Lightning flashed over the face of the manor, illuminating untended walls creeping with vines and filthy windows. Some of them were cracked, still others were boarded up from inside.

As the lightning faded, Caiden narrowed his eyes against the quickly gathering dark. Behind him, he heard Gwen dismounting. But he was already walking forward, taking in every detail he could, while his hand crept up to the harness he wore to remove a potion, uncork it, and down it in one swallow.

Caiden tried to push aside the bitter, acrid taste that almost made him want to gag, and he took a breath, waiting for his senses to sharpen.

One of the first things he’d learned about the Venatori was that training and knowledge weren’t nearly enough. There was a third and crucial cog that made a Venator a Venator: potions. Meant to give them just the slightest nudge closer to the capabilities of their unnatural enemies, nearly all potions almost always lethal to anyone untrained. Every Venator underwent extensive regulation training, almost like poisoners, so they wouldn’t die the instant the concoctions hit their system. Some took to them more readily than others.

Caiden had gotten used to them very fast. It only took a few months of vigilant trials and too many weeks suffering, unable to move, wondering if he might finally just die from all the unspeakable concoctions he was swallowing.

After surviving all that, he only had to wait a few seconds for a potion to kick in. Like right now.

His eyes readjusted to the darkness, his vision sharpened, and the smell of underbrush from the forest, dirt, and rotting wooden boards of the house almost overwhelmed him. This particular potion heightened everything: vision, hearing, smell, and touch. Unfortunately, that included pain reception.

When Gwen reached his side, bow in her hands and an arrow already nocked, he returned her quick sideways glance. She blinked at him a few times, probably seeing the soft glow the potion gave his blue eyes. A minor side-effect, all things considered, but still a reason to not use it around anyone aside from another Venator.

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “I’m glad you’ve got that covered.”

She didn’t like potions and this had been her first corpse, but she’d apparently been on at least one mission with some kind of mentor? Hadn’t done much for her experience level, from the look of it. Aside of keeping her from instantly flying into a panic, which, granted, was already a good start.

A quick inspection of the dirt leading up to the house told him a few people had passed this way. People with an odd gait, mostly moving off into the woods. Some tight, drawn-up dog pawprints dotted the area. Caiden scowled.

The mansion bore a wide, open porch, empty and with boards threatening to rot. Where the monster went, he hadn’t seen, but the front door was shut tight. None of the windows facing the porch were broken, either.

While he’d walked, Caiden took the crossbow off his shoulder and loaded it. Now he held it up, ready to lower and shoot in a moment’s notice, as he reached for the door handle.

He gave Gwen a look, slanted his brow slightly. Waited to see if she was ready.

“Ready,” Gwen whispered.

Right. Not a soldier.

Caiden didn’t make a sound as he tried the door. Locked, like he figured it’d be. Without a word, he took a step back from it, even while Gwen straightened up in the corner of his vision, like she expected them to break in a window instead.

Lightning flashed again. Caiden counted. Just a few seconds. One, two…

Thunder rolled across the dark sky, building to stop with a snapping, explosive crash just north of the mansion. It was that instant when Caiden took a step forward, then another – only that step became a measured kick as he slammed his boot hard against the door.

The door flew inward, slamming and snapping hard against the wall. The very second it gave way, Caiden straightened up and moved forward, crossbow up and at the ready.

Nothing. Just a foyer suitably large for a mansion this size, fit with dusty decorations: lavish pottery, tapestries on the walls, and a thick, deep red rug reaching from Caiden’s feet at the door all the way to a set of stairs on the opposite side of the room. None of the windows here were boarded, and none were broken either.

But every door Caiden could see from here was shut tight. He had no doubt plenty of them were locked – if not all, given the way whoever once lived here seemed to have tried hard to lock and board themselves in.

Gwen padded up quietly behind him and whispered, “What do you think?”

“We need to find where it came from,” Caiden replied, giving her a quick look. “Probably a room with broken windows.”

Thanks to the potion, he could see her almost perfectly even in the darkness, despite the occasional flash of lightning making his eyes sting and take a second or two to readjust. He could even notice her fingers trembling while she held her bow and arrow.

“Split up?” she asked.

Caiden let his scowl furrow his brow a touch darker. “No. The point of partners is we stick together.”

Gwen nodded.

Good.

Pressing on, crossbow still at the ready, Caiden strode deeper into that too-quiet foyer. The air stood still, unmoving, a few motes of dust falling in front of the windows the only sign of movement other than the two Venatori. No creaking floors, no thudding, no signs of any disturbances at all.

He didn’t like it.

The first door on his right was locked. So was the second. By the third, Gwen’s nerves started itching at the back of his neck again, her anxiety building worse with every rattle of an unyielding doorknob.

“Can you knock these in too?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Caiden said. “But the more noise we make, the more we alert whatever’s already in here.”

“The longer we stay, the more likely we are to be ambushed…” Gwen muttered quietly, her fear crawling over his skin like ants.

“We’ll be fine.” He tried another door – locked. “Just keep me covered.”

A moment of silence passed. During it, Caiden found an unlocked door and opened it slowly, but it only led into what looked like a spacious room showcasing art. A quick glance told him it was probably useless, and it led nowhere else – no other doors in there. They could check back there later if they had to.

For now, he moved on to the next door in the foyer. That was all the time he had before Gwen almost hissed, “What was that thing that bit you? Was it a person? Is your arm okay?”

Caiden didn’t even glance at the bite. It still stung, even worse now after taking that potion.

He replied, “I’m fine.”

“It left a tooth in you, Caiden.”

He stopped in front of another door, tried it – unlocked. Second one so far. Carefully, he twisted the handle open and held it there, waiting.

All he said was, “I got it out.”

