4. Rookgate Manor #2
Three of them. Time and damp had done their work. They were flattened against the parquet where the soft tissue had long since liquefied and soaked into the wood. What remained was a geography of bones tenting under the leather armor of Madaze’s thugs. The heaps were blooming with white mold.
Gabriel’s footsteps had stopped. Miles glanced back. Gabriel’s attention was fixed on the bodies.
“Let’s go around,” Miles said.
They skirted the corpses, giving them a wide berth. The cold light’s glow revealed more as they moved deeper into the manor. Another body sprawled across the threshold of the dining hall. A fourth near the base of a servants’ stairwell.
That had been one of his own kills. Miles remembered raising the stone in the face of the charging guard and giving the command, the kinetic force knocking the guard flat on his back.
Stepping forward to finish him with a blow from his staff.
The feeling of bone giving way. Then he tried not to think about it anymore.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Miles said, more to distract himself and fill the silence than because he expected answers. “They got the keys, eventually. The standard procedure would be to clear the scene. Remove the bodies, document evidence, seal the property—”
“Maybe the key didn’t work for them, like it was stubborn for me.
Maybe the Crown found it easier to sweep the whole thing under the rug by limiting the number of civil servants who saw this mess.
” Gabriel’s tone was conversational, almost pleasant.
Too pleasant. “Or maybe the Crown doesn’t care what happens inside a dead vampire’s house. ”
“But the smell. It would have been appalling, for weeks.”
Gabriel shrugged. “No one ever came about the screams either, not ever. What happens in Rookgate stays within the bounds of Rookgate. It had always been like that, as far as I could remember.”
Miles frowned but didn’t argue. Gabriel was probably right on all counts.
Their walk-through took them by the side entrance, the door Gabriel had unlocked for them six months ago when the Order had raided the manor.
The doorframe was splintered. The lock mechanism hung loose, battered, and twisted. Deep gouges scarred the wood where something heavy had repeatedly struck it. The latch had been destroyed, torn from its housing.
“We didn’t do this,” Miles said.
Gabriel moved closer, studying the damage. “No. We didn’t. ”
Miles crouched to get a better angle and swung the door inward with a touch to inspect both sides. The destruction was all on the outside. Someone had tried to bash their way in. The wood around the lock was pulverized, and the metal was bent badly.
The door was swinging free now, but there were no signs through the dust and blood that anyone had been through.
“Someone tried to break in after we left,” Gabriel observed. “Broke the door but didn’t enter.”
Miles stood. “Madaze’s wards keeping the door shut against violent entry, maybe? Still active?”
“Maybe.” Gabriel’s voice had gone tight. “But it’s open now. I don’t understand.”
Miles didn’t have an answer for that.
“Enough of poking about the body parade. The office,” Gabriel said. “Madaze was running there when we caught up with him. When I—” He stopped. Started again. “It was always forbidden. To me and the others. If he had secrets worth hiding, that’s where they’d be.”
Miles nodded. “Lead the way.”
Gabriel moved with more confidence now, navigating the corridors like he knew every turn, even in the dark. Which he probably did. This had been his prison his whole life. He had only been allowed to leave while under compulsion and on Madaze’s orders.
The temperature dropped. Miles’s fingers had gone numb around the cold-light charm. Their breath frosted in the air between them.
Ahead, Gabriel stopped before a set of double doors. Dark wood, carved with roosting birds. The handles were tarnished brass shaped like claws.
The body sprawled before them was different from the others.
What remained of Madaze Goldmar lay crumpled against the doors, one skeletal hand still reaching for the handle. The expensive clothes had rotted into rags. Unlike the others, this corpse was mostly wisps of desiccated skin stretching here and there over bone. But Miles recognized the fangs.
Gabriel’s face remained blank. He stared at Madaze’s skeleton for three seconds, then stepped around it and grasped the door handle.
It didn’t turn.
Gabriel tried the other handle. Same result .
“Of course.” Gabriel put his shoulder against the door and pushed. Nothing. “Because why would anything in this nightmare be simple?”
Miles moved to help, but Gabriel was already rattling both handles, his movements growing sharper, more frustrated.
“Open,” Gabriel demanded. Then louder: “Just fucking open!”
The latches clicked.
Both doors swung inward with enough force that Gabriel stumbled forward. Miles caught his elbow, steadying him.
“What is wrong with the doors in this place?” Gabriel asked.
Again, Miles had no answer.
