I finally have a cover for the book! A very kind person went out of his way to give me a cover to use for Royal Road, and has done so for all three books in the series. I'm extremely thankful to him. This is the last chapter you're getting before Friday, but there's only a few chapters left before book 1 is complete!

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“Winoa!” Cleo shouted, her voice cracking through the comparative silence of the room. “I know who the devourer is!”

“What?” Winoa and Rose both looked up from the food they were cooking in the kitchen of their little home.

“Yeah, you’re not going to believe it. We know him, I’m pretty sure.”

“Why’s that?” Rose inquired. Her heart in her mouth. One of the reasons why she was so terrified was that she had no idea who the devourer, her stalker, actually was. If she could put a face to the beast, then it would be far less of an unknown evil to her.

“The clue for me was that he had been following you up Babel the entire time, he was hunting for you specifically. Maybe it was your friend, Willis, he could have been looking for, but when Willis disappeared the attacks did not stop. In fact, they are slowly increasing again. The person he was looking for was you, Rose.”

Both girls put down their cooking implements and moved over to Cleo. this was simply too important for either of them to miss hearing. “The second point, the one that solidified who it was, is that he is a male child who is a member of the Mephisto clan. Does that ring any bells?”

Winoa frowned, she was having slightly more trouble than Cleo had to remember who amongst their batch were the golden children of the Mephistos. Rose on the other hand immediately looked at Cleo with wide eyes. “Are you sure?” She said. Her fists tightly clenching Cleo’s blue dress, “are you sure it’s Peter?”

“About as sure as I can be of anything else. He’s the only person I can think of from any of the clans who is both studying the book of Death and has an unhealthy obsession with you. He’s probably been chasing you since we left the first floor”. Cleo paused, then flinched slightly as she leant forward and began stroking Rose’s hair. “Rose, I'm sorry for enabling this by not shutting Peter down on the first floor. I know I could have”.

“No. Thank you, Cleo. You are helping me even though I was awful to you”. Rose smiled earnestly at Cleo. It was the first time that Cleo or Winoa had actually seen the girl happy. “I brought this on myself. I should have listened to my mother and just broken him when I had the chance. So what now?”

“Now we see a couple of boys I know about trapping a monster”.

The three girls left the house together for the first time, with their faces full of determination. The afternoon was bright and clear, with none of the unhealthy aura from the previous night. Cleo led them straight to Spring Street, as she had more faith that he would be contactable than Law in the high walls and deep gardens of the Empty Throne school. She also had a feeling that Law was involved Jim's gang on Spring Street. The mask he had been wearing carried the same mark as the one the would-be thieves had worn, and Jim had been emblazoned with the same mark both times she had met him.

Knocking on the door to the bashers HQ again, Cleo stood and waited for the door to open. After two minutes she realised that the does were once again not going to open, so she hammered away like before. Soon enough, the same boy who had answered the door before opened up and glared at her. “Are you here to see Jim again?” He said, glancing over the party of young girls before him.

“Yes. Either bring him to us, or call him again. We have something to discuss that will benefit you guys as much as us”.

The boy pressed down on the array near the door and for the second time that day called for Jim. Within five minutes Jim had arrived and brought them inside the hallway that led into the Spring Street headquarters. They walked for a couple of minutes before entering a side room with a large table in the centre. Eight chairs were set round the oval table, and of those eight, three were currently filled.

Cleo did not recognise two of the seated occupants, a boy and a girl, but she could not help but recognise the third occupant. Sitting at the table, fiddling with some kind of plant shaped gem and constricting a complex array at the same time was Law. It was the second time Cleo had met Law out of his uniform, but the first time she had actually been able to look at him up close. He looked so innocent when he was focussing on his creation that it was hard to believe he had put the fear of god into her merely the previous night.

“Okay girls, this is my team of friends, my crew if you will. From the left, we have Louisa, her... something, Yun, and Law you know. Why don't you introduce yourselves and tell us what you need our help for,” said Jim.

“My name is Cleopatra Tiberian Ignis, I am a golden child of the Ignis clan and I worked out who the devourer is. Behind me are Winoa Zephyr and Rose Briar, two more golden children of the elemental clans of Chaos”. At the mention of the devourer, Yun’s had perked up. Louise began paying attention after Yun did, and Law nodded along as he made what ever he was making.

“How did you work it out? We've been looking for him for the best part of a year,” said Yun. He looked shocked that a girl who looked younger than him was able to do something he could not.

“I admit, we had two bits of information you could have never known which gave us the answer, but either way we need your help to catch him”. Cleo ignored everyone else as she said this, looking straight at the boy who seemed like he was not paying attention.

Law began the final array mark on the gem, and Cleo stopped. She could tell that his array work was exquisite, despite only having trained in the miniscule amount of arrays that the Ignis clan actually used.

The mark sank into the body of the sculpture and the entire thing glowed momentarily before dimming into a soft red gemstone in the shape of a freshly bloomed flower. When the creation was complete, Laurence placed it into a velvet case with twenty other flowers just like it. He closed the case and looked at the three girls standing next to the table. “I was going to look for you tomorrow anyway, but now that you are here, you have made my life a lot easier. I’ll help, but if we have everyone here helping, catching the devourer will be simple for us”. He slid the box towards Cleo. “This box is full of twenty-one individual creations of mine. I call them inferno flowers. If you place at least three of them into the ground , then the area in the middle will have all the oxygen inside it ignite for as long as there are living beings inside. That’s an apology for frightening you last night. Jim told me about it”.

Cleo smiled slightly. She had not expected to receive anything from Law, let alone an apology. So when the box slid towards her, she could not help but be surprised. She walked up to the table and addressed the people presented. “The name of the devourer is Pter Mephisto. He’s a golden child of my generation, and very likely a peak Saint. As a member of the Mephisto clan, he specialises in dealing with the soul, and death in general. Other than that, I cannot tell you much about his capabilities”.

“What else can you say?” Said the boy with white hair, Yun, they had called him. All four of the people in the room freely gave off domineering auras, but Yun’s was by far the most animalistic. He worried Cleo.

“We know what Peter is looking for. He has an obsession with Rose, the girl with green hair behind me. For the last two years he has been hunting her, He’s the reason why I kind of went mad yesterday. He’s a hateful human being. I don’t know how we should go about this, but I think he would move mountains to get her under his thumb”.

“There’s seven of us, and if we put Rose in one of his current hunting grounds we will have six people to be in the area around her,” Jim said, “If Law is there, and can put an array on us that might somehow hide our auras, then we should easily be able to surround him and pen him in”.

“Do you think we will be able to pen him in safely?” Winoa said.

“You may not have noticed, miss, but all of the people in this room are Saints. Together we can easily deal with any single Saint that we come across. Any more questions?”

“What if he comes across one of you while he’s looking for me?” Said Rose. “What if he picks you off one by one?”

“He won’t,” Yun replied. His confidence surprised the girls, “He won’t beat me at least”.