“It was a freaking human tooth.”

He huffed. She was spiraling. Her voice was shaking now.

“I got something,” Caiden interrupted, shooting her a sideways look. She stared at him, wide-eyed, and that made him pause. “You should use a potion.”

“I don’t like potions.”

“I can tell,” he said simply, “but it doesn’t matter whether you like them or not.”

Gwen gave him a long look. “You can be our eyes, because my ears are good enough for me.”

Caiden paused – but he nodded. Gwen’s mentor must’ve reminded her one too many times that potions could get addictive. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a bad reminder, though it didn’t change the fact that they used them for good reason.

Slowly, he opened the door, checking around it and waiting for any signs of life – or unlife. Didn’t matter which.

He stepped into a large study, bookshelves lining the walls on either side. It was much more constrictive here than the foyer: lower ceiling, tighter corners, but he still saw two more doors. They had a lot of ground to cover.

Straight ahead stood a desk piled high with papers, some strewn in the floor, and a few open books. The chair, its back facing him, had been pulled out and left slightly askew from the table. All of it stood out against the stark organization of the quiet, dusty foyer and the seemingly organized books on the shelves.

But something wasn’t right. A familiar feeling hung in the air here: a starved aura of pure hatred, twisted and angry.

Cautiously, Caiden approached the chair, reaching with one hand to drag it around to face him. He never got the chance.

With a harsh, guttural intake of air, like someone almost choking on their own breath, a twitching humanoid form jolted up from the seat. The monster staggered in place, whirling awkwardly to face him, gangling limbs hanging askew from a twisted torso as it hacked up a hungry, mutilated moan.

Caiden didn’t hesitate. He took a step back and pulled the trigger, aiming for the creature’s skull.

The bolt hit it with a meaty thunk and enough force to knock the creature’s head almost off its neck. It staggered with a strange wheeze, teetered awkwardly – and then fell flat on its back on the floor.

Silence filled the room again. The aura dissipated – the monster’s, at least. Gwen’s horror still made the hairs on the back of Caiden’s neck stand on end.

Slowly, he moved forward and nudged the creature with his boot. It didn’t move.

Now that he stood here and got a look at it, there was no question it was human. Human and rotting, wearing tattered clothes stained with patches of old blood. It had skin to match, worn and splotched and too much of it wanting to fall off its white bones. Its lips were largely gone, showing stark naked teeth framed only by dangling patches of decaying flesh.

He noticed something else: it still had every tooth in its head.

“Different monster,” Caiden said quietly. There was more than one.

Gwen hesitantly inched closer, though he knew she couldn’t see it worth a damn. She fished around in a bag slung over her shoulder, but Caiden turned his attention elsewhere. He stood again, going back to the door and closing it, careful not to click the latch too loudly against the deep silence.

But something else broke that silence: scraping, something spitting sparks. Turning, Caiden faced Gwen again just in time to see her lighting the lone candle on the desk. Maybe she’d seen it during one of the lightning flashes, which were getting even brighter and more frequent, making Caiden blink worse.

The candle didn’t help, either. He took a moment to let his eyes readjust and said, “What’re you doing?”

“Sorry if the light was sudden,” she replied, already busy rifling through the things strewn on the desk. “Maybe all this will tell us something useful…”

Her anxiety still lingered, but something else came to replace it: curiosity. Similar to what Caiden felt from her before, back in Deepwell. It flared with each parchment she held by the candle and read, and she seemed focused on it. That was better than fear, at least.

Caiden, on the other hand, suddenly found himself focused on something else. Gwen was a commoner, like him, but she’d lit that candle for one reason: to read.

He tightened his grip on the doorknob, trying to swallow the absurd pang of self-consciousness that fought its way up his throat. Gwen glanced at him for a long moment; he could feel that much. Didn’t have to look at her to know she’d gotten busy trying to figure him out.

But the rustling resumed again as she returned to scratching through parchments and reading a few lines of each. Then a sudden excitement filled the room, almost electrical, and Caiden regarded her again.

“Find something?”

She paused, blinked, and looked at him instead of what she was reading, confusion creeping back into the air. For a moment, Caiden tensed.

Shit. He had asked too early – she hadn’t even stopped searching through the desk’s contents with her other hand, not showing the first outward sign of having made a discovery.

He’d done this before, and it’d gotten him in trouble. Too much trouble.

Still surprised, Gwen held up what looked like a small diary, with no apparent plans to press the issue. Maybe he’d misread her. Maybe the surprise was from whatever was written on that parchment instead. He hoped so.

“I might have,” she said, dropping everything else and slouching near the candle to crack open the book and start leafing through the pages.

Caiden stayed where he was and quietly leaned one shoulder against the door, staring into the darkness in a corner.

“There’s no name in this, whoever they are,” Gwen murmured while she flicked through the diary. “They mention making a deal with an ‘It,’ always capitalized, but they don’t name this ‘It,’ either… and I don’t think they’d call a god an ‘it.’” She scrunched her nose up. “They sacrificed all kinds of things to it, trying to appease it, and said it kept trying to go back on their ‘deal.’”

Caiden let out a pensive rumble. He didn’t have to be well-versed in monsters and dark magic to know what that sounded like.

Gwen frowned. “The last entry says, ‘My plan did not work. It saw through me, realized I was trying to trick It. Its final words to me were that I would suffer for my arrogance. As I write this, I know not what It did, but I have seen none of my servants in the past two hours since It left.’”

She paused, took a quiet, shaky breath, and went on, “’Nothing good will come of this house or my line. I will trap myself and my curse here with me. Should anyone find this, I will lend you power over my Destructor, to perhaps undo whatever unknown horror It left in store for me. You need only use Its true name. Its name is…’”

Silence. Gwen’s voice drifted, and she stared at the book in her hands. Caiden tried prompting her with a single inquisitive grunt.

