Moody looked even worse than Sunset had that morning—his face was pale, his hands trembled, and his touch was cold and clammy, even though the day was already well past noon. Clearly, police officers are better at handling alcohol poisoning than lawyers. Still, the solicitor showed iron willpower and, despite his suffering, threw himself into work at the first phone call. Maybe that’s why he was sweating so much.

  In the half-hour he spent on the phone—which was about how long it took John and me to get to his office—Harold had managed to learn that his reporter hadn’t shown up at the Farnell Daily newsroom since the day before. Worse, the man hadn’t been seen at his rented apartment since the morning before that. Moody called other journalists he knew, made promises worth a hundred pounds, but still couldn’t figure out where the man had disappeared to.

  There were two possibilities: either the Fairburns had a hand in this, or Madigan the bribe-taker professor himself did. A third option was that they had worked together. It would’ve been foolish to think the professor would just let himself be disgraced in front of the entire country and lose a lucrative source of income.

  The reporter held all the evidence of the professor’s bribery, and all we had was a single copy of the newspaper that never went to print. And that wasn’t proof of anything. We could try to stir up some scandal using the kind of tabloids that seriously discuss the existence of Martian shifters in Parliament, the rise of Atlantis, or the creation of obedient werewolf soldiers by impregnating women with beastly seed—but the public reaction would match the audience of such publications.

  We holed up in Moody’s office, deep in thought as we sipped tea. Occasionally, someone would blurt out a dumb idea, met with sour looks from the rest, until Sunset—being the detective, as was his job—asked the right question:

  “Who took the photo?”

  Moody snatched up the phone and began spinning the rotary dial. Ten minutes later, he found out that his reporter often worked with two photographers. Both were currently on assignments. One was at the docks, photographing a new passenger liner scheduled to launch from the slipway tomorrow. The other was in the City, staking out the house of Mary Bolton, whom the public suspected of having an affair with the younger son of the Duke of Farnell.

  We split up: John took a cab to the docks, and Knuckles and I headed to the City.

  After spending a few hours near the designated spot without seeing anyone with a camera, I called Moody again and got the photographer’s home address. He wasn’t there either. The landlord told me the man had rushed in earlier that day, packed his things, and demanded a refund for two months’ rent in advance. Curiously, the rent had only been paid the day before, and I strongly suspected it was with Harry’s money.

  Tracking down the man’s origins would take time. The landlord didn’t care to know such details, the neighbors glared at me like I was a wolf among sheep, and the clock was inexorably ticking toward five.

  After yet another call to Moody, I picked up some meat pies from a nearby bakery and headed back to the solicitor’s office. Harold was looking a bit rosier, though he still couldn’t eat, while John and I made short work of the pastries. Knuckles got his portion, too—without leaving the car, of course.

  At about twelve minutes past five, Harold’s phone let out an unpleasant ring. John was the first to grab the receiver.

  “Yeah?! ... Yes ... What?! ... Bloody hell!”

  I rose from my chair, but John wagged a warning finger at me to stay quiet. For the next minute, which was filled with indecipherable questions and emotional exclamations, John finished the call, pressed the receiver down, and immediately began dialing another number.

  “Couldn’t be worse,” he muttered as he spun the rotary dial.

  “Maybe you should explain what’s going on instead of building suspense!” I said. But someone on the other end picked up surprisingly fast, and John silenced me with another finger wag.

  “Harry?” John asked. “The Archmaker’s gone. He killed one of the Lindemann girls and fled. I know I’m asking a lot, especially given your situation, but could you come to Professor Chapman’s house and perform a tracking ritual?”

  John was effectively asking Harry to publicly spit in Chapman’s face. Not the professor’s—but Chief Justice Chapman’s. That would burn every bridge we had left. After this, we’d have no chance of fairness in court!

  Harry must have asked a question, because John’s answer was firm and decisive:

  “I have to corner him!” Then: “Great! Sungarden, 17 Iveret Road.” John slammed the phone down and waved me toward the door. “Let’s go!”

  But before we could leave, the phone rang again. John, still running on momentum, grabbed the receiver, ignoring Moody entirely.

  “Yeah? ... Yes… Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” Sunset growled, slammed the receiver down again, and pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.

  “Kettle’s been arrested for attacking the professor.”

  "Fourth Precinct?" Harold asked, already reaching for his briefcase.

  "The college in Old City," Sunset replied tersely. "Of course, Fourth Precinct!"

  “I’ll handle it,” the lawyer promised.

  Fifteen minutes later, John and I were speeding toward Sungarden. Sunset had given Knuckles the green light to floor the accelerator, and the boy pushed the car so hard it felt like the wheels might fly off.

