Soon after Yvette’s supper concluded, Winslow arrived with updates, his coat speckled with rain.

  “Contained?” Ulysses’ cigar glowed in the dim parlor.

  “Barely. The jurisdiction overlaps were… messy.” Winslow adjusted his cuffs. “That wax Young Master Ives mentioned? My marionettes handled it cleanly. Met’s Occult Division still struggles with the stuff—it liquefies living tissue. Without automatons, we’d have evacuated the manor.”

  Yvette leaned forward. “And the Viscountess’s public story?”

  A glamorous noblewoman’s demise—front-page fodder for every scandal sheet.

  “Blamed on Met’s recent gang arrests.” Winslow’s mechanical eye whirred softly. “Narrative: Thugs bribed her lady-in-waiting Moore, drugged the staff, attempted looting. Viscountess avoided the tainted soup, confronted them, got murdered. Mundane enough.”

  “Yet the Viscountess herself—alive? Those murdered girls… her doing or Moore’s?” During the battle, Yvette recalled, the noblewoman had lain unconscious elsewhere.

  Evidence suggested ignorance—binding Moore, preparing poisons. Perhaps the sewer corpses were the monster’s independent hunts.

  “Missing prostitutes trace to her.” Winslow produced a singed parchment scrap. “Found hidden in her jewelry case. A ‘Rejuvenation Elixir’ fragment from an Elder God grimoire.”

  “The Book of Azrael.” Ulysses exhaled smoke like a pronouncement.

  “Precisely. Temptation’s ledger.”

  Yvette frowned. “An elixir… in a ritual text?”

  “Superficially, a pharmacopoeia.” Winslow’s glove creaked as he gestured. “But these concoctions only function for the owner. Lose a page, recreate it perfectly—it’s inert. Thus classified as Relic-class grimoire, high-risk.”

  He cited history: A medieval warlord, empowered by Azrael’s pages, dominated rivals until his wife stole a recipe. His next “Hero’s Draught” became lethal nightshade brew. He died mid-battle, forsaken by vanished magic.

  “And its true evil?” Yvette pressed.

  “The recipes demand depravity. Murder. Necrophagy. Debauchery. Worse—it warps the mind. Early pages seem eccentric. Later ones… addictive. Saints become butchers, chasing stronger thrills.”

  “So the Viscountess took those girls for the elixir’s heart-blood?”

  “While Moore—another god’s devotee—ate the remains. She’s en route to Research now. Her biology… defies classification.”

  Yvette grimaced. Charred, dismembered, yet still squirming—no ordinary mutations.

  “My oversight:” Winslow’s jaw tightened. “Traces led from Moore’s closet box to sewers. Pumpkin-sized entity escaped. Disciplinary letters await drafting—"

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Folly.” Ulysses crushed his cigar. “This district’s agents ignored a festering threat. Had we not stumbled upon it, how many more would that creature have devoured? Formal censure is necessary—let indolent oafs choke on their negligence.”

  There it is, Yvette mused. Ulysses’ blame-redirection genius—framing their midnight chimney intrusion as dutiful “colleague activities.” Masterful.

  Unseen by all, the monster in transit decayed strangely. Grafted limbs sloughed off like rotten fruit. By Tower arrival, forearms decomposed mid-swing. Researchers frowned at twitching remains.

  “Last feeding?”

  “Three weeks since disappearances stopped. Death-row donor en route.”

  The Veil demanded hard choices.

  When the shackled convict entered—a hardened killer—he sobbed at the creature’s half-charred maw and squirming limbs. The monstrosity fed. Flesh knitted.

  Next dawn, notes recorded: Subject despondent. Mutters abandonment.

  “Restoring its strength risks containment breaches,” a lead researcher warned. “But its mind decays—starved of symbiotic partner from the escaped box.”

  Resolution came swiftly. Within sacred geometry circles, thaumaturgic flames rose. What remained became crystallized essence—raw material for safer artifacts.

  The Abyss stared back. They made certain it blinked first.

  The azure glow of the Hammer of Witches sigils pulsed to life, casting jagged shadows across the ritual chamber. The monstrosity at the circle’s heart remained motionless—a blasphemous mockery of piety, claws clasped as if in prayer, carapace glistening like cathedral stained glass drenched in rot. Only when eldritch flames began stripping its flesh did the researchers remember this wasn’t some saintly martyr, but a thing spat from cosmic gulfs.

  Praying? The notion curdled blood. To what stygian god did it whisper? To the colossus coiled between spiral nebulae, whose vigil over Earth bent reality to madness? Could such an entity—nameless, formless—even acknowledge this abomination’s devotions?

  None dared dwell on answers. Veterans exchanged uneasy glances. Each ritual peeled back another layer of night’s veil, revealing humanity’s fragility against the things knitting existence’s frayed edges.

  "Field ops outdid themselves," a junior technician breathed, adjusting his spectacles.

  "Priceless specimen," scoffed a gray-bearded alchemist. "We scraped its cells for weeks and only confirmed the obvious—it’s a flesh-horror stitched from corpses. Incinerate it before we get ideas."

  Ulysses would’ve smiled at their caution. Now, though, he watched Yvette wobble up the grand staircase—a far more delicate puzzle.

  "Your mortal coil’s still knitting itself, Princess," he drawled, trailing her like a disgruntled chaperone. "Must you risk splattering like overripe melon on the foyer tiles?"

  Yvette’s grip whitened on the banister. "Movement rebuilds muscle. And stop calling me that."

  "Adorable, your mortal compulsions. Did you know stairfalls kill two hundred Albionites annually? Tragic waste of good brandy."

  She ignored him, focusing on her legs’ alien fragility. When the euphoria hit—coppery and bright, like kissing a live wire—she almost welcomed it.

  "You’re grinning," Ulysses noted, too casually.

  Her fingers flew to numb lips. "Hallucinations. From the crystal."

  Liar. She recognized this feral joy from the train massacre. Some parasitic godling’s spawn had died tonight, and a shard of her reveled in its death-throes.

  The dream came clawing after midnight.

  Cold floorboards. Cleaver sticky with viscera. Someone’s knocking—

  The door creaked open to reveal Miss Moore’s human simulacrum, pearl-buttoned gloves flawless.

  "Kinslayer," it crooned. "Let us merge. Let my flesh seed your ascension. We’ll dance upon dead stars when the veil burns."

  Reality frayed. Yvette awoke gasping, clutching sweat-damp sheets.

  Only fragments remained—a hayloft childhood memory not her own. A violet meteor piercing summer skies. Village children’s laughter curdling to screams as the cracked stone birthing something slick and chittering, its limbs clicking like rosary beads...

  "León was there," she whispered. "Blackjack. Before he became..."

  The revelation hung like a dagger.