If Savalt had once been inside of the apartment, she was long gone. Or if they were going with the option requiring the least optimism--and that was Bezel’s preferred route--then she might have been painted on the walls.

The foyer was stained red with carnage. Large sprays of it coated the chipping wallpaper. The splashes had been cast in great arc upwards to imbed in the popcorn ceiling. The blood pooled on the wood floor boards, in inch thick puddles. High and low, it settled with the stench of rot and iron.

Bezel passed into the soiled room, with just enough consciousness to avoid stepping in the vital fluids soaking into the oak flooring. Mayvalt followed him, looking ghostly pale and close to adding to the mess of the room with her weak stomach.

Her fingers trembled, where she pressed them to her lips. “Savalt?” She whispered. No reply came, but it might have been an issue with her volume. She whimpered as softly as a mouse.

Somehow, that seemed an unhelpful suggestion, so Bezel remained silent.

Startled by the lack of answer, Mayvalt rushed past him, her footsteps heavy on the stained floor. Her meekness crumbled beneath the weight of her fear. “Savalt!” She cried out, “Savalt, answer me!” Bezel watched in withering interest as she fluttered between each room of the small apartment, her heart singing as quickly as hummingbird wings.

Bezel could have called out to her. He could have told her that, beneath the rotting decay, there was no other scent in this room. There was no one here--but Mayvalt had to already know. She often had keener senses than Bezel, so this frenzied searching must have served another purpose. One that defied rationality.

It was pointless--but it was even more pointless to say so. He decided to let her run herself breathless and turned himself into studying the room he’d perched in. It was a strange scene, he could say, perfectly laid out before them. One Bezel could not even begin to wrap his mind around. Simply because it made no sense. It was all just perfect.

Despite the vast violence evident across the entire room, nothing was touched. If Bezel had taken a wet wipe to the blood on the walls, then he could have restored this whole apartment to perfection. Well, nearly perfect. Nothing could be done immediately about the outdated interior design, and at the moment, it seemed the most offensive thing about the place.

The coffee table was exactly eleven inches from the couch, not pushed to any odd angle at any of its corners. It was sitting on a rug that had perhaps been a gift from Savalt’s grandmother. Or, Savalt herself was the one with terrible taste. Although the horrible shag-brown rug, darkened with blood splotches, hadn’t been what caught Bezel’s attention.

That had been the three stacks of paper left atop the coffee table. All still perfectly arranged, in neatly stacked towers, a foot high each.

Savalt was a Faun. It was undeniable when he observed how she had lived--had because he highly doubted that she still did. Bezel had never known a Faun who didn’t show great interest in Heimerian arts, and she was no different. Every flat surface of the home was place to some odd sculpture or vain painting. The ones adorning her splattered and peeling walls were untouched, not a single corner out of line. Somehow, Bezel couldn’t even find a speck of blood on any of their faces. No matter their proximity to the splash.

By the door, on a table that might have once held her house keys, was a clay lump--something Mayvalt would have defended as artistic expression, but Bezel would have accused of imitating an overly microwaved hot-dog--and even this hideous little statue had somehow survived a well deserved bashing against the floor.

Whatever had happened here had happened without struggle. Or nothing had happened here at all, and Bezel had been lured into a perfectly painted trap. Either way, it had happened recently.

“This blood is fresh, Mayvalt.” Bezel called.

He could hear the distant skip of her heart. Mayvalt came pattering out of Savalt’s bathroom, wiping at her large brown eyes with the seal-skin smooth cuff of her leather jacket. “What are you saying, boss?” She whimpered.

He shrugged. He didn’t quite know yet--only that it was all so strange. “How long has she been missing?”

Mayvalt stomped her boot, barely missing making a splash in the iron-rich coating of the floors. She jittered more when she was scared, but that was only an observation. Her fear was obvious--it hung over her as a second skin, clouding the room. “A few days, boss. Not that long. H-how long does it. . . usually take?”

