"My name is Corbin Wells," the man said, still pressed into the shadows like the alley itself might be listening. "Mayor of this town, for whatever that title's worth anymore."
"...Start from the beginning," Xavier said. "Please."
Mayor Wells took a shaking breath. "Three years ago, this town was dying. Not from monsters, not from war. Just from... misery. Bad harvests, sickness, one grief piled on another until nobody here could remember the last time they'd smiled. I couldn't watch my people suffer anymore. So I went looking for... another kind of help."
"...What kind of help?" Bruce asked, though something in his tone suggested he already suspected the answer.
"There is a demon. Emory Comoventus. The Demon of Contracts, some call him, out in an old cabin deep in the Larkwood." The mayor's voice cracked. "He deals in bargains. Anything you want, for a price he decides is fair. I asked him to make my town happy. Truly, permanently happy. I didn't think... I didn't ask him to define the terms. I just wanted them to stop hurting."
"What did he take?" Xavier asked quietly, already dreading the answer.
The mayor's face crumpled. "My daughter. Wren. She was seven years old. He turned her into a rat and told me she'd stay that way for as long as the contract held. And the town..." He let out a broken, humorless laugh. "The town got exactly what I asked for. Happiness, permanent and absolute. He was very precise about the wording. I never specified how much."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"The first few weeks, I told myself it was working," Wells continued, quieter now, like the confession had loosened something in him he couldn't stop. "People stopped grieving. Stopped fighting. I thought I'd fixed something. It wasn't until I saw the baker frosting the same cake for the fourth hour in a row, laughing so hard he couldn't breathe, that I understood what I'd actually done. He couldn't stop. None of them can stop. It isn't happiness anymore. It's a wound shaped like happiness, and it never closes."
"And the rat," Xavier said carefully. "Wren. Is she-"
"Alive. I've seen her. Small brown thing, lives somewhere in the walls of my own house, of all the cruelties." Wells pressed a hand to his mouth, composing himself with visible effort. "I leave food out. I talk to her every night, in case some part of her can still hear me and understand. I don't know if she can. I don't know anything anymore, except that it's my fault, all of it, every laugh in this town is a debt I signed us all into without reading the terms."
"I've tried to undo it," the mayor continued, once he'd steadied himself. "I've tried everything. Priests, wandering mages, one very confident con artist who took my money and vanished by morning. Nothing works. The contract holds. The only way back into that cabin is with the compass I originally found and used to get to him... But I've been too much of a coward to go back and face what I did."
"We'll go," Xavier said, before he'd fully decided to say it.
Bruce and Stephan, still catching their breath from the chase, exchanged a look but didn't argue. If anything, Bruce looked almost relieved to have something concrete to hit, after a full day of smiling strangers and unanswerable questions.
The mayor's eyes welled up; for a man surrounded by people who couldn't stop smiling, it was the first genuine display of feeling Xavier had seen all day. "You'd do that? For strangers? You don't even know me. You don't know Wren."
"We came here for a bounty on a werewolf that doesn't exist," Xavier said. "Might as well leave with something that actually matters. Make use of the time we're out here."
"It won't be simple," Wells warned, wiping at his eyes with the back of one trembling sleeve. "He's not cruel, exactly. That's almost the worst part of it. He's polite. Generous, even. He just doesn't give anything away for free, and he never, ever forgives an imprecise request. I made that mistake once. I don't intend to watch anyone else make it on my behalf."
"Then we'll be careful with our wording," Xavier said. "I've had some experience with contracts."
The mayor didn't ask what he meant by that, and Xavier didn't offer to explain. Some things were easier left as a private, uncomfortable little knot in his own chest.
***
The mayor's house was modest and quiet, tucked at the edge of town, mercifully free of the manic energy infecting everyone else. In a locked drawer in his study, wrapped in a moth-eaten cloth, he produced a small brass compass, its needle spinning lazily even indoors, unmoored from anything resembling north.
"It points to him," Wells explained, pressing it into Xavier's hands. "Wherever he's decided to make his cabin that day. It moves, sometimes. He likes his privacy."
Xavier turned it over. The needle steadied, slowly, and swung to point due east, toward the wall of grey fog pressing up against the treeline of the Larkwood, visible even from the study window.
"One more thing." The mayor hesitated. "Whatever you offer him... And he will want something. He always wants something. Be careful what you agree to. I promise you, he will hold you to the exact letter of it. Nothing more. Nothing less. And nothing you didn't specify."
Xavier pocketed the compass, feeling its slight, restless weight settle against his hip like a held breath.
"Noted," he said. "Let's go get your daughter back."
Stephan cracked his knuckles. Bruce checked the straps on his hammer. Neither of them said anything, but Xavier caught the look that passed between them. The same one they'd worn walking into the spirit realm, into the wolves, into every impossible thing this world had thrown at them so far... Whatever waited in that cabin, at least he wasn't walking toward it alone.