Fennrick Vex's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Saraphillia was hidden in the sunken road now. But Fennrick still didn't know who had dragged three fingers down the children's door. He couldn't guard against a thing with no name. So he went back to where it started. The children had come from a shut orphanage near the docks. Whatever marked their door had watched them there first. He found the place at dusk. Three stories of cracked brick, lower windows boarded, upper ones empty black squares. He dropped his hunter's slouch in the mud-slick alley beside it. No guild watched here. He let his tail loosen, let his ears come up. His true form read the dark better than his false one. The front door hung open. Inside, oily smears streaked the walls. Soot-black. Long. Five fingers wide, dragged slow, exactly like the marks on the children's door. He touched one. Still tacky. He followed them up the stairs. A child's book lay open on the top step. A pressed purple flower marked a nursery rhyme, its petals glowing faint blue. He lifted it. The glow matched the smear under his fingers. The same thing had touched both. Then the stair creaked above him. He looked up. A shape stood in the hall. Thin and crooked, too tall, its skull face pale, its long fingers trailing soot. It moved toward him with sideways, spider grace, leaving smears on the wall as it came. He knew it now. He had a name for the thing at last. An Ash-Walker. Fennrick did not run. He drew the blade Nyx had pressed on him, a crystal dagger wrapped in living briar. It threw a soft lilac light. The Ash-Walker stopped at the glow and hissed. "You marked their door," Fennrick said. "Why warn them? Why not just take them?" Behind the creature, a second shape faded in. A small girl in a frayed veil, her lower half dissolving into starry dark, her fingers long and bone-pale. She was not afraid of the Ash-Walker. It bent its skull toward her like a dog to its master. "He doesn't take," she said. Her voice was a child's. "He warns. I collect the ones who are left alone. Forgotten children sleep best. He marks the doors where no one will come." She tilted her head. "The dock children are promised to me." Fennrick understood then. The threat was not a hunter. It was a thing that fed on children no one guarded. His kin fit that hunger too. "They're not alone," he said. "Not anymore." He backed down the stairs with the blade up. The Ash-Walker did not follow past the light. He took the book. He had his answer and he hated it. The thing hunting the children wanted the forgotten. And every hour his kin stayed hidden and nameless, they drifted closer to being exactly that.