  The professor’s house was in a part of Sungarden that hadn’t yet turned into the opulent estates favored by vampires and their more fearless neighbors, but it also wasn’t crammed with dense urban housing. The two-story building stood slightly apart, with about two meters of space between it and its neighbors. It had a small patch of grass for a lawn—no more than a few square meters—and was surrounded by a waist-high wooden fence.

  Despite our haste, the Third Precinct officers had already beaten us there. For now, only a pair of constables were on-site, but even they gave the detective a hard time.

  “You’re a bit out of your jurisdiction, sir,” said the heavier constable after inspecting John’s badge.

  “This is my case, Constable, and I’ve been working it for a long time. Don’t stand in my way,” John shot back.

  “I’m just saying,” the constable replied, raising his hands defensively. “Procedure and all that. Maybe you’d like to wait for our detective to arrive, so there’s no trouble later?”

  “Sorry, colleague, no time to wait. Now step aside.”

  The constable, clearly not one to give up easily, locked eyes with John in a brief but intense stare-down. Deciding he’d done his duty to the fullest, he finally stepped aside.

  Interestingly, no one asked for my papers. That was fortunate—otherwise, this whole affair could’ve dragged on longer than we could afford.

  “Took you long enough,” said Yan Kilworth, greeting us at the door. The body of the vampiress lay right there in the hall.

  “If you’d wound the constables up any more, they wouldn’t have let us in at all!” John snapped, crouching next to the corpse. It lay face down, head angled slightly toward the stairs. Her head was tilted slightly to the left, frost glistened on her hair, and a thick ice spike protruded from her right temple, just toward the back of her skull.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for the constables to see Roger rummaging through the professor’s records,” Yan, a bear of a man, said gruffly. “For now, we can still pin all this on the vampires.”

  “Find anything yet?”

  Yan shook his head.

  “The other bloodsucker?” I asked. The vampiress had been shot from behind; she hadn’t even had time to turn around. “Was it him who shot her?”

  “Don’t think so. He caught a spike too—right in the liver. Shot likely came from the kitchen doorway.”

  “That would’ve killed a human instantly, but vampires don’t drop from something like that,” I said, uncertain. Yan nodded in agreement.

  “This one’s still alive. He caused a shootout, stuck around long enough to meet us, and then escaped through the window after the Archmaker.”

  “You saw him? The Archmaker?”

  “No,” Yan admitted. That was the last thing he managed to say before the door creaked open, and a stranger entered the room. The question of whether the Archmaker had been there at all remained unanswered.

  The newcomer looked every bit the dandy: a sharp black suit, gleaming cufflinks on a crisp white shirt, slicked black mustache, and a polished cane to complete the ensemble. If not for the carelessly pinned badge on his lapel, I never would’ve guessed he was a detective. But no one else would’ve gotten past the constables so easily.

  “And what the bloody hell is going on here, gentlemen?” he growled darkly.

  I was wondering the same thing—how were we going to talk our way out of this one?

  “Hello, Stubbs,” John said. “Apologies for the intrusion, but we have reason to believe the Archmaker was here.”

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  “Oh, really,” Stubbs said, his tone softening ever so slightly. “Care to elaborate?”

  “Have you heard about the attack on Kettle? That was him.”

  “Was it now? And how exactly did you end up here… ahead of me?”

  Stubbs wasn’t a fool—he went straight for the critical question.

  “It was us who called the detective,” Yan said calmly, then introduced himself. “Sergeant Yan Kilworth, Special Squad.”

  “Us?” Stubbs emphasized the word, zeroing in on the point.

  “My brother’s upstairs checking the upper floors. Same rank.”

  “Well, well,” Stubbs said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Quite the picture we’ve got here. You all showed up so conveniently that it’s almost worth suspecting you lot. Especially—” he added, pointing the ornate head of his cane directly at me. “—you. Who the hell are you?”

  “Duncan Kinkaid, Baron of Loxlin, at your service, Mister,” I said smoothly.

  The word ‘Mister’ clearly didn’t sit well with him, but how was I supposed to know he had a title?”

  “It’s Sir, boy,” he corrected me.

  “Lord, detective,” I shot back, completely ignoring his “Sir.” I had introduced myself properly, and for him to address me like that was nothing short of rude.

  “And what exactly is a Lord doing here?”

  “The Lord,” John interjected, “is a wizard and an apprentice of Sir Harry Smith.”

  “Sledgehammer Harry? And what’s he got to do with this?”

