"I do not care who he is on the White Isles, neither do I care which god he serves! Here in Lux, he is just another grasping foreigner eager to take our sacred knowledge and pervert it! We are alchemists, a sacred order tasked with keeping the deepest secrets of the natural and unnatural world! I will not have this "Murtrey" turning our tools of healing and creation into weapons of ruin and destruction!" - Maester Alchemist Nicodemius DuMel of the Lux chapter of the Hermetic Order of Alchemists.

Aloysius Wolfgang stared at the skull sitting before him. Perched upon a dusty table, the cracked bone was silent and unmoving, yet the Black Fly swore its fanged smile was mocking him and his latest failures. Once again, he'd slithered into Isabelle Gens Silva's mind, and once again, he'd emerged humiliated. Except this time, she'd not just noticed his intrusion, she'd kept him trapped inside a mental maze, forcing Wolfgang to scurry about like a scared rodent until he finally gave in to her demands.

The former countess wanted an audience with his current allies in order to make a deal with them. To anyone else, this would seem reasonable, but to Wolfgang, it was a death sentence. The Troupe had recruited him to reverse-engineer Gens Silva's research, a role that would become superfluous if she decided to cooperate with them. Leaving him at best a disposable asset, or at worst a loose end in need of cleaning up.

Of course, his first instinct was to simply not tell anyone. Since he was the only one actually using the Deja Lanterna, he could control the lines of communication and ensure his position. But Gens Silva's behavior once he agreed to her terms made him shy away from this most obvious option. She'd acted like his compliance was never in question, that he wouldn't dare break their agreement once freed from her mind. In another, Wolfgang might have seen this as a sign of arrogance or even gullibility, but after his ordeal in Gens Silva's maze, he wouldn't dare underestimate her. Therefore, if she let him go without so much as uttering a proper threat or offering a worthwhile incentive, then she'd already found a better method to control him, a method Wolfgang could guess at.

She'd planted a geas in him.

Recent experience had shown Wolfgang exactly how potent that type of mental magic was, and his mind quailed from the idea he'd been placed under one, but he wouldn't allow himself the privilege of denial. Gens Silva was his undeniable superior in terms of psychic warfare, and he'd been near-totally at her mercy for an extended period. Of course, she'd put a geas inside his mind like a parasitic wasp egg!

So now the question was what were the spell's parameters? They couldn't be too terribly stringent since he was considering ways to undermine them, but that might just be another layer to the trap. There was no way of telling what might activate the geas, or what it might force him to do. His only real option was to comply with Gens Silva's demands until he could find a way to dowse and then destroy the spell. Which led him back to his earlier problem: if Gens Silva aligned herself with the Troupe, then his survival came into serious question.

Wolfgang was trapped inside yet another cage, one with bars so nebulous he couldn't even begin to guess at their location. Worse yet, this latest cage was nested within another cage, which was in turn surrounded by yet another cage. Despite struggling to be free his entire life, all he'd managed to do was land himself in a fractal-linear prison. The sheer jagging futility of it all made him wonder if he was still trapped on that infinite staircase inside Gens Silva's mind.

After forcing himself to look away from his tormenter's skull, Wolfgang stared down at his own hands and then balled them into fists. He couldn't surrender, he couldn't give in, he needed to keep struggling, that was the only way forward. The path ahead ran between a jagged rock and a cursed ruin, but that wouldn't stop him; that had never stopped him.

As the first inklings of a plan trickled into his mind, Wolfgang stood up and put the skull back in its box. With the condescending bitch safely in her own cage, he left the manor's dining hall and went to find Scapino. When he'd first escaped from Gens Silva's mind, he'd found himself alone except for a note in the ashborn's strange hand. Apparently, after an hour of nothing outwardly bad happening to Wolfgang, his ally had left him alone with the dangerous fae relic while attending to other matters. The Black Fly still didn't know if he was bitter or grateful for the opportunity created by Scapino's negligence. Either way, he'd survived and put the time alone to good use processing all that had happened.

Moving quietly around the manor, Wolfgang checked dusty room after dusty room, until he started to wonder if Scapino wasn't here. Dawn was close, but that meant little considering he had no idea where exactly the ashborn laired. But eventually persistence was rewarded, as upon approaching the master bathroom, the same room he'd first awoken in after nearly dying to the seraphilim's light, Wolfgang heard whispers.