Bezel seized the size of the carnage, mulling it over in his mind. The puddles were deep, still wet at the top, but cooling and hardening along the edges. “For blood to dry? Or for a murder to take place? I can only answer the former.” As the second question was something entirely dependant on skill, and Bezel believed in his ability to accomplish it faster than the average Faun-hunter. “An hour, at most.”

The color drained from her cheeks. She pressed her palms to her lips and shuddered. “Then this just happened? We have to go, boss! Whoever did this could still be around here! We have to find them!”

Bezel shook his head, and Mayvalt’s eyes widened to the size of moons. “Why not?”

There was a series of cold thudding echoing deep inside of Bezel’s head. A dead heart, pulsing six feet below. It was. . .he didn’t know. He couldn’t drag it close enough to the surface to make any sense of it. All he knew was that he was going to stay here. There had to be something else.

“It’d be a waste of time.” He said. “You don’t know anything, and you already want to flee the only clues we have. What are you going to do if the suspect returns and cleans all of this up? Then we’d have nothing.” He was harsh, and he was uncaring, but those things led him more credibility than one might think.

Mayvalt sighed. Her shoulders slumped until she looked small enough to be consumed by her leather jacket. She worked her fingers into her frizzy pink curls, pushing until her antlers offered some resistance. Her boot tapped out the perfect melody to the rapid tick of her heart. She sighed, and it cut the air as swiftly as a blade. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Bezel agreed. “Let’s walk through together.”

Mayvalt exhaled through her nose and nodded her head slowly. “Okay.” She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and gestured with her chin to prod Bezel into moving. He took the lead, as directed, and moved deeper into the apartment.

Away from the small and gory entryway, the rest of the apartment seemed almost entirely inconspicuous. Bezel walked through the living room, and there was nothing but the soiled rug beneath the neatly stacked papers.

He passed into the kitchen. The countertops were clean of crumbs, and anything more serious. The sink was empty and dry, no one had used it to clean up recently. Which might have been a priority for any blood-covered killer.

It remained completely normal, until he saw the specks of blood on the floor.

The only connection from this nearly pristine kitchen to the viciously sabotaged living room was a small trail left on the black-and-white tiles consisting of a few coin-sized drops.

Mayvalt propped open the fridge door. Which seemed inappropriate even to Bezel--but she seemed to be thinking to herself, and he didn’t want to disrupt her process. “Boss,” she called over her shoulder. “All of this food is expired.”

“Yes, I know.” Bezel huffed. The sickly sweet odor of rotting lettuce had tumbled free into the iron-enriched air the moment Mayvalt had pulled the door open.

Mayvalt shut the fridge with a hollow thud. She wrapped her arms over her torso as if frozen by the cold inside. “Savalt hasn’t been seen by anyone in a few days--but the blood is fresh, and the food is off. Does that make sense to you?”

Bezel leaned against Savalt’s kitchen counter, placing his chin in the palm of his hand to mimic many great thinkers and to give himself time to patch together some semblance of sense.“She’s been gone, so it’d follow that the food would expire-”

“It’s only been three days, boss.” Mayvalt reminded him. “Her neighbor claimed to see her monday night or early tuesday morning.”

“Then she was here, and not in the mood to clean out the fridge.” Bezel shrugged. “If you can trust this neighbor, that is.”

“Wenroth.” Mayvalt hissed beneath her breath. For a moment, Bezel thought it was a Satyrian curse until his mind worked together the familiarity of Satyrian suffixes. It was a name--and if Bezel’s memory of the language was still correct--it wasn’t a great one. “He’s the type to tell you what the gopher was doing on Groundhog’s day--he’s smart as an inchworm and as cowardly as silk. He couldn’t lie to me and hope to get away with it.”

Bezel tried for a moment to untangle the meaning of Mayvalt’s silly phrases but eventually gave up. He ruled it a waste of time like most other things and instead said. “Not trust, then. Just incompetence?”