It worked, even if it made her start.

“It’s burned,” she almost blurted. “The page, where they tried to write the name. It’s burned right through.”

“Hrm.” Caiden finally joined her, standing by the desk. “Nothing else here?”

“Nothing else important. There’s a whole lot of money-keeping, records of purchases, some old…”

Gwen kept talking, but Caiden didn’t hear her. Because that aura came back – it filled the room again, so strong he almost wanted to gag. Instantly, it overwhelmed all his senses.

And, in the floor, the creature lurched back to whatever mockery of a life that had reanimated it to begin with. Fingers twitching, it surged spasmodically but swiftly, straight for Gwen’s ankle.

She tried to pull away and couldn’t, greedy hands wrapping around her leg. The undead tried to pull itself closer to take a bite out of her – and, that same moment, Caiden turned and brought his foot down on its head so hard it cracked.

The undead went still only briefly, an almost confused groan rattling in what was left of its throat, until Caiden stomped it again, even harder.

With a sickening crunch that clearly turned Gwen’s stomach, judging by how she radiated rippling disgust, the monster’s head crushed under his boot. Reeking brain matter and rotten flesh putrefied the air, but the monster stopped twitching after that. Steadily, its strange aura began to fade again, hopefully for good this time.

Gwen quickly pulled her ankle free of the stiff fingers, which popped as she tugged hard against them. She coughed and took a shaky breath, trying her best to look composed. Caiden halfheartedly shook his boot, not that it did much to get the gore off.

“Th-thanks,” Gwen sputtered, making an awful face at what she saw of the smashed skull in the meager candlelight. Caiden didn’t waste time gaping at it.

“Let’s keep looking,” he said, leading the way back out into the foyer. Gwen seemed interested in browsing a few more titles in the study, but Caiden threw her a look over his shoulder, and she promptly stuck close behind him again.

“How can we, if all the doors are locked?” she halfway muttered.

Caiden huffed. There were plenty more doors to try and an entire second floor they hadn’t searched yet. Crossing the vast red carpet in the center of the foyer again, he went to the other side this time and tried the pair of double doors there. They were unlocked, so he quietly pushed one open.

He stepped into a great, open dining hall. The centerpiece of the room was a massive oak table, its rim gilded in gold. Matching chairs lined it, most still neatly pushed in but a few left disorderly, with one knocked over like something had stumbled past it and tripped.

On the opposite end of the room stood a dark fireplace reaching halfway to the landing above, which looked down on the dining area. Judging by the ashen logs still left there, no one had cleaned it since whatever flame it’d last held.

No one had cleaned up the corpse in front of it, either.

The stench of it clung to the air around the fireplace as Caiden slowly made his way over, crossbow in hand, checking the shadowed corners and glancing more than once at another door just to his right, shut tight like all the rest.

But this corpse didn’t move. It lay there, motionless, a set of stark white bones picked clean by starved monsters – all except for the neck and head. It looked absurd: a body only partially dressed in its own flesh, which looked as if some creature had meticulously picked through it, leaving a strange amount untouched. The creatures had proven they weren’t choosy, so what the hell was this?

“Caiden— careful,” Gwen blurted right at his back, but Caiden quietly held up a hand as he stepped nearer to the corpse.

It didn’t move. Its bare skeletal fingers didn’t twitch, and neither did the unchewed, rotting flesh of its face or its neck. And, now that he held his breath and knelt beside it, he saw why.

Resting against the decayed flesh was a small, iron pendant depicting the four-pointed star of Astra Aeterna. The Eternal Star, a deity some claimed didn’t even exist and did nothing for her followers. A relatively modern religious cult, which only gained traction in the Empire in the last century or so.

Caiden wasn’t one to put too much stock in the gods. Never had been. He’d attended a few rituals, saw some services through in the military, always tried to do what was right, but the gods had never played a particularly prominent role in his life.

Looking at this corpse, though, he felt a strange twitch in his soul that he couldn’t ignore. It made him cast his eyes firmly to the floor and mentally recite one of the few prayers he knew.

“What is it?” Gwen asked hesitantly. She still couldn’t see much, still refused to take a potion.

“A house servant,” Caiden replied.

“She didn’t become one of those things…?”

“No. She was wearing a holy symbol. It kept her safe from the curse. The undead still caught her. They ate the body, but they couldn’t get near the amulet.” Caiden’s scowl promptly returned, and he gently took the amulet from around the dead woman’s neck, standing.

Gwen went pale. “You sure you should take that off?”

Caiden nodded, holding the pendant out to her. “She’s at peace now, unlike anyone else here. We can take care of the body later.”

Swallowing, Gwen took the amulet and turned it over in her hands. “Looks pretty rough… just iron, too. I guess the gods really don’t care about what it’s made of.”

“Yeah. Like I said: servant.”

Gwen sighed, turning away from the corpse and briefly pressing one gloved hand against her face. “Okay. Alright. I think… maybe if we try to find the head of the household, we can figure out how to break the curse.”

Made sense. “Think they’re still in here?”

“They said they were locking themselves in, so I’d think so. What’s the most secure room? Cellar?”

“Unless they went somewhere farther from the cursed servants,” Caiden added thoughtfully, scratching his chin. He had only been in one other mansion the size of this one, but with that in mind, he said, “Master bedroom, maybe.”

“It’d be nice and private, if they were trying to find a place to hide when everyone else started turning,” Gwen murmured. “Want to try and find it?”

“Yeah,” Caiden readjusted his grip on his crossbow and led the way back toward the double doors. “C’mon.”

But as he neared the doors again, Caiden stiffened. Something ran ice-cold talons across all his senses just as he reached for the doorknob. He froze in place and tilted his head, listening.

