Vickers wanted an agency, not a grave to tend. So he left Shreveport behind, where his first monsters lived and his first dead stayed buried, and he came to Ashwood to open a place where any man could pay to have his troubles killed. Monsters, thieves, lost rings, locked doors. He had a blessed silver shotgun and a rapier that made ghosts confess they were dead. What he did not have was a roof. He found one up the road from the Ravenheart Tavern. An old firehouse, early century, its wood siding gone green with rot. The bay doors wore a chain and a padlock. Behind the cracked glass, two shapes watched him. Vickers put his face to the pane. The shapes drew back. Haunted, then. He grinned. A haunted building was a cheap building. "Can't scrub ghosts out with a mop," said a voice at his boot. Vickers looked down. Crunchy stood there, a hermit crab the height of a child, his cracked shell hunched over rags and scrap metal. Vickers had sent word he needed a man who could find anything and keep his mouth shut for coin. This was that man. Crunchy's black eyes flicked over the lock, the hinges, the alley. He was already counting what the place was worth. "Then I won't use a mop," Vickers said. He snapped the fox-charm whistle his brother had given him years ago. Wulf came on winged feet, the way he always came. He stepped from the alley shadow with his wide hat low, the whole left side of him crackling blue-white, lightning sealed under skin. Vickers had not seen him since the ritual changed him. He did not reach to shake. He had touched that arm once and woke up across a yard. "You called," Wulf said. Nothing more. "Two ghosts inside," Vickers said. "Won't leave." "They will." They worked three days. Wulf's bowie knife split the chain. Vickers walked the halls with his rapier and made both ghosts admit the truth, and they thinned to nothing. Crunchy hauled out rot and dragged in a copper brewer that hissed and poured dark coffee. By the third night the firehouse stood clean, dry, and theirs. Then the door opened on its own hinge. A half-elf stood there, blue-gray skin, blue hair under a red bandana. She looked at the three of them and spoke before anyone asked. "You're hiring," Loretta Coppersilk said. Not a question. "I'm a seer. I read what's coming before it comes." Crunchy snorted. Wulf said nothing. Vickers crossed his arms. "Prove it." "You'll get your first job before the paint dries," she said. Quieter now. "Something old is already looking back at this town." Vickers hired her as liaison that hour. Ragamuffin Hunters was open. The next morning a letter sat in the black mailbox out front, red-lettered and waiting, and it had no name on the sender's line.