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We turned a corner into a tighter corridor of stalls, this one lit by green floating orbs that pulsed in a rhythm. One blinked red as we passed, a silent warning.

The warlock’s stall, a crooked table draped in faded crimson cloth, was precisely where I remembered it. His wares were spread out like offerings: Brass knuckles carved with infernal names. Finger bones strung into a ghastly rosary. And at the center, half wrapped in moth-eaten velvet, lay a shard of a mirror.

I stopped, and the shadows surrounding me went still.

A man emerged from the back of the stall, his face obscured by a heavy veil of woven hair and tarnished coins. He bowed. “Ah,” he said, his voice raspy. “The child of dusk returns. I wondered when you’d come ask about the vampire.”

“We said nothing about a vampire,” Remiel said, his voice hard.

The warlock chuckled, a rustling sound. “You didn’t need to.”

I stepped forward, ignoring the way Remiel’s hand ghosted near the hilt of his blade. The warlock smiled beneath his veil, if one could call the slight upward twitch of that obscured mouth a smile, and nudged the velvet around the mirror shard aside with two pale, long-nailed fingers.

The mirror shard glinted like polished bone in the dim light. It was old glass—the kind that no longer reflected what was but remembered what had been, the kind they once used in ancient mourning rituals to trap a soul before it could flee a dying body.

“You know what this is?” the warlock asked.

“I know what it was meant for,” I said, reaching out.

The moment my fingertips grazed the mirror’s edge, a jolt, cold and electric, flared through my palm and shot straight up my spine. The shadows around my ankles hissed—not in warning but in a sudden, sharp hunger.

Frost spread across the mirror’s surface in delicate fractures, spiraling inward like ripples in frozen water. The silver then cleared to show not my reflection but Lysanthe’s.

Or what remained of her.

The glass showed her face, which was pale and cracked. Her dark hair was matted with something I didn’t want to identify. In a silent, endless scream, her mouth was parted, yet no sound emerged. Her eyes, voided like twin eclipses, stared into me, through me. And then she moved. Her lips formed words I couldn’t hear, but I felt them in my bones.

“You could not help me,” she said.

The surrounding shadows swelled, lurching toward the mirror as if to feed. Remiel’s hand clamped around my wrist and yanked me back with brutal force. The glass flared again, this time brighter and hotter, but then darkened to dead silver as if nothing had ever stirred beneath its surface.

My breaths came hard, my vision swimming. “Let go of me,” I hissed, trying to wrench my arm free.

“You touched a cursed vessel,” Remiel snapped, his grip like iron. “You don’t know what it pulled from—”

“I saw her!” I cried, the image of Lysanthe’s tormented face burning in my mind.

We were drawing stares now, the market denizens pausing their dark commerce. Not that I cared.

The warlock leaned forward, his fingers lacing together. He looked like a man watching a familiar tragic performance he’d seen a hundred times before. “That piece,” he said casually, his voice a dry rustle, “came from a place desecrated by a seraph’s light. I bought it from a demon smuggler who claimed the woman screamed for her sire when it shattered. Said she begged to go home.”

Remiel stiffened beside me.

I blinked hard, my throat dry. “Where…?”

“Forbidden Quarter,” the warlock said, a hint of pleasure in his rasping voice. “It was moved there. Cleaned. Nothing left now. A piece of silver.”

Out of the safe house. I didn’t have to look at Remiel to know he was thinking the same thing.

The mirror shard still hummed on the table with a faint, malevolent energy. It still wanted something from me. But I pulled my hand away, ignoring how my shadows twitched.

“I love great teamwork,” a voice, as smooth as silk, said behind me.

My spine stiffened. Even before I turned, I knew that scent of amber and winter wine with an underlying hint of iron beneath the velvet. Too rich. Too still. Like a tomb that had forgotten how to rot.

Valden stood at the edge of the stall, his gloved hands folded behind his back. His long white hair spilled down over the collar of a double-breasted wool coat that could have come from another century. He wore no visible weapons, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t need a blade to cut.

“You’re a long way from the broken cathedral,” I said without facing him directly.