The Inquisition spread through the city like a slow fever.
Evander watched from his clinic window as another patrol marched past, their silver-chased armor gleaming in the afternoon sun. Six soldiers, armed with blessed steel, their faces hidden behind helms that made them look more like machines than men. They moved with the coordinated precision of those who had trained together and killed together.
In the three days since Gregor's warning, the Inquisition presence in Valdris had tripled. Checkpoints now blocked major intersections. Random searches had become commonplace. The harbor district remained under lockdown, and rumors whispered through the streets about arrests and midnight raids that left homes empty and families broken.
Mira Vance was hunting.
She hadn't found Evander yet. That much was certain; if she had, he would already be dead or running. But her net was tightening, and the margin for error that had kept him safe for fifteen years was shrinking with every passing hour.
"Doctor?"
Evander turned from the window. A young woman stood in the clinic doorway, a child of perhaps six years clutched against her chest. The woman's face was pale with exhaustion and something worse: the hunted look of prey that knows the predator is close.
"Please. They said you help people. They said you don't ask questions." Her voice cracked on the last word. "Please. My son is sick, and I can't go to the Church healers. I can't. They'll know. They'll see."
She pulled back the child's sleeve to reveal skin that glowed faintly in the dim light of the clinic. A soft, phosphorescent luminescence pulsed beneath the surface, keeping time with the boy's heartbeat.
Ghost-touched. The child had been marked by a spirit, usually a dead relative trying to maintain a connection with the living. Harmless in most cases. A death sentence if the Inquisition discovered it.
"Inside," Evander said. "Quickly."
He ushered them through the clinic and into the back room he used for more sensitive cases. The woman, barely more than a girl herself, perhaps twenty years old, collapsed into a chair, her son still clutched against her as if she could shield him from the world through sheer force of will.
"When did this start?"
"Three days ago. My mother died last month, and she was always so close to Marcus. Always singing to him, telling him stories." Tears spilled down the woman's cheeks. "I think she's trying to reach him. I think she doesn't understand that she's gone."
"Your mother was a necromancer?"
"What? No! She was just—she was just a grandmother. She loved Marcus more than anything. When she got sick, she made me promise to take care of him, and now—" The woman's voice broke into sobs. "Now she won't let go."
Evander examined the child more closely. The glow came from residual death energy, a spirit's signature imprinted on living flesh through sustained contact. It wasn't dangerous. It wasn't even particularly rare. But in a city gripped by Inquisition paranoia, it might as well have been a brand marking the boy for execution.
"What's his name?"
"Marcus. Marcus Thorne."
Evander paused. "Thorne?"
"My husband's family. He died two years ago, in the same fever that's been killing people in the Warren." She looked up, something like defiance mixing with her fear. "Why? Is that a problem?"
Thorne. The same name as the Archbishop. Could be coincidence; Thorne was a common enough surname in the capital. But Evander had learned never to dismiss coincidences. Not in this city.
"No problem," he said smoothly. "I just wanted to understand the family situation."
He placed his hands on Marcus's chest, letting his awareness sink into the child's small body. The spirit's presence was obvious, a warm protective essence that clung to the boy like a blanket. Not malevolent. Not hungry. Just a grandmother who couldn't bear to leave her grandson alone.
Evander could have banished the spirit. It would have been easy, barely a whisper of power. But something made him hesitate. Maybe it was the love he could feel in that spectral embrace. Maybe it was the memory of his own mother, the way her ghost still lingered at the edges of his consciousness, fragmented but protective.
Or maybe it was the knowledge that this woman and her son were exactly the kind of people the Inquisition existed to destroy, and exactly the kind of people he had sworn to protect.
"The glow should fade in a few days," he told the woman. "Your mother's spirit is settling, adjusting to her new state. Once she accepts that she's gone, she'll release her hold on Marcus naturally."
"But the Inquisition—"
"Can't see what isn't shown to them." Evander produced a small jar from his medical bag, containing a salve of his own creation. Mundane enough to pass inspection, infused with just enough death magic to suppress the visible manifestations of spiritual contact. "Apply this twice daily. Keep him inside. Keep him quiet. In a week, there'll be nothing for anyone to see."
The woman took the jar with trembling hands. "How much?"
"Nothing."
"But—"
"I don't charge for this kind of work." Evander helped her to her feet, guided her toward the back door that led to a narrow alley invisible from the main street. "Go straight home. Don't stop for anyone. If the patrols question you, you were buying medicine for a stomach complaint. Nothing more."
