Calm down. Breath.
They don't know you're here!
That man, did he see you back on Peters Street?
Your mind replays it, grainy, like bad security footage.
The fog was thick, impossibly so, clinging to your skin, your teeth, the back of your eyes.
No… you're sure of it.
The fog closed around you like a curtain. Hid you from him, from them.
This is it!
Pack. Leave.
Find another inn before the sun decides whose side it's on.
But no... it's too sudden. Panic leaves trails. Trails get followed.
Ask for help?.
Someone,
Professor or Mrs. Adler might even take your hand.
But can you get to them safely?
Logic tilts toward yes. The odds favor escape. But your instincts says no!.
Stay.
Wait.
"Find anything strange yesterday?" The mustached man's voice again.
"No," another voice replies, casual, almost bored.
"Just unlucky lately."
Knock. Knock.
"Ar!"
Mrs. Palois.
Damn it! your whole body jolts like someone yanked your spine.
The brooch nearly slips from your fingers. You shove it back into the suitcase, not carefully, not neatly, just in.
The lid closes with a muffled clap before your leg kick it back into the shadow of your bed.
Your pulse is still loud when you cross the room.
The door creaks open.
"Yes, Mrs. Palois?" you said, keeping with your casual tone and accent.
Her eyes flick past you for a moment before settling on your face.
"I brought you a bowl of soup and bread, you must have skipped breakfast."
How kind.
How utterly, recklessly kind
You manage a smile. Thin. Stiff.
"Ah… thank you."
The tray enters the room. She put it on your table. Steam raise upward from the soup, carrying the aroma of poorly boiled vegetables and something faintly peppery, too peppery...
The bread sits beside it, hard-edged, cold.
She doesn't leave right away. Her gaze lingers.
Then, after a while, she steps back into the hall.
"If you need anything... You know where I am,"
"Yes, thank you."
The door closes.
You can hear your pulse sound and clear, but you force yourself down into silence.
Focus.
Listen.
The soup cools on the desk, untouched, while your attention bleeds outward, seeping through the floorboards. The voices return, muffled at first, like they're speaking under water. Then clearer.
"…we still have three days before the Inquisitors start suspecting this place…"
The tail end of a sentence. You curse under your breath—missed the first half. The voice is the second man's, flat, deliberate.
A pause, then the mustached one again:
"But it would be better if we leave before that."
Better. Safer. He doesn't sound afraid, only calculating, like a man trimming fat off a corpse.
Three days.
That's all the time this inn has left before more eyes turn on it.
Suddenly, your vision fractures again.
The inn's lower floor opens in front of you. Two men, seated. Waiting.
Their posture is too rigid for hunger, too sharp for leisure.
Coats buttoned high, the fabric thick, their shoes polished despite the cobblestones outside.
Industrial-era policemen, if this were your old world.
The bakerboy caps seal the impression. You've seen it before, 21st-century fiction playing at nostalgia. Back then, you even liked that series, Peaky Blinders.
Across from them...
No apron, no clumsy warmth. Just a woman's face set in stone. Her voice, low, deliberate:
"…two men. No mistake, it's them. There's a young one in the other room. A civilian."
Your stomach knots.
Then:
"I slipped the sleeping draft into his meal. He should be down by now, be careful not to hurt him…"
Huh?
HUH...!!?
It hits like ice water down your spine.
Mrs. Palois. The mismatched slippers. The kindly cackle. The woman who fed you stale bread and half-jokes every morning.
Is actually a spy under disguise!?
Bearers. Was she also one of them? Could she be?!
But your thoughts skid sideways into a sharper fear: the soup.
You were lucky you haven't eaten it yet.
Forget the soup. Chaos has already beaten it to the finish line.
The two men in the room… they miscalculated. Badly.
Footsteps. Climbing the stairs with the rhythm of men.
You move to the door.
The wood is cold under your fingers as you ease it open just enough—just a sliver.
A crack of vision.
Through it, you catch them. The same two you saw below. Now in motion. Not guests anymore, but predators carrying out a ritual they've rehearsed a dozen times before.
It's familiar. Almost comforting, if you forget where you stand. The choreography of a raid. You've seen it before. Hell!
You've led it before. Handcuffs, shouted commands, boots against the floorboards.
Back when you still wore a badge.
But here, no badge. No gun. Just a foreign body and a brooch burning secrets in your suitcase.
And these men? Criminals, Inquisitors, whatever banner they claim—
they don't fight with procedure.
They fight with power.
And you…
You're no one.
No one with a front-row seat to the wrong kind of show.
You start to understand your power, the strange shift in perception.
When your vision had changed earlier, you felt it: something coursing into your eyes, like current running down copper wire.
A surge. On a whim, you imagine it literally, an electricity flowing into your retinas, batteries hooked to your skull.
And then, the world adjusts.
Your sight lunges outward, forward, until you're suddenly behind the two men moving down the hall. So close it feels like you could breathe against their necks.
The one in front raises his left hand, a silent signal. His right already grips a revolver, its barrel pale and gleaming
The man behind nods once. He kicks open a door,
Empty.
A window yawns open.
Wait—!
Bang!
The sound explodes. Too familiar. You heard it yesterday, It nearly end you.
A bullet ricochets. Metal screaming against meta. Glancing off a hanging lamp's frame before whirling toward the man at the door.
Inquisitor B. That's what you'll call him. His partner is A.
B doesn't die. His body twists, slides, as if pulled by instinct, a muscle memory.
A reflex no ordinary man could ever possess.
You realize then, this isn't a fight. It's a collision between monsters.
The shooter leans into view from the window frame. For a heartbeat, your gaze locks into his.
Blind.
The sockets see nothing, yet his aim is perfect, merciless.
A laugh almost rises in your throat, not joy, not relief but the raw absurdity of terror. Even a blind man, armed with the right power almost ended your life.
Then the shadows split. Something else tears its way out.
A wolf. No... not a wolf. A man wearing a wolf's shape, black in color. Fur bristling, jaw snapping with wet hunger, claws scraping the walls as it lunges. The kind of thing cinema once promised you, but you never expected to see outside a screen.
It hurtles at B.
But A moves first. His revolver cracks once
The bullet slams into its chest. Like a runaway cart colliding with a body. The wolfman flies backward, claws ripping trenches in the wooden floor, dragging himself to a brutal stop.
The wound?
None
No blood. No pierced flesh. The bullet stop, then falls off.
The wolfman straightens, its claws flexing against the shredded floorboards.
Then it grins. A full stretch of teeth. The kind of grin that doesn't belong to something that remembers a sense of mercy.
Its eyes narrow, And you feel it. A thought bleeding from the creature's head into yours, clear as words scrawled across paper:
'This will be fun.'