The three agents moved through the city like a localized cold front. Every time they stopped a passerby, projecting a shimmering, spectral image of Marianne's face into the mortal's mind, the reaction was the same: a flinch of pure, instinctive terror.
"Her?" a shopkeeper stammered, his face turning the color of ash. "The Devil Killer? She's the reason the streetlights feel heavy at night. She butchered dozens... even her own blood. Don't speak that name here. It's bad luck to even think of her."
He hurried away, crossing the street to avoid the "cold spot" where the agents stood.
"This is useless," Shetan growled, his fist passing harmlessly through a metal lamp post in a fit of rage. "They all hate her. How are we supposed to find 'unconditional love' for a woman who turned her own family into a crime scene? I want to break their ribs just to make them talk."
"Touch one of them and Dreese will weave your soul into the bridge, remember?" Gerry reminded him, her eyes scanning the crowd with cynical detachment. "We're ghosts. We have to be smarter than these meat-sacks."
Finally, in a trash-strewn alleyway, they found a young boy sitting on a milk crate, staring at the spot where the spectral image hovered. Unlike the adults, he didn't look away.
"You're looking for the house with the red door," the boy whispered, pointing toward a dilapidated brownstone at the end of the block. "The one where the windows are boarded up. That's where the Devil Killer lived before she did it."
"And who else lived there?" Zippo asked, leaning in.
"Just her and the ghosts now," the boy said, his voice trembling. "Nobody goes there. Only Cael and his mom, Mrs. Drustin, used to check on it. They lived right across the hall. But they're gone now. They tried to end it today. The ambulance took them to St. Jude's Hospital. They said Cael got hit by a car and his mom jumped after him. Everyone says they were the only ones who didn't spit when her name was mentioned."
The three agents froze. The air around them suddenly dropped several degrees as the realization hit them like a physical blow.
"The boy in the street," Shetan muttered, his voice a low, hollow rasp. "The one we left bleeding in the rain."
"And the woman who jumped," Gerry added, her eyes wide with a rare flash of alarm. "We stood right over them. We watched them die because we thought they were just 'casualties.'"
The irony was a bitter pill. The very souls they had treated with such merciless indifference were the only leads they had to the "One Soul" who might love Marriane. If Cael and Mrs. Drustin were the only ones who didn't hate Marianne, then the hospital—not the boarded-up house—was their destination.
"If they die before we get to them," Zippo hissed, already beginning to fade as she focused her intent on the hospital's location, "we've failed the mission before it even started. We need to get to that hospital. If either of them has a spark of life left, we have to talk to them."
They didn't waste another second. They flickered out of the alleyway, three shadows racing through the walls of the city toward St. Jude's, desperate to reach the bedside of the two people they had so casually discarded.
In the quiet, shimmering halls of the High Court, a new and dangerous silence began to take root. Marianne sat in her chambers, her skin still tingling from the oils of the grooming she had been forced to endure. She looked at her reflection—smooth, polished, and terrifyingly beautiful.
Marianne wasn't just a killer; she was a woman who had navigated the shark-infested waters of the mortal elite. As the wife of a President's brother, she had moved through ballrooms where a single look could topple a government. She knew the power of the flesh, and she knew that the more a man tried to "shun" desire, the more it rotted him from the inside out.
"So, he's forbidden from desiring any woman," she mused, a cold, predatory smile touching her lips. " If I can make him break his own laws—if I can force him to admit he desires a sinner—the Judges will have no choice but to tear us apart. He'll have to throw me back to the soot of the 1st Hello just to save his own throne."
She began to plan. She wouldn't be rude this time. She would be the very temptation the Sovereign's laws warned against. She would use the beauty that had once captivated a nation to destroy the composure of a god.
While Marianne plotted her "sinful" escape, the three agents materialized in the Intensive Care Unit of St. Jude's Hospital. The air here was heavy with the smell of antiseptic and the rhythmic, mechanical wheezing of ventilators.
They stood between two glass-walled cubicles.
In the first, Cael lay motionless. His head was wrapped in thick bandages, and his chest rose and fell only because the machine forced it to. His life-force was a flickering, pale blue flame, barely tethered to his broken body.
In the second, Mrs. Drustin was in a similar state of fragile suspension. Her monitors beeped in a frantic, uneven staccato.
Shetan leaned over Cael, his spectral form casting a shadow over the boy's pale face. "Look at him," Shetan whispered, his voice a jagged rasp. "One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. If he slips away now, we lose the thread."
Gerry paced the narrow space between the beds. "They said 'Unconditional Love.' Look at the way the mother's spirit is reaching for the boy's. It's strong."
Zippo reached out, her grafted hand hovering inches above Cael's heart. She could feel the vibration of his soul—it wasn't filled with the terror they had seen in the townspeople. It was filled with a profound, aching sadness.
"We can't talk to them while they're like this," Zippo realized. "They're too deep in the fog. We need to find a way to pull one of them back just enough to speak.
Shetan growled, looking at the life-support machines. "If we have to get them killed to bring them to the afterlife anyway, why not pull the plug now and ask the souls as they rise?"
"Because if we kill them before their time," Gerry reminded him sharply, "Dreese becomes our landlord. We stay until they wake up."
The three agents settled into the corners of the ICU, three dark, invisible vultures waiting for a sign of life in a room filled with the machinery of death.
Back in the High Court, Sana was finishing her duties in Zoe's bedchamber. She had just fluffed the silken pillows when the door groaned open. She expected the Sovereign, but instead, Marianne stepped inside.
Marianne was dressed in a new gown of translucent, midnight-blue silk—a far cry from the grey wool. She looked radiant, her eyes glowing with a calculated fire.
Sana stood tall, her amber eyes narrowing. "You have no business here, servant. This is the Sovereign's private sanctum. You aren't even supposed to be on this floor."
Marianne walked toward the bed, her fingers grazing the very pillows Sana had just straightened. "I'm not here for the laundry, little maid. I'm here to see if the High Judge is as cold as the ice he likes to put me in."
"He will destroy you for this insolence," Sana hissed, her heart pounding with a mixture of jealousy and fear.
"Let him," Marianne whispered, turning to face the door as the heavy footsteps of the Sovereign echoed in the hallway. "I've survived the Devil's pits."