Chapter 334: Bait

I rushed over as fast as I could, leaping across rooftops and cutting through the worn-out corners of the street. Los Arcos was a small city, so it only took me about fifteen minutes to finally reach Waterwind.

I walked to the edge of the bridge that arched over the waterway, though right now, calling it a waterway was generous. What used to flow with the clearest water in the city had gone stagnant, choked with filth so thick the smell rising from below actually forced me back a step.

I pinched my nose and decided to ask around while keeping my Enhanced Sense spread wide, scanning for Milo’s spirit essence or anything else suspicious.

The first person I found was a man sitting on a barrel near the bridge’s far side. He had a palm-sized bowl in his hand and was grinding something inside it with the kind of focus that should’ve been reserved for something that mattered. I knew what it was. The slums ran on the stuff — different kinds, different strengths, all of them selling a poor man a few hours of feeling like things weren’t as bad as they were. More expensive than food, somehow, and people down here still found ways to afford it daily while their ribs showed through their shirts. The ways they found were the reason everyone else stayed out of the slums.

And it was the one place Milo had gone looking for a lost slave.

I approached, and the man looked up at me with glazed, distant eyes. The smile on his face had nothing to do with me or anything else in the real world.

"Hey. I’m looking for someone. Young man, early twenties, probably came through here in the last few hours asking about a runaway slave."

He stared at me for a long moment, then pointed vaguely toward the drainage tunnels beneath the bridge with the hand still holding the bowl.

"Lots of people go down there," he said, his voice light and airy. "Not a lot come back up."

’Helpful.’

I tossed him a silver coin for the trouble and kept moving.

Waterwind was worse than I expected. The buildings on either side of the old waterway leaned inward like drunks propping each other up, and the alleys between them were narrow enough that two people couldn’t walk side by side. Clotheslines crisscrossed overhead, blocking out what little sunlight tried to reach the ground. The smell didn’t get any better the deeper I went. It got creative.

I focused my Enhanced Sense outward and pushed it as far as I could manage.

Nothing at first. The usual noise of a place like this — spirit essences so faint they barely registered, the background hum of people too weak or too broken to show up on anyone’s radar.

Then I caught it. Milo’s essence, faint but steady, coming from somewhere deeper in the tunnel system beneath the waterway.

I picked up the pace.

The entrance to the tunnels was a crumbled archway half-swallowed by moss and filth. I had to duck to get through. Inside, what little light remained came from cracks in the stone above, thin beams cutting through the dark like pale fingers. Water dripped somewhere ahead. The stagnant runoff from above pooled in shallow channels along the floor, and every step I took sent echoes bouncing off the walls.

I followed Milo’s essence for maybe ten minutes through winding corridors before the tunnel opened into something wider. A junction. Old drainage infrastructure that had been abandoned long before anyone living in Waterwind was born.

And there he was.

Milo was standing at the far end of the junction, his back to me, completely still.

My shoulders dropped before I even realized how tense they’d been.

"Milo!"

He didn’t turn around.

I walked closer. The looseness that had settled in my chest a second ago started tightening back up.

"Hey, Milo. I’ve been looking for you. We need to get back to the Company. It’s not safe to be out here alone right now, the Blood Mage is—"

"Cade."

His voice stopped me. Not because it was loud. Because it was hollow.

I came up beside him and looked at what he was looking at.

The girl was young. Couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen. She was lying on her side in the shallow water, wrists still bearing the faded marks of shackles, her body thin and wasted in the way that only months of neglect could produce. Her eyes were open.

She was the runaway slave. She had to be.

And she was dead.

’Shit.’

"I found her like this," Milo said quietly. He still hadn’t looked at me. "I thought I was too late. That the master had gotten to her first, or she’d gotten sick, or starved."

He turned his head slightly.

"But then I looked further."

I followed his gaze past the girl, into the darker recess of the junction where the tunnel curved. My eyes hadn’t adjusted yet, and the light barely reached.

I took a few steps forward. Then a few more.

The smell hit me before the sight did.

Bodies. Not one or two. At least a dozen, maybe more, stretched out in the shallow water along the tunnel wall like discarded furniture. Some face down, some on their backs. Men, women, and at least two too small to be anything but children.

All of them had shackle marks.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and kept looking.

"I counted seventeen," Milo said from behind me, barely above a whisper. "Most of them haven’t been dead long. A few days, maybe a week for the oldest."

Seventeen.

I crouched beside the nearest body. A woman, thin like the girl, with a faded brand on her shoulder. I didn’t recognize the mark itself, but the scar tissue around it told me enough. Someone had tried to scrape it off. Partially removed, the edges rough and healed over.

Why would a slave try to remove their brand unless they were no longer a slave?

I checked another. Same thing — faded brand, partially scraped or burned away. And another. The same.

My stomach clenched.

"Milo. These aren’t just slaves."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I know."

"These are freed slaves."

"I know, Cade."

I stood up and faced him. In the thin light, he looked like he was holding himself together with effort alone.

"When I saw the brands," he said, "I recognized the removal pattern. It’s the same method the Company uses. The same acid solution Kassie taught them to use on their marks after they were freed."

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

Kassie had freed over a hundred slaves from the Manhattan Trade Center. It was one of the Company’s biggest operations before I’d arrived. The whole reason people in Los Arcos even knew the name Black Snow.

And now seventeen of those people were lying dead in a drainage tunnel beneath the worst part of the city.

Not from starvation. Not from disease. I looked at the bodies again, forcing myself to see them clearly this time. The injuries were too clean. Cuts across the throat, precise and deliberate. Some had wounds in the chest. No sign of struggle, no defensive marks on their arms or hands.

They hadn’t fought back. Either they couldn’t, or they didn’t see it coming.

"This wasn’t random," I said.

"No," Milo agreed. "Someone collected them. Brought them here deliberately."

’The Blood Mage.’

The thought arrived cold, but even as I had it, something nagged. This didn’t feel like his style. Everything I’d heard about the Blood Mage was blunt force and overwhelming power — the kind of man who crushed opposition through sheer magical superiority. This was different. Patient. Organized.

This was a message.

’But a message for who?’

The answer was obvious the second I thought it. Kassie. The Company. Us.

"We need to go," I said. "Right now."

"I’ve been trying to figure out how to report—"

"Milo. We need to go

right now

."

Something in my voice made him stop. Maybe the fact that my Enhanced Sense had just caught what I’d been too distracted to notice for the past several minutes.

We weren’t alone.

Spirit essences. Faint, controlled, deliberately suppressed — the kind of suppression only trained combatants bothered with. Not one or two. At least six, spread across the tunnel entrances surrounding the junction.

They had been here before us. Waiting.

I grabbed Milo’s arm and pulled him back toward the center of the junction, away from the walls.

"We’re surrounded," I said, keeping my voice low.

Milo’s hand went to his side where he kept his summoning catalyst. I felt the spike in his spirit essence as panic set in.

"How many?"

I expanded my sense one more time.

The number had changed.

"Eight. No. Ten."

They were emerging from the tunnels now, quiet and unhurried, filling the entrances one by one. Dark clothing, faces covered, weapons already drawn. Not bandits. Bandits didn’t move like that. Bandits didn’t suppress their spirit essence. Bandits didn’t set up an ambush around a pile of bodies they’d made and wait for someone to come find them.

These were professionals.

And the bodies hadn’t been a message.

They were bait.