Silas Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Silas had the killer's name. His focus stone would not let him rest with it. Since the warehouse, the stone pulled at his arm whenever he thought the name. It stirred like a dog that smelled its master. He needed to know why before he trusted the trail. He carried the layered mirror and the sealed page across the city to the old museum archive, where records slept in the dust. Malachi Thorne met him at the door. The blind scholar had helped Silas once with the ritual knife, reading its marks by touch when no one else could. Now his gray beard hung over robes hung with charms. He held a walking stick and did not reach for a light. "You brought it," Malachi said. Not the mirror. The stone. "It wants this man found," Silas said. "I want to know why before I hunt for it." Malachi set his bare hand on the focus. The stone went cold under his fingers. Silas felt the silent laugh crawl up his own arm. Malachi did not flinch. He listened the way a man listens at a wall. "It knows him," Malachi said. "Old business. The stone was bound before you found it. Bound by hands that served this same name." He pulled his hand back. "You are not the hunter here. You are the leash it slipped." The words landed hard. Silas rested his other hand on the blessed silver revolver at his hip. He carried it for the day the focus turned on him. That day felt closer now. A voice spoke from the archive shadows. "Two masters. One name." Ezekiel Crane stepped between the shelves. Silas knew the man by reputation, the prophet who slept under the bridge and warned a city that laughed at him. His eyes caught the window light and held it too long. Silas had come for records. He got a witness instead. "I heard the name spoken once," Crane said, flat and even. "A rich man said it to the dark under the bridge. The dark answered. Your stone answers the same way. It is not your tool. It is his lost one." Silas looked at the stone in his arm. The eager pull made sense now. The killer had made this focus. It did not want the man caught. It wanted to go home. "Then it will lead me straight to him," Silas said. "And it will not care if I die getting there." Malachi nodded once. "Now you know what it wants. Decide if you still want the same door." Silas closed his gloved hand over the cold stone. He would use the pull. He would follow it to the scar-jawed man. But he loosened the revolver in its holster first. The focus was not his ally. It was bait he carried in his own chest, and now he knew whose hook it hung from.