Chapter 21
Tamsin
We walked away from the farmhouse as the sun was beginning its ascent into the sky.
The grass outside the farmhouse still wet with night. I didn’t look back, not because I didn’t care, but because looking made it feel like a goodbye.
Eamon walked last, as he always did, making sure no one left a bag behind or a boot print too obvious in the mud. Nox moved like the wind along the path, checking sightlines and always listening. Bishop and Griff flanked me, and Elias stayed close enough that I could always sense that he was near.
We just walked. We didn’t talk. We were just shapes moving through damp fields toward the next point on a route I’d traced and retraced until it was permanently seared into my brain.
We walked miles like that, through roads swallowed by weeds, through a strip of thin woodland, along the edge of a collapsed industrial park that smelled of rust and damp concrete.
By mid-morning, the land got flatter. The horizon was lined with towers, cranes, and several broken spires. The edge of London’s influence, even if the city itself still sat miles away.
We stopped at a shallow drainage ditch half-hidden by brambles.
Bishop crouched beside me. “This is it?”
I nodded. “Yeah. This is one of the entrances.”
Elias’s gaze swept the surrounding fields. “Any chance it’s being watched?”
“Probably,” Nox said. He was already moving, circling wider, his eyes tracking the long lines of sight. “But I don’t see or sense anything or anyone right now.”
The entrance was ugly and unremarkable, with a concrete mouth half-choked with debris, weeds growing out of cracks, the faint stink of stagnant water and rot drifting up. A rusted grate hung crooked, half torn away.
With a deep breath, I gestured for them to descend into the tunnels.
Nox went first. Griff second, because he could break anything that needed breaking. Bishop third, blade already in hand. Elias after, ever watchful. Eamon and me last.
The air was cooler as we went down, carrying the wet mineral smell of old stone and standing water. Our footsteps echoed softly, then were swallowed by the endless tunnel ahead. A slow drip marked time somewhere in the dark.
We moved in silence at first, letting our eyes adjust. I didn’t bother with a flashlight until we reached a junction, then clicked it on low, keeping the beam close to the ground.
“This way,” I said.
Elias fell into step beside me. “You’ve been here before.”
I nodded once. “Not recently, but yeah.”
We walked a long way. The tunnel narrowed, then widened. We crossed a shallow stream of runoff that smelled like industrial waste. Pipes ran overhead like ribs.
After a while, I began to notice subtle signs that people had been through here. A rope tied around a pipe as a handhold. A chalk line on the wall, faint, not fresh but not very old either. A rusted ladder that had been reinforced with new bolts. Someone had stitched a path through this filth.
We reached a heavy iron grate in the wall.
The foul sewer smell seeped out from it like a slap across the face.
Griff stepped forward, braced, and lifted.
The grate groaned, resisted, then gave way with a wet suck of rust and slime.
Eamon muttered something under his breath that sounded like a prayer for his own sanity.
We climbed through and into a narrower passage, then up a set of stairs that shouldn’t have existed in a sewer.
Concrete gave way to tiled walls. The air was less foul this way, which was a nice change of pace.
At the top of the stairs was a metal door. It had no sign. No handle on the outside. Only a small slit at eye level.
I leaned close to the slit and whispered, “It’s me.”
A pause.
Then a voice echoed behind the door, young, flat, and remarkably unimpressed. “That could mean a lot of people.”
I smiled faintly. “My name is Tamsin Drake.”
Another pause. The sound of locks disengaging, one after another.
The door opened a handspan.
A girl stood there, maybe nineteen or twenty, shaved head gleaming faintly under warm lantern light.
Her arms were inked from wrist to shoulder with symbols, names, and tiny drawings of wolves and ships and knives.
Her eyes conveyed the kind of intelligence that belonged to someone who’d grown up reading rooms for danger before she could read books.
She looked me up and down, then looked past me at the men.
“Your pack got bigger,” she said.
“So did your attitude,” I replied.
Her mouth twitched with what could have eventually become a smile. “Mirae said you’d come sooner or later.”
She stepped back and opened the door wider. “Come in.”
We filed through.
The corridor beyond wasn’t the sewer anymore. It was a hidden space inside a broken building made of old wood with lanterns spaced at regular intervals. The air smelled faintly of herbs and smoke and fabric that hadn’t been soaked in filth.
“This way,” the girl said.
We followed her down a narrow hall that turned twice and opened into a larger space.
It was a ruin now, but it had once been a luxury hotel.
