There is the world you see.
Clean streets. Neon signs. Grocery store jazz and the predictable churn of traffic. It's a world built on schedules and sidewalks—where death is distant, wrapped in sterile white sheets and whispered behind glass.
But just beneath it—beneath the concrete and the chatter and the curated normalcy—magic still breathes.
It moves through blood.
It waits in bone.
And some of us were born knowing how to listen.
The mortuary was quiet tonight. No clients. No mourners. Just me, a corpse, and the low hum of spell wards thrumming beneath the tiled floor.
I stood alone in the embalming room, the overhead lights dimmed to a warm amber that left the corners in velvet shadow. The air smelled of clove oil, steel, and a whisper of iron beneath it—like a secret trying not to be heard.
The body on the table was male, maybe thirty-five. No signs of trauma, no blood pooling where it shouldn't. He'd been delivered an hour ago with a toe tag that read Civic ID Unknown, which was city code for we don't want questions asked. Fine by me.
I peeled the sheet back and pressed two fingers to the man's throat. Cold, of course. But more than that—light. Too light. The kind of light that meant something important had been taken.
I clicked my tongue and shook my head.
"Another one," I muttered. "Godsdammit."
This was the fourth body this week that arrived like this: pale, empty, drained. No blood left in the veins, no warmth lingering in the flesh. And that wasn't just inconvenient—it was a threat to my entire operation.
Because I don't just tend the dead. I use them.
My name is Veylen. Most people in the city think I'm a mortician. A quiet, eccentric man who dresses too well and keeps strange hours. They assume I'm harmless.
They don't know about the sigils carved into the foundation.
Or the spells bound to the bones beneath the floor.
They don't know that blood is more than life—it's magic. Power. Currency.
And they certainly don't know I sell that blood to vampires.
It's a delicate balance: I work with hospitals, back-alley clinics, a few crooked donation centers. I take the excess. The expired. The willing trades made by desperate men. I seal the blood with enchantments, purify it, and supply it to the local vampire den with strict quotas and even stricter rules.
In return, they stay out of the gutters. No hunts. No drained bodies in alleyways. No "feeding accidents" left on my table.
That was the deal.
And someone's been breaking it.
I sighed and turned back to the body. The man's eyes were closed, his face peaceful. He didn't look like someone who'd been violently drained. No bite marks. No bruising. Whatever took his blood did it cleanly.
Too cleanly.
I slipped on a fresh pair of gloves and reached for a scalpel etched in bronze sigils. Even without blood, there were still things I could learn. The body holds memory, if you know how to coax it free.
But as the blade met skin, I paused.
A chill had settled in the room.
Not from the corpse.
From beneath.
The magic in the floor had gone still.
Dead blood, I thought grimly. No resonance. No echo.
Nothing I could use.
Whoever drained this man hadn't just taken his life—they'd taken his value. And in my business, that was theft.
No, worse.
That was war.
I cleaned my hands in silence, stripped off my gloves, and lit a thin stick of grave-smoke—my own blend of juniper ash and marrow root. It curled into the air like a sigh, silver threads disappearing into the high, black ceiling.
I didn't say a word. Didn't need to.
The wards would carry the scent. The city would know I was watching. That someone had made a mistake.
I walked through the quiet halls of Morrow's End Mortuary, past rows of silent drawers and shelves of bottled blood sealed with wax and charm-thread. I paused at the door to my sanctum.
Behind that door, power waited.
Stored. Compacted. Folded inside my own blood like a blade sheathed in flesh.
I hadn't needed to draw on it in years.
But something told me... I might need to soon.