The morning sun was fully up now, its bright rays illuminating the horrific spray of blood across the walls. Soon, Dunkan would expect them to open the doors at Marinakas. Soon, the Reignn town guards would begin their morning patrols right outside his thin wooden door.
But Devin was completely lost. He had no allies in this city. Well, except Dunkan.
He pictured the stoic, quiet chef with his terrifying, lightning-fast knife skills. Nah, Devin thought, shaking his head slowly. If Dunkan walked through that door and saw this massacre, he wouldn't ask for a polite explanation; he would simply separate Devin's head from his shoulders with a meat cleaver and clean up the mess himself.
He thought of one thing, and one thing only.
Fenrys.
He had her private trail line securely folded in the pocket of Zain's discarded trousers. She was brilliant. She was a top-tier scholar. Most importantly, she was his friend.
What would she do? Devin asked himself, desperately clinging to the memory of her sharp intellect.
The grim, undeniable answer immediately surfaced: she would call the authorities on him. He was wearing the face of a complete stranger. To her, he wasn't Devin Trangdar; he was just a commoner who had brutally butchered a girl in a slum apartment. She wouldn't believe a fantastical, insane tale of divine soul-swapping. He would be locked in a deep cell and executed before the sun set.
But as he stared at the absolute carnage coating the room, Devin realized he had absolutely no other option. He couldn't carry a body through the streets. He couldn't scrub the blood from the floorboards before Dunkan came looking. He desperately needed a Mortipian elite's resources to make this nightmare disappear.
He crawled across the floor and rummaged through Zain's discarded, blood-spattered clothes. His wet hands stained the fabric until his fingers brushed against cold metal. He pulled out the heavy, brass-plated trail phone. It was a bulky, magical device used for long-distance frequency communication, engraved with faint, glowing runes.
Devin wiped the blood from his thumb and laid it on the rune-engraved dial. He prepared to type the complex numerical sequence Fenrys had left him.
But his hand froze mid-air.
A memory, old and incredibly sharp, pierced through the fog of his panic.
Lotjed.
His grandfather. The former Trangdar royal family head of security.
Although he was old, and despite the harsh, unforgiving anti-sub-human laws of the land, Lotjed had remained an indispensable, lethal shadow clinging to the crown. Officially, he was long retired. A relic of Queen Patrosha's era. But unofficially, everyone in the inner circle knew he handled the odd jobs for the King.
Growing up, wandering the hidden corridors of the palace, Devin had slowly realized that King Arthur would occasionally call upon Lotjed for secret operations. For late-night, bloody clean-ups that were not so kingly.
His father, Arthur, was a good king. He loved his people, and he loved his son. But you could not rule a vast, complex, and violent kingdom in the brutal North the way he did without eventually getting your hands dirty.
There were ambitious political rivals who quietly, suddenly disappeared into the night. There were violent rebellions that were permanently silenced before they ever sparked into public view. There were treasonous scandals that vanished, leaving absolutely no trace behind.
Lotjed was the man who made the blood disappear. He was the royal cleaner.
If anyone in this entire twisted world knew how to handle a slaughtered, mutilated body in a locked room, it was him.
Devin quickly erased Fenrys's sequence from the brass dial. His hands were shaking so violently he could barely input the numbers, but he forced his bloody thumb down. He began to dial the emergency royal frequency—a highly classified sequence that had been burned into his memory since childhood.
xxx-xx-x.
The brass device hummed. It emitted a low, vibrating, magical resonance that made Devin's teeth physically ache.
One ring.
Two.
Click. The secure line opened. Devin opened his mouth, a desperate, incredibly convoluted explanation of his resurrection and the soul swap already forming rapidly on his tongue.
But before he could utter a single, trembling syllable, a raspy, weathered voice came through the receiver. It was calm. It was absolute.
"Devin. You're still alive. Thank God. Where have you been?"
The heavy brass trail phone nearly slipped right through Devin's bloody grip. The air left his lungs in a violent, forceful rush. He stood perfectly frozen in the center of the slaughterhouse, the hair on the back of his neck standing at rigid attention.
He hadn't spoken a single word.
He was calling from a completely unregistered, cheap commoner's trail phone. He was wearing the face, the voice, and the muscular body of Zain Ricky, a Cyprian monster.
How did he know it was him?
Who exactly was Lotjed?