“Yes, boss.” She nodded.

“Then not a great witness, Mayvalt.” Bezel pointed. “And these clues are only leaving us with more questions.” He pushed his fingers through the drape of his oil-black bangs to move them away from his glimmering yellow eyes. There had to be something he wasn’t seeing. So what? Beside Savalt herself, a piece was missing. He turned from the kitchen and crossed back the way he’d come, returning to the stage of his twisted play.

The soiled living room, with perfectly arranged stacks of paper. Only dirtied by a slight red tinge along the edges from microscopic drops of blood. The top paper of each pile was nothing more than a simple cover letter. One for an essay on the digestive system of cattle, another for unique flowers in Northern America, and the last simply labeled cervidae. “Mayvalt, sort these papers. Tell me what they say when I come back.”

“Where are you going, boss?” She asked, hesitating at the corner of the coffee table. Her trembling fingers fluttered to the nearest stack, the one for an essay titled cervidae.

“I’m just going to check something. Stop shaking.” Bezel remembered the days when he could comfort her. When she was little and he was just a little less ancient--but all he could offer her now were words devoid of tone and blunt in delivery because he no longer held any concern or care. Not for her. And certainly not for Savalt, no matter how attuned he seemed to his hunt.

She blinked, absorbing him as a shock. Her cheeks drained of their usual chestnut color until she was a perfect imitation of the sheets she was set to sort through. “Okay.” She chittered, chewing nervously on her bottom lip. Mayvalt inspected the slick smooth surface of the brown leather couch. Carefully, as if balancing a glass dish between her antlers, she settled into a section of mostly unsoiled seating. She pulled the papers across the table, beginning her search into the cervidae essay. “I’ll let you know, boss.”

“Great.” He announced bluntly.

Bezel turned from her slumping form, investing himself into something of greater interest. He’d noticed it since their walk into the kitchen after distancing himself with the foyer. There was a root cause to the stench of blood in the apartment, and he hadn’t found it yet.

It wavered in the air, increasing and dissipating as he’d moved back and forth. There was a pit covered by leaves. If Bezel couldn’t uncover it, he’d fall a thousand stories deep. Luckily, he had some guess as to where to begin.

It was odd to intrude in the bedroom of a woman he’d never met. Not a woman, exactly. A creature--but it still held the stillness of hallowed ground. Even aware of how strange he must have seemed, Bezel couldn’t talk himself into turning around. It was heaviest here--even more so than the staged foyer he’d left--and the reason did not seem entirely obvious. It hung in the air, changing the weight of the atmosphere. It was rot. It was fear. It was something as dark as the starless night sky over Manhattan. It was why he’d left Mayvalt behind on the couch--it was carnage.

Mayvalt had rushed through each room in the apartment as carefully as a hurricane and as clear-headed as a snow-globe, so Bezel didn’t question her lack of attention to detail. It would have almost been more strange if she’d stopped to inspect the scene, beyond looking for any obvious sign of Savalt--as in her alive and well and with a silly excuse for why she hasn’t been coming to work.

Bezel had to admit that at first, the room seemed calm. He could have looked no further and left satisfied, but there was a nagging in the back of his throat. The stench of death. It was as thick as snow over the Speir glacier fields, and he simply couldn’t see anything to lend to it.

Savalt’s unique tastes had been most obvious here, in her bedroom. The wallpaper was sunshine yellow, spotted with pink paintings of falling flower petals. The curtains, a seashell hue of another shade of pink, were drawn over the windows. The top of the dresser was strewn with an assortment of Heimerian jewelry as well as Satyrian goods. Things Savalt had uselessly carried from her old life. A polished pair of horn cuffs laid beside her dazzling diamond studded earrings as if proclaiming to hold the same value.

Her bed was adorned with bedding fitting her pastel-toned room. Blankets the color of soft peach skin was piled up high, inviting as a leaf pile--if Bezel was able to sleep. He wasn’t, and especially not here.

