Chapter 4
The portal released Mingxi onto cold, damp ground.
Mist drifted across the English countryside, carrying the metallic tang of blood beneath the scent of wet grass. The leyline’s resonance here was twisted. Shaken. Saturated with grief, but not the echo of the dead. Someone living had awakened. Someone in terrible pain.
A Guardian stepped toward him from behind an oak, her armor faintly glowing.
“Councilor Shen,” she whispered. “The perimeter has been compromised. The wards are failing. There are bodies everywhere.”
Mingxi nodded once. He felt it too. The wrongness was sharp and bitter, violent in its insistence.
They approached the gate. It hung crooked, one hinge shattered. The ward sigil beneath the Sinclair crest flickered weakly, as if trying to scream a warning too late. When Mingxi touched the gate, the metal jolted beneath his fingers.
Mingxi and the Guardian stepped through.
Grass squelched beneath their boots, wet with more than dew. Drag marks scarred the lawn. Dark streaks. Crushed flowers. A single torn ribbon snagged on a rosebush. A man’s body lay half hidden behind a hedge, his eyes staring at nothing.
The Guardian gagged.
“Stay sharp,” Mingxi murmured. “We don’t know what awaits us.”
The manor doors had been splintered inward. Inside, the stench struck hard. Copper. Broken wards. Terror soaked into stone and wood. Mingxi entered without hesitation.
Blood streaked the hallway in brutal patterns. Slashes. Smears. Handprints that told a story of panic, pursuit, and slaughter. Bodies lay where they had fallen. Some whole. Others grotesquely not.
The Guardian whispered, trembling, “I don’t understand. If someone awakened here, why is there no magical residue?”
“There is residue,” Mingxi said quietly. “Just not from this place.”
His attention shifted to the wall on their left.
Blood had been used to scrawl words in jagged, uneven strokes: Welcome Home Poppy. A message. Mockery. Or a marker.
Mingxi studied the letters.
Poppy.
Was she among the dead? Or the one who had survived?
Whoever had moved through this slaughter had done so with purpose, or with instinct. They had passed straight through the carnage without hesitation.
His brow furrowed.
The leyline’s pull was not diffused throughout the house. It was concentrated. Focused. Calling.
“Upstairs,” he said.
They climbed the blood-slick staircase. Halfway up, Mingxi halted. A shimmer brushed against his senses. Faint. Silver. Moon-aligned. It was not random, and it was not everywhere. The power came from a single point of origin.
The west wing.
He followed the resonance down a silent corridor lined with closed doors until he reached the one left ajar.
A nursery.