The office was what Miles would have expected.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves dominated three walls, crammed with leather-bound ledgers and books on maritime and Aetherial law.
A massive desk faced the doors with a chair like a throne.
Heavy curtains blocked the windows. The same oppressive red and gold wallpaper covered every surface not occupied by gaudy knick-knacks or books.
Dust coated everything. Papers littered the desk. A decanter of something dark sat on a side table, its contents nearly evaporated to sticky residue.
Miles raised the cold light higher. “This will take hours to read through properly.”
“Days,” Gabriel said. He moved to the desk, fingers trailing through the dust. “Look for hidden spaces. Madaze wasn’t original. Try behind paintings, under rugs, false-backed shelves.”
Miles began examining the bookcases while Gabriel checked the desk. The temperature continued to drop. His breath fogged thicker now, and he could feel the cold seeping through his coat.
“This cold isn’t natural,” he said.
“Obviously.” Gabriel pulled a painting off the wall—some Aethership scene in an elaborate frame—and examined the wallpaper behind it. “But if it’s not actively trying to kill us, let’s just get this over with.”
Miles checked each shelf for irregularities. Gabriel moved through the room, tapping walls, rolling back the rug, examining every surface.
It only took three minutes.
“Here.” Gabriel stood before a section of bookshelf, running his hands along the frame. “The wood’s different. Newer. And it’s not quite flush with—”
He pressed something. A soft click .
The section of shelving swung outward, revealing a dark, narrow opening beyond.
Stairs. Leading up.
Miles angled the cold light toward the opening.
The staircase spiraled upward, stone steps worn smooth in their centers. No handrail. The passage was so narrow that his shoulders would brush both walls. The light didn’t penetrate far enough to see where it ended, just to an upward curve into deeper shadow.
“Two stories up,” Miles said, more to himself than Gabriel. He tried to reconcile what he was seeing with what he knew. “When you briefed us before the raid, you said the manor had two floors above ground. The main level and the family quarters above it.”
“That’s right.” Gabriel moved closer to the opening, frowning.
Miles stepped back, trying to picture the manor’s exterior in his mind. The facade they’d approached from the street. Three clear stories, he was certain of it. The main level and upper story both had tall windows. But there were dormered windows among the steep roofs above—
“There were windows,” Miles said. “On the roof. Set into the eaves.”
“Dormers,” Gabriel supplied. “Yes, now that you point it out, there’s an inconsistency. From inside the upper floor, the windows were the same as those down here. If there’s a third story or an attic with dormered windows, I never saw evidence of it from inside the house.”
Miles moved the cold light in a slow arc, studying the staircase again. He was sure the stairs extended past the upper floor.
“A hidden floor,” Miles said. “An entire secret level.”
Gabriel’s expression had shifted from confusion to something sharper. “If you wanted to hide something valuable—truly valuable—where better than a space that officially doesn’t exist?”
“Precisely.” Miles stared up into the darkness. “Well, now we know what to focus on tomorrow.”
“No.” Gabriel was already moving toward the stairs. “We’re here now. We’re doing this now.”
“Gabriel—”
“I’m not spending another night wondering what’s up there.”
Miles didn’t argue with that, as much as he wanted to. He felt much the same, logic be damned.
“Fine.” He moved past Gabriel, positioning himself at the base of the spiral. “But I go first.”
***
Gabriel
Gabriel stepped in front of Miles before his partner could take the first stair.
“Wait.”
With a flick of both wrists, he dropped a dagger into each palm from the sleeves of his coat.
Miles stared. “Did you—did you take blades into a Crown office?”
“I take them everywhere.” Gabriel tested the balance of the left-hand blade, adjusting his grip. “Never been caught.”
“That’s—Gabriel—” A breath left Miles, almost a laugh. “Never mind. Of course you did.”
“It all worked out fine, and more to the current point—” He turned toward the stairs. “—they won’t be much use if I’m behind you.”
Miles caught his arm before he could squeeze past Miles’s greater bulk and height. “Hold on. Am I allowed to be of any use, then? Is the no-magic rule still on?”
Gabriel paused. Of course Miles could defend them. Miles was brilliant at combat magic. But the thought of magic—his magic—aimed at the house made Gabriel’s skin crawl.
“You can defend us,” he said finally. “Just try to avoid casting directly on the house.”
“The house.”
“I can’t explain it. It just…” Gabriel gestured vaguely with the dagger. “Gives me the creeps.”