Someone or something was speaking in a scratchy hissing voice that danced on the edge of even a vampire's hearing. Whatever was being said, escaped Wolfgang, but the cadence implied agitation. After carefully drawing his dagger, the Black Fly reached the bathroom's cracked door and looked inside. Scapino stood hunched over, hands pressed against the room's cracked mirror, his posture strangely wobbly, like a drunkard forcing himself to stay upright. But strange as this was, it paled in comparison to his reflection. Within the mirror was a vaguely humanoid mass of ash and splintered bone that mimicked Scapino's posture.

The bathroom's single candle sputtered unnaturally, then grew slightly brighter, letting Wolfgang notice more details. Twin trails of soot ran down from Scapino's palms, coating part of the mirrors' cracked surface in a thin grey film. This film shivered and pulsed, creating a constant scratching sound that somehow resolved into words, words in a hellish tongue. The demon within Scapino was speaking.

Listening carefully, Wolfgang tried to decipher the hellkyn, but had little luck thanks to the sheer strangeness of its speaking method. Still, the Black Fly managed to make out a single word, an important word that was shared across numerous fell dialects.

"Imbalance."

Vampire instinct and trained intuition stirred within Wolfgang. Here was a weakness, one ripe for exploitation. Scapino was an ashborn, a vampire, and a demon united in symbiosis. Rare as they were dangerous, these chimerias required a unique spiritual equilibrium to function. If either half of them grew too weak, the other half would consume them and become something less than its component parts. A fate that, if Wolfgang's readings on the subject were accurate, was something even the demon part of the ashborn wanted to avoid. Here was an opportunity, one he could potentially exploit.

"I never took you for a pervert, Wolfgang."

Scapino's mocking tone snapped the Black Fly's chain of thoughts. Turning away from the mirror, the ashborn flicked his hands, discarding the soot covering them, and then walked towards his voyeur.

"I didn't want to interrupt," replied Wolfgang, voice carefully neutral.

With a dismissive gesture, Scapino brushed away this excuse. "Come now, making excuses for such behaviors is unbecoming for someone your age. You should know better than to spy on someone in the bathroom."

After sauntering over to the door, Scapino stood before Wolfgang, his face carved into a wide smirk that didn't get close to his eyes. Meeting the chimera's gaze, Wolfgang saw the threat hidden behind mocking joviality. But that wasn't the only thing he noticed; Scapino kept his hands behind his back, hiding them from view.

Noting this for later, but also deciding that a change of subject would be wise, Wolfgang said. "There were complications with the lantern again."

That got to refocus. "Really? I assumed since you were using it for so long, things were going well."

Forcing himself to stay perfectly calm, Wolfgang replied. "Gens Silva attacked me again, but your protections forced an impass."

Carefully, he relayed much of what he'd experienced, never lying, but also filling his words with the right amount of ambiguity. Painting with broad strokes, he illustrated a picture of Isabelle Gens Silva as an unstable and unreliable creature. A madwoman whose torturous death had driven her to new megalomaniacal heights, yet still retained enough of her skill to be dangerous. As Wolfgang spoke, he could see Scapino filling in the sketch's details with the exact assumptions he'd hoped for. Gens Silva was still an asset, but an even more risky one than initially thought.

Upon finishing his edited account, Wolfgang went for the final nail he'd need for this coffin. "As for what she wants. Well, she ordered me to set up a meeting with you, one where she could list her demands."

Scapino's eyebrows rose. "Does she now?"

Wolfgang slowly nodded, suppressing a smile as he did. The geas might compel him to arrange this meeting, but who said the meeting had to be successful? He'd bring these negotiations crashing down around Gens Silva, leaving him to pick up all the valuable pieces.

"Are you barking mad?" spat Paladin Mak Murtery as he glared up at Cole and Natalie. "You want to take the leeches alive? The leeches who've helped cut this damned city off from the rest of the world?"

"Only so she can kill them," replied Cole while gesturing to his partner.

That got a twitch to start in Murtery's face. He was taking the suggested amendments to his plan even worse than Cole expected. Not that he could particularly blame him. Mak's proposed strategy of placing explosives at the vampires' bell tower lair while the leeches slept was a good idea.

Afterall, every vampire hunter knew the easiest way to slay their quarry was to burn down their lair during the day. Only the foolish or truly desperate dared step inside a leech's nest, even when the sun was up. Better to bury the vampire in burning rubble than risk whatever defenses they'd prepared. So, convincing Mak, an experienced restbringer, to eschew such a tried-and-tested approach wouldn't be easy. Which was yet another reason Cole was glad to have Natalie's help

"My curse lets me draw power from the vampires I consume. Think of it not as taking prisoners, but stealing the enemy's weapons to turn against them." She argued. "We'd be able to wrest control of the duchy agents' communication network and put it to our own use. Then, with that in hand, contacting people outside the city might be possible again.

