“Brace yourself, Mar. This bit’s a mad one.”
They were really doing this, then.
August sighed, then led the others forward and through.
The numbing cold crashed over him all at once, stealing his breath like the time he fell into the castle’s fishpond in the dead of winter. He released their hands long enough to mend the tear, then took them again and pressed forward.
The officers were gone, and the decaying street lay bathed in pale silver light. Dried leaves littered the ground, crumbling silently beneath their steps. When they reached the entrance, August stopped. No door, only swirling black stretching across the frame.
He tested it, touching the surface with the toe of his shoe. There was no resistance. After a moment of hesitation, hestepped cautiously through, relieved when Felix and Marlow easily followed. He tore open an entrance back into their world, and they all spilled out into the dim shop.
A single mounted lantern hung near the door, offering just enough light to see by. The air carried an odd scent—sweet and musty, tinged with ammonia and a faint trace of metal.
August released their hands and turned to assess the damage. They both swayed on their feet, disoriented and off balance, and Marlow looked a bit green. But they were still upright.
Felix had been right. The less time spent inside the Hollow Dark, the less it seemed to affect them.
“Alright,” Felix said, dipping behind the counter. “Search everywhere. There must be paperwork or something. A ledger maybe? Any clue about what they’re doing, and where. And be quick. He wouldn’t have left a lantern on if he were gone for the night.”
August walked the length of the room. The shelves, mostly bare, held only a few scattered jars and bottles, their glass surfaces dusty and unlabeled.A front for crooked dealings, Marlow had said. The things they sold here weren’t legal. The rest must have been stocked away somewhere more discreet.
At the back of the shop, he found another door and eased it open just enough to peer inside.
Only darkness waited.
“I need light,” he whispered.
Another lantern flared to life behind him. Felix and Marlow joined him a moment later.
Felix held the lantern just inside the back room. Its glow barely pierced the thick shadows. He stepped in first, and August followed, eyes straining against the gloom.
After a moment, Felix lit a second flame—a wall-mounted lantern across the room. This one burned brighter, its light reaching the far corners, revealing not the expected plants andpowders of an apothecary back room, but something closer to a surgery theatre.
All three of them swore at once.
A wooden medical cot with thick leather restraints stood in the centre of the grimy plank floor, its surface stained dark. Beside it sat a table holding steel tools with ivory handles and sharp-looking blades. The smell he had picked up from the front of the shop was pungent here.
A memory surged forward without warning: his father in the four-poster bed, blankets stained red, cobalt blue fabric cascading around him. That same awful smell. Blood, he realized.
August’s stomach lurched, and nausea climbed his throat.
No, that never happened. His father died of heart failure. Peaceful and asleep. There was no blood.
Then what was that, and why had he seen it?
It felt like a memory, sharp and real, but it couldn’t be.
“What in Naethara is this place?” Marlow asked.
The others moved cautiously through the room, their voices too quiet to hear, but August was caught in the web of his thoughts, trying to conjure the image back, to figure out what it meant.
“Would it kill you to help, Aesling?” Marlow’s voice again.
August looked up, but his attention caught on a flash of silver, a stark contrast to the bleakness that surrounded him. He moved to the table and picked it up, turning it over in his palm. It was a tarnished silver locket. Inside, behind a layer of glass, lay a woven lock of auburn hair.
He grimaced and dropped it on the floor.
Marlow and Felix had stopped to inspect a cylindrical chamber at the far edge of the room. A metal pipe protruded from the back, disappearing into the soot-stained hearth.
