Grass squelched beneath their boots, wet with more than dew. Drag marks scarred the lawn. Dark streaks. Crushed flowers. A single torn ribbon snagged on a rosebush. A man’s body lay half hidden behind a hedge, his eyes staring at nothing.
The Guardian gagged.
“Stay sharp,” Mingxi murmured. “We don’t know what awaits us.”
The manor doors had been splintered inward. Inside, the stench struck hard. Copper. Broken wards. Terror soaked into stone and wood. Mingxi entered without hesitation.
Blood streaked the hallway in brutal patterns. Slashes. Smears. Handprints that told a story of panic, pursuit, and slaughter. Bodies lay where they had fallen. Some whole. Others grotesquely not.
The Guardian whispered, trembling, “I don’t understand. If someone awakened here, why is there no magical residue?”
“There is residue,” Mingxi said quietly. “Just not from this place.”
His attention shifted to the wall on their left.
Blood had been used to scrawl words in jagged, uneven strokes: Welcome Home Poppy. A message. Mockery. Or a marker.
Mingxi studied the letters.
Poppy.
Was she among the dead? Or the one who had survived?
Whoever had moved through this slaughter had done so with purpose, or with instinct. They had passed straight through the carnage without hesitation.
His brow furrowed.
The leyline’s pull was not diffused throughout the house. It was concentrated. Focused. Calling.
“Upstairs,” he said.
They climbed the blood-slick staircase. Halfway up, Mingxi halted. A shimmer brushed against his senses. Faint. Silver. Moon-aligned. It was not random, and it was not everywhere. The power came from a single point of origin.
The west wing.
He followed the resonance down a silent corridor lined with closed doors until he reached the one left ajar.
A nursery.
Chapter 5
Moon-silver residue shimmered faintly along the threshold, delicate as dust caught in starlight. This was where it happened. This was where someone had shed a single tear and awakened something sleeping in her blood.
A tear. A flare. Then pulses, echoes, waves of magic that shook the leyline. Mingxi felt the afterimage of it: grief not for the bodies, but for something older, deeper. Someone she loved.
He reached for the nursery door and froze.
A voice, soft and trembling, utterly broken, drifted through the crack. “Mother and Father are dead,” the woman whispered. “And I can’t help but wish it were me so I could be with you again.”
Mingxi’s pulse stilled.
“I miss you so much, Lysandra. They sent me away after you died, and I don’t know how I’ve kept breathing.”
Her voice cracked, grief sharpening into venom. “They deserved what happened to them. They deserved worse. If only someone had done this kindness before…” Then softer. Smaller. Shattered. “Before you died.”
Mingxi’s heart clenched as the leyline trembled in answer. He pushed the nursery door open with slow, deliberate care.
Silver motes drifted through the air from the earlier flare, glowing faintly in the moonlight filtering through the window. The room lay in complete disarray, curtains torn, small toys scattered, a chair overturned. At the center of the chaos stood a young woman.
