Chapter 37 – Heed My Advice

William made a sound. It was a small, strained exhalation, the kind a man makes when he is trying very hard not to drop something heavy and is running out of reasons to believe he won’t.

“Miss Harlowe,” he managed, his voice tight. “I don’t mean to impose, but Inspector Bannerman is—considerably—more than I was anticipating.”

Thomas’s weight had shifted entirely onto William’s right side when Eliza ducked out, and the rookie was compensating with his legs, his knees bent at an angle that suggested they were three seconds from a joint decision to quit. His face had gone from flushed to a deep, alarming crimson.

Eliza glanced back. She regarded the tableau with the mild interest of a woman noticing a vase about to tip, and then stepped in without comment, sliding back under Thomas’s left arm and absorbing the load with an ease that bordered on insulting. William’s posture straightened by several inches. His breathing returned to something that could loosely be classified as normal.

“Thank you,” William breathed.

“Don’t mention it,” Eliza said. “Truly. Don’t.”

William rolled his neck, shook the stiffness from his shoulders, and then looked around. His gaze traveled across the ruins of the Lacquered Swan in a slow, sweeping arc, taking in the full scope of the destruction for the first time. The collapsed ceiling. The bodies. The burlap hoods and the white symbols painted on them. The breach in the wall, gaping like a wound. The chandelier lying in the center of the floor like a discarded crown.

The colour that had returned to his face drained back out.

“What in the Lord’s name happened here?” William asked.

Thomas spat a mouthful of blood onto the rubble. It landed on a piece of cream linen that had once been a tablecloth.

“Great Earth,” he said. “Terrorist attack. Artifact-induced explosion, breached the west wall and took half the structure with it. Eleven operatives entered through the gap. Minimum four casters among them. Weak. Newly ascended Tier 5s at best. Sloppy lattice-work, poor coordination, limited versatility. The rest were mundane. Armed with standard firearms and hand weapons.”

He paused, working his jaw. The cartilage in his nose clicked faintly.

“Systematic execution of civilians. They weren’t here to rob the place or take hostages. They came through the wall shooting the wounded and didn’t stop. Just killing.”

He let that sit. Then, quieter:

“On my day off, too.”

Eliza said nothing.

Thomas glanced at her out of habit, the way partners check each other during debriefs, looking for the nod, the raised eyebrow, the small confirmation that the other set of eyes had caught something the first had missed.

What he saw was not surprise. Eliza Harlowe did not look surprised. She looked, for the span of a single breath, like a woman hearing a door open that she had locked a very long time ago. It was there and gone in less than a second, a contraction somewhere behind her eyes, a micro-stillness in her jaw that didn’t belong to the present moment, and then it was smoothed over, filed away, and the professional mask settled back into place as though it had never shifted.

She offered no comment. Thomas filed it.

“Is there anyone we can interrogate?” William asked. His notebook had appeared in his hand, the pencil already moving. “Anyone still breathing?”

“One,” Thomas said. He shifted his weight, lifting his chin toward the far side of the ruins, past the fallen chandelier. “Over there. The axe-wielder. My sister dropped him before I could get to him.”

He pointed. The spot was partially obscured by a mound of collapsed plaster and a section of overturned banquette, but the shape was visible, a large, broad form lying face-down in the debris, motionless. Beside him, propped against the base of the wall, was the wounded civilian Florence had been treating. The man was sitting upright, his shredded leg extended stiffly in front of him, the improvised tourniquet dark with dried blood above the knee. In his hands, gripped across his lap with white knuckles and a vacant, thousand-yard stare, was the fire axe.

“The rest of the cultists were finished off by a third party,” Thomas added. “Someone else was in the building. Masked. Armed. They engaged the cultists independently. Took out several on the right flank before disappearing.”

William’s pencil stopped. “A third party? Civilian?”

“Unknown. We’ll get to it.”

They moved. It was slow, ugly work, three people navigating a field of broken glass, splintered furniture, and bodies that had to be stepped around rather than over, with one of the three unable to bear weight on his left leg.

They reached the spot. Looked down.

The axe-wielder was enormous even while unconscious. He lay face-down in a scatter of shattered crockery and bent cutlery, his arms splayed wide, the burlap hood twisted sideways on his skull. One ear was exposed, pale and fleshy against the stained fabric. His breathing was shallow but steady, the broad back rising and falling in slow, animal rhythm. But the damage was what drew the eye.