She paused at the threshold, clutching Marcus against her chest with one arm and the jar of salve with the other. "Why?" she asked. "Why do you help us? People like me, people with connections to things the Church says are evil? Why risk yourself?"
Evander thought of his mother. Of the stake and the fire and the screaming that had stopped only when her throat burned away. Of the boy who had knelt in ashes and sworn that no one else would die for the crime of being loved by the dead.
"Because someone has to," he said. "Now go. Quickly."
She slipped into the alley and was gone.
Evander closed the door and leaned against it, suddenly more tired than he had any right to be. The salve would protect Marcus for now. The grandmother's spirit would fade on its own. One more family saved from the Inquisition's flames.
But how many more were out there? How many ghost-touched children, how many grieving families whose only crime was loving someone who had died? The Inquisition's net was drawing tighter by the hour, and Evander was just one man with limited resources and a growing list of enemies.
He needed information. He needed to know what Mira Vance was planning, what she had learned, how close she was to discovering him. The misdirection with the Broker would buy time, but not forever. Eventually, the Purifier would realize she was chasing the wrong scent, and then she would start looking for the real one.
Evander returned to the front of the clinic, resuming his position at the window. The patrol had moved on, replaced by ordinary citizens going about ordinary lives. But the fear remained, visible in hunched shoulders and averted eyes, the way people walked faster when they passed the checkpoints.
This was what the Inquisition did. Not just kill the guilty, but terrorize everyone else. Create an atmosphere of suspicion that turned neighbor against neighbor. Make people so afraid of being accused that they would betray anyone to prove their own loyalty.
His mother had been betrayed like that. A neighbor who had seen her talking to her grandmother's ghost. A whispered accusation. A knock on the door in the middle of the night.
And a twelve-year-old boy who watched his world burn and swore that one day, the flames would turn in the other direction.
A knock on the clinic door interrupted his thoughts.
Not a patient's knock. Too forceful, too demanding. Official.
Evander smoothed his expression into the bland concern of Dr. Ashcroft, healer of the poor, utterly unremarkable. He crossed to the door and opened it.
Two figures waited on the doorstep. The first was an Inquisition soldier, armored and helmed, one hand resting on the hilt of his blessed sword. The second was a woman.
She was younger than Evander had expected. Perhaps twenty-five, with cropped dark hair that framed a face marked by intensity and intelligence. Her eyes were gray, cold, assessing, and they swept over him with the focused attention of a predator evaluating prey. She wore no armor, just simple traveling clothes, but she carried herself with the absolute confidence of someone who had never lost a fight.
Burn scars traced patterns up her forearms, visible where her sleeves had been pushed back. Self-inflicted, he recognized. The marks of purification rituals that Inquisitors used to strengthen their resistance to dark magic.
Mira Vance. The Purifier herself.
Standing on his doorstep.
Looking at him with eyes that could see through any disguise.
"Dr. Ashcroft?" Her voice was crisp, businesslike. "I'm Senior Inquisitor Mira Vance. I have some questions about your clinic and the services you provide."
Evander felt the cold certainty of death brush against his consciousness. Not his own power, but the awareness of how close he stood to annihilation. One wrong word. One suspicious gesture. One flash of recognition in those gray eyes.
"Of course, Inquisitor." He stepped aside, gesturing for her to enter. "How can I help the Church today?"
She walked past him, and he felt her gaze brush across the wards that protected his clinic. Wards that should have been invisible to anyone without the True Sight.
She didn't react. Didn't acknowledge what she had seen.
But something flickered in those gray eyes. Something that looked almost like curiosity.
"You have quite a reputation, Doctor," she said, turning to face him in the middle of his clinic. "The healer of the poor. The man who never turns anyone away. The physician who somehow cures diseases that should be fatal."
"I've been fortunate in my training."
"Fortunate." She tasted the word like it carried hidden poison. "That's one explanation."
"Is there another?"
For a long moment, Mira Vance simply looked at him. Her eyes moved across his face, his hands, the air around him, seeing things that no normal vision could detect. Evander kept his expression neutral, his thoughts calm, his power so deeply suppressed that even he could barely feel it.
"There's always another explanation," she said finally. "That's what I'm here to find out."
She smiled, and there was nothing warm in it.
"We'll be talking again, Dr. Ashcroft. Soon. Very soon."
She turned and walked out, her armored companion falling into step behind her.
Evander watched her go. A cold certainty settled over him, quiet and absolute.
The Purifier knew something. She couldn't prove it yet, but she knew.
The game had just become far more dangerous.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, in the darkness where his power lived, something stirred with anticipation.
The Death Gods were watching. And they were pleased.