“What is it?” Gwen hissed behind him, and Caiden promptly held up a hand. Instantly, her mouth snapped shut.

Something moved in the foyer. A sharp clacking tapped its way across the hard floor. It sounded like… claws. Dog claws.

But what he sensed wasn’t dogs. Not any ordinary ones, at least. Between Gwen’s fear and tension at his back and the strange sensations of cold, raw hunger and hatred drifting through the door before him like a threat whispered in his ear, tingling down his spine, Caiden stood there for a long moment without knowing what to do.

Finally, he snapped out of it and took a step back. They didn’t have to go that way. The mansion was enormous; there had to be a way around. Gwen stood by quietly, as if waiting for orders. He appreciated that, but he wasn’t actually her commander.

So he glanced at her and said, “There’s something else in there now. Dogs, I think. Sounds like it.”

Gwen blinked at him. “You heard that?”

“Yeah. Claws.”

“Oh… yeah – the potion. Think they’re…?”

“Cursed, like the rest of this place?” Caiden huffed. He couldn’t say why he knew, but he had no doubt they were, not after what he felt. So he settled for saying, “Yeah.”

“Wonder how they got in,” Gwen muttered, mostly to herself. Caiden wondered that too, but now wasn’t the time to contemplate it. Didn’t really matter. All that mattered was they were there now.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Keep your bow ready. Could be more around here.”

She nodded. Leaving the double doors behind, Caiden went to the smaller door near the woman’s corpse. Trying it, he found it unlocked, so he slowly eased it open and stepped through.

He entered into a hall, one nowhere near as open as the massive foyer. Sensing nothing, he gave a quick glance around just to reassure himself of that before turning right again and trying that way.

Winding through the halls, Caiden had half a mind to try more doors and see what other secrets the place could’ve held, but something drove him on. In silence, he continued taking point, crossbow up, waiting for more signs of cursed servants. Still the mansion offered nothing but a hush and a strange unease that came to make a home in his very soul – a kind of tingling sense of wrong that wouldn’t leave him alone.

One that told him not to waste any time.

As he reached the top of the stairs, the whispers started. First just a vague one or two that he pushed aside and ignored, focusing on something else instead: the portraits on the walls, the tapestries depicting some kind of family history…

But as they rounded another corner and found a tall, open room with stairs, the voices got louder. More insistent. One in particular whispered nonsense along his now twitching shoulders in a way that pleaded. It quickly turned to icy, grasping fingers climbing up his spine—

Caiden shivered, his breath catching in his throat, and his grip on his crossbow turning his knuckles white. For a second, maybe two, he pinched his eyes shut against the cold sweat suddenly collecting on his skin.

Focus. He needed to focus on something else…

“Caiden?” Gwen almost squeaked behind him, her anxiety filling the room with still more icicles he didn’t need right now. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said promptly, reflexively, trying to sound dismissive and not sure how well it worked.

Not well at all, apparently, because Gwen’s fear only worsened. She grabbed his arm and tried to look at that bite, like she expected him to start turning into a monster. Caiden frowned at her but didn’t pull away.

“Oh – oh, you’re fine I think,” she mumbled awkwardly, mortified and apologetic. “It’s just… werewolves bite people and they turn, and you hear about some vampires doing that too, so I wasn’t sure if…”

Caiden gingerly tugged his arm away from her. “Right.”

Gwen fidgeted with her bow briefly before immediately nocking an arrow again, like she wanted to pretend her panic had never happened. A lightning flash lit up the room, making Caiden wince – the room was lined with huge, tall windows, two in particular standing on ground level around the bottom of the stairs. Closing his eyes, even briefly, made it even harder block out that whisper wailing distantly somewhere.

“Let’s head up,” Caiden said, just to hear something other than the faint, distant chorus of screams, rising and ebbing like a sickly ocean.

Quickly, seeming eager to do anything else, Gwen nodded and fell in behind him again. He made his way over to the stairs, ignoring all the doors. All of them were closed, like all the rest he’d seen. Odd that someone would meticulously close all the doors. Then again, it seemed whoever had been in here really wanted to keep something in. Made him wonder about the mansion grounds, if it had any.

It did. In fact, the windows looked out to the mansion grounds. He found that out a few seconds later.

A wave of cold surged toward him. It stopped him in his tracks, tried to take his breath away. Then the windows shattered.

They exploded inward, shards of glass spraying the two of them. Instinctively, Caiden pulled Gwen closer and shielded her from the nearest window. Good thing, too. Because, the next second, something grazed right by his shoulder – he felt the wind off it, aiming right where Gwen had been standing, brushing by him to land behind him, bringing with it the fetid stench of something that was meant to be very dead.

Feet mostly made of bone and hard claws clacked hard onto the floor, followed by a meatier thud of a few decaying paws. Caiden spun to face a trio of large – dogs?

What used to be dogs. They weren’t dogs anymore. Fur, matted black with old blood here and there, still clung to them in ugly patches. Others had more exposed skin, half rotten, barely covering stringy muscle and areas of exposed bone.

Their eyes were dead, clouded, a few missing entirely. But that didn’t seem to slow them down. The ones that had lips left peeled them back in vicious snarls over rotting teeth, some broken in their jaws, cocking their heads and flopping what was left of their limp, decaying ears. It would’ve wrenched anyone’s gut hard to see it. Especially if you liked dogs.

Beside him, Gwen sounded unsure whether to gasp in horror or to gag in disgust. Judging by the nausea rolling off her in waves with a violent undertow trying to pull his own stomach out of place, she leaned toward the latter.

Didn’t take long for the dogs to finish sizing them up.

