The van rolled into Millfield just as the afternoon sun started bleeding orange across the horizon, and the town looked exactly like every other forgotten corner of Verland—quiet, worn-down, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone and strangers stuck out like sore thumbs.

They split the moment they stepped out, no need for long speeches because Alistair had drilled the plan into their heads before they left. Cora and Derek drew the short straw of talking to the locals, knocking on doors and asking uncomfortable questions while trying not to look like federal agents, which was going to be hard because Derek had a habit of sweating when he lied and Cora had a habit of looking like she wanted to stab someone. Sera and Mason took the police station, or what was left of it, to sift through whatever files the surviving officers hadn’t burned or hidden, and to see if the lone survivor had started making any more sense since the last report. That left Lucian to do what he did best—move alone, stay invisible, and walk straight into the place where the cops had died, the stretch of woods just outside town where the trees grew too close together and the air felt thick even in daylight.

No one argued about the split. No one wanted to trade places with Lucian either.

The tree line hit him before the smell did—rotten meat, old blood, and something else, something that made his nose wrinkle like he’d just walked into a butcher’s closet in midsummer. Lucian stopped at the edge of the clearing where the police tape still hung in ragged strips, torn by wind or animals or maybe whatever had dragged those officers into the dark.

He didn’t need to crouch or squint because his system was already feeding him data like a river, every broken branch a timestamp, every footprint a signature, every dried drop of blood a story. Most hunters would have spent hours combing this ground, crawling on hands and knees with flashlights and magnifying glasses, but Lucian just stood there and let his enhanced perception do the work, his eyes tracing a trail that had gone cold to everyone else but burned bright as neon to him.

The cops had come in from the east, three of them, their boot prints overlapping and panicked near the base of an old oak where one of them had stopped to vomit. Then they’d spread out, probably trying to surround whatever they thought was hiding in the bushes, but that was their first mistake because the thing they were hunting had never been in the bushes to begin with. Lucian followed a set of smaller prints—barefoot, unnaturally long toes, a gait that switched from bipedal to quadrupedal every few meters—and felt the monster encyclopedia in his head flip open to the right page without him asking.

A Glimmertongue. Rare. Intelligent. It didn’t hunt with claws or fangs; it hunted with whispers, luring its prey closer by mimicking the voices of people they loved. Children heard their mothers calling from the dark. Adults heard their spouses or their kids. The cops probably heard their partners screaming for help, which explained why they’d walked straight into the kill zone without radioing for backup.

Lucian knelt beside a patch of moss that looked undisturbed until he brushed his fingers across it and felt the faint warmth of residual magic, a low thrum that vibrated up his arm and settled behind his eyes. The creature had been here less than twelve hours ago, maybe less than six, which meant it was still in the area, still hunting, still waiting for the next set of footsteps to wander into its trap.

He stood up and pulled out his phone, typed a quick message to Alistair: Glimmertongue. Juvenile. Active. Need fresh bait. Then he looked back at the darkening woods and wondered which one of his teammates would hate him most for volunteering.

In another part of the town

Five figures walked into Millfield from the opposite end of town, the kind of people who made dogs bark and children cross the street without knowing why. They weren’t Ashen Guard—no badges, no uniforms, no respect for the Veil or its precious rules. They were rogue hunters, the stray dogs of the supernatural world, and they’d been doing this long before the Guard started handing out fancy titles and retirement plans.

Rogues don’t answer to anyone but themselves and the client paying the bill, which is why most hunters look down on them until they need something done that the Guard won’t touch. They operate in the cracks between jurisdictions, chasing bounties on anything that bleeds—ghosts that refuse to move on, revenants still wearing their funeral suits, beasts that crawled out of the wrong dimension and forgot to crawl back. Some rogues are ex-Guard, burned out or kicked out for crossing lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Some are self-taught, born with a gift for sensing the dark and no patience for bureaucracy. And some are just mercenaries who figured out that monster guts pay better than honest work.

This particular crew had caught wind of the disappearances three days ago, same as the Ashen Guard, but they didn’t bother with recon or permission. They smelled profit—a rare creature, probably worth a fortune on the black market, and the local authorities were too dead to argue about jurisdiction. Their leader, a scarred woman named Voss who’d lost two fingers to a ghoul and replaced them with silver-plated prosthetics, had already started calculating how many zeroes the thing would fetch. They didn’t know what it was yet, didn’t care, because in their line of work ignorance wasn’t a weakness—it was just another line item on the invoice.

So they walked into Millfield like they owned it, five shadows stretching long in the dying light, and somewhere in the woods Lucian was about to have company he didn’t ask for.

Meanwhile, Lucian has already sent his team that he has found the monster responsible for the missing kids.