Silas Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Silas Nightshade needed a fresh body, and the city refused to give him one. Six people had died in the back alleys this month, drained by some ritual he could not name. His focus should have read the traces at each scene. But the police scrubbed the sites before he arrived, and each cold slab told him nothing. Somewhere an occultist was killing to a pattern, and Silas could not see it. He had to see it. He had brought an old thing into this city himself, and he suspected it was learning the killer's work. So he stopped waiting for the streets. He went to the morgue instead. The night coroner met him at the loading dock. Dr. Marcus Holloway did not ask how a masked man in a trenchcoat found the door. He only wiped his gloved hands on his coat and stared. "You read bodies," Marcus said. It was not a question. "Sometimes. If they're fresh enough." "Three came in this week. Same burns inside the chest. No heat. No cause." He paused. "I saw the first one seven years ago. I called it a lab error. I was wrong." He led Silas inside. The room smelled of bleach and something under the bleach. Marcus pulled a drawer. The man on the tray was young, gray, opened and stitched shut again. Silas set his hand above the chest and lowered his focus close. The stone woke. Warmth crawled up his arm. Behind his eyes he saw it, faint but real: a shape burned into the man from the inside, a knot of lines drawn again and again. The same knot on all six. A signature. A pattern. "There," Silas breathed. "He signs them." The focus laughed. No sound. Only the cold press of amusement, the same laugh it gave the day he first touched it. It found this funny. It knew the pattern already. Silas pulled his hand back, sweating. Marcus watched him. "You saw it too." He reached into a locker and set a thing on the steel tray. A knife. Bone handle, strange pale alloy blade, small marks cut along the metal. "The janitor found this by the dock the night my supervisor stopped answering me," Marcus said. "Same marks as the burns." Silas looked at the marks on the blade. They matched the knot inside the body exactly. His focus stirred again, and this time it did not laugh. It leaned toward the knife, eager, like a hound catching a scent it had waited years to catch. A cold understanding settled over Silas. The thing he carried did not just recognize the killer's work. It wanted the killer found. "I need this," Silas said, and lifted the knife. Behind them the loading dock door creaked open. A woman in black stepped inside, dark hair, steady eyes. She looked at the knife in Silas's hand and did not flinch. "That," said Vivienne Ashford, "belonged to the man who killed my husband."