Two years before the blood hit the cobblestones, twenty-five-year-old Jon was just another cog in the machine, sweating away at the local steel factory.
The pay was nothing to write home about, but it kept a roof over his head and flour in his father's pantry.
They were all each other had left. The Black Plague had claimed Jon's mother in 1756, leaving a silence in the house that neither of them knew how to fill.
Jon had always been the quiet type. Painfully shy, the kind of guy who looked at his boots when a woman so much as glanced his way.
So, at twenty-five, he finally let his workmates drag him toward the gas-lit alleyways where the "night-flowers" sold a temporary cure for loneliness.
At first, he was easy prey for any woman who spoke first. But then, he met Debra.
She wasn't the most beautiful girl in the district, not by a long shot, but she had a predatory kind of pull.
She was seductive in a way that felt like a physical weight. She knew exactly how to make "green" boys like Jon feel like they were the center of the universe.
A few nights turned into a few weeks, and suddenly, Jon was blind to anyone else.
By the second week, he was spending every spare second at her feet. By the third, he was handing over three-quarters of his factory wages just to hear her whisper his name.
Within a month, the family home was a ghost town. Jon was rarely there, leaving old Albert to face the long, hollow nights alone.
When Jon did show up, he didn't bring bread. He didn't bring coal. He didn't pay the bills he'd covered for years.
The entire burden shifted onto Albert's aging shoulders, and the cracks in their relationship began to splinter. The neighbors grew used to the sound of shouting echoing through the thin walls of the bakery.
Two months in, Jon finally brought his "fiancée" home to meet the man who raised him.
But Albert wasn't a fool.
He didn't see a daughter-in-law. He saw the parasite that had hexed his son. He saw exactly where the grocery money was going. He saw the woman who had turned his hardworking boy into a hollow-eyed addict.
Albert hadn't minced words. "There is no chance in hell I'm letting you marry that whore!"
Jon didn't even hesitate.
The boy who used to be too shy to speak stepped into his father's space, his face twisted in a manic, drugged-out rage. "You call her that again, old man, and I'll crush your skull and feed the pieces to the pigs."
Albert's heart must have broken right then. He pointed at the door, his hand trembling. "Get the fuck out of my house!"
That was the end.
The bridge was reduced to ash. Jon walked out into the night and married his Witch, never looking back.
But their marriage was a slow-motion car wreck. To anyone watching from the outside, Jon wasn't a husband but a hollowed-out shell, an abused man obsessed with the woman who was systematically destroying him.
Because he was hexed, his entire existence had narrowed down to one single, pathetic goal: serving Debra.
Then the steel factory shuttered its doors, and the steady paycheck that kept Debra in silks and jewelry vanished.
Life turned ugly, fast.
Poverty doesn't play well with dark magic and high tastes.
Debra didn't offer comfort; she offered an ultimatum. She threatened to head back to the alleyways and the business of whoring if Jon didn't man up and find a way to keep her in the lifestyle she demanded.
Panicked and desperate to keep his goddess from the arms of other men, Jon finally broke.
"I'll go back," he'd told her, his voice trembling. "I'll ask my father to let me work at the bakery. He's old... he needs the help."
That one sentence sparked the fuse.
Debra's mind started spinning. She wasn't about to let her husband play servant to an old man who had seen through her mask and called her a whore to her face.
She didn't want Jon to have a job. She wanted him to have an inheritance.
If Albert died, the bakery and the steady stream of coin from the small folk, would legally fall to his only son.
In Debra's world, a person was either a tool or an obstacle. And suddenly, Albert had moved from being an old man in a bakery to a target standing in the way of her early retirement.
Albert had to go. And he had to go in a way that looked like fate, not murder.
But Debra wasn't a common thug.
She wasn't going to send Jon to do the dirty work with a kitchen knife, and she wasn't about to waste coin on a back-alley assassin who might talk to the Watch.