A simple uniformed suit had been left hanging from the handle of her closet door. A velvet black vest, overlaid pearl-white dress shirt. She’d neatly folded the dress pants and tossed it over the top of the door. It was Eden attire, laid out the night before in anticipation of a shift she’d never attend. He hadn’t asked much of those beneath his service. All he asked was a few years or a few more working for him. He was even kind enough to pay them all Heimerian wages--New Yorker wages at that. So, what could have possibly been more pressing than following his simple orders?

Why had his Faun been disappearing? When had the waves of his pond become so fretful? Had someone been tossing in pebbles to cause these ripples? More questions than he could express swarmed his head, screaming in his ears as flies often did. He couldn’t answer it all. He couldn’t even find a foothold in the chaos.

Or, had he been looking in the wrong places?

Bezel took in the sight of the room again. The neatly folded clothes, the polished arrangement of jewelry, the dusted curtains, and the carpet--still ruffled with lines from the vacuum. He recalled neat stacks of research papers, perfectly aligned portraits lining the walls. Everything quaintly arranged, aside from the blood. And aside from the unmade bed.

It could have been anything. It could have been a late morning, a lazy-day, a forgotten monotonous task--but Bezel had a different idea. He strolled across the small room, his nose filling with the sickly sweet scent of fear. His throat thickened on the iron in the air until he could taste it. Bezel reached for the warm covers. As if revealing a scared child, hiding from the thunder, he ripped back the sheets.

It wasn’t Savalt--not entirely anyway. Although he hadn’t truly been expecting to find her. Well, he hadn’t really expected to find this either. The sunset duvet had been darkened brown by the blood pooled beneath the bone. Bezel had seen demons sliced all sorts of ways to harvest the magic-laiden skeleton inside--but he’d never seen this because he’d never found something so sought after be so carelessly left behind.

The horn had been broken off by the base. The keratin shell had been cracked, revealing the bright bone beneath. Wells of red sinew clung to the shattered lump. The honey golden horn was dry to the touch. The small amount of flesh left behind had cured in the sun.

He looked upon the bone wrenched from body, and he felt nothing. He sighed in mock annoyance and rubbed the bridge of his nose. All of this carnage was piling up to be a rather fretful headache. Each overturned leaf revealed new nonsense. Bezel could see the rest of his week--or his decade--vanishing beneath this job.

And now this? Someone had reached past his illusions to grab hold of the demonic-tell beneath. How had they seen past him? Was his magic weakening faster than he’d anticipated? Messing with the Trammel--it had been stupid of him. He already had seven gates, attempting to open another into the Sikker Wood had been idiotic. Mayvalt had warned him. She’d been right--he always listened when she was right--so why had he pushed forward with the rift? Bezel ignored the banging at the base of his skull and turned himself back into the matter at hand. Her horn, broken and bloodied on the bed.

It was another strange piece in the puzzle, one made of shattered glass. He didn’t know how to fit it back together, and he only sliced himself the harder he tried.

Bezel couldn’t deny the twitch of familiarity he felt. It stirred something in him to see her demonic-tell severed this way. It was not the first time a Faun had been cut up for the resource they harbored inside--but if it was the bone they’d wanted, why was it the only thing they’d left behind? It was unlike them.

What disillusioned seeker had come this far and absorbed this much risk, only to lose the prize of the hunt in the only source of chaos within the small apartment? Besides, Bezel realized that the low-streets were not their hunting grounds. They’d never come here before. As far as Bezel could figure, they didn’t know of its existence.

This place was not Eden. He did not linger here. He did not protect it with charms. It sat, as plainly as a daisy in a field. If they had found this place, then they’d have to know how vulnerable it was.

“Boss, come here!” Mayvalt called, jarring Bezel from his spinning wheel of thoughts. Bezel was pushed into action in an effort to exit the room quickly. He seized the horn in the palm of his hand, surprised by how easily it fit in his fist. He wrapped it beneath the clutch of his fingers and retraced his steps out of the room.

