Mingxi stepped closer, crouching to inspect the wounds. The Guardian averted her eyes. Penelope didn’t. With her arms folded, jaw tight enough to crack, she watched Mingxi work.
He traced two fingers along the man’s shirt, a burn mark, dark and circular, like a sigil scorched into the fabric. His brows lowered.
This was deliberate. Magical. And recent.
“Councilor Shen?” Penelope’s voice was sharp, controlled. “What are you seeing?”
Mingxi rose slowly. “This mark wasn’t made by a blade,” he said. “Or by the revenants.”
“Then who?” she pressed.
Mingxi met her eyes. “The same magic that created the revenant was used here. But this man wasn’t turned. He was drained.”
Penelope’s expression didn’t change. Her voice, however, sharpened to a lethal edge. “So the murderer can raise the dead,” she said, “and they can feed.”
Mingxi nodded once. “Yes.”
Penelope exhaled through her nose, short, controlled, aristocratic.
“Then we are no longer dealing with a killer,” she said. “Instead, it’s a monster.”
Chapter 10
Before Mingxi could respond, a faint noise whispered from the back corner of the storeroom. Not the dragging scrape of a revenant. Not the cold, wet sound of something undead.
A breath.
A single, hitching, ragged breath.
Penelope’s head snapped toward the sound.
The Guardian moved first, blade drawn, boots crunching over broken wood as she edged toward the shadowed corner behind the overturned shelving.
“Councilor,” she began.
The sound came again. A muffled sob.
Mingxi lifted a hand. “Alive,” he murmured.
The Guardian blinked and then shoved aside a heap of collapsed linens.
A woman jolted upright from the darkness with a scream. “Don’t. Please no. Stay back. Stay back.”
She was young, perhaps twenty. A maid, judging by the torn uniform and the blood smeared across her apron, where she placed her shaking hands against her ribs.
Her face was streaked with tears. Her hair was wild. Her eyes were huge and glassy with terror. She shrank into the corner, hands raised as though warding off a blow while begging for rescue.
Penelope did not move. Her expression did not crack. Not even a flicker.
The contrast was immediate and brutal.
“M-my lady,” the maid sobbed. “Please. Please don’t let it get me.”
Penelope stepped forward with the poise of someone entering a ballroom, not a slaughterhouse.
Her voice was level. Calm. Eerily so. “What did you see?”
The maid flinched. A fresh sob tore from her throat.
