Vance & Third Funeral Home. Closed since a fire nobody in the neighborhood liked to talk about the specifics of.
Boarded windows. Chained doors. A parking lot gone to weeds.
Ren and Jian stood across the street from it at dusk, and neither of them moved for a full minute.
"This is a bad idea," Jian said.
"You said that about the drawer too."
"I was right about the drawer too." Jian shouldered his bag higher. "For the record: complaining. Loudly. Internally."
The rain had stopped an hour ago. The air still felt waterlogged, thick enough to drown in.
They crossed the lot. Weeds catching at their ankles. The pin went cold the second they crossed the boundary line — not the sharp cold from Vance last week. Deeper. Like stepping into water that looked shallow and wasn't.
[Threshold crossed.]You're bleeding something in here. Slowly. Don't linger.
Ren's steps slowed.
"What'd it say," Jian asked, watching his face.
"That whatever's in there is taking something from me just by standing here."
Jian's jaw tightened. "Yeah. That tracks."
The ambient dread hit before they'd even reached the door — thick, pressing, the exact same wrongness from the empty lot on Vance last week, except turned up loud. Bottled. Channeled through brick and mortar instead of bleeding out into a whole neighborhood.
Jian crouched by the side door, running two fingers along the frame without touching it. Then his hand stopped.
"There's a trap on this one." He nodded toward a dark smear behind the top hinge, low enough Ren wouldn't have noticed it in a week of looking. "Blood seal. Somebody wanted this door to hurt whoever opened it."
"How badly?"
"Badly enough that I'm not curious." Jian didn't look away from the smear, his voice gone flat in the specific way it went when he wasn't joking about something. "Blood seals don't hurt for show. They're built to cost you something real — memory, sensation, sometimes worse, depending who set it and how angry they were when they did."
He didn't explain further. Didn't waste time. Just abandoned the door entirely and led them around back, toward a narrow frosted window set high above a cluster of dumpsters.
"Boost me."
Ren laced his fingers. Jian stepped into his hands, pushed up, and a moment later the window swung inward. Unlatched.
"Sloppy," Jian murmured, "or they don't care who comes in this way."
He slid through first. Ren followed, dropping onto cold linoleum on the other side.
The inside of the building was freezing — not a draft, a localized, specific cold that put his breath in the air.
[Recommend: quiet.]Sound carries strangely here. Don't test it.
They moved room to room. A storage hallway stacked with boxes. Folding chairs. Everything coated in a layer of dust thick enough that their footprints looked like the first anyone had left in years.
Somewhere deeper in the building, something ticked. Once. Slow. A sound with no obvious source — not a pipe, not a settling wall, nothing either of them could name — and then it didn't happen again, and that was somehow worse than if it had.
Jian took point, silent, moving toward the double doors at the end of the hall.
His heel caught the edge of a steel utility cart in the dark. A basin on top slid, tipped, started falling toward linoleum that would carry the crash through the whole building.
Ren didn't think.
The instinct flared — not the tearing, invasive pull from the backyard. Something cleaner. A current instead of a wall breaking.
He caught the basin an inch off the floor. Silent.
[Access granted — reflexive.]That one didn't cost you much. Good. Do it again sometime when I actually approve first.
Jian turned. Looked at the basin, motionless in Ren's hand. Looked at Ren.
Something shifted behind his eyes — not surprise exactly. Reappraisal.
"Okay," he said, quiet. "That was actually useful. Wildly, spectacularly useful. I take back some of the things I've said about you this week."
"Only some?"
"Don't push it."
They set the basin down and moved on, through the double doors into what had clearly been the prep room. Steel tables bolted to the floor. Drain tracks in the tile, running toward a central grate.
It should have smelled like bleach.
It smelled like turned earth. Like a grave after rain.
Jian clicked on a shielded penlight, beam pointed down, tight and careful. Swept it over the central table.
A shape under plastic sheeting. Too lumpy. Too uneven to be a body.
Ren pulled the sheet back.
Dirt. Dark, clumpy, packed into the rough shape of a person — torso, arms, legs, sculpted crude but deliberate.
His stomach turned over slow. That dirt. The same dead, ashen soil from the lot on Vance.
[Match confirmed.]Same source. Same corruption signature. This is not a coincidence.
"It's the lot," Ren said, low. "The dirt from the lot. It's here."
Jian's penlight found the "head" — a piece of cracked white jade pressed into the soil where a forehead should be. Around the table, drawn in ash and something darker, eight symbols in a tight, closed ring, all pointing inward.
Jian swore under his breath.
"That's not decoration," he said. "That's a containment circle, and it's inverted. Whatever it's meant to hold, it's not built to keep something out. It's built to keep something in until it's ready."
"A proxy," he went on, barely a whisper. "He's not just haunting the neighborhood. He's building something. Using the dead earth as raw material for a — " He stopped himself. "If this finishes, if he actually bridges whatever this is meant to bridge — "
He didn't finish the sentence.
[CRITICAL. Something is coming.]Not the dirt. The hallway. Move.
The temperature dropped again. Ren's next breath came out as frost, hanging in the dark like it didn't want to leave.
Footsteps.
Not heavy. Not shuffling.
Clack. Clack. Clack. Hard soles on linoleum, unhurried, confident, the sound of someone who had never once needed to move fast in his life.
Jian's penlight snapped off. The room went black.
Someone was whistling. Slow. Off-key. Impossible to tell how close.
Jian's hand found Ren's sleeve in the dark — not reaching for a weapon, just gripping, tight, the same instinct that had steered Ren away from the drawer weeks ago now aimed at the door.
The whistling stopped.
The brass handle began, very slowly, to turn.