Bezel found Mayvalt right where he’d left her, only a little more disheveled. She’d come off the couch at some point to kneel on the shag rug. The coffee table came to a rest at her chest. Fully immersed in a scattering of letters, her elbows bumped into small stacks of paper, spilling them into a bleak white wall of confusion. Undisturbed, Mayvalt ruffled through the spewing of papers, reaching for the ones she’d wanted to show Bezel first.

Her wide brown eyes were turned down into the mess. She spoke quickly, determined to get her point across soon rather than coherently. “This one was written second. It’s dated for three months ago.” Mayvalt dragged pages to the front of the paper pile. Bezel glanced over her shoulder, skimming over anecdotes about dandelions and their impact on the ecosystem.

“Am I grading her dissertation? What’s the point, Mayvalt?” Bezel pushed.

Mayvalt’s shoulders stiffened. With her face solely turned into her work, Bezel couldn’t read her expression. That was probably for the best. “Well, if you were to grade it--it’d certainly be passing. It’s great, boss. She. . .she did a really great job.” Mayvalt wiped at her nose with the cuff of her jacket.

“Right.” Bezel said. Only to fill in the blank space Mayvalt had left after her voice had stalled.

“Anyways.” Mayvalt shook her head. Her trembling fingers sunk back into Savalt’s dissected research papers. “This one is from last week. It’s a mess, boss.”

“Well, she only just started. Lacking revision isn’t a crime.” Bezel dismissed. He wasn’t entirely clear on the process required to pull together something so mundane as a study, but he was sure that the first draft would be rough enough at the edges to cut skin.

“Sap, boss.” Mayvalt breathed. She set her face into her palms. Her shoulders shook beneath the shell of her leather. “Just read it.”

Bezel tucked Savalt’s horn into the pocket of his suit jacket. He leaned over her slumped form, taking into his care the top-most paper stack. It was smaller than the other two, which made sense if she had only just begun.

The title was clear and simple. Only one word; cervidae. Bezel’s glittering eyes fluttered towards Mayvalt’s fuzz-wrapped antlers. “This word--what is it?” Although he had a feeling.

“Deer.” Mayvalt whimpered. “It means deer.”

Bezel began unraveling the stack, tucking the title page, and it’s one single word behind the body of the essay. He turned himself inward and began to read. It was. . . boring. Completely uninteresting--unless Bezel needed a source to site on his own deer-based research paper.

Bezel whittled away at Savalt’s observations, trying to keep his eyes from glossing over. He paused briefly to investigate the paragraph of velvet since it was something he recognized in the blur of words.

He didn’t know much else. It all went over his head with terminology he couldn’t decipher. Nor did he know what he was supposed to be seeing. Was he meant to be fact-checking her? It all seemed right enough to him.

“I don’t understand. What am I-” Bezel turned the page, and it became obvious. His words faltered in the space between them. Mayvalt tensed on the coffee table below. She tucked her face into her arms and made small whimpering noises. “This is. . . nonsense.”

More than that, it was gibberish. As if Savalt’s fingers had gone numb to senselessly bash away at her keys. Words became blurs, turning into nothing more than random coalitions of scrambled letters. Bezel picked a few from the page and read them to Mayvalt, trying to pick apart any hidden clue inside of them. “K-S-L-A-L-I-C-T,” he said, “L-I-T-A-S-L,”

The next three pages were full of nothing but these mixed up letters. There were breaks between them, as if they were words in a sentence. The longest mock-word was eight letters. The shortest was three. It was a pattern that Bezel couldn’t wrap his mind around. And it remained that way until he turned to the fourth page.

He blinked in surprise. There were words here. Real ones. Something nearly coherent. “What is a mouse?” He recited.

The question was prosed across the page in giant looping penmanship. Mayvalt had no answer. He turned the page and found nothing. The rest of them were blank. Bezel had the sense that someone was messing with them. He hoped they enjoyed their little game while it lasted so that they would not regret it when he finally caught up. And he would make them regret it.