  “He owes me one,” Sunset explained. “He’s helping out.” Then, glancing pointedly at Stubbs, he added, “And if you’re done with the questions, maybe you could start actually working.”

  “What am I looking for?” Stubbs asked curtly.

  “Anything suspicious.”

  By the time the conversation ended, Roger Kilworth had come down from upstairs, shaking his head discreetly to signal he’d found nothing. The state of the kitchen utensils, the furniture, and the faint lingering smells in the rooms all suggested that the professor had been living alone for quite some time. Only the study, the bedroom, and the kitchen bore any signs of recent use.

  Ten minutes into the search, Harry arrived, and John had to endure another argument to get the sorcerer into the house. Once inside, Harry immediately pulled out his book and began scanning the place using his third eye and a few spells.

  He unearthed a collection of about two dozen items: amulets, enchanted tools, household trinkets, a pile of gemstone reservoirs, a couple of rods, and a pair of old pistols.

  To everyone’s disappointment, the Archmaker hadn’t left anything that could be used for a tracking ritual. The Kilworth brothers both insisted that someone else had been in the house recently—a faint, unfamiliar scent lingered, different from the usual odors of the place. I found a way to subtly ask Roger with a gesture if it was a vampire. He shook his head. That was strange. If it wasn’t a vampire, then who the hell broke my tooth? Maybe the person who attacked me wasn’t the Archmaker after all.

  More constables arrived, and Stubbs sent them out to question the neighbors and survey the area. Meanwhile, Harry experimented with spells, showing no concern for the cost of ether.

  On his second pass through the rooms, he discovered an open safe behind a painting of an old oak tree. The safe was stuffed with documents, but Harry’s short ritual revealed something critical.

  “Someone’s taken something from here recently,” he announced.

  “Are you sure it was the Archmaker?” Stubbs asked skeptically. “This looks more like an ordinary burglary.”

  “Seriously?” Sunset replied, his tone dripping with disbelief. “Even if it was a burglary, it was hardly ordinary. Vampires don’t usually end up dead after regular break-ins. I’m willing to bet the girl downstairs will turn out to be from the Lindemann nest.”

  “That much I don’t doubt,” Stubbs said, waving the comment off. “And what does our wizard have to say?”

  “You’d know better,” Harry replied dryly. “But as for oddities, the house has an abnormally high death aura.”

  “Well, that’s hardly surprising. The professor’s lived a long life…” joked the detective from Third Precinct.

  “I’m talking about magic,” Harry corrected, hinting that the element of death has far less to do with the natural end of life than it does with destruction, leaving behind only ashes. “Something was used here. Across the entire house.”

  “My housemaid uses an enchanted broom,” growled an angry, elderly voice from the corridor. “Works wonders on cobwebs.”

  We all turned to see Professor Chapman, accompanied by his son. Perfect. We’d found nothing, and now we’d have to explain ourselves to the Chief Justice himself.

  The younger Chapman surveyed the room cautiously, clearly reluctant to jump into the conversation. The professor, on the other hand, was ready for a fight. His mustache bristled with barely-contained fury.

  “What’s going on here?” he barked.

  “Haven’t noticed the corpse downstairs, Oscar?” Sunset asked, just as brusquely.

  “I’m talking about why the hell you and your lackeys are in my house!” the professor snapped, not bothering to hold back.

  “Father!” the younger Chapman warned, but the old man wasn’t having it.

  “Damn it, son! Half an hour ago, that drunkard Simon barged into my office and accused me of helping the Archmaker. Me! Helping the Archmaker! Do you know who he says the Archmaker is?”

  The judge looked at his father in surprise, then shifted his gaze to us. Stubbs followed suit, taking a subtle step back as though to avoid catching any of the fallout. The judge, meanwhile, was slowly beginning to simmer.

  “Sunset,” the judge said in a tone that promised nothing good, “what do you know about this?”

  “The Archmaker really did try to kill the baronet,” John admitted.

  “And why don’t I know anything about it?!” the judge barked.

  “Because you’re not a cop!” John shot back. “Because Kettle recognized the attacker! Shall we start yelling, gentlemen? Shall we make this public knowledge? I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: ‘Chief Justice Covers for a Maniac!’ That’d be the end of your career, Clive!” John declared brazenly, clearly enjoying himself.

  The judge hadn’t expected such an onslaught and hesitated for a moment, clearly caught off guard.

  “Ridiculous! Utter nonsense. What are you even saying? How could I cover for someone who took my son from me?!”

  “That’s the point!” the professor interjected. “They think it’s Gregor! According to that brainless drunkard, our boy has been in hiding this whole time.”

