There was no time to find Sir Granville or the Royal Guard now. Every second counted, and they had to ride toward the oncoming train immediately—hopefully intercepting it in time.

  Yvette’s gaze landed squarely on the Duke’s chestnut stallion: a flawless thoroughbred, its powerful legs coiled like springs beneath rippling muscles.

  Fast. It might just be fast enough.

  "Your Grace, I need your horse," she said curtly. "I’ll explain later—just know someone’s trying to bomb the Queen’s train." She seized the reins before he could object.

  "Easy, girl," the Duke drawled as he dismounted, visibly amused by her urgency. Under other circumstances—say, without her stone-faced guardian glaring daggers—he’d have prolonged the charade for entertainment. Royal assassinations? A trifle. Replaceable figureheads bored him.

  "I’ll accompany you," Ulysses cut in.

  His own horse, while sturdy, was no match for a racer built for brief, explosive sprints. But Yvette’s slight frame wouldn’t overburden the high-strung stallion—unlike a full-grown man.

  She opened her mouth to argue—he should stay, alert Sir Granville, have Windsor’s telegraph office warn the next station—but Ulysses was already redirecting the Duke toward the castle’s steward. "I’ll keep up," he assured.

  No further discussion. Yvette swung onto the prancing thoroughbred, dug in her heels, and shot forward like a bullet.

  Ulysses drew a syringe from his coat, punctured his forearm, and withdrew a vial of amber-hued serum. The injection struck the horse’s neck. Instantly, the beast’s eyes flooded crimson; froth bubbled from its nostrils as tendons stood taut beneath its skin.

  Then—it erupted.

  Hooves tore earth with unnatural ferocity, matching the racer’s breakneck pace through sheer, drug-induced frenzy.

  "The lengths people go to for killing a glorified stamp," mused the Duke as he mounted Yvette’s discarded horse. Indifferent as he was, royal displeasure meant social exile—and that simply wouldn’t do.

  Across the windswept plains, rider and shadow raced the iron rails in silence. The Duke’s cynicism lingered in Yvette’s thoughts.

  Modern monarchy was theater. Albion’s rulers signed speeches drafted by others, smiles frozen for cameras. No longer warlords commanding armies, they begged Parliament for palace repairs. Oh, they could ruin a noble’s reputation or passively sabotage a PM—but hard power? Gone.

  Assassinating such a symbol made little sense. Feudal regicide delivered thrones; now, it handed killers a bureaucratic headache. Past attempts here (and in her own world) were laughable—attention seekers, lunatics, radical pamphleteers. Most got light sentences, while bread thieves swung from gallows.

  Yet this plot bore none of that amateurism. A woman had died to conceal it. That spoke of fanaticism—or something far worse.

  Her pendant’s sudden warmth snapped Yvette alert. A projectile whizzed past—not a bullet, but something wet and organic. Without her doppelg?nger’s deflection, it would’ve struck true.

  She wheeled toward the attack’s origin: Windsor’s primordial forest, untouched by axes or poachers for centuries. Now, something prowled its shadows.

  The identification potion glowed faintly in her palm—residual energy. Alto had used these during the Star Seekers case.

  "Occult," she mouthed to Ulysses.

  A nod. He veered toward the trees without breaking stride—handling threats was his specialty. Her mission lay ahead.

  Queen Margaret IV despised smiling.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It wasn’t the expression itself—God knew she’d practiced it enough before mirrors—but the relentless demand for it. To subjects, an unsmiling monarch meant displeasure; to diplomats, a political slight. Even her childhood press clippings harped on her "serene solemnity" as some virtue.

  Paperwork offered rare respite. Alone in the gilded carriage (red boxes for secrets, black for parliamentary drivel), she could finally let her face rest.

  Then—tap. Tap.

  Against the window loomed a familiar face—upside-down, grinning like a lunatic.

  Recognition flickered. The man from Queen Charlotte’s Ball, the night her father died.

  Now clinging to her speeding train.

  Now winking at her.

  Unbelievable.

  The forest swallowed Ulysses in its gloom—a place too still, too quiet. Here, the rustle of a single fallen leaf was audible, and every snapping twig underfoot echoed like a gunshot in the hush.

  There were animals, of course. Birds perched in the branches, squirrels frozen mid-scuttle, rabbits crouched low in the brush—all hushed, all watching. Their heads turned in eerie unison, tracking him as sunflowers followed the sun. It was enough to make a man’s skin crawl.

