

Gael had to glare over his shoulder at that. "She doesn't control me! I control her! I'm the boss of the relationship!"

"No you're not!" another thief barked.

"Brother, you don't even have a relationship with your own socks! Save your theology for laundry day!"

They pushed deeper into the alley's throat. The Bazaar's glow dimmed behind them into a bruise-colored smear, and as rain pitter-pattered down from the overhead shingles, Evelyn snuck a glance at him.

"Um," she ventured. "Are you and Maeve still fightin'?"

He clicked his tongue. "It's not my fault that she thinks a reasonable amount of arson is an unreasonable amount of arson."

Evelyn chewed on that. "But it might be your fault because you called it 'a reasonable amount of arson' durin' the Blightmarch gang council meetin'."

"Semantics."

"You also set the sample table on fire to demonstrate."

"It was a controlled burn. The table merely lacked self-control."

"Right."

He cleared his throat. "Enough of that. Have we been…" He lowered his voice and looked around nervously, angling his body so the word slid off the alley walls. "Compromised?"

Evelyn straightened in a snap and saluted with two fingers to her brow. "Negative, Doctor. No tails, no eyes, no ghosts in the gutters. We're clear."

"Hell yeah."

"But shouldn't we at least tell Cara about this? She always says full transparency makes for a healthy work environment."

"Cara will murder me if she even smells what I'm doing, and if she smells you helping me, she'll kill you too," he said. "It's in both of our best interests that absolutely nobody in the clinic hears a single word about any of this. You hear me? Nobody."

Evelyn visibly shuddered. "When she gets mad, she holds the ladle like a sword."

"And she doesn't miss. Understood?"

"Understood," she said quickly.

Then he dug the pouch out of his coat and pressed it into her hands. The antique coins clinked with a dry, bone-dust note, and a breath of old cellar escaped the leather's seam.

"Can you track the scent back to its owner?"

She undid the thong, tipped the mouth open, and inhaled with an earnest frown. Her nose wrinkled. "Yeah. That's… wow. It's old. And oily. And there's a note of… I dunno. Sadness? Is sadness a smell?"

"Everything's a smell in Bharncair," he said. "You've been nose-deep in our butchered Myrmurs for a year and a half. Use your mutations and shit. You've got the 'Scent Spiral' mutation, right?"

She nodded, a little pride sneaking into her voice despite the gloom. "I can track this."

"Good." He flicked her forehead with his finger, then pointed up. "Fly."

She huffed and unfolded her wing-plates. Black, ribbed membranes shivered out from under her cloak, caught the rain, and flattened into proper wings.

She took one more sniff, pointed her chin west, and leapt for the sky.

Gael cracked his wrist, whipping out his giant hungry flower like a grappling hook. It bit onto the edge of the roof, and then he reeled himself up, swinging over the edge so he could take a knee on the roofline.

The Black Bloom Bazaar sprawled below like an excitable organism, pulsing with light, noise, and commerce. Fights were festivals here; festivals were funerals with better food; the Black Bloom was at its busiest, which meant every sin was on sale with a volume discount.

But tonight, he only had one target on his mind.

Evelyn's shadow skimmed across the roofs. West. She was heading west. He spared exactly one second to make a gentlemanly oath to himself that he would absolutely not let that bag slip his fingers again—and then he rose and ran.

He was about to skip across his first roof in pursuit of Evelyn when his ankle chain tugged at him.

He frowned into the rain, head cocked.

And what the hell are you doing, Exorcist?

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