Mak's tattooed brow furrowed in clear annoyance as he tried to find flaws in this argument. "Even if we destroy whatever hex the leeches have put on the city's interior, that don't change what the river spirit is up to. It's locked down Harmas's moat, in both the Aether and Mundane."

"Considering how our targets attacked Cole and I on the river's west bank, they've found a way to slip through the quarantine. Even if their trick isn't very reliable, it should be enough to contact Sera Deborah and the barge garrison."

Cole shifted uncomfortably at the mention of the allies they'd left behind. While he didn't regret his and Natalie's mad flight into Harmas, not letting Mina, Alia, and the others know the plan had been irresponsible. But before he could brood too terribly on that mistake, Natalie brought up the reason the pair of them had thrown caution to the wind.

"Besides getting word to our friends outside the city, this plan should help me find and maybe even rescue Isabelle. She's a brilliant necromancer and has experience binding dangerous fae. If we combine her expertise with your own, then dealing with both the duchy agents and the corrupted court will be less difficult."

Mak bristled. "I don't need some vampire ghost's advice on hunting sidhe-spawn."

"When have two heads ever been worse than one?" Replied Natalie. "Besides, her perspective will give us insight into the enemy's plans, and I'm sure you'll be able to put whatever she's learned to best use."

If he was being completely honest with himself, Cole occasionally found Natalie's ability to influence people a little unsettling. Just a few hours ago, she and Mak had been almost literally at each other's throats. But now, despite his own apprehensions and distaste for her, Murtery was seriously considering this new plan. It made Cole wonder how many belligerent alcoholics Natalie had coaxed into making smarter decisions while working at the Silly Goat. Still, a smidgeon of credit had to go to Mak, as it seemed bitter loss hadn't completely stripped away his pragmatism.

"I suppose if anyone should be taking unnecessary risks, it's you two," He grumbled, before adding. "If we do this, we'll need to hit hard and fast, breaking through the tower's defenses before anyone has time to react."

Glad that they were all on the same page, Cole said. "Well, the bat swarm is pretty much destroyed, so that's one problem dealt with. What else do we need to worry about?"

In response, Mak grabbed a piece of slate and started drawing on it. After the lines of chalk resolved into a simple representation of the bell tower and the abandoned plaza surrounding it, Murtrey tapped the squat building making up the structure's base. "Before everything went to shit, this was a city watch station, and last time I scouted it, a handful of thralls were living inside, maybe six or seven at the most. They, along with the building's solid doors and barred windows, aren't so much an actual defense. Like the pockets of carrion bats that used to hide in the surrounding buildings, the thralls are meant to keep watch and buy enough time for the tower's actual protectors."

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He erased the sketch and replaced it with two pictograms, both representing bats, but with one much larger than the other. "See, carrion bats are useful, especially in numbers, but they have weaknesses, like explosions. If it were just these vermin defending the tower, I'd have knocked it down weeks ago. What's stopped me from getting close is the demons."

Cole grimaced. He should have expected this, Harmas, with its fetid Aether and isolation made it perfect for diabolism. "What kind?"

"Sickness, but not too terribly potent, considering they're possessing mutant carrion bats," Mak replied before spitting into a nearby bucket.

This made an unfortunate amount of sense. The more attuned the Aether was to a certain kind of suffering, the easier it was to summon a kindred demon. If it weren't for the Gates Beyond, lesser disease hellkyn would have been able to slither right into the Harmas. But unfortunately, strong as Saint Mira's ancient working was, it couldn't stop the wicked from opening the way for hellkyn. Suddenly remembering what Isabelle had unleashed back in the fight with Wolfgang, Cole winced. There would have to be a talk about that once they'd rescued her.

"I don't think disease demons will be very effective against me and Cole," added Natalie. "So once we deal with them, is there anything else to really worry about?"

Mak considered this for a moment. "Leeches always trap their nests during the day. So the actual inside of the tower will be dangerous, but I've maybe got a way around that."

Stepping back from the table, he looked around a shelving unit and said. "Oi, changeling, how strong is your telekinesis?"

Cole put a hand on Mak's shoulder and muttered quietly. "His name is Kit."

The two paladins exchanged looks that bordered on glares. While Cole could understand his colleague's disgust with all things fae, he took issue with his treatment of the magi. Shrugging off the larger paladin's hand, Mak bit back a mix of a scoff and a snarl, but didn't push the issue.