  Like a moth blundering into a spider’s web.

  And the spider was watching.

  "Closer…" whispered a voice that wasn’t a voice, slithering into his skull. "Follow the path… past the throat… through the belly…"

  Not words. Just jagged fragments of thought, stitched together like a madman’s scribbles or a child’s babbling.

  Ulysses stepped over a lightning-split oak—and there it was.

  The thing in the clearing might’ve been human once. Now it was a grotesquerie of knotted limbs and jutting ribs, spine curled like a shrimp on a boiling pan. Its torso tapered into nothingness below the ribs, as if something had gnawed its guts clean away. Arms—no, too many arms—sprouted from its sides, spindly as spider legs, some gripping a hand-mirror, others braced against the trees.

  Its face was worse. A cluster of eyes, mismatched in size, swiveled to fix on him.

  "Frank has the prize," the telepathy hissed. "Frank keeps his bargains."

  Behind it, three ashen-faced men shambled from the trees, their steps puppet-stiff.

  Ulysses frowned. This wasn’t how corruption usually worked. Monsters this far gone were supposed to be mindless—slaves to elder gods or primal hunger. But this thing? It reasoned. It schemed. It hid from prying eyes.

  That made it dangerous in ways beyond claws and fangs.

  "Interloper…" The abomination’s jaw unhinged, disgorging a swarm of black, squirming things. The same horrors that had attacked Yvette—but these didn’t just fly straight. They hunted.

  And they cut off every escape.

  Minutes Earlier

  Yvette spotted the trap before she saw it. Freshly turned earth beneath the tracks. Gravel kicked onto the rails.

  In this era, bombs didn’t detonate remotely. If someone triggered this manually, she’d snuff the fuse mid-ignition. A tripwire? Useless—she’d leave them cursing a dud.

  But picric acid was its own enemy. Strike it hard enough, and it exploded. That’s why it had been abandoned after the Halifax Disaster—two ships colliding, one packed with the stuff, and boom: two thousand corpses.

  Now someone had buried it under the rail line. The weight of a passing train would be trigger enough.

  She was already reaching for the buried device when the tremor came—a faint shudder through the iron, subtle as a moth’s wingbeat.

  Yvette swung back into the saddle, spurring her horse toward the oncoming train.

  Lucky for her, Victorian locomotives were slow. The Queen’s private coach crept along at a snail’s pace—plenty of time to intercept it. That didn’t mean armed guards would listen, though.

  So she played her card: recognition. The Queen would remember her from the Charlotte Ball.

  Margaret IV certainly did. This was the agent whose reports read like prophecy—the one who’d deduced Albion’s ironclad warship project from newspaper ads. A sharp mind wrapped in an unassuming package.

  Now that same agent was mouthing silent words against the window, drowned out by steam and steel.

  Yvette exhaled hard, finger tracing backwards in the fogged glass:

  "STOP. TRAP AHEAD."

  Then motion at the edge of her vision.

  Leanna—the Phase Witch—entered the carriage bearing tea. From her angle, only the silhouette showed: a dark figure clinging to the window like an assassin.

  The teacup left her hand, flickering into translucency mid-air. By the time Yvette sensed the danger, it was piercing the train walls—insubstantial as a ghost—only to solidify inside her chest.

  Spatial displacement didn’t discriminate. A leaf or a knife, it made no difference when matter phased through matter. Even the toughest monsters Yvette had faced wouldn’t survive a teacup materializing in their lungs.

  She twisted aside just as the Queen’s shout rang out:

  "Leanna—stand down! She’s one of ours!"

  Meanwhile, in the Woods

  Ulysses stood over his captive, boot pinning the creature—now mostly human again—to the dirt. The spidery limbs had retracted, though not by choice.

  Desperation had made the thing use its mirror. A cursed relic, lost for centuries.

  Its power was a devil’s bargain: pass your corruption to another, but each time, the madness returned faster. The Church had locked it away after realizing they were the ones being used—like a disease mutating to spread further.

  Now here it was, clutched in the claws of another pawn.

  "Who sent you?" Ulysses demanded, pressing harder. "Where’s the detonator?"

  No answer. Just a wheezing chuckle and wet, clicking breaths.

  The Church’s shadow-self was moving again. Worse,