Just as Caiden leveled his crossbow, they charged. One leapt straight for his throat, but he stabbed with his bayonet – and impaled it, knocking it aside hard enough to send it flying off his blade and halfway across the room.

The others followed after it, one snapping for Gwen’s heels and another making a leap for Caiden’s leg. A swift kick sent it flailing back with an unearthly, demonic sort of wail that only served to sharply remind that these weren’t dogs anymore.

“Upstairs – go!” Caiden ordered, shooting a bolt for one dog. It dodged aside with unnatural, disturbing speed, jerking to one side in a movement that looked almost like a seizure.

Gwen ran up the stairs, but Caiden stayed facing the dogs, eying each one and keeping his crossbow at the ready, his magazine dispensing him another bolt and sparing him from having to reload manually. This time, at least. He had a few more shots left.

The dogs seemed wise to being shot, at least for a while. Until one didn’t seem to care, running forward fast enough that Caiden’s shot went wide.

But an arrow plunged into what was left of the dog’s ribs. Knocked it off course – barely in time for the monster’s pungent maw to miss finding Caiden’s leg.

At the top of the stairs, Gwen readied another arrow and began to loose them, one after another, raining them down on the dogs like an archer in a siege. She didn’t give them a single opening, arrows thunking hard into the wooden stairs in Caiden’s wake as he charged up after her.

All too fast, the dogs learned they didn’t have to worry about arrows. The lead one came running up after him, and Gwen focused on it, shooting arrow after arrow – they hit their mark, most of them, but the dog kept coming despite stumbling from the impacts.

With Gwen slowing it down, Caiden wheeled for the nearest door and tried it. Unlocked. Throwing it open and seeing – and sensing – no immediate threats, he stepped back out to check on Gwen.

She held her own, but she’d been backed against the wall and her quiver was starting to run dry. Taking quick aim, Caiden put another bolt into the walking pincushion that the lead undead hound had become.

“Over here – get inside!” he called.

The next moment, Gwen came rushing by him, dark blue cloak flapping. He shot one more bolt into the dog’s head. Just as the rest of them rounded the corner and came straight at him, Caiden stepped back through the doorway and slammed it shut.

Instantly, the door started thudding hard as the dogs threw themselves at it. He could hear the bolts and arrows snapping as they slammed their bodies mindlessly against the wood, claws scrabbling. Unearthly growls and groans filled the room through the door, and Caiden pressed his back against it, planting his feet.

Gwen turned in a full circle trying to find another barrier to get between them and the dogs. They were in yet another study, but this one looked less well-used. Empty shelves, a strange amount of potted plants sitting under a window.

The dogs hit ever harder. Caiden grunted as the door behind him almost flew off the hinges, knocking against the back of his skull.

“Uh – um,” Gwen blurted, before she squinted at something and disappeared behind a tall bookshelf. He heard her scratching through something and a thud of furniture. The creak of a door.

“Caiden!” she called.

He made a run for it. Turning the corner around the bookshelf so fast he almost skidded, he found an open door and Gwen already inside a very dark room, beckoning him. Not giving himself a chance to wonder what might be in the dark, he ran after her – and nearly hit his head on the top of the doorframe, carved roughly from the stone wall of the house. This didn’t seem quite like the other rooms. His shoulders barely fit, too.

But he got inside and she slammed the thick wooden door shut after him. He blinked, eyes quickly adjusting to the darkness – and all at once a thousand feelings of wrongness assaulted him.

Hatred. Hunger. Fear. Despair. Envy – greed.

Evil.

Besieged by it all, Caiden could only stand there for a moment and try to find his wits again. Before him lay a small but otherwise open room, mostly round like an old, forgotten turret on a castle. Maybe it was.

Stone floor, stone walls. The room was cold enough to bite him to the bone, but he wasn’t sure it was entirely natural. Wooden panels lay out on the floor in a perfect circle. Strange symbols had been carved into the wood. Though he didn’t recognize them, he knew instantly what they were.

But they were dark, cold. Long since dead. If he had to guess, the source of whatever was wrong with this place originated here, but this wasn’t where it rested now.

For Gwen’s sake, he struck a lone candle mounted on the wall. He closed his eyes as he did, slowly opening them to let them readjust, but he already heard Gwen moving toward the center of the room. A low creak of leather armor told him she knelt by one of those wood panels.

“Are these…?”

“Demonic,” Caiden said. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Guess we found our culprit,” Gwen muttered.

Caiden huffed. No, they hadn’t. The culprit wasn’t the demon, it was the one who wanted its power. Chances were that person was still in this mansion somewhere.

Looking around the room again, he caught sight of a narrow outline in the stone on the opposite side of the room from the wooden door. Going over to it, he felt around the cracks and scowled.

“We need to get back into the halls,” he said. “I think this is a door.”

A sudden loud, booming thud came from the wooden door. Gwen started out of her skin. And although the noise didn’t bother him, the startled shock she sent rippling into the air made Caiden start, too.

“I’m not sure they can smell us,” Caiden halfway muttered. “Can undead scent?”

“I… I don’t know,” Gwen replied. She came over to him and started feeling along the wall – then stopped. “Caiden?”

The wall beside her had an odd, circular opening in it. Kneeling, he tried to peer through it, but it was too dark even with the potion enhancing his eyes.

So Caiden stood and drew his sword. Gwen blinked at him, but she didn’t say a word as he slid the blade into the hole. It barely fit.

“What— what’re you doing?” she said. “You’re ruining your sword.”

“I can fix it,” Caiden said, feeling as the tip of the blade snagged on something. “Just testing a theory.”

Gripping the hilt with one hand and part of the crosspiece with another, he turned it like turning a crank. Beside them, something in the wall began to grind. Gears creaked and groaned into place, and the cut-out portion of the stone wall began to slide away.