“This certainly didn’t answer any of my questions.” Bezel noted. He set the book back on the mess strewn about Mayvalt’s shaking arms. “Well, I found something, too.”

Mayvalt turned her wide brown eyes on him. She rubbed at the tip of her red nose. “What did you find?”

He didn’t stop to wonder what this would do to her or how he could soften the blow. What would be the point of any of it? If Savalt had meant something to her, then Bezel could do nothing to make it hurt less. He pulled the horn out of his pocket and extended it towards her. Her lips parted, and a small sucking gasp escaped into the stillness of the apartment.

Mayvalt reached with shaking fingers. She took the horn and held it close to her, pressing it into her chest. “Savalt.” She whispered. She bowed her head and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t speak. She remained perfectly still for so long, Bezel knew she was praying. Finally, she opened her eyes. The caramel brown had darkened, just as clouds did before a storm. When they found Bezel’s glowing golden gaze, he could see the hatred pooling in them.

“Mayvalt,” he breathed.

“It was them.” She snarled. Her voice dripped from her lips, rotting the air as poison.

“I don’t think so.” Bezel shook his head.

Mayvalt winced. Her grip tightened on the severed horn. Her seething gaze never wavered, even as it rested on Bezel’s calm face. He wondered if perhaps it meant that she hated him, too. “What else could it have been if not the war-mongers? They hate us! They hunt us! If they’ve found the low-streets-”

“Then it would be chaos. So, let’s think about this rationally--before we cause a panic.” Bezel spoke low, always aware of how far a demon could hear--especially when it was a particularly delicate secret. He glanced behind them, at the door they’d never bothered to shut. The hallway was empty, but it didn’t mean they were alone. “They might have found Eden, I’ll admit it. It has been harder than I expected to keep you Faun in line while giving you so much excitement--but never have they come this far. If they had, they would have wiped it clean from Bed-Stuy.”

Mayvalt seemed unconvinced. Her fingers worked delicately, stroking the honey-tone ringlets of Savalt’s cut horn. Bezel sighed. He shut his eyes and shook his head.

“Mayvalt, they wouldn’t leave her horn.” He said.

She waited for a long moment before she finally said, “I know.”

Curled in on herself, clutching the broken pieces of Savalt to her heart, she looked much like she had on the day they’d met. She’d been much smaller at the time, with tiny nubs for antlers. She’d not yet taught herself to keep her tears away from Bezel. Her cheeks had been streaked with them. She’d run until she couldn’t any longer, tripping and stumbling on bare feet--cut by roots and sticks. It’d been her bloodied legs that had caught Bezel’s attention. Why had a child so young run so far, pushing past her fears and her pains? Why had no one come to protect her? Well, the answer was obvious.

She was being chased by the kind of predator that would never stop. It’d eaten her protectors, with teeth made of harvested bone. If he turned away now, it would eat her, too. So, he had not turned away. He’d reached down to her, running his fingers through her short brown hair. He’d picked her up and promised that he’d protect her. It had been easy. She’d been quite pathetic, whimpering and clutching her mother’s horn cuff in her small fists. It was a sight eliciting much sympathy, and he’d been the one to give it at the time.

His fingers twitched at his sides. Would she still find comfort in him touching her head? Or would she know that it was just another mockery. Another hollow action to give the appearance of care. So, Bezel did not reach out for her. It would be better that way.

If Bezel had been a simpler person or a person at all, he might have found this all incredibly hard to swallow. Luckily, he was more snake than man.

“What do you think happened?” Mayvalt asked. She brought the horn to her head, pressing it against her forehead with a tight grip. One so firm, her fingers had begun to turn white where they held the bone. “T-to. . . Savalt.”

“I don’t know.” Bezel shrugged.