With a clatter of tools and scraping of chair legs, Kit left his makeshift workstation and joined the meeting. Only Yara was still missing, catching up on sleep at Natalie's insistence.

After a yawn and scratching the short goatee that adversity had forced upon him, Kit answered Mak's question. "Not very. I specialize in finesse and-"

"Eh, that'll work," Mak remarked as he went over a heavy metal box and undid a series of physical and magical locks. After gingerly opening up the container, he lifted out a tightly wrapped tubular bundle, about as long as Cole's hand. A string of carefully inked runes covered the package, and sticking from its ends was a long, wick-like thread.

Recognizing the illegal alchemical creation, Cole started to say something, but Mak cut him off. "We need the leeches intact, not the tower."

As a child, Natalie had always looked forward to spring's first truly warm day. The day when summer's rays shattered winter's final shades and brought a bead of sweat to her brow. Well, she didn't sweat anymore, and neither did she breathe, which was a true blessing now that such a warm spring day had come to Harmas. As the dead city's hot and humid air was thick with debilitatingly bad odors.

At the forefront of this fetid melange was the scent of death: fresh death, old death, hidden death, messy death, so many flavors of it, each picked up by her vampiric senses. This terrible stench was further compounded by the greasy pungence of compost and the musty hints of mold. People weren't the only things left to rot in this place. But even here, at the heart of the miasmic cloud, rot begat life, twisted, avaricious life. Mice, rats, roaches, flies, plaid mushrooms, and other even stranger vermin filled every damp shadow and hidden nook.

Predominantly, Natalie just caught incidental hints of these infestations, courtesy of her inhuman senses, but there were exceptions, as among the teeming scavengers were creatures kindred to the curse within her. A faint preternatural itch told her where she might find a colony of rats, the occasional scrawny cat, or, more commonly, the closer they got to the bell tower, myriad slumbering bats.

Instinct and stolen experience whispered to the Alukah, telling of how she might seize control of these most tenebrous survivors, but tempting as that was, it risked alerting the enemy. So instead Natalie used her gifts to sweep a pall of ignorance over the various nearby night creatures, blotting out her and her comrade's presence. Once, such a subtle but expansive psychic feat would have been unthinkable, but Natalie's strength grew with each passing night, and if things went according to plan, she'd receive another infusion of power by noon today.

Upon leaving Mak's lair, the unusual group of two paladins, one magi, an Alukah, and her Ancilla had headed west, moving towards the bell tower. At first, they traveled slowly thanks to Murtery's defenses, and then even slower for fear of what those defenses guarded against. But once Natalie's control over the ghouls and the efficacy of Yara's subtlety spell were proven to the bearded huntsman, Mak guided them along a more audacious route.

No one talked as they padded down the abandoned streets; what little communication was done through battle cant and pantomime. The only sound aside from the occasional scuff of boots on worn stone was the wind, the constant groaning wind; an eerie noise, made so much worse by how calm the stagnant morning air was. As it wasn't actually a breeze that moaned and wheezed between ragged buildings, it was the city's inhabitants.

The ghouls clustered together in small packs. Some groups were stationary, others shuffled along the dirty cobblestones, endlessly searching for warm flesh to consume. Sending out chains of will, Natalie bound these packs and sent them down whatever alley or other road was available. While this wasn't particularly tiring work, the constant drone of pain and hunger that filled each ruined husk wore against Natalie's mind like sandpaper. It was a bitter reminder that he ghouls weren't just shambling monsters, but trapped victims whose release was not yet at hand, and judging by how Cole quickly dispatched those ghouls too crippled for her to move, she wasn't the only one feeling this way.

Watching as her partner, split skulls, and blessed remains, Natalie offered a silent prayer to Tenth God. Rocky, as her relationship with the deity had been at times, she found herself more and more appreciative of his creed. Just because everything ends, does not mean how it ends is not important. The lurching corpses all around them had their proper endings stolen from them, and even if their current suffering was finished, that didn't settle the debt this city's murderers owed. Wolfgang, the other vampires, the prince's court, they all needed to pay for what had been stolen.