Gwen’s jaw went a little slack at the sight. “That’s a pretty impressive mechanism.”

Still trying to get a good enough grip on the sword to actually turn it, Caiden only grunted in reply. Only as the door slid open wider did Gwen realize something could be out there, judging from how sheepishly and hastily she readied her bow again.

Turned out there was nothing, though. At least, not yet. Managing to pull his sword free again, Caiden took a look and found the stone doorway opened up directly into the dead end of yet another upstairs hall.

He rumbled a low, thoughtful noise. Good. Now they could keep looking for the real source.

Caiden led them into the hall, checking a few more rooms along the way, finding locked doors or a whole lot of nothing. He left one rotting corpse that could only be an undead right where it was, motionless on the floor. The aura in this room, probably coming from it, indicated the creature would gladly wake up and attack them. Since it didn’t, though, they didn’t have time for that right now.

But for all his trying to ignore it, that one voice got worse. Insistent, more distinct than the others. Pleading and clawing, like something reaching out to him and asking him to find it, trying to help him reach it. It didn’t make any sense, but somehow he knew. Something wanted him there, wanted to bring him closer, have him fix something it couldn’t.

Caiden stopped in his tracks right before another door like all the rest, but when he looked at it, he knew this had to be right.

He tried the doorknob – locked. Gwen arched a brow at him, wondering about his sudden determination to get into this room, but Caiden took a step back and gave her another nod. She nodded back, moving behind him, bow still in hand. Fast learner.

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “We don’t know what might be in there. You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” she said quietly.

And with a kick that threatened to knock the door from its hinges, Caiden stepped right into the room, crossbow ready again before the door even hit the wall behind it.

This was the master bedroom, no doubt about that. A lavish bed, nightstands on either side, armoire, large windows covered in boards – plenty of torn-up books strewn across the floor, ripped from the shelves in fits of rage…

And, in the middle of the room, staring straight at them, stood an undead not at all like the others.

It wore the clothes of a nobleman, long since filthy and torn in more than one place, as if it had tried to pry them off and couldn’t remember how. Like some sickly shadow of its humanity, the intricately sewn and dyed clothes now hung from its emaciated limbs – limbs of rotten sinew held together and given motion by nothing but hate. Cold, grey skin crisscrossed with blackened, shriveled veins showed beneath the tatters, along with a heaving, bony chest, full of ribs not sure which way to jut, rattling with something of a useless excuse for breathing. Probably a reflex leftover from life.

Most of all, its eyes were wrong. For a moment, Caiden stood, transfixed by the gaping, hollow pits in its skull, aglow with an unearthly orange flame. They lit the sunken features of its face, stressed and rotten skin worn and clinging thin against its gaunt skull.

Standing under its gaze, the whisper from before turned to a shrill echo of a scream. It was begging. Pleading. And it hated— hated with a hungry fury trailed by heavy guilt. A guilt that wormed its way into Caiden’s gut like an ugly afterthought.

They all moved at once.

Caiden lifted his crossbow and aimed for the thing’s chest, hoping to slow it down. But when he fired, it was already gone, leaping to the side and kicking off the wall to reach him.

Fingers grasped for his arm, for his throat, trying to knock the crossbow out of his hands and tackle him to the floor. The shriveled thing shouldn’t have been so strong; it shouldn’t even have budged him, the way it looked – but one of his feet stumbled and skidded hard against the floor to keep his balance from the monster’s impact. Putrid breath wafted against his skin, its twitching jaws popping and snapping together—

Caiden threw it off, bringing his crossbow with its bayonet around to bear and plunging it deep into the monster’s chest.

It didn’t even pause.

Instead, it grabbed the crossbow with both hands, twisted it out of Caiden’s grip, and pulled it from its own chest. With a sickening rip, the weapon came free, leaving a gaping hole behind. Gwen’s bowstring sang, an arrow flying for the creature’s head – and it dodged that too, ducking low.

Not low enough to avoid Caiden as he charged for it, but that didn’t work either. The thing was too fast. It saw him coming and leapt right to the side.

As it did, it let out a wretched screech, dragged up from the bowels of hell itself – a stuttering, hoarse, but still deafening noise that rang through the entire mansion. Gwen tried to cover her ears. Caiden didn’t bother. Wouldn’t do any good – not with that sound pealing like a death bell through every layer of his soul, raking frigid claws against his heart.

For half a second, everything went still, even the fire-eyed monster. Then, the entire mansion exploded into a terrible cacophony of thudding – thudding feet and thudding doors, and of distant moans drifting through the mansion as every single slumbering corpse woke up.

It was calling them. The thing was calling the other undead straight to it.

“Gwen! Door – now!”

Frantic, Gwen let her bow fall to the floor, whirling to face the door and throw it shut, locking it. She grabbed the nearest piece of furniture to try dragging it over and making a barricade, and Caiden almost moved to help, but he had no time.

The monster lunged for him again, jaws open, its fingers poised like talons – which maybe they were, with its fingernails unnaturally long, thick, and ragged. Caiden saw it coming and sidestepped it, only for it to face him again.

Damn, it was fast…

Gwen gave up on reinforcing the door, drawing a long dagger off her side and rushing the creature from the back, trying to plunge the blade into it – but it whirled for her instead, delivering a quick swipe with one arm that almost knocked the dagger from her hand.

Something began to thud outside the room. Loudly. Slowly at first, but rapidly picking up speed and strength as more flailing undead joined the fray, throwing themselves against the door with all their might.

With the monster distracted, if only briefly, Caiden had to take only one long step to reach the tall bookshelf Gwen wanted to make into a barricade. He grabbed it near the top and heaved it over with one heavy tug, sending it crashing to the floor on its side right in front of the door.