How could he have known, unless he had been responsible? Which wasn’t completely off the table of possibilities. Strictly speaking, he couldn’t be certain of his alibi. He’d been maintaining a decade-long slump of brief appearances in his club, intermittent with vanishing off-grid in week long benders--most of which he didn’t remember when they were over.

Unless he testified for himself, who was going to believe him? Where Bezel went, chaos usually followed. Even if it was only Mayvalt issued mayhem--it still trailed behind him.

“Mayvalt, have you looked for any other missing Fauns?” He asked.

She huffed, prickling for some reason Bezel couldn’t immediately grasp. “Of course I have!” She snapped, her voice was muffled by proximity to the object held against her lips. “You think I don’t care? I’d only go out looking for those with personal relationships to me?”

“I would have.” Bezel said, raising an eyebrow in her direction.

“Well, that’s because you’re a jerk, boss.” She grumbled bitterly. “What are you thinking?”

“You’ve been to their homes?” He pressed.

“Yes, boss.” Mayvalt pushed back. “I questioned several roommates and a few confused one-night lovers. If anyone knew anything--they didn’t want to tell me. Probably because they knew I’d tell you.”

“Were there any vacant apartments, ones you couldn’t get into?” Bezel asked.

Mayvalt shook her head. “Vacant yes, but that I couldn’t get into--no, boss. I got the master key from the janitor.” Her arms slackened, placing Savalt’s piece back in her lap. With one free hand, she reached into her pocket and withdrew a glittering silver key. “I brought it, in case we couldn’t get in, but. . .the door was just unlocked. Like someone. . .was waiting for us to come.”

“Yeah, I have that sense, too.” Bezel admitted. “In the other apartments, the ones without roommates, were they,” he gestured around them, causing a weak wince from Mayvalt, “like this?”

“No, boss. Don’t you think I would have mentioned that? It seems a little critical, doesn’t it?” Mayvalt pressed her arms into her sides, to contain her irritation, or her trembling. He couldn’t tell.

Bezel groaned in something, nearly frustration. A distant cousin to confusion. Why was Savalt different? Why was this room, beneath the gore they could so clearly see, untouched? What was this trap, and for what purpose did it exist? Who was it for?

“Did anyone know how close you and Savalt were?” Bezel asked.

She narrowed her eyes. “What are you saying?”

“It’s strange, is all.” Bezel shook his head. “My Fauns have been vanishing beneath my nose, but that didn’t get my attention. So, maybe they go after someone else. They can’t touch you--you’re too close to me, and I care for no one else, so they go for who you care for instead.”

“Boss, what are you saying?” Mayvalt whispered. “It’s. . . my fault? And for what? To get at you?

“Of course not!” Bezel corrected. “The fault would lay with whoever harmed her, but you may have been the cause.”

Mayvalt’s shoulders drooped, and her eyes fell to the floor. “Oh, sap, boss. You can be so cruel sometimes.”

Bezel did not breathe. He did not sigh, or blink, or absorb her words at all. They came over him and passed as harmlessly as a warm summer day. Cruel? Well, if that’s how she felt. How could he say any different? “Okay.” He said finally. Her antlers cut the air with an audible snap as she whipped her head up to look at him. He found her darkened eyes with his golden cat gaze.

Her chestnut toned cheeks had turned even paler, as if shocked by more than Savalt’s apartment. Her eyelids fluttered, working hard to contain the sea of tears threatening to spill. She did not speak. Her fingers where they held on to Savalt trembled. Her lips parted, and then shut again.

Bezel had no inclination to weep for Savalt. He had no inclination to do anything, but it was too late for that. He was stuck now, doing the bidding of the Fauns he’d betrayed once many, many years ago. A mistake he was still paying for. And the ones he’d promised to protect. Which was a mistake, too, just one he’d yet to bleed for.

“Then, let’s go speak to that neighbor--Wenroth.” Bezel said. He had a feeling that this strange and dark night was only going to get worse. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

12 | Bezel Says He Didn't Do It

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