Natalie's hands balled into fists at the thought of Wolfgang. His very existence somehow felt like a betrayal. He was her kin, the brother of the grandmother she'd never met, but also one of the worst vampires she'd ever faced. After pushing down the choler the very idea of him conjured in her, Natalie found herself looking at Mak Murtrey. Posture low to the ground, crossbow held out before him, the survivalist paladin moved oddly. One moment he'd be perfectly still, then in another he'd shoot forward a few steps with twitchy speed. It reminded her of how a mouse or rabbit might scurry between bits of woodland brush. Strangely, Murtrey didn't pay much attention to the ghouls; he didn't stop to free any like Cole did, or even train his crossbow on those that got close. Was he so used to this place that they didn't even register? If so, that worried her.

For another half hour, the group slipped between ghoul packs and abandoned buildings, following some pre-planned route of Murtrey's, whose logic Natalie couldn't much guess at. But, at least their path's efficacy wasn't in doubt, as another putrid stink started forcing itself up the Alukah's nostrils: guano. They were close to the bell tower.

Before she could mention this to anyone, Murtrey made a series of hand gestures and pointed at a nearby building. It was a tenement much like the one she'd crashed into. Following Mak, the group approached the structure, but instead of heading for its front door, they went to one of its windows. Missing its glass, the high-up window had a small pile of furniture leading up to its bottom. Mak clambered up the crude ramp with honestly shocking dexterity and stood in the window, waiting for the rest of them.

Cole gestured for Natalie to go first. Mimicking Mak, she scampered up to the opening, realizing how precarious the furniture ramp really was in the process. Any ghoul, even a grinner, would struggle to make the climb. Mak vanished into the building, leaving her alone in the window frame to watch Yara take the ramp. When the redhead was near the top, one of the bits of furniture wobbled precariously, and she started to windmill her arms. Hand fast as lightning, Natalie grabbed Yara and hauled her through the window before she could fall.

Seeing this, Kit and Cole exchanged looks, and then the magi started whispering something into the larger man's ear. Natalie caught a few words but thought she must have been mishearing them, right up until Cole picked Kit up and hurled him bodily towards the window. A yelp escaped the magi, and he slammed into Natalie with all the force of a large pillow. Catching him, with a snort of amusement, Natalie then maneuvered the magi's enchanted form. Lessening his own personal gravity was a clever way to get around a tricky obstacle. Once Kit was safely inside the building with Yara and Mak, Natalie glanced back at Cole, gesturing for her to go with them.

Despite her confusion at this, Natalie complied, finding herself upon a set of stairs that zig-zagged up into the building. They were roughly half a landing up from the ground floor, and right on the edge of a precarious drop. Where there should have been stairs leading down to the ground floor, and eventually the basement, there was instead a splinter-lined gap. Someone or something had smashed the bottom part of the staircase, cutting off the building's upper floors from easy access.

Just as Natalie decided the damage was probably the result of some desperate attempt to keep out hungry ghouls, Cole's voice caught her attention.

"Fuck!"

She spun back around to the window just in time ot see him diving headlong through it and smashing into the staircase's bannister with… with not much force. Instead of splintering it into kindling, like she'd expected, his impact just made it groan and crack. After pulling himself to his feet, with an odd wobble, Cole quickly handed a bejeweled pin back to Kit while muttering. "The spell worked."

With the graviturgy-enhanced acrobatics out of the way, the group climbed the staircase and reached the building's attic. At the dusty space's far end was another window, and a crude bridge leading through it to the neighboring tenement's own attic. As they passed over the bridge, Natalie wondered at the desperate ingenuity on display. People had survived in Harmas long enough to start adapting to its dangers, and yet their efforts weren't enough to ultimately save them. Or perhaps she was being too pessimistic? Mak couldn't be the only person left alive in Harmas, could he?

After taking a few more shortcuts, through, around, over, and under different ruins, the group reached the bell tower plaza's edge. Hiding on the second floor of an abandoned tailor shop, they scouted out their destination. Octagonal in shape, the plaza was a wide expanse of smooth stone. At its center was the bell tower, sticking out of the guard station like an unhammered nail from a wooden block. None of the market stalls one would expect in this kind of space had survived Harma's fall. In their place, the plaza was filled with rows and rows of torn, stained sheets.

Gut instinct told Natalie what those sheets meant, but she still focused on them with her vampire senses, hoping her intuition was wrong. Hidden in the filthy tatters of cloth were cracked bones stripped of their flesh. These were shrouds, covering the remains of plague dead. Whoever these people once were, they'd been unlucky enough to die from the pestilence, but fortunate enough to have their souls freed, leaving behind empty shells that no one bothered to bury. No, that was being too harsh; the more Natalie thought about it, the more she figured there had been no one left to bury them. These had been those who died right as civic order slid into desperate chaos.