That same instant, Gwen cried out in pain before shouting, “Caiden!”

He turned. She and the monster were locked, grappling, its teeth in her shoulder while she tried to hold its hands at bay, fingers wildly twitching for her neck. It ripped its teeth from her flesh, going for her throat next. No amount of Gwen’s kicking even made it flinch.

Unarmed, with no time to draw a weapon, Caiden charged. He gripped the monster’s head with both hands, making it pull away and start shrieking again, its jaw snapping at empty air with loud, choppy clicks.

Before he could twist its neck and end this, it reached back for his face with gnarled claws, scratching his head, his jaw, almost hitting his eyes—

Caiden wrenched its neck anyway. Hard. A deep crunch snapped against the monster’s harsh cries, and all at once, it stopped moving, a limp, rotting heap of gangling limbs in Caiden’s hands.

He froze and didn’t let it go. “Gwen,” he said, looking up and quickly assessing her wounds.

She would be fine. The bite on her shoulder was the worst of it by far – they’d at least need to stop the bleeding. Aside from that, she’d live, and they could focus on the problem still at hand.

The other undead hadn’t stopped. If anything, their wretched thudding at the door and hungry groans had only grown louder. More desperate.

Gwen pressed a hand to the deep bite torn in her neck, hissing. But she took a sharp breath and blurted, “I’m okay. Are you okay?”

“Fine. Still got that amulet?”

Something snapped; something crashed. A splinter of the door flew from near the top of the frame and right over the edge of the overturned bookshelf. The undead were beating their way inside. Gwen started out of her skin and cursed at almost the top of her voice. Caiden readjusted his grip on the broken-necked undead in his arms.

Gwen blinked. “Amulet—!?”

“Astra Aeterna,” Caiden said quickly, “the amulet on the body.”

Stuffing a hand in a pouch on her belt, Gwen drew it out.

Caiden barely caught sight of it in her fingers before he ordered, “Put it around its neck.”

She didn’t hesitate, even if confusion mingled with her wild fear while she grimaced and reached around the monster’s neck, quickly fastening the amulet around it and dropping the holy symbol against the bare, dead flesh of its hollowed-out chest.

It screamed. Shrieked and screeched and did its best to deafen him, its bones cracking and snapping, its head hanging by a snapped neck flailing spasmodically, catching Caiden in the chin hard enough to make him grunt. He barely managed to not bite his tongue in half.

The creature kicked and wailed, clawing wildly, leaving filthy, bloody scratches on him anywhere it could reach. Bony feet slammed against his shins and legs, trying to find some way to get free and pull the amulet off.

Caiden didn’t let it go, even while it seized and writhed – and all the heightened pain of that potion made him cringe and grunt. He just closed his eyes and tightened his grip.

Then it stopped.

The twisted, cursed corpse went still, sagging, and Caiden immediately released it to let it fall to a disgusting heap on the floor. At the door, the thudding halted all at once, except for the sickening sound of bodies dropping that shouldn’t have been walking again in the first place.

All that remained were Caiden and Gwen, standing, staring at each other, trying to get their breath back. That and her fear, now allowed to fill the entire empty room.

Something else moved, but he knew Gwen didn’t feel it. Whatever had pleaded with him earlier, almost called out to him – it fell quiet. More than that, it almost seemed to move away, leaving behind an echo of strange gratitude, of peace, subtly and unnaturally warm against the otherwise cold, wet air of the mansion.

That feeling was a perfect opposite to what had been here before. Hatred, madness, the hunger of all the monsters – all of it began to fade.

“Did… that work?” Gwen almost whispered.

Caiden nodded. Scooping his crossbow up from the floor and throwing the strap over his back again, he said, “Yeah. I think it did.”

For a moment, they stood there, locking gazes again. Even her fear started to disappear, if only just a little. But the confusion remained, along with something else.

“You’re pretty impressive, Caiden,” Gwen blurted almost sheepishly, breathing a tiny, almost hysterical little laugh of relief. “I… I – don’t think anybody in the Venatori expected us to lift an entire curse.”

He huffed. Glanced at the twisted-up body of the twice-dead monster, the glow in its eyes gone, leaving a dark, empty skull fitted over with tight, grey skin.

“Little late to lift it,” he said darkly.

Gwen winced. “We did what we could, though. We saved those people in Deepwell from more of these things getting out.” She took another breath, deeper this time, steadying herself and chasing off more of her lingering panic. “We did a good thing.”

Caiden returned to the door and started pushing the bookshelf away from it. Something about this still didn’t sit right with him. It felt wrong laving this mansion here, full of corpses that’d been cursed to walk again and still weren’t really destroyed. Still full of that hatred that had faded but wasn’t truly gone.

He didn’t like it.

“Yeah. We did.” He pulled the door open, stepping over several corpses piled atop each other.

He glanced up and down the hall. There had to be over a dozen of bodies, dressed like upper and lower classes both. Servants, siblings, parents, maybe grandparents – all of them innocent, all paying the price for one wayward resident in that house: someone who’d been stupid enough to make an unknown deal with an unknown demon.

A demon whose touch didn’t feel quite gone. Cold fog still lingered here, tendrils of evil that had retreated to the corners but sometimes still reached out enough to make him shiver.

“We’re not done,” Caiden said, with so much authority that it made Gwen stop right behind him and stare with dread, like she suddenly waited for something terrible to happen. “You got any oil?”

She blinked again, screwing her brow up in confusion. “I – yes, I do, but why do we need oil?”

Gwen pulled a bottle out of her pack and held it out to him. Caiden took it with a nod, turning back to that monster that’d been alone in the master bedroom – and dousing it in the oil, Gwen watching and sputtering quietly.