  “What?!” The judge’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. Then he calmed himself and pointed to Stubbs. “You!” Then to Kilworth. “And you! Out! Now!”

  He turned back to Sunset, his fury building. “Sunset, have you completely lost your mind? Instead of working on the case, you’re chasing the drunken fantasies of an imbecile? Or is this just personal animosity? Did you really want to piss me off? Well, congratulations! You’ve succeeded! Get out of this house! You’re off the Archmaker case!”

  “That’s not your decision to make!” John retorted. “The Chief Constable assigned me to this case.”

  “And he can unassign you just as easily. One phone call is all it takes.”

  Of course. They play golf together.

  “Go ahead, then, make the call!” Sunset snapped, stepping forward aggressively. It might’ve turned physical if Harry hadn’t placed a steadying hand on his shoulder, which conveniently drew the judge’s attention to the sorcerer.

  “And you, Sir Harry, should’ve known better than to indulge this lunatic! Have you forgotten who shelved your case? Or will you hide behind your apprentice?”

  Harry shrugged nonchalantly.

  “I stand by every word Duncan says. But did he promise to report John’s every move? The agreement was that I’d help find the Archmaker.”

  “And you thought to look for him here?” The judge spread his arms incredulously.

  “Shall I remind you about the corpse downstairs?” I interjected.

  “Speaking of which!” the professor sneered. “The moment Simon threatened to tell the vampires, half an hour later I find a dead bloodsucker in my hall.”

  “A vampiress?!” the judge shouted. He turned on Sunset furiously. “What the hell have you dragged my father into, you idiot?!”

  “And what’s your problem with me?” Sunset snapped. “Did I kill her? Why don’t you ask your father what business he has with vampires?”

  “You…!” The judge was so enraged he momentarily lost his words. “You’ll rot for this! I’ll have you demoted to beat cop for the rest of your life! No, you’ll hand in your badge! You won’t even get hired as a dock guard!”

  John jerked forward, clearly intent on knocking the judge’s teeth out, but Harry’s grip held firm.

  “Harry, let me go, I’ll—”

  “Calm down!” Harry said sternly. “And you, calm down as well, Your Honour.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, wizard, or your little case will be reopened by tomorrow!”

  “Please do!” the professor croaked approvingly.

  To my surprise, Harry let the insults slide and made another attempt to de-escalate.

  “This is all just emotions, gentlemen.”

  “Do you get it now, who you’ve crossed?” the judge spat. “You idiot…”

  Harry let go of Sunset, and the detective nearly fell, momentarily losing his balance. The wizard raised his hands toward the Chapmans, and the men’s figures were suddenly enveloped in the glow of their protective amulets. The white gem of the elder Chapman’s tie pin shattered, coating his clothing with frost. The same happened with the judge’s lapel brooch, though its energy source was sandy. Harry had crushed their defenses with sheer power in mere moments!

  Both Chapmans clutched at their throats as they were lifted into the air, suspended near the ceiling.

  “I’ve killed shifters and vampires, fought warlocks and sorcerers with power beyond your wildest dreams! Don’t you dare threaten me!”

  Harry lowered his hands, and the Chapmans collapsed to the floor.

  “If not for His Worship’s request, there wouldn’t even be a case—because there wouldn’t be any Fairburns left. Good day, gentlemen.”

  Turning to us, he commanded, “Let’s go.”

  At that moment, neither Sunset nor I felt any inclination to argue. We quickly followed Harry out into the corridor, passing the Chapmans, who were sprawled on the floor, still catching their breath.

  Downstairs, I saw the vampiress’s corpse and the constables milling around, and suddenly, a thought struck me.

  “One moment!” I said, trying to hold onto the idea. Turning to the stocky constable stationed by the door, I asked, “Did you let the judge and his father in?”

  The constable looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Could I have stopped them?”

  I waved the comment aside.

  “Did they examine the body? Touch it?”

  The constable clearly didn’t understand what I was getting at. Sunset, still brimming with unspent anger, barked at him, and the man obediently answered:

  “They didn’t touch it. Just looked and went straight upstairs.”

  I saw Stubbs peek out of the kitchen and realized he wasn’t going to be in the mood to go easy on us. I quickly asked my next question:

  “Did you tell them the victim was a vampire?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone else tell them? Did they speak to anyone else?”

  “No,” the constable replied, shaking his head in confusion.

  “Stubbs,” Sunset cut in before the other detective could say a word. “Have you reported this to your precinct yet?”

  “No,” Stubbs replied automatically.

  “Then he couldn’t have learned it over the phone either,” John concluded with a triumphant grin. “That lying son of a bitch!”