"A little louder, Mom. I don't think that all the guards heard you. You have to put in a bit more effort if you want people to chase us with pitchforks." Nyka said with a sneer while chewing food from the plates.

Everything tasted like rotten garbage to her, which made the young vampire envious of her little brother who seemed to be enjoying himself a lot despite his awkward condition.

She couldn't swallow solid food without puking in a matter of minutes so Nyka munched for a bit before sending it inside her dimensional ring and washing her mouth with a splash of her "strawberry juice".

"Your brother is right. You did develop an attitude in my absence." Kalla chuckled. "I missed you a lot, dear. I'll try to be more present for you."

"I missed you more." Nyka smiled as she fluttered her eyelashes and used Mesmerize to reassure a member of the army.

"There's nothing to worry about, officer." She said.

"There's nothing to worry about." He repeated with a blank stare, incapable of focusing on anything but her eyes and her hand c.a.r.e.s.sing his arm.

"No one was talking about the undead. The people who called you for help are just paranoid." Nyka said.

"No one was talking about the undead. The people who called me for help were just paranoid." The soldier told to his colleagues after returning to the beer stand where they were waiting for him.

"You must learn to take your time, Kalla." Scarlett said. "Our abilities make us more than the members of our respective species and yet less. More than one Awakened disappeared inside their lab until everyone they knew was gone.

"It's why our houses should have windows. Not for the light, so much as to notice the passing of time." Her words received unanimous approval. "Speaking of time, Faluel, did you adopt the little runt or what?"

"You need to be more specific." The Hydra said since in her eyes Friya was a runt as well and she was still pondering their bargain.

"I mean Lith. He's already got a bright blue core and he's steadily working to achieve the violet." Scarlett used the Eyes of Menadion to zoom on his figure sitting at a table while the kids ate biscuits and hot chocolate.

"No, I didn't and I don't plan on sharing with him any secret of my bloodline. Don't tell me that asshole is training even now?" Faluel asked.

To his defence, Lith had kept his word and used magic solely to entertain the children with a light show. Otherwise, Solus would have killed him. He got the opportunity to practice and to give his fellow babysitters a moment of respite. Two birds with one stone.

"Yes, he is." Scarlett looked at his vortexes flexing and relaxing rhythmically as Lith used spells of increasing difficulty.

'Damn, his technique is too rough and amateurish to belong to any legacy, but he's got it right nonetheless. Maybe I should really ask him for advice about Guardianhood.' She thought.

"I'm going to make him pay for that, but not tonight." Faluel said while claiming an open table before someone else could.

Nyka asked Nok to described to her the difference in taste between the delicacies but his replies amounted just to different gradations of "delicious", giving her a headache.

Their quarrel stopped the moment they realized that they could suddenly hear each other without yelling. Then, the silence that had replaced the sounds of the festivity turned into the noise of panic.

People started to scream, dropping their plates and glasses onto the ground in their hurry to run away.

"What the heck is going on here?" Scarlett's pince-nez released an invisible pulse of energy that allowed her to scan the space around her for several hundreds of meters with the equivalent of mana sense.

It would leave the Eyes of Menadion exhausted for a while, but in the face of an unknown threat, a bird in hand was worth two in the bush. Yet aside from Lith's group and her own there was no powerful creature worth mentioning.

"I'm sorry, ladies, but the fair is canceled." One of the soldiers approached them while trying to make people leave in an orderly fashion. "Someone has killed the Lord of the County and no one is safe."

***

Lith arrived at the Lark household as soon as he brought the kids back home and left Faluel standing guard.

Even Jirni's early report about the crime scene couldn't prepare him for the vision that appeared in front of his eyes on his arrival.

The place he had known since his childhood was no more. The luscious garden was now a black scar in the ground and the main building had been razed to the ground along with its two wings.

"Who did this?" Lith clenched his fists while looking at the Count's corpse hanging from an x-shaped ice structure, in a twisted version of a scarecrow.

Someone had placed it right in front of the main entrance, in the spot where Lark welcomed his guests. They had even stuck his monocle in the eye socket and combed his hair, making everything look like a sick joke.

"Not Balkor. It's the only thing we know for sure." Jirni said. "He would have turned his victims into undead and made them kill the survivors. This, instead, is the work of a single individual."

"How could this happen? The Lark household was hundreds of years old!" Lith lashed out in outrage, making the ground rumble.

"The Lark household is hundreds of years old and counting." Kamila cupped his face, forcing him to look at her instead of counting the bodies of the people he had known his all life. "Lark's heirs are alive and well."

"This doesn't answer my question, it just makes your failure a little less utter! How could this happen? Those f.u.c.k.i.n.g Balkor cards were delivered months ago. How could you leave Lark with no protection?" He asked.

"I can answer that." Marchioness Distar stepped forward, standing tall as her role required.

She had known Lark since she was a child and his death caused her great pain as well, yet as the Lord Commander of the Queen's Corps she couldn't afford to show any of it.

Grief had to wait. Her duty was to take control of the situation and understand the nature of their enemy. It was the only way to keep that night from happening to someone else.

"We didn't underestimate the situation and put an entire unit of the Queen's Corps on Lark alone. On top of that, ever since he received the Past card, I had the best temporary arrays set up around his house. Sadly, it wasn't enough."

"One unit and temporary arrays? Are you kidding me?" Lith's face was millimeters away from hers, looking at Mirim's eyes with the fury of a wounded beast.

"One elite unit for one person is something done only for the highest nobles. As for the arrays, it's impossible to set up a permanent formation in so little time. Isn't it the reason why you've refused to move to the mansion the Queen will build for you?"