I Only Summon Villainesses

Well, we kind of had.

“You smell terrible.”

Something in my voice must have cut through her usual indifference, because she didn’t ask questions. She stood, disappeared through the back door, and within two minutes the available members of the Black Snow Company were filing into the main room.

“What happened to you two?”

Milo dropped into a chair and removed his cracked glasses. Without them, his face looked younger. More tired.

“You want to take it?”

Cressida had stopped chewing entirely. Ophelia returned with two cups of water and set them on the table. Nobody touched them.

The waterway. The drug user on the barrel. The tunnels. Milo standing at the far end of the junction, not moving. The girl in the shallow water, fifteen or sixteen, eyes open. And then the rest of them, stretched out in the dark like someone had arranged them for display.

“Seventeen bodies. All of them had shackle marks. All of them had brands that had been partially removed using acid.”

Milo put his glasses back on, despite the crack. His hands were steady but his jaw was tight.

Ophelia’s cloth stopped moving in her hands. Cressida set down her food.

“Kassie’s people,” Milo corrected gently. “The ones she freed.”

“How did they die?”

Ophelia sat down. It was the first time I’d ever seen her sit without something to do with her hands.

“Kassie freed over a hundred from Manhattan,” Milo answered.

“There’s more,” I said.

Then I told them what happened next.

Cressida frowned. “What do you mean, got back up? Like, recovered?”

Milo leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

Cressida’s frown deepened. Ophelia and Odelia exchanged a glance.

The room was very still.

“Their blood was wrong, too,” I added. “It didn’t spray. Didn’t pool on the ground. It sat in the wounds like something was holding it inside them.”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“That’s the obvious answer,” I said. “But I’m not sure it fits. Everything I’ve heard about the Blood Mage is brute force. Overwhelming power. This wasn’t that. This was organized. Patient. Seventeen people collected, killed clean, arranged in a tunnel, and then ten soldiers positioned around them as a trap that resets itself.”

“When we escaped, they didn’t chase us. They went back to the junction. Back to the bodies. Waiting for the next person to come looking.”

“So either the Blood Mage is more versatile than we thought,” Milo said, cleaning his cracked lens with his thumb, “or he’s working with someone who handles the precise work while he handles the destruction.”

Cressida was quiet for too long. That was the tell. Cressida was never quiet. When she finally spoke, her voice was small.

The question settled over the room like a weight.

“No.”

She was right. Kassie needed to know. And putting it off wasn’t going to make it easier.

Red sparks gathered in the center of the room, coalescing upward, and then Kassie was there.