Instead, she dipped into the rot she'd learned while selling her body. In the gutters of Ypisisti, magic wasn't about sparkling wands, it was a survival tool.
Most of the women in the district practiced some form of the dark arts, charms to keep men coming back, hexes to ward off the violent ones.
Debra had gone deeper. She had hunted for a Death Spirit, specifically one with the power to shape-shift.
She didn't just want Albert dead, but also wanted him compliant.
She wanted a specter that would look like his late wife, the one woman the old man couldn't say no to. She had engineered a haunting specifically tailored to his grief.
-----
Lou stood there, his legs shaking so hard he thought they might give out. The air in the room felt heavy, like it was saturated with the oily residue of Debra's tale.
There wasn't a flicker of guilt in her eyes. No tremor of remorse in her voice.
To her, murdering a harmless old man was a necessity. It was just a tactical move to upgrade her lifestyle from a drafty cottage to a profitable bakery.
Beside her, Jon stood like a statue of blind devotion. He didn't look like a man who had just heard his wife confess to his father's murder.
He looked like a man who believed every word of it was justified, as if the world itself was supposed to bleed just to keep Debra satisfied.
This is insane, Lou thought, his knuckles white around the grip of the flintlock. She didn't just kill him for the money. She turned his own grief into a weapon. This is a total lack of a soul.
He looked at the hole in the wall where William had been dragged out. He was alone with a cold-blooded sociopath and her brainwashed attack dog.
"You're a monster," Lou croaked, the modern moral compass in his brain screaming at the sheer pettiness of her evil.
Debra just tilted her head, a thin, sharp smile touching her lips. "No, little Seer. I'm just a woman who knows how to get what she wants. And right now, I want you to put that toy down before Jon has to get his hands dirty."
But Lou wouldn't lower the flintlock. If anything, his grip tightened, the heavy brass of the pistol biting into his palm as he leveled the barrel directly at Debra's heart.
"You don't deserve to breathe," Lou said, his voice trembling with a mix of adrenaline and pure, unadulterated disgust.
Debra didn't flinch. She just leaned back, a thin, mocking smile spreading across her face like an oil slick. "It's pathetic, weak little creatures like you that don't deserve to take up space, Seer. We both know you don't have the stomach for this. Put the toy down. You aren't a killer."
When Lou's aim stayed true, her smile curdled into a sneer. "I'm going to count to three. If that pistol isn't on the floor, I'll order Jon to tear it from your hands and use it to paint these walls with your brains."
"He can try," Lou said flatly.
The smirk vanished. For the first time, Debra really looked at him and saw something that wasn't "innocent."
She saw a cornered man who had nothing left to lose in this one.
Then, it happened.
BOOM!
A massive explosion rocked the cottage, followed by a flash of blinding yellow light that bled through the cracks in the floorboards. The shockwave sent a cloud of dust raining down from the thatched ceiling.
Suddenly, Debra's face twisted into a mask of pure panic.
Lou felt it too, his Seer senses spiked as the cold, oppressive weight of the Death Spirit's energy simply evaporated. It was snuffed out like a candle in a gale.
And moving toward the house, bright and steady as a rising sun, was William's spirit signature.
"Kill him, Jon! KILL THE BOY!" Debra shrieked, her composure shattering.
Since the moment Lou had stepped through the door, she had written him off.
To her, he was a nobody, an accidental witness, a soft boy who probably fainted at the sight of blood. She thought he was a supporting character in her story.
She had miscalculated.
When a rat is cornered, it doesn't just squeak. It bites.
Jon lunged, his face a distorted mask of hex-fueled rage.
He reached for Lou's throat, intending to squeeze the life out of him with his bare hands. He moved with the desperate speed of a man who would do anything to please his goddess.
"You miscalculated, Witch," Lou hissed.
He didn't close his eyes. He didn't look away. He watched Jon's head fill the sights of the flintlock, and then his finger squeezed the trigger.