“You’re not really going to…?”

Caiden tossed the empty bottle back to her. She caught it, despite jumping in surprise. Getting out his own tinderbox, he struck it, sending a spark to light the motionless corpse in flame.

And then he made his way back over to the door, brushing past her on the way out. Gwen stood there, staring, blinking, as the fire swiftly spread over the twisted form and promptly started making its way to the rug – a rug Caiden had intentionally spilled some oil onto.

“You’re going to let this whole place burn down,” Gwen stated flatly.

“That’s right.” He pushed a body aside with his boot, making her a better path. “Let’s not be in it when it does.”

After another short moment of staring, Gwen followed without a word. Caiden led the way out, checking the wounds on his arms now and gingerly touching the scratches on his face and neck. The mansion was just as silent as before, neat and organized, aside from the dust – uncaring about any nightmares it’d held.

“So… why? Why burn all of this? I’ve heard about burning vampires – I’ve heard about burning undead in the sun, too. But I’ve never really heard about anyone having to burn down an entire mansion after the curse was already lifted.”

Hesitantly, Caiden threw her a look over his shoulder and answered, “The curse isn’t gone. Whatever it was, it cursed the house, not just the people in it. If we give it a chance, it’ll haunt someone else.”

Gwen stared openly now, perplexed. He wondered if he had said too much.

“How do you know that for sure?”

At first, Caiden only offered a vague grunt in response.

They reached the front door. Caiden opened it, waited for Gwen to step out first, and for some reason, he closed it behind them again. Maybe it just gave him a sense of finality.

“I don’t know,” he said at length, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. “Call it a feeling.”

Gwen snorted. “A feeling. Fine, I can live with that. So, do you get these often, these… wise feelings?”

All he offered was a slight hitch of one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. Still, something in him almost wanted to chuckle at the absurdity of her asking. If only she knew the truth.

“Just a gut feeling.”

Drawing a deep, shaky breath, Gwen nodded. “Alright. Okay,” she ran a hand through her hair, then winced at the wound in her shoulder, “what now? I don’t think the baron’s going to take it very well when we try to explain. What do we tell him? The living dead were behind it, and they came from a house a demon cursed, and we had to burn one with glowing eyes just to—”

Caiden scowled again. Yeah, she wasn’t taking this well.

“Worry about that later,” he cut in. “For now, we tend to our wounds.”

Gwen stuttered a broken little laugh. “You really do have it all together, Caiden. You’re not even startled by any of this, are you? The monsters, the curse, the… All of it?”

He huffed, stopping near her horse while she fished into the saddlebags for supplies. And Caiden replied, “I’m fine.”

Turned out, he wasn’t fine.

By the time they’d made it back to Deepwell, Gwen had collected herself well enough to go face the baron and try her hand at explanations, maybe even get a better story about what that mansion was and who’d lived there. Her panic and horror spent now, she seemed almost eager to do all of it. Even if Caiden could still sense that lingering fear in her, waiting for a chance to spring.

In his case, though, Caiden wanted nothing more than to be left alone with a drink. That drink became two. Then three. At that point, he wasn’t sure when he planned to stop.

A man flanked by a dog came into the tavern not long after Caiden started drinking. The dog bore the same black and brown fur like what had been left of those in the manor – maybe someone bred that kind around here.

And the moment Caiden looked at it, he could see its fur and flesh starting to peel away. Falling off in strands. Eyes glassing over with nothing but death and hatred. Its face betraying the skull underneath…

He shivered. But when he blinked a few times and looked again, it was just a dog. Lying by its master’s side, pink tongue lolling out cheerfully – instead of slowly sagging out through the open bottom of its rotting jaw.

Gwen was right: at his age, he had plenty of experience already. Not that he was exactly young – not like her. Hell, sometimes he wondered what someone her age was doing out here. But he had seen tavern brawls, seen them get bad – seen a man beaten within an inch of his life, sputtering and crying while he bled from nearly every opening in his face.

He had seen wars: the ones he trained all his youth and all his life to fight in. He’d seen raiders and bandits burn buildings, pillage and murder, letting horses trample the weak in the streets until they were nothing but pulp underfoot. Corpses of plague victims, piled high to be burned all at once. Reeking stenches of death, blood, and worse filling the air, overtaken only by the smell of smoldering flesh. All of it more than enough to turn most people’s stomachs.

Yeah, he’d seen a lot of things. But he’d never seen something dead twitch back to life. Smelled rot and filth that heralded not death but untold hatred and nothing but a sheer, overwhelming desire to kill. Never had he tensed at every shadow, felt like something was clawing at him from behind every step he took.

And never had he seen the empty pits of a dead man’s eyes turn to haunted caverns filled with the glow of a demon’s black magic. Much less had something like that wanting to bear down on his throat five second later. With its teeth. Human teeth.

Because it had been human once. Just as alive, just as human, as he was right now.

Just someone who’d made a mistake.

Caiden turned his arm, looked at the bandage wrapped tightly there over the set of bite marks from the first undead. Silently, he reached for another drink.

It was true, then. Venatori existed for a reason. They had a job to do, and the problem wasn’t just that no one else could do it. It was that no one else would. Because who wanted to dedicate their lives to this?

But here it was. Curses. Monsters. Magic. Things a thousand times worse than anything he’d ever known. Stripping people of their humanity and then making them kill each other. With their teeth, in this case.

Someone had to protect people from it. And even if it meant dedicating the rest of his life to it, he intended to see this through.

Caiden nudged the silver brooch sitting beside him on the table as he thought of what the Venatori had told him just before he’d set off from Castle Greywatch. Something to think about when he’d finished, they had said.

Something they hoped he’d remember when his first mission was over. He certainly remembered it now.

The hunt never ends.