I could see it in the bones of the building, in the carved banister half-hidden under draped cloth, in the remnants of elegant wallpaper peeling off the mildewed walls, and in the broken chandelier hanging like a dead star above us.
Someone had rebuilt the ground floor into a warren of rooms and passageways, each one lit and guarded and quiet.
The girl led us past a curtain and into a sitting room that could have belonged to a wealthy person two hundred years ago. Now it belonged to someone far more dangerous.
Mirae waited by the fireplace.
She was exactly as I remembered, elegant in a way that didn’t require jewels, pale hair pinned back neatly, skin smooth and unblemished.
She looked to be in her forties, maybe, but with women like Mirae, age was more suggestion than fact.
She wore a dark dress layered with a practical coat, and on her fingers were a number of heavy gold and silver rings.
Her eyes landed on me, just warm enough to be convincing.
“Tamsin Drake,” she began, voice unassuming. “I see that you’re still alive.”
“Mirae,” I replied. “I see that you’re still sitting in someone else’s ruin.”
She laughed quietly, like I’d told her something genuinely delightful. “You say that like it’s an insult.”
“It’s just an observation,” I answered.
Her gaze flicked to the men behind me, taking them in with the quick assessment of someone who survived by knowing exactly what she was dealing with.
“You’ve brought some new faces with you this time. A whole pack, as it were,” she observed.
Elias stepped forward half a pace, keeping calm. “My name is Elias Kade.”
Mirae’s eyes lingered on him. “You have a commanding voice.”
He didn’t react. “So do you.”
Her mouth curved. “I practice.”
“So do I,” he replied with a smirk.
Nox moved a fraction, positioning himself where he could see the doors.
Bishop stayed near the wall, staying quiet.
Griff stood at my shoulder like a bodyguard.
Eamon hovered slightly behind, watching Mirae with a doctor’s wariness, like she was a substance that could be poison if mishandled even just the slightest bit.
Mirae gestured toward chairs. “Sit. If you’re comfortable. Or don’t.”
I sat because I wasn’t here to posture. I was here to get what I needed.
The girl with the inked arms stayed by the door, arms folded, eyes on my men like she was memorizing them in case she needed to fight them later.
“I’m guessing that you didn’t come here for tea.”
“No.”
Mirae tilted her head. “Then tell me what you want.”
I didn’t waste time.
“London has a feral stimulant,” I said. “An inhalant. They’re using it to push wolves into madness and then pointing to the results as proof that wolves can’t coexist with humans.”
Mirae’s expression didn’t change.
“You already knew that,” I observed.
She shrugged lightly. “I know many things.”
“Then you know why I’m here,” I said. “I need where they keep their stocks. Who moves it. Who distributes it. And I need a way into the city that doesn’t end with us getting shot on sight.”
Mirae considered me for a long moment, eyes calm and unreadable.
“I admire you,” she said finally. “Truly. You keep choosing hard problems and somehow, you don’t die while you’re solving them.”
“Truthfully, I’m just tired of burying people,” I replied.
Her gaze softened for half a second. Then her eyes narrowed again.
“I can give you locations. Names. Timelines. I can tell you which docks are watched, and which guards can be bribed. I can tell you which ministers quietly drink themselves to sleep every night because of the guilt they feel over the laws they’ve signed.”
Bishop shifted slightly, interest tightening his posture.
“And?” I asked.
Mirae smiled.
“There’s always an ‘and.’”
I didn’t pretend to be surprised. “What’s the price.”
She leaned forward slightly, voice lowering just a fraction. “Information is expensive. And you’re asking for the kind that gets people killed.”
I met her gaze steadily. “We’re already in that business.”
Her smile widened. “Exactly.”
She sat back and crossed one leg over the other, perfectly composed in her makeshift throne.
“I’ll help you,” she said. “But you’ll owe me something when this is over.”
The words were soft, almost polite, but the meaning underneath them was blatantly obvious.
Mirae didn’t trade in money the way normal people did.
She traded in leverage.
In secrets.
In favors that came due when you least wanted to pay them.
And if she was offering us the keys to London’s locked doors, then whatever she wanted in return was going to matter.
A lot.
I held her gaze and nodded once.
“Fine.”
Mirae’s eyes glittered. “Good.”
Then she leaned back, already moving on, already treating our debt like a quiet certainty.
“Now,” she said, “let’s talk about how you plan to walk into London without getting yourself killed.”