But, grim as this was, it didn't explain the body's current condition. As a morbid side-effect of living inside the Tenth Temple of Vindabon, Natalie had gotten an unfortunately in-depth education on decomposition, and these corpses didn't match what was to be expected. These bones had been picked clean and were not in any way natural. Her first thought was the ghouls, but they didn't hunger for dead flesh; it's why they didn't cannibalize each other. But as her vision slowly drifted from the shrouds to the tower, the answer became clear. All those carrion bats had to have been eating something.

Jaw clenched hard enough to make her fangs prick the inside of her lips, Natalie whispered to Mak Murtrey. "Are we ready?"

The paladin in question was busy modifying his crossbow, screwing on new modular pieces whose purpose Natalie couldn't guess at. Annoyingly, he didn't respond to her question and just kept working, which she guessed was answer enough. Looking over towards the rest of the group, she found them making their own preparations. Kit and Yara were placing more of the magi's bejeweled pins around the room, setting up a worryingly experimental subtlety field. They would stay back and assist Mak with their respective magics, while Cole and she mounted a frontal assault. Well, kind of a frontal assault if Mak's strange packages worked as he promised.

The click of snapping fingers pulled Natalie's attention back to Mak, who was gesturing with his hand at Kit. After a second fumbling with his satchel, the magi produced a strip of rune-marked cloth. "It's not very stable, and I-"

"Can it last ten seconds?" Snapped Mak.

"Uh, yes, it should."

"Then it'll work."

Taking one of his packages, Mak wrapped it with the strip, making sure its end coiled around the bundle's wick. He then went over to the shop's balcony and placed his crossbow on the railing. The narrow groove in the weapon's center, where a bolt would go, had been modified by Mak's tinkering, and an odd square cubby was now mounted onto the slot. Gingerly, Mak slipped the package into the cubby, fitting the wick into a slot along the pocket's top as he did. With this done, he carefully lined up the crossbow, taking a few moments to peek around the obstructing cubby and make sure he was on target. Nodding slowly, the mad paladin said. "Ready."

Cole and Natalie took up positions on the balcony as well, and a slight thrum of magic behind them spoke to Kit, activating the subtlety enchantment. Once affirmatives were shared, Mak reached up to the wick and snapped his fingers, conjuring a burst of sparks that ignited it. The flame eagerly slithered down the string like a hungry serpent, and right before it met the rune-etched strip Kit had prepared, Mak pulled the trigger.

The cubby shot forward with a snap, stopping at the crossbow's muzzle, and sending the package forth like a catapult stone. Despite its weight and awkward shape, the bundle flew fast and straight. It struck a spot on the tower's side, maybe a meter above the guard station, and bounced off. But instead of tumbling to the ground below, the package fell to the side, sticking to the tower like a particularly large bug.

Kit had said changing an object's relative gravity, so it viewed another direction as down, was tricky, but he'd still managed it.

For a few seconds, everyone stared at the package, and then thunder ripped through the air as it detonated. Brick, timber, rock, and plaster sprayed across the plaza as the tower's base collapsed in on itself. A few dozen bats tried to escape the crumbling edifice, but most were clipped by debris and sent spiraling to the ground. The bulk of the tower's weight landed on the already stressed roof of the guard station, cracking the building open and sending a great plume of dust up into the sky.

Cole grabbed Mak's shoulder and pulled him from his crossbow. "This isn't what we agreed on! You said it would punch a hole in the side!"

Murtrey yanked himself from Cole's grip and casually gestured at the building. "It did. This was the best way to bypass the defenders and defenses. Now quit whining and go sift through the rubble, you'll want to find the leeches before something comes to investigate the noise."

Scars stretched by a snarl, Cole looked from his erratic colleague to the ruin, and then Natalie. Having made his decision, he said. "They'll have been lairing in a basement if the building had one. Let's try and find the entrance."

Then he glared at Mak, his angry expression slowly softening into something even worse: disappointment. "I expected better from you."

Mak turned from Cole, but otherwise didn't respond. After pulling himself up onto the balcony railing, he said to Natalie. "Let's go."

She hesitated for a moment; something about this itched at her intuition, but the opportunity to consume the two vampires was too tempting. Vaulting up and over the railing, she landed silently on the ground, spectral wolves already materializing around her. Cole followed by putting his axe's head into the building's plaster frontage and using it to slow his descent. As he lengthened Requiem into a halberd, Natalie drew her shortsword and commanded four of her wolves to stay beneath the balcony, right in Mak's blind spot.

Just in case.

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