His jaw was wrong. Not broken. Rearranged. The mandible sat at a slight but unmistakable lateral offset, pushed two centimetres to the left of where the Eternal Lord and anatomy had intended it to be. The surrounding tissue was already swelling, the flesh beneath the burlap taut and discoloured, and a thin line of blood and saliva had pooled in the dust beneath his mouth.

“Good Lord,” William said softly.

Eliza tilted her head. She studied the unconscious man the way she studied everything, with a detached, clinical interest that bordered on appreciation.

“You did quite a number on this one, Thomas,” she said.

Thomas stared down at the body. He had been sprinting, pivoting, firing, falling. He had not seen what happened between Florence and the axe-wielder. The man had been swinging down, and then Thomas had been on the floor with a destroyed ankle, and when he looked up, Florence was standing and the cultist was not. He had assumed she’d tripped him. Caught his ankle on a piece of debris. Some accident of physics and adrenaline that had saved her life through sheer luck.

Looking at the jaw, he reconsidered.

“This isn’t my handiwork,” Thomas said. His voice was flat, carefully neutral. “My sister’s.”

The silence that followed was brief but dense.

“Blood mage?” Eliza asked. The question was quiet, almost offhand, but her eyes had sharpened. She glanced down at Thomas’s ankle, then back to his face. “I can feel residue. Sanguimancy. Coming off your joint.”

Thomas nodded. “She healed the hemorrhaging. Pulled the blood out of the capsule so I could stand. Found out about ten minutes ago.”

“Registered?”

“I don’t know.” The admission cost him something. He kept his voice level. “We can find out later.”

William was already moving. He knelt beside the wounded civilian, lowering himself carefully to the man’s level, the notebook disappearing into his coat. He softened his voice, the way good officers learned to, not patronising—just human.

“Sir? Can you hear me? You’re safe now. My name is William. I’m with the Department of Arcane Affairs.”

No response. The man sat against the wall with the axe across his lap and his eyes fixed on a point approximately six inches in front of his own face. He was not seeing the ruins, or William, or anything in the present tense. His lips were slightly parted. His breathing was even. He looked like a man who had stepped out of his own body and left the shell running on whatever fuel remained.

“Sir,” William tried again, gentle but firm. “I’m going to need you to let go of that for me.” He reached slowly toward the axe handle, his movements telegraphed and unthreatening.

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The man flinched. His hands clamped tighter, pulling the axe against his chest, the blade angling away from William with a jerk that was pure reflex and no cognition. The eyes didn’t change. The stare didn’t break. But the fingers weren’t letting go.

“William,” Thomas said. “Leave him. He’s fine.”

William looked up, uncertain.

“Back off,” Thomas said, quieter. “Give him space. He’ll come back on his own time.”

William withdrew. He stood, brushing grit from his knees, and stepped away.

At their feet, the axe-wielder groaned.

It was a low, guttural sound that vibrated in the debris, the noise of a body remembering pain before the mind remembered where it was. His fingers twitched. His shoulder blades shifted beneath the stained fabric of his shirt. The groan became a cough, wet and heavy, and a fresh line of blood and saliva spilled from beneath the burlap hood.

His eyes opened.

Thomas couldn’t see them, not directly. The crude, jagged ovals cut into the burlap were facing the floor. But he saw the moment consciousness returned, because the body changed. The slack, unconscious weight tightened. The fingers stopped twitching and curled into fists. The breathing hitched, caught, and then steadied into something deliberate.

The cultist rolled his head. Slowly. The burlap dragged against the rubble, rotating until the eyeholes faced upward. Through the ragged slits, two bloodshot eyes found the three figures standing over him.

He took them in. The silver insignia on Thomas’s collar. The matching ones on Eliza and William. Three D.A.A. Inspectors, looking down at him from above.

He laughed.

It was not a good laugh. It came out of a ruined jaw and it cost him, every syllable of it purchased with pain. The sound was thick, bubbling, the air catching on the blood pooling at the back of his throat and turning each exhalation into a gurgle. It went on too long. Three seconds. Five. The kind of laughter that wasn’t amusement but overflow, something that had been building pressure behind the ribs and simply needed out.

“Why?” Thomas asked.